“Your voice will come. We all go through the same thing. You cannot talk when you first arrive.” He smiled. “It helps you listen.”
Eddie watches a man shovel dirt into a hole. The man says something about ashes. Eddie holds his mother’s hand and squints at the sun. He is supposed to be sad, he knows, but he is secretly counting numbers, starting from 1, hoping that by the time he reaches 1000 he will have his birthday back.
YOUNG MEN GO to war. Sometimes because they have to, sometimes because they want to. Always, they feel they are supposed to. This comes from the sad, layered stories of life, which over the centuries have seen courage confused with picking up arms, and cowardice confused with laying them down.
“But you…” He lowered his voice. “You lost your life.” The Captain smacked his tongue on his teeth. “That’s the thing. Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you’re not really losing it. You’re just passing it on to someone else.”
Ain’t you supposed to have peace when you die?” “You have peace,” the old woman said, “when you make it with yourself.”