In his own eyes, though, Jack was like a wooden toy train, his wheels set in their grooves, going round and round a short track. He hated that everybody in town thought he was like his father, hated that they thought he was a son-of-a-bitch, a hero, an eccentric, one of those men who came back from the war and was not the same, a man to be feared, perhaps scorned, perhaps idolized. Not a human being, but a mythical figure of their own creation. Something children might dress up as on Halloween.

But of course he was not the same, and anyone in town wouldn’t have been either, if they had seen the things he had. If they had lived in the mud and stench of the trenches and hung their helmet on a foot protruding from the wall of dead human beings that protected them, trying to get a little shut-eye, trying to sleep sitting up with their butt three inches deep in water and muck, while shells burst overhead and every five minutes there were screams, muffled sobs—like trying to sleep in hell itself. And the next morning, busting out of that trench and running headfirst into a storm of fire, screaming like a banshee because you were a Marine and (you were told) didn’t feel fear.

No, Jack was not the Jack Mickelson who had left town in 1917, the Jack Mickelson whose greatest trial had been the big football game against Merrill his senior year. He’d continued to play after breaking a finger, winning Pine Rapids the game with a fifty-seven-yard rush. But Jack didn’t even know that intrepid, proud “Jack Mickelson” anymore.

Sometimes he couldn’t help but feel it would have been better if his brother Chase had been the one to survive the war. Surely Chase, great artist that he was, would have brought more to the world than miserable old toy-train Jack Mickelson, whose best days were behind him.

In fact, since the war, Jack hadn’t been proud of much of anything, except for fathering two great kids and being, he hoped, a passable husband, despite his nightmares, despite the horrific things he’d done. He certainly hadn’t been proud recently when the county had asked him to be head of the draft board in this war, saddling him with deciding the fates of all the county boys. He rarely slept; when news came that one of the boys he’d classified as 1-A had been killed or wounded, he didn’t sleep at all. And he didn’t sleep when he thought of his son, JJ—Jack knew that JJ had joined the Marines both in spite and because of Jack, and he knew JJ was on Guadalcanal learning the same unspeakable lessons about life and death that Jack himself had learned in France.