New York City, 1941 to 1945
He tried to enlist in January of 1942.
He was forty-six, which was too old, and had a bad back, which was disqualifying, and had no birth certificate, which was fatal, and he stood in a recruiting office on Whitehall Street for two hours with a form he could not fill in and walked out again.
That was not why he did not go. He could have gotten around all of it. He had gotten around worse. He could have built a birth certificate in a week and knew which clerk in which office would have done it for forty dollars.
He did not go because of entry 61.
He had written it in October of 1941, two months before Pearl Harbor, in handwriting that was still, at that stage, quite good, and it was the longest entry in the book, four pages, and the only one written in the second person.
Do not enlist. You know where every division is going to be. You know the dates. You know the 29th goes in on the left at Omaha and what happens to them in the first twenty minutes, and the name of the town they cannot take for six weeks. You would not be able to stand it. You would open your mouth. You would say one thing, to one sergeant, on one night, and it would be small, and it would be correct, and he would live. And the man who was supposed to be standing where he stood would not be there. And a war is four hundred thousand men standing where they are supposed to be standing. You are not able to watch men die and say nothing. You never have been. It is the worst quality you have as an officer and it is the only thing about yourself you have ever liked. You proved it on Twenty-second Street. So do not go where the dying is. Stay in the shop.
* *
He stayed in the shop. He fixed radios for four years, fast, for women who were listening for a name, and did not charge them, and there was a card in his window from 1942 to 1945 that read, in his own small furious hand, NO CHARGE FOR SERVICE FAMILIES, and Edith took it down in September of 1945 and did not throw it away, and it was in a drawer in that apartment when she died.
He listened to the news every night at six. He knew what was coming, the way a man knows the words of a song, and he sat in the back of a radio shop on Flatbush Avenue with a hot iron in his hand and listened to Edward R. Murrow describe, in that magnificent unhurried voice, a thing James Kirk had known about for twelve years and had not stopped and had not tried to stop.
*
Halina Kosinski's boy went in 1943.
She brought Kirk her radio that spring, because the tubes had gone and she could not afford a new one, and she needed it, she said. She needed it particularly now.
He fixed it in forty minutes and told her it had been a loose wire and charged her nothing. And she stood in his shop with the radio in her arms and did not go, and he waited, because he had learned to wait, and after a while she said:
"He's in England."
"That's good."
"Is it?"
And James Kirk, who knew her son was in the Quartermaster Corps in a depot in Wiltshire, and knew what that meant, and knew, with something close to certainty and not quite certainty, that the boy would come home, looked at a woman whose face was breaking.
"He'll be all right, Halina," he said.
And he watched her decide to believe him. He watched a woman take a sentence from a man she trusted and put it inside herself and close over it, and she was going to carry it for two years, and it was going to hold her up.
She went out. And he went into the back room and put both hands flat on the workbench and stood there a long time. Because he had said it. He had told a woman her son would live, and he had been right, and it had cost nothing, and it was the most reckless thing he had done since 1930, and he had done it because she was standing in his shop and he was so tired.
He put it in the notebook that night.
121. Do not do that again.
He never did.
*
The lists came out in the papers. Every week. Column after column, small type, name after name, borough by borough, and the whole city read them standing up in the street outside the newsstand, because nobody wanted to be sitting down.
James Kirk read them every week for four years. He did not know a single name.
He had commanded four hundred and thirty souls, and lost men, a great many, and written every letter himself, in his own hand, because he believed a man who would not write the letter had no business giving the order. And he stood on Flatbush Avenue in 1944 with a newspaper in his hands, reading four hundred names of boys he had never met, and understood he was going to do this every week for the rest of the war, and that not one of those names would ever mean anything to him, and that this was the deal he had made.
A man who has traded the future of the human race for one woman on one street does not also get to be the man who carries everybody.
He carried them anyway. He read every list, every column, every week, for four years, and never skipped one, and Edith found him at the kitchen table at midnight more times than she ever mentioned, with the paper open and a cup of coffee gone cold at his elbow, reading names.
"Do you know any of them?" she asked him once.
"No."
"Then why?"
And James Kirk, who had spent his life in the company of an answer he could not give to anybody, said the only true thing available to him.
"Because somebody should," he said.
* *
In August of 1945 the news came on the radio at six o'clock in the evening.
Edith was at the sink. The boys were in the yard. Kirk was at the kitchen table with his hands flat on the wood, and he had been sitting like that for about ten minutes, because he had known since the first of the month, and known the city, and known the date.
The announcer said a name. A city. A single aircraft.
Edith turned around from the sink with her hands still wet. She did not say anything. She did not have to. It was item six on a list she had read at this table three years earlier and burned in that stove, and she had known the month, and had done the arithmetic in 1942 and been doing it every day since.
She crossed the kitchen and stood behind her husband's chair.
And she put two fingers on the back of his neck.
That was where it came from. Thirty-eight years of a small unconscious gesture, a hand on a neck in passing, worn and private, the thing that would one day undo a Vulcan through the Guardian of Forever. It started in a kitchen in Brooklyn on the sixth of August, 1945, at four minutes past six, because a woman could not think of one thing to say to a man who had known for fifteen years.