He remembered his dream of fish swimming in air, following the ghost of the bass.

Maybe the people of the valley had told their stories about the lake being a place of dying while they were there, he thought, and their words had been trapped in the tangled limbs of the trees and had stayed there to be heard in dreams. It was possible. In the war, he had heard voices of men long after they had died, had imagined their voices clinging to his uniform like grime.

Marvin Linquist.

Marvin Linquist had been like an older brother to him, guiding him along through boot camp and then in the fighting. From Kentucky. Tall. Strong. Made nervous laughter out of being scared. In quiet times, talked about his wife back home, their two children, the land he farmed, his games of baseball with a team of town boys. Bragged proudly about the long home runs he hit, about the crowd calling him Babe and how that had made him want to take everybody’s turn at bat, and damn the rules that said he couldn’t. Those who made the rules had never seen him hit.

Marvin Linquist had been such a yarn-spinner of stories that other soldiers found their way to him when there was a lull in the fighting. Made them smile, Marvin did. Made them write home to tell about Marvin and his stories, which was better than telling about killing and being killed.

When Marvin was shot—the bullet exploding through his spleen, his warm blood steaming in the cold air of winter—he had collapsed into Noah’s arms, had turned his surprised, paling face to Noah, had said in a whisper, “I wish you was God, Noah. If you was, I’d know I was going home.” And then he had nuzzled his head gently against Noah’s chest, like a child wanting to nurse. He had exhaled softly, a gurgled sigh. And then he had died. For the rest of the war, Noah had seen the angel-ghost of Marvin Linquist in acid clouds of gunsmoke.

Even now, Noah realized, he could hear Marvin saying, “I wish you was God, Noah.”

He stood, dried his hand across the front of his shirt. He took a sip of his coffee and let Marvin’s face take focus in his memory, like a pose in a camera picture. In the picture, Marvin was grinning, his mouth fixed in the way it always was when a story was about to spring from his tongue.

He thought of the trip he had taken to Kentucky a year earlier, tugged there by a promise he had exchanged with Marvin: if one died, the other would make a visit to his grave site, just to make sure the body had made it home. In a cemetery near the town of Paris, at a grave that seemed not long dug, he had found a small tombstone giving Marvin’s name and the dates marking the separation of his birth and death. Also, his service rank—Cpl., United States Army. A line of truth chiseled into the granite tombstone told his last story: He Gave His Life to Keep Life from Perishing.