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Show 169 narrow white vase in front of Raxxaxixxaiaxix Red's and Helen's wedding x4asiaxxx«xia portraits in xxx their heart shaped frames, sometime during that time it happened, though I guess I sometimes like to think it occurred on the night in December when Red had the night shift at the Forge and President Roosevelt came on the radio and said that the Japs just bombed Pearl Harbor. xxiaxxaxxaaxxkai Helen cried that night. Helen cried and at first she didn't even know why she was crying though later even before Red got home it hit her, it hit her real x-iaxax plain. Outside the whistles from the factories hooed under the purple Lake Si Erie sky and the bells from the churches began giant kaxgixgx bongings like a great funeral drone and all over the city people put on their coats and went out and stood on their porches and didn't say a word except for a few older women, there was one on Helen's block, who lost their kx young husbands in the last one and stared at the women like Helen who were going to learn a lot about waiting in the next years, and a few young men were in the streets shouting ready for war, but most everybody else wasn't ready. Helen wasn't ready. Things had just begun. And Red came home ixx that night as tight as a fist and as easily opened and put his arms around Helen and felt her grab down in deeper for that sweet calm than she'd ever grabbed before, and though thinking about the end of all things was thinking in smaller ways than it is now, they were thinking about the end of all things and that's what I like to think I came out ax of. At work the next day the Union's dirty man gave Red a white rose instead of a Rax red one and said "Well," and Red said "You can't wait around to be drafted," and the Union's dirty man lowered his head like a little rhinoceros and Red said "the Marines." "Not the Marines," xx said the Union's dirty man, and Red didn't say anything to him but that day the Union's dirty man fought harder than he'd ever fought before, throwing himself at Red like something launched, Red's fists meeting him like mallets on beef, their bodies wronging the steel walls like funeral bells until the whistle for end of lunch. The next day they enlisted in the Marines. But the Union's dirty man flunked the xxxxx physical. axxiJ^xMaKfawxtxa-iH \ |