The car that came up the cemetery road at 5:40 was an old green Oldsmobile with a dented fender, driven slowly, as if the driver were afraid of waking someone. It parked beside the fence, twenty feet from mine. The door opened and a man got out, thin and tall, in a gray windbreaker and a baseball cap. He reached into the back seat for a paper wrapped bunch of pink carnations. He did not look around. He walked straight to Section F with a limp, as a man walks to a place he has walked a thousand times in the dark.
I got out of my car and followed. My heart was pounding in my ears. He knelt at the small granite stone, with some difficulty, and removed the old flowers, and laid the new ones in the little vase. Then he took his cap off and bowed his head. He was seventy five or so, with white hair thinned to a few combed strands and big, rough hands. He murmured something I could not hear. I stood ten feet behind him with my coat collar up against the cold. I said, “Sir.” He did not startle. He said, “I wondered when you would come.”
He turned. His face was long and kind and heavily lined, and his eyes were wet. “You are Walter,” he said. “I would know you anywhere. Ann kept a picture of you on her dresser, in your Army uniform.” I could not make my mouth work. He rose, one hand on the stone, and put out the other. “My name is Danny Pruitt. I think I owe you an explanation, and I think you have owed one to yourself for fifty years.” We shook hands in the pale light. His grip was gentle.
Some love is hidden not from shame but from the fear of giving pain, and it waits patiently for the right hand to find it.
We sat in his Oldsmobile with the heater running and a thermos of coffee between us. Danny told me, in a slow voice, that he and Ann had been sweethearts in high school, in 1970 and 1971. He was drafted in the spring of 1972 and sent to Vietnam. Ann was seventeen. Before he left, they were foolish, as the young are, and she was carrying his child when he shipped out. She wrote to him every week. She never told him about the pregnancy, because she did not want him distracted in the field. Her mother sent the letters to a girl cousin until they could decide.
The baby came early, in March of 1974, at a hospital in Roanoke, two months before her time. A girl, three pounds, who lived for nine hours. Ann named her Hope. She held her until the end. Danny was in a hospital in Japan at the time, recovering from a leg wound, and no one told him. He came home in April, thin and quiet, and went to see Ann, and she met him on the porch. She told him everything in one breath. Then she told him she could not marry him, because every time she looked at him she would see the grave.
I thought of June of 1974. I met Ann at a church supper that summer, shy and pale, with a heavy cardigan on a warm evening. She said little. I thought it was her nature. We were married within a few months, and I never learned why her hands shook on the day, why she cried so hard at the baptism of her niece. I asked the man beside me, in a cracked voice, whether she ever loved me. Danny did not answer at once. He turned to look at me. “Walter,” he said, “she wrote me, every Christmas, for fifty years, that you were the best thing that ever happened to her.”
He took a folded paper from his jacket. It was a letter in the neat handwriting of Ann, which I could have picked out from a thousand. She had written it in April, the month before she died, when the doctors told her there was little time. It said, Danny, I am leaving soon. Walter does not know about Hope. I never had the courage. I was afraid he would think I had lied to him, and I had, by silence. Will you look after the flowers? And tell him, when the time is right, that I loved him with the whole of my life.
I read it in the car twice. I folded it and held it against my chest. The sun was coming up over the ridge, and the first light fell across the little stones in Section F, the lambs and the angels, in rose and gold. I asked Danny why he had come every Sunday. He said it was the only time he got to be her father. He said he brought carnations because Ann had carried them at the funeral of her mother, and that it was the only flower she ever asked him for. His voice broke. “She was so small, Walter.”
We stood together at the grave, the two of us, in the early cold. Neither of us spoke. After a while I took off my own glove and laid my bare palm on the top of the little stone. It was colder than ice. I said, “Hello, Hope. I am your father. I mean, I am the man who was the husband of your mother. I am sorry I am late.” Danny took out a handkerchief and gave it to me, and I used it, and then I gave it back and he used it too.
We arranged it that day. In the Lynchburg paper, a new line was added to the stone in the spring, under the name of Hope, where there had been a blank. It said, Daughter of Ann and Danny. Beside it, a smaller line, carved at my request, said, Beloved by Walter. Danny came to Thanksgiving, and every Christmas after, and I took to joining him on the early Sundays, with a thermos of my own. We bring the pink carnations. We do not talk much. In the cold light before the gate opens, we are two old men tending the same small garden.