The Thanatos Syndrome

everything else, but missed the silver. You see those handles?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œNot a white hand touched those handles until the war.”
    â€œIs that so?”
    â€œThat’s so. All you had to do was walk to a door and it would open; go through and it would close.”
    â€œIs that right?”
    â€œThe people around here were thick as fleas.”
    Lucy makes a sound in her throat.
    â€œYou can’t hardly get one of them to do anything these days,” says the uncle.
    We eat at one end of the long table in the dark dining room, taking fried chicken from the Popeyes bags. There is a pitcher of buttermilk, cornbread, and a tub of unsalted butter. The greens are thick and tender and strong as meat. The one light bulb winks red and violet in the beveled crystal of the chandelier. Dark paintings the size of a barn door are propped against the walls. They seem to be landscapes and bonneted French ladies swinging in a formal garden. They’ve been propped there since the war, too heavy to hang from the weakened molding. They must have been too big for the Yankees to steal.
    I ask the uncle about different duck calls. Lucy makes a sound in her throat. He begins to tell me, but she interrupts him.
    â€œYou can have Dupre’s room,” says Lucy. “I cleaned all his stuff out.”
    â€œFine.”
    â€œHe had his own room here his last year here,” she adds without looking at me.
    â€œI see.”
    â€œDo you know who slept in that room?” asks the uncle.
    â€œNo.”
    â€œGeneral Earl Van Dorn.”
    â€œIs that right?”
    â€œThat’s right. You knew he was from Mississippi—right up the river. One of our people. You know what he did, don’t you?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œAfter those frogs in New Orleans and those coonasses in Baton Rouge gave up without a fight, the Yankees occupied this place. Beast Butler made his headquarters right here. Buck Van Dorn came in with the Second Cavalry from Texas and ran them off. He stayed here until they ordered him to Arkansas. He slept in that room. He was a fighting fool and the women were crazy about him. Miss Bett’s grandma, the one they called Aunt Bett, like to have run off with him.”
    â€œThat’s a lot of foolishness,” says Lucy absently. “Come on upstairs, I have something to show you,” says Lucy, and leaves abruptly.
    But the uncle leans close and won’t let me go.
    â€œYou know what they’re always saying about war being hell?” he asks.
    â€œYes.”
    He leans closer. “That’s a lot of horseshit.”
    â€œIs that right?”
    â€œLet me tell you something. I never had a better time in my life than in World War Two. When I was at Fort Benning I lived for six months in a trailer with the sweetest little woman in south Georgia. She was an armful of heaven. When I was at Fort Sill, I had two women, one a full-blooded Indian, a real wildcat. She like to have clawed me to death. Do you know who were the finest soldiers in the history of warfare?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œThe Roman legionnaire, the Confederate, and the German. I read up on it. The Germans were like us. They beat the shit out of us at Kasserine. Don’t tell me, I was there. We shouldn’t have been fighting them. Patton gave me a field commission. I made colonel by the time we got to Trier. When I was at Trier I lived with a German girl for three weeks. They were putting out for anything you’d give them, but she was crazy about me. A fine woman! But Patton was a fighting fool. We whipped the Germans in the end, but it was because they’d rather us than the Russians. Patton took seven hundred thousand prisoners. I was in the 3d Armored Division of the Third Army. He wanted to take Berlin and Prague and drive to the Oder—the Germans would have helped us—but Roosevelt wouldn’t turn us loose. That son of a bitch Patton was a fighting fool. We could have gone to the Volga.”
    â€œTom!” Lucy calls angrily from the dim hall.
    â€œIf Roosevelt hadn’t stopped us, we’d have gone to the Volga and wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in now. We were fighting the wrong people.”
    â€œTom!”
    Lucy takes me upstairs.
    â€œHow much of that was true?” I ask her.
    â€œWhat? Oh, God, I don’t know. Very little. I stopped listening ten years ago. He made himself a colonel last year. But if I