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top. “Sicily?” he said, the word emerging as little more than a whisper.
    For a moment or two, the prisoner just stared, then he said,
“Ich verstehe Sie nicht.”
    “Sicily.” Louder this time.
    The man held his hands out, palms-up, as if for some reason he believed it was important to show they were empty.
    “Sicily. Was that where you got captured?”
    “Ich kann nichts verstehen.”
    “Were you
captured
in
Sicily
?” Marty moved a step closer, and the aura surrounding the other man’s body seemed to dissipate. “You were, weren’t you?”
    The prisoner glanced over at the men painting the barracks, who’d put down their brushes and were watching.
    “Nein,”
he said.
“Nein. Nicht in Sizilien. . . . In Nord-Afrika.”
    His eyes never straying from the prisoner’s face, Marty Stark slowly dropped to his knees.

SIX

    FRANK HOLDER had lost a lot in the last year, and one of the things he didn’t have any longer was the radio aerial on his pickup truck. The spindly little thing had gotten bent, and then it had rusted, and one day while he was driving into town to buy some cottonseed, it broke off and flew past his window, and he didn’t bother to stop and retrieve it. But he wished he had it, not because he liked listening to the radio—he found the uppity way announcers talked annoying, and considered listening to music a waste of time—but because the aerial would’ve been the perfect place to attach the flag he now had to drape from his side planks.
    His sense of himself as an American was all of six months old. Before that, if you’d asked him what he was, he might have given any number of answers, depending on who was asking, and none of them would’ve been “American.” If it was the preacher from Arva’s church, he’d say, “Nothing,” because he knew the fellow was trying to trick him into admitting he was a Christian. If it was somebody from Memphis or Jackson, he’d say, “I’m a redneck.” And if somebody from New York was fool enough to walk up and ask, he’d say, “I’m a Southerner, and you’re not, so why don’t you get on back where you come from?”
    He now would say he was an American because he wanted to find common ground with his son, and that’s how Biggie had always referred to himself in the letters he sent home before getting killed back in February at the Kasserine Pass. He’d said he was proud to serve with the boys in his company, who came from all over, and he never would have known them if they hadn’t all come together as Americans, to do what was right for their country.
Some’s from Michigan, some’s from New York, there’s fellows here from Indiana and California and a lot of what you hear about folks from them places is not so. They sound di ferent than us but they’re not. It’s hard to think your granddaddy fought a war against these people, but I’m glad they’re on my side now and me on theirs.
    That Biggie had felt the need to explain why he’d ignored his father’s wishes and enlisted was to Frank’s great shame. He’d told his own son that he was a goddamn fool and an ingrate, too. “Me and your momma,” he’d said, “what did this country ever do for us? We durn near starved to death back in ’33 and ’34, and ain’t nobody got a answer but to wear the Blue Eagle. You know folks was coming down here offering to buy babies if we’d rut one up? That’s right. Folks in big long cars, people that couldn’t have babies and wasn’t meant to, and they wouldn’t come inside, they’d stand out there in that goddamn yard and make a offer while they smoked a big old smelly cigar. Happened not once, but twice. Second time, the fellow’s wife was in the car herself, and when I told him to get his ass out of my yard and get it out fast, he shakes his head and says folks like us deserve to starve, that we’re too ignorant and backward to survive. And you mean to go die for that kind of bastard? You was sitting on the porch at the