Throughout March, the letters came from the regiment’s winter camp in Virginia. Izzy wrote about the other boys in their company: who had measles and who had typhoid, who’d failed to return from leave and might have deserted. Vic complained laconically about the food and the weather, but Izzy described whatever caught his eye: an observation balloon, for instance, being towed like a tethered cloud by a crew of men holding ropes. How big was that? Henrietta wondered. What kept it up, who invented it? Before her father’s death, they’d followed the story of a balloon that had carried four men and a sturdy lifeboat from St. Louis to the northeast end of Lake Ontario, where a storm had tangled it into some trees. She envied the group of schoolgirls who’d seen the men crawl down from the branches.

It was frustrating not to be able to ask Izzy directly why this smaller balloon was forbidden to fly. One day he wrote about a general’s visit, and another about the excellent meals he and his messmates made when some boxes arrived from home in which the jellied chicken hadn’t spoiled, the poorly wrapped honeycomb hadn’t saturated the shirts and stamps, and the dried apples hadn’t grown mold. Those damp, jumbled boxes . . . Henrietta had only to look at Bernard’s plate to imagine them clearly. Equally clearly, she could envision the other boys from their county who’d enlisted in different regiments and chosen to channel their words through Izzy.

Some couldn’t write, Izzy said; others felt awkward writing to their families; he took requests when he visited their camps. Levi’s mother hasn’t told him if the wood-lot sold. Can you find out and let me know? This too was familiar to her. For as long as she could remember she’d helped her mother with business letters: first watching and then—she’d learned to read and write very young, perhaps from spending so much time with her mother—writing herself. The shortest form letters at first; later, letters dictated by her mother and having to do with what was left of her father’s business and the patents on his inventions. A natural leap, from there, to acting as scribe for neighbors and acquaintances who didn’t write so easily. She’d written letters for vineyard workers and masons, travelers and newcomers with relatives in other countries.