HE HAD TAKEN THE STEERING wheel off of the green Oliver tractor but for no other reason than to do it and to give the impression that he was working even if he had been making the same tinkering noise for twenty years. The tractor had started once during their first year on the farm, and John had driven it for a mere ten feet before the engine killed and stayed dead.

“Cracked manifold” was the diagnosis from the local snuff-chewing farm mechanic, and then he named his price for fixing it. Of course John would not pay it then just as he would not pay for it now. His older son had put it in plainer terms not long before he left for Vietnam.

“The engine’s fucked!” his son had called out from a window in the upper level of the barn. “And has been for twenty years! Besides,” his son sneered, his cigarette ash drifting to the grass below, “you wouldn’t know how to drive it anyway. Who do you think you’re foolin’?”

John Lucas stared up with hatred at his son but made no move to go after him. Nothing John did made the kid obey him, and when Jimmy got older, it became dangerous even to try. But as a young boy Jimmy was immune to his father’s punishment. It didn’t matter how many times he told the boy he was stupid or hit him with a belt, the kid just laughed. If Jimmy hadn’t been conceived so early in their marriage, John Lucas would not have considered Jimmy his because there was nothing of the Lucases in his looks except his height. He was dark like his French-Irish mother. Jimmy had her black hair and deep brown eyes, and he could tan up in the summer as brown as an Indian. John grimaced, thinking of their neighbor Ernie Morriseau.

He could hear his wife singing as she hung clothes on the line. He threw the wrench against the wheel and then settled himself down next to the hub to rest. Earlier that day he had purchased a bottle of Wild Turkey bourbon. A treat, he told himself, for working so hard at the mill lately. He drank straight from the bottle. Claire’s voice drifted over the top of the barn, and he shifted uncomfortably against the wheel. He had awakened that morning in a strange mood, an almost oily feeling that made his limbs feel disconnected. He slithered out of bed, and he noticed that his brain felt the same way. It slid inside his skull like kneaded but well-greased bread dough. His head grew heavier as the day went on, as though his brain were expanding. Things he had not remembered for years bubbled up, warm and yeasty. Until his wife began singing something familiar that punctured the bubbles.

John was in love then, proud of his lovely and well-educated wife.

“Shut up, Pa.”

Basil Lucas blinked several times in astonishment, his broad fatback face turning red as though slapped into a hot frying pan.

“Don’t think,” he slurred, repeating what he had grown fond of saying to his tall son, “that I can’t reach up and pull you down, big-shot soldier. Height’s nothin.’ ”

“Here,” John said, grabbing a stein from a passing waiter and pushing his corpulent father down into a nearby chair, “drink another beer and sit tight for a while.”

Basil Lucas downed half his stein and stared after his son dancing with his new wife. “Height’s nothin’!” he roared, and they danced farther away from him, ignoring him. “You gotta have muscle too,” Basil muttered to himself.

God, he had a sudden terrible pain in his head. He put his head between his knees to relieve some of the pressure. He sniffed again, and he thought he smelled blood, and then, oh, God, that was another memory he thought he had buried.

The truth was it never left him. The sight and smell of those blood-soaked bed sheets or how the smell of blood mingled with the odor that was always in their Milwaukee neighborhood, living as they did four blocks away from the Schlitz brewery. That dank primeval smell of blood mixed with the odor of fermenting hops and yeast. Because it was too late to transport her to the hospital, the doctor did what he could in their home. But his mother died in childbirth anyway, the baby girl dying with her as well. He and his sister, Edna, sat on the parlor sofa and listened to the frenzied sounds of footsteps and watched as two neighborhood women ran back and forth from the kitchen to his parents’ bedroom. Then it became quiet except for the low, moaning sobs of the women.

His mother’s labor had come on with sudden force while she was preparing breakfast for eight-year-old John and his younger sister. His mother hadn’t been feeling well for the last month of her pregnancy, but nothing prepared him for her collapse next to the stove and the sight of all that pinkish fluid that flushed out from beneath her skirts followed by a river of blood. He ran to their next-door neighbor, the Krugs, and Gertrude Krug called for Dr. Horowitz before running over to the Lucas house. She sent John to the brewery to get his father, but Basil Lucas sent his son home, saying there was nothing to worry about as women had babies all the time and he was needed more at work than he was at home.

His father remained speechless for a few minutes upon his arrival home hours later. John thought it was grief, the way his father bent over and moaned, smacking his hands against his thighs. But then he started shouting.

He had no wife! How the hell was he supposed to work and raise two kids? “What was wrong with her? What was wrong with you? Why the hell didn’t you do something!” he yelled at the doctor. “She didn’t have any trouble before! They slid out like butter!” How the hell could she do this to him?

Dr. Horowitz stared at Basil Lucas. He was wet with sweat, and the front of his shirt was soaked with blood. If he had not been a medical doctor, John knew Basil Lucas would never have let him in their home because he was Jewish.

“You thickheaded ass!” Horowitz shouted back. “She had high blood pressure! She’s always had high blood pressure, and your son and daughter did not slide out like butter! Your wife had a massive stroke! The placenta detached too soon, and the baby died before it could breathe.”

Horowitz wiped his forehead against his shirtsleeve.

“Mr. Lucas! Mrs. Krug says your wife hadn’t been feeling well for a while. It was not your wife’s fault! Why didn’t you bring her in to see me? She never regained consciousness, the poor woman.”

“Damn it all!” John and his sister heard their father say as Gertrude Krug was pushing them out the door toward her own home. “It was that goddamn baby! A girl! What a waste!”

Gertrude Krug fed John and his sister pork roast with heavy gravy and onions, poured over boiled potatoes. Henry Krug, over his wife’s protest, put two large glasses of lager in front of John and his sister and told them to drink it. His sister refused, hating the taste of beer, but John drank it and was grateful for the numbness it brought him. Henry Krug filled the glass up a second time and a third time until the boy was nearly incoherent. Then they were put to bed, John with the Krug boys and Edna with the Krug girls. He dimly recollected hearing the conversation between Henry and Gertrude Krug float up from the kitchen, as the boys’ bedroom was directly above the kitchen.

“The cheap bastard. He wouldn’t pay for Amelia to go to the doctor.” To which her husband responded, “Enough, Gertie. The man has just lost his wife.”

“Well!” Gertrude Krug cried. “He might not have lost her now, would he, if he’d have dished out some money? You yell about the Jews being cheap? They take better care of their women!”

Rather than mourn his wife, Basil Lucas bore a grudge toward her until he died. It never occurred to John to be angry with his father. In his family’s particular German culture, obedience to a father and a husband was absolute and remained the highest value, above love and respect. His mother had disobeyed her husband by dying. Without his wife, Basil Lucas seemed to forget about things his children needed, such as new socks and decent shoes and boots. He and his sister did without or quietly accepted the clothing neighbors gave them. Their humiliation deepened when their neighbors’ children recognized their own cast-off clothing on the Lucas children and teased them relentlessly. John and his sister stayed miserably silent. His father would not tolerate complaining. In this way he was just like the other working-class German fathers in their neighborhood.

Whenever his father beat him, John cried with anger at his mother. He silently agreed with his father. His mother should have been stronger. His father labored fourteen hours, sometimes eighteen hours a day. The other German women in the neighborhood were as tough as horses, and many of them had more than five children. Why not his mother? It was Basil Lucas’s excuse whenever he thought his children were faltering.

“You’re weak!’ he would yell. “Like your mother! I’m doing this,” he often added, hitting his children with the belt and the belt buckle, “to toughen you up. You won’t make it in this world if you cry all the time!”

In his child’s mind, John concluded that his mother wanted to leave them, and without realizing it, he nursed this thought his entire life. When later asked about his mother, he would feign to have no recollection of her and would simply say she died.

Gertrude Krug and two other neighborhood women took turns cooking the family meals and cleaning the house, having Edna work alongside them so that when his sister turned ten, she became responsible for the housekeeping. Their father continued to work at the Schlitz brewery despite his loud opinions and garrulous nature. Basil Lucas was the physical epitome of the beer-drinking, working-class German man: big-chested, thick-waisted, and ham-fisted with graying blond hair and watery blue eyes. Unlike a baker who spends his days so drenched with the smell of sugar and spices and cream fillings that he cannot eat his own creations, Basil Lucas drank his company’s product with pride and as frequently as if it had been water. He puffed on nothing less than Cuban cigars. It was not uncommon for his father to come home from the brewery with a bucket of beer, its sides smeared with butter to keep the foam down. He drank the entire bucket with his heavy meals of pork, sausage, or beef and fried cabbage or potatoes. His skin reflected the basics of his diet, and his red face had the corrugated consistency of a tire tread. He might have retained his pride in being a German had it not been for the backlash and prejudice during the First World War. Basil Lucas bristled anytime his loyalty to America was called into question. He could not have proved his loyalty, as he was just a hair too young to fight in the First World War, but oh, what he would have given to have the chance. He was a fighter. There was no one that could stand up to Basil Lucas’s fist, and he carried out his job as a foreman at the Schlitz brewery just by the threat of that fist.

While Edna maintained their house, John Lucas got a job at the brewery during high school by the force of his father’s will. Basil Lucas did not want anyone to think he favored his own kid, so he worked his son to exhaustion, running errands, filling in for a sick worker in any one of the sections of the brewery. If he made a mistake, his father’s punishment was immediate. Once he hit his son so hard in the head that it nearly shattered his eardrum. John hated working at the brewery. It was the local priest’s intervention that allowed John Lucas to participate in the school sport he loved the most, football. For three nights of the week he trained with his high school football team.

John Lucas did not want to enlist. He wanted to serve the war effort by working as a merchant marine on the Great Lakes, but his old man was adamant. Basil Lucas made it clear during their Christmas dinner of 1944.

“I’m gonna go with you tomorrow. You’re gonna sign up,” he said, gazing at his son across the dinner table with hard-boiled eyes and pointing to him with a mustard-covered butter knife. “We are Americans, and it is your duty to serve your country. You can fight the Germans because you are an American first.”

John Lucas thought about his father’s handshake before he boarded the train for basic training. That stubby-fingered paw that threatened to crush the bones in his son’s hand.

“Make sure they send you to Europe,” his father said gruffly. And then he walked away from the train platform.

John Lucas almost didn’t pass basic training when it became apparent that anything beyond fistfighting was hopeless. He was so cockeyed in shooting a rifle that they had his vision tested several times, and they discovered, after his initial physical, that the hearing in his left ear was impaired. But an opportunity arose and he tried out for and was accepted into the Army football team. He rationalized that his playing football for the Army was a contribution as well, to lift morale. He never wrote home, fearful of his father’s response to a letter postmarked in the United States. He also dreaded the day of his release from military service because he had no stories or medals, only a letter praising him for his skills as a quarterback and one of the tallest quarterbacks ever at that. He did mingle with some of the returning veterans, working part-time at a VA hospital, and escorted them on various outings. Disabled or not, they all found a way to hit the local bars and taverns, and John went with them, quietly listening to their stories of hand-to-hand combat, the types of bombs, the snipers, the various landscapes they had been in and the various strategies of fighting. They weren’t all enlisted men. One man who frequently joined them was an Army officer, and John often felt the man’s dark eyes rest on him while they played cards. The officer usually didn’t say much, but John knew that he had fought in Europe and that his wounds were less physical and more mental. Shell shock.

“I thought you were a doctor or an orderly,” the officer commented one evening, “until they told me that you were a football star. At least in the Army. How did you manage that?”

“I applied several times to be sent overseas, and they wouldn’t send me,” John lied. “Do you think,” he added, his temper rising, “that I should’ve gotten my own rowboat and gone over?”

“No, I guess not. Pretty peachy, though, that you got to play football. I guess,” the officer drawled out, “you can get injured that way. Too bad, huh? Big German fellow like you. We could have used you on the front lines.”

“I said I wanted to be there. It’s not my fuckin’ fault I didn’t go.”

John got up from the table and threw some bills down. Striking an officer when he was so close to being discharged would be stupid, but his temper often got the best of him, and so he decided it was safer to leave. John could see the contempt on the man’s face.

“It’s none of your fuckin’ business anyway,” he said, and, dramatically clicking his heels together, saluted the officer just as contemptuously.

Two days before John was to go home, they all went out for another evening of cards and beers. The Army officer remained quiet during the entire evening and finally slumped over in his chair. He’d been drinking bourbon while the rest of them had stuck to beer.

“Jesus Christ,” said the sergeant they called Limb Limkowski because he was missing his entire left arm, “he’s gonna take a leak soon, and it’s gonna be over our fuckin’ shoes.”

“I’ll take him to the biff. I have to get back to the base anyway.

John hoisted the officer up and managed to get him to half stumble, half walk, leaning heavily on John’s shoulder, as they made the trip through the dark and narrow hallway behind the bar to the men’s room. John kicked open the stall door, yanked down the man’s pants and underwear, and pushed him down on the toilet. The officer’s upper torso leaned sideways like a branch heavy with fruit until one stubbled cheek was resting against a stall wall. John listened as the urine hit the side of the toilet, and he briefly considered pulling the bastard off the seat and shoving his head into the toilet bowl. He noted that the officer was not circumcised and that his previous assumption that the man was Italian was probably not right. He was dark-skinned in a funny way. It was hard to deduce from the name. Captain Waterston.

The guy was taking a long time to piss.

Fuck ’im, John thought.

He opened the stall door and looked around. Nobody else was in the bathroom, which was unusual, given the amount of drinking going on in the bar.

He shut the stall door again. He grabbed the officer’s head by his hair and rammed it into the stall wall at least three times until John was sure the officer was unconscious. He held his breath and stood still to listen for any other noise. Then he unpinned the man’s Purple Heart and Bronze Star from his uniform and shoved them into his own pants pocket. He slipped from the bathroom, left the bar from the nearby back door, and ran down the alley.

Before John was discharged two days later, it was with only a minimum amount of questions about the incident from his CO.

“He was drunk but okay when I left him in the bathroom.”

“You left him? Was he conscious?”

“Yeah. He told me to beat it because he could go to the pisser by himself. So I left him and went out of the back door of the bar,” John lied, “because I was on my way out anyway.”

When he disembarked from the train, his father was waiting. Basil Lucas stared in wonder at the medals pinned on his son’s chest. Then he did something he had never done before in John’s memory. He embraced his son.

“No letters? Ach! You were probably too busy fighting.”

“Yeah, it got pretty rough out there. But boy, can I tell you some stories.” And John proceeded to tell his father the stories he had heard, embroidering them so that his father’s face flushed with more and more pride every time.

Then John met Claire at a VFW dance and told his father he wanted to go to college on the GI Bill.

“You think you’re a Uihlein? Or a Pabst or Miller? That fancy fiancée of yours has filled your head with corncob dreams. A workingman doesn’t need an education beyond reading, writing, and arithmetic. If I was your age again, I’d go north. The land is cheap there, and the only reason some of those poor SOBs ended up back here in Milwaukee is that they didn’t work hard enough or weren’t smart enough. Uncle Sam still giving GIs house loans?”

John nodded.

“Then get that loan and go north. When you own your own land, you are your own boss. And you have more freedom. The secret is to make the land work for you! Then you can go hunting and fishing all you want. You’ll be a happy man then. You will have,” his father said, slapping him heartily on the back, “Gemütlichkeit! Unless,” his father added shrewdly, “you want to stay here and work at the brewery.”

He was grateful that his father died five years after they had left Milwaukee and had never come up to visit them. Just picturing his shriveled white-haired father in the hospital made the tears start up in his eyes.

His old man never understood. None of them understood. He was a good man, but the world had always been against him. What had been hard for some was harder for him. He worked, didn’t he? He raised a family and didn’t run out on them, did he? Yet they weren’t grateful at all. People in Olina looked at him as though he were eight years old again and wearing hand-me-down clothing. Shit, his son was dead, but Jimmy was talked about like a hero. Why the hell was that?

John had been secretly relieved when Jimmy had asked for his help in signing the enlistment papers because Jimmy was underage at the time. Thank God, he remembered thinking, signing the papers in the Cedar Bend recruitment office, the kid is finally going to do something besides listen to records. He was grateful that Jimmy was leaving. The kid had been nothing but trouble and was too smart for his own good. Just like his mother. Well, smart-ass, he thought smugly as the bus drove away from the Olina Standard station, welcome to the real world. Life won’t be so easy anymore. You’re gonna get what’s comin’ to you. They’ll dress that fathead of yours down. That’s what happens when you disobey your father, when you point a gun at your father, when you humiliate your own father.

On the way home from seeing Jimmy off, John whistled a tuneless song and, glancing back at his younger son lying across the backseat, began to make some plans. Now that Jimmy was gone, John was going to make sure his younger son didn’t grow up as cocky as his older brother. John wasn’t sure how he was going to do it, but Bill was not going to point a rifle at him. That pipsqueak in the back of the car was going to grow up knowing the normal order of things. Father first. Then son.

But he was angry now. She had the nerve to sing while he worked. He started to rise, bracing his free hand against the tractor tire.

His wife had once told him that he went about it all wrong and that he didn’t understand where they lived. The fury he felt at her criticism came out swinging until he had knocked her down. They hardly talked anymore, but he was going to talk to her now in a way he felt she best understood. She deserved to be hit just for the audacity she had in singing while he was out there trying to fix the damn tractor and for the way she looked at him sometimes. His older son had that same look, and now his younger son too stared at him as his brother once did. On the rare occasion when he ran into Ernie Morriseau, he saw the same look. Through their eyes came Captain Waterston’s cold stare.

“Liar,” it said.

“What?” he asked, because he could have sworn he heard it spoken aloud.

Then his chest seized up, and he was falling down, the bottle slipping from his hand so that he could grab his chest.

THERE WAS NO INDICATION IN his mother’s voice about why he had to come home in the middle of his shift as a mechanic at the Standard station. Bill had just gotten the job after school let out that May and was still thrilled, although not outwardly so. He was seventeen and had a natural knack for fixing engines. It was the perfect job for him. It allowed him to work and not have to talk to people. That was the owner’s job. Wally Wykowski explained to the car owners what needed fixing on their vehicles, how much it was going to cost, and when the cars would be ready. Wally praised him every other day, slapping him on the back. Bill swelled under the rare light of being told he was good at something. Now it was July 5, and his mother had called the station in the middle of the afternoon.

“Come home.”

“Now?” he asked irritably. “My shift isn’t over. What’s so important that I have to come home now?”

“Come home,” she repeated. “Now.”

He bristled after hanging up the phone. His mother could be maddeningly taciturn. Yet Bill was just as reserved as his mother, just as reluctant to give words away or any hint to what he was feeling, keeping his voice flat like his mother’s when she spoke the language of everyday needs and wants. He had seen his mother unhappy, seen and heard her sob uncontrollably, and experienced her voice raised in anger. But it was mostly her choice of words that conveyed what action she wished him to take. Now meant “right away.”

So Bill drove the six miles home in the battered ’67 dull blue Ford Falcon that he had purchased for a hundred dollars and arrived in time to see the Olina ambulance unobtrusively depart from the Lucas’s long driveway. He pulled his car onto the shoulder to let the ambulance pass and waited until it was well on its way down the gravel road toward town before he turned into the driveway. His mother, dressed in her slippers and her blue polka-dot housedress, stood near the back porch of the house. Standing on one side of her was their neighbor Ernie Morriseau. Standing on the other side of her was the very fat Alfred Meyer, the sheriff who doubled as the coroner and was a parody of a small-town sheriff. Someone who didn’t have to chase, and couldn’t have chased, crooks. He was merely a waddling presence, wearing a uniform to signify law and order. He called upon the state troopers for any chasing that needed to be done.

About forty feet behind them and apparently unnoticed by everyone except Bill sat the Morriseaus’ dog, Angel. When Bill parked his car alongside Ernie’s truck, the dog silently loped into the tall grass next to the barn.

“I’ll be all right,” Bill heard his mother say to the two men as he got out of the car. “Bill’s home now.”

“Are you sure?” Al Meyer asked.

“I’m sure. We’ll be all right.”

“Billy,” Ernie Morriseau said, lightly clasping Bill’s upper arm, “call us anytime if you or your mother need help.”

It was only after the two men had left, their vehicles spewing pillows of dust as they drove away from the Lucas farmhouse, that Bill’s mother spoke to him.

“Your father is dead. Ernie found him. He came over to talk to your father. I told him I didn’t know where he was. But I said to check behind the barn. And sure enough,” his mother said, shrugging her shoulders, “that’s where he was. Heart attack, they think. Maybe a stroke too,” she added as though Bill had asked.

She stood next to Bill with a tired but composed face. Bill had already known it was his father when he saw the ambulance lumber out of the driveway. What was inevitable had finally happened. Bill was unable to react because he had no emotions to react with except one. He glanced at his mother with curiosity.

“Well, Mom,” he asked hesitantly, digging the heel of his boot into the ground, “do you want me to do something?”

“You don’t have to do anything,” she answered matter-of-factly. “Neither do I. It’s already been done.”

“These are the highlands I was telling you about—a lot bigger than our ridge, huh? They’re pretty, though,” James had written in his heavy block-style print. “It’s too bad they’re in Vietnam. I’ll tell you more about them when I come home. Love, James.”

The picture helped Bill remember the movie star sensuousness of his brother’s full lips and the flint-colored eyes, so like their mother’s. But he could no longer recall his brother’s voice.

He lay on his bed for a couple of hours but could not sleep. Leaning over the side, he reached under the bed and pulled out a six-pack of beer that he had filched from his father’s stash in the barn a month ago. Bill drank all six cans. Instead of causing the dreamy stupor that he had hoped for, the beer hooked him, creating for Bill an illusion of clear thinking.

The last American troops were pulled out in 1973. President Ford had announced last year that the war in Vietnam was finished. Their father was now dead. There was nothing to keep his brother away from home.

His brother was back, Bill drunkenly reasoned, because he felt him. But Bill never sensed him near the house. James would not come near the house because it was stained with their father’s presence, even after death. Away from the house, though, Bill had a hunch that he was being watched and even touched. He could smell something, too. On a clear morning in the woods or on a hot and dry summer’s day his face would become cold and moist as though mist had fallen. Or fishing off the bridge at the river, he would smell smoke and, walking up and down both sides of the river for a ways, could not find the source of it.

He would go looking for his brother tonight. But where would James be? He might be down at the Chippewa River, among the big birches bordering the water there. Bill ruminated on several favorite spots along the river and then reconsidered. It was too far away from the farm. James wouldn’t go there. Bill picked up the Polaroid picture and looked at it again. There was only one place his brother could be.

He put the picture back into the shoebox and thrust the box into the dresser drawer. One by one, he quietly placed the empty beer cans back underneath the bed. Then he padded out of the bedroom and down the stairs, stopping for a few seconds to listen for any sounds that might indicate that his mother was awake. Donning his blue sweatshirt and green rubber boots, he slipped through the barely opened screen door and walked just outside the perimeter of the yard light. Once his eyes adjusted to the dark, Bill broke into a dogtrot and headed toward the hump of land that rose out of the middle of the swamp on the edge of their farm.

“Hello, Claire. Is John around?”

That sonorous and silky voice. I pulled the clothespins out of my mouth.

“Behind the barn.”

I watched him walk to the barn. Put one clothespin back in my mouth and bit down, chewed on it a little. Rubbed my sweaty hands down the front of my housedress. I looked terrible, my short black hair uncombed and dirty. The cheap rubber sandals on my feet. I looked down at my bare legs. For some absurd reason, I had shaved them that morning, sitting on the edge of the tub. I was happy that at least my legs were smooth, even if the smoothness showed all my purple and blue spider veins.

It was the way Ernie emerged from behind the barn alone. How he stopped and looked back for a few seconds before turning around to look at me. He kept his eyes steadily on me as he approached, as if to make sure that I would stay put. When he stopped, he reached forward and clasped one of my hands. He didn’t waste words.

“John’s dead. I think he suffered a heart attack. He’s back there,” Ernie said, nodding toward the barn, “lying against one of the tractor wheels.”

It had been a few hours since I’d seen him. I rarely went behind the barn when I knew my husband was back there. He’d been using the tractor as an excuse for years to sit back there and drink. Even if he had fixed the tractor, what would he have done with it? Why would I go back there? Why go looking for a fight?

I shrugged. “Should I call Sheriff Meyer?”

“I think so.”

It was my turn to move, to turn around and walk into the house and call Al Meyer. I didn’t want to move. I didn’t want Ernie to let go of my hand.

“Do you want me to call him?” he asked.

He was considerate in the way he pulled his hand away slowly so that it didn’t feel insulting. My mouth felt dry and tasted of wood. I tried to think of something to say just so I could look at him.

When we first moved up to Olina and were still reasonably social, we drove over to the Morriseau farm and introduced ourselves. We did not go into the house for a cup of coffee although they repeatedly invited us to. We simply wanted to say hello so that they knew who was now living on the place next to theirs. Ernie smiled and held out his hand. I was instantly captivated. He was the dark and handsome man of dreams. There was a calmness about him that was charismatic although I was sure that he did not realize it. My mouth was dry then too, but the rest of me became wet. I felt the sweat trickling under my arms. Could taste it on my upper lip. I wanted to leave right away, so sure that my husband and Ernie could see what I could not control. Then Rosemary stepped out of the house. She was tall and lithe with long black hair and skin like a model in a Rossetti painting. I could see that my husband was taken aback, that he had not expected our neighbor’s wife- to be so beautiful. They both were extraordinarily beautiful.

How little Ernie had changed. He smelled faintly of cedar and a freshly laundered shirt. He was still brown and muscled and ruggedly handsome, made even more so by hard work. My right hand lifted, and as if to stop an impending sin, my left hand caught it and brought it down before I could do what would have been embarrassing. To run a fingertip over his lips, before pressing one of my cheeks to his face. I crossed my arms obediently against my chest.

“Will you stay here until the sheriff arrives?”

“Absolutely. You better call Bill too.”

I turned when I reached the screen door.

“Do you want something to drink?”

“A glass of water would be wonderful. Thank you, Claire.”

I would never forget his answer. “Thank you, Claire.” My newly dead husband lying against the hub of the tractor wheel never said thank you. Bill, in the way of all children who take their mothers for granted, never said it either.

As I was filling a glass with ice and water, I remembered a day during the summer when Jimmy was twelve. I had walked across our field and the adjacent Morriseau field to fetch Jimmy It was hot that day too, and I needed Jimmy to do chores. Rounding the corner of the Morriseau barn, I saw Ernie bent over the engine of his truck without a shirt on. The perspiration on his upper torso glistened like dew and collected in the hollows and curves of his muscled back and chest before trickling down. I could not say anything to announce my presence, overwhelmed by my desire to palm his broad chest with my hands. To bend my knees and catch the tributaries of sweat with my mouth before they reached the waistband of his jeans.

I took the glass outside and gave it to him. Watched him gratefully drink the entire glass before wiping his mouth dry with a clean handkerchief. That’s when I felt grief.

It certainly wasn’t taught to me by my own parents’ example. Although my mother ceased to talk about how she came to meet my father or chose to marry him while I was still very young, I surmised later that she married my French-American father in a small moment of rebellion and because of love. Who could not have fallen in love with my father, Michel Chappeau? I looked at their wedding photograph and two other photographs of my father as a young man, and I thought he could easily have beaten Rudolph Valentino in looks and charm. My father had black, curly hair and dark, long-lashed Gypsy eyes. His lips were full and sensual, and in later years he wore a mustache with the ends waxed and turned up into a handlebar. His cheekbones were high and slightly wide, and his large nose, although arched, was refined and not blunt or pugnacious like those of so many of the German men I’d seen in Milwaukee. My father joked about his looks, saying it was impossible for any French family who had been in America for at least a hundred years to avoid having some Indian blood. It gave him the kind of sultry looks attributed to Latino men. He was easygoing and loving, which didn’t seem to fit what he did for a living. He was a banker. Clearly he was in love with my Irish mother, and she with him.

She was beautiful too, with strawberry blond hair that fell to her tiny waist and dare-me blue eyes. In later years the blue of her eyes became as cold as ice, and she could silence anyone with a sharp glance. I imagined their attraction to each other. But it didn’t last.

My father wanted a large family. My mother often said she never wanted to be a broodmare, dying young from childbirth or from just being worn out. My mother wanted only two children, a boy and a girl. As if willing it, she had my brother, Andre, and then me, and that was it. No more lovemaking. My mother’s God was the feared and wrathful old man of the Old Testament. My father was Catholic too, but his New World French Catholicism was less dogmatic and filled with the light and love of the New Testament God. They would not divorce for religious and social reasons, but my father found other ways to obtain the love he cherished. He was, for the most part, discreet so as not to hurt my mother, but she knew anyway and became more enraged through the years that her husband did not follow her example of celibacy. I used to think that if they had had access to the modern birth control of today, they might have remained a loving couple. But my mother’s Catholicism was too rigid even for that, and she had a willfulness that increased with age and did not serve her well, eventually turning into hatred.

I once saw my father with another woman. A beautiful brown-haired woman who was at least a foot taller than my father. I was a freshman in high school and, having gotten my period, had left school early one day. I was sick with cramps, and one of the nuns suggested that the walk home might ease them. I had just shut the gate to the schoolyard behind me and turned to face the park across the street. It was then I saw my father sitting on one of the polished granite benches in the middle of the day, his arm around a woman’s shoulders. He was kissing her, and it was clear that they would leave the park soon to seek a more private spot. Although I was almost doubled over with cramps, I could not stop staring at them, at the intensity with which my father kissed the woman’s lips, cheeks, and neck and how she responded in kind, unbuttoning the top of her blouse so that he could reach her breasts. I saw for the first time what passion was and how it could overwhelm all inhibitions and judgment.

My father did not see me. I was not hurt for my mother’s sake but for my own. My brother, André, physically took after my mother’s side of the family. But I was my father’s daughter. I looked and was every inch a Chappeau, and my father loved me for it, calling me his petite chérie. When I began to menstruate, my mother was no longer able to hide her hatred. She saw me as she did my father’s women. He was generous with me, kissing and hugging me often and giving me beautiful dresses and small presents that my mother immediately took away. When I turned sixteen, he gave me one of the most beautiful dresses I’d ever seen.

“Stop it! She’ll get conceited! She already thinks too much of herself!” she shouted at my father. “Do you want her to end up doing nothing with her life except to become some man’s plaything?”

My father was about to leave the house when she began shouting at him. He turned around at the door and said quietly, “Is it so terrible to have some joy? Or to give joy? Am I not allowed to give my daughter what a father should give her? Claire’s too smart to end up being anyone’s plaything. But love. I would never deny her that. What happened to you, Sylvia?”

Although my father loved me, he was not stupid. When I came of age and was noticed by boys, he became strict and fiercely protective, frightening the boys who came to our door.

“Claire,” he said, two weeks before I was to graduate from high school with honors, “it shames me to say this, but most men are evil. Particularly toward women. And you are both pretty and smart. It is the rare man who can appreciate that combination in a woman. Don’t give yourself away. Think well of yourself, and choose carefully.”

He was smoking a cigar, and I noticed that my father didn’t look well. His lovely olive-colored skin was washed out. I did hear his words, but I could not forget the sight of him kissing that woman in the park. Or the rapture on her face. I wanted to be touched like that.

I made love on the sly to a young medical student when I was nineteen and in college. It was all that I dreamed of. God, it was bliss. It was like going to heaven or how I imagined going to heaven would feel. It was passionate and crazed, and I learned that my young body could bend and turn in ways I never thought possible. We made love in the wildest of places: closets, empty classrooms, in a park near campus late at night, and once in one of the medical school’s laboratories with cadavers in the refrigerated room next door. I laughed later, thinking it was a kind of anatomy class for him, and wondered how in the world I didn’t get pregnant. But he was near the end of his formal studies and went back to New York to fulfill his residency. He did not ask me to marry him, and I did not presume that I could ask him. I was supposed to wait to be asked. I was supposed to be a good girl—unassuming and sweet, just like my name.

My father died just before I met John. A burst blood vessel, the doctor said, or more accurately now, a cerebral hemorrhage. He was found slumped over his large banker’s desk with blood coming out of his nose and mouth. I imagined my father looking at accounts and concentrating on balances when that small explosion in his brain suddenly made the world go dark for him, and then nothing. I cried for so long that my mother couldn’t stand it anymore and yelled at me. Then I grieved silently. I think there were women privately crying all over Milwaukee. That was an odd comfort to me. Whatever my father’s sins may have been, seeking love was not one of them. If my mother would not mourn him, then his daughter and all his lovers would.

I was so vulnerable when I met John. He promised to renew my dreams and ambitions, and I believed him.

The funny thing is, John wanted the dream of a farm, but it didn’t want him. He never caught on to the basic idea of living a rural life: that it took patience. He expected instant success and when it didn’t happen, when the boys and I couldn’t provide it, his disappointment came crashing down on us. It enraged him, I think, that I provided all our vegetables from the garden, eggs and chickens from our coop, and that I excelled at those things. And that Jimmy, not he, provided so much fish and meat for our freezer.

I realized I hadn’t really fallen in love with John. What I had fallen in love with was a uniform, for what I thought it stood for: someone to protect me, someone with respect and honor, and someone who was brave and who respected freedom. My freedom. I stumbled for years, thinking that he had to know he was hurting me and hurting our sons. I had been taught to believe that every person has an inherent sense of remorse or a conscience. But in time I found out that one-dimensional people can often act three-dimensional when they are in pursuit of something. When they get what they want, they settle back down into their shallow personalities and do ugly and shallow things.

After that our life together began its slow descent except for the two times I gave birth. My mother refused to hear of my unhappiness just as she refused to acknowledge her own. She was as clichéd in her statements as any staunch Catholic mother of her time could be.

“You were married in the church. You took a vow,” she said venomously, clearly happy that her daughter had done even worse than she had and would suffer the same fate of going without love. “There is no going back. Just make the best of it.”

My generation of women was never told what to do if the marriage went bad. We were the new generation, the progressive generation just after World War II. Marriages were not supposed to go bad for us.

We still had some feelings toward each other when Jimmy was conceived. But I’m not sure how Bill happened. A drunken roll over the top of my body one night when I was asleep? Bill was certainly not conceived in love, although I adored both my sons from the moment they were born, considering them the only worthwhile things that ever came out of my husband. I looked at my husband after Bill was born and realized that he was no longer handsome, no longer lovable in any way.

By the time of Bill’s birth I had ceased to think about love as being related to sex. Forgotten the swelling of breath or the rapid chest pounding of desire until I saw Ernie Morriseau.

Just two weeks before John’s death I had dreamed of Ernie’s fingertips walking the bumps of my spine with the delicacy of a cabbage moth. I woke up. The room was dark, and I was alone in my bed. I cried, unable to recall what it was like to have such hands on my body. To have a sensual and welcome interruption to my sleep. Just to be touched.

Then the shame of it. Rosemary Morriseau had been nothing but kind to me. For years I wanted to stone Rosemary for her lucky twist of fate, for her movie star beauty and strength, and for what appeared to be a hardworking but charmed life. For having a husband with such a voice and such kindness. For having a man who was as handsome as she was beautiful. I often stood transfixed, staring at him until I had to look away before he became aware of it.

But crying can last only so long and then comes exhaustion. And after that a tranquillity and a thankfulness. I had slept alone ever since that August night when I heard the voice in the field and obeyed it. A long peal of laughter. Voiced hilarity that trumpeted out of the dark and terrified my husband so much that shit had poured down his legs. I found his pants the next day by the bird feeder. Who would have thought that laughter could be as effective as a gun? That it could deflect my husband’s desire to terrorize me. After that night, if John slept at home, it was on the couch in the living room. I did not have to endure his body next to me in bed any longer. His sour, oily touch. His sallow skin and fleshy, loose horse lips. He could not in fact summon the courage even to hit me after that night.

If drinking caused him to cry, then it would also relieve me of that ugly and shameful part of my history that I thought was over but that loomed in front of me like a necessary ghost. Necessary because I would repeat that history if I had to, to make my son cry. I would hit him as I did years ago when he was a little boy and didn’t deserve to be shaken like a rag doll or have his hair pulled until his small head was wrenched back, all because Bill had, maybe, spilled a glass of milk.

What child, I thought bitterly, wouldn’t spill milk, wouldn’t shit in his pants or wet the bed, wouldn’t act out in a household where threats hung in the air like wet laundry until fists pulled them down?

I crawled back into bed and pulled the sheets up despite the heat. I always cried after I hit Bill, cried when I heard his terrified sobs, cried because my little boy had done nothing wrong except exist to be a receptor of a long line of pain. And I cried too because I felt almost powerless to stop it. When Jimmy left, the truth finally locked my fists to my sides and found its way out of my mouth. I walked away, talking aloud to myself and the invisible whoever and whatever inhabited the space around me.

Bill had always been an introspective child. A different child. Unlike his brother, who could be verbally picked at and teased into a rage, Bill remained quiet and nearly impenetrable to verbal taunts. After Jimmy left, my husband tried the same humiliating tactics on our younger son. He pulled out those medals and dangled them off his fingertips when he was drunk, most often during a meal, and proceeded to tell stories I knew were lies. Bill calmly ate his food heedless and undeterred by the nearly indecipherable words of his father. When he did look at his father, it was with a momentary lift of his eyebrows and brief detached interest. Sometimes Bill looked at John with puzzlement, but most often he noticed him with an “oh there you are” attitude. Eventually my husband would give up, his lips pursed with confusion, his eyebrows wrinkled with thwarted anger. John was unable to determine whether Bill was spurning him or mocking him or simply didn’t care or was too stupid to react. Knowing my husband, I watched him wordlessly reach the conclusion that Bill was too daft to understand the concept of the medals or what they stood for. What they meant to becoming a man, to being a man. What they meant to John.

Since John paid little attention to the details of our children’s lives, he did not know that his younger son had an astonishing IQ. That Bill read books and painted pictures and could memorize whole songs just like his brother after hearing the song only once or twice. When he was quite young, he sat like a meadowlark on the fence railing by the chicken coop and sang songs he had learned from the nuns who spent time with the smaller children after church. Wistful and fluty songs. Robust and affectionate songs. I taught him the French songs I had learned in Catholic school, and I could hear his little voice from the house. “Frere Jacques, Frere Jacques, dormez-vous? Dormez-vous? Sonnez les matines, sonnez les matines, ding dong ding, ding dong ding.”

My husband did not observe or know of Bill’s loves. He did not know that Bill had learned to survive by merging with what he loved best: the sky, the birds and animals that lived on or near the fringes of our farm, and even the soil itself underneath his nails. He tirelessly took care of wounded or orphaned animals, watching for hours the menagerie of animals he kept in his bedroom until they were well enough or old enough to live on their own. The large animals that lived in our woods could not be caught or did not need Bill’s ministrations, and so he did not have the same chance to observe them. Instead I occasionally watched Bill study his father when John wasn’t aware of being stared at or ruminated over. I imagine Bill considered his father a large and incomprehensible species of being, a kind of animal gone bad that not even Bill could feel compassion for. Bill’s professorial concentration, his pale and thoughtful face constantly reminded me of something.

It came to me one evening when Bill was ten. Silently defeated by the lack of response from Bill or me, my husband had left the dinner table. He went outside to the car, to drive to Pete’s Bar, where someone was always drunk enough to listen to him. I dried the dishes and watched Bill draw in his sketchbook at the cleared table. I put a cup away in the cupboard. A porcelain cup with many cracks in the glaze. Looking at that cup caused me to turn around. Despite the smoothness of his kissable, cherubic cheeks, the pale brown of his long lashes or the fineness of his light brown hair, and the cowlick near his forehead that refused to lie flat, my son looked old. Not just old but sagacious. He paused in his sketching and looked up at me. I silently stared back at him. With the robes of an ancient Nazarene around him, my ten-year-old would look exactly like an apostle. Better yet, a prophet. A man of God.

I suppose some women would like to think of their sons as God or sons of God. I had no such ambition, nor did I want my sons crucified. Looking at Bill that night, I was afraid. I had a ten-year-old holy man on my hands. How do you raise such a son? Bill had even been born unconventionally I had not wanted to be put under, as I had for Jimmy’s birth, not knowing or seeing what they were doing down there. So I endured the labor pain, the episiotomy to accommodate his head, and the painful stitching afterward, just to see Bill emerge. One of his tiny hands was clenched around the umbilical cord as though the placenta were his blanket and he was determined to drag it with him. They pried his fingers away from the cord and cut it. And he cried.

“Well!” the attending nurse said. “He didn’t like that.”

I always thought it would be Bill who would turn out fragile enough to lose his life. As did other people, I mistook his quietness, his observation of the world for fragility and helplessness. He had vulnerability. That was true. But of such a quality as to make people step away from him, not toward him. As though he possessed an understanding of them that they didn’t want seen. I knew that look. I saw myself reflected in my son’s eyes all the time.

But Bill lost the magic somewhere in the spurt of adolescence and simply became old. He encased himself so that it became increasingly difficult for me to talk to him, to sense his thoughts. He didn’t laugh anymore. He reminded me of those chicks in the incubator that, for reasons of uneven temperature and humidity, were conceived into shells too hard for them to break through. I often found them too late, the tip of the egg tooth on the beak peeking through a small hole in the shell. “Died While Pipping” was one of the categories under “Problems in Incubating” in my chicken handbook. On occasion I triumphed, delicately peeling away the shell from a still-alive chick so that it could stretch out and fluff up into activity and into life.

Bill was all I had left. I could not fight the cultural demons, tangible and intangible, that had killed my older son. But I could fight that which I had inadvertently taught to Bill: to deny the truth in order to endure the small horrors of our daily lives. I was sure that if I had summoned the courage to leave my husband years ago, there would never have been such a string of events in our lives. My older son would never have enlisted. My husband, left alone to his self-destructive ways, might have died sooner, thereby freeing up the farm for us. Bill would have been a happy, normal teenager and not a boy so deaf to the reality of life that he was at that moment wandering in the dark woods sleepless and drunk.

I turned on my side and stared at the window again. It all was a matter of timing. I wasn’t exactly sure how I was going to do it. To peel around the small opening of the egg tooth too soon might hurt the chick inside. But I would risk it because I knew. Better to live with some hurt than die silently in a shell.

ERNIE WAS UNCOMFORTABLE around Claire although he was careful not to show it. He had the sense that she saw some extraordinary goodness in him that he did not believe existed. True, he was far from being like her husband, but men like John Lucas were the extreme. John Lucas made other men squirm. Men who tried to be good, who lived every day with those intentions. Ernie felt that way too, but he was unable to name it until he cautiously walked to the back of the Lucas barn. He saw the green Oliver tractor with its missing steering wheel and the open toolbox tipped against one wheel.

“John?”

When there was no answer, Ernie ran his hand across the ridges of the big tire facing him. He did a half turn and looked down at the power takeoff, noted how greasy and dirty it was. Then he tapped the top of the other big tire before doing another half turn. His foot stopped in midair, and he sucked in his breath. John Lucas was slumped against the wheel hub with his mouth hung open as if to yell and his eyes staring out into his own field. Ernie didn’t need to touch him to know he was dead. He could smell him. That sour bowel of a chronic boozer.

“Yup, he’s dead,” Alfred Meyer commented matter-of-factly after he had arrived and ambled out to the barn with Ernie.

“Natural causes?”

Meyer snorted.

“Are you joking? Smell him. Yeah, I would say natural causes with a little help. Probably a heart attack. He’s lucky he died this way” Meyer added, spitting out a stream of tobacco juice. “He’s borrowed money from anybody and everybody, but they were always too afraid to ask for it back. I always thought he’d end up dead from a fight in Pete’s Bar.”

“He’s always been like that. Troubled, I guess.”

“I suppose. I noticed Claire doesn’t seem too heartbroken. Can’t say as I blame her. I never did like him.”

“That makes two of us.”

Ernie stepped around John until he stood in front of the dead man. He stared down at him. He could not understand John Lucas’s seeming ingratitude at having two sons, nor did he ever understand the fate that bestowed children on a man who didn’t want them. It was, Ernie reflected, as though John had lived in his own world, his own time zone, his own age. It was then that Ernie understood what it was about John Lucas that bothered him and that bothered other men, who, in brief conversations when John Lucas’s name was mentioned, could not find the words to describe the man. John Lucas had stopped time in his head so that he was a cemented twelve-year-old. He was a reminder of secret deeds done in boyhood and even in early manhood. Ugly acts of bullying or cruelty. Men felt that old violence anytime they happened to glance at John Lucas. That tall and mean drunk was a persistent pinch, a twang in their heads that reminded them that they had possibly not outgrown those mean displays of machismo. That one day they would embarrass themselves or hurt their families because it would bubble up unexpectedly. An old hormonal response they were incapable of controlling. Claire Lucas bothered them too. The scarves and sunglasses that hid her bruised face and the wariness she displayed whenever she was in town made them feel ashamed as grown men that they stood by and felt powerless to stop her pain. John Lucas walked their streets like a film character, haunting them when they saw him in the bar, working at the mill, or driving on the road. He was a wrong turn personified. A wrong turn they might have taken, might still take.

Looking down at John Lucas, Ernie knew that one did not need to die to become dead.

“He stinks. Charlie won’t have to use embalming fluid on him,” Al Meyer commented before leaving Ernie and lumbering back to his car.

He would always remember seeing Claire as he walked to the house after his discovery of her husband. The wooden clothespin in her mouth. How she took it out as he approached her. Her smallness. Claire had been pretty once. He imagined her as a vivacious young woman who went dancing every Saturday night, who could have been at any number of the dances in Milwaukee that kept people occupied during the war. He imagined her as a daring dancer, small enough to be swung and cradled in her partner’s arms, energetically covering the floor, doing the jitterbug. He imagined her laughing with girlfriends, enjoying every minute of that release they all felt after the war.

He wanted to hold her then because of the secret slaughter of her life. It was visible in her prematurely wrinkled face, the cheap and ugly housedresses that she wore, and the shuffle of her bare feet in dime-store rubber sandals. Her hunched shoulders. How her eyes reflected despair as though her life were a rope insidiously slipping through her fingers and she was falling and falling. Ernie felt his own depression settle deeper within him when he saw her walk the perimeter of her field and saw her gesturing to the air and talking. She did not have the frank toughness of his own wife, nor had she been blessed with Rosemary’s beauty. But she had her own life, and she did not deserve the way it had turned out.

He thought about it for a few seconds. If he reached forward, would she run away? Even if she didn’t run away, he wondered, would she break like thin crystal if he touched her? He decided against it. He was afraid that hugging her would only make things worse, and it might frighten her.

Her reaction to her husband’s death did not surprise him as it might have shocked and surprised others. If Ernie had not seen death up close or been responsible for killing, he might have been shocked too. But he believed that there were some people who deserved to be dead, who inflicted unnecessary pain, who were impossible to mourn but easy to breathe a sigh of relief over. People who were in such deep pain themselves that a quick bullet to the head would be as merciful as killing a rabid dog before it bit others. Whatever had happened to make them that way could not be undone after a certain age. It was the only compassion he could feel toward John Lucas. A general feeling of pity.

IT WAS AS MUCH A shock to me as it probably was to my mother when I spoke out loud, when I realized that I could speak and be heard. I have feelings too, which is weird. Although not pain in the physical sense. I have the memory of pain, the burning of my body. My mother once said the same thing about giving birth: that she could remember the pain but could no longer feel it. But humor has never left me. Sometimes my laughter echoes through the trees although I’m not sure anyone can hear it.

I laugh a lot. The history of my short life is fuckin’ funny. Joining the Marines was not the smartest move I could have made. I was so conned. At first I thought the Marine Corps and my drill sergeant were just an extension of my old man, and in some ways they were. I was never good enough for him either, and he reminded me of it since the day I was born. Somehow he thought it would toughen me up. I believed him before I figured it out. I had hoped that at some point I would be good enough for him and then he would love me. Well, once I learned to shoot at twelve and got bigger at fifteen, I figured out part of it, and that took care of that. I refused to believe in his lies, in his little stories. I didn’t love him, and he didn’t love me. After fifteen he didn’t scare me anymore, and in fact I scared him. But he’d done his damage. If it hadn’t been for Ernie, I wouldn’t have thought I was worth being alive. I might have ended up dead anyway like Terry. Besides being a 4-F because of all his smoking, Terry was generally just a lowlife. I can see that now. I watched him get drunk that spring of 1968, hit the gas, and plow his car into a telephone pole. I would never have wanted him in Nam with me. Terry would never have protected me. He only would have watched out for himself. Most bullies do that.

I was one of the most physically fit grunts, but still the first six weeks of basic training were beyond, hell. I got the piss beaten out of me through every sadistic drill the Marines had thought up over the years. Sergeant Davidson called me a pussy so many times that I got paranoid, as though the continual suggestion might actually make it true. I would look at myself every now and then just to make sure I still had a dick. Davidson threatened to write me up as unsatisfactory, which was nothing new. My old man’s vocabulary never extended that far although he said the same thing when he called me a dumb-ass. We all were treated as though we were a dented can of peas that couldn’t be put on the shelf for sale.

That changed when we got down to serious rifle training.

I blew their minds. I picked up a rifle, any rifle. I could shoot with my eyes closed. I could see through thick woods and cover and focus on the smallest target in the time it took Davidson to raise his finger and pick his nose. A marshmallow on a branch. Half a marshmallow. Then half of a half of a marshmallow.

“Pretty boy can shoot,” Sergeant Davidson drawled. “Our man Elvis here might be worth something after all.”

Davidson quit calling me the worst of the names he used on all of us and chose me, among the select few, to go on for more weapons training.

“You’re a natural leader,” he told me one day, and all I said was, “Yes, sir.” But how nuts is that? I could shoot. How did that make me a leader?

The goal of the military is to take your brain, wipe it clean of anything you have ever cherished, and write its own bullshit on it. I had grown up with my old man’s mind games. I was not as vulnerable as some of the guys. As much as I hated the Corps in basic, I discovered that unlike my old man, it did give me some skills to survive by. And something I’d felt only when I spent time with Ernie: a sense of pride. Not necessarily American pride, but pride in belonging to the Marines. They wanted me. Was that so bad? It was not so much the Corps as it was the guys I met and trained with. I got a whole slew of brothers when I joined up, with only a few of them being assholes like in any family. I was worth something to them. They were worth something to me. That was the secret of survival. If I was conned, then the Corps was conned on another level. Once we landed in Nam, we could see that the Corps was dicked around just like any other branch of the military by LBJ and Westy. By McNamara, who my buddy Rick nicknamed McNightmare. But when we first landed on Okinawa, we were treated like the sons of Zeus. Then a week before some of us in the Fifth Division were scheduled to rotate into the Khe Sanh Combat Base, Sergeant Fuller laid it down real and gritty.

“Martinson! Wipe that shit-eatin’ grin off your face. This is not a Boy Scout trip!” he roared. “Some of you are not comin’ back. Do you hear me? But at the same time you will come back. The Corps will never leave you. But I want you to understand one thing. You are never to leave one another. Do you understand me? NEVER! If you stick together, most of you might come out of this shithole alive. And another thing: Always keep your rifles clean.”

Marv Martinson had bad dreams that night. Rick and I had to wake him up, to keep him from yelling so much. I wasn’t going to buy all of it. I was gonna go home, come hell or high water. I think I survived as long as I did by thinking about Bill.

Barricaded inside the KSCB, I would think about how my brother had a way of traveling inside his own body. How he seemed born with the ability to ignore our old man. He had no illusions. He didn’t love the old man and didn’t need his approval. I wanted to know what that was like, to travel so lightly, to need so little. Only after I got drunk or stoned did I even get near to what I thought that experience was.

I became good friends with one of the Bru scouts. We called him Peanut Butter Pete sometimes because he loved peanut butter so much. But his real name was Kho. He was my age, which shocked me at first. He looked older, and he had kids. Once his daughter became sick, and he left us for a few days. When he came back, I asked him if his daughter was better. He said she was, but that was all he said. I wondered what she was sick with and how she got better. Then our chaplain explained to me that the Bru believed that when someone is sick, a bad spirit is living in that person and causing the sickness. So Kho’s family cooked rice and other food and put it on a little altar in their house to feed the bad spirit. I guess they hoped the bad spirit would crawl out of his daughter and go after the food. When I thought about it, it made sense.

Kho told me that there were spirits everywhere. Once when we were returning from a short patrol, we came to the edge of a rice paddy. Kho made us stop, and he covered his mouth and shook his head. We were not to talk. I thought it was because he saw a North Vietnamese. But it wasn’t that. The people from his village were harvesting the rice. Silently. Nobody talked. It was weird seeing all those women working without saying a word. The way their small hands slid up the stalk and stripped off the seed heads without dropping any of them. Kho told me later that to talk while harvesting the rice would anger the rice spirits, and they might cause the crop to fail the next year.

I thought about Bill then. About the way he could not go to sleep until I crawled into my own bed. He thought there was a monster under his bed. It didn’t matter how many times I shone the flashlight under there to show him that there was nothing but dust bunnies and mouse turds. He was stubborn. He said that something pinched his toes at night, and it lived underneath his bed.

I teased him. “Maybe it’s your damn mice. Or your hamster. Maybe they’re getting out of their cages at night and biting your feet.”

“No!”

Christ, he was stubborn about it.

I thought about Bill’s funny ways. I was ashamed on those nights when I thought about him. I don’t know what came over me when I was mean to him. When I hung him by his ankles from the bridge, knowing that if someone had done it to me, I’d have beaten the pulp out of him. Or the time that Terry and I dumped a whole bottle of Tabasco sauce in a glass of grape juice and gave it to him. Bill took a big drink of it and started to choke. I was terrified, but at least I remembered not to give him water to clear it. I poured milk into his mouth. Water would only have spread the pepper sauce whereas milk helped neutralize it. A fact I learned in first aid and that bubbled up just then when I needed it. Bill ran and hid in the upstairs closet, his mouth and throat burning. I could hear his gasps between crying. I told Terry to go home. Then I went into the barn loft and beat hay bales with a baseball bat until I broke it and finally cried. What was wrong with me? To make it worse, my brother always came back to me, looked up at me with those eyes the color of aspen bark. So hopeful. As though he could see some good in me when I was just a lousy bastard.

Some nights when I felt afraid, I would think about him fighting with that wooden sword that I had made for him in shop class and that snapping turtle shell he used as a shield. There was never anyone out there in the barnyard. Just my brother, spinning on the balls of his feet and shouting threats to some imaginary enemy. I would watch him from my window in the barn loft and shake my head. I told Mom once that I thought Bill was retarded. She got mad and then laughed.

“Retarded! Do you know what his school tests say?” she said. “You’re smart too, but Bill’s IQ is supposedly near genius level. So much for his being retarded. He’s just different. Always has been.”

Then she laughed and hugged me. “You are both smart boys.”

All those boxes from home. Cookies, sweet rolls, venison sausage, candy, and clean underwear. I didn’t have the heart to write to my mother and tell her that I could buy underwear at the PX cheaper than what she had paid for them at home. I knew Bill helped Mom pack the boxes, and he did what only Bill would do. The entire box was usually lined with cedar leaves from our swamp and sometimes with leaves of wintergreen. All the food had a faint aftertaste of cedar, but that was okay. It did something to the rest of the guys too. After the box was empty, the smell of cedar lingered and possessed them. Nobody wanted to throw the empty boxes out. They had to smell them and even rub their faces against the cardboard. In addition to the cedar, each box always had a little something extra that Bill had found. One box had a shed garter snake skin wrapped in tissue. Another box had a mud turtle’s shell and a smooth skipping stone from the river. The box I received just before Christmas had Mom’s fruitcake in it, and a Canada goose feather had been placed on top of the cake. I was made to understand that I wasn’t allowed to open those boxes until most of the guys could be present. It was as though they all wanted to belong to that box somehow. I could pretend to be a Marine, a fighting man without ties to distract him, but I was James Peter Lucas and I was from northern Wisconsin and my brother sent me continual proof of our home.

Kho was there too. He would not touch the snakeskin or the turtle shell, the stone or the goose feather. But the cedar he put up to his nose just like the rest of the guys. Cedar is like that. You can’t get enough of that smell.

“Your brother,” he said to me one night as we sat out near the razor wire, “holds many spirits in here.” Kho tapped his chest.

I didn’t know what to say back. Kho didn’t look as though he expected me to say anything. I thought about it. I was raised to think that we all were supposed to have souls, and it’s funny but when Kho tapped his chest, I realized that I had always thought that souls did live in the chest area. At least that’s where the nuns implied the soul lived, and we all were supposed to have souls although my friend Terry told me something different.

“Girls have souls,” Terry whispered, leaning over in class. “Boys have guts.”

But I never believed I had a soul. If I couldn’t see it or feel it, then it didn’t exist for me. Still, after what Kho said, I had to wonder. Then I thought about those people with their brains in their asses. I suppose they are sitting on their souls too. Kho was right when it came to Bill. I think that was where Bill traveled to when he was quiet. His soul filled with spirits.

I found a way to puncture a hole in the turtle shell so that I could tie it to my gun belt. Everybody had some sort of lucky charm he carried. Most of them were harmless but significant. There were a few guys, though, that lost it. Mostly the Special Forces guys who went nuts after their second tour. I can’t even say out loud what they carried or kept as souvenirs. What they shot at for the hell of it. I kept my gun with me at all times, knowing that it wasn’t just the VC or the North Vietnamese I had to be afraid of.