Deel bent over him, lifted his mask, and then the man’s head. The man said, “My mama won’t never see me again.”
“You’re gonna be okay,” Deel said, but saw that half the man’s head was missing. How in hell was he talking? Why wasn’t he dead? His brain was leaking out.
“I got a letter inside my shirt. Tell Mama I love her…Oh, my god, look there. The stars are falling.”
Deel, responding to the distant gaze of his downed companion, turned and looked up. The stars were bright and stuck in place. There was an explosion of cannon fire and the ground shook and the sky lit up bright red; the redness clung to the air like a veil. When Deel looked back at the fellow, the man’s eyes were still open, but he was gone.
Deel reached inside the man’s jacket and found the letter. He realized then that the man had also taken a round in the chest, because the letter was dark with blood. Deel tried to unfold it, but it was so damp with gore it fell apart. There was nothing to deliver to anyone. Deel couldn’t even remember the man’s name. It had gone in one ear and out the other. And now he was gone, his last words being, “The stars are falling.”
While he was holding the boy’s head, an officer came walking down the trench holding a pistol. His face was darkened with gunpowder and his eyes were bright in the night and he looked at Deel, said, “There’s got to be some purpose to all of it, son. Some purpose,” and then he walked on down the line.
Deel thought of that night and that death, and then he thought of the dead woman again. He wondered what had happened to her body. They had had to leave her there, between the two trees. Had someone buried her? Had she rotted there? Had the ants and the elements taken her away? He had dreams of lying down beside her, there in the field. Just lying there, drifting away with her into the void.
Deel felt now as if he were lying beside that dead woman, blond instead of dark haired, but no more alive than the woman between the trees.
“Maybe we ought to just sleep tonight,” Mary Lou said, startling him. “We can let things take their course. It ain’t nothin’ to make nothin’ out of.”
He moved his hand away from her. He said, “That’ll be all right. Of course.”
She rolled on her side, away from him. He lay on top of the covers with his hands against his lower belly and looked at the log rafters.
A COUPLE OF DAYS and nights went by without her warming to him, but he found sleeping with her to be the best part of his life. He liked her sweet smell and he liked to listen to her breathe. When she was deep asleep, he would turn slightly, and carefully, and rise up on one elbow and look at her shape in the dark. His homecoming had not been what he had hoped for or expected, but in those moments when he looked at her in the dark, he was certain it was better than what had gone before for nearly four horrible years.
The next few days led to him taking the boy into the woods and finding the right wood for a bow. He chopped down a bois d’arc tree and showed the boy how to trim it with an axe, how to cut the wood out of it for a bow, how to cure it with a fire that was mostly smoke. They spent a long time at it, but if the boy enjoyed what he was learning, he never let on. He kept his feelings close to the heart and talked less than his mother. The boy always seemed some yards away, even when standing right next to him.
Deel built the bow for the boy and strung it with strong cord and showed him how to find the right wood for arrows and how to collect feathers from a bird’s nest and how to feather the shafts. It took almost a week to make the bow, and another week to dry it and to make the arrows. The rest of the time Deel looked out at what had once been a plowed field and was now twenty-five acres of flowers with a few little trees beginning to grow, twisting up among the flowers. He tried to imagine the field covered in corn.
Deel used an axe to clear the new trees, and that afternoon, at the dinner table, he asked Mary Lou what had happened to the mule.
“Died,” Mary Lou said. “She was old when you left, and she just got older. We ate it when it died.”
“Waste not, want not,” Deel said.
“Way we saw it,” she said.
“You ain’t been farmin’, how’d you make it?”
“Tom brought us some goods now and then, fish he caught, vegetables from his place. A squirrel or two. We raised a hog and smoked the meat, had our own garden.”
“How are Tom’s parents?”
“His father drank himself to death and his mother just up and died.”
Deel nodded. “She was always sickly, and her husband was a lot older than her…I’m older than you. But not by that much. He was what? Fifteen years? I’m…Well, let me see. I’m ten.”
She didn’t respond. He had hoped for some kind of confirmation that his ten-year gap was nothing, that it was okay. But she said nothing.
“I’m glad Tom was around,” Deel said.
“He was a help,” she said.
After a while, Deel said, “Things are gonna change. You ain’t got to take no one’s charity no more. Tomorrow, I’m gonna go into town, see I can buy some seed, and find a mule. I got some muster-out pay. It ain’t much, but it’s enough to get us started. Winston here goes in with me, we might see we can get him some candy of some sort.”
“I like peppermint,” the boy said.
“There you go,” Deel said.
“You ought not do that so soon back,” Mary Lou said. “There’s still time before the fall plantin’. You should hunt like you used to, or fish for a few days…You could take Winston here with you. You deserve time off.”
“Guess another couple of days ain’t gonna hurt nothin’. We could all use some time gettin’ reacquainted.”
NEXT AFTERNOON WHEN DEEL came back from the creek with Winston, they had a couple of fish on a wet cord, and Winston carried them slung over his back so that they dangled down like ornaments and made his shirt damp. They were small but good perch and the boy had caught them, and in the process, shown the first real excitement Deel had seen from him. The sunlight played over their scales as they bounced against Winston’s back. Deel, walking slightly behind Winston, watched the fish carefully. He watched them slowly dying, out of the water, gasping for air. He couldn’t help but want to take them back to the creek and let them go. He had seen injured men gasp like that, on the field, in the trenches. They had seemed like fish that only needed to be put in water.