And so his life entered its long and slow decline. He went off to California once, to see Amy and the children, and in 1988 he came down to Washington to see Gwen married to Jerry. But — and now they were trying to remember, as they sat in a truckstop at the Breezewood Interchange — he had never seemed, well, weighed down by anything like this. “Five pounds of solid metal?” Jerry kept saying, gazing out incredulously at the snow, now turning to rain. “How did he ever keep it such a secret?”
When they got home Gwen put the pewter urn on the mantel. They would know in a week or so, once the will was read, where the ashes should be scattered. Gramps had never said anything. Perhaps, Jerry said later, there would be something in the will about the shrapnel. If that was what it was.
They unwrapped the brown paper and put the thing on the dining room table, where there was a strong light. God, it was an ugly thing to have had to carry around. It had a coarse, brutish look about it. The heat of the furnace had distorted it, of course — the three furrows on one side must be the imprint of the bars, the moly-steel fireproof bars inside the oven itself. This chunk of metal had melted itself around them until they turned off the gas jets and raked it out. So it wouldn’t have looked quite as bad as this all those years it was inside the old boy. But even so, it was ugly. You only had to think of muscle moving around that. Jerry winced.
“Hell, I remember playing basketball with him, out in California. You remember — out in front of the garage, with Phil. Amy was pregnant at the time, and you and she were in the kitchen yakking about something or other, and we all went out to the front of the house. Gramps started shooting baskets. He couldn’t have done that with this thing inside him, surely. Not unless he was one hell of a lot tougher than I thought he was.”
He squinted more closely. On one end — if the thing could be said to have ends — was what looked like a screw thread. There were some regular grooves, half a dozen or so, all parallel. They formed an approximate annulus around what, for the sake of this inspection, he would call the upper end. The lower end was narrower, almost pointed, but it was here that the metal had melted into dozens of small blisters and it was barely possible to see an outline of what the thing might have been.
But over that evening, and then again over the weekend, Jerry began to work out what the object was. He weighed it on Gwen’s Braun kitchen scale — five pounds, two ounces. He measured it carefully — from end to end, five inches, from side to side, four. He found an old physics textbook and measured the volume by seeing how much water it displaced, measuring it in cups, using one of the kitchen milk jugs. He found out the density and worked out that what he had was probably an alloy of steel and nickel.
After that, and with the memory of all those good old boys of the 423rd VFW standing to attention back up in the cold of western Pennsylvania, the conclusion was simple enough for Jerry Morgan, amateur engineer and military history buff, to draw. Sergeant First Class Henry Drewman Allen, Ninth Infantry Regiment, Second United States Infantry Division, a wounded hero of the Battle of Old Baldy, had been taken from the field bleeding from a wound in the left arm on the evening of Thursday, November 13, 1952. A small piece of shrapnel had been removed by surgeons at the field hospital, and Sergeant Allen had been flown to a hospital ship in the sea of Japan and then, eventually, back home to Pennsylvania.
What the doctors never knew, and what the stoical Sergeant Allen never bothered to inform them, was that the nose casing of a Chinese 82mm M-41 mortar, fired during the battle, had somehow not only fragmented and smashed his arm, but had also embedded most of itself in his shoulder. He was to live the rest of his life in pain, with the burden of a fist-sized chunk of iron and nickel inside him, with a memory far more potent than that of the simple scar with which he’d frighten his granddaughters and shock the Thanksgiving guests. He was even more of a hero than they had thought.
One or two nights later, Gwen telephoned Amy, who was now back in San Mateo. They talked for twenty minutes, and afterwards Gwen reported to Jerry.
“They agree. They think we should tell the VFW chapter. And the papers. It has the makings of a really great story. And she said what I said. We never knew he had it in him. A good line, don’t you think?”
Captain Kruzscinsky of the Ligonier and District Branch of the Veterans of Foreign Wars was as excited as one would imagine. Of course, he said, a special citation would be prepared, honoring Henry’s memory, his courage. “It was his grace under pressure,” the captain said. “Just the sort of thing we like.”
The piece of metal would go into the VFW museum on Main Street. They would bring it out on Memorial Day and on the Fourth of July to show what Pennsylvania fighting men were made of. It would be like the wooden hand, the prize trophy of the French Legionnaires, which they still kept in a glass box in Marseilles and paraded once a year, held by a soldier wearing white gloves.
“We’ll take good care of it, Mrs. Morgan, have no fear. We’ll only handle it with white gloves. You have my word on that, as a soldier.”
And good to his word, Captain Kruzscinsky was in touch with the Tribune-Review in Greensburg the next day and a freelance photographer turned up at the Morgan’s front door in Chevy Chase the following week. So far as they heard, it was the front-page main story the following Saturday. “Postal Worker Died a First-Class Hero,” read the headline. “Carried a secret package all the way home from Korea.” The story was written by a woman whose father hadn’t been born when the Battle for Old Baldy had been fought.
The story made the Pittsburgh TV stations next day, by which time the captain already had the “Korean meteorite” as people had dubbed it and was preparing a new home for it. An honor guard was filmed taking the UPS Next Day package up to the Main Street VFW museum, and there was footage of the ceremonial unwrapping and the placing of the object in a glass case which had previously held a Junior League bridge trophy.
The coverage was respectful, if faintly amused. It didn’t make the lead, but it was well enough placed. It featured blurred black and white photographs of the young Sergeant Allen at Inchon, a picture of the Purple Heart he had won, the reminiscences of a buddy named Mack Kamovitch who Gwen had thought was long dead but who was in fact in a retirement community in a town called Mars, and who had fought with a Pennsylvania-raised infantry unit on either Old Baldy or Pork Chop or one of the great Korean mountains. “Old Henry was a great battler. A great battler,” he declared shakily.
And then came the pictures from Ligonier, with the ceremonial guard, the case, and the piece of metal.
“So old Henry Allen was a bigger hero than we ever knew,” said a young man in a blazer, a man with a voice far too deep for him. “He was a bigger man than we ever knew. Everyone knew he was a good man. But seeing this — they all said simply: We Never Knew He Had It In Him...
“For WGBG News Hour this is James Sneed reporting, in Ligonier.”
Over in a studio apartment in Pittsburgh, Dan Harris saw the story that same night. He blinked, then pinched himself. This, for ten miserable days, was what he feared might happen. It was his personal nightmare come true. The piece of metal in that poor innocent man — it was all his fault. Poor Mr. Allen — yes, that was his name, he remembered the tag on the toe — had nothing to do with it at all. The explanation was no less bizarre, but it was a great deal simpler than that which Mr. Sneed had just told half of the folks in the Monongahela Valley.