![]() ![]() Even though I know the bones in that ground aren’t animal bones. Somehow we protect ourselves it’s the nearest I could come to imagining Nicaragua. Those long, flat fields of bone-fed green. Three years later when my sister talked about leaving Tucson to work in the cotton fields around Chinandega, where farmers were getting ambushed while they walked home with their minds on dinner, all I could think of was France. But now the farmers who grew sugar beets in those fields were blessed, they said, by the bones. In the sudden quiet after the evacuation the cows had died by the thousands in those pastures, slowly, lowing with pain from unmilked udders. They were the first casualties of the German occupation. Who knows why people do what they do? I stood on a battleground once too, but it was forty years after the fighting was all over: northern France, in 1982, in a field where the farmers’ plow blades kept turning up the skeletons of cows. Hallie is the one who went south, with her pickup truck and her crop-disease books and her heart dead set on a new world. I can only tell you my side of the story. ![]()
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