They lived on the base in Fort Story through the winter of 1949, when Duane turned three years old and Gregg turned two. Both boys were active and Duane was already a precocious talker, repeating words he heard his parents say. His birthday was November 20 and Gregg’s was December 8, so Jerry picked a day to celebrate both at once. She bought two little cakes and the boys chose the color of their icing. Gregg asked for blue and Duane green. “Green icing?” she said. “Who ever thought of anything so ugly?” But that’s what he wanted and that’s what he got. The boys were given matching cowboy outfits with felt hats and real leather holsters to hang from their belts. The fancy black shirts had pearly snaps and the pants were trimmed in silver. Best of all, they each received a shiny silver cap gun and real smoke rose from the barrels when they were fired. An extra length of string had to be tied around Gregg’s waist to keep the weight of the gun from pulling down his pants. Duane and Gregg chased each other from room to room, galloping on invisible horses.

Bill drew an unpopular rotation and had to stay on base for Christmas Day that year, so Jerry drove the boys to Rocky Mount to visit her family for a couple of days. Duane begged to be suited up in his cowboy clothes, and loudly refused to wear anything else for the long drive to North Carolina. Gregg put on his cowboy hat and wouldn’t take it off. She said, “Suit yourselves,” and hustled her two little Hopalong Cassidys down the driveway.

On the way out of town, Jerry stopped at a roadside stand and bought fireworks. Duane and Gregg could barely sit still just knowing there was a bag of sparklers, bottle rockets, and Buck-a-Roo flashlight crackers in the car.

At dusk, Jerry took the boys and their cousins, Jo Jane and Ervin, into the backyard of their grandparents’ house to light the fireworks. She wore a little fur jacket over a red party dress, her curls piled high with combs, and when she lit the fuses and sent those paper rockets screaming into the sky, Jo Jane told her she had never seen anything so wonderful. The kids ran in the grass painting hot white circles in the air with their sparklers, until they bent and fizzled, and Jerry took the molten wires away.

The grown-ups settled around the kitchen table, Jerry and Joe sipping shooters of whisky, poured from a bottle kept in a paper bag under the kitchen sink, while Janie watched them gravely. Duane, Jo Jane, and Ervin lay on the living room rug listening to the radio while Gregg wandered alone into his granny’s bedroom and crawled under the bed to hide. Lying on his belly, he kicked his legs out like a frog and hit something with his ankle. It was too heavy to scoot with his foot, so he wiggled back out and grabbed the little package with both hands. In the light, he could see that it was a hard leather holster, a bigger version of the one he wore, and inside, a familiar shape resting beneath a snapped flap.

Gregg rushed into the living room with the long black pistol unsteady in his hands, the weight of it pulling him forward, the barrel weaving wildly, and exclaimed, “Gee! A real gun!” Duane jumped to his feet and Jo Jane followed. Ervin stayed frozen on the floor and watched openmouthed while Gregg pulled the trigger.

The bullet struck the brick mouth of the fireplace with a force that sucked the air out of Gregg’s lungs and knocked him into a sit. The sound was so loud, it left a hum that rang through his ears for a long time. That shocking crack became his earliest memory, the blast and the weight of the gun against his lap. Jerry descended on him, a fluttering flock of bodies behind her, yelling and whooping. The gun was taken away and Gregg was in her arms, squeezed and held and rocked, his soft little body folded into her, her warm breath on his forehead.

The next night, the boys slept slumped against each other in the backseat on the long drive home, Jerry navigating carefully through the darkness, her mind still clutching the moment she heard the gunshot and didn’t know where the bullet had gone. It made her dizzy and she turned the radio up and rolled her window open a crack to feel the cold air on her face. She was so tired, only wanting to lay the boys down in their beds, change into her nightgown, and settle in to wait for Bill. It was just after ten o’clock. She imagined he had gone out for drinks with his friend Bucky, as he often did. She wanted to tell him about the gun. She needed to get the sound of that shot out of her head, and stop thinking of what could have happened so easily if it had pointed any other way. Her heart was in her throat as she drove as fast as she safely could.

She was startled to see the post commander and his wife sitting grimly in her living room when she opened her door. She could see they were shaken. The feeling in her stomach tightened. Bill was hurt. She turned from them and rushed to change out of her traveling clothes. Whatever had happened, she would go to Bill now. The commander called out to her, stopped her, and stammered, “He’s been shot, Jerry. Bill is dead.”

Jerry ran into their bedroom, shook off her slacks, and changed into stockings, dress, and coat, pushing every thought away. The commander’s wife stayed behind to watch Duane and Gregg. The commander guided Jerry to his car, then into the hospital, and down the corridor to the waiting room. She felt half blind; her eyes and her mind seemed disconnected. She was asked to wait.

The hospital was horribly cheerful, with a little evergreen tree covered in tinsel and greeting cards arranged on the nurse’s desk. She didn’t want to look at any of it. Behind closed eyes, her mind began spooling out her life with Bill. The horrible sound of the gun was still pounding in her ears. Bill must have heard an explosion just like it, the last sound he would ever hear. The thought made her ache. She felt the memory of the shot’s sound cut through her chair and into her back. She bent forward and pressed her folded arms against her lap. Then someone rested a hand on her shoulder and asked her to come identify her husband’s body.

The Oriental Gardens was a bit of a dive, with multicolored Christmas lights flashing over a long greasy bar, and a shuffleboard table in the back. When their shift on base was over, Bill and Bucky went for a beer and a game, just in time for happy hour. Bill sprinkled sand across the long wooden shuffleboard table and sent his red puck gliding down the edge without tipping off the far end. He twisted his wrist with a flick, saying, “Bucky, you’ve got to put a little English on it!” The disk spun back toward him just in time and Bucky laughed at the easy perfection of the maneuver. He was an easygoing guy, not long back from Europe, and Bill liked how calm he was and how he never tried to talk about the war, even though they both felt the experience between them, like a numbed wound. Bucky rushed through his own turn, his black puck bounding off the side in a blur. Bill smirked and patted Bucky’s shoulder.

A man walked up and asked to join in, and they welcomed him. A few people had gathered around a tuneless piano by the back door and began to sing. After a few rounds of play, the man walked away before his turn was done, then came back after a half hour or so and asked for a lift to a bar down the road. Bill and Bucky finished their pints and agreed. No one should have to walk alone from bar to bar. The man had been in the service; you could tell by the proud way he walked squared-off and tall. He didn’t say much, just that he could use another drink and maybe another chance to redeem himself at shuffleboard, so on they drove him to the C&C Bar and Grill. They played two quick games and said their goodbyes. It was getting on to nine o’clock, but the man asked again to be taken to one more place, Jimmie’s Drive-In Grill, just a little farther down the road.

Bill nodded and they walked into the parking lot. Bucky opened the passenger door to the man, but he insisted on riding in the backseat of the car.

Just as the pink glow of Jimmie’s neon sign came into view, the man leaned between Bucky and Bill and asked a little loudly to be taken home, to a little lane off Sewell’s Point Road, a name he pronounced souls point. As Bucky made the final turn, the man pushed a gun into his ribs and said, “This is a holdup.”

He ordered them to stop, get out of the car, and remove their shoes. As they slowly raised their arms and edged out into the road, twin beams of light rushed over them, a car approaching from the other end of the lane. The man yelled at them, “Get back in the car!” They crouched quickly back into the front seat for a moment, exchanging a quick glance before the man was leaning between their seats again. He ordered Bucky to roll the car back into the adjacent lane until they faced Sewell’s Point Road again. He shook the gun in a frantic wave and said, “Get out of the car! One at a time!” and they did. By the little light mounted over the license plate, the man looked through their billfolds and took most of their loose change, letting a few coins fall in the dirt. He shoved the four dollars they had together into his pocket with his fist. He made them remove their shoes and marched them along the road’s edge toward a grove of trees. He ordered them to lie facedown on the black ground, at a distance from each other.

Bucky begged, “Don’t shoot us, buddy.”

He said, “You know my name, so here is where you get yours.”

Bill lunged for the man. A loud popping sound made Bucky jerk his head to the side to look behind him. Then he heard a second shot and saw Bill running into the trees. He was calling Bucky’s proper name, “Robert!” and he yelled back to Bill, “Run!”

The man had disappeared in the darkness, and Bucky leaped to his feet and ran toward a farmhouse at the head of the lane. A light in a single window, a golden bounding square in front of his eyes, led him as he ran. At Bucky’s pounding, an old man opened his front door a crack and said quickly, in a strange, formal way, “I am sorry. I am unable to help.”

In deepening shock, Bucky ran back to the road, a sick metallic taste in his throat, until he saw his car and called out again, “Bill!” He heard the car door slam and called again, “Bill!” There was no answer but he could hear the car door open again and footsteps moved toward him. He stepped back from the gravel road as silently as he could and saw the silhouette of the man turn and get back in his car. The door slammed and the car sped away, leaving Bucky alone in silence.

Bucky had no memory of it later, but he must have run down the lane to another house and used a telephone to call the police. He did remember sitting in a kitchen by a blackened oil stove and looking at his watch: It was only nine-thirty. It seemed impossibly early.

Several policemen searched for a long time, walking close together in the furrowed field. They parted at the trees, stepping carefully and sweeping the grove with flashlight beams. They found the body of Lieutenant Allman facedown with a bullet in his back.

Later that night, the police found Bucky’s car parked outside a silent wood-frame house three miles from the crime scene. An elderly couple led the officers to their son’s bedroom, where they found the man asleep in bed, his warm gun under the pillow.

Robert described the whole scene in an official statement. A copy was given to Jerry, typed on onionskin paper and signed. He told her as much as she could stand to hear before the funeral, and most of the story ended up in the newspaper. Jerry read that Bill wasn’t the only man who carried the war home inside him. His killer was a fellow serviceman, still fighting invisible battles in his mind. He shot Bill without a thought.

In his confusion and sickness, he took Bill away from his family forever.

Jerry didn’t have any interest in his trial or punishment, although she attended the proceedings with a soldier appointed to sit by her side in the courtroom. She heard Bill’s killer sentenced to life in prison, but it didn’t matter what happened to that man. Nothing would bring back Bill.

Sixty years later, Duane’s cousin Brenda gave me an original copy of Robert’s signed police statement. She mailed me the fragile, yellowed pages that describe the day my grandfather was killed. I try to imagine what it felt like for my granny to read the words. The statement gives just enough haunting detail of the crime scene to fire one’s imagination, but my granny doesn’t think that way. She protects herself by staying in the present now, defiant of memory. “I’ve got better things to think about,” she says when I ask her about Bill. “That was a hole I fell in. And my son was another hole, but you can’t live in a hole. You have to heal.” She likes to think of riding her motorcycle, the wind clearing all the ghosts from her mind. She says riding was the joy of her life. She speeds away from the patch of dirt where Bill no longer lies; her body leaning into the curves in the road, she leaves it behind her.

She is stronger than I am.

Bill and Jerry had made it safely through the worst danger they would ever face; that was what she had thought when he made it home from World War II. Bill was a survivor and her fears for him were long over. In Normandy, Bill marched through waist-deep water with one hundred pounds of gear on his back and a steel helmet on his head. He crawled through sand with machine-gun fire whistling by him, and saw his friends killed where they stood. He saw ships blanketing the English Channel and fighter planes filling the sky. Sirens screaming, huge engines grinding and howling while thousands of shots deafened him. And then he made it home. But he let his guard down in Virginia, on the night after Christmas. He didn’t see the bullet coming for him.

Bill’s coffin was draped with the American flag. Soldiers stood in full dress uniform, faces wooden and expressionless. Jerry recognized many of them from the base, from picnics with their families and children’s birthdays on the beach. She had never seen them look so stern. Her sister Janie sat beside her. Bill’s mother and father stood at a distance wrapped around each other in a rare moment of tenderness, their sons beside them—Sam in his uniform and young David in his first suit.

Duane and Gregg: This was the first time in hours she had let herself think of the boys. The weight of them was resting on her chest like a stone. “Where are the boys?” Jerry asked Janie.

“Safe with your housekeeper, remember?”

A trumpet played taps, ceremonial shots were fired, and the flag from his casket was folded and presented to his mother, who pressed it to her chest. Soldiers marched in formation and Janie rubbed Jerry’s back in quieting circles. Now Bill’s body would be sent to Tennessee on a train, and buried at the Nashville National Cemetery in a silent sea of identical white headstones.

Duane’s cousin, Jo Jane, wrote a short story about where she, Duane, and Gregg were while their parents were at Bill’s funeral. Duane was wiggling in his seat wedged between Jo Jane’s little body and the familiar curves of their housekeeper. They’d been in this car forever, circling downtown, winding through the empty streets under garlands of holly, passing the same store window with a mechanical Santa nodding and waving.

“Where’s Mama?” Duane asked again. Every time he asked, he was told he’d see her soon, but soon wasn’t coming and he was getting mad. “Where’s Mama?” he said a little louder.

Jo Jane put her arm around him and told him to hush and they would get ice cream. Gregg was in the front seat on a strange woman’s lap, his white blond head resting on her dark brown shoulder. Gregg furrowed his brow and whispered, “Where’s Mama?” in his lispy baby way. Duane didn’t know who that skinny lady was, holding his baby brother, or who the man next to Jo Jane was, either. That man had dark skin and black hair plastered flat against his head. One shiny gold tooth peeked out from his mouth and Duane couldn’t stop staring at it. He wanted to ask how he got it, but he didn’t.

Their housekeeper’s husband was driving all over town, even though it was cold and crowded in the car. Duane knew him all right. He had watched him help his daddy change a tire on their car. He was a soldier like daddy, even though he was colored. There were colored soldiers, too, his daddy said. Duane kicked the back of the front seat as hard as he could and Gregg’s eyes opened so wide they looked like they might pop out.

“Take me home!”

“Duane, you been told, now. We are going to get ice cream, baby.”

She squeezed him against her bosom and rested her warm hand on his head and he settled for a minute. No one would really talk to him, or look him in the eye. No one but Jo Jane, but she was just a kid, too. She treated him like a baby, but he wasn’t a baby. He wrapped his finger around one of Jo Jane’s long brown ringlets and watched it tunnel into the shining softness. She turned her pretty face toward him, her blue eyes serious.

“Your mama’s at the funeral,” Jo Jane said. “For your daddy, remember?”

“Look at that Santa, baby! Isn’t he pretty?” the woman he didn’t know in the front seat shouted out.

“I ain’t no baby!” Duane yelled back.

Duane felt the horrible thing that happened in the night lingering into the day. People he didn’t recognize came and filled up his house and now he wasn’t supposed to go home, and his daddy was gone. His mama had told him. His daddy had gone to heaven to sing with the angels. Nothing made any sense.

The car stopped in front of a small whitewashed building with a hand-painted sign over a sliding window and a few picnic tables tilting in the sand. They were far away from home, on the other side of town.

“This ain’t the ice cream place,” Duane said.

“Baby, this is where we get ice cream, and it’s just the same.”

“I want vanilla!” Gregg shouted.

“I don’t want any,” Duane said.

“Oh, come on now, honey. Don’t be that way.”

“Just get him chocolate,” Jo Jane said. “He’ll eat it. Can I have a Coke instead of ice cream?”

By the time they got back to the base, night had fallen on Jerry like a heavy thing and she couldn’t keep her eyes open. She lay in her wide bed and turned away from the space beside her. She couldn’t feel him here. Shouldn’t she still be able to feel Bill close to her? She couldn’t stay with the thought of Bill, or his spirit and where it resided now. The emptiness beside her yawned and sank in like a hole. She grabbed on to the one golden image in her mind—their boys. Her boys. They belonged to her alone now. Their sturdy little bodies, their pale and perfect skin, and sweet smells: She would think only of Duane and Gregg and all it would take to protect them. They would be her strength tonight and every night to come.

The next evening, Jerry dressed her sons in matching corduroy coats and brim hats with earflaps snapped under their chins. She kissed their fat cheeks and didn’t let herself cry. They would return to Rocky Mount with Joe and Janie until Jerry could get her mind straight and decide what was next. She had been told she would have to leave the base in less than a week. When she saw Duane and Gregg again, somehow they would have a new home in a new town, the three of them alone.

On the night drive back to North Carolina, a ripple of panic passed through the children. Gregg began to cry that he was thirsty. The sodas and bottle of milk Janie had brought for the ride were finished and they were at least an hour away from any town. Duane and Jo Jane sat in grim silence listening to Gregg’s steady whining. By the light of the moon, Janie spotted water flowing over rock, a small waterfall by the road. Joe pulled over onto the soft shoulder and took three empty soda bottles and Gregg’s baby bottle to fill them with the icy runoff. The kids wiggled out of the car and into the night, Janie yelling after them to get back in the car, or at least button their coats. They lined up like three little frogs squatting next to Joe, and watched him dip the mouths of the bottles into the flow. They huddled together in the total darkness and tasted the sweet water, colder than the winter air, each holding their bottles for themselves. “You see?” Janie said. “The Lord will provide. Now get back in this car.”

I was a teenager when my mother first told me about Bill. She told me a hitchhiker had killed Duane’s father. That is how she described him: Duane’s father. She did not say “your grandfather.” I was well into my thirties before I saw my first photograph of Bill. I was clearing a box of magazines out of Granny’s garage when I found an old folder of photographs. One of them was a formal portrait of a soldier in a baggy uniform and lace-up boots, sitting with his legs crossed. I knew who he was without asking. He had my father’s eyes, and mine. I saw in an instant that Duane and I shared something far deeper than our features. I knew something true, something no one else could ever tell me. Duane and I both knew, from the most fragile age, that death is real and sudden and the loss never ends.

When you lose your father, everything he could have given you is lost. With Bill’s picture in my hand, standing in the dusty garage of my father’s childhood home, I knew what my father had felt; the pain I had always suffered and hidden, he’d shared. The deepest hole I ever fell in, he had fallen in, too. We were together in all the things we could never know about one of the people we could have loved the most. I felt my father close to me, looking over my shoulder at Bill’s face.