- “Birdie” was what my father called me.
- He was a sergeant in the Army. He left for Vietnam when I was twelve.
- He never came home.I was thirteen when two officers knocked on our door in Duluth. My mother fell to the floor. I stood in the hallway holding the letter I was going to mail him that day.
- Nobody called me Birdie after that. I wouldn’t let them.
- I called 911 from the creek. It took the rescue team ninety minutes to reach us. The dog wouldn’t leave his side the whole time.
- They flew him to the hospital in Duluth.
- Broken hip. Severe hypothermia. Dehydration.
- “Another two nights out there,” the doctor told me, “and he wouldn’t have made it. That dog kept him alive. Body heat and biscuits.”
- His name was Harold Tate. He was 84.
- Three days later, they let me see him.
- He was propped up in bed, thin and pale, but his eyes were clear.
- “You look just like him,” he said. “Same chin. Same stubborn face.”
- Then he asked the nurse for his jacket.
- From the inside pocket, he took out a plastic sandwich bag. Inside was an old photo and a yellowed envelope.
- The photo was two young soldiers on a sandbag wall, squinting into the sun.
- One of them was my father.
- The other was Harold.
- “We were in the same unit,” he said. “He talked about you every single night. Birdie this, Birdie that. Birdie’s going to be a teacher. Birdie can out-fish any boy in Minnesota.”
- He pushed the envelope toward me.
- “He wrote this two days before he died. He asked me to bring it to you if anything happened.”
- “Why didn’t you?”
- His eyes filled up.
- “I came home in pieces, Dot. I drank for twenty years. By the time I got sober, I was ashamed. I didn’t know how to knock on your door and say, ‘I’m the one who lived.’”
- He looked at his hands.
- “Two years ago, I found you. I bought the cabin by the fire tower. I came into your diner every Tuesday. Black coffee, two eggs. I never had the nerve to say a word.”
- I knew him then. The quiet man in the corner booth. Always left a twenty.
- “Then my memory started slipping,” he said. “I took Duchess for a walk and got turned around. Fell by the creek. And she wouldn’t leave me.”
- I opened the envelope with shaking hands.
- It was my father’s handwriting.
- “Birdie, if Harold gives you this, it means I’m not coming home. Don’t be sad forever. Be a teacher. Be kind to strays. And never let anybody tell you that you can’t.”
- I hadn’t cried in front of anyone since Ed’s funeral.
- I cried in that hospital room for a long time.
- The county inspector did come on Friday.
- So did the local news.
- And so did half of Ely. The VFW. The high school hockey team. People I hadn’t seen in years.
- The line went out the door and down the block.
- The inspector ordered a coffee, ate a biscuit, and left without writing anything.
- The VFW post voted to cover my rent increase for the next two years. “For the woman who found one of ours,” their commander said.
- Glen Hobart doesn’t come in anymore.
- Nobody misses him.
- Harold lives in the assisted living home two blocks from the diner now.
- Every Tuesday, Rudy drives him over. Black coffee. Two eggs.
- Duchess lives with me. She sleeps on Ed’s side of the bed.
- And every morning at 6:40, she sits by the register and waits for her biscuit.
- Now she eats it.
