The letters from Vietnam, the ones that arrived every few months for two years in an envelope with a foreign postmark, were signed Your Danny, and they were written in the handwriting of my husband. Christine Sobczak told me this in the back room of the library with the folded flag in her lap, and I felt Gary stiffen beside me. “Mrs. Pfeiffer,” she said softly, “he forged them. For two years he wrote to my mother as if he were her son. And she never knew.”
I looked at the letter in my own hand. It was the one Gary had opened, dated in the spring of 1970, and I recognized the loops of the letters, the slant of the lines, the tiny cross through the number seven that Leon always made. My darling Mama, it said, I am well. The food is bad but the boys are good. Do not worry. I think of you every day. I held it to my chest and tears blurred the room. For thirty nine years I had lived with this man, and I had never known the best thing he ever did.
Christine explained the rest. Her mother, Margaret, had been a widow, with a husband killed in the war in Italy, and one son. When the telegram came about Danny, she refused to read it. She tore it in half and said it was a mistake, and every week she wrote to him and put the letter in her mailbox with the flag raised. The postman who walked that route knew that every one of those letters would be returned with a stamp that said DECEASED, and that such a stamp would break her mind.
A mailman who carries ten thousand letters knows better than anyone that a few lines in a familiar hand can keep a human heart beating.
So Leon had done a tender and foolish thing. He had taken every letter from the box before the post office could stamp it. He had read them, one by one, sitting in his truck at the end of the street. And then, after a month of thinking, he had begun to write back. He bought stamps from a collector and soaked the postmarks off other envelopes, and every few months he sent a reply from a mailbox across the city, in the scrawl of a nineteen year old boy. He had never told a soul.
“Mama died believing he was alive,” said Christine, wiping her eyes. “She said once that the letters from Danny were the only reason she got out of bed. She had a drawer full of them. We found them after the funeral, tied with a ribbon. We thought they were real.
We thought Danny had survived somewhere, and that the Army had lied. It was years before I understood. The handwriting was too steady. And the stamps were from Erie.” She turned to me. “I have been looking for the postman for fifty years.”
Gary had been crying silently since she began. He stood at the end of the table with his hand over his face, a big man in a flannel shirt. When she finished, he walked to the chair of his mother and knelt in front of me. “Mom,” he said, “I sold his stamp book for a dollar. I told you it was worth nothing.” I laid my hand on his head. I said, “Honey, you did not know. It is worth everything. It is worth thirty one letters, and a woman who lived.”
The next Sunday, the four of us drove to the cemetery on the east side of Erie, where Margaret lay beside her husband, under a flat stone. Christine laid the folded flag on the grave. I opened the green album and took out the first envelope, which Leon had never mailed, a letter he had written to Margaret in his own voice, and had been too shy to send. I read it aloud over the grass. Dear Mrs. Sobczak, it began. I am only the mailman. But I thought you should know that someone was listening.
The mail carriers of Erie held a small ceremony at the main post office in October, with a plaque and a wreath. The name of Leon was engraved at the bottom of a bronze tablet beside the names of the others who had gone above the call of duty. Gary spoke. He said he was proud to be the son of a man who had carried the mail for thirty nine years, and that he had only learned what the mail had carried when it was too late to thank him. The room was silent. A few of the old carriers saluted.
I still go to the Thursday club, and I still write my letters. Gary comes to breakfast every Sunday at the Pancake House, and sometimes brings his own children, who are learning to lick a stamp. I gave the album to the Erie County Historical Society, after a good deal of thought, with all thirty one letters, and a card in my own hand. It says, For the mailman who wrote back. Underneath, I added one more line. He would have wanted you to know how much a stamp can weigh.
