Free Beast of the Field by Peter Jordan Drake Page B

Sentences not required may be erased.  If anything else is added the post card will be destroyed.  
     
    {Postage must be prepaid on any letter or post card addressed
    to the sender of this card.}
    ________________________________________________________
                  I am quite well.
                  I have been admitted into hospital
                                {sick}  and am going well
                                {wounded} and hope to be discharged soon
     
                  I am being sent down to the base.
                                                                          {letter dated             
                  I have received your               {telegram "    __________
                                                                          {parcel     "    __________
     
                  Letter follows at first opportunity.
                  I have received no letter from you.
                                {lately
                                {for a long time
         Signature Only }              Jr.
         Date______ Oct '18 _____________________________
    U.S. War Dept.
     
     
    “So that was it?” Millie asked, but she was not surprised or angry anymore; something about Junior just signing his name to them, and not doing anything else made her sad.
    Tommy thought hard before he answered.  “Well, this is supposed to be a secret, Mil, but I’ll tell you.  Junior has one more letter he keeps hidden away.  I don’t have any idea what it says.  He won’t let me read that one.  He won’t let anybody read it.  He did let me figure out by asking him questions that it was something bad in it.”  Tommy shook his head.  “It must have been real bad.”
    “Why do you say that?”
    “Because whatever it was, it’s what made Junior what he is today.”
    So Millie spent a few days finishing her story, solving her mystery.  She watched Junior work.  He was like a mule.  Two mules.  He never said a word, except for the one, “H-y.”  He never complained.  It was like he was doing penance.  For what?  She had wondered.
    Suddenly, three days after Tommy showed her Junior’s letters, she woke up from a dream she couldn’t remember with a brother she could.  Junior was there as she knew him before he left.  The big quiet laugh, the hugs—those huge squeezes that hurt but you still never tried to get out of them—the drunken dancing he used to do in the barn, in his big old boots and a bottle of beer in his hand, the cussing he taught Millie just because it made Mother batty, and yes, the fights too.  The fist fights in town, the cussing with Pa in the fields, the deep shade of red his forehead would get when he got mad.  She remembered it all.  In that moment a mystery was solved.  A story could be told:  The Story of Junior Before the War. 
    And that same moment she learned not how to read, but why to read.
                 

 
     
    8.
     
    Yes, it was starting again:  a draining, gritty feeling behind and beneath his ribs.  There had been a few cases before—the dead Arab in Louisville, for instance, that family of seven in Little Rock—that had appeared to everyone else to be accidental deaths, and at first to Sterno too.  The Arab had been a hophead, clumsy enough in his altered state to fall off the top floor of the Brown on the eve of the Derby.  That family had been—father to baby—Ozark simpletons: only a matter of time, said the residents of their town, before one of those idiots burned the house down.  Yet in each case Sterno had stuck around for some reason, nothing more than the trace of a scent.  He