The Book of Ruth by Jane Hamilton

we did have to retreat a mile or two we always begged and pleaded for more Japs to kill. After the funeral the relatives went back to the home place and they had all the leftover food from Marion’s wedding: slabs of roast beef warmed up and potatoes made into hash browns. May wore the same dress she had worn at Marion’s wedding. She hadn’t shed one tear at the church. She sang out the hymns while everyone watched to see what she might do next. They were waiting for her knees to give out; they expected her to keel over and hit the hard pew and then everyone would swarm around her mopping off her cold brow. When the guests left she wrapped her wedding china in newspaper. We still have it in our attic. The teacups are preserved in memory of Willard.
    May figured the officials in the government who had the lists of dead people made a mistake. She told Sid she knew it was a simple mistake and that after the war was over Willard would come home. He was hiding under all the carnage so the enemy wouldn’t notice that he was alive. Once, she woke up in the middle of the night screaming. She had dreamed he was dead, and if it was true she knew that wherever she went she would always be a stranger in a foreign country.
    May lived at the home place for ten years after Willard died, until she was thirty-five. Her brothers survived the war, and of course Frank Bane never had to go. May couldn’t tolerate Marion. She insinuated, by gesture, that Frank wasn’t any better than a fop with the thick glasses he had to wear. She bet he could actually see perfectly, he just didn’t want to defend his God and his country. Marion and Frank moved to North Carolina. They couldn’t stand it in Honey Creek.
    It came to me, as a revelation, that May lived through all the history I learned about from Miss Daken. Not of course the Romans and their sewer systems, but to think that May was living and breathing while Nikolai Lenin rode through Russia on the train. If May was around then, it doesn’t seem so much like history; it seems like life itself, close and thumping. Still, she never spoke about islands in the Pacific or the European theater. While it was going on she couldn’t seem to see farther than the wash hanging out on the clothesline. In those days she didn’t have words for one single person. She did all the cooking for the hired men but she didn’t speak to them; she served and went straight back to the kitchen. They were such rough, ugly old men, and they always tried to catch her eye. She knew each one’s shoes by heart. She promised herself she would never look farther than their ankle bones. She washed and ironed and canned. She kept her hands flying while her mind probably said the same thing over and over: she whispered, “I don’t believe this is my life.” She watched her enormous hands become chapped and tough. They got so cold when she drove tractor, from the metal steering wheel and the wind cutting through her cloth gloves. She said all her sentences to herself. “Someday I’m going to leave here” was her favorite. But then she’d go up to her room and lie down on her bed and stretch her arms across wondering when her Willard was going to come back. She knew it wouldn’t be long now. She knew she’d wake one morning and there he’d be at the door, with a bandage over his burned-up heart. That old hole was just about healed, he’d tell her, while she tried to control the tick in her smile. She believed he’d come back because she couldn’t imagine him not in the world. He was probably walking the streets down in Argentina. He was in a park picking flowers that he was going to press and then send to her. There’s a stone for Willard over in the Honey Creek cemetery with nothing below. It says on the stone that he’s singing unto the Lord a new song and that May was his beloved wife.
    When May was thirty-five Elmer Grey started coming around by himself. He didn’t bring flowers or chocolates. Elmer had a