Lunch-Box Dream Read Free

South.”
    â€œAnd stuff is happening at the battlefields now?”
    â€œLook.” Ricky unfolded a creased clipping of yellow newspaper that he slipped from inside one of the books in his suitcase. The headline read: “Civil War Battlefields Tour: Two Weeks of Leisurely Driving Through Famous National Shrines.” The article was dated April 5, 1953, and had been saved a long time by their father before he gave it to Ricky, who then kept it pressed between the pages of the atlas. The paper was browned at its edges and stiff. Ricky held up the map that accompanied the article. It was labeled “Highways to American History.”
    â€œAnd because most of the fighting was in the South,” he said, “there are lots of battlefields to visit.”
    â€œBecause the South lost,” said Bobby, pulling his own red suitcase out from under his bed.
    â€œThat doesn’t have anything to do with it,” Ricky said, sounding annoyed. “It’s because most of the fighting was down there. I told you that, too. The real big northern battle is Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, but we won’t be going that way. But some of the best are on the way to where Grandma lives. Even Kentucky has a couple. But Tennessee and Georgia, oh boy.”
    Bobby didn’t care so much, except that he was supposed to care. It was battlefields. The bluecoats and the graycoats. Cannon blasts and cavalry. Swords and pistols and flying bullets. You were supposed to want to walk around where so many fought and died.
    Ricky had already taken two shelves of their small bookcase for the Civil War. Worst of all were the collections of photographs their father had bought for him: bodies lying in fields, bodies in shadowy dens, bodies stacked next to one another near fences, bloated and unreal, their hips twisted the way they fell, their stiff hands reaching to touch something that wasn’t there. Did shovelers break those hands and arms and legs to get them into coffins? Bobby imagined the sound of snapping bone, the pop of swollen flesh. Or did they dig oversize graves and just shove the dead, body after body, into the trenches? Did chocolate men dig graves back then, too? Didn’t they have to, if someone told them to? Wasn’t the war about them?
    â€œWe’re going to see all these fields. Lookout Mountain, Chattanooga. Chickamauga is huge and right near Lookout Mountain,” Ricky said. “Kennesaw Mountain is outside Atlanta, which we’re driving through.” He started to breathe over his pictures.
    â€œNeat,” said Bobby, slowly opening his drawer of the dresser and looking inside at the folded clothes. “As long as we don’t have to take the bus. Chocolate people always sit behind you.”
    â€œWe won’t,” his brother said. “But that’s how they all come here.”
    â€œWhat do you mean? On the bus?”
    Ricky didn’t look at him. “Clam up and let me read.”

Friday, June 12
Five
Louisa
    Jacob rode the bus from Atlanta north to Dalton this morning. He left with my husband Hershel. Then Hershel will come back home and Jacob will stay in Dalton.
    It will only be for one week.
    Let me tell you about it.
    I went to the bus terminal with Jacob, in the colored door. The man at the ticket window must have been thinking about something else. After I paid him, he passed only a single ticket to Dalton through the hole and not a ticket back. “Next,” he said. But I didn’t leave my spot. I reminded him politely what I had paid and asked for the return ticket, and he apologized and pushed it through to Jacob.
    Jacob doesn’t own a fishing pole, but I had packed Hershel’s old lunch-box with Hershel’s tackle from when he was a boy in Dalton. It was settled neatly inside with socks in between. I told Jacob to be careful and not eat the baits and flies.
    He looked at the red lunch-box and laughed. “Weeza!”
    He had a