The war was over now, of course, but those years in which the names of the dead appeared in the newspaper had hardly closed at all. The regular news conferred a kind of terrible celebrity, those families anointed by the war’s great scythe becoming, through tragedy itself, the sudden center point and fulcrum of countless whispered conversations, as if giving full voice to those names—the names of the war dead—would somehow draw the attention of that dark reaper. Delivery of that news was—and this directly from Mrs. Wilson’s lips—the purview of the postman, Eddie Farwell, a short, timid man of forty during the war years, whose unlucky lot was to deliver the Western Union telegrams announcing what amounted to a roll call of dead boys.

MR HOMER E WILSON

NEWCASTLE CALIFORNIA

THE SECRETARY OF THE ARMY HAS ASKED ME TO EXPRESS HIS DEEP REGRET THAT YOUR SON PRIVATE FIRST CLASS JAMES WILSON DIED FEBRUARY 21 IN PACIFIC AREA WHILE IN PERFORMANCE OF HIS DUTIES AND SERVICE OF HIS COUNTRY LETTER FOLLOWS

ULIO THE ADJUTANT GENERAL

That quiet man in his rattling mail wagon seemed to shrink in the span of those years until he was nothing more than the gray ghost of his former self, one ghost carrying news from a whole world of ghosts.

Despite the fact that many of the residents of Placer County could draw their family trees to England and France and Italy and even Germany, few had been to any of those places, the dusty, sepia-toned photographs of their ancestors—our ancestors, since I am speaking, of course, of that dreaded but hardly universal we—providing a tenuous link. The great war machine in Europe boiled in us as if our homelands were overrun by the unwashed barbarian hordes of our nightmares, homelands we assumed were little different from our lives in Newcastle or Auburn or Loomis or any of the other little towns up and down the old highway, the European languages mostly forgotten, but the culture sharing a common root so when our boys died on that soil it was not so foreign as it might have been otherwise. It was Europe, after all; the people there looked like us and spoke languages we could at least recognize as languages. That was enough to bind us to a common sense of shared humanity.