The porch light was an old yellow bulb in a cage, swarming with moths. A man stepped out from behind the screen door and stood at the top of the three wooden steps. He was in his seventies, tall and stooped, in a flannel shirt buttoned to the neck, with a gray beard down to his collar. His hands hung at his sides. He stood very straight, the way a soldier stands in front of an officer. When my headlights fell across his face, I put my hand over my mouth. I knew that long jaw. I had seen it every morning of my married life.
He came down one step at a time. He stopped at the bottom and looked at me. He said, in a low, slow voice, like a man long unused to speaking, “You must be Naomi.” I could not answer. He said, “I am Ward. I am the twin of Cecil.” I would have fallen if I had not been holding on to the door of the car. Cecil had a twin. He had told me so, long ago, on our honeymoon, and then he told me that Ward had been killed in Vietnam in 1971, and that we would not speak of it again.
We sat on the porch, on the old wooden bench, under the moths. Ward told me the story in pieces. He was nineteen when he was drafted. He was a radio operator with the First Cavalry, near Quang Tri. In May of 1971, his unit was ambushed. Most of the men were killed. He was dragged away by the survivors, shot through the lung and in shock. When he was well enough to understand that the army had already listed him as killed, a mix up of dog tags, he could not make himself go back. He had seen what he had seen. He walked out of a hospital in Da Nang, and came home in the dark of a November night to the hollow behind the farm of his mother.
Cecil hid him. He told me this with his chin up. Cecil was the only one who knew. Their parents were gone by 1980. For sixteen years Ward lived in a shack in the woods behind the old farm. Then, in 1987, Cecil bought the five acres up the hollow, with a cabin, and moved him in. He paid the power bill, and the taxes, and the doctor. He told the county it was a hunting camp. He told me it was the best part of his year.
A man who loves his brother can lie to the whole world for him, and spend every November weekend at his door, and call it hunting.
Every weekend in November, Ward said, Cecil came up with a sack of groceries. He brought flour, coffee, canned peaches, and a stack of western paperbacks. He brought tobacco and medicine for the lung. They sat by the stove, two old men, and talked about the ballgame. Cecil never came home with a squirrel because he never shot one. He sat on this porch and listened to the woods. He said, once, “Ward, I would give anything for you to meet Naomi.” Ward always said no. He was afraid that if anyone knew he was alive, they would come and take him away and put him in a prison. He said he was a deserter and a ghost.
When Cecil died in May, Ward did not find out for three weeks. No one came. The groceries stopped. He walked five miles to a gas station and bought the paper and saw the obituary with a photograph of his brother. He sat on a curb for an hour. Afterward, he went home and paid the power bill himself. He had a checkbook that Cecil had given him in 2012 in case of an emergency. He signed the name of his brother in a hand identical to his own. The hands were the same. He did not know what else to do.
I stared at him. He took his cap off and held it. “I am so sorry,” he said. “I signed his name on the checks. I did not know any other way to keep the light on.” I looked at the old yellow bulb above us. I said, “Ward, that light has been burning for thirty eight years, and no one in this county has ever known why.” He nodded. “Cecil said it was so I could find the road home.” His voice broke. “I did not leave it on for me. I left it on for him.”
I did not know what to do. I am a Baptist woman in my seventies who sings alto in the choir. I stood up, and I sat down, and I stood up again. Then I did the only thing that seemed right. I put my arms around the stooped, thin shoulders of a man who had been dead for fifty four years, and I held him. He smelled of woodsmoke and Ivory soap, like Cecil. He did not move at first. Then his arms came up, very slowly, and he held me back, and shook.
The sheriff, who is a cousin of mine, took the news with remarkable calm. He said it was an old mix up with the Army, and that no one was going to prosecute a man for failing to be a ghost. He made a few calls to Washington. It took four months of paperwork, and one visit from a very polite colonel in a suit, but in the end the Army reversed a death record that had been wrong for fifty four years. Ward received a letter, a pension, and a discharge under honorable conditions for a wound he had carried since he was nineteen.
He lives with me now, in the spare room, with the hunting coat on the hook by the back door. He sits on my porch in the evenings and listens to the quiet. I took him to church on his birthday, and the whole choir stood. He wept in the back pew. We still keep the cabin. Every November, we drive up the hollow with a sack of groceries and sit on the porch together, and I turn on the yellow light. It is not so that anyone can find the road home. It is so that Cecil can see that we did.
