from her watchful gaze. Shook his head. “Look, I’ll stop at the hospital in the morning on my way out of town and look in on Hiram.”
Then he opened the cabinet beneath the sink, stooped, took out a tall plastic juice container, straightened up, placed it in the sink, and twisted the tap.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
Eyes still downcast, he watched the water fill the container. “Going to water the plants out yonder,” he jerked his head toward the sun porch, “otherwise they’re going to die.”
6
MOLLY WAS ASLEEP IN HER ROOM DOWN THE HALL and Jenny leaned back in the king-size bed, rubbing African Shea Butter into her arms and legs. As she smoothed the emollient into her skin, she studied the precarious stack of books leaning on Paul’s nightstand. Shelby Foote’s three huge volumes dominated the pile; so bulky, Paul joked they amounted to a public works project and took about as long to finish as the interminable road improvements on I-494. Then there was McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom , Confederates in the Attic , The Killer Angels , and, perched on top, a slim, fifty-year-old paperback Pocketbook edition of the Red Badge of Courage. A Union soldier was portrayed in raw watercolor on the cover, dashing past a ruined cannon. The style reminded her of the noirish paperbacks unearthed from an old trunk and laid out on a card table at the garage sale her mom held after her dad died. Except the cover art on those books all seemed to be variations of a tough Barbara Stanwyck–type babe with a Chesterfield jammed in her painted lips as her slip draped off her shoulders on top and hitched up her thighs on the bottom.
Paul read Stephen Crane’s classic over and over, as if it was a relic—a splinter from a purer time.
She understood that her husband was smart and sensitive and moving in emotional retreat from the twenty-first century. He’d concluded that he’d grown up in the last stages of a stable ahistorical bubble that existed between the end of World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now, he believed, the true forces of history were reasserting themselves, namely ancient religious and ethnic hatreds. He worried that Molly would grow up in a world full of shadowy suicide bombers stalking the malls alongside child molesters and computer-game-addled teens planning school shootings.
So he’d found refuge in the Civil War, where he believed what individual men did on a given day had determined the course of history.
Paul wanted to make a difference. He just hadn’t figured out how yet. They’d met as Wellstone volunteers, had intended to join the Peace Corps together and save the world. Molly changed their plans. Paul went into insurance to make some money so she could stay home until Molly started preschool. She studied nights to get her special ed degree, then set a more modest goal to save just part of the world in one inner-city school.
After four years of failing to make a dent in a reluctant parade of broken kids, she scaled her expectations down to saving just one of them from the streets. She wound up leaving to save herself. They moved to the “quieter demographics” of Stillwater, where she taught general ed to mostly white kids from intact families.
Starting to drift, Jenny stared at the cover of the Red Badge of Courage . Perhaps Paul would look like the illustration on Saturday, crossing a field in his accurate getup. She had the powerful impression that Paul was grabbing hard at a second chance for the boyhood adventure he’d missed growing up. That’s what the reenactors called their emulations of Civil War soldiers…
Impressions.
Maybe this was his way of making up for never having been in the military. In fact, none of the men in their new neighborhood had worn uniforms. Unlike her dad and her uncles, who, after a few beers in the backyard, would send the women away when the strange place names from Vietnam and Korea started cropping up.
She pursed her lips
Then he opened the cabinet beneath the sink, stooped, took out a tall plastic juice container, straightened up, placed it in the sink, and twisted the tap.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
Eyes still downcast, he watched the water fill the container. “Going to water the plants out yonder,” he jerked his head toward the sun porch, “otherwise they’re going to die.”
6
MOLLY WAS ASLEEP IN HER ROOM DOWN THE HALL and Jenny leaned back in the king-size bed, rubbing African Shea Butter into her arms and legs. As she smoothed the emollient into her skin, she studied the precarious stack of books leaning on Paul’s nightstand. Shelby Foote’s three huge volumes dominated the pile; so bulky, Paul joked they amounted to a public works project and took about as long to finish as the interminable road improvements on I-494. Then there was McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom , Confederates in the Attic , The Killer Angels , and, perched on top, a slim, fifty-year-old paperback Pocketbook edition of the Red Badge of Courage. A Union soldier was portrayed in raw watercolor on the cover, dashing past a ruined cannon. The style reminded her of the noirish paperbacks unearthed from an old trunk and laid out on a card table at the garage sale her mom held after her dad died. Except the cover art on those books all seemed to be variations of a tough Barbara Stanwyck–type babe with a Chesterfield jammed in her painted lips as her slip draped off her shoulders on top and hitched up her thighs on the bottom.
Paul read Stephen Crane’s classic over and over, as if it was a relic—a splinter from a purer time.
She understood that her husband was smart and sensitive and moving in emotional retreat from the twenty-first century. He’d concluded that he’d grown up in the last stages of a stable ahistorical bubble that existed between the end of World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now, he believed, the true forces of history were reasserting themselves, namely ancient religious and ethnic hatreds. He worried that Molly would grow up in a world full of shadowy suicide bombers stalking the malls alongside child molesters and computer-game-addled teens planning school shootings.
So he’d found refuge in the Civil War, where he believed what individual men did on a given day had determined the course of history.
Paul wanted to make a difference. He just hadn’t figured out how yet. They’d met as Wellstone volunteers, had intended to join the Peace Corps together and save the world. Molly changed their plans. Paul went into insurance to make some money so she could stay home until Molly started preschool. She studied nights to get her special ed degree, then set a more modest goal to save just part of the world in one inner-city school.
After four years of failing to make a dent in a reluctant parade of broken kids, she scaled her expectations down to saving just one of them from the streets. She wound up leaving to save herself. They moved to the “quieter demographics” of Stillwater, where she taught general ed to mostly white kids from intact families.
Starting to drift, Jenny stared at the cover of the Red Badge of Courage . Perhaps Paul would look like the illustration on Saturday, crossing a field in his accurate getup. She had the powerful impression that Paul was grabbing hard at a second chance for the boyhood adventure he’d missed growing up. That’s what the reenactors called their emulations of Civil War soldiers…
Impressions.
Maybe this was his way of making up for never having been in the military. In fact, none of the men in their new neighborhood had worn uniforms. Unlike her dad and her uncles, who, after a few beers in the backyard, would send the women away when the strange place names from Vietnam and Korea started cropping up.
She pursed her lips
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