As Bright as Heaven(20)
“Where’s that brave lad of yours?” Uncle Fred says happily, and I see that he’s wearing his APL badge on the inside of his suit coat like it’s a medal of honor.
Mrs. Sutcliff greets him with a smile, but I see the uneasiness in her manner at Uncle Fred’s question. You can almost hear her saying back to him, “You wouldn’t be so jovial if it was your son being sent off to war.”
“There he is,” Roland Sutcliff says, motioning to the far end of the sitting room. Jamie is talking to two young women who seem to be hanging on his every word. He has a glass of punch in his hand, and it is trembling slightly at their coquettishness. At least that’s how it appears to me.
We make our way through the crowd of people. Jamie looks up as we approach and seems relieved to have a reason to ease himself away from the girls’ flirtations.
Despite having his mother’s eyes and his father’s build, Jamie Sutcliff has a voice of his own, soft and a bit like my teacher Mr. Galway’s. He has the look of someone who is neither soldier—what he will be very soon—nor assistant accountant, which is what he had been before. I wonder what he might want to be if he were allowed to choose. He thanks us for coming.
“Who are they?” I hear Maggie ask him under her breath, eyeing the girls who he’d been talking to before.
He shrugs. “Just old friends from my school days.”
And then Mr. Sutcliff is bringing someone else Jamie’s way. We all step aside.
We eat a supper of fried chicken and succotash, beaten biscuits and coleslaw, and chocolate cake—all Jamie’s favorites. Charlie, who considers Papa and Uncle Fred his employers, sits with us. After the meal, everyone stands with a glass of punch to toast Jamie and we sing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” The reverend from the Sutcliffs’ church prays a blessing over Jamie, asking God to protect him and bring him safely home when this time of conflict is over. Then Mrs. Sutcliff hands out little cards with the address of Jamie’s army unit so that we all might write him letters so he won’t feel so far away. She was going to give our family just one card, I think, but Maggie holds out her hand after Mama already has one. Dora Sutcliff smiles and gives her one.
When people start to put on their hats to go, Mrs. Sutcliff begins to cry and excuses herself to the kitchen. I understand why. Once everyone leaves, the party will be over. The next big thing the Sutcliffs must do is take Jamie to the train station in the morning and say good-bye. Dora Sutcliff doesn’t want the party to end.
Once we’ve come home Willa wants to know where Jamie is going after training camp. I take her up to my room, get out the atlas, and show her where France is. Maggie lingers over the page, too, even though she knows the geography of Europe. Willa wrinkles her brow and says she hopes Jamie isn’t afraid to go so far away from home to fight in the war.
“It’s a stupid war,” Maggie mutters.
“Don’t let Uncle Fred hear you say that,” I tell her.
“I don’t care if he does hear me,” Maggie says. “All wars are stupid. They don’t fix anything.”
“What do the Germans want?” Willa’s forehead is puckered by curiosity.
“It’s not just the Germans, Willa. It’s . . . it’s complicated.” I close the atlas to end the conversation. I don’t want our voices to carry downstairs and perhaps provoke a lecture from Uncle Fred.
“But what do they want?” Willa persists.
I have no answer other than they want to win. The assassination of some faraway heir to a foreign throne as the reason Jamie must leave his family seems impossible to explain to a seven-year-old. But Maggie seems to be waiting for my answer, too.
When I say nothing, Maggie walks to my bedroom door with Jamie’s address card still in her hand. Sleet begins to fall outside as she leaves the room and I slide the atlas back into its place.
“Show me my insides.” Willa points to Uncle Fred’s anatomy book on the shelf. I withdraw it and open the volume to a page that shows us what we’re all made of.
CHAPTER 12
? May 1918 ?
Pauline
Did you know people have been caring for their dead since the most ancient of times? I read this in one of Uncle Fred’s books. He’s letting Evelyn read anything in his library that she wants to, and she left a book about ancient history open on the sofa table in the sitting room a few mornings ago when the school day beckoned. Fred has an interesting array of books in his office and in the sitting room—only one shelf in the office is dedicated to publications about his trade. The rest are about nature and history and science—all the things Evie loves to study. I picked up the book to see what Evie had been reading about and saw that she’d stopped on the chapter about ancient rituals for the dead. My interest piqued, I read the chapter in its entirety.
I learned that in every culture in human history, the living have treated their dead with honor and respect, some even with adoration. There is something sacred about the body when the soul has left it, no matter which corner of the globe or how far back you look.
You’d think the opposite would be true, that this tent of flesh, which starts to decompose within hours of the soul leaving it, would immediately be cast aside as worthless. Instead, our mortal remains are given more reverence after Death’s visit than even before it.