The Money Jar

   Rain whipped the decking as the wind picked up and the birch swayed like a soldier on shore leave. Milton struggled to the house and shouldered the back door open. Stepping into the kitchen, he heaved the burlap bag full of rusty tools onto the kick stool and pulled with a wet suck the sodden cap from his bald head.

   He slammed the door; no simple feat in a gale. The burlap bag, with hammer-head and rusty saw-tip poking through the holes in its side, slid off the stool and cracked a kitchen tile. He growled and kicked the stool with his good leg forgetting his bad one. He was flat on his back as the squat grey turret careered across the floor and crashed into the glass paneled door of a cabinet. Dusty jolted in his chair. Jesus Christ, he said. Glass lay scattered on the faded rug. Milton struggled to his feet and turned his head to look at the broken cabinet and the toppled framed photograph. Him and Rose. Him short and powerfully built. Her fair-skinned and choppy-haired. Both smiling; him so broadly you could tell it despite the fact he was wearing a snorkel. Milton limped to the settee and sat down. The kick-stool stood triumphant amidst the shattered glass. He rubbed his bad leg at the thigh.

   When he had his breath back he stood and limped to the fallen photograph. He placed it on the windowsill, careful to avoid the glass which covered the rug. Dusty’s eyes followed him from the corner of the room. Don't you bother with that cuss jar on my behalf you son bitch, he said. Milton thought for a second about the jar. He held off putting anything in it. Nothing ever happened when he did, of course; but always after a few seconds the familiar feeling came. He stuffed three dollar bills into the half-filled jar, two for Dusty, and apologized to Rose. The jar was her idea and it meant more to him since her death than it did when she was alive. She used to tease him about it, and trick him into cursing when she wanted him to put some money aside for home improvements. He limped to the counter and flicked the kettle on. Three mugs sat on the granite work-top with teabags inside. He poured water into the first two and watched the steam rise from them. He lifted the dry tea-bag from the third and put it back into the plastic tub, and placed the mug back on the rack beside the others.

   He still made an extra cup. It was an old habit.

   Dusty was watching him still. This had to stop soon, he knew. He was amazed it had gone this far. A few months back it was the doors; the son bitch spent all mornin unhinging and dumping them in the garden then the next two fitting the lacquered ones from the home store. Persuaded three of them up the stairs cussin all the way.

   Then the goddam yard; prying up the slabs with that pitchfork and edging them like an old timer teaching his young'n to walk. Left swing right swing left swing right.

   And now the shed. The materials weren't cheap, and no matter how much Dusty cussed the money in the jar was growing sparse.       

***

   The three of them met in the war. Milton and Dusty served together in the same regiment in Sicily. Dusty was eighteen at the time, a straight-laced boy from Maine. His naivety endeared him to bigger personalities in the regiment, like Milton; it was Milton who first called him 'Dusty'. Milton was Canadian; he lived in Massachusetts where his father settled. He was twenty-two when they met, clean-faced, energetic and handsome. He was broad in the shoulder, ham-handed, and smiled effortlessly and often.

   The regiment arrived in Messina after the Landings. The two friends were on watch duty, a consequence given after their lieutenant found Milton drunk and naked urinating into the canteen tent, and Dusty unconscious beneath the flagpole where his boots had been erected. Watch duty was dull punitive work; but it often provided the opportunity to escape for an hour or so without detection. Milton dragged Dusty to the nearby town Saint Elia regularly during these stints.

   It was there that Milton met Rose. They stopped for a beer one afternoon, as all good soldiers in their regiment did when the war was slow. Three drinks in, Milton slammed his glass down on the wooden table and rose, his attention grabbed by something outside window of the cafe.

   Her hair was short, her skin olive, her eyes lively and keen as the eyes of the lovely so often are. She wore a white dress.  Milton followed her as she wandered from house to house; she hummed quietly and turned occasionally to smile at the pair of young soldiers. Dusty followed Milton, not daring to interrupt him. He looked for landmarks in case they got lost, but the white-painted walls of the short, narrow houses which sloped down to the sparkling sea were all identical to him. The waves were crashing gently.

   Milton’s Italian was passable; his father, a trader, taught him to read and to speak it when he was a boy. Within an hour he had convinced Rose, and more importantly himself, that he loved her. American soldiers always show up here with that story, she said. I’m not American, he said, quite seriously. When she told him he was Canadian, she feigned disinterest. She was like that.

   They kept up their clandestine meetings with Dusty as their unwilling lookout for four months, when the news broke out that the regiment would be deployed in Sangro, four hundred miles North of Messina. Milton proposed to Rose and she said yes, God yes. Neither truly believed they would see the other again.

   Milton distinguished himself in Sangro, but Dusty never had the chance to see it. He was discharged after suffering burns when a stray hit the fuel tank of the Daimler he was repairing. Milton wrote him a letter, which he received in the hospital, six months later. He was on home soil too; he’d taken enough shrapnel in the leg to render it useless in the eyes of the military.

   It was a year after the armistice that Rose arrived in the US, and they married quickly. They moved up to Maine, where Milton drank with Dusty at least twice a week. They bought a place by the water. She sometimes nagged him to curse less, to drink less, to finish his little projects around the house. She was wicked like that; she could make him feel bad and she sometimes did it to tease him. She had the finest sense of humor of any woman he’d known.

   With time Dusty’s straight back was bending; with time Milton’s good leg carried the lame one with trouble. And with time, both agreed, Rose did alright.

***

   Milton watched the steam rise from the mugs. He poured milk into them and almost poured some on the counter, anticipating a third. The shed was finished. He felt let down by it. There would always be something else.

   He was torturing himself, he knew. He was atoning for sins that he knew would never have meant a thing to Rose. She used to tease him about how serious he took things.  
   To hell with it, he thought. He poured the hot tea into the sink and turned to the living room where Dusty was slouched in the chair.

   Fancy a pint Dusty? He said.

   Dusty turned his head. I’ve no money you son bitch, you know that.

   Milton reached over the counter and clutched the jar. Drinks are on me, he said.