When I was sixteen, our class wrote letters to soldiers overseas. Mine went to a boy named Eddie from Kentucky. We wrote for two years, him about the heat and the homesickness, me about nothing at all, which he said was exactly what he needed. In 1971 his letters just stopped. You didn’t ask questions back then. You prayed and you went on. I married, raised three, buried my Kenneth last year. Last month I donated Kenneth’s old uniforms to the VFW, and the man at the desk read my maiden name off the donation slip and went still. “Briggs? From Sycamore Grade School?” Then he called toward the back room, “Eddie. Eddie, come out here.” And the door opened, and the man standing there.
“Briggs? From Sycamore Grade School?” Art asked, his voice cracking slightly as he looked from my donation slip to my face. He was a retired mailman who volunteered at the VFW reception desk on Tuesday mornings, and he smelled like peppermint lozenges and old paper.
He was staring at my maiden name on the yellow carbon slip I had just signed.
I had not seen that name on a document in nearly fifty years. I stood there in my wet raincoat, the water dripping off my umbrella onto the worn linoleum floor. The rain was drumming hard against the glass of the double entry doors. I had spent the morning dragging Kenneth’s old army duffel bag out of the crawlspace above our garage.
Inside that bag were Kenneth’s pressed khaki uniforms from his time stationed in Munich.
They smelled of camphor and cedar shavings. Kenneth had been gone for exactly eleven months, and the silence in our small ranch house on Maple Street had become too heavy to carry. I thought donating his things to the local post would help me close a door.
But Art wasn’t looking at the uniforms. His eyes were wide, blinking behind thick bifocals as he stared at my signature. He turned toward the narrow hallway that led to the back office where they kept the old files and the spare coffee urns.
“Eddie,” Art called out, his voice echoing off the wood-paneled walls. “Eddie, get out here. You are not going to believe this.”
The door at the end of the hall creaked. A man with white hair and a slight limp stepped into the light of the fluorescent bulbs. He was wearing a faded green flannel shirt and holding a plastic mug of black coffee. He looked at Art, then his eyes shifted to me.
My brain stopped working for a second. I just stood there. He was older, his face lined with the hard years of a tobacco farmer, but his eyes were exactly the same shade of slate blue I had imagined every night when I was sixteen years old.
It was Eddie. The boy from Kentucky who had stopped writing to me in the autumn of 1971. The boy I had spent fifty years believing was buried in some unnamed field across the ocean.
I need to back up for a second. This all started in the winter of 1969. I was a junior at Sycamore High. Our English teacher, Mr. Henderson, decided our class should do something for the boys overseas. He brought in a cardboard box filled with names and military serial numbers scribbled on index cards.
I reached in and pulled out a card with a smudge of grease in the corner. The name was Edward Vance. He was nineteen, a private first class from a small town outside of Bowling Green.
I wrote my first letter on lined notebook paper. I told him about the snow in Illinois, and how our school basketball team had lost three games in a row. I told him my mother had burnt the Sunday pot roast again. I felt incredibly silly writing it.
Three weeks later, his reply arrived in our mailbox. The envelope was thin, made of cheap paper, with an army post office stamp in the corner. His handwriting was large and slanted. “Clara,” he wrote. “Your letter is the first thing that hasn’t smelled like diesel fuel in six months.
Tell me more about the burnt pot roast. Tell me about nothing at all. That is exactly what I need.”
And so I did. For two years, we wrote twice a month. I kept his letters in an old blue tin box with a chipped lid that had once held peppermint candies. I kept it hidden under my mattress, away from my brothers’ prying eyes.
Eddie wrote about the red clay that turned to thick soup when it rained. He wrote about the heat that made your clothes stick to your back by six in the morning.