The Road from Gap Creek

by Robert Morgan

Genres: Historical Fiction; Family Life; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

When Gap Creek was published in 1999, it became an instant national bestseller, attracting hundreds of thousands of readers to the story of a marriage begun with love and hope at the turn of the twentieth century. Set in the Appalachian South, it followed Julie and Hank Richards as they struggled through the first year and a half of their union. But what of the years following? What did the future hold for these memorable characters?

The Road to Gap Creek answers those questions, as Robert Morgan takes us back into the lives of Julie and Hank as well as their children, seen through the eyes of their youngest daughter, Annie. Through Annie we watch the four Richards children create their own histories, lives that include both triumph and hardship in the face of the Great Depression and World War II.

Far more than a sequel, The Road from Gap Creek is a moving and indelible portrait of people and their world in a time of unprecedented change, an American story told by one of the country’s most acclaimed writers.

Release date: March 25, 2014

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 336

Sample

A Note from the Author

The Road from Gap Creek opens on a scene in which an ominous black government automobile pulls up at the front door of a remote mountain house. The model for that house is my grandparents’ homeplace in Green River, North Carolina.

There was a time when the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina were isolated, almost cut off from the mainstream of American life. People like my grandparents lived on subsistence farms in remote valleys, in hidden coves, or in clearings high on mountainsides. After the Confederate War, the whole South was poor. But because of the lack of roads and lack of schools, the people of the Mountain South were among the poorest of all. In the early years of the twentieth century, my grandpa had so few opportunities to make a living that once a year he loaded his wagon with produce, hams, molasses, and honey and drove down the mountain to Greenville, South Carolina, to peddle his goods door to door. With that money he bought shoes and staples for the winter. The only real industry in the mountains was making corn liquor to sell in towns such as Greenville and Asheville.

It was World War I that began to change all this. As mountain boys were drafted in 1917, trained in camps all over the eastern United States, went to fight in the trenches in France, and returned with their wounds and stories, new life began to stir in the region. Having seen so much of the world, and the horrors and glories of the Western Front, the veterans were not content to live as their ancestors had. Returning soldiers bought Model T trucks and roadsters. Some went to school at government expense, to places such as North Carolina State College.

But with the excitement of the returning soldiers, men who could talk of Chateau-Thierry, Belleau Wood, and the Meuse-Argonne Offensive that brought the Great War to an end, a new horror swept the country. The Spanish Flu took the lives of many thousands, perhaps more than had been killed in the trenches of France and Flanders. And no sooner had the flu epidemic passed than a typhoid epidemic spread down valleys of the Blue Ridge Mountains, including Green River Valley, where my folks lived, killing many more. Sometimes whole families were wiped out.

In spite of the epidemics, or perhaps because of them, the changes to life in the mountains accelerated. The Roaring Twenties affected the mountains, as luxury hotels were built, along with golf courses, lakes, tourist courts. Developers poured into the region, and the price of land skyrocketed. Expecting to grow wealthy, ordinary people went into debt to invest in land, buy new cars. My grandpa—the model for Hank in Gap Creek and The Road from Gap Creek—who, with his sons, made a good living building summer cottages on Lake Summit, paid off his mortgage and bought a Model A Ford truck.

Then suddenly the bubble burst and set off a chain reaction that quickly reached the Blue Ridge Mountains, even before the crash on Wall Street in 1929. The price of land plummeted, half-finished hotels were left standing, and nearly everyone was in debt. And when the Great Depression really hit, times got much worse. When the banks failed, my grandpa lost his savings. Building stopped, and my grandpa and my uncles were unemployed. My dad, who worked sometimes as a house painter, finished an important job just after the crash. Paid a full fifty dollars, he took the money to Asheville and bought the finest suit he could find. Later he liked to say he had no money throughout the Great Depression, but he had “a mighty fine suit of clothes.”

Only my mother, who graduated from high school in 1930, could find work—as a clerk in the dime store in Hendersonville. She made nine dollars a week for a six-day week. As the model for Annie, The Road from Gap Creek’s narrator, she provided most of what the family lived on for several years, along with the quarters my grandma made selling eggs and butter at the store on the highway. Eventually my Uncle Robert was able to join the Civilian Conservation Corps and have his allotment sent home each month. But it would be fair to say that the family depended for years mostly on what they raised in the garden, henhouse, pasture, and hog pen.

Every day, hoboes, transients, and the homeless passed on the roads, begging for drinks of water, crusts of bread. Whole families traveled on foot, carrying their few belongings. It was not unusual to find a transient dead beside the road, starved, killed by police, or beaten to death for a pair of shoes, a watch. My grandma—Julie in Gap Creek and The Road from Gap Creek—never turned away anyone who asked for a bite to eat.

Slowly things did get a little better, and my grandpa occasionally found work as a carpenter. Sometimes he could make an extra dollar by hewing crossties for the railroad or cutting tanbark. But the only real change for my family came in the late 1930s, when the government began expanding military bases at Fort Bragg, Holly Ridge, and Wilmington. My grandpa got a job building new barracks and hired many family members, including my dad, his son-in-law (Muir in the new novel and the hero of an earlier one, This Rock). The men had to live and work away from home, but they made the first decent wages they’d seen in almost a decade.

The changes seen in the Blue Ridge Mountains after World War I were modest compared to the impact of World War II. Every family was touched in some way by the second war. Pearl Harbor galvanized the whole country. Millions joined to serve as war was declared. With most of the boys gone and with gasoline, rubber, leather, sugar, and almost all else rationed, life took on a very different tenor. Everything, including farming, was marshaled for the war effort. Traffic disappeared from the roads, except for the school bus and the mail carrier. People wore old clothes and old shoes, and women really did make dresses out of feed sacks. As Annie will tell you, those who had radios listened every day for news from the Pacific, from North Africa, from Sicily.

And those who had sons, brothers, husbands, and fathers in service lived in dread of receiving a telegram saying a loved one was missing or had been killed in action. Telegrams were often delivered by soldiers in uniform who drove black government cars, the same kind of car that brought the news of my uncle’s death to my grandmother—and that brings such news to the character, Julie, based on my grandmother.

The soldiers who did return later would never be the same. They thought of moving to Florida, to California. The world they returned to was not the one they had left. And they were not the people who had gone away. It would take time to figure out exactly who they were, and what they wanted. And the families of those who did not return would never be the same. Their world and their lives were changed forever. It’s that world that is the setting of The Road from Gap Creek, a novel I wrote to tell the rest of Julie and Hank’s story, what happened to them and to their children after they pulled up stakes and moved on from Gap Creek.

Questions for Discussion

1. In The Road from Gap Creek we see a family swept along by events beyond their control: the typhoid epidemic, the Great Depression, and World War II. Do you think people are at the mercy of history? Can our decisions give us any significant control?

2. Annie Richards Powell, the narrator, refers several times to the importance of acting, the way we play roles in everyday life. She says, “It come to me that most of the smart things people do are a kind of playacting. It would be awful to just act the way we feel” (page 165). What does this suggest about Annie? Do we all play roles in our lives? Do those roles evolve as we evolve?

3. At several points in the novel Annie admits her faults, her sharp tongue, and her temper. How does Annie address these flaws as she gets older? How have you addressed your own flaws as you’ve matured?

4. Annie is married to a preacher, Muir, as she begins narrating this story, and yet she says that a preacher’s words “always seem faraway” when a loved one has died (page 16). Does Annie’s view change during the novel? How do Annie’s and Muir’s differing views of religion affect their relationship? Have your religious views changed during your life? What caused the change—the loss of loved ones, the influence of family?

5. When Julie receives news of Troy’s death in the first chapter, she seems to turn inward, to keep her grief inside. How do the other characters, such as Hank, Annie, and Sharon, deal with their sorrow? How do you?

6. In the novel Gap Creek Julie is much more mature and confident than Hank, but forty years later Julie is depressed and unsure of herself. What brings on this role reversal? How do the dynamics of their marriage change? Is this sort of change inevitable in any marriage?

7. Were you surprised when Annie finally agreed to accept Muir’s proposal after the years of on-again, off-again courtship? “Suddenly . . . I seen that I’d always come back to Muir and that if I didn’t marry Muir, I’d never marry anybody else” (page 208). What had been keeping Annie from accepting?

8. Why do you think Troy refuses to marry Sharon before he’s deployed overseas?

9. Based on what you learn about Troy before he goes to war, what kind of middle-aged and older man do you think he would have become?

10. Annie and Troy think of their German shepherd, Old Pat, as almost human. What role does Old Pat play in the novel? How does she help reveal the character of the humans around her? Do pets help bring out our humanity, both the good and the bad?

11. At Troy’s funeral, Annie realizes that “the war was far from over” (page 311) even though the fighting has ended. How did the war continue to affect their lives? Do you see that in today’s world? Are there parallels or differences between now and the post–World War II era?

12. Surviving in Appalachia during the Great Depression required hard physical work. How do Julie and Annie view their strenuous labor? What surprised you about their daily tasks? How has the role of work, especially for women, changed since the first half of the twentieth century? How does it compare to your approach to your work—either at home or at a job?

13. The Road from Gap Creek is a story of people, not politics. Yet economic issues and political issues are hovering in the air throughout the novel. Do you see the irony in Papa’s resentment of Roosevelt’s New Deal, even as the country begins to mount a slow recovery from the depths of the Depression? Troy’s job with the Civilian Conservation Corps is a godsend, yet no character credits the government for creating the CCC. What does this suggest about American politics of that time? And of our time?

Other Algonquin Readers Round Table Novels

Gap Creek, a novel by Robert Morgan

An Oprah Book Club Selection in hardcover, this timeless story chronicles the struggles, disappointments, and triumphs of Julie and Hank, newlyweds facing the complexities of marriage and a changing world in the Appalachian wilderness at the end of the nineteenth century.

“[Morgan’s] stripped-down and almost primitive sentences burn with the raw, lonesome pathos of Hank Williams’s best songs.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Gripping storytelling, indelible sense of time and place . . . Morgan turns the stories of prosaic lives into page-turners.” —The Raleigh News and Observer

Winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award

AN ALGONQUIN READERS ROUND TABLE EDITION WITH READING GROUP GUIDE AND OTHER SPECIAL FEATURES • FICTION • ISBN 978-1-61620-176-0

The Truest Pleasure, a novel by Robert Morgan

Tom wants land to call his own; Ginny knows she can’t manage her aging father’s farm by herself. Their marriage, born out of necessity and plagued by their dueling obsessions, is at once highly frustrating and deeply gratifying to them both. A story as old, as true, and as beautiful as the hills in which it unfolds.

“Marvelously vivid imagery . . . A quietly audacious book.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Morgan’s simple, eloquent language grounds the story in a tough farm life, his language pulses with poetry.” —The Washington Post Book World

AN ALGONQUIN READERS ROUND TABLE EDITION WITH READING GROUP GUIDE AND OTHER SPECIAL FEATURES • FICTION • ISBN 978-1-56512-222-2

The Art Forger, a novel by B. A. Shapiro

In this New York Times bestseller about art, authenticity, love, and betrayal, a long-missing Degas painting—stolen during the still-unsolved heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum—is delivered to the studio of a young artist who has entered into a Faustian bargain with a powerful gallery owner.

“[A] highly entertaining literary thriller about fine art and foolish choices.” —Parade

AN ALGONQUIN READERS ROUND TABLE EDITION WITH READING GROUP GUIDE AND OTHER SPECIAL FEATURES • FICTION • ISBN 978-1-61620-316-0

The Watery Part of the World, a novel by Michael Parker

This vast and haunting novel spans more than a century of liaisons that develop on a tiny windblown island battered by storms and cut off from the world—beginning in 1813 with the disappearance of a ship off the North Carolina coast and ending 150 years later when the last three inhabitants are forced to abandon their beloved, beautiful island. 

“A lush feat of historical speculation . . . A vivid tale about the tenacity of habit and the odd relationships that form in very small, difficult places.” —The Washington Post

AN ALGONQUIN READERS ROUND TABLE EDITION WITH READING GROUP GUIDE AND OTHER SPECIAL FEATURES • FICTION • ISBN 978-1-61620-143-2

Heading Out to Wonderful, a novel by Robert Goolrick

In the summer of 1948, a handsome, charismatic stranger shows up in the sleepy town of Brownsburg, Virginia. All he has with him are two suitcases: one contains his few possessions, including a fine set of butcher knives; the other is full of money. From the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling novel A Reliable Wife comes a heart-stopping story of love gone terribly wrong.

“A suspenseful tale of obsessive love.” —People

AN ALGONQUIN READERS ROUND TABLE EDITION WITH READING GROUP GUIDE AND OTHER SPECIAL FEATURES • FICTION • ISBN 978-1-61620-279-8

When She Woke, a novel by Hillary Jordan

Bellwether Prize winner Hillary Jordan’s provocative novel is the fiercely imagined story of a woman struggling to navigate an America of a not-too-distant future, where the line between church and state has been eradicated, and a terrifying new way of delivering justice has been introduced.

“Chillingly credible . . . Holds its own alongside the dark inventions of Margaret Atwood and Ray Bradbury.” —The New York Times Book Review

AN ALGONQUIN READERS ROUND TABLE EDITION WITH READING GROUP GUIDE AND OTHER SPECIAL FEATURES • FICTION • ISBN 978-1-61620-193-7

Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions, by Daniel Wallace

This hilarious and wrenching, tender and outrageous, novel about a young man who wants desperately to know the truth about his elusive father—an indefatigable teller of tall tales—has been turned into a major motion picture and a Broadway musical. 

“A charming whopper of a tale.” —The San Diego Union-Tribune

“A comic novel about death, about the mysteries of parents and the redemptive power of storytelling.” —USA Today

AN ALGONQUIN READERS ROUND TABLE EDITION WITH READING GROUP GUIDE AND OTHER SPECIAL FEATURES • FICTION • ISBN 978-1-61620-164-7

Wolf Whistle, a novel by Lewis Nordan

When Lewis Nordan unleashed his extraordinary writing powers on the events surrounding the killing of Emmett Till and the subsequent trial during which his killers were acquitted by an all-white jury, the result was epic: profoundly sad, manically comic, and stunningly powerful. 

“Wolf Whistle is an immense and wall-shattering display of talent.” —Randall Kenan, The Nation

“An illuminating, even uplifting, achievement . . . Flat-out wonderful.” —The Washington Post Book World

AN ALGONQUIN READERS ROUND TABLE EDITION WITH READING GROUP GUIDE AND OTHER SPECIAL FEATURES • FICTION • ISBN 978-1-56512-110-2

Running the Rift, a novel by Naomi Benaron

A stunning award-winning novel that –through the eyes of one unforgettable boy—explores a country’s unraveling, its tentative new beginning, and the love that binds its people together.  The story follows the life and progress of Jean Patrick Nkuba, a young runner who dreams of becoming Rwanda’s first Olympic track medalist.

“Benaron writes like Jean Patrick runs, with the heart of a lion.” —The Dallas Morning News

“A culturally rich and unflinching story of resilience and resistance.” —Chicago Tribune, Editor’s Choice

“Audacious and compelling . . . An authentic and richly textured portrait of African life.” —The Washington Post

Winner of the Bellwether Prize for Fiction

AN ALGONQUIN READERS ROUND TABLE EDITION WITH READING GROUP GUIDE AND OTHER SPECIAL FEATURES • FICTION • ISBN 978-1-61620-194-4

The Puzzle King, a novel by Betsy Carter

This is the story of unlikely heroes, the lively, beautiful Flora and her husband, the brooding, studious Simon, two immigrants who were each sent to America by their families to find better lives. They found each other and built a life—and a fortune—together. Now they are the last chance for their loved ones’ escape from Hitler’s Germany.

“The kernel of Betsy Carter’s third novel is a powerful bit of family lore . . . A work of genealogical fiction from the late 19th century to the eve of World War II . . . it balances the Jewish immigrant experience in New York—both the achievement of the American dream and the curdling of it—against the insidious anti-Semitism of Germany and Eastern Europe.” —Los Angeles Times

“A fine novel with twists and turns and pieces that interlock tightly . . . Carter at her best.” —The Miami Herald

AN ALGONQUIN READERS ROUND TABLE EDITION WITH READING GROUP GUIDE AND OTHER SPECIAL FEATURES • FICTION • ISBN 978-1-61620-016-9

A Reliable Wife, a novel by Robert Goolrick

Rural Wisconsin, 1907. In the bitter cold, Ralph Truitt stands alone on a train platform anxiously awaiting the arrival of the woman who answered his newspaper ad for “a reliable wife.” The woman who arrives is not the one he expects in this New York Times #1 bestseller about love and madness, longing and murder.

“[A] chillingly engrossing plot . . . Good to the riveting end.” —USA Today

“Deliciously wicked and tense . . . Intoxicating.” —The Washington Post

“A rousing historical potboiler.” —The Boston Globe

AN ALGONQUIN READERS ROUND TABLE EDITION WITH READING GROUP GUIDE AND OTHER SPECIAL FEATURES • FICTION • ISBN 978-1-56512-977-1

Pictures of You, a novel by Caroline Leavitt

Two women running away from their marriages collide on a foggy highway. The survivor of the fatal accident is left to pick up the pieces not only of her own life but of the lives of the devastated husband and fragile son that the other woman left behind. As these three lives intersect, the book asks, How well do we really know those we love, and how do we open our hearts to forgive the unforgivable?

“An expert storyteller . . . Leavitt teases suspense out of the greatest mystery of all—the workings of the human heart.” —Booklist

“Magically written, heartbreakingly honest . . . Caroline Leavitt is one of those fabulous, incisive writers you read and then ask yourself, Where has she been all my life?” —Jodi Picoult

AN ALGONQUIN READERS ROUND TABLE EDITION WITH READING GROUP GUIDE AND OTHER SPECIAL FEATURES • FICTION • ISBN 978-1-56512-631-2

West of Here, a novel by Jonathan Evison

Spanning more than a hundred years—from the ragged mudflats of a belching and bawdy Western frontier in the 1890s to the rusting remains of a strip-mall cornucopia in 2006—West of Here chronicles the life of one small town. It’s a saga of destiny and greed, adventure and passion, hope and hilarity, that turns America’s history into myth and myth into a nation’s shared experience.

“[A] booming, bighearted epic.” —Vanity Fair

“[A] voracious story . . . Brisk, often comic, always deeply sympathetic.” —The Washington Post

AN ALGONQUIN READERS ROUND TABLE EDITION WITH READING GROUP GUIDE AND OTHER SPECIAL FEATURES • FICTION • ISBN 978-1-61620-082-4

The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, a novel by Heidi W. Durrow

In the aftermath of a family tragedy, a biracial girl must cope with society’s ideas of race and class in this acclaimed novel, winner of the Bellwether Prize for fiction addressing issues of social justice.

“Affecting, exquisite . . . Durrow’s powerful novel is poised to find a place among classic stories of the American experience.” —The Miami Herald

“Durrow manages that remarkable achievement of telling a subtle, complex story that speaks in equal volumes to children and adults. Like Catcher in the Rye or To Kill a Mockingbird, Durrow’s debut features voices that will ring in the ears long after the book is closed . . . It’s a captivating and original tale that shouldn’t be missed.” —The Denver Post

Winner of the Bellwether Prize for Fiction

AN ALGONQUIN READERS ROUND TABLE EDITION WITH READING GROUP GUIDE AND OTHER SPECIAL FEATURES • FICTION • ISBN 978-1-61620-015-2

Praise for Robert Morgan

“Robert Morgan’s writing is as clear and simple as befits farm life, yet it
possesses a luminous poetic quality, a rough beauty hewn from the countryside and from old, forgotten ways.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer

“In examining the hard, honest lives of his people, Robert Morgan gives voice to a time and place rarely imagined . . . Both intimate and eternal.” —STEWART O’NAN

“[Morgan] shows what it was like to be human in a time and place now far removed from modern America. He creates living, breathing souls who, as transparent as their dreams and fears may seem today, demand to be taken seriously.” —The Orlando Sentinel

“[Morgan] brings . . . his novelist’s instinct for drama, an eye for telling details and valuable insight into human nature.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“In Morgan’s hands . . . details become the stuff of stern, gripping drama . . . Morgan is among the relatively few American writers who write about work knowledgeably, and as if it really matters . . . You begin to feel, as you sometimes do when reading Cormac McCarthy’s or Harry Crews’s early novels, that the author has been typing with blood on his hands and a good deal of it has rubbed off onto your shirtsleeves . . . I wanted to cry uncle and go bury this novel in my backyard, someplace where it wouldn’t slip into my dreams. I couldn’t take anymore, and I mean that as a compliment.” —DWIGHT GARNER, The New York Times Book Review

“[Morgan] writes with an enviable clarity that makes personalities, issues and events come alive on the page . . . Authoritative and enlightening.” —BookPage

“[Robert Morgan] is a seasoned author whose prose reads like poetry and whose nonfiction reads like novels . . . His books teach and inspire. He gives the past, with all its heroes and villains, a new life, if not a new purpose.” —Southern Literary Review

“Morgan brings the past to life . . . [His] eye for detail makes compelling reading whether he is describing working on a farm or fighting with muskets and bayonets.” —Richmond Times-Dispatch

“Morgan’s marriage of history and well-wrought prose is as engrossing as it is edifying.” —The Louisville Courier-Journal

“Robert Morgan should be declared a national treasure.” —The Charlotte Observer

One

The thing about Mama was she’d never tell you how she felt. When she was feeling bad she’d just go on with her work, washing dishes or peeling taters, or mopping the floor, and I’d know she was feeling pretty low, but she wouldn’t say nothing. Work was what she done, what she’d done her whole life since she was a little girl up on Mount Olivet, and she’d keep on scrubbing the dishes and cups with a rag in soapy water and rinse them in cold water and dry them with a linen towel.

It would make Papa mad that Mama wouldn’t say nothing when her feelings was hurt or she had the blues. It was a difference between them that went all the way back to the beginning of their marriage, back to the days on Gap Creek. Papa would argue and say she’d spent too much money on flower seeds or a shrub for the yard. He never could see wasting money on beautifying flowers, while Mama was crazy about flowers and liked nothing better than a rose of Sharon bush blooming in the yard and attracting bees and hummingbirds, or colorful geraniums in pots along the edge of the porch. She once said that it was a sign that God loved us that he put such colors in the world as you seen in the red of geraniums or the pink of dahlias or the dark purple of ironweeds along the road.

“Julie, you’re going to break us up,” Papa would say if she paid a peddler a dollar for some bulbs to hide in the ground. Mama wouldn’t say nothing back. She’d just go on with whatever she was doing or maybe start something harder, like washing the chicken piles off the porch or sweeping the backyard. I never saw nobody take more pride in keeping the porch clean than Mama did. Chickens would get up on the porch looking for something to peck and leave their piles like big melted coins on the boards. If the piles got baked in the sun, they’d be hard to get off, set hard as cement or glue in the cracks of the wood. So almost every day Mama would heat a bucket of water on the kitchen stove till it was near boiling. Holding the bucket with a towel or the tail of her apron she’d splash tongues of smoking water on the planks that made them steam like they was burning. And then with the broom she’d scour the chicken piles off, flirting the dirty water into the yard. She’d splash and sweep until the porch was clean as the kitchen table drying in the sun.

About once a week Mama done the same thing to the yard, splashing and sweeping, running away the chickens, sweeping again, sometimes sprinkling white sand she got from Kimble Branch, till the yard looked smooth as a piece of white twill cloth that had been washed and ironed.

That day when the black car stopped in front of the house and the two men in uniforms got out, my heart sunk right to the soles of my feet. It was November of 1943 and you didn’t see many cars then because of the gas rationing, even on the big road, and on our little gravel road you could go half a day and not see a vehicle pass except for the school bus. That car could not mean any good as it stopped there on Mama’s swept yard beside the boxwoods.

Those two men walked across the ground she’d swept so careful and I wished I could close my eyes and make them go away. We’d read in the paper about two men coming to deliver bad news from the war. It made me cold in the belly to see them, and then it made me mad. I wanted to fling open the kitchen door and tell them to go away. They had no business coming on us all of a sudden like this. I wanted to tell them to get back in their black car and drive back to town or some army base or Washington, D.C., or wherever they’d come from.

They knocked on the kitchen door and when I opened it the taller one said, “Is Mr. Hank Richards here?”

“No he ain’t,” I said. The truth was Papa was out cutting firewood on the Squirrel Hill with my brother Velmer.

“Is Mrs. Richards here?” the second man said. He took off his army cap and put it under his arm.

“No . . . I’ll see,” I said, trying to think of some way to keep Mama from having to see them. But the other man took off his cap and looked past me. I turned and seen Mama standing right behind me, in the light from the door.

“Ma’am, I’m awfully sorry to be the one to bring you this news,” he said, and handed Mama a tan envelope. Mama held the envelope a minute without opening it, then handed it to me. As I ripped open the paper and looked at the telegram I told myself this was a mistake. We’d read in the paper about men reported killed who later turned up wounded in a hospital or lost from their unit.

The telegram was words printed on paper ribbons pasted to the page. “Dear Mr. & Mrs. Richards, it is with profound regret I report your son Troy Richards, Serial no. 34119284, lost in the crash of a B-17 heavy bomber on Nov. 10, 1943, near the village of Eye in East Anglia. Stop. A grateful nation mourns the loss of your son whose sacrifice for his country will never be forgotten.”

I read the words glued to the page to Mama and she just stared at the door like she didn’t see nothing.

“Ma’am, if there’s anything we can do for you, just let us know,” the tall man said. But Mama had already turned away from him. I thought she was going back to the fire in the living room, but she didn’t. Instead she walked to the far side of the kitchen and set down in the chair by the bread safe. The two men said more things. They talked real gentle, like they was truly sad, and asked again if there was anything they could do. I reckon it was what they done every day, going around and delivering those telegrams and telling people how sorry they was. Finally they said a letter would be coming in the mail, along with a box of Troy’s personal effects. And then they put on their caps and walked slow back to the car and drove away.

“Mama, you go back