Flags in the Dust

Virgil Kane. That was the name they gave me, and I never traded it for anything — not a dollar, not a uniform, not even when the world shifted and the men who walked in grey came back home and found their homes gone, tilled into dust or swallowed by vines.

It comes in flashes now. The sound, the feel. The iron breath of the Danville train still in my lungs, as if I were made of coal soot and hammered rivets. I can feel the rhythm of the wheels in my spine when I lie too still at night. The way the earth trembled under the tracks in Yoknaptawpha County. She was a proud beast, that train — pulling more than men and cannon, pulling hope. And when Stoneman’s cavalry tore it up again, it was like pulling a vein from the chest of a dying man.

I remember the sound. Wood snapping like bones, steel screaming. Men yelling things you weren’t supposed to yell in the company of God, but God had turned His face away by then. Or maybe we just stopped looking. That was the winter when the hunger wasn’t just in the belly — it was in the eyes. In the way we looked at each other. Each of us seeing what could be traded, eaten, burned. Just barely alive.

By the time Richmond fell, we weren’t soldiers anymore. We were ghosts of the land, drifting through smoke and ash. May 10th, they say, but the day had no number to me. Just the colour grey and the sound of boots leaving, one by one, not marching anymore but wandering.

That night — the night — they drove old Dixie down, I could hear the bells from every corner of the South. Bells that rang for the dead, for surrender, for something we couldn’t name but felt in the marrow. They tolled like judgment, like memory made sound, and I swear even the trees listened. And the people sang — not in joy, not quite mourning either — somewhere in between, as if trying to stitch something back together with their voices. Something smeared between life and death. Some kind of cosmic, sonic smudge. Like a copper moon in eclipse when it goes behind a cloud.

Na, na, la, na, na, la.

It wasn’t a song so much as a conjuring spell.

We went back — me and Clara. She was quiet those days, folding grief into biscuits, into quilts, into the rhythm of our days. She didn’t cry, not where I could see. She called to me once, from the porch, in that same calm voice she used to hush the hens. “Virgil, quick come see!”

And I did. I ran out thinking it was a snake or a hawk come down, but it was him, looking straight ahead, mounted like an elegy. Robert E. Lee, riding past like a ghost still wearing his skin, and I didn’t know if I should salute or hide. My hands just stayed there, dumb as fenceposts. Clara ill, taken by typhoid, though we didn’t know it yet, her hands laying on the quilt like two of them roots dug up.

But you have to work. Work is the one thing the war left untouched. So I chopped wood, each swing a kind of forgetting. The trees didn’t care what side you’d been on. They burned the same. And the money? Paper rot. You could wipe your boots with it, but you couldn’t buy back the dead.

You take what you need and leave the rest.

That's what we said. That's what we told ourselves, but what do you do when what they took was the best part of you?

My brother, Thomas, was eighteen. Too young to shave clean but old enough to die proud. Took a rebel stand and never came home. A Yankee laid him in his grave. Quick, clean, they said. But death is never clean, not for the ones left behind. Mama kept his boots by the door, like he might walk in again. They’re there yet.

I work the land like my father did, like his father before him. There’s a rhythm in it — plow, sow, reap — that feels older than war, older than grief. But the soil doesn’t forget. It keeps everything. Blood, bones, seeds. Sometimes I swear it remembers better than I do. You can’t raise a Kane when he’s in defeat.

And the earth was silent, the way it gets when the sun is going down and all the light leans sideways.

Na, na, la, na, na, la.