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York.
    He remembered the endless drill, the lonely hours standing guard, long miles of marching, his feet bleeding in his shoes. He still knew how it felt when fear nearly overcame his will, and it took everything just to stay in line with the rest of the regiment, amazed that the fools weren’t running. He had been ashamed of those times, still was, and he didn’t like to recall them, never spoke about them either, not even to Sam. They had been eighteen, he and Sam, full of fight and itching to whip the rebs. He chuckled silently to himself. How young and stupid they had been.
    Bob was singing in his surprisingly good tenor:

    The years creep slowly by, Lorena
The snow is on the grass again;

The sun’s low down the sky, Lorena
The frost gleams where the flowers have been
But the heart throbs on as warmly now
As when the summer days were nigh;
Oh! The sun can never dip so low;
A-down affections cloudless sky
A-down affections cloudless sky.

    Tom sipped his beer and felt tossed about by his memories. An image came into his head of himself as a poplar tree, his leaves blown by the wind of Bob’s old songs. The leaves were his memories, and as the songs swept through the leaves those memories sometimes turned and showed a different side. They were part of him, those leaves, and they made him what he was. It was strange sometimes the things that stirred them, but the songs always did. Always.

    It matters little now, Lorena,
The past is in the eternal past,
Our heads will soon lie low, Lorena,
Life’s tide is ebbing out so fast.
There is a future! O, thank God!
Of life this is so small a part!
‘Tis dust to dust beneath the sod!
But up there, up there, ’tis heart to heart.
But up there, up there, ’tis heart to heart.

    Tom looked up from his beer and stared at his reflection in the dusty, cut-glass mirror behind the bar. He looked older than he remembered. He had been a young man when he had sung “Lorena” around the Company D campfire at night. His face was thinner then. So was Sam’s. His mustache had been a little scraggly, not like the luxurious specimen he sported now. And there was a look in his eye then that he had not seen in the mirror for a long time. It was the look that said he saw the world in blacks and whites, a look of fire and optimism. He had been so certain then when the war was new. The world had yet to color his vision in shades of gray. Though Tom still saw where the blacks and whites were, a lot of grays had crept in over the years. In some ways he missed that naive vision of the world. It was comforting to see things so clearly. But the real world wasn’t like that. That young man was gone and those days were gone, and that was all there was to it.
    With a small start, Tom noticed that Sam was staring into the same dusty beveled-glass mirror, its dark mahogany frame surrounding them both in its
carved embrace. Sam looked at him in silence. Tom knew that Sam was stirred by the old song too. Their silence bound them. Shared memories blew through Paddy’s bar on invisible winds. Tom realized with a sudden self-consciousness that Sam was watching a tear roll down his face as it shone dully in his silvered reflection. Too quickly, he raised his beer in its sweating glass and held it to his cheek with a small sigh. It was a warm day, after all. Sam looked away.
    Joe Hamm washed glasses behind the bar and served up beer or sometimes whiskey or gin to those who had the taste and the money for it. He and Bob had given Tom everything they knew about Terrence Bucklin, which wasn’t much. Bucklin came in from time to time, actually more often in the last year. He didn’t drink too much or start fights like some of the other bridge workers. He had been seen mainly in the company of about six to eight other men, most of whom Hamm didn’t know except by sight. There were a couple though that were known to him: Rolf Mentzer, a rough but