Underneath the bag was a stack of yearbooks going from the fifties into the sixties, and I cracked open the first one.Ronald Duganwas written in large, childish handwriting just inside the cover.
“Dugan,” I said out loud. “I wonder if this kid was related to...”
I glanced over at Sunny to see that she was looking down at the cape in her hands like she’d just found a ghost inside. Wordlessly, she tilted her hands so that I could see the tag sewn into the neck, with a name written in faded ink.
James Dugan
Our miraculous mailman.
We stared at each other in shock.
“Do you think this could bethecabin? From the story?” Sunny finally asked, turning her wide eyes back to the cape. “I know we shouldn’t be snooping, but...”
I was already lifting out the yearbooks to see what was underneath. Baby blankets. Baby clothes. An old wedding veil. And then neatly piled pictures—starting with thin, colorfulrectangles from the 1990s all the way back to thick, square pictures only in black and white.
One was a wedding picture, although the woman wasn’t wearing a traditional white wedding dress, but a tea-length blue thing with an overlay of white lace flowers. The neckline was a little daring for the time, I imagined, as were the short sleeves. Her blond hair was coiffed in gleaming perfection, and her slender neck was wrapped in pearls. Equally stylish for a town this small, her husband stood next to her in a dashing suit, his grin crooked and his jaw alluringly square. I could make out a thin chain around his neck with a ring hanging from it. The last two fingers of his right hand were curled into themselves.
I flipped it over to read the writing on the back.
Bernice and James Dugan, wedding day, 1945.
And then, added in newer but still old ink underneath:
James is wearing Ronald’s wedding ring.
“Certified hotties,” said Sunny when I showed her the picture. “Do you think they named their son Ronald after the soldier Ronald?”
“I do,” I said, and then shifted more pictures in the trunk to get at the last thing in the bottom. It was a shallow wooden box with a tarnished brass key sticking out of its lock. I pulled it out of the trunk and set it on the floor, and then Sunny set the cape aside to open it.
The first thing we saw was a newspaper clipping from Christmas 1945.
Townsfolk Remember Last Year’s Christmas Miracle; Lobby for Town Name Change
Local residents gathered at a town hall meeting yesterday to discuss the novel idea for changing the name of Piney Notch to Christmas Notch. Those in favor—a strong majority—recalled the fatal blizzard of last year and how the arrival of the town mail truck with all its letters and presents had provided a beacon of hope in a grim and cheerless time. Postman James Dugan, the letter carrier who’d been stranded with the truck, told those assembled about his ordeal in the blizzard and how he had sheltered at a nearby cabin until the day after Christmas. He confirmed that he hadn’t been the one to drive the truck into the town square, and that it had been helplessly snowbound when he’d abandoned it to seek help. No one at the meeting has claimed responsibility for moving the mail or has heard anyone else claim so either, further bolstering the rumor of a so-called Christmas miracle. Although when asked about the popular rumor that Mr. Dugan had been rescued by an angel last Christmas, Mr. Dugan declined to answer. Residents opposed to renaming the town Christmas Notch cite the expense of changing the city limits signs and the delay in Shell Oil and Rand McNally updating their road maps.
“Valid concerns,” I said after I finished reading.
Sunny smoothed the creases in the clipping. “It’s wild to see the miracle grow from two lines in the article we found in the library’s archives to a whole movement to change the town’s name.”
But stories were like that, weren’t they, going from irregular grains of truth to polished and luminescent pearls? They grew and they became prettier and you could string them against other large and pretty gems until you had something everyone could see and understand. Doris had told us as much at Lucky Duck Acres. It was so much easier to think of angels rather thandeath, so much easier to imagine magic than the very human miracle of three people being in love.
But maybe there was a kind of goodness in both, a beauty in both the reality and the story. The rough strangeness of our histories and also the ways we grew those gritty truths into fairy tales inside the tender flesh of our hearts.
“Sunny...” I started, but she was deep into the box now, flipping through old papers that had been folded so many times that they seemed in danger of falling apart.
“I think these are Ronald’s letters to them from the war,” she said reverently. “Oh... and love letters from before he was drafted. So many of them.”
There were so many of them, stacks and stacks, handwritten and typewritten, an equal mix of Bernice’s short, irreverent missives; James’s long, sensitive observations; and abject filth from Ronald.
The filth tapered off once Ronald was writing as a soldier—the occasional black rectangle was a stark reminder that these letters were all being read and censored—but it was easy to see where he got around his restrictions.
I think often of our favorite spot by the road when I’m alone, particularly of the views I had inside the car.
I miss you and our dear friend so much it hurts, and I can give myself no relief here, I just have to endure it.
One of the letters had a picture of Ronald folded inside, standing next to an old church, arms around some other soldiers, an infectiously wide smile on his face. It must have been summer, because his uniform was open, showing a sweat-glistened chest and a ring on a chain hanging from his neck. The same chain and ring James had been wearing in his wedding photo after the war.
“I think this is his last letter,” Sunny said quietly, looking down at the paper in her hands. “It’s dated December 1944.”
