My dearest Margaret, he wrote.
I don’t know when this will find its way to you, but I am writing it only hours after we have lost our beloved John and I’m hurrying to have it be carried out on the next helicopter leaving Chilton Foliat. I know those army telegrams don’t tell the families what their hearts most want to know, and I would hope that should the jaws of death ever take my life that someone would do the same for my parents and sisters.
And so, I am sending this out to you at the earliest opportunity.
William wrote at length about how much John had come to mean to both him and Tom ever since they’d trained together in Georgia. Only a third of the men who’d enlisted as paratroopers actually made it past boot camp into the Airborne in North Carolina, so they trusted each other’s abilities, having proven themselves time and time again.
He’d become the brother that neither of them had. John taught them how to play “Yankee Doodle” on a harmonica, and as southern boys, William and Tom had pressed upon him the need to learn something with a different flavor. John had been kind to everyone they met and insisted on helping old Mr. Brown with chores around the cottage even though he, himself, was entirely spent after days of training. William wrote that for as long as he lived, John’s example would be a guiding light to him.
And now, he continued,
a bit on what I know you’ve been wanting to hear about. John was one of our best paratroopers and Tom and I are certain that he was mere days away from a promotion to Specialist. It is too early to say what made his parachute fail. The smallest error in coiling it could have dire consequences. But more than likely, the culprit was the infernal wind that plagued us today. All the men had difficulties releasing their parachutes as the wind did its worst against us. Our first lieutenant is stone-faced, as his role requires him to be, but we’ve come to know him well. And I can tell that underneath his staunch military demeanor, he is as bereft as the rest of us. Maybe more than most, as losing a man you are charged with sending home safely must leave a feeling of profound failure.
This will be hard to hear, and so I give you fair warning that you may want to place this letter down. But I believe, Margaret, that you are as strong a girl as John always described. If that is the case, then you should know the details. John’s fall was broken by a low-lying tree, and it likely kept him from dying on impact. You might believe that would have been a more merciful end, and in one respect, you would be right. But in the few minutes he lived, Tom and I were able to rush to his side.
We found him just feet above our hands, and Tom and I scrambled up a maze of branches to get to eye level with him. His body had been pierced with a particularly sharp limb, and it had cut clean through his abdomen. Tom took off his jacket and pressed it against him, hoping to stop the blood, but I knew that even the most skilled surgeon would not be able to repair what the fall had done to him.
But his last moments are sentiments that I think will give some peace to your heart. Please tell Dottie that his first words—in case they’d be his only ones—were for her. “Tell Dottie I’ll love her forever,” he whispered through labored breaths. “And Mom and Pop. And tell Margaret that I want her to find the happiness that I found with Dottie.”
Margaret’s heart clenched as if a vise had wrapped itself around her. John had always wanted for her the idyllic love he’d found with his beloved Dottie. And Margaret had told him that it was not a lack of wishing for it but a sense that she would know when it happened. It was not something she could rush just because many of her friends were settling down.
Leave it to him to give her such consideration even as he spent his last breaths.
And one more thing, added William.
Which I will leave to you to tell Dottie or not, as you see fit. But we told John about the baby. If that was wrong of us, please find it in yourself to forgive us. Tom and I looked at each other after John had struggled with the litany of his loved ones. And we nodded, understanding that he deserved to know. “There’s something else,” I said. And I spoke the words quickly, fearing that he had no more than a few seconds left. “Dottie is carrying your child. And I and Tom and your family will all be sure that your son or daughter will be loved and cared for.” At this, Margaret, a sight I wish I could give justice to—he smiled a brilliant smile and it seemed in that moment that no amount pain could overcome his joy. “I’m a father,” he said.
Those were his final words.
Margaret, by the end of this war, I fear that John’s will be only the first of many deaths that we will have to witness, and I will admit that it terrifies me. No man, no matter how tough he proports to be, is prepared for the unnaturalness of a passing that is far too early and far too tragic. But John’s bravery has bolstered me—and Tom too—and I believe that because of him, we will be able to withstand whatever lies ahead. And if I am grateful for one other thing, it is that John escaped the ugliness I know we are about to encounter. Perhaps, in the end, he is the luckier of us.
At the bottom, Tom had drawn an exquisite lily.
* * *
The days at the engraving department continued to roll into one another, anesthetized by sadness. Two weeks passed before Dottie moved back in with Gladys. She’d told Margaret that she had trouble breathing in a place whose air and walls and memories were so saturated in grief. Every time she walked by John’s bedroom, her heart clenched at the thought of what might have been. Mr. Beck had barely spoken since the telegram arrived, and Mrs. Beck had become a ghost of herself. Her cooking lacked salt and she sat by the radio out of habit, but without any reaction to its output.
And though she herself would never get over John’s death, Dottie knew she wasn’t going to be able to begin to adjust unless she got out of there.
If Margaret had only herself to worry about, she might have let it all consume her as well. She might have buried herself in the quilts on John’s bed and never left. But there was Dottie and John’s baby to consider above all else. Margaret needed to rally from the grief to be the support that Dottie needed at this time.
Margaret knew that her parents’ immediate gloom of the news would mellow into an acceptance of something one should never have to accept. But it was still too early. They’d lost their only son. And though she’d lost her only brother, she knew something they did not—that he lived on in the child that Dottie was carrying.
She hoped Dottie would be ready to tell them soon.
As it was, she showed William’s letter to Dottie, revealing that she’d told him about the baby.
The discovery that John knew and was happy gave Dottie a peace she might not have arrived at otherwise.
On the first night of their return to the Sock ’Em Club—as Gladys continued to call their knitting klatch—Oliver had stopped by with flowers and chocolates for them all, and then left just as quickly as he’d arrived. Margaret had to hand it to him—with his gentlemanly manners came an extraordinary consideration not only for Gladys but for her and Dottie as well. This time, Gladys had even rewarded him with a voluntary peck on the cheek.
The following evening, they’d already made their way through half of the box, declaring the caramels to be their collective favorite.