A Star for Mrs. Blake Read Free Page B

Everyone in town had a different opinion. Some said yes—let their final resting place be overseas, to show America’s commitment to her European allies. Some thought hell no, bring the boys back home, where they belonged, because we never should have gone to war in the first place. The rest of the country was fervidly divided as well. In the end, the War Department left the choice to the families.
    Cora didn’t even know how to think about it. She wanted Sammy close, but what was best for the country? He had left home to serve—was she being selfish to want to bring him back? She yearned to ask her father’s advice, but Grandpa Harding had died the spring just before Sammy enlisted, and so she heeded the words of the biggest daddy of them all, Theodore Roosevelt. He and his wife had decided that their son Quentin should be buried over there, and strongly urged other parents to do the same.
    “Mrs. Roosevelt and I have always believed that where the tree falls, there let it lay,” he wrote.
    It was a poetic image that appealed to Cora’s good sense—things die and go back to nature. But was it too much to ask for yet another sacrifice, after losing Sammy in the first place, not to have his marker in the town cemetery next to her parents and sister in the Harding family plot, along with the Higgins, Noyes, Spofford, Pressey, and Haskell clans that had inhabited the island since the Revolutionary War? Not to be able to stop by for a visit anytime she pleased?
    A decision was called for, and she’d have to make it on her own. It was a fair day in March 1919, four months after Armistice. A kindly sun and stiff breeze had dried the linens by noon. There was chop in the harbor out to the bay. Cora had been walking north on Eaton Road, over to Elizabeth Pascoe’s to buy her scrumptious homemade maple sausage. She had received two cards from the Graves Registration Service. The first gave the location of Sammy’s temporary burial. It was a place in rural France called Chaudron Farm, map reference 78.6-02.4, although of course she didn’t have a map. He was in grave number 72, identified by his dog tags, which were apparently nailed to a stake. The second card asked that she state her relationship to the deceased and answer yes or no to the question “Do you desire that the remains be brought to the United States?”
    In the spent garden of the last house before a stretch of woods, she came upon the odor of geraniums. Geraniums always smell as if they’re dying anyway, that turpentiney scent, which even when they’re bright with flowers can bring a melancholy mood. These were nothing but a browned-out tangle along with last year’s yarrow and veronica. Cora kept walking, but what was on her mind and in her heart were two different things. Instead of going straight to Elizabeth’s she took a right at the Cross Road, which led to the town cemetery.
    Sarah Bently, Elizabeth’s mother, had been walking in the road as well, but the poor thing didn’t know where she was. She wore a housedress and slippers and her knobby fingers worked desperately to keep her cardigan closed. Cora stopped and buttoned it for her, speaking calmly about ordinary things. Battered blue veins showed through the thin skin at the old woman’s temples, as if the endurance it took to stay alive had become visible. Sarah said she was going to the hospital. She meant that she was going to die, as she was walkingtoward the cemetery also. Cora waved at Elizabeth, who was running after her mother.
    A hundred-foot sycamore marked the entrance in the rock wall around the graveyard. Even bare, its network of zigzag twigs seemed to fill the sky. Although the sun was shining, it could not penetrate the chill that rose from the creek at the bottom of the hill on which the family plots were laid. Nothing moved in this timeless place but shadows. Cora strolled between the stones, familiar as the houses on her street, calmed by a porous quiet that let in just