A crowd of spectators was fast filling the bleachers on the opposite end of the field, so I crammed the certificate into my back pocket and galloped my way back to Dad. He was leading the last guy in line to take a quick wash with a Robert E. Lee soap in wagon water blackened by gunpowder.

“Where’ve you been?” Dad asked.

I suddenly felt bad for swiping the certificate, sure that he’d be mad I’d put my sticky fingerprints all over it.

“At the monument,” I said.

“Doing what?”

“Counting cannonballs.”

He gave me a look like, Well, how many are there?

“And um, I think there are a hundred forty-five.” No clue if I was even close, but I was relieved that the Robert E. Lee guy didn’t care to correct me. I pulled up a folding chair and took a look at the soaps piled in the bottom of the case. Now that I’d seen that certificate, the slivers took on a whole new radiance.

“Who all else you got in there?” I said.

“Tons. Have a look.”

I saw a creamy-white sliver marked I N sitting right on top.

“Who’s that?”

“Sir Isaac Newton. The man who discovered gravity.”

“And what about that F M one?”

“Ferdinand Magellan, the first guy to sail all the way around the earth.”

“And that?” I pointed to a blue L T.

Dad smiled. “That one might not be of much use to us here today, I’m afraid,” he said. “That’s Leo Tolstoy, Russian writer famous for being a pacifist. That means he believed in solving conflicts without the use of violence.”

Dad tumbled the soaps around gently to refresh my view. When he did, he uncovered a soap that so stood out, it was like it had a little glow around it.

“That T N one right there,” I said. “Is that a Toodi Nordenhauer?”

Dad picked up the soap to have a closer look, and I feared for a moment he might squish it in his fist.

“Sorry, Cass,” he said, with a shake of his head. “But no. This is Thomas Newcomen, inventor of the steam engine.”

“Oh…well then, do you have any Toodi soap?” I said, knowing full well I should drop the subject. Dad’s reddening face suddenly made him seem like he might become the human version of a steam engine. He squeezed the slickified T N soap with a fwit, right across the table.

“No, Cass, I’m afraid we don’t,” he said, wiping the Thomas Newcomen residue on his pant legs. “Surely there must be someone else you admire in this big world of ours.”

The crowd of battle spectators grew larger and louder in the bleachers.

“But how do you even know who’s what?” I asked.

“Say again?”

“How do you know what the initials stand for?”

“Here’s how,” he said, finding the tear in the lining of the suitcase and sliding his whole hand behind it, making a few of the slivers almost jiggle off their tacks.

Yeeks, I thought. He’s looking for the certificate. But then he pulled out a second folded document that looked to be just as old and crusty and official as the other one had. Dad unfolded it and handed it to me. This one was larger than the certificate, but the cursive written on it was so very tiny, and the handwriting unlike any I’d ever seen. It was an alphabetical list of names, hundreds of them, it seemed, each with its corresponding soap initials next to it. But before I could even read beyond Abigail Adams, I was startled by the shrill blast of a bugle from the far corner of the clearing. As it played a rousing song, the men stood stiff in rows. All the ladies rose to their feet, their shoes hidden by billows of fabric. Dad grabbed the list from me, and with a fold-fold-fold-tuck, it was gone.

“I see Tommy Hubler has masterfully commanded everyone’s attention,” said Dad, pointing across the field.

And sure enough, the young drummer boy stood straight and proud, a perfectly solemn call-to-battle rhythm coming from a drum he’d fashioned from a coffee can. Even the puppy stood still at his feet.

Soon after, the people in uniform took their posts. After the first chilling shot was fired, Dad and I spent the rest of the day sitting on a quilt at the edge of the battlefield, watching men who looked like living monuments charge at each other with swords and shoot one another with invisible bullets from smoky pistols. Throughout the skirmish, I paid special attention to the ones who had washed with our soaps. Stonewall Jackson led the men in gray. Ulysses S. Grant led the men in blue. Each one of them playing his part in such a powerfully real manner, it gave me a fearful stirring inside, as if I’d stepped right inside that schoolbook and was a part of history myself. Like I’d better choose a side quick and hope hard that my side was winning.

The woman who washed with Abigail Adams sent one Clara Barton after another into the field loaded with supplies, be it water, food, or blankets, for every need out there. More than once, a Clara would drag a collapsed man twice her size out of the line of fire. And all the while, Tommy Hubler played on. At one point, I even saw little Stubby bravely bound across the grass and bite the enemy on the ankle, right before the guy who used the John Wayne soap reared his horse up on two legs at the edge of the battlefield and told his men, “Courage is being scared to death and saddling up anyway!”

I felt a fresh twinge of sadness for each and every man who crumpled in a heap on the battlefield, and for each woman who rushed to a wounded soldier’s side. As more and more men lay across each other in the clearing, the sadnesses built up so that I could hardly stand to look. By the time the battle ended with a different, sorrowful bugle sound, there wasn’t a dry eye among the onlookers. When all was quiet and still, Abigail Adams passed me a tissue and a tuna salad sandwich, and Dad wiped his nose on a napkin.

“Amazing, isn’t it?” he said. “How something so pretend can feel so real?”

“Amen to that,” Abigail said, with a sniff.

And I guess I must have totally agreed with them, considering the immense relief I felt that the fighting was over. Once the final call of the drum sounded and all the dead had stood and dusted themselves off, I watched the participants mill about and shake hands. Several folks broke away to come thank us as we packed up our things. Dad was locking up the old brown suitcase, and I was kicking our table legs flat, when Napoleon Bonaparte stuffed his hand into the breast pocket of his gray coat and pulled out an old coin.

“It’s a genuine relic, worth at least twenty bucks,” he said. “A token of my appreciation for the inspiration today, Mr. McClean.”

“Thank you.” Dad looked pleased and more than a little surprised. In fact, he had a total Well, whadya know look about him.

“The suds will rise again!” he hollered out, and the folks around us chuckled.

Then the spectators made their way toward us, spilling their compliments.

“Most passionate reenactment ever. Stirring beyond words!” they said. And I could have sworn I heard Tommy Hubler call it awes, while Napoleon gave him a good hair-mussing.

“Land sakes, what a success,” said a purple-skirted Clara, her bun unravelings all stuck to the sides of her face. As a dozen civilians collected at the ladies’ table to enlist in the next reenactment, she said to me, “Darlin’, will you and your daddy be back here again?”

She stretched out her words slow and sweet, just like my mom.

“No, ma’am. I’m not sure where we’re going.”

Purple Clara’s skirt made a ding-ding sound.

“Pardon me,” she said, digging a cell phone from a side pocket. “That’s my daughter texting me from the beach.”

Just the mention of the word beach made me feel warm inside.

“From Florida?” I said.

“Nope,” she said. “Gulfport, Mississippi. I guess I should tell her everyone made it out alive today, huh?” She laughed, thumbing out her message super fast.

“I’m pretty sure Miss Barton never texted LUV YA to anyone,” a green-skirted Clara teased, yanking on Purple’s apron strings.

“Excuse me,” I said, looking over my shoulder to make sure Dad was still packing. “Do you all know how I could add more minutes to a phone? Ours ran out.”

“Oh, it’s easy,” Green Clara said. “Just get your daddy to buy you one of those refill cards. They got ’em at all the quick marts.”

“They got what at the quick mart?” Dad asked, sidling up next to us.

“Nothing. Just beef jerky,” I said, and more than one lady gave me a funny look. The mention of beef jerky put a hungry twinkle in Dad’s eye and a tiny twinge of liar’s guilt in my tummy. He gave the ladies one last salute before joining me for the trek back through the woods.

“Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees!” a soldier shouted to the crowd.

“They say those were Stonewall Jackson’s last words,” Dad said as we walked with some of the wounded back through the thicket toward The Roast. “Thankfully, these soaps only give people the good stuff.”

“So how do you know so much about all those people the soaps belonged to?” I asked.

“Six words,” said Dad. “En sigh clo pee dee uh. I’ve been doing me some studying.”

I helped him nudge the back end of the wagon over root after root. With each step stirring up the curiosity inside me, I decided there was no sense in holding back when it came to this thing called Sway. I wanted to know more about that stuff, and right then.

“Dad, what does bequeathed mean?” I said.

He grinned. “You found the certificate.”

“Yeah, it’s in my pocket. I accidentally put some smudges on it.”

“Now, don’t you go and mess that thing up too much,” he said. “That has a lot more historical significance than a SMART certificate.

“In fact,” he said, reaching out for the paper, “you better let me hang on to that.”

Dad and I tilted the wagon to let the last of the war drippings out, and climbed inside The Roast.

“I heard that freezing cold is a good way of preserving important documents,” he said, opening the fridge and sliding the folded certificate onto the ice tray shelf.

For someone to do something strange as that, I knew the certificate must be the real deal.

“So what’s M. B. stand for?” I asked him.

“That question uh-gane?” he said.

The last time I’d heard him pronounce again all fancy like that was when he beat me, Syd, and Uncle Clay by fifty points in Scrabble by spelling the word RESCUERS. “Would you look at that? I used all seven letters uh-gane,” he’d said, all proud.

McClean looked to the ceiling in thought. “Hmmm…perhaps the M. B. stands for Magic Bubbles.”

“Yeah, maybe,” I said.

That night, the smell of gunpowder and hot dogs breezed in through our open sunroof as I noodled in my book. A whole page of fiery swirls being shot from a cannon seemed right for the way I felt. Outside, a few of the sort-of soldiers lingered around a portable grill, telling and retelling the events of the day and how there’d been “new life breathed into the battle,” which seemed to me like such an odd thing to say. It wasn’t long before their talk and Dad’s snoring became just background noise to the thoughts hovering between me and the top of The Roast. I still wasn’t certain why people would want to relive something as ugly as war again and again. It seemed like the worst kind of permanent to me. Unless, of course, it was just a permanent reminder of how good it feels for a battle to be over.

As Dad made grumbly sleep sounds on the other side of the curtain, I wondered if he had ever really considered what it means to have a suitcase full of immeasurable power. I mean, if Sway was real, then who knew? Maybe it could bring our family back together somehow. Maybe put an end to our own battle.

After a while, the sound of Tommy Hubler’s rata-tattats lulled my wonderings out the roof. I made a list in my head of the days that I would want to reenact if I could. All but one of Mom’s homecomings, of course. The day Syd and I caught a chipmunk in the storm cellar. And this day, maybe.

With that thought lingering, I tiptoed into the bathroom, squeezed a blub of toothpaste onto my brush, and whispered just one word to the mirror.

Sway.

Saying it out loud was like recognizing my own face for the first time in a week, like the twinkly-eyed arrival of a million possibilities.