Anyway, that was all I could tell them, and I sat down, and there was a big lot of applause, and I realized then that I'd done right. I'd told them just what they wanted to hear, and everyone was all happy about it.
Then things broke up, and people came up to me, and I shook a lot more hands. And finally, when I got outside, it was darksoft, summery dark, the way I hadn't seen it for a long time. And my father said we ought to be getting on home, so I could rest.
I told him, "You folks drive on ahead, and I'll walk. Ill take the short cut. I'd sort of like to walk through town." Our farm was only a couple of miles out of the village, and the short cut across Heller's farm I'd always taken when I was a kid was only a mile. Dad didn't think maybe I ought to walk so far, but I guess he saw I wanted to, so they went on ahead.
I walked on down Market Street, and around the little square, and the maples and elms were dark over my head, and the flowers on the lawns smelled the way they used to, but it wasn't the same eitherI'd thought it would be, but it wasn't.
When I cut off past the Odd Fellows' Hall, beyond it I met Hobe Evans, the garage hand at the Ford place, who was humming along half tight, the same as always on a Saturday night,
"Hello, Frank, heard you were back," he said. I waited for him to ask the question they all asked, but he didn't. He said, "Boy, you don't look so good! Want a drink?" He brought out a bottle, and I had one out of it, and he had one, and he said he'd see me around, and went hum- ming on his way. He was feeling too good to care much where I'd been.
I went on, in the dark, across Heller's pasture and then along the creek under the big old willows. I stopped there like I'd always stopped when I was a kid, to hear the frog noises, and there they were, and all the June noises, the night noises, and the night smells.
I did something I hadn't done for a long time. I looked up at the starry sky, and there it was, the same little red dot I'd peered at when I was a kid and read those old stories, the same red dot that Breck and Jim and Walter and I had stared away at on nights at training base, won- dering if we'd ever really get there.
Well, they'd got there, and weren't ever going to leave it now, and there'd be others to stay with them, more and more of them as time went by.
But it was the ones I knew that made the difference, as I looked up at the red dot.