The Wedding Gift

Ross propped himself up on his elbow and looked down at the sixteen-year-old girl laying on the blanket next to him.

“What do you say, Nita? Marry me?”

The proposal wasn’t how he had imagined it but Pearl Harbor had just been bombed and he had plans to go to the county courthouse and enlist. He was nineteen, had a good job driving heavy farming trucks and was saving up to build a home on a little plot of land where he and Nita could raise their babies. A salary from the Army would help solidify that dream.

Nita giggled. “Don’t you need a ring to propose?”

Ross reached into his pocket and took out a simple gold band with a tiny sapphire in a square setting. The ring wasn’t impressive, but Nita didn’t notice. She inhaled sharply and bobbed her head up and down. “Yes!”

Ross slipped it on to her slim, cool finger and tentatively gave her a peck on the lips. She closed her eyes, reached up and encircled his neck with her arm, pulling him down on top of him. He kissed her again. The feeling of bliss abruptly ended when he felt himself roughly grabbed and pulled off Nita.

Ross could vaguely hear Nita screaming at her brothers who were busy giving Ross a though pummeling, leaving him dazed and confused. He saw one of her brothers rip the ring off her finger and toss it in the direction of the creek bed. They left him lying there, broken and bleeding in the grass with the hot smell of lavender surrounding him.

After what felt like hours, Ross picked himself up and searched for the ring. When he found it he pocketed it and hobbled home. The next day he went to the courthouse and enlisted in the Army.

“When I come home a decorated soldier,” he thought, “Nita’s brothers and father will realize I am a man.”

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Nita’s brothers were rough on her but it was nothing compared to the switching her daddy gave her when they brought her home and told what she had done. She was locked in her room the day Ross left on the bus to head to Kansas City where he would hop the train that would take him to basic training. She cried bitter tears and immediately started writing letters to him, tearing clean pages from the back of her mama’s little black book where she had journaled before her death.

Every day for weeks, Nita would write to Ross, filling the paper with her tiny, neat handwriting. She would seal the letter in an envelope and walk it down to the post office, giving it to Mr. Jamison along with a couple pennies for postage. Every day she enquired if a letter had come to her and every day she walked home dejected, no letter or word from Ross.

Weeks turned into months and months turned into a year and then two. Nita faithfully wrote to Ross at least once a week, making the trek to Mr. Jamison’s store and coming home empty handed. Two years and fourteen days after Ross left there was a knock at the front door. Nita had been working in the kitchen when she heard it. Wiping her hands on her apron, she moved into the foyer and her heart almost stopped when she saw a man in a uniform standing on the front porch. For a moment, she thought Ross had come home to her.

“Venita Cunningham?” The young soldier looked very uncomfortable and squirmed a little in his uniform.

“Yes?”

“I regret to inform you. . . . . “ She heard nothing after that. Blindly she took the piece of paper that was offered and blindly she walked back into the kitchen, holding the impersonal note that stated, matter of fact, the government’s regret and condolences for Ross Binder’s death.

Nita threw herself into mourning as she did everything else, with gusto and completely. After six months she wiped the tears from her face for the last time and reentered the world. Her daddy had money and even though Nita wasn’t particularly beautiful, money made people attractive and she had no shortage of suitors.

Time passed along and two years after Ross’s death, Nita was attending her own engagement party, sitting at a little table set up in the meadow under the tree that Ross had proposed to her on the blanket, so long ago. The man she was going to marry was the soldier who brought her news of Ross’s death, sent home from the Pacific due to a shoulder injury. She wasn’t head over heels in love with Alan, but her daddy said he was a good man and that she could be happy.

First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes babies in the baby carriage. To all outside appearances, Nita and Alan’s marriage was a good one and he doted on his wife. Sure, he hit her occasionally but she probably deserved it, according to her daddy at least. Nita gave him a daughter and then, to his delight, a son that he adored. When she got pregnant a third time he was less than thrilled because things at the business wasn’t going as well as they had been, and babies are expensive. Her daddy’s business was slowly going under and Alan worked for her daddy so there was a lot of stress involved these days. Nita learned how to make a meal last for two nights and how to cover up her black eyes and bruises with homemade concealer instead of the expensive store-bought brand she used at the beginning of her marriage.

The newest baby was only three months old when she got the phone call that her daddy wanted to see her. He had been battling stomach ulcers for years and had recently been told it was cancer, eating him up from the inside. After he got that diagnosis he gave up fighting and got sicker and sicker. Alan was at the office for twelve hours a day, working with her brothers to save the business, while her daddy was slowly dying in an empty house, the land sold off in increments years ago.

With baby Jon on her hip and the two other children in tow, Nita let herself in the front door of the house and made her way to the top of the stairs into her daddy’s room. The curtains had been drawn and the July temperatures made the room stifling. She put the baby down on the quilt she spread out on the floor and went over to the window, throwing open the curtains and lifting the sash, allowing some breeze to flow in. Her daddy grunted and she walked over to him, sitting on the side of the bed and stroking his hair like she did for her children.

“I’m here, daddy. It’s Nita.”

His rheumy eyes opened and looked at her. He turned his head and took a sip of the water she offered and tried to speak. Nothing came out on his first attempt so he coughed and tried again.

“Nita. I did something bad. I’m a bad person.” He became agitated and started coughing again.

“Oh, Daddy.” Nita stroked his hair. “You’re not a bad person.”

He shook his head violently. “Nita. I’m a bad person.” He coughed again. “Look in my closet. In the trunk.”

Nita gave him a look and went to the closet. In the back was a medium sized wooden box with a lid, hinges rusted. She grabbed a handle and pulled it out.

“Nita. I’m sorry. I lied. I made Alan lie.”

Nita looked at her father then at the baby, contently cooing on his back and turned her attention back to the trunk. Tucking her dress under her knees she knelt in front of the box and opened it. It was filled to the brim with letters, unopened, and a package the size of a small shoe box.

Puzzled, she looked over at her father again. He wouldn’t meet her eyes. Hesitantly she dipped into the box and pulled out an envelope. She saw her own handwriting.

All her letters to Ross were in the box, unsent. Mr. Jamison must have set them aside and given them back to her father. Intermixed were letters from Ross, a few opened but most unopened, postmarked first in the United States and then from various places in Europe. The package was postmarked in France.

Settling back on her heels, she started opening the letters at the bottom of the pile. Ross was at basic training and had received his orders to Europe. He was going into a medical unit.

More and more she read. He was driving an ambulance. The pain and suffering he witnessed was overwhelming. He was tired of being shot at. He missed her and wondered why she wasn’t writing.

Tears were running down her face as she continued to read, the noises of her playing children fading in the background.

Ross was wounded in the Battle of Metz and while convalescing had received a letter from her father with news of her engagement. He wrote that he was sad but he understood and promised not to stand in her way. That was the last letter he had sent.

Nita wiped her face and reached for the package. Using her nail she pried at the old tape, ripping her nail off at the base but loosening a corner. She grabbed it and ripped open the side of the box and turned it on its side, dumping out the contents. She gasped. Ten neatly bound packets of one-hundred-dollar bills and a ring, a simple gold band with a tiny sapphire in a square setting, fell into her lap. Ignoring the money, she put the ring on her finger and unfolded the paper.

Dear Nita,

I have heard of your upcoming wedding and am sending $20,000 as a wedding gift. I sincerely hope you are happy and that Alan treats you with the love and respect you deserve. I will always love you and I hope you will never want for anything.

I couldn’t stand the idea of coming home and not being able to be with you. I decided to stay in France. I have built up a good business for myself buying and selling jewelry and gems. I enjoy it and I am good at it. I have a nice home and a little jewelry shop on Champs Elysées. I think you would like it if you saw it.

I am returning your ring to you. It is the one piece of jewelry I can’t bear to sell. I am sorry it isn’t more impressive.

Be happy, Nita. I respect that you have moved on and I will not contact you again.

Always yours,

Ross.