Tom looked out at the river from the upstairs bedroom that he shared with William and John, and ran his hands through the hair that he’d kept a bit longer than the buzz cuts that his friends preferred.
John’s snoring was keeping him awake and it drowned out most of the sounds of crickets that populated the nighttime hours. Would John’s fiancée mind this particular disruption after they’d married? By all accounts, Dottie was an angel, and she would probably put up with it.
The intimacies of marriage both fascinated and frightened Tom. Not the most obvious aspect of it. That part was no longer a mystery to him, thanks to a brief encounter years ago with a college girl from William & Mary. She was doing some historical research at a plantation near his family’s orchard over one weekend and made a very persuasive case to then-eighteen-year-old Tom to spend some time with her in the barn. He’d thought he was in love after that, this creature who swept into his life and seemed so unlike the few girls he knew in the surrounding area. But when he’d borrowed his father’s truck and driven to Williamsburg to visit her, she’d laughed at the wild daffodils he’d picked for her and told him that she preferred the company of academics to farmers.
He didn’t bother to tell her that he’d just been accepted to the University of Virginia. If she could laugh at his past, why should he offer her his future?
After that, he was reluctant to take up with a girl, even though some of the co-eds in Charlottesville presented more than enough opportunities. He knew his mission—join the military after graduation. Or after his master’s degree, if his mother’s influence prevailed. Love and family would come much further down the line, and he didn’t care to playact them casually in the meantime.
But John and Dottie—though he knew her only through John’s descriptions—seemed ideally suited, and Tom’s faith in love was restored through the ardor with which his friend talked about her. It resembled the flame that Tom wanted to feel in his heart for a girl.
Next time, though, he would be more discerning. Love was not instant. He would take his time to really get to know her. Cherish her for what she said and not what else came with a romance.
Whomever and wherever she was.
“You can’t sleep, either, with the freight train in that bed over there?” Tom asked. The room was lit with a streak of moonlight and Tom could see William as he sat up in his cot.
William didn’t sleep well most nights, and Tom had been in on John’s idea to have his sister write letters to him. It seemed to have worked—Margaret Beck had written William a letter, just as John had asked. And though it was no substitute for the ones he’d hoped to receive from his family, it had bolstered him a bit.
He had yet to write her back, but Tom planned to encourage him to remedy that.
“It’s not that. Well, in part, it is. I guess my thoughts keep me up,” William admitted. “That and this damn hand.”
William had fallen on his right hand on their last jump, and though he mustered up the ability to shoot on the rifle range, he didn’t hide his pain back at the cottage. He’d turned down John and Tom’s pleas for him to see a medic because he was afraid they would sideline him.
“Care keeps his watch in every old man’s eyes. And where care lodges, sleep will never lie,” Tom mused.
“What’s that, Professor?”
“Shakespeare.”
“Of course it is.” William threw a pillow at him. “You college boys love to show off.”
“Hey,” Tom defended. “We’re sitting in the land of Shakespeare. Cut me some slack.”
“I know, I know.” Tom could see William grin in the dim light and he was relieved for it to make an appearance. William continued. “Have you taken a good look at a map? My pops would be happy to know how close we are to Oxford. He was a Rhodes scholar. A fact he inserted into every stump speech on the campaign trail.”
“I know what you mean. You would think from hearing him talk that my dad’s Bronze Star was the flippin’ Congressional Medal of Honor.”
William’s mouth twisted and he lowered his voice. “You know, son, I walked six miles uphill both ways to school and I expect you to shine my shoes with your tears of gratitude.”
Tom laughed. “Yeah. Something like that.”
“Really, though, my pops once gave me a ten-dollar bill for my birthday. And on the envelope, he wrote ‘Here is milk from the cow that got no respect.’”
“Ouch.”
“Maybe that’s why he hasn’t written. He’s waiting for me to do something worth writing a speech about.”
William’s words hung thick in the silence. There was no response for what Tom, too, felt so deeply, words betraying him. He could only return to what they’d begun talking about.
“You know, Stratford-upon-Avon would be less than an hour from here if I could only wrangle a Willys Jeep for a bit. What I wouldn’t do to send my mom a postcard from there.”
Tom thought about all the places he’d only read about that were so very close. London. Oxford. Cambridge. And Paris, across the English Channel, still quite a distance and under siege by the Germans. But the French roots on his mother’s side had always felt alive in him, and he wanted to see the place where his ancestors had walked.
If only a war weren’t going on and they could go exploring. And yet, without the war, they wouldn’t be here in the first place.
“If I see an opportunity, I’ll find us a Willys and we’ll go. Maybe Dick Winters will need me to head that way on an errand,” offered Tom.
“Not likely. It’s to Littlecote and back for you. But thanks, anyway.”
They were quiet again, only the sound of John’s heavy breathing between them. A melancholy had sunk into Tom ever since this morning when he’d walked past a cottage with an open window, through which he’d heard a small child playing a labored version of “Greensleeves.” Her mother sat with her and they talked about the girl’s part in the upcoming pageant at St. Mary’s Church in December.
The rigors of their march today had suppressed his thoughts of the upcoming holidays, but now the stillness of the nighttime had brought them back to the forefront.
“William?”
“Yeah, Tom?”
“Do you realize that next month will be Thanksgiving? And then Christmas.”
William sighed, and his voice sounded flat, the way Tom felt. “Don’t think about it. Anything can happen between now and then.”
“Sure. But there’s no chance that we’ll be home. Whether we’re here in the English countryside or out on the battlefront by then, the point is that we won’t be with our families. I guess that finally just sank in.”
William paused. “Thanksgiving. It’s my favorite.”
“Yeah.” Tom’s father would shoot a turkey. And his mother would prep it. Removing the feathers, boiling the innards, and dressing it in a bath of spices and vinegar to sit in overnight. The highlight of the day, for Tom, at least, was not the meal itself, but what his mom did on the afternoon of Thanksgiving. She pulled out a large cast-iron pot that was used just this one time every year, a Cousances that had been owned by her great-grandmother and brought over two generations ago from France. She simmered the carcass for hours and then added the meat, the vegetables from earlier, and some barley, and it turned into what they called Leftover Soup. They’d store it in the refrigerator and eat it for the next three days, letting the glow of the original holiday dinner extend just a little longer.