CHAPTER ONE: A HOUSE BURNING

“Hide and watch, boy. You want to learn something, just hide and watch.” The Sergeant liked to say that; Robbie was hiding and watched him string a rope over the back porch rafters and tie it off to a bucket handle. There was gas in the bucket; the Sergeant was being careful not to get any on his clothes, probably because he was wearing his brown Air Force shirt. He had on his khaki shirt with the six stripes on the sleeve that Annie had sewn there for him.“Six stripes, one for each of us kids,” Robbie imagined. He had just been promoted to Master Sergeant and the stripes were blue and silver with a little star in the middle. He pushed the nylon parachute cord through a hole in a fat church candle and tied it off to a nail.

It was a hot day in July and the boy did not have a shirt on.“You’re going to be sunburned,” Annie had told him. Robbie didn’t care; he didn’t know what sunburn was. He could feel the sweat, though, coming out of his armpits, rolling down both sides of his small body and over his ribs and stomach. His forehead glowed, and more of the salty wetness dripped from the hair in front of his ears. It tickled. His feet were bare and dirty, and the grass between his toes felt cool in the shade. The shade made the smell of the lilacs stronger. A bee buzzed nearby, but the boy didn’t care, he liked bees. It was a honeybee, and he wondered if it smelled the Kool-Aid on his face. His brother Sean was allergic to bees, and his sister Eva was afraid of them, but Robbie always liked them.“Mama makes music and the bees make honey,” the boy thought to himself. The bush smelled as good as a bush can smell in July, and grew only a few feet from the porch of their sorry ass farmhouse on the outskirts of what was barely an Illinois farm town. The boy and his home were surrounded by green fields of tall corn.

The Sergeant knelt in the sawdust and wood chips strewn all around the old back porch, then cleared an area and lit the candle. As he stood, he turned his bald head and looked straight at the boy. The child’s dark blue eyes became dark blue saucers. The