By Christine Briel / Skaneateles Design
Thursday, February 28, 2008, 10:21AM EST

This last holiday season I came across 2 or 3 parts of Bob Comenole’s wonderful holiday tale “Watchman, Tell Me of the Night”. He offered it as a “gift” to Skaneateles Journal readers. Unfortunately, later when I searched the Internet to try and read the story in its entirety from beginning to end I had trouble locating all of the parts to the story. The stories original appearance was found in 3 separate newspapers:

The Reno Gazette-Journal, December 9th, 10th, 16th, 17th, 23rd, 25th, 2007
The Auburn Citizen, Sunday, December 2nd, 9th, 17th, 24th, 2007
Skaneateles Journal, December 4, 11, 18, 26, 2007
Below is Skaneateles resident and author Bob Comenole’s holiday tale called, “Watchman, Tell Me of the Night” in its entirety, including an epilogue. If you haven’t yet read it from beginning to end, I urge you to go ahead and do so. It’s a wonderful tale that begins in Chicago and ends in Skaneateles at the Stella Maris Retreat & Renewal Center (Wiki).

Part I:
Letters From Home

I walked against a biting wind from the Embarcadero up Market Street. All around me the lights of San Francisco began to poke into the falling night, red and yellow, shimmering off into the Bay. I raised my collar, more against memory than cold. Behind me was an eleven-month, eleven-day tour of duty. I didn’t know if it would ever feel like home again. After a year overseas I avoided catching my reflection in the storefront windows.
A small brass ensemble played “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” as children hurtled down the streets, filled with the helium of joy. Their trailing scarves left long brushes of color suspended in the air, red, green, yellow, and each hung there, like a colorful ledge upon which anyone might rest a dream or a want. At 19, I thought how much closer in age I was to them than to their parents who were madly dashing behind. I overheard a man say that there’d been only ten instances of measurable snow in San Francisco in the past century. Apparently, this was going to be another one of them.
Snowflakes gathered upon my shoulder. My heart lightened, for I knew if flurries had come to California then by the time I arrived back east my hometown would be buried. And in five days I would be there, shoveling out the long drive at my folks’ home on Pine Ridge Road, a little gravel comma half-way between Auburn and Skaneateles, two small towns at the frontier of the Finger Lakes.
At the Fleet Post Office an older vet was stepping to the double glass doors, keys in hand. Before addressing the locks he pulled up his shirt sleeves, one by one, in that quick, peculiar ritual of those giving meaning to small tasks. On his left arm was the tattoo of a woman in profile, on his right an intricate monogram encircled by the name it must have represented: Billi Callico.
“Don’t dawdle, soldier,” he said without looking up, pausing for the five bells which began to sound overhead. I hurried in. Waiting for me were three forwarded letters. One contained a check from the Treasury Department for half a year of pay errors. Each of the other two was addressed in my mother’s handwriting. The vet held the door for me and I asked, nodding toward his tattoo, “Yer wife?”
“I wish!” he grunted. In the midst of his laugh there was a perplexed crinkle, as if to say ‘You the only one who doesn’t recognize her?’
I fashioned a loose salute and headed out. He stopped me, nodding at the Treasury check, “The Wells Fargo will take it. They’re open till 6.”
“Ga-Mug,” I said, and he winked. I realized that his was the first face that I’d looked full into since coming back. And when I looked into it I could see that he had already perceived, despite there being no outward evidence, each of my wounds: a staple-sized scar on my thigh, and two sickle-shaped dings on my ribs, one above and one below the heart. There was a fourth, but I could not remember what it was. As he turned, his limp surged and cascaded like a spring gone bad. And I was ashamed at how short my own convalescence had been.
Outside the bank I took a bench under the awning of a bus shelter, trying to decide what to do with the nine 100-dollar bills now in my hand. I divided them up, four in each sock and one for my wallet. I bought a bus ticket over to Oakland, where I’d pick up the railroad east. While I waited outside the station, I opened the other letters. The first, in a candy-cane envelope smothered in Christmas Seals, looked like it had been stuffed with a pillow. That was my mother’s. And knowing my mother, I went first to the P.S. to work my way backwards.

P.S. Your father’s in such a rage, Luke. Such a rage. He doesn’t say anything. He stopped going to the VFW!! Won’t be seen at the Legion. I don’t see he’s going to adjust. I don’t know what to do. Please let me know what your Christmas plans are. You know I stay up later than your father if you’re thinking of the phone. He’s written you a letter. Things will be better next year. What made this have to happen?

My thumb ran along the paper’s edge. A woman in an upper apartment across the street was spraying her windows with canned snow, over stencils. A sleigh and reindeer, then a fir tree. She went to the next window: ornaments, icicles, pine cones. A child came to the window, begged the mother low and received the can. She shook it with the stiff ceremony of a child and up went an off-centered Santa Something twinkling in a room beyond them threw flickers of light over mother and child as they merged into the next room. At the last window the aerosol, like a bad cough, spit only a few flecks onto the stencil. Then the four hands of mother and daughter gripped the reluctant can and shook and shook and laughingly shook it in movements so gleeful that a miracle could be the only outcome. I recalled my mother shaking the dreadful thermometer against the croups of my childhood, the nightly studies of my father’s self-renewing disappointment in me. I thought, too, of the empty cans of my own life and then all the spent aerosols of the world. I wondered what a miracle might feel like.
My neck was now cold. I flipped back through my mother’s letter, finding only village particulars and niceties. ‘A plus, Ma,’ I thought.
A letter that I had sent my parents a month earlier was wedged within her own pages, as if snuck by a bad-mannered jailor. It’s why it was so fat.
In that letter, which ran to thirty pages, I explained—it the first time I’d raised the subject—I explained why I was petitioning for conscientious objector status. At least I began the letter with that concept. I worked out for my mother and father my own moral objections. The fear for my soul. My ignorance of political matters. The loss of things I could never regain, and the acquisition of things I could never shed. I did not tell them what I had seen, or what I was ordered to do. I put several months into writing, rewriting, meditating. Perfecting what I knew was a one-shot memo: the most cogent manifesto I could muster.
I was nearing the end of my tour and got word that I was being reassigned out of my combat unit to specialty duty stateside. This wasn’t an indicator of how the Army might rule, I was told, and so I didn’t hold my breath. I had not sought to leave the Army, I’d not made plans to flee to Canada, I was prepared for prison, I was even prepared to die at the hands of any number of men in my battalion who’d made such threats: but on the issue, I would never again put a rifle in my hand.
And so, my tour ended 19 days early. I was being shipped home.
The second letter—nothing more than a very long sheet of that waxy onion paper my father’s firm used—was folded sloppily in half and stapled in four corners. I slid my finger into an open seam and ripped it open. In the center was another envelope, my own. Also stapled. My mother had returned the contents, my father the wrapper. In my enthusiasm I had written on the back of the envelope a short phrase, again and again, beginning in the center and working outward in ever smaller print, nesting the phrase inside itself over and over: “I’m coming home!” It wrapped around the edges until the whole back was filled and the lines fell off every side. “I’m coming home!” When I pulled my envelope from the staple that pinned it to the sheet I saw, written with grease pencil—in my father’s own unyielding hand—those squashed strokes that come from bearing down: “Don’t Bother.”

Part II:
Two For Chicago

If my father could have figured a way to express his disdain in one word he would have. But two were enough. I looked into the little window of my watch, the red 19 rounding the box. December 19th. It would have taken me five days to make it home. Now, though…. Where would I go?
Suddenly I was no longer hungry. The woman and her daughter were gone from the window. Snow was accumulating on the limbs of trees, telephone wires, window ledges, none of it sticking to the ground. The ground was now nothing more than a great spill, slick and obscure, for which someone, I was sure, would be punished.
An old wreath lay in a trash receptacle, squashed and dry. I reached in and pulled out a gummy stem. I creased my father’s long waxy sheet in several folds, pleated the ends and fleshed it into an upright bag, a luminary. I lit the stem and set it on the curb. At the end of the block I looked back, and it shone there, brightly, the letters of the grease pencil showing through, wavering with the flame.
I was standing in the aisle of the bus. An elderly woman took her hand from my arm; I didn’t realize it had been on me. She smiled and I looked into her holiday broach, sparkling red and green. She said, “Here’s your seat.” I sat, and could not remember having gotten out of it. Had she just guided me? “Thank you,” I said, bewildered.
At the Union Pacific Depot, I pulled the cash from my sock and bought a ticket to Chicago. I was not keen on being anywhere for Christmas but my own home. Stretched out in front of the big register. But that was no longer an option. Maybe I’d give Krebs a call; he liked to go up into the Adirondacks for the holidays. Maybe I’d just get a cabin by myself in the back country. I could rent skis. White fields and blue sky: that’s all I’d need.
The lobby of the train station was a bumper pool castle; people edged along, holding packages aloft, outpardoning one another. I was glad that I’d put the extra cash in my socks. I squeezed my way to a bank of seats. A girl rose from one of them and I darted toward it. I settled in and unbuttoned my coat. An instant later the girl was back again, smiling tentatively. “Oh, I’m sorry, I thought you’d left,” I said.
“Oh, that’s OK. I did. I mean, my train’s leaving. I just forgot…” She blushed. And then kneeled to retrieve a small bag under the seat. “Oh,” I said, and rose. She spurted out a thank you and then took my hand. She tossed my duffel bag onto the empty seat and dragged me some distance. All I could do was button my coat.
“My family’s waiting in Portland. It’s Christmas! I’m having a heart attack leaving him.”
“I don’t follow.”
“See, we rode together all the way from Tucson. He’s the nicest man. Old, but nice.” And she turned me by the shoulders so I could see who she was referring to: he, this broad-shouldered, white-haired man, had his arm around my duffel bag, protectively. “You notice he doesn’t have any luggage? He told me,” and she hesitated, “he said he just wanted a white Christmas. That’s all he was thinking: ‘Go north, young man.’ He got as far as Oakland. I gave him twenty dollars. He gave it back. I slipped it into his coat. Will you be sure it stays there?”
“As long as—“
“I don’t know where you’re going, but you’re a soldier, and he needs, you know. He’s got no family. Snow’s such a simple need.”
“It’s snowing now.”
“Real snow! Oh, my train! Promise me…”
“I’ll do what I can…”
“I know,” she said and spun away. She turned back. “Oh, and he’s deaf.”
“Huh?”
“Deaf. And, uh, moot.”
“Moot?”
“Can’t, ya know, speak.”
“You mean—”
“But he reads lips. I swear, just watch what you say under your breath!”
“OK, I’ll—”
“Here,” and she tossed me a thick notebook. I looked at it: Organic Chemistry.
“I doubt I’ll be—”
She took it from my hands, opened it from the back, and ran two fingers down the page, “He writes real neat!” On the first sheet, printed in tidy block letters like those on blueprints, was: YOU’RE VERY KIND. GLAD TO MEET YOU, ALSO’ And under that: WILFRED FIST-WITHER.
“Wilfred?”
“Yeah, he’s 75 and British.” She patted the notebook. “This is everything we talked about, Tucson to Oakland. It’s yours!”
“But,” and I looked at the ledger, which was filled, front to back, with notes. Jammed with writing. On one side of each page were her notes and on the other, the fine printing of Wilfred Fist-Wither. “But your class!”
“—semester’s over….and I aced the final!” She hopped away, waving goodbye to her confederate as if madly washing a small window with her mittens. Mr. Wilfred Fist-Wither waved back, his smile throwing a narrow beacon that seemed to go out in front of her; she followed it and disappeared out a dark exit. The beacon returned, as if on a spool, and when I looked down to my feet, there it was, quietly humming. And so I traced it up to its source and we smiled at each other, comfortably, his eyes blue and clear and welcoming…and snow-hungry.
He looked both younger and older than our friend had said, his hair an unblemished white but very thick. His build was enviable, but he had a tremble throughout his right arm. I looked around for a shaving kit, for it seemed as if he’d just finished a shave. I smelled bee balm. The skin on his neck was weathered but taut, and his hands showed a life of labor. His eyes moved deliberately, as if every movement in the great lobby was a satisfaction. And although I didn’t see one, I was sure he smoked a pipe.
He’d already noticed, and so I held the notebook openly on my lap, trying to look cool. He raised a genial brow, as if to say ‘I’m at a disadvantage…’ And so I introduced myself.
I told him I was heading to Chicago. Then who knows. He listened. I spoke for a long time about coming home, not realizing at first how much I needed to. His dabbed his eye. I ducked my hands into my pockets, as I do when I get uncomfortable. Then I pulled out a little ball of paper and laughed aloud. “Once the world’s smallest pamphlet, now a wrinkled mess.” He leaned with interest. “An old woman I was very fond of made this a gift my last week in country. Tiny little thing that I couldn’t even read. In English, but the writing so small, elvish.” I showed him the little wad; it was shriveled, blanched and compressed in immeasurable folds, little more than a mass of cotton fiber. “I left it in my fatigues… Which then went through the wash!” He laughed.
I rolled it up sad-faced and aimed for a trash bin. Wilfred reached for my hand. ‘Let’s have a look,’ was his expression. He turned it in his hand, inspecting how the wrinkles were layered, how the folds adhered to themselves. And crease by crease he began to separate the inscrutable folds. Peeling them back, pausing, contemplating, peeling. After five minutes I said, “Really, it’s a bother.” He just smiled and patiently went about the next set of layers, separating them with infinite attention, careful not to tear the paper or spoil the faint ink. Another ten minutes and I said, “Really, you’ve worked too…” He just smiled at me, beneficently, and kept on working, slowly, as if an old woman knitting, delighted by the task. After fifteen minutes he looked up, and I saw behind the weariness of his eyes another message: ‘I try never to throw anything away.’ A half an hour later he smoothed out the brittle paper. There it was, the ink laced and pale, but legible. At least for anyone with a magnifying glass. He nodded to himself as he read the lines.
“You can read that?” He smiled. And then pulled from his jacket a pair of reading glasses. I brought them close to my nose…

“I do not pretend to give such a Sum; I only lend it to you When you meet with another honest Man in similar Distress, you must pay me by lending this Sum to him; enjoining him to discharge the Debt by a like operation, when he shall be able…” - Benjamin Franklin

Suddenly, a thunderous bang came from the platform. Everything went again into that slow motion tick. From my place on the floor, I replayed all that I’d just seen: first, the rattle of the plate windows, children squawking, eyes drawn toward the platform, eyes turning away from the platform, a few hands to chest, looks of relief. That was on one periphery. On the other, I saw Wilfred Fist-Wither swing his head in a half-pivot, just as I had done. Then bring down his shoulders, leading with the right, just as I had done. Then pounce onto the floor, just as I had done. And there we were, on our knees, slowly bringing ourselves upright, eye to eye, like two men in the same on-deck circle. The boom had been an air-brake and the hard coupling of two cars. If anyone had been watching—and they were—we must have resembled a pair of synchronized swimmers.
Wilfred read my face: ‘I thought you were deaf?’ He brought his palm twice to his chest, and I understood. He had felt the concussion, just as I had.
He stood and motioned that he needed a walk, and I signaled as if to say, ‘I’ll hold your seat.’ He winked.
I started reading.
There was barely a single empty page in that ledger. I soon had a dilemma: where to find a pencil and where to find room in the book to put the answers I sought. Wilfred had spent the first World War in the trenches. He was in Belgium during the famous Christmas Eve truce of 1914, when the Germans and Brits crossed lines to exchange gifts and sing carols to one another. Yet there was so much more! Before he returned I raced to buy another ticket for Chicago. For a moment I wondered if he’d even return; then I became afraid that he might have just walked off—he’d had no bags to return to, nothing for me to guard.
But he did return. And when he did, we sat quietly. Over the loudspeaker came the boarding notice for my train. I stood, he stood, and I could see my departure in his eyes. Then I bent over.
“Oh, here—you dropped this…” I handed him the ticket. “Hey! Looks like we’re on the same train…” I moved rapidly: showed him my ticket, put it next to his in comparison, then wedged it between his fingers. “If we don’t snap to, we may be hoofing it…!” And I started to gallop. He followed, open-mouthed, reaching for me with an outstretched hand, my ticket at the tip of that hand, not like a spear, but the prong of adventure.
On the train, as the departure whistle blew, he slid the notebook from my pack and took a short pencil from his pocket.

Part III:
The Snowsheds of the High Sierras

Was I doing right by Wilfred? He was captive of my whim, my charity, my ticket. As we came into the foothills of the Sierra’s, he scratched something into his book and touched my arm: ‘You are a godsend!’ His smile curled and threatened to overtake his face. As we began to ascend the snowcapped range, brilliant in the moonlight, both of us submitted to capture.
Wilfred and I gazed out the window, transfixed by all that passed: sugar pines turning to heavy timber, purple canyons, wild rivers that Wilfred later called barmy. The snow was coming heavier now, and then became so fierce that nothing could be seen but the hilarious scurry of flakes at our noses.
A slew of colorful placards were pasted throughout the coach. They marked the centennial of the 1869 completion of the intercontinental railroad. There were announcements of all sorts: parades, banquets, a ball at the Confucius Temple in Sacramento. They featured the verses of a song commemorating the event. I’d never heard it before but whistled a likely melody. It was a railroad song, a song of struggle, of land, of labor. Words honest and earthy.
The train made several flag stops, and each time we peered out together to see who was boarding. Wilfred was driving the pages in that ledger like a man on a buckboard. At a sign for Emigrant Gap Wilfred slid me the book. “On this spot?!” He motioned as if to say ‘very near here.’
“I wasn’t even two years old!” He gathered his brow: ‘I was younger then, too.’ In 1952 he’d been coming west on these very tracks. The train was hit by a massive snow slide. Everyone aboard was stranded for three days. “Three days?” He held up three fingers and with them suppressed a wide grin. I read on. No question came that wasn’t immediately answered. I held up the notebook, “I feel as if I’d been there” He tilted his head, ‘You are!’
“Yuba Pass,” I whispered.
A conductor announced that the train was pulling off into a snowshed, so that the big plows could come through and clear the track ahead. The snowshed was a long shelter of very heavy timbers built up to protect the train; we’d already passed through several. To some they were barns, to others cathedrals. The storm was intensifying. I looked at Wilfred jestfully, “It wouldn’t be a disaster if a blizzard socked us in for a week, eh?” He studied me and wrote, ‘In such firmament I could live. Or die.’
“How old were you in 1914, during that Christmas truce?” He wrote ‘My 19th birthday came just a month before.’
“Do you ever wonder who started it? The truce, I mean, not the war.”
‘We saw them putting candles in the trees. Then heard a smashing tenor voice. I knew German and so joined the voice. I came in on alles schläft—all is calm—then his mates and mine, each in our own tongue, stitched the song on. A few started to toddle out of the trenches into No Man’s Land We exchanged gifts, stupefied by the mixture of uniforms. Acquaintance so irregular. There’s always been talk about candy and cigars and whisky. But some of us didn’t have any of those things. I gave a fellow a box of evaporated cranberries. I see it still: Packed in Wareham, Massachusetts. You see, Luke, I was born between Wareham and Swanage. England, you know. In fact, I was born in the little train station at Norden.’
“Get out!” A passenger behind tapped me to ask what it was! Here was another story. But Wilfred was running out of white space. Pressing hard over the top of other notes he drew a sketch of himself offering the box to his foe. And then wrote in the clean margin, ‘He gave me this…’
He withdrew a tin, about four inches square. It was royal blue, the maker’s name embossed in yellow: GREIF. The sides were stamped Farbband, and 25mm.
I took it into my hands. “What’s in it?”
‘I presume typewriter ribbon. That’s what Farbband means.’
“Typewriter ribbon? You mean you’ve never looked?” He shook his head; the seal was undisturbed. The tin showed its age. ‘It’s been with me ever since that day. Not once out of my hands. I swore that…’ And he put the pencil down. I did not follow up, nor need to. Soldiers carry many things for many reasons. Even long after soldiering is done. To Wilfred this was no souvenir. It was his tin reminder, portable and enduring. ‘We exchanged gifts. Then, together, buried the dead. And together we prayed, a cobble of German and English. I forget it now, something like: …my shepherd…He restoreth my soul. It’s been a long time.’
I lowered my head.
It was not boldness but camaraderie that eventually led me to break the silence: ‘How did you lose your hearing?” He battered his hands, signifying so much shelling. ‘How did you lose your voice?”
He looked at me, paused and wrote, ‘I didn’t.’
“You mean you’re able—?”
‘I pledged that I would carry this tin until the day I died. But to remain silent, I didn’t set out to do that. For a long time I just didn’t talk much and then, over time, it became an obligation. An oath to those whose voices are still in that perpetual hush. What I miss most is singing. My mother adored my voice.’
I was quiet a long time. “If I took such an oath, would I be able to speak on the day of my dying? I mean, the promise is until that day, right?” Wilfred went blank. Finally, reluctantly, he nodded.
Another announcement came that we’d be further delayed. There were more snowslides ahead. It was very late into the night and the passengers took this with good nature Some began singing “I’ve been working on the railroad…” The lights dimmed. Soon I was the only person still awake. I reread the lyrics on the poster nearest me. I watched Wilfred sleep. Then I, too, amid the downy lights, was out.
Wilfred shook me awake. Everyone in the train was still fast asleep. It felt strangely like a barracks: some shifting hilariously in their sleep, others mumbling softly. At first my eyes, sill blurry, could not make out what he was shoving toward me Then the ledger came into focus, ‘You are needed!’
“Huh?” My confusion was compounded when I realized that the train, while again at rest, had moved. Now in an entirely different snowshed. When the conductor stepped silently into the car I asked where we were. “Near the summit!” he whispered. “Norden. Won’t be long. Storm’s ended.”
“Norden?”
Wilfred brought the notebook closer to my eyes. “I don’t know what you mean! Needed for what?” He wrote: ‘No more room.’ And indeed that was the last of the space in the notebook; there was not room for a fraction. But…why hadn’t I thought of it before! I pulled out my mother’s letter. He wrote on the unused side, ‘You must get to the Guard’s van.”
“Guard’s van?”
‘Caboose. You must go now!’
“I don’t get it!” His face, beseeching and firm, brought me to my feet. “For what purpose?” He simply wielded his pencil with fervor and affirmation. A panic set in: I was sure this was a ruse. “We’re in Norden!” I said in a cautionary tone. It did not escape me that this was the namesake of his birthplace. Was this the destination he’d had in mind all along? To leap from a snowbound train, to build one last fire? To die, warm and drowsy, along Henderson Creek? Had I been used? The forlorn look I first noticed about him had not faded. He pleaded. And I went, powerless, certain I would not find him when I returned.
I walked through each of the cabins until I reached the last. And out upon the platform in the open air a man stood holding the fence rail, looking out, the stiff wind thrashing his long coat and scarf. The car was slightly beyond the tail of the snowshed, and I could see the sky clearing overhead, the moon level with the two of us, perched between two distant peaks. The man turned toward me, stiffly, and held out his arm. Frailly he spoke, “Watchman?” He felt round. “Watchman…tell me of the night.” He kept his face, stiff and unblinking, toward me and his arm outstretched. There was no doubting he was sightless. “What do you see?”
“I…I’m not the watchman. I don’t see anybody.”
“Are you from the train?” I didn’t know how to respond to such a peculiarity. “Uh, yes.”
“Oh, you’re a traveler. I thought you might have been one of the celestials.” By his inflection I felt that perhaps I should laugh. I didn’t. “You’re young, “ he said.
“Not so young.”
“You’re not from the west.”
“New York.”
“The Celestial Kingdom, that’s what they call their homeland, the Chinese workers who built most of what you’ve been traveling on. That’s why the name.”
“Oh.” I misfired a laugh. He leaned further over the rail, as if preparing to be devoured.
“Do you read much Danish?”
“Uh.”
“Funny I should be thinking of that story way up here. We’re at the summit, aren’t we?”
“Is Norden the summit?”
“At the Bottom of the Snow Ocean. That’s the name of the tale. By a fellow Gunnar Gunnarsson. The father is out to sea. The family is nineteen days snowbound. Their house completely submerged Christmas Day.”
“Does the father return?”
He turned his head again into the wind, which seemed to tear more at him than me.
“Tonight there is no mercy. Everything that is out and about must die.”
Into my pockets went my hands. Then out. He shifted suddenly, like a bird dog, and came off the rail. He went to his knee and felt around on the platform. “Oh, here, you dropped this.”
I feared a swindle coming. But when he put into my hand a coin I didn’t know I had dropped I flushed with a form of shame. It was my coin all right. An old Chinese woman, the very first person to greet me when I got off ship in Frisco, had clapped it into my hands. It was a heavy piece, very old, and minted on one side was: ‘One Wondrous Token.’ On the reverse was a field of stars, a raised series of bumps that I took to be stars. Then I remembered hearing the clink of the coin on the floor. Yes, I had dropped it, but hadn’t heard: the sound had come only through memory. “Thank you.”
“I’m usually pretty good with my fingers, ‘One Wondrous Token.’ But the other side. What’s it say?”
“There’s nothing on the reverse.” I flipped the coin high in the air, and in its rotations, like one of my holographic trading cards, there appeared a pointing finger, Uncle Sam-like, and the phrase: ‘Six Days of Sight For You.’ I stared. Flipped it again. This was my coin all right. But!
“Watchman?”
“There’s no watchman.”
“Do ya hear the thundering of those slides, far off?”
“I only hear the engines.”
“What do you see over yon mountains? Tell me, son, of the night.”
“Hard to see anything distant, but the sky is clearing; the moon’s setting behind the peaks.”
“And stars, you see stars?”
“One.”
“What sign does it give? Hope…or sorrow?”
“I…I don’t know.”
He made a left face. “And over yon, what do you see?”
“I see—” I gave a perfunctory look. Then I craned forward.
“Over yon.” His face became a promontory of emphasis, “What do you see?”
I looked deep out into the night. “It’s a man!” I shouted.

Part IV:
Two Trunks and a Snow Goose

Half a mile downgrade a solitary figure flailed like a drowning creature. He tread a step and then fell into a cleft. His head rose, topped with a furry cap. The fuzzy ball of the cap tossed side to side as he labored; he looked like a small mouse, alone in the great plain of snow, turning left, turning right, seeking the last comfort of earth. Just then the last of the moon disappeared behind the mountains. A shiver ran through me, like bone striking bone. What made me shudder more violently, though, was the sudden blackness of the sky. Its emptiness. Not only the blackness, but the size. The entire universe was poised above us, cold, dark and infinite. And it seemed that it could crush us with nothing else but its own magnitude. Or, if it were merciful, simply congeal us where we stood.
I leaped off the platform and tramped through the depths. I encountered a blue flag on a pole and pulled it up; it became my walking stick, yet I ran. By the time I reached the figure I was out of breath. I found him bent under the weight of a huge canvas knapsack on his back. He was dragging two trunks, large as steamers, by their long leather straps. And under one arm he cradled a snow goose, gloriously white and sedate. “Let them go!” I yelled, my voice carried off by the raging wind. “What’s that?” he cried. “I’ll bring you in. Take my hand!” I shouted. Then I heard the grating of steel wheels and several quick releases of steam from the train. Its whistle blew. “Hurry!” I barked.
“Just a moment,” he shouted, and bent over to refasten one of the decorative buckles on his shoe. Was he buckling his shoe? I got alongside and propped him up. The wind eased. He offered his hand and said, “Everet Haskell, at your service. Some call me Zeke. What can I do for you?” just as he fell over. “Do for me?” I helped him up once more. “On a night like this,” I shouted, “everything that is out and about—” He roared with a jolly laugh that cut through the air, “What’s your distress?” The man’s delirious from cold. “Save your energy,” I hollered. “Nonsense, I have energy enough. But I won’t, no I won’t part with these trunks.” Taking the two straps from his hand, I led him toward the restless train. I prodded, he plowed, we strove.
Once aboard, I commanded him to stand still, “What were you doing out there?” He took me by the shoulders and said, “Well…Captain, what fortune brings us together!” He was by no means ignorant of rank, but I corrected, “Private.” He gave a conquered chuckle. “Very well, let’s have a look at you, Luke.” And as he did, I got a look at him: I don’t know what was more astonishing, the three pocket watches that fumbled out of his two inner coats or the long clay pipe that was stuck through a buttonhole, wobbling as he walked. Peaking out under his wool pant cuffs were the bunched legs of long underwear. His outer robe was long, heavy and collared with white fur. It was cinched together by a rope belt, and all throughout great patches of repair work were held in place by thick stitches of twine. His face was broad, his complexion a deep cocoa-brown, richly burnished and beautifully clear. Under his cap an orchard of silver hair coiled every which way. He had an eternally long beard, silvery white, and he wore a silver scabbard with no sword. I looked round: the sightless man was nowhere to be found.
Soon the whole train was alert to the rotund figure of Mr. Everet Haskell, bumping passengers indiscriminately as he passed through each of the cars, giving out hearty belly laughs every fifth step. I followed, dragging the two monstrous trunks. But rather than rile the sleeping mob, his great crimson robe shook them from their dreamy stupor. The glint in his eye induced a sort of mesmerism: he drew people out of their seats like children to a fire engine, so that the whole of the train was now in our coach. He would not answer a single direct question! Now they were asking questions of me, as if he were in my charge. Even the conductor whispered to me, “He’ll need a ticket.” I went for my socks.
Wiping his brow, Everet began: “Does the o’clock matter? So many rosy cheeks!” And he gave some groggy children there a handful of candy canes, which were mostly cracked and gummy inside the cellophane, as if they’d been half licked already. A child asked point blank: “Who are you?” He roared, “Better to ask where I am going.” A man whispered into my ear, “It’s the oldest trick in the book. I suppose you ‘rescued’ him, out in the snowshed.” Stunned, I said, “No, he was down the mountain.” The man raised an ominous hand to me, two fingers of it black as if from old frostbite. Then he disappeared.
Everet bellowed, “My friends, Cheyenne is my destination. Not for revelry, but business. Ah, but this business is pleasure all the same. I am a merchant. And I advance to possibly the world’s largest convention, ever, of Christmas trimmings—oh, not just any sundry merchandise, but goods of old—the way they were once made, by hand, with care, with imagination!” And he opened wide one of his trunks. It was a stand-up wardrobe trunk with fine cedar drawers on either side. A pair of red pajamas squeezed out one of them; Everet quickly stuffed them back.
“Humility forbids me from further exposition, but,” and he opened one of the drawers. It was filled with a number of small compartments, each filled with straw. And from one he removed an ornament that caused the whole throng to hold its breath as one. “I have wares that, well…” And he brought out another, an old Victorian jewel made of blown glass and ribbing of real silver. Set into the indent, against a pink and aqua background, a pair of angels danced under lametta haloes. The whole sparkled in a surround of green rhinestones, sugar diamonds. A woman began to cry, “My mother had one exactly—” And she trembled terribly. “Saved six years to buy it. And now so long gone.”
Everet bowed with a soft and penetrating look, and handed the ornament to the one distressed, “Your mother was a very fine woman.” She continued to shake, and said, “I can’t hold this; it’ll break in my hands!” Everet whispered, “When you are able, come to me, and it is yours.” Then he stood and brought back the carnival air. “Doubters still? Oh, I have inventory! What do you want to see? Kugels, Dresdens? Tree-toppers? Not an ornament I don’t have. French, Polish, Czech. Teapots, lemons, lanterns. Drums, trumpets, ships, hot air balloons.”
“We liked Shiny Brites!”
“Oh, don’t think I don’t have stock! This is not a trunk only for the well-heeled. Anything that Frank Woolworth had, I have,” and he slapped his massive chest. He pulled out a papier-mâché Belsnickle, and then the whole crowd began to swap stories of ornaments of old. And it was an unrelieved symposium of nostalgia right there, not a person without a story of home and family and tradition. And wrapped up somewhere within every tale was a charmed piece of Christmas, described with warm and loving detail by even the most tongue-tied. Everyone had a different protocol for what went on the tree, how it went on the tree, when it went on the tree!
They spoke of glass violins, spun cotton, mercury glass, carved softwood, die cut decorations, sachets filled with spices, hand-painted egg shells, tinsel, chenille, objects made of wax, mica and brass. Even crocheted snowflakes, which to some was an unthinkable frill. And when they differed on taste or preference it was all just an excuse to openly exchange affection. They listened one to the other, intently, without wearying, as if to speak was to resurrect days of old. And everyone waited their turn. Children climbed over the shoulders of jovial strangers. Men sat on other men’s laps. They inventoried every conceivable item known to the season. And even those who didn’t celebrate Christmas joined in, trading stories of their own traditions, artifacts of the home, placeholders of memory.
And although there was great love expressed, it was not the love of objects. Which are nothing more than the hand-held symbols of time, of place, of blood. The repository of kinship preserved. These glittering stories did as much to reveal the eccentricities of family as anything. Eccentricities which distinguished the individual, yes, but also marked and connected the family from which they came. And regardless of practice, faith or tradition, the anecdotes that passed in that coach formed a treatise that hovered above them all, like a wreath of pipe-smoke, revealing this central truth: that they were all just variations sprung from the same source. Proving, too, that family was at the heart of all celebration, and meaning.
For every item described Everet went to another compartment and bestowed on a giddy traveler what was either a true relic or the world’s best reproduction.
It was an unrivaled celebration.
And it ended when Everet had emptied the entire trunk. Seeing the trunk now empty, the multitude became silent. Not because there was nothing more to receive. But because they realized that they’d taken everything from him, not out of intemperance, but enthusiasm, however unbridled. Nevertheless, no one stirred. We had all seen it—the tenderness and power in his face and frame. No one spoke for a long time and some hung their heads. But then he roared, jolting everyone from their places, “Don’t be so mum. I’m not going to give away everything here!”
“Your kindness, sir. How do you profit?”
“Hah!” and he almost fell over with laughter, “Such a question!”
“You’ve given—”
And again he roared, “Why do you think I carry two trunks? Besides,” and he reached deep into a low drawer, “this wardrobe is not entirely empty!” He withdrew a little home-made figure, a Kris Kringle wearing a cloth coat with a rabbit’s fur beard, and riding a giant snowball. “This, though,” he smiled, “is mine!”
Like after all surfeits of joy, we knew when to retire; one by one passengers made their way past Everet, giving him any number of salutations. Soon, save for those who belonged in this car, the whole compartment was empty, leaving the coach silent and melancholy.
Only two empty seats remained, and they were both opposite Wilfred and me. I gestured to Everet and he plopped into the window seat. He wiped his moist brow. And no sooner was he in the seat than he was fast asleep. I attempted to assemble his various coats as they competed for their own rest.
In the aisle there remained a chaos of stuffing and straw. I got up to clean it, thankful for the distraction—the peculiarity—of it all; it’d made me forget, at least for a while, who I was, where I’d been, and that I had no place to go.
Everet’s great chest rose and fell in a sublime sleep. I stowed his trunks. I returned to my seat. Wilfred was sleeping, too.
I pushed myself into my seat, enjoying the blissful clickety-click-click of the rails. I looked up. And through the oval window from the end of the coach, I saw the face of the ominous man, his two blackened fingers raised in a perverse disfigurement of the peace sign.

Part V:
Enter The Folk Singer & the Waif

Thank god for slackers. I found another ledger, abandoned with other textbooks in the trash. It was marked History/Algebra. And only three pages of it were filled in. I was jubilant in my find. Then I saw the ominous man again. I woke Wilfred, a little creeped out. I learned that he had first seen him in 1914. ‘He will not go away,’ he wrote ‘Dismiss him.’ And Everet, summoned from sleep, leaned in and added, “He has no power in himself; he can’t hurt you, only change your mind.”
“What’s that mean?” I asked Wilfred. ‘He is the devil’s chaplain. A shining patriot—and the greatest preacher of peace that ever lived.’ I was confused. ‘He roams the earth seeking to convince men that peace flows only from a ready bayonet. That war is the calling of a holy god.’ Everet interjected, “I can tell you: a thousand generations ago a man said ‘if war must come, let it come in my time, so that my child may have peace.’ But no child since has ever known peace.”
“I won’t be moved,” I said. And Wilfred nodded, ‘I know.’ Before returning to sleep, Everet whispered, “In my younger days, Luke, the mountain would have been no challenge.” Then he rolled up the pant of his right leg and with this pipe tapped his calf. It resounded with a knock of wood. It was an old prosthesis! “I rode with the Buffalo soldiers. But I grow older.” He gave a wink of an eye. “I wouldn’t have made it without you, my friend.” Then he was back to sleep, a grin of assurance lingering there, snug above his whiskered chin.
We came quickly off the mountain, down steeply through thinning trees and into sage country. Hand to chin, I watched the river flow, the elbowed Truckee. And suddenly we were into the streets of Reno. I spied the station, stretched out in stucco with great round arches and a terraced roof covered in red tile. And there Wilfred and I stepped off to unkink. Given the serious delay I expected to see a swarm of unhappy faces stampeding the train. Rather, the crowd of waiting travelers, sitting on luggage, was placidly gathered around a woman strumming a guitar. Her voice was quite good; the fades, though, gave evidence that she’d probably been at it all night. Surely what must have kept those waiting from becoming a hub of agitation. I didn’t recognize a single song. But on every chorus the gathering joined in, on and off key. Those who had just dashed off our train stopped, dropped their bags, and sat in the ragged circle, dumbfounded by luck; it was like a glee club. The rush turned into a sit-in. Folk music was not my bag, but it was hard not to enjoy this little improv.
Wilfred returned to the seat opposite mine, next to Everet, who was still snoozing. A moment later a voice came over my shoulder. “May I?” It was the folksinger. “Sure,” and I helped stow her guitar case and knapsack. “If you want the window seat,” I said, and she took it, bowing to thank me. A moment later a man was leaning over my shoulder, pushing a pad of paper across my face; he wiggled a pen. After writing something in his pad, the folk singer turned to me, “I’m sorry. Maybe I should take the aisle.” Then I was pushed again by a woman. Another little pad. More writing. What was going on? When the third person came forward and passed a copy of Rolling Stone magazine across my lap, I understood. On the cover—which read America’s New Folk–was a trio sharing a single mic, guitars slung over their shoulders. Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and the woman on my right, whoever she was. She signed the cover. The man held up a pair of tickets, “We’re on our way to see you in Omaha” Then she said to me, “I really am sorry. I don’t fly for this very reason. I thought the train would be more, you know, tranquil.” I waved, “No bother.”
Even Wilfred brought his ledger across the seat, sheepishly, respectfully, and she signed it. He beamed. And I nearly came out of my seat when in his sleep Everet—and he was genuinely sleeping—began to sing in a soft mumble. Soon several people were gathered about our seats. But it was not Everet this time who was drawing attention; the song he was singing was one of hers, and they took it as a cue to serenade her with their adoration. Even I could feel the discomfort in her as she shuffled in her seat. I forced a smile, noting that something about her seemed oddly familiar.
Then the conductor approached shyly; in his hand was one of the centennial posters. And boyishly he asked her to sign it. She was also the author of the railroad lyric on the poster! Nothing was going to surprise me now. Once she had autographed the placard, she whispered to him, “Is there a way to—uh, purchase any sleeping berths?”
“One may, yes. There are roomettes open, several; all the double sleepers are filled. This for yourself?”
“For all of us,” and she drew her hand in a circle that encompassed Wilfred, Everet and myself.
“There’s a stateroom that was just coupled, accommodates six.”
“Dealer, show me the way!” And she pulled out the plainest of rawhide saddle purses, which contained the most unplain clump of large bills I’d ever seen. As the four of us followed the conductor, I lugging the trunks, the woman said, “So much for traveling with the common folk. That’ll bother me. But I don’t want to be a nuisance.” And as I followed her I wondered: first, how someone so famous could have escaped my attention, and secondly how someone so loaded could appear so normal. She seemed to be around my mother’s age, maybe a little younger. She wore a suede coat with long fringe across the back and arms. Her hair was long, sandy brown, her face unmade, and as clear as a mountain stream. She was plain in every way, completely unvarnished. Plain in language, in smile, in touch. The only color on her was a dot of turquoise from a small, solitary ring. And she had freckles in spades.
The cabin was less glorious than its name, but it had fine wood paneling and smelled of pine. The windows were larger and let in a soft light that washed through the cabin. The woman pressed her head against a window; she looked drained, as if she needed a true hibernation. And when she turned I saw her in profile. Without meaning to, I blurted aloud, “Billi Callico!” She swung round, almost angry, as if I had cornered her. “No, I mean, I didn’t know who you were; I don’t know who you are!” I explained, apologetically, that I’d never heard of her, that I’d seen her on a tattoo. She came forward and hugged me, “If only the whole world were made of Lukes like you!” For the next few hours she kept her hands wrapped round my forearm, as if afraid that, without an anchor, she would be sucked out the window.
Later, as Everet slept, snoring softly in an oriental scale, Billi whispered to me, “Have you ever seen the great salt lake?” I shook my head. “Wait till you see the sparkle of the salt. It’s like quartz. The colors of the water change by the hour. Sapphire and turquoise. Sometimes metallic. All crystals and tiny little algae.” And then we were upon the lake. Wilfred looked at me, open-mouthed, ‘Do you see what I see?’ I nodded my head, speechless. We came closer to the window, the three of us, watching the sparkles, our heads adjoined like a cluster of berries.
Just then a flare of greenish-gold lapped across the entire sky. Then came another, with more fingers to it, then the light just erupted in a fantastic sheet of wispy color. And it arced across the heavens, billowing, changing form and color. And Billi exhaled, “Borealis…!” I had seen northern lights before, but nothing like this. We didn’t know whether to wake Everet or not: we figured he was well acquainted with the spectacle.
The train, itself part of this movement, cut a trail between earth and sky. The long shallow lake sparked as if the polished rings from ten thousand hands were catching life’s last light. The northern lights danced, shifting in lovely, unpredictable waves, bending low, reaching out, withdrawing. It seemed as if we were witnessing the colloquy of two great powers—companions of light. They gestured, one to the other, unrestrained and unrestrainable. They danced. But by their power they had lost all ability to understand the gestures of the other. And so they radiated only their longing, hopelessly lost in adoration.
“Borealis speaks to me,” Billi said. “I’ve written three songs to him.”
Wilfred wrote, ‘It reminds me of the air once over the Garone, at Toulouse.” I could think of nothing to say. When it was over, we sat in silence. Wilfred laid his pencil on the table, keeping it lightly in hand. Billi put her hand above his, and then I lay mine higher still upon hers. All three loosely round the pencil, as if clutching a fallen flag. After that, every word that we had for each other was filled with the kind of intimacy known only to siblings.
It would be nearly 24 hours before we hit Omaha, and so we settled in. Wilfred was sleeping now, too. Billi was crying lowly. “There’s one song,” she said, “that I’ve never been able to write. You don’t know anything about me, do you?” I shook my head. This comforted her. “The only song that matters. But I can’t come to it. The words I have but no courage.” And there, somewhere in the Wyoming night, I learned of the anguish Billi could not put in song. She had had a child at 18, just as her career was beginning to rise. And she had given the child away. “I wish I could say it was a hard choice. But it wasn’t. All that mattered then was my career. And I could not have both. So I left it—this will sound incredible, I know—but at a convent, Our Lady of Angels in Omaha. That’s why I give a charity concert there every Christmas. And what breaks my heart still is that only one day later some bureaucrat wrung that child away from the Sisters there. I never knew after,” and she leaned against me, beginning to faint, “never knew whatever happened to her.” I plunged my hands into my pockets.
“Have you ever had a regret so deep? So deep you feel like you’ve swallowed a sword…that you’ll be forced to live forever? And the more good happens to you the more it aches?” She could see that I did. And so she spoke softly on.
The train made another stop. Just then we heard a bang, bang, bang. And then a rumble of feet in the corridor. There were shouts and then a girl shot in through our door, slamming it behind her. She took immediate surveillance of the room and dashed toward the second of Everet’s trunks. She swung it open, “For the love of Rome, does this thing have an apartment?!” She swashed aside the dust-shield tapestry and crouched into the little cavern where Everet might have kept hangered trousers. Everet, roused but bleary, looked at the girl in his trunk. Then he slammed it closed. A knock came to the cabin door
From the knock we learned that a certain young girl had stolen a loaf of bread, made an inscrutable gesture toward her pursuers and jumped the train. “All that commotion for a loaf of bread?” Billi asked. “A loaf today, tomorrow a purse. Then anarchy. They breed, these types. There is no small crime in the eyes of Justice.”
Everet swung open the trunk, exposing the knees of the girl crouched behind the dust shield. I stood, confused but ready. And then Everet stood with severity in his cheeks and said, “Justice should take the bandage from her eyes long enough to distinguish between the vicious and the unfortunate.” The men moved forward and I brought my chest to theirs. Before the ominous man could appear, though, I retreated and bent to unroll my pant leg. “I have your bread, and her fare. How much will it be?”

Part VI:
The Grammar of Ornaments

When she emerged from the trunk, the girl—gaunt, olive skinned with rich black hair—said, “If you got any more bread, man, I’ll make it up to you.” She was probably 17, wore hip-huggers and a jean jacket with a big red ‘I Brake for Men’ button. Her eyes darted round, her face a grimace of dare. “There a lotta soldiers on this train?” The bottom of her bell-bottoms was hemmed with a salty-black crust of dried slush; I tried to see behind the heavy mascara she wore, but failed.
Billi stayed back, but the rest of us gathered in the Dining Car. The girl made a point to sit next to Everet, and for every evasive answer he gave, she gave two. When he took out his pipe, she asked for a puff, and he gave her one.
“Will ya tell us yer name now?” She wolfed down handfuls of food. Then fired out, “Teardrop.”
“Where you from?”
“The North Pole”
“And family?” She smirked, “Twenty-four brothers and sisters!” Everet put his arm round her and she didn’t seem to mind. “You go to school, work?” She laughed, “School? I sell matches!” I forced a smile, “Well, bunk as long as you like with us.” She grunted. Billi later joined us. “Feeling better?” I asked. She shrugged. A pinkish line was pressed across her face, the imprint of a window stile. She sat next to Teardrop, who moved away slightly, even though the bench was wide. Our server did not hear half our orders, befuddled by the white goose there and the aspect of Teardrop’s wrists. He could not help staring at both. The goose, calm as a sleeping kitten with eyes alert as a hilltop, took an occasional nibble at Everet’s crackers. The young girl’s wrists were wrapped tightly with white adhesive, exactly as a boxer’s. The tape extended over her palms and through the gaps of her fingers.
The rattle of the plates and silverware offered a cheerful distraction. And every time we passed a railroad crossing the pleasing bells sounded, pitched high, then low. And the five of us spoke. I yapped away. Only Everet outpaced me. Wilfred wrote like a madman. Billi conjured a few words, but I could tell it was forced. Teardrop snarled her words. All the same, she could not completely conceal herself, this unsolvable girl: at once restless, brassy, guarded, insatiable, indiscriminate, tremendously vulnerable, quick to please, angry. And something about her seemed so very familiar to me; I could not tell what it was.
A call came that Cheyenne would be our next stop. Everet took from his coat a handful of envelopes, sealed with green wax. And to each he gave one. “Just a simple blessing, my friends, for we must soon part.” As I opened mine Billi said, “I’m going to remember you as Mount Everet. I may write your song!” Everet blushed. “Will you excuse me, though—I’m still not with it.” As she stood there was an almost imperceptible friction between her and Teardrop, who seemed both relieved and offended that Billi was leaving the table.
When Wilfred opened his envelope, his eyes grew large as silver dollars. What he held was a hand painted Christmas card: a little girl speaking to Santa on an old-time candlestick phone; it was inscribed: ‘Thine Own Wish Wish I Thee.’
He opened his ledger onto a plate of gravy and did not care. He wrote nervously, a joyful impatience spreading out over his face. He held up the book: ‘MY HATTIE!’ He made a swirling motion across the card. He had known the artist. When he wrote out ‘Hattie Clapsaddle’ I thought that he might be pulling an Everet. And I looked to see signs of British deadpan.
He put the card to his chest. ‘My friend!’ he wrote, tracing over and over each letter of the word friend. Then he saddened. In a flash he filled three pages. I read to the group the story of their great companionship. Of how she’d been working with engravers in Germany just as the war broke out. And how it crippled her. He put pencil again to the ledger, writing, ‘Her heart was like a child’s. All that violence. Her innocence. The breath of war. She was the most virtuous woman I ever knew. And because she was incorruptible, it destroyed her.’ Teardrop came out of her seat and was reading over my shoulder; when Wilfred wrote the word virtuous, she pressed down on me, as if to gain a closer reading. Wilfred sat back in memory, enveloped in the sorrow of joy.
Teardrop’s card remained on the table. “Who’s Tahira?”
The girl squirmed. “Is that your real name!” She squirmed again, “Anyone could guess that!” Still, she would not open her card in front of us.
We formed a weary string back to our cabin, Everet bringing up the rear. When we opened the cabin door we discovered Billi sleeping and all of Everet’s trunks gone. I looked behind me. Everet was not there. I rushed back to the Dining Car. We were already at the Cheyenne station. I raced up and down the train, searching. When I shot out to the caboose I saw a single railcar being drawn on a parallel track. It came alongside me, brightly lit. And through the window I saw about twenty or so ragged men who looked and dressed so much like Everet I thought it was a trick of light. The red and green car was filled with stacks of trunks and wreaths of smoke. The men were gathered in little cells and filled them with wild gestures of commerce, wheedling one another with amusement and passion. And then I saw Everet’s nose in a window. He shot a wink and a smile that spanned all understanding. And then he raised his pipe to me. A swirl of steam bloomed into a cloud between us and bloomed ever wider and upward and when it cleared the car was gone.
On one hand I felt as if I were ten again, felt the abandoned buoyancy of the child I had been, the ticklish delight of knowing nothing. Open to enchantment without any need for explanation. The belief that if your favorite ball go down one hole it will come up another. Everet, even if only for a few brief miles, had given me that. On the other hand, I felt the pulse of bereavement, the acute knowledge of how suddenly we lose what is most precious. Even in the moment after I had last met his eyes, I wondered if Everet had ever existed at all. No, I had no doubts.
When I walked into the cabin I found everyone gathered round the table. A small scatter of crumbs surrounded a saucer and an empty glass in what had been Everet’s place. “He’s gone, isn’t he?” I nodded my head and took my seat. In front of each of us was a printed card with a single calligraphic marking: ‘Kuponki.’ In the middle of the table was a small ruffled banner, stitched in gold thread: ‘Thine Own Wish Wish I Thee.’ Under the saucer was a note folded over. Billi read. “I’ve never gotten used to them…and I really can not bear goodbyes, and so your forgiveness I beg. I get in such a hurry I forget myself. I suppose first that you must want to know what is a Kuponki. Well, it’s Finnish. A voucher. A Coupon. For the desire of your heart. May you be blessed forever. Until we meet again, E. Haskell.”
Looking up from the note Billi gasped. Then we all did. How could we have not noticed before? Fastened to the ceiling were four long strings, and depending from them, at eye level, were four shiny glass ornaments, majestically blue. And what I first saw—what we all first saw—was a sign outside the train reflected in the glass: “Welcome to Cheyenne, Magic City of the Plains.”
Each ornament had a footing of snow and a wispy line of clouds engraved round the two poles; between them was an empty band. Billi studied her reflection. After a short while she rubbed her eyes. Then an ecstatic laugh popped out of her. She motioned, “What do you see there?!” I had to narrow my eyes, but deep within the glass—I have to say within because it was both on and not on the surface of the glass—I saw the interior of what looked like a coffeehouse. “It is a coffeehouse,” she screeched. “It’s the Café Lena! The first place ever to hire me. And what do you see there?” I strained, “It’s a woman, with a guitar—it’s you!” And we all, save Teardrop, began to peer into the balls before us.
Noises bubbled up out of Wilfred’s throat; his pencil flew, ‘It’s my Hattie! It’s her!’ Out of respect we did not look into the glass, considering it his moment, not ours. But he motioned to look. ‘Quickly! look!’ And we saw scene after changing scene of a young soldier, a happy woman. I, too, saw images from youth, from my home in untroubled times.
Teardrop slapped her leg, “All you’re doing is projecting your own memories on that thing. I could do it with a corn muffin. Buncha mass hypnosis.”
Then Billi said, “Maybe you’re right. I don’t see anything anymore.” And Teardrop huffed on Billi’s glass, “Told you.” When the fog of her breath had cleared, Billi shouted. “No, wait! That’s Constitution Hall.” We all looked. “I was once booked to play there” And her expression deepened. “It was the first place to deny me.” I asked what she meant. “The DAR wouldn’t allow me in the building.” She lowered her head. Teardrop asked, “What’s the DAR?” I told her. Billi continued, “I wasn’t the first. They’d done the same thing to Joan Baez two years ago. Just as they had to Marian Anderson.”
“What’d they have against Baez?” Billi lowered her head, “Well, you do the math: she was a peace-nik…and Mexican.”
“And you?”
“I wrote protest songs; add that to being an Egyptian born in Hoboken, an Arab. When I did charity concerts they called me a saint. When I stood up to ask why in this great nation we still had the poor, they called me a communist.”
Teardrop asked, “And they wouldn’t let you sing because you came from Hoboken?” We tried our best to stifle what went up as a community laugh.
“Where’s Constitution Hall?” demanded Teardrop.
“Washington, D.C.”
Teardrop turned to me, “Can you get me there?” I paused and then shrugged. Teardrop turned her Kuponki card over and then we all did; they were identical: “Unconditional Lifetime Warrantee. Discharge of One appeal. Granted upon Request. Guaranteed by the full faith and credit of E. H. & Partners”
“What’s this?”
“Looks like—”
“A wish?” By this point I was ready to believe anything.

Part VII:
Butterflies are Freed

What is a wish, really? In the 500 miles that stretched from Cheyenne to Omaha, we tossed out all sorts of ideas. Billi said that they weren’t necessarily magical. After all, what was an encore? The wish of the many given by one. An unexpected pleasure. Something they couldn’t provide on their own. I said a furlough was like that, especially when given when least deserving. Teardrop dismissed each theory as it appeared, “Wishes is soft peoples’ way of dealing with worry. A fad that’s never gone out of style. Castles never will float in air!” Wilfred wrote in his book all across Wyoming and now Nebraska, and none of us touched our cards. What were we afraid of?
Billi was again looking into her glass. She twirled it and gurgled, suddenly distraught, “No!” In a flash she ripped the glass from its string and threw it down; it did not break. She turned fantastically pale and shot out of her seat. “Why have you locked this door? Why have you locked me in!” she screamed. The door wasn’t locked, and she twisted the handle in panic, finally ripping open the door, escaping in a flight of sobs. Neither Wilfred or I moved to see what she had seen.
Teardrop picked up the glass. “That’s Billi’s glass,” I said. She said, “I have a right.” But she did not look.
Wilfred then twirled his glass round. His face collapsed. He looked upward as if to ask ‘Why show me this?’ I peered into it; all I could see was a small farmhouse. I put my hand on his shoulder.
Teardrop held her ornament, “I’m not afraid to look, if that’s what you’re thinking.” She became unusually serious. “It’s just that, sometimes.” She gave the glass a spin. “I know there’s nothing to see. Can’t be no happy scenes cus I’ve never been happy. And for the rest, I don’t need a little glass to remind me.” I listened. Her voice became different, softer, thready. She let her shoulders down. “If you want truth, it’s this: I was born in Omaha. My mother named me Tahira. That’s the only thing I have of her, and the only thing I know of her. She left me in a basket somewhere. I had about twenty foster parents, each worse than the last. I dropped out in the 9th grade. Ain’t never looked back either. I get by.” She did not want us to see her cry, and so grabbed her jacket and said, “I’m going for a smoke.” As she went out the door Billi was coming back in, both so intent on their sorrows that they didn’t even notice the hard knock when their shoulders collided.
I did not want to chase after her, but felt certain that Teardrop was going to hop off the first chance she got. And so, when she returned, I jumped up. “Hey, kid!”
We all slept at different times, and as we neared Omaha we found ourselves all around the table, the cards still untouched. “This is just bogus,” Teardrop said. “Here, I’ll show you how.” And she tore her card, halving it and then ripping it again and again. Then she brushed the little pieces of it onto the floor. “Bogus!” Billi then just blurted out, “I wish you hadn’t done that!” In that instant, I felt something thrusting my feet, as if in front of a giant turbine. Everyone must have felt the same thing, for we all looked under the table. Then something hit the window of our cabin with a tink; it sounded the way a BB does. Probably just a stone thrown up. When we returned attention to the table Teardrop’s card was no longer on the floor in pieces; it was in her hand, whole. She screamed, as if stung by a bee. Then she tried to fling the card away. It wouldn’t leave her hand. She thrashed violently, but it remained between her fingers. “Get it off!” She gripped it in her teeth. And then it was again in pieces. She went to the window, opened it, and let the bits fly out into the Nebraska countryside. Billi slid her card into the narrow rail below the window, where it fell down into the panel of the cabin, “Guess that leaves me with none.”
Teardrop, who had shown far too much emotion, marched out of the cabin. This time I followed. But not soon enough. I could not find her. I walked through every car on the train. Then I went into the caboose. Empty. I stepped onto the rear platform, where I’d seen the sightless man. And there, crouched by an anglehedge, holding the rail, was Teardrop.
She looked up, “You think there really ever was such a person, Hattie Clapsaddle?”
“I suppose.”
“What did he mean ‘most virtuous’ woman?”
“It’s self explanatory, I think.”
“No one ever explained it to me.”
“I think it means she was untainted.”
“Once,” she began, “I was hitching round the northwest. A couple a guys took me out to one of those islands off the coast. Hardly anybody on’m. All rainy. Everything soppy and overgrown. There was a bike in a tree. I don’t mean hanging in the limbs. It was embedded in the trunk, huge trunk. Like a birth defect. About ten feet up. Some kid had leaned it against the tree one day and just never came back. The tree grew up around it and then engulfed it. The bike was all rusted, its front wheel sticking out one side of the tree, its back the other. Nobody could’ve faked anything like that. It was part of the tree! Probably took twenty years to grow like that. Where was that kid? Why’d he never go back? It was the saddest, most loneliest thing I ever seen.”
“I can imagine.”
“No, you can’t.”
“Well, if I try—”
She saw me staring. “I learned how to wrap like this from a boxer I knew. A guy I never, you know, went out with. He was just a friend. About every week I make a new wrap. It’s the only thing I steal: the tape. I swear.”
“Why do you do that?”
“Makes me feel more secure. Want me to show you how?”
“Sure.” She took out a jackknife. I slid the blade under the layers of dirty white and cut away last week’s tape. I did not remark on the long scars underneath. She gave me a roll of the white adhesive. She instructed me. And she guided my hand as expertly as any DI as I wound the tape round her wrists and hands.
“Not bad for an amateur,” she said.
“Do you have a home?”
“Wherever I hang my hat.”
“You don’t have a hat.”
“If that’s what you want to call it—I live in Ottawa. Just like Omaha.”
I crinkled my eyes.
“Ya know, starts with an O, ends with a A. I’m just back for—have friends in Wyoming.”
“For what?”
“Ya know, I don’t take money.”
“I never thought that.”
“In the summer I catch butterflies. I sell them to a company that does butterfly releases for weddings. Winters I sharpen skates on the Rideau Canal. I’ll go back to any warm shack, but I don’t—there’s no money.”
“I never thought that!”
“That lady, she’s a singer?”
“Yeah, up there with Dylan. She was on the cover of Rolling Stone.”
“I wrote a song once. Wanna hear it?”
“Sure!”
She stepped onto the bottom rung of the rail. “Sometimes I wish I could fly…like a bird up in the sky. Sometimes I feel like freedom is near. Sometimes I feel like freedom is near!”
Now that was one song I had heard before, but did not let on. She sang on. She had a stupendously good voice. The wind picked up considerably. She sang more loudly, overcoming the wind. We were entering greater Omaha. “Do you know what’s just over that rise?”
“No, what?”
“Boys Town! Ya know, Father Flannigan and all.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Have you ever read Paul Gallico?”
“No.”
“You should read more.” She stepped up onto the rail itself, and sang with abandon.
“What are going to do?”
“Sing!”
“No, I mean, come down from there.” We were approaching a long trestle bridge. I saw its sign: Big Papillion Creek Bridge. The train was slowing as we entered the city.
“What’s regret feel like?” she shouted over the wind.
“Like a sword going down your throat. Like a croquet ball forever in your gut. Being afraid of anything good happening.”
Teardrop stood high on the rail and the train was out over the bridge. It must have been a hundred feet to the water below. She swung her arms free and began singing again. Just then the door to the caboose flew open and Billi raced through it. “I knew it! What is she doing?”
I yelled, “Enough.” Billi shouted, “Come offa that this instant!”
She shouted, “OK.” And turned. I stepped back and then she jumped. Billi went to her knees, howling. And all I could do was watch her tumble. Perhaps she thought she was going to glide, but her body had struck the side of the trestle and went into a terrible spin. Billi was howling. I screamed, “Teardrop!” as if my desperation alone could bring her back to the rail. “I wish….I wish… I wish!” And then, as she was about to strike the rocks below, I yelled, “Wish that Billi had her wish back!”
When I returned to the cabin I found her new wristwrap, uncut; it looked like a papier-mâché casting, a smooth little tunnel for her tiny wrists. A mouse couldn’t have wriggled out of that tight wrap. Billi’s pack was gone, too, as was her guitar case. In place of the lyrics on the railroad poster was an illustration of the golden spike. Other than the wristwrap, there was no evidence that either had ever existed. I tried to explain to Wilfred, who seemed to understand better than I.
We stepped out into Burlington Station, the two us, to walk around as the train took on fuel and water. It was teeming with holiday rushers. We saw more than a few soldiers there, reuniting with loved ones. That made me all the more homesick. I bumped into a sailor. “Oh, sorry, partner,” I said. Both of us were jostled back and forth by the throng. He looked familiar. He had a bad limp. He slapped me on the back. An older woman, likely his mother, stood with him. And they both stood on their tiptoes when someone they were waiting to see appeared.
They shouted, “Over here!” I did not get a glimpse of whoever it was that was obviously making their way closer. The excitement of the pair grew. The man’s mother had been holding a child that I had not noticed. And she held the child up high, “Mommy’s back, Mommy’s back!” In the child’s arms was a stuffed animal, a snow goose with exquisite stitching and a dark pink beak. The sailor embraced the woman, who was probably about my age, mighty freckled. He swung her around, the fringe of her jacket swirling in air. Then I lost them in the rush.
Rather than fight the mob, Wilfred and I went back aboard the train. I was running faces through my mind as Wilfred, sitting across from me, seemed immersed in some good humor. It almost seemed he was laughing at me. When the train’s departure whistle blew I jumped from my seat with the shock of recognition. I raced to the station-side window and thrust it open. The man, his mother, wife and daughter were walking along the platform, pushing a carriage. I yelled out, “Hey, sailor!” He looked up. “Come again?” I shouted once more, “What’s your name?” He took off his name pin, and tossed it to me, saying, “No more gigs for me!” He was almost hysterical with laughter, “I was just discharged!” The train moved out of the station and they were gone. And in my hand I held the nametag: “Charles. A. Callico.”

Part VIII:
One Blind Dog, One White Dove

When we departed Omaha I sat across from Wilfred, pointing one by one to the empty seats, “There sat Everet Haskell. And there Billi Callico! And Teardrop was there: Tahira, we never knew her last name. They were real, weren’t they, Wilfred?” He radiated, ‘Oh, yes!’
When we arrived in Chicago I said, “I’m in no hurry, you?” He swung his head. “May as well see the town, then.” I stowed my duffel bag in a locker and we walked, shoulder by shoulder, almost as if we were in route step march. We tramped down Lake Shore Drive, wandered out onto Soldier Field and had a time deciding whether to go into the Museum of Natural History or the Adler Planetarium; we shuttled up and down the road that connected the two—about a thousand feet apart—three or four times, changing our minds like schoolboys on a slim allowance. Finally we decided on an open carriage ride. It took us up Michigan Avenue and into a bitter wind, but we cared only for what our craning heads took in. We came to a magnificent cathedral, and Wilfred gripped my arm. I tipped the coachman and we got out.
‘This was the last church I ever stepped foot in. When I was here in ’52.’ We walked round it, enthralled by every chiseled detail in the great limestone. And then we entered. ‘It is exactly as when I left—hasn’t changed at all.’ There were a few people sitting in pews, praying, and about as many sightseers, milling, and the two of us. Wilfred asked for some time alone, and I waited outside for him. When he found me again, he bore a better calm than I have ever known.
We ate in a little pub nearby and it grew dark. When we were out again on the sidewalk we heard the voices of a choir. We passed again the great cathedral. It was a rehearsal. I booked a room in the hotel directly opposite the clerestory of the cathedral, and that night we opened wide the windows, despite the fierce cold, and savored the repeated verses of the choir, whose painstaking leader we blessed again and again.
Later, Wilfred wrote long into his book. “Your epic?” I asked. He looked up and pulled out Everet’s Discharge card, his wish. He fell asleep smiling, the book clasped to his chest.
Neither of us wanted to speak of our departures. And so the next day when we stumbled on an arcade photo-booth we took it as providence. “A photo before we go?” We both squeezed onto the little round seat and the machine flashed four times, capturing both of us in poses so unbolted and juvenile that we could not hold the strip still. When we stopped laughing he signaled, ‘One of you for me to keep.’ I stepped into the booth. Then I said, “One strip for me.” He stepped in. I had no more change and so turned into the newsstand behind us.
I returned shouting, “Bob’s your uncle!” As I was about to drop in a quarter I noticed a strip already in the return slot. “You had change!” I waited for him to come out, studying his smiling face. I called. And then instantly I was struck with that same dread I’d felt at Norden. I looked beneath the brown velvet curtain. Then I snatched it back and found the seat empty. On it lay his ticket to Tucson, a stuffed envelope with my name, and Everet’s Discharge card, which now bore some strange validation mark.
I sat there, on a curb as cold as my heart was raw, reading. It was a fat letter. But I found my own letter—the one to my parents—tucked inside his; my note was filled with marginalia in his hand.
His letter began: ‘Dear Luke, I thank god for you. Without you I could not have come this far. I go now to die.’ I read of the events of 1914. He hadn’t told me he was an officer. A day after the Christmas truce his unit had encountered an enemy squad outside a Belgian farmhouse. He ordered an assault. It was long and fierce. When it was over, they recovered six German soldiers, all dead, including one possessing a box of evaporated cranberries. Inside the farmhouse he also found a farmer, his wife and three small children, all bearing British bullets. He wrote, ‘I’ve never had a day without sorrow since. I struggled, I never found rest. You answered plainly what I should have known, Luke. For 55 years I’ve wished that my life had ended that Christmas Day, so that my order and my rifle of the next would have had no accomplishment.’ I had to pause. ‘Then you came in on Shanks’ pony. I was a coward until then. Peace may not come through my act, nor yours, but at least our souls will pass chaste and uncorrupted. You’ve been my friend and teacher. Now, you’ve a home to get to. Merry Christmas, Your Servant , W. J. F-W.’
On the train east I hid myself in a sleeping berth, alone. My reverie was over. My adventure had collapsed into loneliness. It was me and the blank sky and nothing else. In Buffalo I got off the train; I couldn’t bear it anymore. It was now Christmas eve and I bought a bus ticket to Vermont. I had friends in the mountains. We made Rochester when the blizzard set in. Route 20 was as well known to me as was the Mississippi to Twain, but I saw only white from the cold window. Strangely, I discovered that my sense of hearing was growing more and more acute the closer we came to my hometown. I could hear the driver whispering low to himself. I scraped at the window as we neared a stop and realized that we were in Auburn already! Not knowing whether it was a good idea or not, I got off.
I stepped out of the blizzard and into Hunter’s, an old 50’s style diner perched on I-beams and pilings over the Owasco outlet. I had taken my last meal here before shipping out; nothing had changed in that diner in years, but in my year gone everything seemed different. I sat at the counter, keeping to myself. I didn’t recognize a single person there.
Two deputies were sitting at a booth. From their name pins I recognized the family names—Harold Norman and George Crowther—but had not seen them before. Must be rookies. The waitress, Anna May, obviously George’s sister, was making every kind of eye at Harold, who was so oblivious to the signs that I wanted to go knock his hat off. A woman with a press badge came in, Linita Rebo. “About a hundred calls came in all at once,” began Harold. George added, “We figured it was just a little holiday fun. But then we heard the concussions. No one knew where it was coming from. We went up to the reservoir to spot.” Harold came in, “It was fireworks without the works. There was no spray of light in the sky. Only explosions. We were trying to pinpoint them when Frank Dickson called. And we mostly got the story from him; it was all on his property. There’d been an injury.”
Frank Dickson was a neighbor of ours on Pine Ridge Road, a toymaker who often paid me and my brother to help in his fields. The deputies continued, “By the time we arrived on scene, the explosions had ceased, but there were real craters out there, all right. Plenty. Frank was jumping out of his boots, and Paul, he just sat on the ground, gazing.” Who were they talking about? There were more Pauls per square mile in Cayuga county than there were Kelly’s in Ireland. I had a cousin Paul; my brother was named Paul, as was my father. But I did not want just yet to speak to anyone from home.
When I came out of Hunter’s I raised my collar, and looked up to the building that abutted the diner; it was a four or five story whose side brickface still bore the faded paint of a long-gone advert: E & W Linens in letters ten feet high. And I chorted, “Everet and Wilfred. God love ya!” Just then a cat racing west brushed my leg. I’d been gone a year, but I’d know Mutley anywhere: it was this old diabetic cat that lived up on Genesee Street, over in Skaneateles. And that cat was on a tear! It was partial to showing up dinnertimes at Stella Maris, a retreat house and convent on the lake. That’s how I’d known him; I spent a lot of time with the nuns there. And his passing gave me the idea of going to the convent: they’d let me stay till I figured out what was next for me. And so I thumbed my way into Skaneateles.
I got a lift from another soldier in a pick-up, whose radio was playing a household tune: Jim Reeves’ tearjerker ‘Old Tige.’ I closed my eyes as we passed the turn off to my home. He dropped me off at the waterworks. I sat by the lake a long time, fumbling the heavy coin in my pocket. I heard the night guard from the Argus plant making his rounds. And then he was off duty. For the life of me I couldn’t see very far out into the lake, and so when he approached I asked, “Hey, Watchman. Is the lake froze over yet?” He looked at me curiously, “Not yet. See for yourself. We ‘spect it t’be.” I tried to look south over the lake; I couldn’t make anything out beyond the shoreline. “Hey, tell me, Watchman: you see any stars out tonight?” He came closer, “Aye, many. But one shines. And higher yet that star ascends.” The cold had gotten into my eyes. Before departing, he put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Let thy wanderings cease.” Then he vanished.
I walked up Genesee Street. As I passed Morey’s restaurant, jam-packed, I heard flying versions of the barrage that night. But when I peered in through the glass no face would come into focus. Finally I was onto the grounds of Stella Maris. And there, standing at the end of the drive, was Joe, the cook. “Luke! Has it been a year?” We shook hands. “I was fixin’ to go home,” he said, “but we’re waiting on this woman from Fosterville. This here’s her dog.” I hadn’t noticed the dog. It was a shaggy thing, unblinking and still as night, shivering slightly. “Just showed up here. Had tags on it. We called the owner. She cried, ‘how’d my dog get way over there?’ Then she dropped a shocker: ‘That dog’s blind!’ The sisters and I—we knew—it was Mutley that had led him; he’s always leading strays to the home for some meal or other.”
When I entered the retreat house I learned of the second marvel. Sister Francis Leora, newly assigned, introduced herself and then, so excited I thought she was going to faint, began: “They’ve called in the coadjutor. Monsignor is here, too!” She spoke so nervously that I could not make sense of the story: “There was a man wounded, restored, slain, vanished. No one’s saying it was a miracle yet.”
Several figures emerged from the chapel study: faces I well knew. Coming into the light was Sister Celestine and Sister Gladys, their well-pressed habits crisp and austere, their faces pious and genial. Between them a man walked unsteadily in their escort. At first I only noticed this fuzzy quality about him, as if he were recently shattered. Then in segments the man came into focus: in his shaky hand a blue tin with an unbroken seal. On his collar a white dove, the insignia of a peace union I had sent home. And then I saw, as lucid as morning sky, individual tears streaming down my feather’s face. He shouted, “Son! Son, you’re home!” Then everything went dark.
And I remembered… I remembered it all: tracking back through the ant hills and elephant grass. Someone shouting that we were in the middle of one of our own fields. The blast. My buddy Leroy’s splintered leg. The sting on my face as if someone had thrown gravel into it. The maddening ringing in my ears. I remembered the doctors speaking of fortune: it had only been an M-14. I remembered their conference: ‘no penetrating ocular trauma.’ I remember screaming, ‘Why can’t I see?’ I recalled the cool answer: the blast wave itself had dislodged both retinas. “Only ever seen that once before,” one said. Then I remembered seeing nothing at all until walking off ship in San Francisco.
And there, as I listened to my father make his way across the room, I stretched my arms out into the pitch—and in the heavy dim of nothingness I patted around to find who it was that had brought me all this way.
Then my father embraced me. He had not shaved that day.

Epilogue:
It’s been nearly forty years now since that day. Today I own of a small factory that manufactures ploughs; we are expanding. I write poetry reviews for several newspapers. It is Christmastime and I am home again. My mother is rocking by the tree, my twins and their kids by her side. My father lies in the next room, dying. He calls me. I sit at his side. He asks again to tell the old story. Sometimes he asks for Billi’s tale. Sometimes Everet’s. He may say, “Teardrop’s narrative, I want to hear that.” I tell from beginning to end.
Then I ask him to tell me the old story. And he gives the account: of how on the morn of that Christmas Eve he had taken my brother to the new doctor, the émigré no one else would see, and how he opened his throat when a quarter hour later would have been too late. And how that afternoon he discovered in the corn fields two lines of massive, opposing trenches, appearing out of nowhere And how that evening as he and Frank worked in the shop the bombardment began. He slows when he tells of how he rushed out to find a badly wounded soldier, a Brit who carried my photograph. And how, cupping the soldier in his arms, amid new shelling, he attended to his dying words.
And I say as I always do, still filled with fervor and yearning, “What did he sound like, Dad?”
“Oh, his accent. It was thick. All his s’s like z’s. He knew much about you. In the end, he said to me, ‘I die not for my country, but for mankind. And for your boy—not your soldier son, but your younger one. And all the innocents.’ And he gave me the blue tin. He said, ‘All men must die, but God will tend us.’ And then he opened his pocket; there was your photo. He said, ‘To refuse, that is the greater bravery. Thee canst not get more valiant than that.’ Then he gazed at the great line of icicles on our barn, and he died smiling, saying, ‘tinklebobs.’”
Then I remind my father of how we used to look into the registry of ‘The War Dead of The British Commonwealth,’ and the Omaha phone book, finding all the principals. And how he would reflect, “Oh, what stories might have been written from ribbon never taken from its tin.”
He turns to me and speaks the refrain I wish he would stop repeating. “Son, I’m sorry; I mistook you for a brittle man.”
I lift my father’s head and cradle it in my arms, one hand coming round his neck, my fingers upon his collar, feeling there the silver and enamel dove, a piece that through all these years he’s never once removed.
I said, “Rest, Pop. Tomorrow is Christmas day.”

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