Ramona Ausubel - Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

Another man came in later, spit blood into a cup, his lungs wracked from running for hours in the cold. He did three hundred push-ups, four hundred sit-ups, then went outside naked and stood there in the arctic evening, the sunlight hardly more than a grey fog. Edgar, from the window, looked at the man’s body, imagined his sweat turning to a crust of ice. It got dark and Edgar checked his watch: 4:00 p.m.

“We call him Runner,” the fat kid said. “By ‘we’ I mean ‘I.’”

“Is there anyone else here?”

“Nope.”

“What are we supposed to be doing?”

“Fuck if I know, brother. I’m drawing fucking kittens. Best job in the Army. Better than getting my legs blown off.”

They had a radio, which Runner knew how to use, but no one ever called them on it. Runner ran every day and hardly spoke. The other boy, who Runner called Fatty, kept a series of jam jars filled with urine under his bunk. They had rations in crates in the corner. The sink didn’t run so they melted snow in a pot over the fire. There was a pit latrine out back and Runner had built a wooden platform on which to stand while he poured a pot of boiled snowmelt over his head.

Edgar figured that both of the others were also rich, that they had the kind of fathers who knew whom to call to move the game pieces of their children into safe territory. He hung on to the thread of anger at Fern for rendering him so useless at the very same time that he was eaten up by gratitude for not being imminently dead in a rice paddy. Next he hated himself for ever having thought he might serve a purpose in the world, that he might ever have been anything but a rich kid. Edgar wrote to Fern and described the whiteness, described the silence. For three weeks no one came or went.

Then, across the ice came a sled pulled by dogs. Runner was out but Edgar and Fatty sat at the window, watching the approach. “Who the fuck is that?” Fatty whispered. He seemed terrified. He was sweating. They had their guns at their sides.

The sled stopped and a person stepped off, yelled at the dogs, which all lay down in the snow. The person, almost child-size, was wearing a fur coat and fur boots and carried a leather bag. The voice at the door was high and then whoever it was came inside, and Fatty pointed his gun until the hood came off and it was a girl, dark-haired, pretty, her cheeks red with cold.

“Put those things away,” she said. “And make me some coffee.”

The two men scurried like mice. The girl sat down on the floor by the fire, opened her bag and took out a stack of newspapers, magazines and books. She worked for the library, she explained, and had the assignment of bringing materials to the far-flung villages, mines and outposts. She drank her coffee and said, “Here’s your fucked-up war,” and shoved the newspapers towards Edgar.

“Are you an Eskimo?” Fatty asked, as if he had encountered a unicorn. Edgar could see him imagining undressing this girl in an igloo carpeted with otter pelts.

“I’m Inupiat,” she said. “But I’m also American. I’m here to make you feel guilty about your job.” She drank her coffee, left the cup and shut the door hard. Edgar jumped up, got the letters out from under his pillow and chased the girl. It had started to snow.

“Will you mail these for me?” He explained that they were for his wife, because having such a person made him feel credible, worth saving.

“Are you grateful or angry?” the girl asked.

“Angry,” he admitted. “And grateful.” He thought of Fern. Her absence was a bee sting that had suddenly ceased to be numb. He could have scratched his skin off with want for her.

“You should be,” she said and took the letters.

The other boys went to bed and Edgar stayed up. He had read the papers before he left but now, in this quiet, the stories hit him. There was a sound outside the cabin and Edgar sat up. He took a flashlight and cracked the door. Two reindeer pawed at the ground. They looked up at Edgar’s light, their eyes bright marbles, and then they turned and ran.

—

After Edgar had been in Alaska for six weeks, the jeep returned with more food and also a box of stationery and three typewriters. “The guys down in Nome sent these,” the logger said.

“They couldn’t be bothered to come themselves?”

“I’m the only one who knows how to get here.”

There was a list of names and no one had to tell the boys that this was a catalogue of the dead. Just to see them laid out like that — all men, their rank, two dates. The driver said, “Guess they need more letter-writers.” There were mothers upon mothers upon mothers who needed to be told that their sons were dead.

The man said he would be back every day. Right now, today, there were thousands of living bodies in the war but everyone knew that a certain number of them would die by nightfall, by morning. The question was which ones.

The three men put matches to the wicks of their kerosene lanterns that night and began to type.

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Kingsly,

Please let me be the first to tell you how bravely Private First Class Kingsly fought and how respected he was. He died the way he lived. You should be proud. We thank you for your service and patriotism and offer our sincere condolences.

Dear Dr. and Mrs. Thomas Abbot,

I cannot imagine the loss you feel at this time. First Sergeant Abbot was a generous fighter and a good friend. He was one of the finest men we had. Our hearts go out to you.

Edgar tried to make each letter unique even though he knew nothing of the boys he was writing about. These were whole lives, or had been. He tried to say the same thing a new way dozens of times a day. Later there would be a handwritten note stapled to the newest list: Lieutenants, Just follow the script. Please and thank you.

At night Edgar used the typewriter to write to Fern. He told her that he had started to write a novel. He described a plot: a young man with money that he didn’t earn or necessarily want, a father who did nothing but acquire, a question of how to create a meaningful life of one’s own. In the letter, Edgar wrote that he was working on a few pages a day, between work orders. It’s really cold. There’s nothing else to do. He tried to describe the place where he was, the way ice gave way to ice and how the line between sky and land was just a smudge. That was it. There was nothing else to look at or see. Just white and white and white. Privilege was a kind of nothingness, suspending him outside of the lived world. Not even color joined him there.

Fern did not ask where the character of the wife was in this novel. Instead of asking, she wrote, I wish you were here.

And then: Edgar, my love, I’m pregnant. We’re going to be parents. We are going to be a family.

THE NIGHT AFTER the dinner party at which he had failed to pair his wife with John Jefferson and thereby even out all wrongs, Edgar stood with Glory at the milks in the health food store, looking for her brand and fat percentage. She liked the farmed stuff, something that still had a faint cow scent. Edgar never shopped with Fern. He was used to the items in their cupboard. He thought of them as the foods that were available to the American family — he had not ever considered Fern as a choice-maker, rumbling down the aisles, editing what her family would be made of. Glory, holding the basket against her bright, smooth legs, had a different list: dark bread, black grapes, yogurt and a shining ham for her husband. While they walked the sugars, the cereals, she played with the hair on the back of Edgar’s neck, which he had meant to trim but now felt grateful that he hadn’t.