June asked her to read it aloud to her but Sylvie said it was not like poetry, or a children’s story, something to be enjoyed; it was an account of war, and she said that June didn’t need to read about it. But June persisted, if only because she saw how Sylvie handled the book, with indeed a kind of enjoyment, a certain somber savoring. June would peer inside the bedroom when she was supposed to be dusting, or creep behind to the plot in back, and there would be Sylvie with the faded-blue cloth-covered book in her clutch, often not even reading it, more keeping it close, her form characteristically folded up in a chair with it tucked against her chest, or propped beneath her chin. Whenever June was in the house alone she would steal into the room and try to read a page. It was difficult for her-she was otherwise reading mostly English primers then, though easily-and she realized it would take her hours simply to get past the preface and initial pages of historical background.
So she took it, reading it in her spare late-afternoon hours in the cover of a natural bunker amid the hillside brush and weeds. When the account of the battle began the writing became clearer to her, the words sharpening and crystallizing and soon enough disappearing, the reading coming to her as easily as if she were viewing a picture show in a theater. What the author saw of the battle was horrifying, the grinding carnage of the cavalry charges, of the artillery rounds and chain-gun shot, the piles of sundered, crushed bodies and scattered human remains, the veritable rivers of blood, but it was in fact the days following that haunted him most. It was the unspeakable fate of the wounded that haunted him, their privation and “perfect torture” because of the grave lack of food and water and medical supplies, most of the caretakers being laypersons like himself or the local townsfolk, all willing to aid the survivors but frightfully incapable of doing so. All the churches in the area surrounding the town called Solferino were filled with miserable soldiers, the air of their sanctuaries fouled with the stench of the dead and dying.
After a few days Sylvie Tanner asked her if she’d seen the book. June shook her head, wondering aloud if Hector had taken it back by accident with some other books to the base library. It was an uncharacteristically poor lie from her, as if she intended to make obvious her guilt, but it worked, in that Sylvie told her that if they could somehow get it back from the base, she might be willing to read and discuss it with her. The next day June slipped off to the half-buried rifle-shell canister where she’d hidden it, brushed the dirt from its cover, and took it back to the cottage. Reverend Tanner recognized the book in her hands and asked what she was doing with it but Sylvie came in then from the small rear plot and exclaimed, “Oh, you sweet dear, you got it back for me!”
Yet she still refused to read the book with June, who then begged her if they might read others together regularly, after her chores. Sylvie hesitated, surely worried about showing even more favor to her, but eventually agreed when confronted with what June could contrive of her face, when she required, blunting its hardened aspects to the rounded eyes and tender cheeks of any other girl her age, back to the waif she should have been. After June quickly completed the cleaning they’d sit up in her bed and read aloud to each other until it was time to join everyone else in preparing the tables for supper. June found that her usually constant feeling of hunger would magically subside-after the war and for the rest of her life it would never quite disappear (she was like a stray cat that way, always willing to eat, no matter the state of her belly, of course except now)-and she would have stayed with Mrs. Tanner all night if she let her, losing herself in the warm tuck of her side.
Still, June kept reading the book to herself whenever she had a free moment; she couldn’t help but imagine that it was Sylvie Tanner who was the witness and author of the book, as if she had seen with her own eyes the fierce fighting and wretched wounded in the churches, had toiled to alleviate the suffering without the aid of medicines or clean bandages or food. There was an inscription on the book’s title page, written in a handsome, flowing, old-fashioned hand, To our steadfast daughter. May you be an angel of mercy, and it was Nicholas who once asked June, when he was seven or eight, what a “steadfast” person was, holding the very book in his hands. The blue cloth cover had been long burned away and the binding was crackly and exposed, though the inner pages were intact. Because of its fragile condition she kept it in a large jewelry box on her bureau.
She heard herself tell him what Sylvie had said to her, almost to the word: “Someone who is firm in his person and beliefs, who brings to the world a constant heart.”
“Are you an angel of mercy?”
“I would like to be one,” she told him, realizing that of course he assumed the inscription was meant for her. “We should all try to be.”
He nodded, then gingerly placed the book back in the jewelry box. Sometimes she could tell that he had come in and inspected the book, tiny bits of charred paper left on the bureau top, and though she would have preferred his not handling it, and then taking such an interest in its harrowing, difficult content, she grew to see the activity as a strange kind of intimacy between them, a way to let him peek into her life and past without her having to tell him a thing. Then one day, when he was older, in sixth grade, he came into the kitchen with the book and asked whose it really was-he’d realized the illogic of the English inscription, when her parents had been Korean-and she told him it was a gift from a friend. A woman who had helped her when she was a girl but who died after the war.
“What was her name?”
She told him and though it could mean nothing to him the name seemed to spark his imagination as might a character in a story. “What happened to her?”
“There was an accident.”
“What kind of accident?”
“A fire.”
He didn’t say anything to this. Nicholas, always very mindful of her emotions, did not push her on it. They sat in silence for a moment, and then he said, “Is that where you met my father?”
“Where?”
“Solferino.”
She shook her head. “I’ve not been there.”
“Do you know what’s there now?”
“I imagine there’s a small town. I know there’s a church.”
“I bet it’s a special one,” Nicholas said. “You think it’s like in the book we have on the Vatican? Full of fancy stuff, like gold statues and paintings?”
“You mean great treasure and riches? Maybe so.”
“We should go someday,” he said excitedly. “Don’t you think?”
“Yes, we should,” she answered, even if she had always imagined visiting the place by herself.
“Could this be mine?” he asked her hopefully, holding the book.
“I don’t know if I can give it up just yet,” she replied. “Even to you.” But the expression on his face dampened and she quickly offered: “But how about I write something to you in it. How’s that?”
“Okay.”
He quickly ran and retrieved a pen for her and opened the book to the page with the inscription. She was composing her thoughts on what to write when the phone rang; on the other end was a wholesale dealer whose call she had been awaiting. Nicholas waited patiently but when she hung up she had to leave right away to get downtown, to inspect an estate lot and make a compelling bid before any others got there. Nicholas stayed home. When she returned a few hours later (having purchased most all of the estate) he had fallen asleep in front of the television, a half-eaten salami sandwich he had fixed for himself on his lap, and she gently roused and walked him to his bed.