Leona Haskell lifted the lid of the cardboard box and set a thick bundle of envelopes on my kitchen table, each tied with a faded blue ribbon. Her hands, spotted and thin, did not shake. “I want you to read them in order,” she said. “The first is from March 1969, the day he shipped out. The last is dated June 1971. After that, the letters stopped, and so did I.” I looked at her. She looked at me, a woman of seventy three with a gray bun and a cane hooked over the chair, and I understood, with a slow cold wonder, that I was going to like her.
I read them till midnight. The first letters were the letters of a boy. Dear Leona, the food is terrible, the sand is everywhere, I think of your hair. By the winter of 1970 the handwriting had changed. The sentences shortened. In October one stood alone near the bottom of a page: They gave us an order that I could not obey. In February: I did what I could. Please do not write about it. In April the letters grew angry. In June, the last, he wrote only one line. Sign the papers and forget me.
“I did not forget him,” Leona said, sitting very straight in the chair of Harold. “I signed the papers. I sent them. I never heard back.” She took from the bottom of the box a long manila envelope, stamped with the seal of a Georgia superior court. “Margaret, I want you to open this. I have not told a soul about it in fifty three years.” I untied the string. Inside was a certified decree of divorce, dated August 14th, 1973, in the matter of Haskell versus Pratt. Granted. Final. And at the bottom, the stamp of the clerk.
A decree filed in the wrong county can hide a true marriage until two old women meet at a kitchen table.
I stared at the page. “But the pension office says there is no record,” I said. “There is no record,” Leona agreed, “because the Army never asked the right court. The decree was filed in Muscogee County. They looked in Fulton.” She smiled thinly. “I knew it the moment the letter came to you. They addressed it to me because Harold put my name on his enlistment papers in 1969 and never changed it. He never knew I had divorced him. The papers I sent to Vietnam came back to Georgia unsigned. I took the decree by default, and never told him.”
So my marriage, I understood, had been lawful from the day it began in 1972. Harold had been free to marry me. Neither of us had known. “Why did you come now?” I asked. Leona was quiet for a moment. “Because last month a reporter called me,” she said. “A man named Cho, who is writing about a village in Quang Ngai. He has a list of names. He asked if I knew the family of Harold Pratt. He says one of the men is living three streets from your house, and that this man has been writing letters to the reporter, telling him to stop.”
The next morning I took the decree to the pension office in Fayetteville, a gray building near the base, and a young clerk in a gray cardigan examined it for ten minutes. Then she picked up the telephone. Forty minutes later a supervisor came out, a stout woman with reading glasses on a chain, who said, “Mrs. Pratt, the matter is resolved. You are the lawful widow. The benefit will be reinstated retroactive to September.” I said, “And Mrs. Haskell?” The supervisor said, “Mrs. Haskell has no claim.” Leona, beside me, nodded as if she had been told the time.
We told the reporter that afternoon. Samuel Cho, a lean tired man in a rumpled raincoat, sat at my kitchen table and read the letters of Harold from beginning to end. His face changed as he read. “Mrs. Pratt,” he said at the end, “your husband is the witness I have been looking for. He wrote to the Army three times asking for an investigation. I have the replies. They were buried.” He pushed back his chair. “You will not be asked to do anything. I only ask your permission to publish what he wrote.” I looked at Leona. She gave a tiny nod. I said yes.
The story ran in the Washington paper in March, on the front page below the fold, under the headline: THE SERGEANT WHO TRIED. A retired colonel in Virginia read it and called the Army. A man in Fayetteville named Carl Vickers, eighty one years old, was found sitting in his garage with the door closed and a pistol on his knees. A neighbor saw the light under the door. He lived. He later told investigators everything. I will not pretend that I felt pity, but I did feel something like the tiredness of a very long day finally ending.
The Army, after fifty four years, issued a statement of acknowledgment, and a posthumous letter of commendation to Sergeant Harold Pratt. A man in a dark uniform presented it to me at the cemetery in April, with a flag folded in a triangle. Leona stood beside me in her good coat. When the bugle played, she took my hand, and I held hers. The sound went out across the rows of white stones like a long breath. We had both loved the same quiet man, in two different decades, and neither of us had known the whole of him until now.
Leona moved to Fayetteville in the summer. She rents a small apartment two miles from me. We have lunch on Wednesdays at the diner on Bragg Boulevard, and the waitress thinks we are sisters. In the evenings she sometimes comes to the porch with a bag of peppermints, and we sit in the swing and talk about nothing at all. She says the box is lighter now. I say the house is, too. On the kitchen wall, beside our wedding picture, I hung a small photograph she gave me, of a boy with a crooked grin at a bus station, who never stopped trying to do right.
