The well was six feet deep when they found the first bomb.

Caleb Turner was watching his foreman, a man named Epps who had been working his grandfather's cotton land for twenty years and his father's cotton land for ten, when the pickaxe struck something that did not sound like rock. It sounded hollow. Like metal hitting metal in a cave.

Epps knelt and brushed away the dirt with his bare hands. Beneath the clay and the Georgia red earth, a curved surface appeared—grey, pitted, and unmistakably man-made.

"Mr. Turner," Epps said, and his voice had the careful tone of a man who knows he is about to ask for something he cannot afford to lose. "What in God's name is this?"

Caleb knelt beside him and ran his fingers over the metal. It was cold, even in the August heat. It was shaped like a bullet, but a bullet the size of a barrel. The nose was pointed, and along the body were grooves and seams and markings that Caleb recognized from a life he had spent twenty years trying to forget.

A bomb. A five-hundred-pound bomb from a B-29.

"How many more?" Caleb asked.

Epps shook his head. "I don't know, sir. This is the first."

It was not the first. Over the next three weeks, Epps and two other workers found three more bombs buried at different depths beneath the Turner plantation. One under the old cotton barn. One in the field near the creek. One so deep that it took a dynamite charge to reach it.

Four bombs. All of them unexploded. All of them from the Pacific theater. All of them with serial numbers that Caleb Turner could have recited in his sleep.

He had dropped bombs like this over Tokyo. He had pulled the release handle and felt the plane lurch as four thousand pounds of steel and high explosive left the bay and fell toward a city full of people who were not soldiers and not sailors and not airmen, but people—children, old women, factory workers, shopkeepers—and he had told himself that they were not people anymore, not in the war, not when the orders came down and the mission was to burn everything to the ground.

He had come home with scars that were not on his skin.

Now the bombs were here, in Mississippi, buried in red earth that had been planted with cotton since 1842, and they were a reminder that war does not end when the treaties are signed and the flags are lowered and the bands play. War is something you carry, and it sits inside you like a bomb that has not yet detonated, waiting for the right moment, the right trigger, the right spark.

The summer of 1945 was the hottest on record. The cotton was dying in the fields, the leaves turning brown and curling at the edges like fingers reaching for water that would never come. The drought had been coming for months, and Caleb had been watching it with the patient despair of a man who knows exactly what is happening and is powerless to stop it.

Then the rain came.

It started on a Tuesday, in the middle of the night, and it did not stop for eleven days. The sky was grey and the thunder never ceased, and the Mississippi turned brown and swollen and began to eat away at the banks of the plantation with a slow, methodical violence that reminded Caleb of things he had seen in the Pacific—typhoons, floods, villages swept away by water that did not care about borders or property lines or the names of the men who owned the land.

The bombs were becoming a problem.

The first one, the one in the well, began to leak. Not water—oil. Black oil seeped from the seams and stained the earth around it like a wound. Epps reported it to Caleb, who stood at the edge of the well and looked down at the grey curve of metal and felt something cold and old move through his chest.

"We need to move it," Epps said.

"To where?" Caleb asked.

Epps had no answer.

The second bomb was in the field near the creek, and the flood had surrounded it. The water was swirling around the bomb like a river flowing around a stone, and the current was getting stronger. If the bomb washed away, it would end up in the Mississippi, and then it would be in the river, and then it would be somewhere else entirely, and eventually it would be found by fishermen or dredge workers or children playing on the bank, and one of them would pick it up and bring it home and show it to their father, and one day it would explode.

The third bomb was under the barn. The barn was leaning. The wood was rotting. The foundation was cracking. And the bomb was sitting there, under two hundred tons of decaying timber, waiting.

The fourth bomb—the deepest one—Caleb had not gone to look at yet. He was afraid of it. Not because it might explode, though it might. He was afraid because he knew, with a certainty that had nothing to do with logic and everything to do with the part of his mind that still lived in 1945, in a B-29 flying over Tokyo at twenty thousand feet, that the fourth bomb was not just a bomb.

It was a mirror.

He went to see it on the twelfth day of rain, when the sky finally began to clear and the light came back into the world and the land looked like something other than a watercolour painting left out in a storm.

The bomb was buried under twelve feet of earth, and Epps had dug a shaft to reach it. It was the largest of the four—a two-thousand-pounder, the kind that was designed not to kill individuals but to erase entire blocks of a city. The nose was covered in mud, but the body was clean, and the markings were clear, and the serial number was a string of digits that Caleb Turner had seen a thousand times on a thousand bombs and had never once let himself read.

He stood at the edge of the shaft and looked down at the bomb, and the bomb looked back at him, and in that moment he understood what it was.

It was not a weapon. It was a memory. It was the physical embodiment of everything he had done and everything he had seen and everything he had carried for twenty years, compressed into a steel shell filled with high explosive and a fuse that was always, always armed.

He climbed down into the shaft. The earth was damp and cool, and the bomb was cold against his hands, and he placed his palms flat against the metal and felt something that might have been a vibration, or might have been his own heartbeat.

"Epps," he said.

"Sir?"

"Get the detonator."

Epps was silent for a long time. Then: "You mean—blow it up?"

"I mean blow it up."

"Which one?"

Caleb looked around the plantation. The cotton was dead. The fields were flooded. The barn was leaning. The creek was eating the bank. And beneath the earth, four bombs were waiting to be found by someone who did not know what they were.

"All of them," he said. "All four."

Epps swallowed. "That is a lot of explosives, Mr. Turner. In one place."

"I know what I am doing."

They worked for two days. Epps and Caleb and two other men, digging tunnels and connecting charges and setting the detonators in a sequence that would bring all four bombs down at once. It was not easy. The earth was soft from the rain, and the tunnels collapsed twice, and Epps cut his hand on a piece of rebar and cursed and kept working.

On the third day, everything was set. The detonators were wired. The charges were positioned. The fuse was ready.

Caleb stood at the edge of the plantation, where the land rose up into a small hill—Wild Duck Mountain, the locals called it, though it was not a mountain and there were no ducks. It was just a hill, and from the top you could see the entire plantation, and the flooded fields, and the creek, and the barn, and the well, and the earth that held four bombs and twenty years of unspoken war.

He lit the fuse.

The explosion was not loud. It was deep—a sound that came up through the ground and into your bones and made your teeth ache. The earth opened like a wound, and dirt and stone and metal rose into the air, and the shockwave hit the hill where Caleb stood and threw him backward onto the grass.

When he opened his eyes, the plantation was gone. The fields were cratered. The barn was destroyed. The creek had changed course. And beneath the earth, where four bombs had been, there was nothing but a scar in the land, black and scorched and permanent.

Caleb lay on the grass and watched the smoke rise into the sky and thought about Tokyo, and the bombs he had dropped, and the men he had killed, and the things he had done that he could not undo.

The scar on the land was exactly like the scar inside him.