“Well, Mr. Eaton, hello,” said Mrs. Bingham, rheumy eyes popping from sleep to joy in an instant. “You came.”
“He came,” said Hailey.
“It’s great to see you, Mrs. Bingham.”
“Mad Anthony Wayne,” she said. “One of the best Wayne presentations I ever had.”
Gone was the elocution-school way of speaking, replaced by a slow and precise slur. Her hair was now bone white and so thin he could make out the moles on her scalp. She looked gaunt; her face an unhealthy plum, the blood looking congealed beneath the skin, and the right side drooped so the eye, lips, and cheek seemed in the process of sinking into quicksand. She took his hand in both of hers, the fingers pointed off like the gnarled knots of a tree branch.
“I’ll also say…” She patted his hand and drew a deep, laborious breath. “I was surprised how well you did when you were doing all that extra research on Simon Girty.”
He felt his blush as he laughed.
“She won’t stop giving me hell about that,” said Hailey. “I told her I did all the writing on my own—how am I supposed to help it if you suddenly got interested in Simon Girty?”
“You’re so wonderful to come see me,” said Mrs. Bingham, still holding his hand. “I keep telling Hailey my mind is not what it used to be—I used to be able to tell you any important date in the last five hundred years of Western civilization. I used to be able to do all the presidents and vice presidents. I could even tell you what my children’s names were most of the time—” This mined another laugh from them. “But I still remember every student I loved and every one that was an awful little shit.”
Hailey faux scolded her. “Mrs. Bingham.”
“No, you’re not supposed to say that when you’re teaching, but middle schoolers can be some supreme turds, and I remember every one of them. But I also remember all my favorites, and you two were on that list. Daniel likely at the top.”
“Don’t play favorites,” Hailey warned. “Only one of us here feeds you.”
Mrs. Bingham worked at taking her breath. “Hailey tells me you work in Titusville.”
“That’s right.”
“Edwin Drake and the town that started the oil boom. Bet you get a kick out of that.”
“Yeah, I think I’ve read every book written about it at this point.”
“What are you reading right now? I just got this wonderful book—” She pointed to her bedside: 1491. “It’s about the Americas before European discovery with all this new research.” She let go of his hand to raise both of hers and indicate the ecstasy of a great read. “Oh, it’s just fascinating. Hailey reads to me because my eyes get tired. What did you say you’re reading?”
“I’ve actually been rereading some Ohio stuff. Andrew Clayton and this historian Rob Harper.”
“Oh!” She put a hand over her heart. “My life was worth it. End it all now, dear.” She closed her eyes. “Put the pillow over my face.”
“Stop,” said Hailey. Then to Dan, “She always says that. When it’s meat loaf night she says that.”
When she opened her eyes again, it seemed like more of a task. Her breath came with such difficulty.
“I’m glad you’re back, Daniel. That’s so much to be proud of. So much pride. You know my husband was headed to the Pacific when Harry Truman dropped the two atom bombs. I always said, you can mourn the devastation, you can mourn all the loss, but I would still thank him for it to this day. That kept my man out of combat, so he could come home and meet me.”
She took a tissue from her bedside and held it with only the tips of her fingers, delicately, as if feeling a ball of skin.
“I’m so proud of all of you who served. Though it doesn’t surprise me, I’ll say. I had you pegged for some kind of hero back when you were in my class. You were a good, decent boy on his way to becoming a good, decent man.”
How he’d come to hate this part of it: the gulf between how people thought of him and how he felt about what he’d done. It brought all the dread back in one vivid constellation: Wiman, his lip pregnant with dip, as he threw an old man to the ground and shattered his arm; Daniel Imana grabbing an ANA soldier and forcing him through a door, telling him to get the fuck in there because these men were their human shields, and some booby trap bomb ripped this guy’s entire chest out; backing over an Afghan hut in an MRAP and later finding a whole family inside. What happened after their Humvee was hit on Highway 1, and he crawled out with his M4 ready. He could put that stuff away better than most—except when people got starry-eyed and dreamy about, as Homer put it, where men win glory.
He put his hand on Mrs. Bingham’s to steer her away from heroes. “I’m glad I got this chance. And I think you know you were my favorite teacher by about a mile if it was a footrace.”
Her eyes slipped closed and back open. “Oh. Well. When you’re in the storm of it, you’re mostly just hoping that you’re not screwing up all the kids too bad.”
Toward the end of seventh grade, when Hailey stopped coming over and all the boys had started to feel the itch of impending summer, the class reached the industrial boom part of Ohio history—a unit far less exciting than frontier gore—so Mrs. Bingham told the story of her family, beginning when a German immigrant named Heinrich Mundt arrived in Ohio in 1877 to soon become a fiery organizer for the Knights of Labor at the Cleveland Rolling Mill Company. She showed them an ancient copy of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, with a quote from her grandmother, Ada: “If the police try to break up the strike, the women will charge first. And then the men will come and kill every policeman that comes out here.”
“Which gives you an idea of what my grandmother was like,” she’d said.
She led the class on a tour of the Great War, Prohibition, the labor disputes that rocked the industrial Midwest, how her father was run over by a train after stumbling onto the tracks while drunk on the eve of Pearl Harbor. How her widowed mother moved the family to Toledo and found work at the Willys-Overland Motors Plant building a vehicle called the Jeep that helped the Allies fight and win two wars at the same time. Forty-five years old with four children, she went to work six days a week welding together pieces of a vehicle that would roll into Berlin four years later.
“My own life and times aren’t quite as interesting,” she said. “But when I say that my mother was my hero, I do not say it lightly. There were many times when she could have given up, when it might have gotten too hard for anyone, but she shut up and then put up, as they say. So that’s my family’s story, that’s my Buckeye blood, but let me say one more thing. I tell you this story only to try to explain to you that the world you see today and the world you will see at the upper span of your long lifetimes—well—it will amaze you. The changes you will experience, the chances you will have to shape those changes—I just cannot stress how astonishing and astounding and joyful an opportunity it will be.”
Thirteen years old, he walked around for weeks thinking of those words, feeling the way you do when you’re outside with your friends and it starts to rain, but you’re too far from home to run for it. So you just get soaked and marvel at why you don’t do such a thing all the time.
They left Mrs. Bingham to fall back asleep.
Before changing out of her scrubs, Hailey poked her head into a few rooms, brought ice water for one resident, elevated a swollen ankle for another. She moved with that graceful, Haileyed confidence he remembered only now that he saw it again. When she was twelve her mother was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, cancer of the bone in her leg. For two years while her parents were absorbed with tests, treatments, two surgeries, and many rounds of chemo, Hailey took over the household responsibilities. She’d make dinner and clean most nights, pack lunch for her two younger brothers, coordinate rides to school and all social outings, and pay bills with her dad’s checkbook. They were a tough family. Her dad used to say to Dan that if he had to get stranded on a desert island with one person, “It would be my daughter. She was born with steel-toed boots and knows how to put one foot in front of the other.” She could do it alclass="underline" sports, school, partying, helping to save her mother’s life with her calm and collected takeover of the home front. “Triple-threat Kowalczyk. The strong carry on,” as Lisa used to say.