“Heck,” Ryder said. “I thought she was fourteen.” He pulled out his harmonica and played a triple-time “When the Saints Come Marching In.”

Jimmy and I sat on the hood. Ryder stood in front of us. When he finished playing we went quiet for a few minutes. Jim had managed to walk outside with a full bottle of Pearl beer. We passed it around. I took a wonderfully long cold chugalug. It was Jimmy who brought up the vow.

“Listen, you two.” He had his arm around me. He reached out and lay his hand on Ryder’s shoulder. “Let’s never quit. We should swear to each other that we can’t ever quit.”

“Quit what, Guitar Jim?” Ryder still had a smile in his voice.

“Just that. My guitar, and your harmonicas, and Katie Faye’s poems. We should just keep marching ahead. You know?” Jim looked at me, then pulled me close. “I think I’m figuring out once you start you’re not supposed to ever stop.”

“Should we draw blood?” Ryder said.

“No,” Jimmy said. “Let’s just promise we won’t let each other quit.”

“I promise,” I said.

“Throw me in there.” Ryder sipped the Pearl. “But when I start sounding poor you should promise to make me quit.”

Jim raised his right hand. “I promise to keep you, Ryder, playing and you Katie, writing. I also promise to lie to both of you when you’re not sounding good anymore.”

I laughed and hugged Jimmy with both arms. Ryder took out his mouth harp and played a down-home wedding march in half-time.

And in July of the next year, 1950, marching is what they did. We’d been hearing about the possibility of a civil war in Korea for months. On June 25, when Leo was ten months and five days old, the North Korean communists attacked the south and two weeks later Jimmy and Ryder and thousands of other soldiers were on their way. For two months Leo and I stayed at our boardinghouse apartment behind American Flyers— the army was paying the rent—but then the widow terrors set in and I found myself moving in with Mama and Gram, the only real widows I knew.

Lord, how wildly unpredictable this living is. Jim was gone seventeen months and in all that time only five of his letters got through to me. Meanwhile, hundreds of boys were coming home dead, and the last thing I would have believed then was that Jim would be burying me.

March 7, 1955

(It occurs to me I should have been dating all these entries.)