Epilogue

James Wheeler. Lexington, in the Province of Massachusetts Bay. Thursday, 28 November 1946.

Rebecca believed sincerely but did not expect every doubt to have an easy answer. Her confidence did not settle his questions. When he spoke plainly about service, she listened without requiring a heroic account or treating the conversation as a complete resolution of its effects.

The Universal Register: Eli Wheeler

I finished it on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, at about eleven at night, at the kitchen table.

It took five composition books, not two. I went back to the drugstore three times. The third time the man asked me whether I was writing a novel, and I said no, and he said that was what everybody said.

I read it on the Monday night and the Tuesday night, from the beginning, from the Sunday in December with the halter on the kitchen table, to the shelf over the sink. I read it once. I did not change anything.

My mother came down for a glass of water on the Tuesday, at about one in the morning, in her dressing gown, and found me at the table with the last book shut in front of me and the other four stacked beside it.

“Is it finished?” she said.

“Yes.”

She ran the tap and filled the glass and stood there with it.

“Are you going to let anybody read it?”

“No.”

She looked at the five books on the table for a while. She did not reach out for them.

“Well,” she said. “Put them somewhere they won’t get splashed.”

I put them on the shelf over the sink, beside the paybook. She watched me do it. Then she drank her water and went back up.

On Thanksgiving morning my father and I walked down to the brook before breakfast, the way he does on a holiday, to look at things without having to do anything to them.

It was cold and still, with a white sky, and the ground was hard. The wall along the brook was standing. We had put it back in April, the four rods the frost had taken in the winter, the same stones, and it had stood all summer.

My father put his hand flat on the top of it.

“Still up,” he said.

“Till the frost.”

“There’ll be frost tonight. You can smell it.” He took his hand off the wall and put it in his pocket. “Every winter, somewhere.”

“Somewhere.”

We stood there a while longer. Then we went up and did the milking, and had breakfast.

We were five at dinner. Lyons had gone home to his own. Walter Gaines had written that he would come out at Christmas instead, because his sister in Dorchester had a turkey and would not be crossed. So it was my father and my mother and Clara and me, and Aunt Ruth from Worcester, who comes every year and tells us what the trains cost.

Clara is eighteen now, and wants to be a teacher, and asks more questions than she did when she was thirteen, which nobody would have thought was possible.

“What does Peter say?” she said, before my father had finished carving.

“He’s reading Gibbon again. All of it. The professor says he’s argumentative.”

“Is he?”

“Yes.”

“And the General?” Clara had read about the General in the papers, and had not let it go since. “Does he still write to you?”

“Once. In the spring.”

“What did he say?”

“Nothing.”

“He wrote to you to say nothing?”

“Yes.”

Clara looked at me. My father went on carving.

“And Mr Brandauer?” said my mother.

“Hay’s cheaper in Wisconsin.”

“It would be,” said my father.

“And the sergeant?”

“Two postcards. One at Christmas and one in June. They both say it’s raining.”

“And the one in Arizona?”

“He sent a photograph.”

“Of what?”

“Of himself. Standing in the yard at home. No hat.” I had it in my shirt. I took it out and gave it to her. Baca, squinting, in a white shirt, with a stick, in a yard of bare dirt with a fence behind him and nothing behind the fence but more of it. On the back, in his hand, in pencil, one word.

“Dry,” Clara read out. She turned it over and looked at him again. “Is that all?”

“That’s all he needed to say.”

She gave it back. Aunt Ruth asked who he was, and Clara told her, a great deal more than I would have, and most of it right.

The vinegar was on the table where it always is, in the small bottle, by my father’s place, with the spoons.

My father did it the way his father did. He filled his own spoon and drank it, and coughed, and passed the bottle to my mother, and she filled hers, and drank it, and passed it on. Aunt Ruth did hers without any fuss, the way she does everything. Clara made her face, the same face she has made every year since she was four, and drank it, and made the face again afterwards.

“For Lem,” said my father.

“For Lem,” said my mother.

Clara passed the bottle to me.

I filled the spoon and drank it. It goes up the back of your nose and down your throat at once, and your eyes water. It is supposed to.

Then I sat there with the bottle in my hand.

Nobody said anything for a moment. Aunt Ruth was looking at the turkey. My father was looking at me. Clara was looking at the bottle.

“Jim,” she said. “Are you having another?”

“No,” I said.

I put the stopper in. My father held out his hand, and I gave him the bottle, and he put it back by his place with the spoons, and picked up the carving knife.

“Well,” he said. “Who wants the leg?”

They have all gone up now. Aunt Ruth is in my room and I am to have the sofa. The radio is off. I have taken the last book down off the shelf to put this at the end of it, because I said at the beginning that I would say each time how I know a thing, or that I don’t, and this is a thing I don’t.

Eli knew what his spoonful was for. He knew Lem’s name, and where he was from, and how old he was, and what he died of, and he had stood at the door of the hospital at Valley Forge and not been let in. So it was for Lem, and everybody who has taken it since has known that, even before they knew who Lem was.

I know Auguste Morel’s name, and how old he was, and what he did for a living, and where he was standing when he died, and what he was going up the stairs for. I do not know whose round it was. I know that the battery fired forty-four rounds from my gun that night, and I loaded every one of them. I do not know who said the mortars were there. The General looked longer than anybody, and he does not know either.

I did not take the second spoonful because I do not know what it would be marking. I do not know if it would be for him, or for me.

So I have not taken it, and I have written that down.

There is a letter from Lucien on the shelf. It came on Tuesday, between the seed catalogue and a card from Aunt Ruth to say what train she would be on.

The shop is open every day but Sunday. There is sugar now, a little. His mother is worse in the cold and does not like to be asked about it, and it has turned cold. The roof held through a storm in October that took the slates off the church. He asks after the cows. He asks after Normandy, by name, whether she is well, and how big. He does not say anything about living in it.

He tells me the price of eggs.

He does not mention his father. He never has. Neither have I.

I have got a clean sheet of paper. I am going to write back tonight, while the house is quiet, before the frost.

I am going to tell him that Normandy is well, and nearly as big as her mother, and that she has her mother’s temper. I am going to tell him about the hay, which stayed dry. I am going to tell him the price of eggs here, because he always tells me his, and because his father asked me, the first evening, in the farmyard behind the lines, what an egg cost in America, and I told him, and he wrote it down on the back of an envelope.