The whole time they rode out to the cemetery, Lewie Van Dam talked and talked and talked, the steam chunks around his words filling the pick-up. Out front, a south wind snatched up corn leaves from the frozen fields and sent them dancing across the blacktop, but inside Van Dam's chatter was the only movement in the solid cold air. On and on he went, Wiley thought, as if the man were afraid of silence.
They'd walked out of church together after the funeral, and Lewie told him they might as well ride out to the committal together since both their wives were staying behind to get lunch ready. All the way out there, Lewie Van Dam bitched: how his fuel bills were killing him; how even after forty years on the farm, he gets shaky nervous come spring when everything has to get in on time; how a man might as well get out of farming altogether if he can't make a decent living; how he's got nothing anymore but nitrate poisoning bad enough to kill a cow. Kept jabbering.
He finally quit when they got to the cemetery and joined the thirty people or so already out there, a small crowd, with the temperature what it was and Henry Minnard, the dead man, having no real family to speak of. The snowfields to the south put an icy edge on the wind that snapped the plastic shelter so hard it seemed as if it might shatter and leave the retired farmers and the color guard, all bundled up, nearly defenseless against the cold ridge where the cemetery overlooked town.
Wiley stood in the back in his snorkel jacket, the fur zipped up tight in a tube around his face, while Lewie, hands in his pockets, scrambled up front in his wool dress coat, as if he had to be in the middle of everything. It was so cold they just scratched the whole taps thing, the color guard simply standing at attention instead of walking out in front of the hearse. The minister's lips turned purple as he chopped off the words, Henry Minnard's wife standing in front shaking in her sister's arms.
From the back of the crowd, Wiley watched Lewie Van Dam bawl. County Cattle Feeders chairman, fourteen hundred prime Iowa acres, and what not else, Lew Van Dam stood there and cried.
Once the preacher finished, the Legion commander gave Lew Henry's own flag, neatly folded, and Lew gave it to Henry's widow, a sugary edge of frozen tears around his eyes, then hugged her, his breath trumpeting over her shoulder like a steer's.
On the way back to church the whole story came out--how Lewie claimed he knew Henry Minnard so well that it just about killed him to have to see that shiny casket and lay him down forever in that field of frozen death, how the two of them had been buddies forever during the Second World War.
“I can tell you everything,Wiley,” he said. “I can tell you because you'll understand. You been in the service. You know, don't you?"
Wiley shrugged his shoulders and let the man rattle on in the cold.
He said how he and Hank Minnard were together right from the start, from '42, from the day they left Sioux Falls; how they stood side-by-side when they were issued uniforms, how they did every last thing together.
"Motor pool, both of us," Lewie said. "We followed the front from Normandy across the Rhine, fixing every last piece of army hardware—jeeps to deuce-and-a-halfs to tanks. All through Europe—’44 right through until we got out,” he said. He stopped talking to take a drag of his Winston. “Paris, France?” he said. “Shit, I been there. Germany? I seen it all.”
Wiley did a tour in Vietnam. Out in 1971. He’d always thought there wasn’t much to say about it. Everything had been said or written—even TV and movies. He’d done it, that’s all. The rest of them could say what they wanted to, argue forever but at least he could say he'd done it. He'd been there. Their daughter Mary Lynn did a paper for a school report, and he told her some things; she was even proud, he thought.
"We went through the whole thing together, see?--Hank and me--start to finish." Lewie blew on his fingers. "Damn, Wiley, you put a man like that in the ground and you start to wonder if those times weren't the ones that really counted--back there in Europe. We did it—the two of us.” His nose was running, so he leaned over to pull out a hanky. “Shoot, that was something, but you know it. You know as much. You been there.”
“I didn’t even know you and Hank were that close,” Wiley said.
"Close?" Lewie said, throwing that hanky on the dash in front of him. "What do you mean, close?" He locked his hands up around the top of the steering wheel. "You live with a guy for three years--eat, sleep, drink, even shit with him--you read each other's love letters, you work your butt off, up to your elbows in grease, and all the time--every last day--you're saying to each other how great it's going to be someday to sit out on the back porch on a perfect warm night in June, knowing the whole crop is in down in the ground, every last seed is warm and wiggling.” He sucked some air through his teeth and sniffed. “You got dreams is what I’m saying. That’s what you live for. Who cares about Paris, France? He blew warm air into his gingers. “You know that, Wiley,” Lew said. “I don’t have to tell you. You been in war.”
Wiley sat across the seat with a hand up over his mouth as if to hide his breath.
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Tomorrow: Wiley and Carolyn
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