by Tom Hanks
David Amos Beuell
Davey left his letter hanging out of the typewriter carriage, posing the machine to face the fireplace, where Santa was sure to see it.
“You guys should arrange your presents in piles under the tree. To make things simple come morning,” Virgil said. Santa always left the wished-for presents that were his responsibility unwrapped on Christmas morning, ready for immediate play, so Virgil and Del would have time for their morning coffee. The family gifts—from Uncle Gus and Aunt Ethel, from Uncle Andrew and Aunt Marie, from Goggy and Pop, from Nana and Leo, from as far away as Urbana, Illinois, and as close as Holt’s Bend—had been collecting under the tree, wrapped in colorful paper, for days, growing with almost every stop at the village post office.
Once twin stacks of gifts labeled DAVEY and JILL had been built up, the kids put the records back in their sleeves and the albums back up on the shelf. Del asked Jill to tune the big cabinet radio to the Christmas Eve Programs, for seasonal music that was not about a deer with a red nose.
Cookies had been baked on December 23. Jill pulled them out of the Kelvinator and arranged them on a plate while Davey poured milk into a tall glass, then they carried the snacks to the coffee table, setting them beside the Remington. From then on it was a waiting game. Davey added another log to the fire as Jill reacquainted herself with her father’s lap while the radio played Christmas carols celebrating wise men and holy nights and the birth of Jesus.
Not long after, Virgil carried his sleeping daughter up to her bed, sliding her between the covers, marveling at the softness of his little girl’s closed eyes and the lips that were Del’s in perfect miniature. In the front room, Davey was on the sofa, leaning close against his mother as she played her fingers in his hair. “She swallowed it hook, line, and sinker,” he said.
“You’re a good big brother,” Del told him.
“Ah, heck. Anyone would do it.” Davey was looking into the fire. “When Jill first asked me if Santa was really real, like she was afraid to ask you and wanted it to be a secret between just us, I didn’t know what to say.”
“How’d you handle it, honey?”
“That’s when I came up with the plan. To have an answer for every question she had. How does he make it to every house? He goes superfast and there aren’t all that many houses anyway. What about a house with no chimney? He can use the oven or the furnace.”
“Touching the milk to make it cold,” Del whispered to her son as she brushed hair off the soft skin of his forehead. “So smart. So quick.”
“That was cinchy. He’s a magic man.”
“You’ll have to do the same for Connie soon.”
“Of course. It’s my job now.”
Virgil came back downstairs to Daddy’s Chair as a carol, in Latin, was crooning out of the mouth of Bing Crosby.
“Dad, how does radio work?” Davey wanted to know.
—
At quarter past ten, Davey went off to bed, announcing this might have been the best Christmas Eve ever.
“Should I put on some coffee?” Delores asked.
“You’d better,” Virgil said, following her into the kitchen, where he stopped her from reaching for the coffee can, wrapped his arms around her, and kissed her. She kissed back, both of them feeling that such a kiss was one of the reasons they were still married. The kiss lasted longer than either of them expected, then they smiled at each other. Del prepared the coffee as Virgil stood next to her at the stove.
“Next year, let’s try to get to the Midnight Mass,” Delores said. “We are raising godless kids.”
“Just Davey.” Virgil chuckled. Davey had been born seven months after their wedding day.
“The Midnight Mass is so beautiful.”
“Three kids up all hours on Christmas Eve? The drive all the way to St. Mary’s? If we’d tried that tonight with the snow?”
“The McElhenys manage.”
“Ruth McElheny is as nutty as a can of Planters. Ed doesn’t dare cross her.”
“Still. The candles. The music. So pretty.” Del knew that in years to come they’d make the drive to Midnight Mass. Not because he didn’t dare cross her but because he loved to give her what she wanted. But for this Yuletide, there was just his hand over hers in the quiet, warm kitchen of the snowbound house as they sat with their coffee.
Virgil put his overshoes back on and pulled on his heavy coat, cracking open the front door just wide enough for him to slip through. Nearly three inches of snow had collected. Hatless, he went to the Plymouth’s trunk to retrieve Santa’s bounty. Not wanting to risk a fall on the frozen walk, Virgil made two trips carrying small loads. Closing the trunk, he paused a moment to ponder the final hour of Christmas Eve 1953. A cold night, yes, but Virgil had been colder.
Stepping carefully, he felt the pull of a ghost pain where his lower left leg used to be. He took the five steps to the front door one at a time.
Del laid out the nurse’s kit by Jill’s stack of treasures. Honey Walker, the walking doll “just like a real little girl,” needed batteries. Santa had batteries. Before too long Davey would find his Space Rocket Launch Base, with towers and soldiers and spring launchers that, once Virgil assembled the components, actually flung spaceships into the void. Connie would delight in a new play blanket and a set of blocks direct from the North Pole. When all was laid out and Honey Walker had taken a test stroll, Virgil and Del sat close together on the sofa and kissed some more.
After they’d sat, arms entwined, quiet and still for a while, Del eyed the fire, then rose up. “I’m done in,” she confessed. “Try to answer on the first ring, honey. And give him my love.”
“I will.” Virgil checked his watch. It was almost 11:30. Seven minutes after midnight, the shrill peal of the phone broke the silent night. As instructed, Virgil picked up before the first ring gave way to the second.
“Merry Christmas,” he said.
An operator was on the line. “This is a long-distance call for Virginia Beuell from Amos Boling.”
“Speaking. Thank you, Operator.” As always, the operator had gotten the name wrong.
“Sir, your party is on the line,” the operator said, clicking off.
“Thanks, honey,” said the caller. “Merry Christmas, Virgin.”
Virgil smiled at his nickname. Because of Amos Boling, the whole outfit had come to call him Virgin. “Where the heck are you, Bud?”
“San Diego. I was over across the border yesterday.”
“You don’t say.”
“Lemme tell you something about Mexico, Virgin. The place is loaded with cantinas and cathouses. Nice and hot, too. How deep is the snow up there in Dogpatch?”
“Seen worse. But I’m sitting by a nice fire, so no complaints.”
“Delores still burdened with you?”
“Gives her love.”
“You are one lucky son of a bitch and that gal could have done better.”
“I know that but haven’t told her.”
Both men chuckled. Amos “Bud” Boling forever joked that when Delores Gomez was taken off the market by Virgil “the Virgin” Beuell, there was no longer any point in getting married. There had been a time, more than thirteen years before, when someone else in the outfit might have come along to snag Delores. Ernie, Clyde, or Bob Clay, or either of the two Johnny Boys would have all taken a run at her had Virgil not met her first. A dance at the Red Cross Center was so chockablock with soldiers, sailors, and airmen that Virgil needed some air and a few moments away from the crowd. He stepped outside for a smoke and found himself lighting a cigarette for a brown-eyed girl named Delores Gomez. By the end of the next morning she and Virgil had danced, laughed, had griddle cakes with lots of coffee, and kissed. Two lives changed forever.
—
In the years since, Bud had not married and Virgil knew he never would. Not landing Delores had nothing to do with it. Virgil had, years before, figured Bud was one of those men, like his father’s youngest brother, Uncle Russell.
Virgil had been around his uncle rarely, the last time during the long day that was his grandmother’s funeral. Uncle Russell had driven from New York City with a friend, a man named Carl, who called Russell “Rusty.” After the service, the burial, and a reunion dinner at the house that ended with coffee and pie, Carl and Rusty drove off into the night, headed all the way back to New York City, still wearing their funeral suits. Virgil remembered his father later saying, under his breath, that “women were neither the weakness nor the passion” of his kid brother. Bud Boling had plenty of weaknesses and a few passions, but just as for Uncle Russell, none of them involved women. “So,” Virgil said. “How you been, Bud?”
“The same, the same,” Bud answered. “Came down here three months ago from a town up north near Sacramento. That’s the state capital, you know. Bought a Buick secondhand and drove it down. Nice town. Navy town. Every cabdriver will tell you he was at Pearl Harbor.”
“You working at all?”
“Not until someone makes me.”
“I know I say this every year, but here it is: I’ve got room for you at the shop. In fact, I could use you with the way things have been going.”
“Doing well, are you?”
“Bud, I’ve got so many orders I’m working six-day weeks.”
“Hell on earth.”
“I’m serious, Bud. You come work with me and you’d be set for years.”
“I’m already set for years.”
“I’ll pay you more than you’re worth.”
“I ain’t worth a flat plug nickel, Virgin. You know that.”
Virgil laughed. “Then just come by for a visit. In the summer. Hop in that Buick and we’ll go fishing.”
“You country boys always make a big deal about fishing.”
“I’d just like to see you, Bud. Del, too. Little Davey would be over the moon to meet you.”
“Maybe next year.”
“You say that every Christmas.” Virgil kept going. “Come see us, Bud. We’ll go to Midnight Mass. We’ll say prayers for all the fellows.”
“I’ve already said all the prayers for all the fellows I’m ever going to pray for.”
“Aw, come on. Next year will be ten years.”
“Ten years?” Bud let the static crackle on the long-distance line. “Ten years for who? Ten years for what?”
Virgil felt like a fool.
—
Bob Clay had been killed in Normandy on the same day that Ernie, wounded in his right thigh, had bled out. No one realized his artery had been severed because the pool of blood under Ernie never spread, but was absorbed by the damp ground. Nobody saw it. Attention was not paid as closely as it should have been since there were Germans trying to kill them from somewhere on the other side of a thick hedgerow in the French bocage. Mortar rounds coming at them from the unseen enemy kept the outfit pinned down for nearly an hour. Bud and Virgil were in two squads sent to hack through the roots and trees—impossible but for the use of grenades. They flanked the enemy position and killed all of them, but at a cost. Bud’s squad leader, Corporal Emery, was cut in two, literally, by a German machine gun. Virgil was unsuccessful giving first aid to Sergeant Castle, who took three rounds in the chest that severed his spine. Burke’s head wound was beyond aid, and a fellow named Corcoran lost an arm that was cut clean from his shoulder and he was moved back to an aid station. No one knew if he lived or not.
A week later Johnny Boy disappeared and the other Johnny Boy cracked, and one by one, others in the outfit were lost in ways soldiers are lost. For fifty-eight days, from the seventh of June to early August, the outfit was either fighting or moving toward the fighting. Bud was promoted to corporal and Virgil’s teeth began to go rotten from eating nothing but K rations.
On Day 59, the outfit rested at a camp in France—there were cots with blankets and relatively warm showers, hot food, and all the coffee a GI could stomach. Later, a big tent served as a theater where movies where played. Clyde was transferred to Intelligence because he spoke decent French. Every airplane in the sky was either the RAF or the USAAF, and the word was the Germans were on the run, that the worst of the fighting had happened and they’d all be home by Christmas. New guys came in from the replacement depots and had to be drilled and trained. Bud was tough on all of them, and Virgil didn’t want to learn any of their names.
In the middle of September the outfit was given new uniforms, rearmed, and loaded into transports for an offensive in Holland. Four of the trucks slammed into each other in the dark of night. Five soldiers were killed, three were so injured they were no good for the war anymore. The trucks were repaired and moving by daylight. Three days later the outfit was surprised by a German attack just before dawn. The command post was blown up, leading to a confused, chaotic battle that had Virgil and Bud fighting the enemy hand to hand. By chance, three tanks, British Cromwells, were close enough to roar in and overpower the German advance. Many of the new guys were killed in what was their first time in combat, and plenty happened that made no sense, no sense at all.
Virgil lost count of the days before he found himself back in France, where he and Bud slept and slept and slept. They walked around huge, ancient cathedrals and played football. Movie stars came to put on shows. There was a cathouse not far from the barracks, a place called Madame Sophia’s. While many of the officers had three-day passes in Paris, Bud and Virgil and the other enlisted men drilled and trained more replacements, even in the rain. There was a different movie every night. Then came the coldest December on record, and the Germans roared into Belgium. The outfit was loaded onto trucks, driven hell-bent into the night, and dropped off on a road somewhere between Paris and Berlin. Virgil appreciated the spirit of one driver—a colored fellow—who gave him a pack of Lucky Strikes and a wish for God to look out for him.
The outfit marched on roads and across ice-solid fields, along trails dragged out in the gathered snow, hauling ammo and supplies for themselves as well as for others who were already up ahead in the fighting, which Virgil could see in the distance like Fourth of July fireworks. They fought along with the paratroopers who had taken heavy casualties, moving forward in a show of arms meant to convince the Germans that an entire division was at the ready to take them on. The ruse worked. But lives were lost.
The outfit came under artillery fire in the Belgian woods and some guys were blown apart, vaporized. Then Virgil, Bud, and the outfit were sent marching the other way, through Bastogne proper. They passed a neatly arranged stack of dead soldiers just outside the church, burned-out, useless tanks with their treads thrown off, and a pair of cows eating hay a farmer had stocked. The farmer and the cows seemed oblivious to the Germans, who were trying to retake the port at Antwerp, and to the general hullaballoo. The cold cut them all to the bone. It was inescapable. The cold killed some men in the outfit. Sleep was so rare, some guys went nuts and had to be sent back into Bastogne. The hope was that they could gather themselves so they could return to the cold and the fighting.
—
A new kid—Something Something, Jr.—had the watch. Virgil was in the hole, under the roof of branches, on top of the pine needles that lined the floor, wrapped in a single GI blanket. Sleep was a joke. He had a few Charms fruit candies left in a roll, so popped two into his mouth. One remained, so he rose up from the frozen-ground floor of the hole and palmed the final square of hard candy into the hand of the new kid.
“Merry fucking Christmas,” Virgil whispered.
“Thanks, Virgin.”
“Junior, call me Virgin again and I’ll crack you one.”
“Isn’t your name Virgin?”
“Not to fucking new guys.”
The hole was at the far left of these woods, two trees in from the edge of the rise, overlooking, in daylight, a Belgian farmer’s barren field and, just beyond it, a collection of houses built along a narrow road leading northeast. At night, there was only the void. Somewhere down there were supposed to be the German soldiers. The rest of the outfi
t was in holes and shelters of their own, spaced off to the right. This was the main line of defense, theoretically. In reality, the idea of an MLD was as laughable as that of a cozy nap. The line was so thin there was no listening post forward of the trees. There was little heavy armor in the rear. The big guns had only a few shells left. There was no kitchen and thus no hot food for miles.
This hole was the seventh Virgil had chipped out of the frozen ground and covered with tree limbs since they had walked through Bastogne. Virgil didn’t want to dig any more of them. Moving to another position meant shouldering weapons and gear, carrying it who knew how far or for how long, digging another hole, and building another shelter, working up the sweat that, in the subzero winter, caused a man’s uniform to freeze to his back. Frostbite had taken more men off the line than wounds from enemy fire. Some of the freezing guys had been able to get out before the encirclement. Those that hadn’t had already lost toes and fingers, some even their feet and hands.
Virgil didn’t want to be one of those guys. He kept his one extra pair of socks tied together and draped across the back of his neck under his uniform to hang in his armpits. His body temperature, what was left of it, would dry the socks out some. He hoped he could always have that reserve of semidry socks to avoid frostbite. He also hoped Hitler was going to come walking across the field waving a white hankie to surrender personally to PFC Virgil Beuell. Right after Rita Hayworth dropped by to offer a blow job.
“I sure could use some coffee,” Junior whispered.
“Tell you what,” Virgil whispered back. “I’ll start a warm and toasty fire to percolate us up a couple of pots. I got some cake mixings, too, and we’ll make a batch for the whole squad and shut the fuck up, you fucking fucker.”
