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wandered battlefields in their silk top hats and camel-hair jackets, sifting the still smoking and writhing aftermath, and soon those men stood like butchers in leather aprons and with sleeves rolled, connecting hoses to figures as-if-asleep on tables, and how the red fluid was drawn from the bodies while the yellow fluid was injected.
    And the skin of thousands of dead soldiers took on a yellow glow and neither did they age nor putrefy nor gray. And your father gazed upon the aspect of these men and said it was a “genuine miracle” and he wrote to your mother, “If only such capabilities existed when Walter—how different our lives may have been.”
    And Abraham journeyed those lands when all was silent along the fields of combat, sifted through the rubble and kicked at the skulls smoldering in dust. And Abraham spoke unto the gathered generals and politicians and the press and unto those former soldiers who sat in chairs, their pus and blood-smeared bandages, and to the wives of those attending, and how this man Abraham said, “We come here not to dedicate, nor consecrate, nor hallow this ground. The men who have lived and died and struggled here have consecrated it far beyond our low powers to add or detract. It is for us to commit to the great task before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to the conflict for which they gave the last full measures of their lives—that we resolve these dead have not died in vain—”
    And there were those who scoffed and snickered and said, “See here the gibbering ape.”
    Houses throughout your town were abandoned, the windows punched out by neighborhood children. Families officially “went west” to stake a claim toward a future, and no one remembered these families planning to move although they remembered the covered wagons of the military in their yards or militiamen drinking the bottled milk from their front stoops.
    And your school chums found notes in their desks accusing them of rebel sympathies, and even your teacher’s voice seemed tinged with twang, and it was so that she disappeared the very next week, and soon a man who knew nothing of your class or your studies stood at the front of the room and said, “Let us now open our books” and the children each opened a different text.
    And the neighbor across the way disappeared, his milk bottles gathered on his stoop until runaway workers carried them to the forest, and when you asked your mother where this man went she said she dreamed that he had piled into a covered wagon with a mattress and burlap sacks filled with clothing and feed and his chickens and rabbits thrashing in cages and hutches, while everyone else called this neighbor a “rebel sympathizer” and said it was only a matter of time. And soon the house was boarded over by militiamen and indeed there were many such houses now and it seemed half the houses one passed were houses boarded over or houses in the process of being boarded over by militias crowded into wagons with hammers and boards and other implements. And your friends investigated these abandoned houses while you watched from your porch, rifle across your lap. And your friends whispered of the rebel flags they found bannered throughout your neighbor’s house, the portraits of gray woolen generals in his personal office, their bedroom, above the child’s bed.
    And now children accused classmates of accents, of smelling like rebel foods, and children met in the mornings before school and bloodied noses, their pale faces spattered with red, eyes smote with tears.
    And detention centers or “camps” constructed of concrete and barbed wire were initially denied, then proudly confirmed with headlines: “Our Country Kept Safe.” These centers constructed and filled with turncoats, traitors, and spies, for the impulse to “turn rebel” was pervasive in the low times of war. Your