Orrie's Story Read Online Free PDF Page B

Erie for cowering at home on Fridays the 13th and always walking under a ladder when he found one.
    If Cassie saw in a dream that an outdoor picnic would come to grief by way of flood (though there was no body of water near their place of choice), Augie was pleased to eat the chicken leg in a stifling kitchen, just as he washed it down with oversweetened ice tea rather than the cold beer he preferred. You made such sacrifices when you loved somebody. Unless the auguries were favorable you passed up ballgames, evenings of bowling, afternoon walks, and other such minor pleasures, because you consistently enjoyed the major rewards of love, which concerned not the senses but rather the soul.
    There was nothing else about Cassie that could be called a foible. Her fidelity went without saying. She had had little enough to do with the opposite sex even before Augie’s day. Now, with no urging from him (though he was certainly not offended), she interpreted the state of engagement as being one in which she looked no other male, except her father, straight in the eye, and conversed with none unless it concerned work at the plant. Aside from the board paid to her folks, she saved all her money for the marriage to come. She embraced Augie’s opinions, when he had such, and when he had none, as in the area of religion, she continued to practice her own faith without demanding that he join her. Even after meeting him, her best idea for Saturday recreation remained baking several loaves of raisin bread. An accomplished seamstress, she made much of the clothing she wore.
    Cassie readily assented to her fiancé’s schedule for the wedding, which of course would be in her church, she in white, but not take place till the war was over. In her naive way she accepted the patriotic argument—Augie couldn’t take her off the assembly line to make babies instead until the peace had been won—but his private motive was a matter of personal responsibility and honor. A living hero did not come home before the enemy had been defeated. He would meanwhile continue to send Esther the monthly payment. But as soon as the war ended, he would return to his wife only to see her face when he said goodbye forever. Naturally he would miss the children, but his feeling for them must ever, unfortunately, be conditioned by his memory of their mother and her unceasing efforts to unman him. All his hopes now were with the brand-new family he would create with Cassie.
    With the second atomic bomb the conflict was over at last, and here he was, back at the Idle Hour, where he could smile at Rickie Wicks’s remarking it was (aside from a gray hair or two) as if he never left, for on the contrary it was as different as anything could be: he had left a failure, returned in triumph. Already he no longer felt uncomfortable in the decorated uniform into which he had changed in a toilet booth at the bus depot. He had not worn it during the trip lest other soldiers try to strike up conversations, which might have proved embarrassing, though the details at his command were sufficient to bluff civilians: e.g., the Purple Heart was for a wound he got from 88-shrapnel, couldn’t show it because it had come too damned close to changing his voice; won the Silver Star at the Bulge, Xmastime there in the snowbound Ardennes, encircled by Krauts. In his cards to the Idle Hour he had claimed a part in the liberation of Paris and then, a year later, also in the occupation of Berlin, for who of the old gang was in a position to doubt him?
    Augie was drunk by the time they all went into the back room for lunch, and throughout the meal he continued to drink, not beers after the first one but, given the occasion and that his tab was on the house, Canadian Club, which went down like sweet cream, all to the good because the steak was quite tough and the onions glistened with grease. He had been spoiled by Sunday dinners prepared by Cassie’s mother, assisted