Mother had sent me photostats of two letters Colonel Hartley wrote his wife after the Battle of Shiloh. (My aunt, recently remodeling the family farmhouse, found them tucked under dining room wainscotting.) I read the things hoping to understand my great-grandad’s character. But all he really ever mentioned were the awful conditions, his boys losing their teeth from simple malnutrition, his outrage over all of this, his feeble attempts to make things locally easier. That seemed the single thing he thought about. Rare mention of a Yankee. Only the salutation and endings of his bulletins threw her scraps, a sentence or two of something a little personal, stray emotions for his worried hungry wife left home, fending with six kids. It was always only The Front, only Care and The Cause.

“They cannot do this to us, Julia. This loss of life shall not be permitted to continue. What must our boy recruits think of such a God? He is surely setting, Julia, such a poor example for our young. Pray without ceasing for my charges and your too obdnt. husband, … Increase.”

Results

told Robert he would have to go and have The Test, and when he asked me why, I gently turned over his wrist and pointed to spot. It had now become two. They were black.

The look that then passed between us, the questions filed like knives in it, would take the rest of this lights-out fairy-tale story to unpack and catalogue, longer. “Who knew what when?” The Watergate hearings tried to answer. An impeachment followed. But the rushing questions still abound.

So, how did I become Emissary of Testing? And for them, not me? Hurt feelings? If it’d been a three-way on his kitchen floor, who knows how long we might all have drifted, unchecked. A busy bee erotically, I was not likely to accuse. My first simple impulse was to just save them both. If that casts me in the role of school monitor, well, they’d always considered me somewhat fusty, slow, and square.

I knocked on Angie’s door. I had not, as usual, phoned first. She bobbed out, but wearing a swipe of red paint across half her face; and I could see she didn’t much like being interrupted. “Call me Mr. Butt-insky, witch at the wedding. But it’s this—we have got to get you tested, honey.”

“‘We?’”

“Yeah, I think ‘we.’ To be so short, it’s a right crowded word, ain’t it? I saw a thing. Before you two were together, that one single solitary time, ever ever, right? … sorry, I saw a mark on our dear one. I’m not saying just because you … I don’t know, if things’re not done the usual way with guys and gals, if that’s better or worse or counts more … Nobody knows much of anything anyhow but … I will only ask this once. Did you ever wonder about it, your health, while you were with him? They say these days you should be careful … It was in the Voice. Warnings you’ve probably started seeing stapled to phone poles, Bama. It’s just, I love you both. Shouldn’t we go find out? If only so we can all relax, at least about this part? I am not being spiteful. This is the reverse of Bitch, girlfriend. These days, most of what I want to do is run from you two. But I’m right here. —Your Hartley here’ll do the legwork. Now you go right on back to making art, my wizardgirl. —Test or no test? Just give me a nod.”