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staggered into our house for a place to sleep. I knew it was just a matter of time until he slipped into that deep, deep sleep that no amount of shaking or even a house fire would wake him from. I would take my gun, my books, and leave him forever.
    Then, without any explanation of why he changed his mind and without any pretense that by talking about this war he could somehow excuse the way he lived, he told me one last story. He used his aged, ruined voice like an old man’s palsied hands to pick the lock on his past, and tugged me inside.

2
A killing, and a man who tried to walk on water
    T he dead waved from the ditches in Korea. The arms of the soldiers reached out from bodies half in, half out of the frozen mud, as if begging for help even after their hearts had cooled and the ice had glazed their eyes. They had been shot to rags by machine guns and frozen by a subzero wind, leaving olive-drab statues in the killing, numbing cold in the mountains in the north. The young Marine from Alabama trudged past them as he fought the North Koreans and Red Chinese at places with great strategic military importance for a second or two in time. Of all the tales he told that day, more than twenty years ago, the image of dead men reaching to him from the roadside still won’t lie still in my head.
    The dead have the decency to lie flat in Calhoun County. In my father’s time they still laid them out in the parlors and in their own bedrooms, with pennies on their eyes. The women and the very old would take turns sitting up with the dead, because to leave them alone would be disrespectful, and because the very oldest ones still believed that the soul lingered until the final benediction, until the first handful of dirt, and Satan might fly in through a window and snatch it away if someone didn’t watch close. Even the littlest children would be led in to stare, to hide their face in the skirts of their momma or the pants leg of their daddy, while the young men stood sentry most of the night on the front porch, smoking, sipping black coffee. It was all about respect, about ceremony, as if by making the dying of a woman or man an event, a happening, it somehow made up for the fact that there was so goddamn little nicety in living. That, for my daddy, was what was wrong with Korea. He just glanced at the dead, and left them where they lay.
    Like most other Southern boys who grew up far from the Big House, the ones who fought and died and fought and lived in every armed conflict since Cemetery Ridge, his world had been narrow, and the only way to see the rest of it was to enlist. His father worked for dusty, stifling decades in the cotton mill. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with his life, but anything that would keep him out of the mills was fine with him. He happened to come of age in one of those eras when America was in the market for rough-as-a-cob country boys who could shoot bumblebees off dandelions with a BB gun. They could knock gray squirrels out of the tops of trees with a .22 rifle, and could bring down quail and even doves on the fly with no. 9 birdshot. It would be like hitting a bear in the ass with a bucket of sand, to shoot a man.
    Boot camp had been like a party for him, or at least what he figured a party was like. The Marines, balanced against the harsh world of home, dripped with life, with experiences. He got plenty to eat and unlimited milk to drink. He got weekends off to chase women. He would drink beer with his newfound friends until they were tighter than Dick’s hatband and even the fat girls started to look good. They would fight anyone who looked at them funny until the MPs came, then they’d fight them. He got a pure silver cigarette lighter, a gold-plated ink pen and a five-dollar camera, so that he could take all his experiences back to Alabama after they vanquished the communist horde and defended democracy, or whatever it was they were supposed to do.
    He rode in a plane, the first in his