Balm by Dolen Perkins-Valdez Page B

at a party how her deceased husband rapped messages on a table. He wanted more than a rap, but he would take even that.
    He waited. There was no clap of thunder, no darkening of the room as clouds hovered above the house, only the soft sound of the two of them breathing. Her body shrank, and he feared she might slip out of her chair. She was so slight. The lips moved, and though it was her voice—the same girlish vocal—there was something else.
    He waited, strung between his need to know and the scientific skepticism of his training. On either side, two lights summoned. He smelled something, detected an odor coming from his clothes. It was the same scent that had been with him the day he read the letter fromhis brother, the day he entered the enlistment office and paid money in exchange for his freedom. He opened his mouth and the scent slipped inside, moved over his tongue, passed a flap of skin into his nasal passage.
    A light shook on its string, its flame weak, but steady. He reached for it.
    J UST AS THE SPIRIT OVERTOOK HER , her own thoughts nothing more than a background whisper, she remembered the doctor’s name: Heil .
    I figured you’d make your way back to me .
    The widow’s eyes were empty, and Michael knew he was speaking to the spirit. His doubts slipped down a chute. He cleared his throat. Was he supposed to speak back?
    â€œI beg your pardon?” he uttered softly.
    No one has told you my name? You don’t know who I am?
    Michael shook his head. Laughter erupted from the widow’s mouth and Michael went cold. The sound was as familiar to him as any he’d ever heard. It pitched into high notes, went on for longer than natural. He focused on it, trying to fathom what his brain could not imagine. The laughter trickled into silence.
    Then, a whisper: I have missed you, Michael .
    Michael leaped up from the table, almost knocking it over. He reached over and shook the widow’s shoulders. She lay limp in his hands, her cheeks jiggling as he arrested her. “Wake up!”
    Her lips moved. Please sit down, brother. Control yourself before you hurt her .
    Michael released her and sat down. Though it was still the widow’s face, he could not look at her. The room went out of focus.
    â€œJames . . . ?” he asked, but he did not need proof. Suddenly there was no need to verify.
    I know why you came.
    Michael still did not look up. “You do?”
    You want to hear how it was. Well, not actually. It is not war you want to know about, but the things that go along with war. Where did we go? How did we carry on? You want to know about the mettle of a soldier. You want to know how we rose from the smoke of battle, not how we fell. You, of all people, know how one falls—the tearing of muscle and tissue. You want to know why one soldier banged his head on a tree until it bloodied. Why another talked to himself. The reasons behind the empty eyes in a soldier’s photograph. The nostalgia, not just for home, but for a more innocent time. After war, a man walks and talks differently. You want to know why. You want to know everything.
    We joined out of duty. We owed it to this land that had embraced our fathers and our fathers’ fathers. We owed a debt. Our country was ripped apart and we needed to set things right. These were the things we told ourselves before battles, in those hopeful spaces when we imagined we would survive it. And to survive it, we did everything we could. We set up tables and threw cards. We danced, caroused, and then prayed for forgiveness the next morning. We dressed each other’s wounds when there were none around to help. If provisions did not reach our camps, we ate grass and emptied long strings of it in the woods. We dreamed of women and spilled seed onto barren ground. We sang patriotic songs through bleeding, cracked lips, slept packed together on cold nights, gummed rotten hardtack. We walked until we could not pick up our