Aftermath:  West Nickel Mines     On Thursday, October 12, 2006, a crew demolished the one-room Amish school where, ten days prior, Charles Carl Roberts, milk truck driver, had shot five young girls.     Dawn is still an hour away.  The bulldozer’s chuff of ignition sounds like a dinosaur belching. It startles the blackbirds from their red maple branches. The clapboard schoolhouse is a murky grey box. It seems transparent, an architectural ghost, as if it too had died.  One man, rocking on his heels, says something, laughs like a weed-whacker. A co-worker shoves the speaker’s shoulder and, for a moment, all four hands become fists.  Loose crime scene tape flutters like thin banners of an abandoned country.  Ants have discovered the splinter-edged holes the bullets made, and they nibble at the dried brown pools.  Rulers, textbooks, unbloodied desks have been ferried to another school.  A newswire stringer murmurs into his recorder.  ‘The walls vibrate, as if echoing the frantic pleas of last week’s victims. This is what happens when man cannot reach high enough to slap God’s face.’  He grins, pleased. An iron blade penetrates the foundation like a lance bursting a boil.  The birds and the mice retreat to await the incipient pasture.  They wonder why men bother at all:  building it up, only to bring it down.             © 2008 Scott Urban