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the eleven men who died at Wereth. The townspeople said a family had hidden them in their barn, but a neighbor had told the SS. The eleven soldiers, not a gun among them, did what they were taught and gave themselves up for surrender. The Nazis marched them toward a field, and that was the last the people in Wereth saw of them.
    When the spring came and the snow thawed, we saw the ugly show the Germans had made of the killing. The folk said it had just looked like another mound in the snow. A drift, or a gun position covered over by the winter. When we heard about the bodies, we drove as fast as we could. An army chaplain looked for tags so he would know what name to call the men when he prayed. When I saw the bodies, I couldn’t even close my eyes to pray on them,because I searched their faces, trying to recognize one friend from the other.
    The Germans had taken their time, bayoneting them and cutting off fingers. Those spared the knife were beaten. Maybe the marks had come from rifle butts or boots, but whatever the weapon was, they’d struck them over and over. My mind filled up with that sickest kind of wondering, thinking about who had to be the first to feel it coming down. I wondered who was the last and had to see the rest die before he did.
    I had been around my kin out in the country, and I had seen enough hog killing to know the propriety of such things. The particular way that we got quiet when the knife went in, because hog or not, it was still blood.
    Two of the dead, George Davis and William Pritchett, came from Alabama. George talked about Montgomery like it was a country boy’s metropolis. I told them they ought to visit when we got home. George said, “If I go back.” At first I thought he was talking about dying, but he was talking about the opposite, living like a man who could go where he pleased. He thought about Detroit, New York maybe.
    â€œCan’t say for sure,” he told me. “At least not yet, but somewhere.”
    Standing in that field, I tried so hard to remember theirvoices, but all I could hear was that wartime quiet, how the world sounded to a dead man’s ears. My mind always went back to the worst of it. Victory had not been enough, and neither had the time that passed. They were resting beneath the crosses in the Henri Cemetery, but I still saw them in that mud.
    So when I saw that man jump onto the Empire Theater’s stage, heard the weight of his pipe on that hardwood, and then saw him swing for Nat Cole’s skull, I thought of other friends ambushed by men who’d been hiding and waiting. The dead quiet that came over that room when Nat Cole stopped the music was enough to stop my heart. And then came the ruckus and the screaming and me right in the middle of it. All I did was stand between a friend and his trouble.
    My lawyer wore an Air Medal on his chest and one of those Tuscaloosa bow ties worn by the courthouse crowd. Johnson was his name, and he called me Sergeant Weary. He looked at a man in the back of the room. Johnson had a look on his young face like he himself was scared of getting put on that prison jitney with me.
    â€œAttorney general’s here, and, well—” he told me in a grave sort of whispering. “Seems like they want to make a show of it. They gave the other man three years.”
    I figured I might get thirty days’ labor, but if the white boy got three years, then, Lord. When the months in my mind turned to years, the chain between my feet got twice as narrow, because balancing was all that I could manage. I put my knuckles on the corner of that table and tried to breathe and swallow. No wind wanted to come into me, and that jailhouse breakfast was about ready to come back up.
    â€œHow many they got in mind for me?”
    â€œLike I said. Seems like they want to—”
    He was being so careful with the bad news, which made it all the worse.
    â€œThe state’s attorney,” he said,