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hear the marching bands. That music was worse than the waiting and the silence in the jailhouse, waiting to see what they gave me. Wondering. Praying.
    Every man in that corridor that Tuesday morning was quiet, because the deputies watching us demanded as much. We waited our turns, lined up along the windows. It was the first decent light I had seen in three days, so I stole a face full of whatever I could see. Down on the courthouse steps, a growing line of soldiers stood with their wives-to-be. More of them gathered on the narrow lawn, all ready for their turns before some other judge. It had become regular business downtown, the courthouse weddings. A marriage license was free for a man in uniform.Because so many came, a clerk would draw names from a hat, and a little bit of whooping would come after she read each one. They all brought flowers, and petals covered the courthouse grass the same as the leaves did. Newlyweds left in cars with ration cans tied to the bumpers, and that tapping on Ripley Street cobblestones carried farther than the voices.
    Bunting covered every bit of courtroom wood and railing, upstairs and down. The judge had his picture on the wall, and his chest was poked out and swollen. Every lawyer in the courthouse had come home with a medal on him, it seemed. The colors that lined every street between Paris and home were meant to make us all feel victorious. I had carried that bit of pride, too, before they dressed me in jailhouse colors. They had taken my uniform from me before they snapped my picture, turned me sideways and snapped again. They lied to the world and acted like I had never fought, but Lord knows I had. And in those moments when I did my cold and heavy remembering, I was again in that place.
    I had made it up Utah Beach with the Battery D boys of the 333rd. After Brittany I spent that last winter of the war in Bastogne. I saw Europe from a truck with our gun towed behind. We’d named ours Joe Louis, and ifsomebody asked why, we’d say, “Because he was quick to put a German on his ass.” I had eleven men in my crew, and we could get all six tons turned, loaded, and fired in five minutes flat. It was a dance we learned in Camp Gruber, Oklahoma, like that two-stepping the black folks did out west. We fought our way through France and into the Ardennes Forest, and in the winter of 1944, we took our place in that line of American guns, eighty-five miles’ worth.
    Big-gun fighting was a different kind of war. From that far away, I heard the battle before I saw it. The boom of howitzers had become a sweet sound to me. Our guns talked back to Hitler, getting the last word in when we put our shells on a man’s head. It was a certain kind of screaming, outgoing fire, that told us that our lines were still holding.
    But by December, so close to Christmas to have me thinking about home, the Germans had made it through the lines. “The Bulge” was what they called it. The Nazis had gathered a quarter million men in the woods. Coming at us that fast, the big guns couldn’t do much. Batteries A, B, and D were ordered to retreat and make a new line ten miles back. The four guns of Battery C stayed behind to cover us. When they followed, we planned to do the same and cover them. Each rumble of their guns was good news that told us they were still fighting. The quiet told us they’d been overrun.
    People talk about peace and quiet like they’re kindred. The Ardennes Forest was the quietest place I’d ever known, and quiet was where the SS waited for us. Quiet was where those boys from Battery C ended up. I learned that quiet was not really quiet at all. It’s the sound of friends tortured and dying too far away for anybody to hear. I prayed for them the same thing I’d prayed for myself. I hoped to die quickly and that whatever cut through me came like lightning without enough time for me to shake my head.
    But I knew better when we saw the bodies of