Excerpt: Confessions of the Tinman

As they lapsed back into silence, dark figures moved across the meadow beyond the tents. The British were drilling again. They did not walk so much as drifted, like ghosts moving over the landscape, their heads bowed, their shoulders slumped under the weight of their loss. They were not men. They were the walking dead.
Still they turned at orders, they held their guns tightly, and Marc absently touched his shoulder and found the strap of his rifle there.
“They’re not here, are they?” Lucky said quietly. He lit up another cigarette and followed the line of soldiers with his eyes. “Not really.”
“No,” Marc said, “I don’t think they are.”
“I can’t imagine,” Lucky wet his lips, suddenly becoming agitated, “I can’t imagine years of this place, Marc. I already have trouble remembering what home looks like. I ask my mother to write to me and tell me, so I won’t forget.” He turned to Marc with misty eyes full of memories he was struggling not to lose, “But when I do remember things they seem… cold. Don’t they? Like old things, past things that aren’t really there anymore.”
Marc stared back and did not know what to say. He thought of home, every day, and while he remembered every brick, every well-worn corner to his house, it was strangely distant. He remembered times, events, and people in that house, but it was as though reading it from a book. He could read every page, know all of the stories, but he could not go there.
“When we get home,” he started, determined to sound like Mat, to know that it was true, “we’ll go to the diamond at Bainbridge Park. We’ll play a pick up game. Then go home for dinner.” He lifted his cigarette to his lips, and his fingers shook. “It’ll be alright.”
“Will it?” Lucky pressed his lips together, his dark eyes searching. Then he turned to watch the soldiers drilling in the meadow. “I’m not sure it will be.”
Marc smoked his cigarette down to a stub and dropped it. It fizzled in the mud. “I’m not sure, either.”
The soldiers raised their guns and thrust their bayonets in unison, like little wind up toys. They were not thinking about the drill. Perhaps they were not thinking at all.
“We can’t end up like them, Yankee.”
“No,” Marc replied, “we can’t.”

As Marc returned to the trench, the front was quiet. The light snow brought with it stillness, as though the war had heard winter’s coming, and respectfully lay down to let it pass. As night came on the sky was soft with hazy light, and the sounds of the front died beneath that dampening blanket. Yet Marc could still hear the droning of the shells and the gunfire, distant as if miles away, but constant in his ears.
Just across from the factory where his father worked there was a small pier that jutted into the Delaware river. The river ran deep there, and on the best summer nights of his youth, he sat at the edge of the pier and he fished for anything he could catch, watching the lights of New Jersey twinkle across the water, and the trains come and go along the bridge.
How could he forget it? Had he not spent twenty-two summers in that place? Was life not waiting there for him? But he remembered it as if he were looking at a painting, loving it, moved by it, yet not there with it at all.
He touched the shoring on the trench wall and ran his fingers between the revetments. There were no such things as piers and quiet summers here. They were, like the British soldiers drilling on the meadow, things that were lost.

In the bowels of the reserve line, he came across Sam Kelley, who sat with one hand over his eyes. In his other, which dangled between his legs, was his harmonica. He had not played it since Chess Hopkins had died two months ago, but every night sat with it, as if he hoped to put it to his lips again, and never could bring himself to do it.
Marc hesitated, watched Kelley, but the private was so immersed in grief he did not raise his head, so Marc moved on.
Grief, he had found, as much as love, was a sacred thing, which no one should intrude upon. But it was also a dangerous thing, it could swallow a man whole, just as the shell craters did, and he would disappear forever inside of it. For a moment, Marc imagined that Kelley might never play his harmonica again, that he might be swallowed, and it scared him more than the lifeless soldiers drilling, or even the dead lands.