Please forgive the metaphor. Too much salt air and too much time has softened a hardened soldier.
I want you to know, though, that with every step I took in my cracked leather boots, you were near me. Your friendship is that fortification that kept me safe. When I saw the beauty of the yellow rapeseed flowers blooming on landscape, I wanted to pick them and make a bouquet to give you. A real one, not simply the ones sketched for you at the end of my letters.
The thought resuscitated me when I feared I would suffocate from the ugliness of the battle. I carried your picture in my left chest pocket. Not as a talisman but as a reminder of why we were there. What—who—we were fighting for. All the beloved ones we left behind when we crossed the Atlantic. I pressed on when I wanted to give up because I wanted to believe that we will all see home again.
Dare I hope—I would like to see you in person when we are on the other side of this.
This is more than we have shared before, but when you have been surrounded by too many lives cut short, it makes you think about the things you want to say and to say them now rather than to wait. And say them without reservation.
Please write soon. You can’t possibly know how your letters give me the strength to continue on.
Tom set the pen down and looked it over.
The words were a surprise, even to himself. There was something about the curve of handwriting—the slope up, the slant down, over and over—that dulled inhibitions and crafted courage where one wouldn’t have thought it existed.
He meant what he’d said—seeing how swiftly death could take a man created an indelible change.
The nurse had somehow procured two pencils at his request—yellow and green—jaune et verte—and he drew out the delicate petals of the rapeseed flower. He held it at arm’s length when he was finished and frowned. Individually, it was an unremarkable blossom. But it had been the one beauty in the battlefield—yellow so vibrant and abundant that it seemed as if heaven itself had spilled paint upon the ground.
How he wished Margaret could see it in person.
He picked the pen up again and stared at it.
He still had to finish the letter.
Love, he began.
He took a breath.
William
Chapter Seventeen
August 1944
As soon as Tom sent the letter off, he regretted it.
Not the sentiments. Actually, pouring onto paper what he’d been wanting to say for months felt like nothing he’d ever felt before. Perhaps the closest thing was the moment he jumped from an airplane. The second of hesitation and fear, toes hanging over the edge, questioning and hesitant. Choosing courage. Stepping off into nothingness. A literal leap of faith. And then—the exhilaration of a free fall as he looked around and marveled at the beauty that he would never have seen if he’d kept his feet on the ground.
Yes—it was exactly like that. He’d jumped.
Would she be his parachute? Or would his words fall flat and be extinguished?
No, he did not regret the sentiments. He’d seen life snuffed out too soon too many times to think that playing it safe was a winning strategy.
It was the name that made him wince. He’d signed it as William.
Why oh why oh why had he done that?
In the moment, he’d told himself that she couldn’t bear more bad news just when she was finally sounding happy again. But had that really been the considerate thing to do? Or was it a less daunting way for him to share his feelings—hiding behind the protection of William’s name? The familiarity of it?
He’d sent the nurse to retrieve it, begging her in his stilted French to rescue the letter before it was tossed into the mail sack with countless others and shipped off in a cargo plane.
She’d come back empty-handed, consoling him only with a warm glass of milk. The plane had taken off.
What had he done?
One little action—seven letters instead of the three in his name—had changed everything.
It was one thing to do so when William was alive. And even with his encouragement. William had rightly pegged that Tom would feel more freedom in his words if he wrote them in proxy.
It was a worthy exercise for a while. When the stakes were lower.
But shouldn’t things be different now that he was no longer here?
If Margaret welcomed the words, she would welcome them as William’s words. Not Tom’s.
If the words were unwanted by her, she might stop writing altogether. Or she’d send a letter letting him down easy.
Oh, that would hurt worse than all of the broken bones he’d endured.
There was no way to come back from this. Even a follow-up note in which Tom confessed that he’d been the actual author of the letters had little hope of success. She knew him only by his drawings at the end of what she believed were William’s longer messages. And although he had labored over each of those, trying to delight her with renderings of the countryside, it was not enough for her to reciprocate what he’d said.
The only alternative was that she would be rightfully angered by what he’d done. Intention, or no intention.
That was that. He’d go dark until he could figure out what to do. And it would be a long time before he’d know her response anyway. His bones had healed and he’d received permission to rejoin his unit.
They were heading to Holland.
Any letters from Margaret would take weeks to catch up to him.
Or may not reach him at all if they were addressed to a dead man.
* * *
Margaret’s heart swelled when she read William’s letter.
There was something about it that had reached a new depth. It was not merely the signature—Love, William. That just reflected what she herself had written and she could not infer any more than what she had intended in her own letter. Though it did signal a receptivity that pleased her.
It was his candor. As he’d put it, the loss of inhibition. Dottie had told Margaret that after having a baby, she was in awe of her own body and the remarkable things it was capable of. Perhaps it was the same with men—there was no more grueling challenge one could face than a battlefield. And when he’d done so—aware of the brevity and sacredness of life—he could find comfort in discovering his feelings.
She rather liked this new side of William and was flattered that he’d chosen to share those feelings with her.
She had hoped that he would mention his previous letter—the typed one with the odd message on the back of the envelope. The one she could only read if the unthinkable happened. No matter. There was no need for it now that she knew he’d survived Normandy.
As had Tom. Although William had made no mention of him, his friend had drawn a lovely likeness of a rapeseed flower. And she had just the right floss with which to embroider it.
She lay back on her bed, wrinkling the lace coverlet she’d placed across it, and held the envelope to her heart.
“Are you okay up there?” asked her mother from the bottom of the stairs. “I thought I heard a noise.”
A grin spread across Margaret’s face like butter on hot waffles and her cheeks burned with excitement.
“I’m just fine! I promise!”
She sighed and closed her eyes.
William and Tom were safe. Weeks of worry could rest at last and nothing could dampen the feeling of tremendous relief that came over her.