When she left, Charles trailing after her, I sat clutching the haversack, rocking to calm myself. By and by, this succeeded and I was able to pull the letter from its envelope. It read:
Dear Private Russell S. Boyt, Please be sure to give this to Charles when you deem him old enough to make good use of it. Love, C. Muldon.
Love, she wrote. It did not occur to me then that she must have written these notes after leaving me in the henhouse and before I did what I did to her. I reckoned her still alive because that is what I surely wanted. But even still, in that sliver of time, she had written “love,” and it was this word I now fixated upon. I had elicited this articulation. A person loved me. I would hold onto this for some time. A shiver danced through me – I had finally achieved the lov
