Snapper by Brian Kimberling Page B

he blasted an indigo bunting off a maple branch, the same bunting who gave him away. He took a shot at a cardinal but missed. Farther down the creek bedhe knocked out a flycatcher nest, AF28, with the mother on the nest lip and three nestlings inside due to fledge within twenty-four hours. He saw Rory watching him from sixty feet up, and he took aim, but he didn’t shoot. Rory was smart. He was probably seventy feet up just in case and keeping most of himself on the other side of a thick branch. Either way it would have been shooting gravity in the face.
    Killing songbirds is deeply illegal, even in Indiana. I couldn’t intervene, but I shadowed him back to his car, a pale blue Chevy Impala, and I wrote down his license plate number.
    I never reported it, though. At most he’d be heavily fined and stripped of his hunting license. But he’d surely guess who had reported him, and what if he was one of them?
    Every white middle-class Southerner in my experience claims some Confederate hero in the family tree. I have never understood this; even today you can sometimes overhear them bragging about the battles their ancestors nobly and gloriously lost. Uncle Dart had enough of this kind of lore to supply ten families. If even a fraction of it could stand up under scrutiny then I must owe my existence to some wildly glamorous Confederate brothel: there is no other way to weave so many illustrious warriors into a single genealogical line.
    My favorite among them was a private who stood six feet seven in his socks and served without distinction until late in the war, when he captured seventeen Union soldiers single-handedly. Asked by his commanding officer how he had accomplished this, he replied, “Aw, hell. I just surrounded ’em.”
    I had challenged Dart once, in Texas, over dinner. I was sixteen and had become absorbed in the Civil War thanks tomy high school history teacher, a fierce black woman from Alabama. I asked Dart, in my uninformed and adolescent way, whether he didn’t think that ending slavery was worth the cost.
    “Now that is a dumb Yankee question,” he said. “That is a question you got from your dumb Yankee high school.”
    “But wasn’t it worth it?”
    “Let me ask you a Southern question,” he said, laying his knife and fork on his plate, though he hadn’t finished eating.
    “Don’t, Dart,” said Loretta.
    “Let me ask you a Southern question,” he repeated. “Was it wise or humane to make four million people homeless, unemployed, not to mention uneducated, at the stroke of a pen?”
    It took me a moment to work out who he meant.
    “Is it a surprise that one hundred thirty years later a third of them are in prison and another third are living in ghettoes shooting each other? Do you include that in your cost of the war? There were cooler heads then. Plenty of cooler heads. But nothing can stand up to a crowd of sanctimonious Yankees wanting to feel better about themselves and damn the consequences.”
    “He means slavery could have been phased out, with job training programs and such,” said Loretta.
    “That’s not what I mean,” said Dart. “They teach you about Hiroshima in that school of yours? Nagasaki? Dresden?”
    “Yes,” I said.
    “Where do you think they got the idea for those?”
    “It was a war,” I said.
    “That’s right. And they looked back eighty years to when William Tecumseh Sherman went to Abraham Lincoln and said, sir, the way to end this war is to make the civilians suffer. I repeat,
make civilians suffer
. And then he burned Atlantato the ground. Now does that enter into your cost of the war? Showing the whole world how to mount unbridled barbarism on an industrial scale?”
    “I think the world would have figured it out eventually,” said Loretta.
    “But they wouldn’t have learned it from us!” said Dart, smacking the table with his open palm. It was only years later that I reflected that his short sharp statement could stand up proudly to any other