She started over with one out of three sons and a buried pile of sweet
potatoes. The other two of each were scorched, litter and staple both.
Gunpowder and flambeau rent a scar across the republic, clay and flesh
red-gaped. Her heart hardened to a fist.

A month after the march, two night riders debouched from the wood to
have their way, hungry and carnal. Confederates. Tied him, her lone
remaining, to an amputee oak and cornered her in the burnt pantry. She
soul-mined them both, armed with shears. Never so much blood, it came
black as Texas crude. She put them in the ground, caparisoned in
soot-streaked grays, teeth yellowed. Her lone remaining, a boy full of
shrapnel, dug a two man grave in the soft spot where the sweet
potatoes had been. She dropped her crusted shears into the yawning
earth beside them, story thus entombed.

A century later, great-grandson Winston was born disfigured, his feet
curled club-like, purple and mean as twin bludgeons. But the
orthopedists un-contorted his destiny in the modern fashion. Staples,
pins, and fasteners riveted conformity from malleable flesh.

Thenceforth, he was preoccupied with underpinnings. A tripper of
metal-detectors, and wielder of his own. He had a top shelf model long
as two sabers and heavier. Summer of his 20th year, this wand went
crazy in his own backyard. First exhumed was a pair of antique
scissors. A corrosive like rust—but darker—froze the action. Big as
veterinary shears, they couldn’t be pried asunder. Winston limped over
to the clapboard house and laid them on the porch planks. There was no
longer anyone inside to tell him what story this was. Mother passed.
Never a father.

“What’s down there?” he wondered aloud.

He trudged back for more, his lurching gait like a ball and chain
manacled to his ankle. Shirtless and pale, he bore into the red earth
like a mite, shoveling on and on into split raw palms.  Six deep, the
shovel hit upon a metal tube, long and curved with an ovate throat:  a
scabbard vacant, but nevertheless full of wonder. Winston toiled on,
inspired, and next excised a white bone, ambiguous. Then tatters of
cloth. Other relics. Soon the shovel was insufficient for what lay
beneath.

“More firepower,” he told himself.

The backhoe was Komatsu, yellow as a Tonka truck. It rented by the
hour for half what he earned per. The front-end loader scooped out
troughs of earth for sifting, and Winston could work it well. Slowly
the carcass of history accrued on the front porch: the shears,
scabbard, a broken saber, a belt buckle, fabric scraps, the frame of a
six-shooter, more shards of bone.  Then, finally, he uncovered a
ribcage and two white bulbs of empty skull—imbedded fragments exhumed
as if from an opened scar.

The porch became his autopsy table. Under the naked bulb heroes were
assembled. Soldiers arranged out of excavated miscellany. Empty
cranium atop scraps of uniform, armament hung low from no hips.
Skeletons construed of artifact, fleshed of imagination. Cavalrymen.
Last-standers before the onslaught of Sherman. Relations. Sons come to
defend home and hearth from scorched policy, or so imagined. Winston
reconstructed them gutless on the wood planks.

Twilight gathered and he hobbled back into the 30 foot wide bowl,
ravenous, with him the metal detector. Below his feet lay the bygone
scrap heap of history, soon to be resurrected. So prophesized the
device, quickening his heart over treasure-rich soil. Surgical metal
tripped it, his own. He did not know then that he dug for his own
architecture.

The backhoe and he descended like tunnel drillers, earthmoving deep
into the night. They pushed on and on, past six feet, past prudence,
and found nothing. And then farther. Deeper. Dredging the russet soil
in profound swathes, heedless. Winston wanted more than scant slag. He
wanted the joinery between.

He found nothing and went to bed by the moon’s last wane. As he slept,
disinterred brethren bivouacked in his cranium, beguiling him.
Fire-ingestive and bellicose, with swords aloft. Tomorrow he would
unearth the bones of their warhorses, surely. And the clapboard house,
once white, weathered silver—he would repaint it bright as the day
ancestors died defending it. Least he could do. Its A-frame the
iceberg tip of a war beneath the soil, and thus imbibed of grandeur.
For such he yearned.

He woke to a foul stench. Outside, the dug bowl brimmed of sewage. In
the dark, the bulldozer had ruptured a pipe, precipitating the slow
accumulation of black sludge beneath starlight. He walked over to the
septic tank and tapped. Hollow. One thousand gallons bled dry. Winston
turned to look upon the backyard pond he’d fashioned.

“Shit,” he said.

A shape floated atop the septage. Winston fished it out with a
freshwater rod. It was a bird. Dead. Drowned in a lungful of feces and
urine, thinking only of rest. And not just any winged migrant, but a
swan. Trumpeter or Tundra he didn’t know. Neither anymore. A swan
stained black. Divorced forever from its mate. They were monogamous,
Winston knew that much. He knew the pain of rupture too. He brought it
over to the house and hosed it down, but the feathers would never be
white, the stain too deep.

Twenty years old, Winston clutched the polluted bird to his chest,
tight. The bone-structure was more delicate than that of his hand, and
hollow. Filled not of marrow or blood or steel, but air. Light enough
for flight. Perhaps the truest creature to arc the sky, and its death,
his doing. He, club-footed and clumsy, had drilled for the world’s
framework, eager for stature and stainless girding, and struck only
this.

He slogged to the other side of the yard, the soles of warped feet
carving half moons into the soil. There, far from cesspool and leech
field, he dug a proper grave, double wide, and in it reburied the
soldier pair, or what there was: articles of metallurgy and ivory. He
did his best to lay the remnants properly, shears included.

Into the chest cavity of one skeleton he placed the despoiled swan.
Razor-bobbed ribs clutched the creature like a heart transplanted.
This seemed good to Winston. The sullied creature fit cozy in the
man’s ribcage, and was protected. A museum may pay for such plunder,
but Winston believed himself the better curator.  Now he knew what
ground he stood.

He shoveled broken earth back over the grave, and it was done. But
there was nothing to be done about the pond. Not soon. The backhoe had
drained funds to nil. So in the migratory season, Winston kept vigil,
anchoring himself in a lawn chair for days, his back to the shore. In
his hands a 12 gauge shotgun, birdshot extracted from the shells. When
the imperial V passed overhead, white as glory, he defended them,
firing warning shots, blanks, like an antiaircraft gunner if warring
men could be dissuaded that easy.

But swans, they heeded, and no more fell victim to the mire.