An Ear for Good Luck

From the Field

They say losing an ear out here is good luck—good luck meaning you live long enough to leave this place. I don’t know who decided that, but I’d trade more than an ear just to see home again.

I joined in ’62. Three years now of blood, mud, and the kind of screaming that stays with you long after the guns go quiet. Sleep barely visits anymore. When it does, it don’t stay.

When we took Chancellorsville, we were certain it couldn’t last much longer. I remember standing there, smoke still hanging in the trees, and swearing I could smell collards cooking back in Georgia. I thought of pecan trees and red dirt and my mother’s hands, always busy with something good.

That was two years ago. Since then, we’ve only lost ground—and everyone I ever called a friend. Names I won’t say anymore because saying them feels like calling ghosts.

I want it finished. All of it. I want to see Momma and Pop again, my sisters too. I want to shake the pecan trees and wander the hills like time never learned my name.

Some days I’m not sure this war will ever end. Worse, I’m not sure who I was before it began.

So if good luck is what it takes—if that’s the price for leaving this place whole enough to remember who I am—then take the ear. Let it fall where it may.

I just want to go home.