Second Place—2019 first annual short story contest

When we go to get in the car after we bury him, he’s already there in the backseat. He waits patiently as we climb in. Hums something to himself, a tune I don’t recognize. I hiss at him:

—Papaw, what the hell are you doing here?

—Is that how you speak to your grandfather, Elaine Johnson Hall?

—Sorry.

He looks like he did when my sister Julia and I were children. Long, spindly legs and a bit of a hunch to his back; overweight but not yet obese. He’s in jeans and a red-checked shirt. There is no scar on his skull, no chemo needle in his brain.

—I’m coming with you, he says.

—Why? I ask.

—I don’t really know, he says. I just wound up here. Making up for lost time, maybe.

—That’s ridiculous. You’re dead.

—So it would seem.

—And besides, you didn’t even like us that much when you were alive.

—That’s how you think of ?

—…

—…

I almost want to laugh at him.

•

I’m not sure exactly how I felt when Mom told me that he’d died. I think I felt something like relief. Something like: one down, three to go. Mom said a word that I’d always taken to mean skin cancer, but obviously couldn’t have been that, since it was also in his stomach and his liver and his brain.

I said, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

She said, “You’ve been doing so well, we didn’t want to upset you.”

I said, “I’m not upset.”

He was in treatment for three months and no one mentioned a thing about it.

•

We buried Papaw on a bright April morning in the Shiloh graveyard where the rest of his family is. There are reasons we didn’t visit him down here that often, and they were all standing right up next to his casket. At least four of our relatives paired their best mourning suits with black cowboy hats. The colleagues from Washington shifted back and forth on their feet and made stiff speeches. His loss is the country’s loss, they said; D.C. has never seen a smarter man. One of the cowboy cousins asked a black senator to hold his coat. Another lost his hat to the breeze, and in the middle of a eulogy he had to chase it all the way to the minister’s feet to prevent it from rolling into the grave. Papaw wouldn’t have minded too much if we’d buried him with it, though. Nobody cried during the service except for Mamaw.

At the house afterwards, I stayed close by Mamaw’s bowl of potato salad, licking dangerous mayonnaise off a spoon. When Mom saw, she came over and said, “Laine, honey, are you sure you should . . . ,” and she cast her eyes down, back up, and settled on the spot where my dress clung tight to my hips. Then she left. I put my plate down.

“You know she doesn’t mean it,” Julia said from behind me.

“How?”

•

The Civil War trip is a last-minute idea. Something to do on the long drive back to Philadelphia. Something for us to talk about.

“I’ve always wanted to see those battle sites,” Mom says.

Julia says, “I haven’t.”

Mom says, “You know you had an ancestor who fought for the Confederacy, on my side.” The twang in her “a” is like an out-of-tune banjo.

I didn’t know. “You never mentioned.”

“It’s not exactly something to be proud of, Lainey.”

I can’t stand when she calls me that—it makes me feel about twenty years younger than I am and it sounds trashy in her voice. Thankfully, Julia and I don’t sound like her. But Julia does a killer Southern belle impression when she’s bored.

“Mah goodness,” says Julia, “Well I never.”

“Julianne.” Mom says. “Cut it out.”

Our rental car smells like all rental cars: the air has that tinny quality a new car’s leather smell gets when you leave it alone for too long and clean it too aggressively. It’s a lonely smell, a smell that ought to belong to somebody.

“Anyone hungry?” Mom asks. I think she wants to say: I need to get out of here, I need some air, I am sad, please, let’s stop. But she never says what she means. I know she will eat very little, and I won’t eat either. I still have trouble eating in front of her, even though technically I am recovered and living alone and stable. I don’t hold it against her or anything, I just—

—You don’t know what it was like growing up how she did, Papaw says. Don’t blame her.

—Okay.

—You don’t know what it was like raising a kid like her either.

—A daughter?

—Any kind of kid. Listen; you don’t know anything about anything. Especially with respect to this family.

—Oh.

At the rest stop, I take a clementine into a bathroom stall. I consider eating it in there, but I throw it out instead. Papaw is still there when we get back to the car. He’s somehow gotten hold of a Big Gulp.

—That stuff’ll kill you, I say to him.

He laughs. I look out the window and wonder what’s growing in all of our country’s fields.

—Who was it that fought for the Confederacy? I ask.

—My great-grandfather, Papaw says.

—What was his name?

Papaw smiles.

—I don’t know, he says. We never talked about him.

•

I don’t have many memories of Papaw. Stories about him are in short supply, and he wasn’t around much, but it’s something more than that—even when he did visit us, he was barely there. He always had something more important on his practical, political mind. A weighty silence entered our house with him. I think we all feared it. But one time, I remember, he said something that set Mom off. We were in the kitchen and Papaw’s face was half-shadow across the table. “She’s a dip,” he said. I don’t know whom he meant.

“Dad,” Mom said. “Not in front of the girls, please.”

“Why? They don’t know what it means.”

“Doesn’t matter. You’d never call a man a dip.”

“That’s because men aren’t dips,” Papaw said.

Mom just shook her head, sighed, and stopped talking. She did that a lot when Papaw was around. She was right—I had no idea what the word meant. But I immediately fell in love with it. Paltry and light as it was, Papaw’s voice imbued it with a heft and glamor beyond the seeming potential of its single syllable. So I tried it out. Julia and I were in our room, it was almost bedtime, and she wanted to play pretend.

“I’m a princess,” she told me, “and you’re the queen.”

“That would make me your mom,” I said.

“So?”

“So I can’t be your mom. Don’t be a dip.”

And Mom was there in the doorway, like I’d known she would be, and I’d expected the expression on her face to be anger but it wasn’t. It was something much closer to sadness.

•

Julia and I bicker to pass the time. It works like this: one of us makes a trivial statement, such as: “Look at that tower over there,” and the other one violently rejects it, like: “That’s not a tower, moron, it’s a grain silo,” and we find different ways to make the disagreement escalate in volume and pitch until Mom slams her fist into the power button on the radio and the car goes dead silent except for the sound of her voice telling us to “Shut the fuck up.”

During these arguments, Papaw is conspicuously absent from the car. He is what you call conflict-avoidant, a quality which my therapist says I share with him. As in, “Rather than tell your mother that her comments about your eating habits and her comparisons of your adult body to your prepubescent sister’s made you uncomfortable, you internalized your anger and directed it back towards yourself by electing to starve.”

In my newfound health, I derive pleasure from starting fights with Julia. To her credit, she still comes to my place for dinner every couple weekends, and I buy her wine and she talks to me about boys. Sometimes I’ll look at her out of nowhere and say, “Mom always loved you best,” and she’ll say, “Yep,” and then we’ll both laugh. She is the only person I believe when she tells me I’m beautiful.

•

On the second day, Mom pulls off the highway in Manassas without warning us.

“I thought we weren’t doing this,” Julia says. She’s cranky because the humidity has taken the iron-straightness out of her hair, and we had to share a bed last night, and the Days Inn had no hot water, and her mood is nebulous, variable as a cloud. Papaw looks worse today too. I think he has less hair than he did yesterday. His hands are white-knuckled around the sides of his Big Gulp.

Mom doesn’t say a word, only slows down and parks near the battlefield.

Papaw smirks.

—I didn’t think it would be so green, I say to him.

—What did you expect? Papaw says.

—I don’t know, I tell him.

What I expected was that the grass would grow bloodstained forever, that it would come up out of the dirt already brown and dead, but I won’t admit it. The battlefield is beautiful, bucolic. It’s picture-book America. And for a second I think, of course Papaw’s great-grandfather fought for this. I want it for my own too. I want the meadow under my feet and the flowers at its edges and the stone house in its corner, I want to repaint its decrepit wooden fence until it’s white as paper, I want to see my unborn children playing in the field, I want to lie down in the grass and wrap myself in it like it’s a blanket and I want to die here.

Julia pulls out her phone and takes a picture. My stomach drops.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“Documenting,” she says.

“Were you taking a Snapchat?”

“Why do you care?”

“It’s not—it just doesn’t seem right.”

“You have such a stick up your ass. It’s fine.”

—Leave your sister alone, says Papaw, and then he coughs, but of course Julia can’t hear him.

“People died here,” I say, and I can hear my voice break, and I know it’s over then and so does Julia. She’s already won.

“Are you crying?” She says.

“No.”

“Yes, you are. Jesus, what the fuck is wrong with you?”

“Leave me alone.”

“It’s a field, OK? It looks nice. I wanted to show people.”

“But that’s it. Why would you want to share this? Like, you’re so deep and meaningful?”

Julia pauses. “Have you eaten today?” she says.

“Fuck off,” I say.

“You haven’t, have you.”

“I did this morning.”

“You’re lying.”

“I said leave me alone.” I turn around and start for the fence.

“When was the last time you—”

“Shut up.”

I don’t know.

—When was the last time—

—Papaw, not you too.

—Last time, Laine . . .

Mom comes out of the stone house to see what’s going on.

“Laine?”

Quick flash: Mom carries me to our car, wrapped in a fuzzy blanket from college, and deposits me awkwardly in the passenger seat. I am cold and shivering even though it’s spring, I’m in a sweatshirt and my body is covered in lanugo fuzz: I am a creature with fur, and I know without asking that we are going to the hospital.

•

I walk straight and silent on the way back to the car. Mom drives us out to the unfinished railroad, and there’s such cheer in her voice when she suggests a picnic that I know it’s a plan, not a proposition. We spread a blanket on the ground. Mom reads from a nearby sign, “So this was a locus of much carnage during the Second Battle of Manassas . . .”

Papaw lies on his back, sunning himself, looking reptilian and vaguely translucent. There’s a scar on his head that wasn’t there before.

—Why do we even have a blanket, I ask him by way of conversation.

—You know your mother, he says. She likes to be prepared these days.

—For what?

“. . . was the largest simultaneous assault of the war . . .”

—You know very well, missy. Papaw raises his eyebrows at me.

—It’s not a relapse. I just haven’t been hungry since you died.

—Sure, he says, and rolls onto his side like he’s going to take a nap.

—Don’t turn away from me, listen, I’m trying to understand—

“Laine?” I’m on the ground, wrapped in half the blanket, and Julia’s face is about two inches from mine. “Who are you talking to?”

I feign grogginess. “Oh, I—I don’t know. Must have been sleep-talking.” I am wide awake. Papaw is gone.

“Here.” Julia has half of a peeled clementine in her open palm.

I look at her, clean-skinned and messy-haired. The sky over her head is a Maxfield Parrish, all cloud and cerulean. She is not supposed to be taking care of me. We were born in the wrong order. But I can’t help myself: “What am I supposed to do with that?”

She doesn’t sigh or shake her head or get upset like I want her to. She just takes a slice and puts it in my mouth. I bite, and the juice is like battery acid on my tongue. Julia holds out her free hand and pulls me up so we’re both sitting, and the blanket falls into my lap with little bits of orange peel. “You have grass in your hair,” she says, and hands me the rest of the clementine. I wonder then if she hates me.

“. . . a significant tactical victory for the Confederacy, and a blow to Union morale. The decisive battle of the Northern Virginia campaign,” Mom reads.

Julia snaps a picture of me as I regard the clementine. I reach for the phone, but she pulls it back. “Relax,” she says, “It’s nice.”

There’s this other memory I have of Papaw from when I was a kid, one I can’t quite place. It must have been winter, maybe Christmas, because I remember roasting inside one of those massive puffer coats. Papaw was trying to help Julia zip hers closed, but he couldn’t do it, and he was furious. “Why is it like this,” he demanded, “who made this goddamn thing?”

“The zippers on girls’ coats are the reverse of men’s ones,” Mom said.

“That’s ridiculous.”

“That’s how it is.”

“Doesn’t make it any better. Jesus. Women do everything backwards.”

“Dad—”

“Everything. Including thinking.”

I think now that he would have liked it if we’d used that for his epitaph, inscribed it on his tombstone.

•

Here is how it feels to watch my mother cry at night in a bed by herself, while she thinks we’re asleep: repugnant. She is hideous, an amorphous whale-form drawing its dying breaths under the covers, not Mom. I want to look away, but I can’t—I’ve never seen anything so disgusting. I used to fear that I’d inherit her body, and now I know why. I want to shake her, slap her, stop this. I can’t move. Under our sheet, Julia grabs for my hand. I kick her in the shins; she muffles her gasp with her pillow, a pretty-pale Desdemona. I regret it with a firm immediacy that’s new to me. I roll over and whisper into her hair, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” and she doesn’t make a sound.

Papaw sits in the corner of our room, hooked up to a chemo IV, all night. He sings to us, which I know he never did when he was alive. I blink in and out of a song Mom once used for a lullaby: Oh, my darling, oh . . . you are lost . . . gone forever . . . oh, my darling, Clem—

•

In the morning, he has no hair. He’s lost weight, too. The air pockets crack between his bones when he gets into the car. He’s still sucking away at his Big Gulp. I’m still not hungry, but Julia makes me eat half a croissant in the backseat while Mom checks out of our room.

“Do you miss him yet?” I ask, knowing that he’s there, that he can hear.

“Who, Papaw?” Julia says from the front. “Not really.” She holds up her phone, snaps, and writes a caption: Day Three in Hell. Papaw pretends not to wince. Julia turns to me, looks right through his abdomen. “Why, do you?”

“Not really.”

She shimmies down a little further in her seat. “It’s just, I feel like I didn’t really know him.”

“Yeah.”

—I worked my whole life for you, you ungrateful little shits, Papaw says.

I wheel on him.

—What was our last conversation about? I ask.

Papaw runs a hand over his bald head, through the memory of bygone strands.

—OK, when was it?

—I built you rockets, he says. I made this country safe for you to live in.

—What about our house?

—What?

—Was that safe?

—How should I know, Papaw says. Your mother wasn’t big on sharing.

—You’re our grandfather, I say. It was your job to ask.

—Don’t be ridiculous, your mo—

—Papaw. I almost died last year. You didn’t even call.

—You did that to yourself, Elaine. That was your own fault. He takes a long sip from his plastic cup.

I do what I’ve wanted to do since he showed up, which is punch him in the face, hard.

Julia screams.

The window across from me sports a single, thin crack. My hand throbs red.

“The fuck, Laine? What the actual fuck?”

I’m crying and I can’t remember when I started, but my chest hurts. “I don’t know why I’m like this. He was awful.”

•

Mom is not pleased about the window, but she also seems sort of concerned when we tell her that we don’t know what happened, that I punched the glass but don’t remember a thing. She pulls a clementine out of her purse.

“Where are you getting all of these?” I ask.

“What do you mean?” She says. “Mamaw gave us three sacks of them before we left her house. You were there.”

“Right,” I say.

She extends her arm towards me, proffers the fruit. I take a sudden interest in my phone, which has been silent for days. I didn’t tell anyone about Papaw. I wasn’t sure I cared myself, so it made no sense to burden other people with the awkwardness of trying to find some pat, appropriate phrase to parrot.

“Not today, Elaine,” Mom says. I take the clementine, and she gets in the front seat. But she doesn’t start the car. Instead, she turns around to watch me. “We’re not going anywhere until you finish that.”

“Are you kidding? I’m not five.”

“Do I look like I’m kidding?”

Papaw re-materializes, bleeding profusely from his nose.

—Come on, sweetheart, he says.

—Don’t give me that, I tell him.

—I’m going to tell you something, young lady, he says, not everything is always about you. Stop being so selfish. And rude. It’s unbecoming.

“You almost broke the window,” Mom says. “You’ll do exactly as I say.”

I can’t really argue with either of those things, so I sit quietly and eat.

•

Three things happen when we get out of the car at Antietam, in rapid succession, to all three of us at the same time. First, we see the tubes. A sea of them, each one about three feet tall and an inch wide and wrapped around the base of a sapling. They stretch across the field, from one rickety fence to the next, clamoring for space, for air, for light. Then we see that the tubes are color-coded. I know, because we all draw a sharp breath at once. Blue and gray. Colors we know from textbooks, from paintings, but that we haven’t seen on an actual battlefield yet. From there, it’s not a far jump to the third thing, which is the realization that the tubes and the trees represent bodies.

“How many?” Julia breathes.

Mom says, “I don’t know, but—”

“Antietam was the single bloodiest day of the war,” I say. “So, a lot.”

“Shit.”

“Watch your mouth, Julianne,” Mom says. Then she starts counting under her breath. We follow her voice with our eyes. After a while she gets to one hundred, at which point she stops. “About six rows back,” she says, as if we haven’t been counting with her the whole time. “That’s one hundred men. But there were tens of thousands. All those men on both sides who died, so the country they believed in could live.” It sounds trite at first, but I remember Papaw saying, I worked my whole life for you, I made this country safe. And then he’s standing right there, nodding, and I get it.

“Mom?”

“Laine?”

—I don’t know how to ask.

“Papaw’s tumor. Was it from radiation? From the missiles.”

She nods. “It might have been, yeah,” she says, and she looks proud when she opens her arms for both of us, and we all stand there like one big tree, intertwined.

•

Mom and Julia cross Burnside’s Bridge quickly, so that they can read about it on the other side; I hang back with Papaw near the middle, in the shade. We’re standing on top of the turning point in a battle that was more or less unresolved—both sides lost about the same number of guys, but after this bridge fell to the Union, that was it. Everyone just gave up. The water cools the stone of the bridge, and I rest my elbows on the wooden slats that cover the railings. It’s peaceful here. When I stand Papaw offers me his arm, and I take it like I imagine a real Southern lady would. This, too, would never have happened when he was alive. But I’m OK with it.

—I do remember our last conversation, you know, I tell him.

—So do I, he says.

—Really?

—Wasn’t it when you visited us last Christmas, after they let you out of the hospital?

—Yeah.

—Only I don’t know what we talked about.

I laugh, but quietly, so Mom and Julia can’t hear.

—Well, I say, I had that CD of Carmen, the one Mamaw gave me when I thought I wanted to be an opera singer.

Papaw looks at me, puzzled.

—You stopped? He asks.

—I don’t exactly have the, um, physical stamina. Right now.

—Oh, he says.

—Anyway, you noticed I was listening to it, and you sort of grunted.

He chuckles.

—Then you said, ‘Why did you bring one where she dies at the end?’

He doesn’t say anything, but he pales, and for a second I can see right through his skull to where his brain sits, pulsing.

—And I said, ‘In all the good ones, she dies at the end.’

We stop walking then. He reaches out and cuffs my upper arm with his thumb and his pinkie. I pull away.

—You’re right, he says. All of the good ones.

I want to catch up to Mom and Julia, but he grabs my shoulder.

—That’s not you, he says.

—What?

—You’re not Carmen. You don’t get to decide that you’re doomed. You think you’re so special? What are you dying for, exactly?

—What did you die for?

—Don’t be smart. I didn’t choose to die, but I served our country. You, on the other hand—you’ve devoted yourself to something you made up in your head. You don’t know what it means to serve, not really. He glances across the bridge, goes on: And aren’t there better ways to make your mother talk?

—That’s not what this is about.

—Isn’t it?

And then he turns his back and walks away. As he does he starts to sing her aria, the one about how love is like a rebellious bird, but with the wrong words. He’s singing the song from last night: Oh, my darling . . . gone forever . . . darling, and the syllables barely fit with the music, but his voice sends a chill from the base of my spine to my head.

I follow behind him, and as I pass between the tubes I reach out and touch them to make sure that everything is still real.

•

I said we didn’t tell a lot of stories about Papaw, but there’s one that got repeated over and over. He had these cousins who moved to Shiloh before I was born, vaguely eccentric artist-types. Mamaw insisted that Papaw invite them over for dinner. When he eventually did, one of the cousins warned him that she was a vegetarian, and that she and her boyfriend were both sort of picky eaters. Mamaw’s an incredible cook, so she wasn’t fazed. She prepared a massive meal: meat for the omnivorous cousin, pasta for the vegetarian cousin, plain-tasting options for the picky boyfriend, hors d’oeuvres and drinks and desserts for everyone. And when they arrived for the dinner party, the omnivorous cousin ate everything, the vegetarian cousin picked politely at the vegetables, and the vegetarian’s boyfriend didn’t touch a morsel.

Mamaw said, “I know you don’t like to eat meat, but can I get you some cheese?”

The boyfriend said, “No thank you, ma’am.”

Papaw said, “How about vegetables?”

The boyfriend said, “No thank you, sir.”

My grandparents looked at him quizzically, confused.

The boyfriend said, “I get all of the nutrients I need from the air I breathe. I’m a Breatharian; it’s a fairly new group, but it’s been great for me. I’ve found that everything necessary to sustain life is in the air and the sunlight that’s already all around us, all the time.”

Papaw said, “Has anyone ever been a Breatharian for more than a week?”

The boyfriend said, “Yes, of course.”

Papaw said, “It just doesn’t seem like a very sustainable lifestyle.”

The boyfriend said, “We can sustain ourselves for quite a while. We spend a lot of time meditating to reach a higher plane of consciousness.”

Papaw said, “I think I’ve heard of it, actually. I’ve just heard it by a different name.”

The boyfriend said, “Oh? What have you heard it called?”

And Papaw said, “Dead.”

•

The Dunker Church is cavernous and empty except for a few pine benches and a table that must have been for both oration and the distribution of the sacrament.

“Why were they called Dunkers?” Julia asks.

“There’s a sign about it literally right here,” I tell her.

“Just read it to me and be helpful for a change?” she says.

“They practiced full-immersion baptism. Thus the nickname.”

“Drowning babies,” Julia says. “Nice.”

Mom reads from a sign across the room. “The Confederates stationed their left flank here the night before the battle, and there were several attacks the next day.” The place is cold, and dark, and silent, as if permanently closed to any possibility of beauty. Mom goes on. Apparently, the Union used the church as an embalming station. When I shut my eyes, I can see how the floor was—carpeted in blood, the whole space interwoven with bodies and bandages. There’s a breeze and I know it’s Papaw and I don’t want to see him right now, so I keep my eyes shut.

—It doesn’t work that way, Papaw says, I’m in your head.

And he’s right, naturally. I blink and he’s there.

Mom walks over to where I’m standing. “Drafty in here, isn’t it,” she says, and Papaw winks. Julia joins her, and we all face each other in the middle of the room. They can’t see the symmetry. On a plaque in the corner there’s a picture of a truce that happened here: the generals from both sides stand in front of each other to shake hands and exchange the wounded and the dead. The four of us look sort of like that.

•

At dinner, Mom tries to talk about what it means, why we’re doing this now, but she ends up reciting historic facts instead. “A slave rebellion at Harper’s Ferry without any slaves,” she says. “No wonder it was such a catastrophe.”

Julia chews her wilted salad by fake candlelight. I push mine around my plate.

“Laine,” Mom says, “Don’t think I don’t see—”

“Can you just give it a rest for one fucking night? Please? Look,” I say, spearing a tomato, opening my mouth wide, displaying its contents, “I’m eating. See?”

She sighs and goes quiet, just like she used to when she argued with Papaw, and I feel a guilty wave of delight. I put my fork down triumphantly.

“Your Papaw would have loved to do this drive with you,” Mom says after a while.

Julia gets upset this time, which makes a nice change. “Then why didn’t he?” she asks.

Mom coughs. “It was hard for him—”

Papaw isn’t having any of it.

—Listen, he says, listen to me. I did right by you, my whole life, I gave—

“He wasn’t really raised with a strong family unit.”

—. . . this country from the ground up—

“Just because he wasn’t around, or didn’t engage much, doesn’t mean he didn’t love us.”

“I can’t believe you’d still defend him,” Julia says. “He was a prick.”

—For you, I did it for you, it wasn’t my way to—

“He was our family,” Mom says, “We’re allowed to miss him, now that he’s gone.”

“What’s there to miss?”

“He was a good man,” Mom says.

“But he was a shit family member,” says Julia. “Mamaw basically raised you alone.”

Mom’s voice pitches up. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

—No respect for your elders, and—

“Laine,” Julia says, desperate, “Do you remember Papaw ever telling us he loved us? Ever?”

“Excuse me,” I say.

In the bathroom, Papaw holds my hair back and I puke up whole, undigested leaves. When I’m done, he rubs my back in little circles.

I sleep poorly, and when I wake up I know what I’ll see before I open my eyes. Today, Papaw has a needle in his brain. He looks so small.

—It’s ending, isn’t it, I say.

—I think so, he says.

—But it’s not better.

—Did I ever say I was here to make things better?

—I guess you didn’t.

—Well, then. Time to head out.

My body makes a noise like a cement mixer.

—What was that? I ask.

Papaw shrugs.

It takes me a few minutes to identify the sound and the attendant feeling in my stomach. I am ravenous. I take a big gulp of air.

•

Gettysburg is like nothing I’ve ever seen. The sky is overcast but it glows faintly, and the space is huge, space that calls to mind the phrase “Manifest Destiny,” and stone walls mark the battle lines, and there are monuments everywhere. Way off, I can hear the faint roll of thunder. When sunlight breaks through a cloud and hits Papaw the right way, he flickers like a hologram, and I can see a replica cannon through his chest.

—Is it weird to say goodbye now if I didn’t before?

—You made me up; you can say what you want.

Involuntarily, I smile. I surprise myself by thinking that I want to remember him like this.

—Bye, then.

He steps closer but keeps about a foot of space between us as he gives me a quick, uncomfortable hug and a pat on the back.

—Remember, you little shit, he says. Remember what it was all for.

Then he’s gone. On the ground where his feet were, I seem to have dropped a clementine. I don’t recall taking it out of the car with me, but I leave it there, like an offering.

•

It’s strange to be here alone, just the three of us. But I guess that’s how it’s been all along. The tension from last night’s dinner hasn’t quite dissipated, and so we walk around the battlefield in near-silence. There are low mountains in the distance, and I spend most of my time looking at them, because every few feet along the path are these plaques with Mathew Brady’s historical photos of Gettysburg immediately after the battle and all the pictures look the same: bodies and bodies and bodies and bodies. I worry that if I look at them for long enough, I’ll become desensitized to death. I worry that if I look at them for even a second, I will break down and say something stupid. But every so often I peek. If I glance quickly enough, the photographs resemble still frames from a ballet: full of movement, and trauma, and life.

“Just think,” Mom says. “They walked that whole route we drove, to come here and die. Americans shooting other Americans. Can you imagine.”

“Well, yeah,” Julia says. “It happens every day.”

There is another very long pause.

“I suppose,” Mom says.

I think of Papaw, of what he said. “But it’s different,” I say. “Those soldiers died for their country, or, I don’t know, for an ideal. What’s it for, now?”

“What’s with you today?” Julia says.

•

I am tired of the silence, of the abrasiveness, of how thin the air around my shoulders feels, and so I read facts about Gettysburg out loud off my phone as we stand at Devil’s Den, in the shadow of a massive rock outcropping. Three days of slaughter, mistakes, more slaughter. I find myself strangely elated when I read off the Confederate missteps, like the fate of our country is still somewhat uncertain. Julia sits on top of a boulder as tall as a house and swings her legs. She’s texting. She’s tired of this, tired of me.

“Where you’re sitting?” I tell her, “There’s this really famous picture of like ten people lying there, dead, and two other guys sort of looking over all the bodies.”

“Ew,” Julia says, unimpressed.

“Wanna see?”

“Not really.”

Mom and Julia stand up on the rocks over my head and look out over all the space, all the green and the trees and the blood-rich soil. They kick at the dust. No one says anything. The space inside of my abdomen feels taut, stretched, and I want to scold them both, but it’s not my place. I don’t tell them that Gettysburg is one of the biggest spots for ghost sightings in the country. Loads of people have seen spectral armies limping around here, especially on overcast days like this.

I’d thought I understood; I’d thought Mom was trying to make a point about what Papaw did with his life by stopping where she stopped, but maybe I was wrong. It occurs to me that we might not be doing this for any reason at all, except to distract ourselves from new ghosts by chasing older ones.

•

The High-Water Mark of the entire war is a stone wall, and more meadow. Looking around, it seems like the battle went on forever, and it could have, but it stopped here instead, like when you think a wave will wash up over your shins, but in fact it barely touches your toes. It’s strange, though—the part of the battlefield that was actually decisive is relatively small. The history of the nation shifted on a patch of grass the size of someone’s front lawn. The sky stains everything gray. The stone wall, and the monuments, and Julia’s skin. I step across the wall and I face her as an enemy. She takes a picture, but I don’t say anything. Instead, I reach out to shake her hand.

“What are you doing?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” I say. “Feels right.” She cracks half a smile, then, and we shake on a nameless thing, on consecrated ground. I want to promise her that I won’t go on any more kamikaze missions, won’t try to destroy us both by destroying myself, but I can’t do that. Instead, I ask, “Are you still coming over for dinner this weekend?”

“I guess so,” she says.

“OK. Sounds good.”

“I’m out of booze, anyway,” she says.

“Did you know,” I chirp like an enthusiastic tour guide, “that Lee shook the hand of every single man who came back from Pickett’s Charge and personally apologized for sending them into certain death?”

—I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.

“Please stop,” Julia says, laughing.

The thunder I heard earlier is back. It’s louder this time. There’s a breeze, and we both shiver at once.

•

We can’t avoid the cemetery here. We drive towards it, and I hear the first line of Lincoln’s address over and over in my head:

Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon this—

Upon this—

Fourscore and seven—

—Upon this what?

—. . .

I can’t remember. I don’t know how the rest of it goes.

After the battle, the residents of Gettysburg turned every single building they had into a hospital or an embalming station. There was a days-long influx of the dead and doomed as volunteers identified bodies, wrote down names, contacted families. The names, I think, were what did it. The ghosts were everywhere after that. They never broke rank when they marched through the town, because that would have been dishonorable. They just saluted as they went by.

We walk through a stone arch and face several concentric circles of graves, and then the storm breaks.

•

I close my door gently when we get back in the car, since I don’t want to make the window any worse than it already is. I offer to pay for it as soon as I’m back at work. Mom just shakes her head. For the final stretch back to Philly we break open Mamaw’s last bag of clementines. “We really shouldn’t,” Mom says, “It’s nearly dinner,” but the car already smells like citrus oil, and Julia already has a neat strand of peel in her hand.

“Too late,” she says. She offers me half, and then we share another. Mom turns on the radio.

What else can we say after that? Sometimes, fewer words are better: at the dedication of the Gettysburg Cemetery, the town mayor spoke for two and a half hours and provoked only a modest, respectful response; Lincoln spoke two hundred and sixty-seven words and there wasn’t a dry eye in the crowd.

Sometimes, it’s best not to say anything at all: it’s already in the air.

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