“What do you want?” I ask him.
“You know it,” the voices say. “Every day we tell you. Justice. Satisfaction. Vengeance.”
“What do you want?” I ask again, and this time I poke him in the chest.
“You know!”
“Tell me!”
“You said it would be different, but everything is the same. You were supposed to become your better self, and where is he now? Pay us our blood price. Bring him back!”
“Him? My son?”
“Fool! Your self!”
“I just want my son back,” I say. “Just give me back my son.” I push him again, harder, so he falls back against the headboard we’ve padded with blankets, and the voices laugh.
“Prove to us that you deserve him. Prove to us that you will be different.” They laugh and laugh and laugh at me. I grab Carl by the front of his pajamas and haul him out of bed, and drag him with me, still laughing, downstairs to the kitchen, and I hold him dangling next to me while I look around frantically at the butcher knives, the oven, the microwave, the vacuum cleaner, trying to think. . what can I do that will be enough, a final proof, enough to get him back forever. I take him through the door and down the steps, around to the back of the house.
It’s a little rainy but warm. Low clouds reflect the streetlights back at us and the whole yard is bathed in a soft orange light. I push Carl down too roughly against the neat wall of wood my father has made, enough for two long winters. I kneel down beside him and take up my father’s ax. Carl has stopped laughing and smiling. His gaze is fixed on me.
“Coward,” he says. “Fool. Promise-breaker.” But the voices are speaking very softly. I put my hand down against the top of the stack of wood, looking at the bruises and the burns, and it occurs to me that I have always kept one hand whole and untouched, and that the vast majority of my body is unbruised and untouched by Carl’s ordeal.
I switch the ax to my injured hand. It’s not easy, not, like one might hope, a matter of a single stroke. I don’t know how many it is — three or four, I think, but it feels like I am chopping away in an eternity of effort at something much more durable than flesh and bone. I only look at my wrist for the first stroke; afterward I find my mark without looking at it. I am staring at Carl, at the thing that is in him, asking them both with every stroke, “Is it enough?” And I think I mean is it enough to prove to them I love my son, or that I deserve to have him back, that I mean it when I say I promise to take better care of him, that I promise to be a better father, to unroot whatever fault in me threw him into the company of these angry souls who died to make us all citizens of the world, and that I’ll be better to them, too, and never step out of the shadow of the day they died, if that’s what it means now to be good. “You fuckers!” I shout. “Is it enough?”
Carl’s face changes: he looks proud, then curious, then he seems to be gorging on the blood and anger and pain in the air. His face gets ruddy and full and more and more pleased, and then all of a sudden it is entirely blank, and then he is wearing an opposite face. His grinning mouth contracts to an O of sorrow and distress, and he waves his arms around so it looks like he is falling through the air, like he is falling back into himself. He gives a start in his whole body and his face is changed so fundamentally I feel sure there can’t be anything foreign left in him. I am listening so hard to him cry, trying to hear a trace of the other, that I forget to breathe and forget to cry myself, and I would not be surprised if I forgot to bleed. Then I fall over next to him, my wrist jammed against my side, and I can’t get the words out to tell him what time it is, or to answer when my father comes out with a flashlight to curse me to hell and ask me what I’ve done.
A HERO OF CHICKAMAUGA
There is not much to do, when you are dying, but lie on your side and watch the progress of the battle. I have taken an early hit on the first day at Chickamauga. It’s an inglorious end, one for which my father and my brothers would never settle. They are still loading, shooting, advancing toward a field where Rebels sprout like contrary weeds. “Shoot one for me, Captain!” I shouted to my father as I fell. He did not look away from his aim, but said, not without some tenderness, “I’ll shoot you a brace of ’em, my boy.”
The way I have landed there are long blades of grass tickling my lips. When I nibble on them, they have a green and sour taste. All around me, expiring actors are crying out for their mamas, for God to spare them. “O God O God O God,” says a voice from ahead of me. I wish they would shut up. I always thought if I died for real, I would die quietly, because pending oblivion would surely snatch away my voice. Sometimes the thought of death makes me silent even as I pass through an ordinary living day. The wind shifts and carries a burning whiff of naphthalene to my nose — some reenactor has been storing his uniform in mothballs. “Ain’t I too young to go? Ain’t I too young? Who will look after my Frieda?” The boys cry out for their Friedas, their Birgits, their sweet little Maueschens. We are supposed to be an all-German regiment.
“Hey, dead man,” says a voice just behind me, after the cries of the wounded have quieted to moans. Someone’s fallen there: I can feel a foot resting against my thigh. “You got a view? What’s happening?” He sounds like a little boy.
“Much shooting,” I say. He kicks me square in the ass.
“Farb!” I say accusingly. I want to clutch my ass, but the dead don’t rub their hurts.
“It’s a contraction of the thigh muscles,” he says. “Authentic. It went on. I got documentation. Some boys flailed like puppets as they went. So tell me what’s happening, or I’ll do it again.”
“Son of a bitch!” I say, because I’m not accustomed to being kicked by boys from my own side. “Shit-house adjutant!” He kicks me again, hard, and I tell him what’s happening. The Ninth (that’s us) is making steady progress across the field. The Fifty-fifth Ohio is with them, but where the rest of the brigade has got to, I have no idea. There’s Colonel Kammerling bouncing stoutly across the field on his Appaloosa. He is the sort of brave or foolish colonel who carries his own messages into battle. Goddamn he’s been hit! Just as he pulled up beside the captain some dirty Reb has plucked him off.
That last bit is untrue. The colonel is entirely well. Little Billy Kicking Boots can see this when he sits up with a curse. “Farb!” he says. “Kammerling didn’t die at Chickamauga!” I can already tell he’s the sort of stickler for historical accuracy that can be the bane of improvisation, if not fun. I turn my head to look at him, trying to be ready when he kicks me again, and see that he is not a boy after all, but a boyish-looking girl. She has tried hard to make herself mannish, but her face is pretty and gives her away. I think immediately of Joan of Arc, who was surely cursed with all sorts of medieval defects, smelliness and hairiness and bad teeth. The other dead and wounded are calling for her to lie down, and she does.
“I’ll fix you,” she tells me, but doesn’t kick me again. She has positioned herself so she can see the battle; I am positioned so I can see only her face. A good sport, she calls out soft updates to me. I don’t need them. Chickamauga was dinner-table talk at my house when I was growing up. My father would shape peas and carrots into infantry lines to illustrate the battle. “So here,” he’d say, taking away a piece of carrot and eating it, “you can see how Rosecrans left a gaping hole in his line, and Longstreet was not the sort of fellow to ignore such an opportunity.” And Rebel peas went rolling through the gap. A lifetime of dinners like that puts history in your head. I know Chickamauga backward and forward, and since these reenactors pride themselves on absolute fidelity, I know just what will happen on this first day of battle. I have died repulsing Cleburne’s near-duck attack on the Union left. It was not a spectacular battle, not a Pickett’s Charge or a Thomas’s Stand, though we are in fact going to do Snodgrass Hill tomorrow. That will be the big blowout of the whole weekend.