America has two national holidays that honor those who have served, Veterans Day and Memorial Day. The former is for the living; the latter is for the dead. How we remember, honor, and judge the dead was on my mind as I wrote Halcyon, a novel that imagines an alternate America in which a scientific breakthrough has allowed a few of those dead to again wander among us. What follows is an excerpt that foregrounds questions of national memory, in which the novel’s narrator, Martin Neumann, encounters the World War II hero and renowned lawyer Robert Ableson considering his military service and the symbolism of our national cemeteries. Halcyon is about the intersection of individual and national memory, which is what Memorial Day is about too.

Oak Ridge Cemetery was as its name described. The headstones were interspersed among the ancient trees, and the ridge was one of many that bracketed the northeast-by-southwest-running Shenandoah Valley. It lacked the grandeur of Arlington National Cemetery, where Robert Ableson’s military service had entitled him to a plot; instead, he had opted for this quieter and less trafficked place. Before his wife, Mary, mentioned the grave, it had never occurred to me that Ableson had one. But without a grave, you can’t really have a funeral, and his had been a well-attended affair. Mourners had crowded the cemetery from all four corners of the country, but few of those who would mourn him in death had been confidants in life, and no one among them had known that the casket was empty and that Ableson had made other arrangements.

It was Mary who’d asked me to search the cemetery. Of those of us gathered in the kitchen, she recognized that I had the least to do. It was a modest drive from her home at Halcyon, 20 minutes. Scribbled on a scrap of paper in my pocket was a section, row, and grave number. Having parked my Volvo, I was referring to this scrap as I ascended a gravel path that wound through the terraced rows of headstones, family plots, and marble angels with their lichened wings.

When I crested the ridge, I found Ableson on its far side. He sat with his back leaning against one of the ubiquitous oaks. He was facing away from me, down into the sprawling valley below. It was one of those spring afternoons when slanted light catches every mote of pollen, making the invisible air visible. A few clouds lumbered overhead. The Shenandoah River meandered in the distance, and when the sun fell on the water, it glistened like foundry iron, and when the clouds obscured the sun, it appeared as water again. I watched Ableson watching the elemental interplay between sun and clouds and water. Then he turned, looking over his shoulder, saw me, and stood.

“I’m glad it’s you who came,” he said, brushing dirt from the seat of his pants.

“Is that your plot?”

He glanced down at the simple white marble headstone behind him. “It is.”

[Read: A real story of Memorial Day]

The marker was the same as those modest ones used for graves at Arlington. Etched into the white stone were the dates 1914–1999, and I ran my hand over the numerals. Other facts were etched into the headstone as well. His name, his branch of service, and rank during the war. However, none of those held my fascination like those two dates. The year of your birth. The year of your death. They’re supposed to be immutable brackets. But he’d proven otherwise. This made him a time traveler of sorts.

“Right after they brought me back,” he said, “when I was in social quarantine, I’d sneak out here.” He wasn’t looking at me as he spoke, but down into the valley.

“I can see why.”

“No, it wasn’t the view I came for.” He again turned toward me. “I wanted to know if anyone had visited.” Pebbles rested on top of many of the headstones around us, and I could see how Ableson jealously counted them. “Sometimes I’d come and a person would’ve placed one on my headstone. More often there’d be nothing. It’s terrible to feel as though you’ve been forgotten.” He squatted to the ground and picked up a small stone. He weighed it in his hand. He then slung it out a great distance so that it sailed down the ridge, disappearing in the late-day sun. “Amazing to think that now, if you want, your life can just keep going on and on.”

“Except Mary doesn’t want hers to,” I said.

“No,” he answered somberly. “She doesn’t.”

“Everyone is pretty worried about you.”

“I know,” he said, dropping his shoulders with a little sigh, as if the burden of other people’s worries had exhausted him. “I could have had a grave at Arlington,” he commented, continuing to stare off into the valley. “My service in the war qualified me for one. The plot they offered was ideal, in a prominent part of the cemetery, not too far from Section 16.” He glanced back at me as if to gauge whether I knew the special significance of this section—which I did not—and he disappointedly turned away. “That’s the section for Confederate war dead. There’s 482 of them buried there. You know the story of Arlington, of course.” I did, but this didn’t stop Ableson from recounting it, how the land was originally owned by the grandson of George Washington, who was in turn the grandfather of Robert E. Lee’s wife, Mary Custis. The white porticoed house that still stands at Arlington, and which bore a striking resemblance to Halcyon, is named the Custis-Lee Mansion. If you look out from its front porch across the Potomac River you can see the Capitol dome, which remained under construction in 1864, the war’s third year. By then, the cemeteries in Washington overflowed with dead. The government needed more space, and they charged the quartermaster general of the Union Army, General Montgomery C. Meigs, with finding it. Meigs, who was mourning the battlefield death of his own son, 22-year-old John, appropriated the land around the Custis-Lee Mansion for the new cemetery. Specifically, he chose Mary Custis Lee’s rose garden as the site to bury the first bodies, so she could never return home. “A hundred and fifty years later,” said Ableson, “and you can still feel the perfect enmity of that gesture. How do we then go from burying our dead children in one another’s gardens to honoring Confederate soldiers with an interment at Arlington?”

This part of the story I also knew—and taught in my course at Virginia College. Thirty-seven years would pass until, in 1901, the U.S. government would exhume the graves of Confederate war dead and inter them at Arlington. The reason was national reconciliation in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War. Only blood can wash away blood and the United States, North and South, inspired by a new grievance, had come together to form a fist. When the dead returned from that war, many also found their resting place at Arlington. Among those dead were African American soldiers and they too had a place at Arlington, though not in Mary Custis Lee’s rose garden, nor in the centrally located environs of the newly dedicated Section 16. Their segregated acreage was in an isolated corner, less visited, and on low ground that in heavy rains collected runoff and remained sodden for weeks. All it took was a minor skirmish like the Spanish-American War to create the political impetus for Confederate and Union soldiers to reconcile within Arlington, while for African American soldiers it would take another 50 years and something far larger than a Caribbean quarrel; it would take a world war for the dead—of all races—to finally mingle within Arlington’s sacred soil.

“Do you know what pattern the graves of the Confederate dead are arrayed in at Arlington?” Ableson asked.

I had to confess I did not.

“The other graves in the cemetery are laid out in rows, easy to elongate,” he said. “The Confederate dead are arranged in concentric circles. They’re set up that way so you can’t add any more graves. Someone like my daughter looks at me—at the cases I’ve tried, at the causes I’ve championed—and she can’t understand why I would want to preserve the Virginia Monument. She probably believes that I should be leading the protest myself, shouting ‘Burn, baby, burn,’ with the rest of them. But tearing down monuments isn’t too many steps removed from digging up graves. I know better than most what happens when you bring up the dead—they find their place again among the living.”

[Elliot Ackerman: The two Stalingrads]

It was Ableson’s place among the living that had come to concern me. He couldn’t stay here, loitering in Oak Ridge Cemetery. He would need to return to Halcyon. Right now, I needed to get Ableson home, and said as much.

“You’re right,” he answered. “Let’s go. No doubt Mary’s worried.”

But before leaving, Ableson bent over. He fussed about in the grass near his and Mary’s shared plot. He was stamping around, searching for something. Then he stopped. Whatever it was that he’d found, he was clutching it in his hand as he stood. As we left the cemetery, I saw what it was. He had placed a single dark pebble on top of his headstone.

This story was excerpted from Elliot Ackerman’s novel Halcyon.