Nearly every family in Beeville had a boy in the service. A few were not coming back. Some had come. The others had been heard from. Everybody knew that Henry’s whereabouts were unknown. The post office had been so besieged over the telephone, every day and Sunday too, with inquiries as to whether a letter had come from this boy or that, the inquirers too eager to wait for the mail, that the postmaster ordered the phone taken out. He was a good friend of my family.
One day in February, 1919, my mother answered the ring of the telephone in her house. A post-office clerk was calling. The postmaster, he explained, had sent him across the street to telephone from a store. The postmaster wanted my mother and father to know that a letter had just arrived—from Henry. Yes, from Henry, postmarked U. S. Army of Occupation, in Germany.
With Mama and Papa in the house at this hour were an infant grandson, lying in a baby buggy, and his mother, Elizabeth, my brother Lee’s wife, Lee being in the Air Corps.
“I can go faster than anybody else,� Elizabeth cried.
The post office was about four blocks away. As she tore out, Mama and Papa followed as rapidly as they could, pushing the baby buggy. There was no pavement to roll it over. The streets were sandy and gullied, but the baby buggy was more than halfway to the post office when Elizabeth met it coming back. She was running, hand stretched out holding a letter that had already been torn from the envelope.
There in the middle of the street the little group read it through—a father enfeebled beyond his years by a disease that was soon to carry him off, a young kinswoman of eager sympathy, and a mother, still wonderfully vigorous, who had said, “Go, son. I’d rather you’d go and never come back than stay home feeling like a slacker.� I asked her years later for her definition of bravery. “A brave person,� she came back, with steel-spring energy, “is a person who is scared to death and goes ahead anyway.�
I don’t remember now why no letter had come from Henry. Anyway, a letter now brought him home in safety and changed the world for a few people who had been waiting in utter anxiety.
