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I looked away, toward nothing. Thought of Faye Tanner back in Tonawanda.

I didn’t need to think on that one long; later, I’d hear that beyond a shredded sleeping bag and a few body parts, there wasn’t much to see. I shook my head sideways. That wasn’t Skip Muck back there in that foxhole. Skip Muck was sitting on the floor of the PX with me, listening to the Mills Brothers sing “Paper Doll” on the jukebox. He was getting my food for me when my legs had given out on the march to Atlanta. He was swimming the damn Niagara River at night, a thought that made me want to laugh and cry all at the same time, the crazy fool.

I did neither.

“Thanks, Roe. I’m fine.”

He reached into his pocket. “Here,” he said, pressing the cross of some broken rosary beads in my hand. “He’d want you to have it.”

I held the cross in my hands for who knows how long, frozen like a statue. A few hours later, Roe came to see me again. I was staring off at nothing, still holding that cross.