“I know what they did,” she said. In her notes she could track the hours when the enemy had crossed unseen past their front and flanked them, the hours when the entire corps, including this regiment, had thought itself safe and taken a rest, prepared some food. The hours of the rout, the slaughter, the disintegration; the hours of separation and chaos; the hours of terror and then the days afterwards. Because she could not trace Vic’s fate directly, she’d decided, not to erase him from the record, since there was no record, but to pleat his experiences in with his brother’s, in that way preserving at least some of what he did and felt. After tunneling through her notes many times, she thought she’d found a way to combine the two brothers’ experiences so that in her version, when she wrote it, a single Deverell would have been shot three times, a ball through each arm and a third grazing his head, which had left him lying among the dead in a copse that had caught fire when it was shelled, burning so fiercely the men had burned too, leaving Deverell and several companions to be pulled aside and later brought to a low-lying cabin where the ground on which they lay unattended had been flooded by the rain.

As the men, who came from this regiment and others, lay waiting for rescue, a huge balloon would rise to the east, and although the observer inside would be invisible (she had to imagine this carefully, as the wind had been too strong those days for an actual balloon to have actually risen: but some men claimed they remembered one), the men lying there, burned and wounded and wet, would be comforted by the knowledge that one person at least knew what they were going through. Down the tethering line would slide a note enclosed in a little capsule that, when it made its way to the officer waiting for it on the ground, to the general back across the river, perhaps finally to the president himself, would make their story clear.

Henrietta and Her Moths

HENRIETTA AND HER MOTHS

FOR A CLUB GATHERING LATE IN THE SPRING, HENRIETTA chose rosy maple moths, which Marion loved. A moth like a flower, a moth like a doll: the body furred in soft yellow, legs and feathered antennae bright pink, dark eyes shiny above pink and yellow wings. She had some pupae just ready to open and the afternoon’s program planned, before discovering she’d have with her not only Marion but also her two other nieces.