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watch. He claimed that the moment for returning it won’t quite right, North-South mails still unsafe. Fact is, hehated giving it up. Only souvenirs he owned were that and his sword and scabbard, his dead buddy’s bugle, and a twig cut from one pondside tree where the bad thing happened.
    Marsden was both a civilian child and a military grownup. He’d been hardened on each count by what he’d lost. He had only outlived his much-loved Ned by three war years. During that time, Willie’d seen so much, he’d had to hurt so many, the poor fellow got to thinking Ned had been his son!
    That’s how far in advance of your legal age a war can toss you.
    And, oh dear, young William More Marsden remembered everything. Later I understood: a good memory is about one-third cure and two-thirds curse. My own memory, this very one I’m using, is my best handy example. You drop a child into the middle of a battle, he can’t guess at the bigger reasons leading here—like maybe Northern factories vs. Southern farms.
    A child just sees the results. I mean
sees
them.
    Every passing minié, it’d stuck. That boy’s brain was a savings account with waste in it: times of day, smoke, the whole map, horses lost, names of all his dead. True facts had snagged and abscessed, their sharp ends in. His poor young head was a pincushion calendar.
    If they made my husband walk through one of these new aeroport X-ray machines checking for weaponry? why, just his memory would set it off.

Weird for 1860
    Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law. I am a stranger in the earth …
    — PSALM 119:18–19
    H
OME in Falls—three weeks after the waterhole shooting—Ned’s mother was still mailing her boy long letters. Mostly gossip about nesting habits of her thirty-odd Harz Mountain canaries.
    Telegraph lines were being cut then mended around Richmond. Headquarters favored military dispatches over condolence notes to thousands of civilian mommas. If your boy is dead, finding out a month late is really a type of favor, right? Such runs gents’ logic anyway. I’ll say more later about gents’ logic, where it parts ways with mine. Shortages in Falls meant folks had already tried baking bread with acorn flour. “How’s it taste?” somebody asked concerning the first loaf. “Sort of like,” a taster smacked, staring into space, “… oak.”
    Local children claimed that Ned Smythe’s mother used her back-yard bird feeder to trap sparrows and thrushes. Children swore the widow then chopped up birds’ bodies, fed these to her canaries so they’d sing more larky and free. When I was coming up, kids yet said this about her. Of course, I knew it just won’t true. Still, I pictured it so clear.
    Now I don’t want to say that Winona Smythe, the songbird breeder, was a odd-type person but—fact is—even before her Ned perished in so sad a manner and prior to grief’s taking over, the lady had a knack for seeming the wee-est bit weird. People wondered how Ned—so platinum and mild—had sprung from this stubby grunch of a lady. Bound for school, Ned left a yard where wisteria did what it jolly well pleased, where saplings claimed the lawn. Ned whistled toward Lower Normal, orderly and starched, offering greetings to Falls’ citizens, milkmen included.
    When people inquired about his widowed mom, Ned’d say, “Momma’s never been better, thank you. I’ll mention your asking. Bound to please her.” Folks nodded, guessing just what Winona Smythe might sputter about the idiots and hypocrites in this backward town. She fancied herself a thinker.She’d grown up in Richmond and had never got over it. Some locals claimed she’d been a beauty when arriving here, a bride. Winona had been admired (if at all) for the tininess of her feet and the high number of books she put away. Her boy never seemed to notice the shouting matches his momma sparked in Lucas’ All-Round Store. Winona Smythe, hands on hips, would corner perfect