Eddie Kaminski sat in the little wooden chair with his cane between his knees, and for a minute neither of us could say a word, two old men at a table meant for children, with a coloring book between us. Emma slid a green crayon toward him and said, “Mister, do you want to draw a horse too?” Eddie laughed, and it cracked halfway through. Then he lowered his voice, and he told me what he had not told in sixty one years. The night of the fourteenth of March, 1959, in Rolla, Missouri, he had been twenty three years old and as drunk as a man can be.
We had gone into town from Fort Leonard Wood on a pass, six of us in a borrowed Army jeep, and Eddie had insisted on driving. On a county road outside Rolla, at one in the morning, in the rain, he took a curve too fast and put the jeep through the rail of a bridge over the Little Piney Creek. I was in the passenger seat. I remembered the water. I remembered it coming up over the hood, and Eddie trapped behind the wheel with his leg pinned, and my own hands on the door. I had no memory of pulling him out. Eddie said that I had pulled him out twice.
He said that the Army had held an inquiry. He had been the driver, and he would have gone to the stockade, and lost his chance at the plant job his father had arranged in Milwaukee. I had said, to the captain, that I had been driving. I took ninety days in the post stockade and a reduction in rank. I never said a word to Dorothy until we were engaged. She wrote to Eddie after that. A short letter, he said, and he had kept it. “She said she forgave me,” said Eddie. “And she said that one day I would need to say it out loud.”
A paper tablecloth and a stranger with a cane gave one retired controls builder the length of a single birthday dinner to bring his son back to the truth in Milwaukee.
I gave my terms at the kids table, quietly, in the kind of voice you use in a church. I did not wish to ruin my son birthday. I wished to finish my prime rib. But Eddie was ninety, and had been waiting sixty one years, and a man who waits that long has earned his turn. I told him he could say it to the whole room, if he wished, at the end of the dinner, after the cake. Eddie nodded and wiped his face with his pocket square. Emma, who had been listening with the gravity of a judge, drew a very careful horse in the margin of the coloring book.
At the end of the dinner, as the waiter Marcus rolled out a cake with sixty candles, Eddie rose from the little chair with his cane and walked to the family table. Twenty two people turned around. He said that he was Eddie Kaminski, grandfather of Janet, and that he had something to say about Stanley Wojcik, who was seated at the table with the crayons. He told the whole story, from the bridge to the stockade, from the water to the letter. He said, “That man gave up his stripes for me. And my granddaughter put him at the children s table.” You could have heard a candle drip.
Janet had gone the color of the linen. She stood up. She said it was a misunderstanding, that she had only wanted to make sure the children had someone to sit with, and she moved fast around the table to the little stage where the microphone stood, meaning to snatch it and cut her grandfather off, and to thank everyone for coming. She seized the stand with both hands and turned toward the room. And Marcus, the waiter, with enormous presence of mind, began to sing. “Happy birthday to you,” he sang, in a strong baritone, holding the cake in front of him.
The room joined in. Twenty two people at the long table, and forty more at the bar, and the cooks at the kitchen door, and the hostess, and three small great grandchildren at a round table by the kitchen, who sang loudest of all. Janet stood with her hand on the microphone, in the glare of sixty candles, while a whole restaurant sang to her husband. She could not speak over it. She did not try. When the song ended, the room applauded, and she let go of the stand, and she sat down on a chair by the stage and covered her face with both hands.
My son Bob had not said a word. He came across the dining room slowly, in his navy suit, a big gray man of sixty, and stopped in front of the little table. He knelt on the carpet. His knees cracked. “Dad,” he said, “I did not know. About the stockade. About Mom s letter.” I took the rosary out of my coat pocket, the crystal beads from Krakow, and put them in his hand. “Your mother said you would need this,” I said. “She said someday I would know why.” He looked at the beads. He looked at me. He said, “Dad, I think today is the day.”
In the name of Dorothy, who passed in 2016, I started the Dorothy Wojcik Fund. It pays for Table of Honor dinners at supper clubs and church halls for older adults who eat alone, with a car to bring them and a car to take them home, in Milwaukee, Waukesha and Racine counties. In the first year we seated nine hundred guests at the head of the table. A man of ninety one, a veteran of Korea, was given a place by the window and asked what he wanted. He said he wanted someone to ask him what he wanted.
On Sundays, Emma comes to my narrow brick house with her mother and sits at my kitchen table with a coloring book. She is six now. I keep a box of crayons in the drawer where Dorothy kept the dish towels. Last Sunday she drew a picture of the two of us in front of a supper club, with a long table, and an old man in a gray suit at the head of it, and a little girl on his knee. Under it she wrote, in large crooked letters, GRANDPA STAN SITS HERE. I taped it to the refrigerator, over the plaque from Allen Bradley.
