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9 8 Y L I N E S COMPOSED AT BEAUFORT, SOUTH CAROLINA, A FEW MILES ABOVE PARRIS ISLAND M A R Y S T E W A R T H A M M O N D Five days have passed; five days with the length of five long nights, and nothing has changed, not I, not my brother’s mind, not the world’s. It takes ten days, the duty sergeant said, for discharge papers, and I unpacked, and waited. Mornings, I sketch boats nodding on the sun. Nights, I study a rare collection of antebellum mansions drawling around a quiet port with the musky smell of Hepplewhite and Adam on their breath. Afternoons, I spend at the Base Dispensary, waiting to see my brother, driving the eight-mile hyphen between morning and night cocooned in the car radio’s full-volume bravado. At the sentry box I present my Visitor Pass, reserved for families of graduates, the injured, the suicidal. Inside the Island’s barbered tropics, crew-cut grass and topped palm trees hung with hanks of untamed Spanish moss muster in precision through the azaleas and Birds of Paradise. Signs coming and going on the roadways boast We Train the World’s Best Killers, and platoons, fresh from bayoneting sandbag bodies, scoring hits on pop-up, plywood humans, drill and stomp to breakfast, lunch, and dinner shouting Oh, yeah, Oh, yeah, ready to fight, ready 9 9 R to die, ready to kill with all our will! Oh, yeah, Oh, yeah . . . I retreat, after each visit, to Beaufort and talk to ghosts, drawing comfort from Federal and Greek Revival dwellings, water-turned, catching breezes under discreetly raised white-columned porches, each a temple to love, because one Miss Judith (shall we call her) slept six months with Sherman to save her town from burning, or just because. In any case, the town was saved, to its everlasting shame. It endures, a tribute to the act of love, without honor, and curves around the bay like dirty linen for all the world to wonder why it is the only place untouched in all the path of Sherman’s holocaustic march. And Miss Judith? Was she the fairest and purest? Or maybe a young widow of three years and four months? Could the town do nothing to stop the collaboration, or did it not want to? Where is honor in a place captured and occupied? Consider the consequences: She climbed into Sherman’s bed, he didn’t torch the place, she was shunned, and the town became sire and heir of its shame. When Sherman withdrew, plugged in his place was a dildo of memory, each spared house, the heroine’s tabby A, on its chest, sealing the town in a borrowed time. Such a nice girl, the whisper runs down to this day. From one of our finest families, too. And he was no gentleman! As if that would make a di√erence. Ah, General. Cump, I understand they call you, for Tecumseh. If I may be so familiar. A coup, a stroke of genius hoisting them on your blade, dangling with the thought they honored you by their mere existence. Your face is saved in theirs, and their face unbaptized by the cleansing fire, is ruined. How you must have loved looking back as you 1 0 0 H A M M O N D Y and your army rode away, seeing your manhood risen tattle-tale white and glistening in the sun – not just one, but ten, twenty, forty houses with your seed pulsing through their halls and English basements, joining you to them, for so long as they shall stand. What more could any man want? Did you know fire would make them victims, that survival would destroy their face more than fire, would leave them for generations sipping bourbon on upstairs wooden porches staring o√ to sea, rocking tangled feelings in complaining wicker chairs, dwelling endlessly in their dwelling in their dwelling Or do I wrong him? Was the town his parting gift to Judith, given out of love? He did like giving towns as gifts; Savannah’s destruction he called his ‘‘Christmas gift...

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