The Reverend Maurice Kidder used to wake at five to write sermons in his dark study where the beagle slept; that early hour seemed to give him the clarity to compose his lectures, which he delivered in an unaffected but commanding baritone voice each Sunday at his All Saints’ Church in western Massachusetts. By the time I knew him my grandfather had been giving sermons for more than thirty years. He was a tall, powerfully genial man with blue eyes, a colonial-looking head of wavy white hair, and a long, squared jaw. I knew a few things about him: that he drove faster than my parents did, in a white Rambler with blue vinyl seats; that he liked Heath bars and believed in God; that he ate leftover ham fat with a spoon in the kitchen at holidays; that he sang very beautifully in church or while washing his hands. He had played football in high school, where they called him Tiny to be funny, and his boyhood New Hampshire town had a name out of the Iliad, Laconia.

I did not know very much about his war.

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