Alexander Hammil has a moment of clarity, when he is red with blood to the waste and when the shrieks of the boy are still echoing off the parlor walls and ringing through the streets, a moment of pure awareness when he recoils in horror. Then he pushes on. The war must still be ended.

He takes the still warm skin from the child’s back and spreads it across the frame, pulls it taut. It lacks the shape of life, but the image is clear, North and South in matrimonial dignity beneath a spreading tree, the work of agonizing hours. He settles himself beneath it and cuts his own throat, quick and clean with a knife.

It will be days before they breach the walls and find him, but Death and History are there before the knife has fallen to his lap, have been there for hours, have always been there, watching.

“So unnecessary,” says History, revolted. “The Union will survive. The Union was always going to survive.”

“Let him have this moment,” Death says. “He tried, poor thing.”

History shudders and turns her eyes away. The Union survives, and Alex and his victim are forgotten, a gory footnote in a gory century, two minor deaths lost amid the noise.