Instead of getting Carr's answer about that leaving solider, we get Tom Waits's response. He wants to take us back to that house again, a few years later.
The reason that Waits has been lauded as the definition of cool for so many generations is not that he's genre-defining and shifting, though he is, nor is it that he can play every damn instrument under the sun, though he can; it is because he is the country's best short story writer that has never published a thing. But they live in all of his songs.
In this, against a stand-up bass and macabre piano, Wait's road-rubbed voice runs down a list of items. Everything is very pedestrian: scuffed shoes and a sewn catcher's mitt, paperbacks and swallow tail coats, a communion card and tobacco tin. Through the items that fill the song we see the life of the young man who owned them. We understand that he's away in the service, but we see all that he was before duty called, we're even shown the metals that he's won. The last item is a shoebox in which everything inside of it is priced at a dollar. The boy isn't coming home to these things; he's left them behind. We've been at his wife's yard sale.