In any case, her interest in the soldiers had been cut short by what had happened in the crematorium office. It had been a strange few minutes, which started when old Mr. Tate had come over to her in the parking lot. He sidled up, trying to be respectful and serious, but he had a strangely excited glint in his eye, and clearly had something urgent to say.
“I’m so sorry to interrupt, Mrs. Morgan, but could you come to the office for just a few moments? There’s something — well, something unexplained. Something I’d like you to see.”
Gwen followed old Mr. Tate up the steps and into his dim little office. She thought it might be the bill, though in truth it seemed somewhat ungracious for Mr. Tate to be talking about money at this point. The firm had a good reputation, after all. The hospital had said they would handle things with the utmost sensitivity, and even though she lived down in Washington, so far away, Tate’s could be trusted to handle everything with great discretion.
Then she saw a small gray vessel on the blotter on the partner’s desk, and realized instantly that she was being dense. It was the ashes, of course — Mr. Tate was going to give her old Gramps’s ashes. She grinned inwardly. She had never been to a crematorium before, but had always wondered idly how long an interval there was between the process and the product, as she preferred to think of it. There must be a period of cooling, surely. Anyway, here was the answer: old Grandpa Allen, laid out on a bed in Westmoreland County Hospital on a Wednesday morning, his ashes in a six-inch-high pewter jar on Friday lunchtime.
She reached down to touch the urn. The grayish metal, with its skinlike hammered texture, was as warm or as cool as you expected pewter to be. It was sort of neutral, like the color. No more than that.
“Everyone likes to touch the urn when it’s holding their loved one,” said Mr. Tate. “It’s a very kindly gesture, I always think.”
Gwen nodded. “These — it’s for me, yes?”
“It most certainly is, Mrs. Morgan. But there is something else I have to give you. I am a bit puzzled, to be candid. I was wondering if something had gone wrong here.”
He leaned towards her, so close she could read the name on his spectacles.
“Tell me, Mrs. Morgan — your grandfather. I hope you don’t mind my asking. But was there anything, well, odd about the way he — the way he moved, let us say? I’m sorry to ask. But something’s come up. Something — and we didn’t know if it is our problem or his.”
Gwen must have looked puzzled, for Mr. Tate stood up in a decisive sort of way and strode over to a table on the far side of the room. For a moment he had his back to her, and she could see he was picking something up. Something large and gray and lumpen that he carried back to her inside his spread fingers. He brought it back to the table and then, with an exhalation of relief, released it next to the urn of Sergeant Henry Allen’s ashes.
It was a large piece of gray metal, twisted and deformed by heat. It was about as big as a fist — Tate had had to spread his bony fingers right around it. It must have weighed five pounds. She looked up at him.
“Pick it up,” he said.
She did so, not without difficulty. It was warm — a good deal warmer than the urn. In fact, as she held it longer it seemed to get hotter, and she dropped it on the desk and it rolled to one side. She fingered it gingerly and turned it this way and that. It was an excessively ugly thing, in parts sharp and irregular and glassy like obsidian, in other places smeared with a rust color that seemed to have been sintered into the mass. There were little gobbets of once-molten metal standing out from the main body of the piece like warts. Mostly it was irregular, though along one side there were three straight furrows with folds of metal alongside. For the moment she discounted their appearance and recalled pictures she had once seen at an exhibition in Arizona.
“Meteorite?” she asked wanly. But she knew what Mr. Tate was going to say.
“No, Mrs. Morgan. Your grandfather. There’s no other explanation. I’ve spoken to Mr. Mawby — he’s the engineer around here. Had him for thirty years. Knows the oven better than any man around. He’s seen everything — gold teeth, titanium plates — we always give them back, of course. Scissors, bits of molten glass. We had a man here had a Parker pen, the tortoiseshell all eaten up. But it could write as well as the day it was made.
“But this — this thing.” He gestured with distaste at the malevolent chunk of ironmongery. “Mawby and I can’t think of any other explanation for it. Oven’s clean as a whistle. We always check. So there’s only one solution. Only one. It had to come out of the body. This dam thing was inside Mr. Allen, and he must have known.
“You’ll forgive me for saying so, I’ve never seen anything like it. Five pounds of iron inside a man, and he carries it around all his life. That’s why I asked you — did he move funny or something? He must have been all off balance. It must have been something terrible. How’n hell did he ever get into an airplane? He’d be setting off alarms from here all the way to Katmandu.”
They talked about it all the way home. The weather was closing in as they passed over Chestnut Ridge, and near the mouth of the Allegheny Tunnel the state police had lit flares because a truck had gone off the turnpike and was hanging dangerously over a stream-bed. The snow was heavy here and the road slick with wet ice. The traffic crawled along with muffled-up policemen flagging the motorists, warning them of the dangers. It was, in other words, a typically diverting December night on the Pennsylvania Turnpike when most drivers would be white-knuckled with concentration and fear. But in the Morgans’ Ford the urn and the neatly wrapped chunk of iron knocked heavily against each other in the back, and in the front seat Jerry and Gwen tried to make some sense out of one of life’s more bizarre discoveries.
They both knew a little of the old man’s war stories. They knew he had been in the infantry, had seen some service on Okinawa and in Japan; and they knew, most intimately of all, that he had been at the Battle for Old Baldy, that infamous hill in Korea. That was where he had won his Purple Heart. He had been hit in the left arm, he had told them over not a few Thanksgiving dinners; once in a while he’d roll up his shirt and show them the scar, faded now. It was part of Gwen’s childhood — seeing Gramps’s bad arm.
The injury had never caused him much of a problem, by all accounts. When he came out of Korea he had gone to school, courtesy of the G.I. Bill, but he was never graduated. He was thirty-five, set in his ways, had no aptitude for study, he said. Instead, after a year of doing odd jobs, he had joined the United States Postal Service. His wife — they had married during the Second War, and Gwen’s father was born in 1944 — had left him around this time. He was not especially grief-stricken, by all accounts. First, for a decade or so, he had done the obligatory rounds duty in Pittsburgh and Wheeling and some smaller iron cities like Uniontown and McKeesport and Monroeville — and no one that Gwen could recall ever complained of him limping, or walking funny, or anything like that.
Then he was made up to inspector during that momentous time in 1963 when the postal service introduced the Zone Improvement Plan Code, the Zip code, and he worked to see its implementation in Punxsutawney 15767 and Indiana, PA 15701 (where there were, not unnaturally, some few problems, just as there were in California, PA, and in other confusingly named communities). He was very proud of that: forty-six years old and a part of history, however so small. Finally he was promoted to Senior Inspector of Mails in the office in Greensburg 15601 and had retired in good enough health, so Gwen remembered, two years later. They had given him the senior’s job just so as to help with the pension, for which he was eternally thankful.