Frank Marston was the first to see Ray Takahashi that day—a soldier, small of stature, stepping down from the penultimate train car and into the bright eddying dust of the town square—and it was Marston who, much later, would comment on just how ordinary that train had been: the same as the train that had stopped alongside the fruit sheds the day before and the same as the train that would arrive the day after, its cars empty to receive the stacks of crated peaches and plums and pears that rose in compact towers from the dark interior of that long, bustling room. Indeed, as the locomotive’s roar descended into its low idling rattle, the workmen of that day were already slipping into their gloves in the air of diesel fumes and oil and the ever-present cloying scent of the fruit itself.

Ray Takahashi’s beauty had always been tragic and heroic but upon his return that tragedy and heroism felt real in ways that before had been only imaginary. His hair, once swept back in a shining black wave, was shorn close now, and his thin, lithe body, always tight and muscled, had become, somehow, even harder than it might have after a season in the orchards, his skin as tan as ours, but his gaze somehow more distant, as if he was, even as he looked in our direction, gazing past us into some landscape we could not see and never would, not the boy who had gone away but a man now, a soldier who stared through the shimmering air into the darkness of the sheds from which, even as he struggled to pull shapes from the sunlit glare, came the floor lady’s high peal—“All right, you lazybones. Let’s get at ’em”—and he knew, he must have known, without having to see them, that the workers had begun the process of loading the cars. August meant that peaches were coming to an end, replaced by the season’s first pears and plums, a fact he also would have known, a knowledge and understanding that ran deep in his bones and blood the same as it did for all of us, the smell of it—a mix of fresh sugar and sweet decay—like the smell of his own toil across all the summers of his youth. For a long trembling moment he simply stood there in the shadows, watching the shapes of the loaders move back and forth from the crates to the cars and back again. “Christ I wanna get home,” one of the soldiers mumbled from inside the car. “Christ I just wanna get home.”

The dust around his feet. The scent upon the air. Frank Marston’s shape must have appeared a black specter stepping through from one world to the next. “Welcome home, soldier,” he said.

“Thanks, Mr. Marston.”