The world changed, around Shiloh. The sky tried on shades of gray, each darker than the last, as if dressing for a funeral. Time dawdled and seemed to fall behind. Time stopped in the middle of the road like a soldier who’d been shot but not killed and left alone to fend, but no longer knew what it meant to fend, or anyway had not the strength for it.

The trees were alive, if nothing else was; they were long-limbed and so expressive as to have gone speech one better. Limbs flew to the sky, in exaltation, and limbs reached to the ground, as if to begin digging a new way home. The trees were sinners testifying and congressmen speechifying, they were generals pointing the way to heaven, or hell, or Corinth, Mississippi. The trees cracked whips and they curtsied, too; they gave the victory sign and the peace sign, called for another round of that old soldier’s joy, and they gave God and other side the fine middle finger.

Ivy Coldwater drove through the grounds, past siege guns and statues of dying soldiers, and a statue of a mother, sitting, with a fierce grip on a sword in its scabbard; you couldn’t tell whether she was there to take away the boys’ playthings, so there be war no more, or was about to join the bloody fray herself. Either way, Ivy thought, there would be proper hell to pay when she came down from up there.

And on past cannons and mortuary monuments, and another monument, seventy-five-feet high, dedicated to the eleven Iowa regiments, on top of which was an eagle, poised on a globe, and at the bottom, a woman, twelve feet tall in bronze, black silk-draped, it seemed, and reaching for the monument, pen in hand, to write some loving words about the brave lads who had fought and died and done their best to fend on the Hawkeye State’s grateful behalf.

Ivy left the park and circled back, past a trailer with a Confederate flag out front, and a handmade sign that said:

FOR SALE
BATTLE FEILD RELICS
BULLETS
MINNIE BALLS

There was an arrow on the sign, pointing toward the trailer with the Confederate flag flying. There was a man out front, in boxer shorts and a wife-beater T-shirt, sitting in a lawn chair drinking beer from a quart bottle and looking down at his dog, or someone’s, as if it, the dog—a mutt, the color of the day—had uttered something against the man’s flag, or his drawers, perhaps his spelling. Ivy would not have put it past the dog to have the gift of speech and the man not.

The man waved when he saw Ivy watching. He didn’t seem to think it strange that Ivy’s old Caddy was painted black, with white road stripes the length of the hood, roof, and boot. Ivy Coldwater was a folk artist out of the Mississippi Delta, on a search for meaning—or proof, perhaps, of the absence of meaning.

She drove on, back through the heart of the grounds. She parked the car, walked and wandered. She ducked into the woods and peered out from the brush to see what it was like to stare down the barrel of a cannon, to look inside death’s gaping maw, its parched gullet, to see the meaning there, if meaning there was. There was not. It was dark, was all. Death is not this living thing, this beast, she thought, but just the standard outcome of life. Death was the sound at the end of it all, the great thud. Death was nothing. But a mean fucker, even so, was death, she thought. Such were the revelations, such as they were, of Ivy’s search for meaning or its absence.

Ivy stopped and studied stone carvings of battle scenes and plaques that told of the bloodletting there, of how many died and from whence they hailed. Much solemn to-do was made of the death of Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston of the Confederate side, shot off his horse, Fire-eater was his name, at two in the afternoon and then brought to die, bleed out, in a ravine not far away. Ascending then to the command of the Southern forces was the general with that Southernmost of Southern names, by way of far-off France: Beauregard. Ivy didn’t know any actual Southerners named Beauregard, only some dogs. She bet the dog back yonder had such a name—Beauregard, or Jeb, or Fighting Ned.

On she walked, with a mist of rain starting to fall. On to Bloody Pond, then to the Confederate Burial Trench, and on over to the site of what was the Union Burial Trench before they dug up the bodies for proper burial in the national cemetery. And then the national cemetery itself, with its stately black and gold gates, and those rolling hills of dead, with all the symmetry and beauty that war, messy business, lacked. It would have been redundant to paint a picture of it, for that’s what it was; no, more than that—it was a painting of a picture of a dream of a memory of a prayer of the world’s most dangerous lie, Ivy thought: that God watched wars like men watched football games, and had a little money riding on the outcome. Ivy thought of God in the cheap seats, watching. God, waving the pennant of his favorite team. God, giving two goddamns as to the outcome, or maybe already knew it, the outcome, and had lost interest in the game altogether.

Running alongside the cemetery was the down-sloping road to Pittsburg Landing. It was there Ivy saw the soldier, standing on the side of the road. He was leaning on his one good leg and grinning for no good reason that Ivy could see.

She asked him was there some kind of re-enactment going on.

The soldier said, “A what?”

David Wesley Williams is the author of the novels “Everybody Knows” (JackLeg Press) and “Long Gone Daddies” (John F. Blair). His short fiction has appeared in Oxford American and elsewhere. He lives in Memphis with his wife and, at any given time, a retired racing greyhound or two. davidwesleywilliams.wordpress.com