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didn’t understand. Glad she didn’t have to fight the demons. Glad her sleep wasn’t haunted by faces of men dying in the mud in France.
    Everybody thought the memories of the terrible things that had happened in the war should be faded away by now. All that had been years ago. They’d won the war, beat down the Germans, and come home. Life went on. The living had to go with it, and for a while he had. He and Nadine had been blessed with babies and had watched them grow into beautiful girls. Life was good, and the war memories stayed locked in a back corner of his mind.
    He hadn’t intended to ever let them out again, but for some reason the bad memories had started slithering out into his dreams. Then the dreams stayed with him even after he woke up in the morning, until any time he shut his eyes he could see the men on the battlefield calling out for help while their blood turned the ground red around them. He watched them die. His friends. Bo.
    He’d never seen Bo in France. He’d looked for him, asked others if they’d seen him, but they never crossed paths in the war. He didn’t know Bo had died there in the trenches until he got home. Yet often it was Bo who cried out to him in his dreams. Bo who reached for him. Bo who needed his help. Bo who was dying while Victor was living.
    Bo was his best friend when they were young. He couldn’t remember a time when Bo wasn’t there watching out for him. Making sure the dangers lying in wait along the path of life didn’t win over Victor the way they’d won over his brother, Preston Jr.
    Victor’s father said a man wasn’t your friend if he was paid to watch over you. He said that man was a servant, not a friend. It was true that Victor’s mother paid Aunt Hattie and Bo. Victor had always known that. It wasn’t a secret. More a matter of pride with Victor’s mother. And a necessity. Juanita Gale Merritt never enjoyed good health after her marriage. She said the Kentucky air weakened her, until by the time Victor came along she spent most of her time sitting in her chair by the window doing needlepoint. Aunt Hattie ran the house.
    Juanita’s family, the Gales, were well-to-do landowners in Virginia and, according to Aunt Hattie, not at all pleased when Juanita was swept off her feet and carried away to the uncivilized west by Preston Merritt. The family had insisted Aunt Hattie go along with Juanita. Aunt Hattie could have refused to go. She wasn’t the Gales’ slave even if her mother and father had been.
    Slavery had ended when Lee surrendered to Grant the year before Aunt Hattie was born. She was a free woman who could go and do as she pleased, but going west to Kentucky seemed a fine way to sever the ties with those who refused to forget the time when people of her color could be bought and sold. Plus she’d grown up with Juanita Gale and had watched over her for years, much as her son, Bo, grew up with Victor and watched over him. Money changed hands, but that didn’t keep affection from being exchanged in hearts.
    Aunt Hattie was more a member of the family than a servant. At least to Victor. And Bo was more brother to him than Preston Jr. Of course Preston Jr. had died when Victor was ten, and Bo had watched over Victor until Bo was eighteen and Victor was fourteen. Then Bo had joined a Negro league baseball team and traveled all over the country to play ball before the war. Victor had gone with Aunt Hattie to see him play once when Bo’s team came to Louisville. He was good. Hit two homers. But then Bo had always been good at everything he did.
    It was Victor who could never hit a ball much past second base. It was Victor who tripped over his own feet whenever he tried to run a race. It was Victor who had to have a sheet of paper and a pencil to figure up the right change to give customers at the store. It was Victor who had lived when Preston Jr., a true Merritt who could make any father proud, had died. It was Victor who had lived when Bo, the