Little wonder that a bullheaded boy like that, grown to a young man, would rush to enlist when war beckoned, and would consider enlistment just as inexorable for his younger, more circumspect brother. John, despite his misgivings, had not protested against this particular bullheaded act of Jack’s, not even when Wilma had put up a fuss. He was proud of his boys, after all.

But when Chase was killed, John couldn’t help thinking: It was all Jack’s idea to join the Marines!

Wilma didn’t think any of the family had suffered Chase’s loss as much as she. “He wasn’t born out of your body,” she had told John once. “You didn’t feel how much it meant to him to live. How much he struggled, just to be born! Only to have what he had worked so hard for taken away! His very life, taken away!” Of course, John had had no reply; often, when confronted with Wilma’s bitterness, he was struck dumb. She typically interpreted his lack of response as an aggravating stoicism, and would turn away in a huff.

He supposed she’d had a right to believe him heartless, all those years. It was 1940 before he cried with her, awakening in the hospital in Wausau after his heart attack with her looking at him so beseechingly that he broke down. To think, she had been with him all this time! And there was so much he had never told her! So much of their hearts that they had never revealed, though they’d lived under the same roof and shared the same bed for nearly forty-five years! And so, clutching her there in Wausau General, he had vowed to start anew, now that he had been granted a second chance. Indeed, it was thought that he had actually died for at least an instant. His heart had stopped beating, then, miraculously, had started again.

He couldn’t help but ask God: Why save me, an old and bitter man, and not my son so many years ago who had his whole life in front of him?

An old and bitter man who for the last twenty-seven years has betrayed everyone he loves (yes, loves, though sometimes he doesn’t know how) and even now betrays not by a lie so much as by an omission of the truth?

Chapter 62

Pine Rapids
Late June and early July 1918

John went back to work the day after the telegram came. He had a bank to run, after all, and there was nothing more they could do until they received the letter, which he presumed would tell them not only the circumstances of their son’s death but the whereabouts of his body, which they would then make arrangements to bring home. On his lunch hour, John went to the Pine Rapids Cemetery office and paid cash for plots for Chase, himself, and Wilma.