Leona Haskell put the last letter back into the cardboard box and closed the lid, and for a minute the only sound in my kitchen was the refrigerator humming. “His name is Carl Vickers,” she said. “He was a sergeant in the same unit as Harold. He is eighty one now, living in a brick house on Rosehill Road, and he keeps a pistol in the nightstand. The reporter told me that Carl called him last week and said that if anyone spoke, he would make sure they never spoke again.” She folded her hands. “I am too old to be afraid. But you have a right to know.”
I thought of Harold at his workbench, repairing lawn mowers in the garage, humming hymns. I thought of the sentence I had read. I was there, and I did not stop it. Something in my chest turned over. For fifty four years I had slept beside a man who carried that, and I had never once asked why he woke at three in the morning to stand at the kitchen window. I had never asked because he was so gentle, and I was so afraid of what the answer would do to the gentleness.
The reporter, a lean tired man named Samuel Cho, came to my house the next morning. He had the records of the Army Inspector General, heavily blacked out, a file thick as a phone book, and a recorded interview with a medic who had been in the village. He sat at my table and said, “Mrs. Pratt, your husband wrote three letters to the Army in 1971. Three. He asked for an investigation. Each time the request was buried.” He pushed a photocopy across the table. At the bottom was the signature of Harold, young and firm. “Your husband was not a man who stood by. He was a man who tried.”
Two women who loved the same quiet man can finally carry the truth between them where he carried it alone.
I read the letter slowly, three times. Then I looked at Leona, and she was crying quietly, her thin shoulders shaking. “I thought he was a coward,” she said. “All these years. I thought he had run from the truth and from me.” I put my hand over hers. “Leona, he ran from nothing. He just did not know how to carry it. So he carried it alone.” We sat that way for a long while, two old women in a kitchen, while the coffee went cold and the sun moved across the linoleum.
Carl Vickers did not threaten anyone that week. When Cho and two federal investigators knocked on his door on a Thursday, he opened it in a bathrobe, thinner than a coat rack, and said, “I figured you would come some day.” He gave a statement for three hours. He named the lieutenant who had given the order, a man who had died in 1998. He named the village. He named the number of people. At the end, he asked to call his daughter. His voice, an investigator said later, sounded like a man putting down a heavy pack.
The Army reopened the file in April. It was not a trial; the men were too old and most were dead. But it was a finding, three pages in length, signed by a general, that acknowledged what had happened and that Sergeant Harold Pratt had reported it promptly and repeatedly. A letter of commendation came to my house in a gray envelope. I read it aloud at his grave in the national cemetery, on a gusty afternoon, with Leona holding her hat in the wind. The flag at the grave rippled like a hand waving.
The matter of the pension was settled quietly, in the way that real things are. Leona, sitting on my sofa with a pen, signed a notarized waiver of all claims on the survivor benefit. She said she had not come for money. She had come, she said, to keep a promise she made to a nineteen year old boy in 1969: that she would tell the truth about him if it ever mattered. The pension office accepted the waiver. The monthly check came to my mailbox in the name of Margaret Pratt, widow.
I asked Leona to stay for supper that night, and she said yes. We ate pot roast and potatoes. I showed her the albums, and she showed me a photograph of a young Harold in uniform, with a crooked grin, standing in front of a bus station in Columbus, Georgia. “That is the boy I knew,” she said. “This is the man you knew. I think they were both him.” I told her that in fifty four years I had never seen that grin, and she gave me the photograph.
Leona lives in Fayetteville now, in a small apartment two miles from me. We have lunch on Wednesdays at a diner where the waitress knows our order. People in town think we are sisters. We do not correct them. We share a pew at church, and a bag of peppermints, and a firm belief that Harold, wherever he is, is finally able to rest. The legal status of our marriages is, as Leona says, a matter for lawyers. The truth of them is a matter for the two of us.
On the anniversary of his death, we drove to the cemetery with a thermos of coffee and two folding chairs. We set them in the grass before the stone and poured three cups, one for each of us and one for the grass. Leona read aloud the first letter that Harold wrote her in 1969. I read the last he ever wrote to me, a grocery list on the back of a church bulletin. Milk, bread, and tell Margaret she is the best thing that ever happened to me. We laughed until we cried.
