Prologue

The letter from Lucien came on Saturday, between the seed catalogue and a bill from the grain store, and my mother put it on the shelf over the sink. That is where she puts anything that comes from away, so that it will not get splashed before I see it. She started doing it the winter I went into the Army, and she has not stopped, though there is hardly anything from away now except Lucien.

I was in the lower field with my father when it came. It is the mud season, and there is not much a man can do in a field in March except walk round it and say what he will do when it dries. The frost had put down about four rods of the wall along the brook, as it does somewhere every winter, and we stood and looked at the stones lying in the mud.

“Four rods,” my father said.

“About that.”

“Every winter, somewhere.”

“Somebody’s been putting that wall back for a hundred and sixty years,” I said. “It’s never once stayed.”

“Never once.”

He bent and took a small stone out of the mud and set it on the wall, and then another. He left the big ones lying.

“Those are yours,” he said.

“Your back?”

“My back.”

He would not have done that before I went away. He is fifty-six. When I left he could lift the tail of a loaded hay wagon off the ground and hold it while I knocked a wheel back on, and talk to me the whole time about something else. Now there is a hired man to do the things my father used to do without thinking about them, and my father stands and watches him do them. My mother says he got old in the summer of ‘forty-four, when the papers printed the casualty lists from Normandy and there were weeks with nothing from me. I tell her a man gets older between fifty-two and fifty-six whatever happens.

We worked along the wall until the light went. He did the small ones and I did the big ones, and neither of us said anything else about it.

When we came in my mother said, “There’s a letter. It’s on the shelf.”

“I’ll read it after supper.”

“I know you will.”

---

After supper I took it down and read it at the kitchen table. My mother washed and I could hear her not asking. Then she asked.

“Well?”

“The shop’s open again,” I said. “Every day but Sunday.”

Lucien writes in English now. He started in French, in 1944, and I needed help with every line. He has learned more English since then than I have learned French, which is not saying a great deal for me. He writes the way he talks, which is a lot and fast, and when the English runs out he puts the French in and underlines it.

It is not yet what it was, he writes. Sugar there is none to speak of, and the coffee is not coffee. People pay on account who never did before, and I do not like to ask them. My mother is better when it is warm and worse in the cold, and she does not like to be asked either. So I ask nobody nothing, Jim, and it is a very quiet shop.

“And his mother?” my mother said.

“Better in the warm weather. Worse in the cold.”

“Like the rest of us.” She hung the cloth over the rail. “Did the roof go on?”

“Before the winter. Slates on the street side and tarred paper on the back, because the slates ran out.” I turned the page over. “It held through two storms in January. He tells you about both of them.”

“He would.”

He asks after the farm. He asks after the cows by name, because I told him their names once in June 1944, and he has kept them all this time.

“He wants to know about the cows,” I said.

My father had the paper up in his chair by the stove. “Which ones?”

“All of them. By name.”

“All nineteen?”

“All nineteen.”

He turned a page. “I couldn’t do that,” he said.

He tells me the price of eggs. He always tells me the price of eggs.

“What are they getting?” my father said, and I told him, and he said that was dear and went back to the paper.

Lucien’s father asked me the price of American eggs the first evening we met. Lucien has never said so, and I do not know if he remembers it.

He does not mention his father. He never has, in any of the letters. Neither have I.

My mother dried her hands. “Will you write back tonight?”

“Tomorrow.”

She looked at me for a while, the way she does, and then she said good night and went up.

---

I have been home five months. In that time a good many people have asked me what it was like. Mr Hartwell asked me again at the grain store on Thursday, with his hands on the counter.

“Must have been something, that beach.”

“It was something.”

“And Paris.”

“And Paris.”

He nodded, as though I had told him a great deal. I have told everybody about the beach and about Paris, because those are the two things people have heard of. I have not lied to anybody. I have only found that the beach and Paris will take up as much time as anybody wants to spend asking, and nobody has had to hear the rest.

I have decided to write it down.

Not for anybody. Not for Lucien, who knows his part of it better than I do, and not for my mother, who keeps my letters from the war in a shoebox in the bottom of the wardrobe and can tell you which ones I wrote in a hurry. I have started to tell some of it a little differently each time, the way the family tells the old stories. I would like one copy that is the same as what happened.

So I will say the hard part once, here, and then go back to the beginning and come to it again in its order.

In July 1944, in the hedgerow country of the Cotentin, Lucien’s father was killed by shellfire in his own village, on a night when my battery was firing on that village.

I know that much for certain. I asked to have the battery’s record looked at, and it was looked at, and I saw what it said. A good deal more I do not know, and some of it nobody knows, and I will try to say each time how I know a thing, or that I don’t. I have a habit, which my mother will tell you about if you give her the chance, of mending a thing before I tell anybody it was broken.

There was a Wheeler in the old war, Eli, who was a gunner too, a hundred and seventy years ago, in Crane’s artillery. Before that he was in the infantry for a summer, and at Kip’s Bay, when the British came ashore, he dropped his musket and ran with everybody else, and the army charged the musket against his pay. He did not tell his own brother the whole of it for three years. The family has been making a joke of it ever since, and I have told it myself, and I will probably tell it again. Since I got home, it is the three years I keep coming back to.

I bought two composition books at the drugstore this morning, and a bottle of ink.

“Going back to school, Jim?” the man said.

“In a way.”

The kitchen table is mine after supper, once the radio goes off and my mother has gone up, and I will go on until I come to the end or the books do.

I will start with the Sunday, because that is where it started for everybody I knew.