Neverhome

THREE

That afternoon I slept my way until dusk time in a cave in a hickory tree had been hollowed out to smoke meat. There were some meat shreds caught in the wrinkles and crevices of the wood, and my fingers found them and felt of them and brought them to my mouth. I woke at moonrise with my teeth chattering hard enough to crack hickory nuts and set off at a trot up the road to try and get warm. I wasn’t any ways at all up the road when I come up on another traveler, a colored gal I knew straight off I had seen before, though it took me a minute to know where. She was taller than me and broader at the shoulder. She walked like she wasn’t back in a dress. Maybe she had always walked that way. Down in a field. Hundred-pound basket on her back. It came to me. The last time I had seen her she had been marching out of our camp wearing contraband pantaloons.

“You can come on out of the shrubbery,” I said, for she had vanished as quick as spit as soon as I came up on her. I called this out more than once. I called it out and told her I wasn’t going to alert the guard or the dogs or anything. I said I knew she was hiding in the bushes not even an apple throw away and that she ought to quit being scared and come out. Or if she couldn’t quit being scared she ought to come out anyway. I was heading north, I said, and if she liked, we could be two travelers together on the road instead of two travelers apart. I said all of this and felt like I was making quite a fair speech out there in the dark night but it wasn’t until I told her I knew she had been a man and that I had been one too that she came up out of the bushes. She was even bigger standing next to me than she had looked hurrying along the chalky road. We hung there some time not saying any word then settled kind of gradual into walking. She was dressed in heavy skirts and a shawl. She had a rag bundle in one hand and a heavy stick in the other.

“Have you had anything to eat?” I said.

She shook her head so I fetched her up a cracker. It took some time of me holding it out and us walking along for her to take it. It took even more of us walking down the road and past a frozen pond and through a grove of burned trees holding up their empty devil hands at the dark for her to lift it up to her mouth and crunch.

“What regiment?” she said.

I told her and when she said she’d shouldered her rifle awhile for the Fifth U.S. Colored I asked her why she had stopped.

“Why did you stop?” she said.

I gave out a cough started out as a laugh at how long it would take me to answer and we left it there at that.

After a minute and another bite of wilty cracker she said, “After Antietam, that’s where I saw you,” and I said that was right and something a little like a smile come up in her eyes but it didn’t stay there long.

“I thought you were a ghost coming along that road back there,” she said.

“I’m not a ghost,” I said. “I don’t think I’m a ghost.”

“Ghost of my old mistress come along the road to catch me. Left her dead of a finger went sour back in South Carolina. She came to me all through the fighting, pointing at me with that finger.”

I showed her my fingers. She nodded. She also shivered a little and you could see plain it wasn’t a shiver come from the cold.

“I’ve seen a ghost,” I said. “I think I did.”

She nodded. Kind of sucked up her lips.

“My ghost had a knife.”

“Ghosts don’t need knives.”

“Mine did.”

She looked away to the side, shook her head.

“You got to get north and out of this country,” I said. “We could help each other, share the road.”

“Share the road,” she said. If she had been a well you could have dropped a stone down her throat and not heard any echo.

We kept walking, with her some way in front or some way behind, and after some good yards of this I started to talk. I had it in my mind, I suppose, to cheer us a little along the way after our talk about ghosts, maybe pull a story or two out of her, hear something about her own fighting days, march along together like two soldier men, even if we were wearing dresses, but the stories I told were about as twisted up as wet turkey feathers and she just kept breathing in and breathing out and looking back and forth across the road. I told one about Antietam, because we had both of us been in those parts, deep in those ugly times, about an unscratched lieutenant had done well for his men in the fight and when it was over leaned his head against a hot cannon barrel and burned off his ear. That story had seemed funny to me at one time but it didn’t any longer out there on the road in the moonlight, so I told another meant to be rosier about a Confederate boy so hungry he tried to play bear and got himself stung to death scooping up fresh honey. When we come up on him, I told it, he had gotten so swollen you could have rolled him down a hill like a ball. There was an old lady had a corncob pipe stuffed in her mouth sitting there next to him said she had some claim on this bee-stung boy, though what claim that could have been I do not know because we didn’t ask. We left her sitting there with her legs splayed out, waiting for him to swell back down. He had something of hers in his pockets, she told us as we walked away, and the swelling had stretched them too tight and she couldn’t fetch her hand in. I gave a chuckle when I told this story but my fellow wanderer didn’t think as much of it as I did.

“The hell kind of story is that to tell?” she said.

“You ever pretend like you needed a shave?” I asked.

“A shave?”

Thinking about shaves set me to thinking about Bartholomew and I told my companion about the beard that wouldn’t ever grow very well on his face, though maybe, I said, during the many months that had galloped past, he had learned the beard-growing trick. I told her about Bartholomew’s small hands and how he was a better operator in the kitchen with his small hands than I was with mine. I told her that he had a bottle of French cologne water that he liked to sprinkle on a handkerchief before he went out of a morning to do his work. I had missed him terribly, I told her, and more all the time. I was going home to him now, to reacquaint myself with him after the hard separation and set things straight on our farm and settle scores.

“What kind of scores?” she said.

She said this and it seemed to me that a new note of interest had crept into her voice and I would otherwise have leaped in to tell her what I meant but we both heard that very minute horse hooves on the trail behind us and so we stepped quick and quiet off the road.

“They had me locked up,” I whispered as we crouched in the frosty bushes. “There was a chair they put me in. A bucket they put over my head. This dress I got on is borrowed. Ain’t impossible that I’m being chased. You got anyone in particular after you?” She didn’t answer, just looked long at me and then long at the road and the horses filled it up, then left it empty again. I don’t know why it is I got that image of a road empty of us and of anything else but the moon making a white ribbon of it stuck in my head.

“You want to hear about those scores now? I got all kinds of them,” I said after a time.

“We used to kill dogs,” she said.

“Kill dogs?” I said.

“Every one of them we could in those last days. I beat one of those bloodhounds to death with a butter churn.”

I thought about it a minute. It came to me then that I’d heard stories about dogs had had their throats slit on the big spreads, dogs dead the way she’d said and wouldn’t go hunting runaways anymore.

“We ought to go on now, the road is clear,” I said.

She again didn’t answer but there had been a shift in her shoulders and suddenly I didn’t like the look of the size of her as we crouched there in the dark. I tried to stand but the next second I found myself with her knee on my chest and her stick across my throat.

“Tell you what,” she said.

I fought halfway up and she wrestled me back down and got her knee and stick pressed down harder. There’s times part of me likes to think if I hadn’t been fresh out of the slops and ice baths I could have fought her but there’s the other part of me thinks there just wasn’t any way I ever could have.

“You want to share the road, head up north together, we both wore the blue, fought the grays, well, tell you what,” she said.

“Tell you what. It’s a winter’s day. January day. You feel the cold of the ground here, that’s just the swaddling to the cold of the day I’m conjuring. There’s rain coming down, rain like the ropes of the draper man. Ruts and puddles in the barnyard. The one rooster whose neck you haven’t wrung hasn’t crowed day yet. So it’s darker than this dark we got here. It’s black-cold and wet and you got little ones on their pallets and your old mother still dreaming in her chair. Your old mother who never did anything but work and get whipped every day you’ve been alive. Dreaming her dreams. You tell me where she was. Where those dreams had made her go. It’s cold like that and it’s dark like the devil’s teeth and you are awake because you just heard the warning bell. Death is coming down the road to knock on your door and you don’t know what to do. Master’s back after barely a month from the war and Mistress is dead of her bad finger and lies in the dirt next to her dead sons and now he’s coming to bury you. Bury you and your babies and your old mother before he’ll let you go to live with Uncle Lincoln up north. Live in his white house and pluck fruit from his trees. Master and his hired boys are coming. I got two arms and one back. I got three babies and one old mother can’t walk. ‘Run now’ is what my old mother said. She got up long enough to get one of my babies on my back and snug the other two into my arms. ‘Run now,’ she said. My old mother. There was a rise across the yard with bushes like these ones and I went there and I watched them come and pull my old mother out by her hair into the yard. Make her lie down in one of the puddles. Hold her down there in the wet. Hold her down there until she didn’t move. Me carrying three babies. Sitting there watching them drown my mother. Like a rat to spit on. And any minute any one of my babies might cry. And you want to share my road? Hand me a cracker and help me on my way? Tell me stories about some fool captain and some other fool got his pockets swollen shut? Shaves and French perfume?”

“I fought them,” I said, even though that stick at my neck hadn’t budged, even though I couldn’t breathe, even though I thought I was looking up into the eyes of my end.

“Not them, you didn’t,” she said. “You didn’t fight any of that,” she said. “You did not,” she said, putting her face down almost nose to nose with mine, her mouth almost onto mine, her shoulders almost onto my own, “fight any inch of that.”

“Where are your babies?” I said.

“My what?”

“I had a baby once.” I don’t know why I said that to her.

She didn’t answer, just took the knee off my chest and the stick off my neck and set off into the dark woods behind us. Away from the moon-white ribbon of the empty road. Last thing I heard her say as she vanished and I lay there choking up the air could now come back at last into my throat was “Tell you what.”

When I was young, my mother liked to start one story and finish it off with another. Hansel and Gretel would end with Rumpelstiltskin, and the Snow Queen with Mother Hen. I don’t know if she did this to investigate my state of interest or awakeness or because she thought the old tales had gotten played out and she wanted to freshen them up. Sometimes she would put three or four together. Tie them into a bundle and let loose the whole shooting match. Bartholomew claimed to me once he had heard her at this game but I don’t know how he could have since she was dead of her own hand no time at all after he gave me that dark red zinnia I took in the house and pressed and have lying here in its hints of old-time crimson even now. Maybe he dreamed it. Maybe my mother visited him in his sleep. Maybe she talked to him too. Told him about the gingerbread boy ran out of the house and bit an apple and the little man spun gold so the whole kingdom fell asleep, the end.

Whether Bartholomew had dream visitors or sat one night outside our window and heard my mother stitching stories together or he didn’t, I had moments after I left the rebellious states and as I walked and rode my slow way back to our Indiana farm that I thought I had stepped out of one story and into some other. In that other I was now in, the angel of death had not unfurled its wings and blacked out the stars and sent metal and men to shriek together in its awful night wouldn’t ever end. Here where I now walked there were no fields of fresh dead to sink in up to your knees, no bee-stung boys in gray or blue or any of the other colors you could find on the field, no towns entire gone mad, no hot cannon, no dogs beat to death with butter churns. Instead there was a season full of flowers, fields that felt the plow and fat young cows at their grass. Birds swooped the trees and sang the branches. Lee’s try on Pennsylvania was long since just bones for the ages in the fields. Laundry hung sweet on the line. Clocks ticked loud on mantels and told something like the right time.

My hair had grown and I had on Neva Thatcher’s good dress and good shoes and more than one family took me in for a meal. It was times strange enough and they did not ask me why I was abroad. A pair of sisters I dinnered with said they had given soup to a trio of one-armed jugglers not the week before. An old man and woman in a house at the bottom of an apple orchard outside Waynesburg had woken up one morning to find a stove-in mortar abandoned in their barn. Negroes done forever with the South and its yokes were everywhere with their bundles and mules. I thought I recognized my friend from the road one time. But it was some other woman dressed in rag skirts with a calico swaddle in each of her strong arms. Here and there you would cross a discharged veteran still had bombs and bullets flying in his eyes but there was good swaths of the country been emptied out of its men. Didn’t stop the ones who were still there or already back from trying out their tricks and evils, though. It was them more than once let me know my story hadn’t yet slipped its hinges entirely into some other one.

The first time I was just over into eastern Ohio and had been marching a stretch in the rain. Yonder I saw light in a house and I went up and knocked on its door. There was a big fellow with a scar on his forehead come to answer. He told me to step in, step in, said I looked hungry and his wife would get me my supper. The wife looked to be about seventy-five pounds of beat-up bone. She had a bright blue bruise on her cheek and didn’t say a word, only gave out a cringe when the husband pointed a finger at her. When the husband stepped past — to get some cider, he told me, from the shed — she gave me up a hand gesture you didn’t have to work too hard to understand meant run. I stayed long enough to look out the window and see it wasn’t cider he was bringing back from the shed but a standard U.S. military — issue horse pistol and a length of rope. I told the woman she ought to come with me but she just smiled at this, handed me a biscuit, and said she wasn’t worried for herself. I stepped out the kitchen door and trotted off with my biscuit into the dark and rain. I gnawed that biscuit under a lilac bush. The woman had dipped it into some lard and it made a fair meal. As I chewed I thought about her bruise. The rain came down hard through the lilac. I don’t know why I was sitting under it. There is shelter and then there is the idea of shelter. Shore up under the second all you want. You still get wet.

I need to run on out of here and keep getting home, I thought. I thought this once and then I thought it again. I tried saying it out loud to my mother but didn’t get any answer. Tried to think of when I had last talked to her. Started to make my plan about leaving this place and marching off through the rain, marching all night. Still, when I had finished the biscuit I groped myself up a good stick and circled back as wet as a drowned piglet to the lit house. When I got there, ready to take my chances against the horse pistol, I lifted my eyes up to the window and saw the two of them sitting next to the fire. The rope lay coiled on the mantelpiece and the pistol wasn’t anywhere in sight. Go on and figure. World has many ways. The man was weeping with his head in his hands, and the woman had a smile on her face and was slurping at a cup of tea.

Another less interesting time it was an old grandpa thought he needed to snatch a kiss from me. He had offered me a ride on his manure wagon and when I sat down next to him he hit me straight off in the face with the pommel of his switch. Then he tried to slobber over on top of me. I got the idea that he broke something when he hit the ground next to his mule. I drove on another few miles then left the wagon by the side of the road. The mule tried to follow me a few steps but gave up pretty quick. I had a notion lasted five minutes that I would unhitch it and ride it off for home. The thought came to me, though, about a boy out of Martins Ferry in my company had tried that once with a sutler’s mule and got hung up by his thumbs for three hours then drummed out of camp at my own Colonel’s now a General’s order when they caught him. Still, I did unhitch the mule and give it a good swat to get it going out over the fields and away from that old man, though. There was more than just the sting of the old man’s crop over my eyebrow to motivate me. More than just the man those days before with his rope and horse pistol. More than the memory of all the men I’d lived my life with in the Union army. Men who would piss on a dying cat. Laugh at a little boy lost. Violate a woman in her autumn years. Burn a house belonged to church ladies. Lock you up in the mad chamber and leave you there to rot.

No, I unhitched that mule and sent it flying because I’d had a picture come to me of my mother. My mother tall and strong. My mother who could captain a heavy scythe all day then go out into the moonlight and plow. My mother, all of that, sitting on the front step with her head in her big hands, her shoulders a-heave, her eyes when I could look at them gone far away from me like beads of black glass. I had been out at some chore and had seen a man come up to the house. I had seen him stand talking to my mother and had seen him shaking his head and pointing his finger at her and at me even where I was way off in the distance and then walking away and climbing up onto his wagon. There had been men aplenty come up to our house for one reason or another but there hadn’t been any before had left my mother sitting like that in her own puddle of tears.

I was five years old when that man came and left and didn’t come back to our property for many a year. Didn’t keep me from getting the fancy that I should have unhitched his animal while he was talking and pointing and turning my mother’s eyes into black beads. Many was the time in the days to come, even though my mother went straight back even that afternoon to being her invincible self, that I saw it in my head how I would unhitch that man’s animal and poke it with a stick. Watch it run off. Set the man maybe to chasing me. It takes work to unhitch an animal. I never could have done it. But that was the fancy that took me. And that was what I thought of there on that day as I unhitched the old man’s mule. Of my mother crying. Of my fancy. Of the man I’d hear it later said was my father hollering and chasing after me.

It wasn’t just time- and war-ruined men had tricks to try. Two days after I left that mule to run free I found myself at table with three young girls. I had crossed them sitting together at the end of the lane that led down to their farm. Sitting shoulder to shoulder and twisting daisy chains. Littlest one had a daisy crown in her hair, daisy bracelets around her wrists. They said hello and I said hello back.

“You hungry?” they asked me.

There wasn’t any doubt by then that I was.

“Where’s your folks?” I said. The biggest one winked up at the sky. The middle one smiled out over the fields.

Their father was dead at Shiloh and their mother had vanished away long ago, and now it was just the three of them. The youngest couldn’t much more than talk, and the two older ones weren’t any riper down the road than eight or ten. This didn’t stop them from welcoming me in once we had got down their lane and serving me up a fair soup of pork and beans, nor from handing me a hunk of soft bread, a chew of butter, and a cup of good cream milk. They had a square locket had pictures of both their parents and took turnabout wearing it around their necks. It looked to be about every hour that one would take it off and pass it to the next, who would put it on, open it, give a nod, and get back to her business, whether that was handling a broom or playing with a corncob doll. The floors were swept, the windows washed, daisy chains were everywhere, and they let me lie down for the night in their parents’ soft bed. When I woke the next morning all was as cheerful as the day before except that my dress and shoes were gone.

“Now you can’t leave,” the oldest of them said.

“Not ever,” said the middle girl.

They had spread the table with food. There was good coffee had but just a minute before boiled. I sat down barefoot in my underthings and ate. I went barefoot in my underthings with them on their chores and took my midday dinner the same way. More than once as we walked the yard the three of them looked over at the well. I let the little one climb up into my lap as we rested a minute at midday. I gave her a tickle and told the older girls they were doing handsome by her, that if they kept on that way they would see her raised up nice. This pleased them so much they let me take a turn wearing their locket and offered me up a show after the meal. Both of them could dance and sing. The older of the two brought down a banjo had belonged to their uncle. She played it so well it made me uncomfortable to watch.

“Don’t you have any family you can go to?” I asked when the show was over.

“Such as they are, they are up in Cleveland,” said the oldest.

“That’s quite a way you have of talking,” I said to her.

“But we like it here,” said the middle one. “We want to stay here forever.”

“Forever and ever,” said the youngest.

“That’s a long time,” I said.

“Don’t you like it here?” said the oldest.

“I do,” I said and gave the youngest another tickle. Then I walked outside, pulled the bucket up out of the well shaft, and retrieved my dress and shoes. When I had put them on I found I had the barrel of a pin-fire pistol trained on me. It was in the hands of the oldest girl. I walked over to her and placed my hands on top of hers and held them there a minute, then let them go.

“You have to fire that thing to make it work on a person,” I said.

“I know how to fire it,” she said.

I nodded and thanked the girls for their hospitality, accepted the bundle of food they had packed for me, told them I wouldn’t stand for any crying or carrying on, and left off down the road.

An hour later I crashed through a small wood had set a squadron of deerflies after me and came across a place where the earth swelled up like a giant’s dinner bell. There was a tree or two on the flanks of this swollen place but the ground underfoot was spongy and mostly it was just high grass and scrub. I walked up this swelling and paused on its top. I had heard about mounds like these, heard there were whole dead cities buried in each one of them, that no one now alive could say for sure how they had come to be.

I crouched a minute and scraped at the soft surface. I lay on my side with my ear to it. Sun for a blanket. Tune one of the girls had sung on my lips. The dirt below me felt heavy. Like it might whisper. Whisper some secret. I fell asleep and dreamed the world had run to its end.

I don’t think I would have done anything much more than imagine a visit to Yellow Springs, Ohio, if a tinker selling bedsheets and colored socks hadn’t asked me was I bound there. I hadn’t been, hadn’t even had any idea I was near it, but after he had taken out a sample of his wares, and I had told him I did not at that present time need anything he had to offer, even if the red of his socks was, as he had said, very fine, I followed his direction over a hill and down a good road and took myself into town.

It was a handsome place. Good, quiet streets and neat houses had squared about each one of them its own pretty yard. There was a well-made church and churchyard with more than a few fresh graves. I found the General’s cousin, buried beneath pink granite and a young almond tree fluttering its first raggedy blossoms in the breeze. The stone had careful carving you couldn’t see from afar. There were stars and birds. There was a bright harvest moon. If you looked close you could see a river curling off toward heaven. Under the cousin’s name were his dates. Under his dates was the word Unafraid.

It didn’t take much asking to find what had been the cousin’s house. I meant just to have my look from afar but there was the woman of the house chopping hard at some rosebushes spoke to me and told me I had to come in. I said I had been scrabbling with outlaws and orphans in the countryside and wasn’t fit for stepping in a fine house, but I had known her husband and, if she liked, would sit with her a minute on her porch. She took off her garden hat, wiped a hand through her hair, sat me down, and bade me wait, then five minutes later brought out cool tea and sandwiches on soft bread. She brought a whole stack of those sandwiches, which had ham and sweet pickles swimming in fresh butter, and I worked hard at not eating them too fast. Once or twice as I ate I started to speak but she held up a hand. She was as fine to look at as her town. Into her middle years but elegant along with it, maybe more so for her age, soft and flinty both, gentle at the same time as hard. She sipped quietly at her tea and looked out over her garden. She had pink and purple hydrangeas blooming, white lilacs, a pale-trunked line of peach and apple and sour cherry trees. There were maples everywhere well into leaf and you could see the church steeple shining white beyond.

“Where did you know my husband?” she said when I had eaten the last sandwich and wiped my hands on my napkin. I didn’t like for her to look at my fingers for they were nothing but dirt and chewed-down nails. Even if I had tried to scrub at them some at a well on the way over to her house.

“I knew him to look at in Maryland and Virginia and some earlier in Kentucky too. He was about as brave as they make them. He would just stand straight up through a battle, calm and quiet. Like it was Sunday afternoon and we’d all gone home from church to eat these sandwiches of yours.”

She smiled and she shivered. You could barely tell which was which.

“He did his duty, no doubting that. There wasn’t a man in his company would claim the contrary,” I said.

“Were you attached to his regiment?”

“I did laundry and sundry jobs. Drove a wagon now and again. I can cook a little if I have to. Helped the sutlers spread their wares.”

She had a sharp eye and she looked a good while at me. If I had had on my uniform, she would have seen straight past it like it wasn’t there.

“And now you have left that service and walked all the way up here from Virginia?”

“I’m heading back to my husband, who stayed home for the war.”

“Ah,” she said. “A young married woman, far from her home, traveling with an army at a time of war. That’s an extraordinary image.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“Penelope gone to the war and Odysseus staying home.”

“Ma’am?”

She was quiet awhile and sipped her tea. I did the same. It was good tea. Plenty of sugar and more of mint. There was birdsong in the air. Robin. Cardinal. Wren. One or two I didn’t know. Some yelling to add to it from a jay. It was a big brick house and just the porch would have done for fifty. We didn’t have a porch at home, though we had often set our chins toward the subject and talked about building one.

“Please excuse me a moment,” she said.

She stood and went into the house and came back out with a green velvet sleeve. Out of this sleeve she took a gilt frame. She held it close to her. The gilt had been well wrought and looked pretty against her dark blue dress, like a window onto the other world.

“We had this likeness made before he left on his orders. He was still a professor then, finishing up his spring term.”

“A professor,” I said.

“Here at Antioch, of course. The college is shut down now. We expect it will reopen after the war. It stands just over there.” She waved toward some poplars. There was a hint of stone through the trees, a pair of peeping towers, the corner of a wall, the mossy curve of a well. She handed me the frame and asked me if her husband had still resembled his likeness. If the war hadn’t ravaged his fine looks away entirely. She had seen him after he was wounded, she said, and had not liked what she saw and had begged him to stay at home with her after his recovery.

“This is your…?” I said.

“My husband,” she said.

I had in my hands a picture of the Colonel, my Colonel who had become a General.

“Then you are not the wife of the man lies yonder under the pink stone who was the General’s cousin.”

“The General’s younger brother.”

“His brother.”

“My husband called him his cousin so that the connection would not be too clear. Neither too clear nor too close.”

I sat silent. My brain making its rearrangements.

“He was not well, of course, and he would not be parted from the General. The General was good to him. Very good.”

“Very good,” I said, my brain still trying to make the new shape.

“Yes,” she said.

“Yes,” I said back.

Then I had it all. Nothing was any different.

“I never spoke to him but once; still, I saw him many a time. Like I said it a minute ago, he did his duty.”

“Just as you did yours.”

I looked at her. She had her eye on me again and was smiling. It was a kind smile. There wasn’t any shivering.

“Has the General changed, in your reckoning of it?”

“Yes.”

“Yes,” she said. She crossed her feet in front of her and sipped her tea. She looked hard at me again.

“I know you did not do any laundry and wagon-driving down in Maryland and Virginia, unless it was your own laundry and the wagon-driving was in your official orders.”

I did not answer her, just sat holding the likeness of the General carefully in one hand and my glass carefully in the other. She took a letter out of a clever pocket sewn with crimson ribbon onto the front of her dress. She unfolded it and read.

My Dear,

There is a young woman who disguised herself and fought bravely and indeed with considerable distinction for a time in my regiment. She was badly treated upon her discovery. By myself not least of all. After paying me a visit earlier this afternoon to leave me a warm coat she no longer required, she is gone away from us now and I hope has left war behind forever. I do not know why I think this, and so hesitate, my dear, to write it, but I somehow expect she will be coming to you. Look for her along the road. Treat her well if she arrives. Give her your welcome. Let her know she has mine too.

She showed me the letter and I looked a little at it. There was a brown thumbprint on the left side of the page where someone with dirty fingers had held it. The bottom half of the page had been torn off. The General had a long, tall hand looked something like he did. He had written in a kind of purple ink that bled here and there around the letters, making some of the curlicues look like chrysanthemums.

“He knew it about me long before anyone else,” I said.

“I can well imagine that he did,” she said.

“But he said nothing.”

“No, he wouldn’t have.”

“Why wouldn’t he have?”

“I don’t know.”

“What was he a professor of?”

“Greek and Latin.”

“I am very tired.”

“Then you must come in the house, Private Thompson, and lie down.”

I stayed at the house of the General still away at war and of his wife, who was good to me, for longer than I would have thought, for the crops were up and it was deep on into summer when I started to think about setting back out on my road. I had stayed all that time in the big room that had been the General’s brother’s and as I began at least in my mind to step away from the house and make north and west for home, I thought considerably about his soft eiderdown and good feather bed. It had been the kind of bed you could bury yourself down into and let the warmth and softness smother your dreams. There was something about that bed had to do in my mind with the Indian mound and the chair in the madhouse and the General’s brother’s grave and my mother’s grave and the one I had waiting for me soon or late whether I did or I didn’t keep on. It was that trick of did or didn’t got me slowed and looking slow one way and then the other and then no way at all. In the middle of that no way I found a bucket. Filled up with tears. The bucket was leaking. I wiped my cheeks with the pillowcase. There was some more leak came out. I had never cried beyond getting my eyes damp before. Or any good crying I had done was past my remembering of it: scrawny child in her mother’s arms. I did not like that I was doing it now but couldn’t see any way to stop it. My bucket was still leaking when the General’s wife knocked on my door one warm late morning and told me to come down, someone needed my help.

“I fear I am indisposed, ma’am,” I told her.

“Well, dispose of your upset and come on down,” she said back.

It was a wagon with an old man looked an awful lot at first glance like my beau from the road. This man didn’t have any chaw dribble in his beard, though, and when I walked up with the General’s wife, he took off his hat and gave a nice nod. He was soft and green of eye to the point that they watered what looked like tiny green leaves and after I had made my own head nod back at him I could see he was missing an arm.

“I can do it all but I can’t shift boxes,” he said.

“Glad to help you,” I said.

The General’s wife gave us each a good smile and we left, or that’s how it seemed as I thought about it later as the old man’s mare went trotting along. There had been the General’s wife’s smile and then there was us, me and the old man, his watery eyes and my leaky bucket, and the open road leading us out of town.

“You take snuff?” the old man said, reaching into his waist pocket, pulling out a turquoise bag, and fetching out a pinch.

“No,” I said, then I said, “Yes,” thinking it might help wake me up away from my reveries.

“Those are strong-looking hands you’re wearing there,” the old man said after I had stopped my sneezing.

“My name is Constance,” I said.

“I know it,” he said. “We got introduced back there in town.”

I didn’t say anything to this and we rolled on a ways in silence, up a flower-topped hill and down its other side. The old man had been casting me quick glances with those watery green eyes and after another minute of rolling he said, “Weatherby. Weatherby is my name.”

“Nice to meet you,” I said.

“Meet you again, is what you mean.”

We rolled some more and hit a patch of crows working a deer carcass, and Weatherby said it looked like they were having a grand time. That there was few things happier than an animal had found its midday meal. He said the General’s wife had packed us sandwiches and after we had picked up our load we could have a picnic under a shade tree. There was nothing, he said, like a picnic under a shade tree, a picnic under a shade tree in the summertime couldn’t be beat if you worked at it a year. Then he said if he had a handkerchief he would offer it to me. I hadn’t realized it but my bucket was back at it, leaking tears out of my eyes, brown ones. Dead leaves. Creek mud. Falling down my face and off my jaw.

“I understand you’ve had some scare out along the road and seen some things of the war,” Weatherby said.

“I am sorry,” I said. “I do not know myself, I do not know myself at all.”

“I lost this arm in a fight fifty years ago,” he said. “My son is gone and my grandson is still down there in the Shenandoah.”

“Then I pity you,” I said.

“Pity the whole wide world while you’re at it,” he said. “But what I meant by that remark was that I’ve done my share of letting it leak out too.”

I wiped my face on my shirtsleeve. It did not strike me until later that he had used the word leak in referring to his tears. I did not cry ever again after those days of care and comfort in Ohio, but forever after when I saw someone at it, large or small, I thought of buckets dripping their contents.

“I thought I was turning into a crybaby,” I said when we had got a little farther and I realized my face had stayed dry.

“You don’t look like any crybaby to me,” he said.

He had let the mare slow to a dull step but now he flicked the reins and we jollied on.

There were fifteen crates to be carried and we found them stacked neat in the front of a shop had been owned by a man had earned some of his living making likenesses up into the war. The machine stood with its black shawl in the center of the shop opposite a red velvet curtain hung over a vanity screen. The likeness-maker’s sister, who was overseeing the affair, said we could take the machine in the bargain if we wanted it but I didn’t say a word and Weatherby shook his head. There was a coal-black chicken in the shop with us while we worked. It was pecking at the cork on a jug under one of the benches and didn’t let anything disturb it. It wasn’t any work at all to shift the crates to the wagon but Weatherby fretted some over how I stacked them in.

There were shade trees aplenty on the dead likeness-maker’s property but Weatherby said that if I could wait, there was a spot he liked back down the road. We pulled up some water was warmer than it ought to have been from a well with a mossy rope and slaked off our thirst. As I held the wet well bucket in my hands, I waited a minute to see if I would start back at it but I didn’t. When we were set to go, the sister came out, took Weatherby’s money without a word or sign, then disappeared into the dead likeness-maker’s house again.

We had our picnic under a giant crab apple had once, said Weatherby, stood beside a house that had vanished along with all of its traces from the earth. He knew of this house because he had once worked its fields, or something to that effect. Some in the neighborhood believed a tornado had picked the house up and flung it, along with a family full of children, down into Kentucky or up over the Great Lakes.

“You ever see a tornado, Constance?” he asked me.

“I saw the war is all.”

This kept him quiet a time although I hadn’t meant it to when I had said it. In the middle of his quiet he swallowed down a pickled carrot and walked off into the bushes. I expected he was seeing to his business and shut my eyes but when he came back some good while later he was dripping and said he had been into a pond for a swim. We had to start heading back but there was time, if I wanted, for me to take a dip. He would sit under the crab apple and crunch on carrots and make sure no one — even though he was willing to bet one of his boxes that the road would remain empty — disturbed me.

“What’s in those boxes, anyway?” I said.

“Glass. For a greenhouse,” he said.

I walked through the bushes and down a twisting path that went right through the marshy middle of a stand of cattails to the edge of the water. The surface of the water was smooth except for the skaters on it. I took off my shoes and socks and hitched up my dress and stepped in, sent the skaters skittering off into the weeds. The cool from my feet and ankles rose straight up to my neck and I stepped out and wrestled off my clothes. It was when I was back in it up to my thighs, holding still and hoping the handsome skaters would return, that my mind turned a crank and I remembered my adventure in the creek. I remembered killing that rebel boy in the water after I had danced with him. Whether I had or I hadn’t. Danced or killed. Fiddle music bedeviled my ears. I shuddered so hard I fell over sideways. There were fish or snakes in the wet dark and one of them brushed by my shoulder. Sleep was all I wanted. Get back to that bed at the General’s house or drown. But I stayed in the water awhile longer and didn’t drown. Lay there adrift on my back letting some little fish nibble at my toes.

All the ride over to Weatherby’s and all the unloading and careful stacking and all the ride back to the General’s house, the talk was about the war. Once Weatherby got started you couldn’t get him stopped, didn’t matter how long you didn’t say anything, how long you swatted sweat bees away from your eyelashes or looked off into the yonder clouds.

“You were down there close up to some of those battles, if I understand it correctly,” Weatherby said. “Don’t you have an opinion?”

“I have an opinion,” I said.

His war, as I heard him tell it, was the one you can read about now in books if you care to. I have some of those books near to hand. I’ve perused them carefully. From many of them, you would think it was just captains and colonels and generals leading each other in one after another handsome charge. There are dates this and battles that. Men were foot soldiers in heaven’s war. Quite a healthy number of the women that did get described were saints, and some were angels, hallowed and unscarred. I with my own eyes saw Clara Barton working with the wounded after we fought at Antietam. She brought supplies to the sawbones, gave comfort everywhere she went, and wouldn’t quit until she got the typhus and had to be carried away. But there wasn’t any saint or angel to it. Just a woman in an apron and a sturdy dress. By the by, she would have looked fierce handsome holding a gun. But there aren’t any women holding guns in this pile of books I have. In these stories women are saints and angels and men are courageous noble folk and everything they do gets done nice and quick and nothing smells like blood.

One book talked about Petersburg made it sound like it was a five-minute affair. Like a few officers had set down their cards and whiskey a minute and strolled over out of their mansions and used their officer power to batter down Petersburg’s doors. There weren’t any Fort Hells or bloody redoubts or gabions or trenches cut for miles in this fellow’s telling of it; there weren’t any twelve-pounders, no howitzers, no Dictator to smash what bellowed like burning bulls and elephants through the night sky. You would have almost wanted to be there, the way it was told. Let yourself get killed by a bullet to the bosom, let yourself get shot straight up out of your indescribables just to enter the tale. I read it and felt myself mounted up on a charger holding a jousting lance and getting ready to do battle. God and country. Damsels. Shield the children. Mine eyes have seen the glory. Save the poor black brethren. Bathe each night in the light of the stars.

The way Weatherby told it, or the way I heard it, his grandson’s fighting for one of the grander Ohio regiments was an awful lot like these books. I hadn’t read them yet then, nor had they been written, but they might as well have been. Didn’t mean he didn’t have his reasons. Maybe they all have their reasons. For telling it like poetry, I mean. I learned this that day when I finally roused myself and spoke.

“You’re a nice fellow and you have been kind to me, but it wasn’t pretty like the way you’re saying it,” I said.

He stopped the wagon when I said this. Pulled on the reins and made the mare snort. A hummingbird buzzed by us and Weatherby gave it a laugh then flicked his stump up sideways in the air. He left his stump pointing straight at the side of my head a minute. The knobbly end of it was browner than any other part of him that I could see.

“They burned that shut with an officer’s hand iron,” he said. “Fifty years ago and I can still feel it. I mentioned earlier I had been to war. It took them four tries, and they had to heat up the iron again between each time. But that’s the gentle part of my tale. I know something other than knights in armor about this war we got now. My grandson I’m building this greenhouse for is getting sent home to me next month without half his face and missing both his eyes. You say something one way instead of the other often enough and maybe the thing quits crawling into your bed with you and stroking its claws at your cheek.”

Weatherby said this and then dropped his stump and gave the reins a hard flick. The mare hopped once to the side, then started up again. Weatherby pointed at the air over the road with his chin. The hummingbird was seeing us off. Green shrub. Ruby bloom. We had stopped in its territory. Weatherby had spoken without anything sounded angry in his voice. Only his stump had looked angry. Maybe a fleck or two of the green echoed the hummingbird swimming in his eyes.

“I beg your pardon for misunderstanding you,” I said.

“Isn’t any need for begging or pardoning either,” he said.

When we got back to the General’s house it was into dusk time and the General’s wife was sitting on the front step smoking one of the General’s pipes. When I had made my farewells to Weatherby and walked up the front path, she produced a second pipe and we sat a time together there and smoked.

“The General likes to take a walk in the evening with Mr. Weatherby,” she said. “He finds him fine company.”

“Weatherby likes to talk,” I said.

“When he gets it going.”

“But in a kind way. No argument to it.”

“He is always kind.”

We sat quiet then. If you can call it quiet when the air is getting killed by an army of crickets.

“When will the General come home?” I said.

“When will the war end?” she said. “In his letters he writes that the fight goes badly. Then he writes that it goes well. Lately, more often it is the latter. Will that bring him home sooner or later? I do not know.”

She said not another word. Our smoke walked out together into the night. After a time I took my pipe up to bed with me. The tobacco was stale but still filled the room with the smell of whiskey and cherry and the fields on which I had fought.

During his speech, Weatherby said his ruined grandson had been at Antietam and I thought about this as I laid my head against the pillows and smoked. Maybe we had both been in the cornfield. Charged nobly forward through the powder smoke. Or maybe his fear had found him and he had turned around and run. Maybe he had been in my madhouse with me before the war had grabbed him back and found a way to steal his face and rip out his eyes.

There must have been some spell to that tobacco I carried up to my room for I spent days entire afterward, didn’t matter how hot it was, back down under the covers in the dim, my eye, tearless as it was, sometimes eating at the dust whirling the light planks come in through cracks in the curtains, sometimes the dark of the pillows, sometimes just the back of its own lid. Other days I rose and worked in the garden or saw to the yard or cleaned windows or washed floors from dusk until dawn, smelling the fresh airs of the world all the length of the day, only to crawl at its end back into that room and under those covers where I stopped remembering battles and madhouses and husbands and stories and the soft breath of small babies and mothers who broke their own commands. I did my eating at night, standing in the cool of the pantry. Sometimes the General’s wife would come down in her nightgown and stand alongside me and eat her meal that way too. We almost never talked as we ate. Just let our fingers go out and open jars and cut slices and spread spreads. It was one of these nights, as we were eating hoecakes and honey, that she put her hand on my hand and asked me if I was awake or asleep.

“I don’t know,” I said, so she told me to follow her and we went out to the pump where she had me fill a bowl and give it to her. Then she lifted up that bowl and poured it over my head.

For a minute I was far away. I was back in the heat of Virginia. I was standing at the General’s side. He was asking me to be a sharpshooter; I was hiding in a well; whole days went by as I waited to take my shot, and then I was in a tree, swaying with its branches, leaning with its leaves, aiming my gun. “I know you didn’t steal out of any of your own comrades’ haversacks, I know it, you are my sharpshooter, you are my best soldier,” the General said. The bowl came back up off my head before I could answer.

The General’s wife told me then as I dripped out there in the yard in Ohio and not on the fighting fields of Virginia that I could stay at her house for as long as I wanted but that it was time to wake now, that I had slept long enough, that there would be sufficient time in the hereafter for the variety of sleeping I had been doing those past weeks.

“Your husband, my General, left me behind to rot in that madhouse,” I said.

“Are you sure that’s the way it happened? Are you sure that is what he did?” she said.

I was silent a long time.

“I’m not sure,” I said.

It was the next day I put an end to my thinking and got myself roused up to go. After she had filled my sack with jars and sandwiches, the General’s wife walked me to the edge of town. We had a plan to stop by Weatherby’s on my way out, for he had built his greenhouse. She said as we walked it was a wide world had new greenhouses go up on one of its ends and black powder to blow a man apart on its other. I said she wasn’t wrong. That the world was wide. I had seen some of it. Weatherby had too. We all had. Chasms never greater and miles just as long. She whistled as we walked. It was a handsome tune, happy and mournful both, and I realized I had been hearing it every day the past weeks without listening to it.

“What is that you are whistling?” I asked her.

She looked at me long and a little strange, then laughed. It was just something she had heard from the General when he had last been home on leave, a song his men and lieutenants and captains liked to sing or whistle when they played cards or washed dishes or dressed wounds or cleaned rifles or wrote letters or chopped wood or raised tents or lay in their sickbeds or stood firm by their cannon or mounted their horses or ran into battle for a war wouldn’t ever end or wandered the fresh fields of the dead.

“The General sang this song?” I asked.

“Oh, he loved to sing it,” she answered.

“Say its name,” I whispered.

She put her hand on my arm and leaned close to my ear and whispered back.

When we arrived, Weatherby gave us a ceremonial bow and asked after the General. We talked on the General some but it got to sound almost like we were making speeches, one after the other, and we left off. The General’s wife had brought Weatherby a few jars of pickled carrots, one of which she opened for him.

“Nothing in the world quite like a pickled comestible to my way of looking at it,” Weatherby said.

“They are choice morsels,” I said.

“You can say it and then you can say it again and not use it up,” he said.

“Show us what you have built,” the General’s wife said.

I was ready for the road but found my curiosity for this new thing too strong. Weatherby led us past a wide square of peach trees were now loaded and not above a week away from producing and past the silvery curve of a little stream.

“You got sold smudged glass,” I said when we came to it. It was a pretty thing, planted off by itself in the middle of a fresh-scythed lawn, with the glass neat set, but all the panes I could see from where we stood held marks.

“I got sold what I paid for.” Weatherby smiled strangely. “Just exactly what I paid for.”

“That’s picture glass,” the General’s wife said. “A greenhouse made out of picture ghosts.”

We went inside. Stood among the empty benches. As we watched, the sun tore off its cloud and lit up a hundred likeness images. It was the happy faces of fifty men gone off to war and fifty women didn’t. Or maybe they didn’t. Maybe there were some standing up there straight in their Sunday dresses were out right that minute on the field holding rifles, getting their arms sawed off, dying over their slops, singing it out with all the rest of them about watch fires and fateful lightning and the coming of the Lord. Away off somewhere in that other country knowing they would never get home. There was ghost pictures too of countryside and farm buildings, a town square, a trail, flowering bushes, a tree in the sunlight, a brook in the breeze. There was even three or four windows full of boys had got left behind in their bones at the Second Bull Run, which the photographer, Weatherby told us, had visited the weeks before he died.

Weatherby and the General’s wife stayed inside that greenhouse awhile longer but my face and neck had grown hot, so I stepped outside into the cool and thought I would walk a minute among the peach trees. They were old and intergrown so I had to work and crouch a little to pass between them and after a minute gave it up and sat down near the middle of the orchard against a trunk. There were sweat bees and butterflies at their work and one of them, with green and gold and turquoise to its wing, took my eye over to the back of Weatherby’s house, where, sitting on the bench in the sunlight, I saw his grandson. He was wearing pants and undershirt and had his hands in his lap. The hands were big and the fingers skeletal. His bare feet, planted firm in front of him, were flat and narrow and long. There was a clean bandage wrapped around his ears. Over his face he wore a purple veil. There was a little bit of a breeze playing with the under-end of it. Otherwise there wasn’t a thing on or around him outside flying insects that moved. He might have been graven. Image of hurt for the ages. Hurt come home. I stood after a minute and started to crouch my way out of the orchard to give him a good morning, but my feet found out other ideas and before I knew it I was off and away, without any farewells, let alone good mornings, on my road.

I thought as I put Yellow Springs behind me and walked fast away that it was seeing those dead soldiers and that whole world being lit to vanishing that made me want even harder than I had to get home before it was too late and Bartholomew and I and the wide world got turned to just some jelly dried to a cracked glass sheet. Cracked for the wind to whistle through. I thought too it might be the picture that bloomed up of Weatherby’s blind grandson tending sprouts in his purple veil under all those fading faces he couldn’t see, all those eyes fading off away until they were all as blind as he was that had put the snap in my step and made me move. Or maybe it was just the smell I still had in my nose of pickled carrots and the sound in my ears of them being crunched by Weatherby with his old teeth in that quiet place. Or the after-hum I had in my head of the General’s wife whistling “The Ballad of Gallant Ash.”

Whatever it was, I walked away and didn’t stop any longer than I had to over those last miles. So much so that it wasn’t much more than a week after I’d left them at their floating room and its ghosts that I walked back up into Randolph County where I’d left from better than two years before. It was late. Raining, or I would have pushed on for home that evening. Instead, I spent a night with some boys had a fire going under a rubber sheet rigged up high next to a field near Winchester. They had three women with them who all looked happy enough. The boys were back from the war, is what they said, and the women had come out to meet them. They were having a party out of the homecoming and there were jugs of corn whiskey involved.

I took my drink and shared out what I had left of the jars and sandwiches from the General’s wife and we had a fine old time. They had some impressive firearms they’d brought back with them, including a pair of Sharps and a Henry breechloader made me give out a whistle. That whistle led to a firing demonstration once the rain had stopped. The Henry looked like it had come straight out of the crate and into their hungry arms. It could hit any size object you liked at any distance if you knew how to shoot it. Which I knew I could and which the fellow who said he owned it could not. After he had made the dirt around the can do some high kicks, I took my turn and showed how it was done. I had my suspicions about whether or not those boys had done much soldiering when they couldn’t answer straight about where they had been and had fought and just which line they had stood in to fire off fine fresh weapons like the ones they were toting, but my mind was mostly elsewhere up the road. It was elsewhere enough that when later the boy that claimed to own the Henry left off trying on his snoring woman and climbed on top of me, I let him go with a kick and a elbow to his jaw.

He crawled back over to his woman and set in to snoring next to her and I thought I’d try to join the party but I couldn’t fall asleep. I lay there under the Indiana stars and thought my thoughts. Couldn’t quit thinking them. Not too far off dawn, my paramour let off a loud fart, woke himself up with it, and came back over at me. I was agitated and hit him down harder than I probably would otherwise have done.

This got the whole band of them roused and before I knew it I was getting chased a hundred yards down the road. Later that same morning, just ahead of noontime, I stepped my foot back down on the dirt of my farm.

I didn’t do much more than step on it before I left out again. Off yonder in my yard I had spied the fat criminal I’d known all my life called Big Ned Phipps feeding hay to geldings I’d never seen before in a corral I hadn’t built. The seed shed was burned to the ground, the mule pen was empty, and some of our fence was knocked down. There wasn’t any crop to speak of in the field, and a dozen ugly goats were snapping at each other and nibbling the weeds. Here and there around the yard there were holes had been dug in my dirt. Close up next to the house there were four boys sitting in the shade holding plates in their hands. They were laughing and leaning back on our chairs. They were the good chairs, not the ones we used for sitting together in the yard. They had been my mother’s and hers that loved roses before that. Two of them sitting there in the mud on my good chairs had been off to war and come back before I’d left home. One was the son-of-a-bitch who’d pushed me down at the market when I was a girl and who I’d gone back and fought in my muddy dress until he cried, and the other I had never seen before.

After a time one of them hollered into the house and the next minute my Bartholomew came out. He was holding a tray had cups of coffee on it. He went around to each of the boys and let them choose a cup. By and by Big Ned called for his and Bartholomew went over and stood there a long time in the June sun as Ned moved his mouth and made a fuss over picking it up. I came a tongue crunch away from calling out at Bartholomew to crack that cup of coffee over Ned Phipps’s head but if there is one thing war and the lunatic house can teach you it is how to wait.

I walked five miles back the way I had come from that morning and I climbed into the cool under some mulberry bushes and I slept. I woke around nightfall and waited until it was late and the moon had dropped down into its cradle of earth. Then I went back to the sleeping camp of boys and their women and stepped right into the middle of it and plucked up a box of cartridges and the Henry gun. They must have all gone swimming down at the creek because they were snoring there in their wet underthings. The one had tried his luck with me was about my size. It took me a long minute of groping but when I left, I had his hat on my head and his clothes under my arm.

I walked a mile or two east under the stars, then cut north another mile and bivouacked under a shag-bark hickory looked about set to fall down. I tried sleeping some but didn’t. At first light I took a good look at the Henry. They had mishandled it doing their dirt designs but the mechanism was still true. I took it apart, cleaned it as best I could, put it back together again. I removed my dress and wrapped the Henry in it and hid it under some brush a hundred feet from the hickory. Then I again changed my clothes. The pants were big but I found myself some rope. The outfit smelled ripe but I reckoned that helped my cause.

Town was just waking up when I walked in. I stepped straight into the café and ordered coffee and biscuits. I had ordered that same thing regular in that same café all the grown years of my life but I was in my other clothes and they could not see me. When I had eaten I called over for more coffee.

“You been off to the fight,” said the can of corned beef brought it over and couldn’t recognize me.

I nodded. Said I’d had my discharge. Said I was passing through on my way home.

“Home where?” he said. He had leaned against the counter and crossed his arms, interested in the traveler going his way from somewhere to somewhere else.

I pointed out through the wall in the direction more or less of Marion and Noblesville. I took a sip of my coffee. Took a look at my fingernails, picked out a speck of grime.

“I paid a visit to a farm about three miles yonder yesterday evening, looking to beg a sup of water and some directions, found the welcome wasn’t any too warm,” I said.

“Which farm was that?” he said.

“Horse farm, to look at it. They’ve had some fire trouble and fence damage. Goats grazing wild and such.”

The man uncrossed his arms and gave out a laugh.

“That’s what used to be the Thompson farm. Gal and her husband. Gal ran off and joined the gypsies. Little fellow she left behind couldn’t fend off the wolves.”

“I heard some of those wolves are Secesh lovers.”

“I couldn’t speak to that.”

“I saw a little corncob serving them cups of coffee.”

“Bartholomew Thompson. He’s missing the fight because of a bad foot or eyes or some such. Boys that took his farm let him run their errands and live in the barn.”

I took another sip of my coffee. I looked the man in the eye a good while. He had aged but a little, had a few fresh wrinkles and only just a bit more yellow in his eye than before. He wasn’t any thinner than he had been either.

“Sounds like he could have used a hand in the fight. I expect there’s folks love the Union in the vicinity.”

If he heard the iron in my voice he didn’t show it.

“Time of war,” he said. “I reckon there’s more want him gone than want him to stay.”

“You among them?”

It was his turn to give me a good look.

“I reckon whether I am or I’m not isn’t any of your affair, stranger.”

We talked war and devils for a while and by the time I left I decided I had had the answer to my question and didn’t need to pursue it further. My next stop was the sheriff’s office. The man who had put his boot on the neck of that institution for many a year and who had stood shouting amongst the burning-out crowd two weeks before my mother hung herself one rainy morning from the ash tree on the edge of our farm was cousin to Ned Phipps, but the fellow built like a broke-string banjo I talked to there told me that old outlaw had gotten drunk one night the past winter before investigating some pranks at the rail yard and let a train take off his legs. They had him in a rolling chair up at the county home. This man, his successor, had only an unrifled musket in his arsenal to go with his badge and wasn’t going to gun for anyone took an angry interest in Ned Phipps.

“Where you heading off to?” he said when I walked back out of his sorry door.

“Home. Home is where I’m goddamn heading,” I said.

On my way out of town and back to the Henry I passed the very Ned Phipps I had business with. He was riding one of the horses he kept corralled on my property. Riding it grand like the cavalry officer he had never been. It was a crow-black racing horse about as handsome as they come. You could see it was on its way to having its back broken by the fat son-of-a-bitch sitting like a general on top of it. That fat son-of-a-bitch gave me down a green-toothed smile and a nod.

“You back from the fight?” he said.

“Traveling to it,” I said.

“Well, then, I wish you luck.”

In my dream of it there is no moon and there are no stars and I am lost in a crowd carrying torches to set the world alight. My mother’s voice and I cannot reach her. My mother’s voice farther away or me from it as the crowd grows closer and closer still. They turn giant and I rain my blows against their giant legs.

“Constance,” my mother calls out in the dream. Her voice sounds as thin as a piece of paper and twice as light. “Constance, come and stand up here beside me.” But in the dream I am afraid. In the dream I turn my back on my mother and run.

On that night it was different from the dream. We had heard there was to be trouble at the house of our neighbor the woman whose husband was gone and who had her two babies and nothing else but the peeling paper on her walls to protect her. My mother sent me to my room to sleep and told me to shut my eyes, but they stayed open and I climbed out my window as soon as I knew she had gone. There was stars and moon aplenty, in the memory and not the dreams, and I could see her up ahead stepping her long legs through the barley. There was a crowd of them already there and my mother walked straight through that crowd and went to stand on the neighbor woman’s front step and face them. She crossed her strong arms over her chest and yelled out to them that they needed to head home and look to their own business. Leave women and their babies alone. She had just yelled this a second time when I came through the crowd and climbed up the steps and stood next to her. In the house behind us the neighbor woman was sitting at her kitchen table with a babe in each arm. Her eyes were wild and she was singing a song I’d never heard before. Rocking a little on a chair wasn’t a rocker. There was upward of fifty of them holding their torches and stepping ever closer to the house and setting in to jeer.

“We don’t ever turn our cheek, do we, Mama?” I said and crossed my own arms and looked out at the crowd. The constable was at the front of it. Ned Phipps, who I had known of since I was five years old, was there. There was a woman in the mob holding a pitchfork and yelling out for the others to toss forward their torches and send us and all the gypsy niggers in the house to hell.

“No, we don’t,” my mother said and as she said this, her voice cracked. It was just a speck of a crack, the smallest thing, like a twig touched in winter, but I had never heard any crack come out of her throat before. I looked up and saw there were tears on her cheeks and that her lower lip was moving. A minute later she had set off away, first at a fast walk, then at a run. When she had left I found I couldn’t keep my arms crossed. They dangled at my sides like they’d been sawed down to the strings. Still, it was me helped the neighbor woman to leave, who took one of the babes and a bundle and walked her away through the crowd already set into their burning and off a long stretch down the road. When we got close to the Ohio border, about where I would cross it again those years later on my way to war, she told me I better get back and see to my mother, that whether she would confess to it or not, she was the one needed seeing to now.

“But where will you go?” I said, for she looked small and alone with her children and her bundle there on the midnight road.

“You go on now, go on back home,” she said.

I followed after her awhile but she would not speak to me any longer, was already striding away from Indiana and off into the sadness of the world. World woven from the wool of such partings.

My mother and I did not speak about that night on any of the days that followed even though the cinders of what had been the neighbor woman’s house smoked dark and slow through every one. I kept looking for my mother to find a piece of fine story to put onto the end of this poor one but she stayed quiet and no crown of justice came to her brow, no sword of vengeance crept into her hand.

A week or ten days into this some boys on horses called of an evening at the edge of our property. They had a torch with them might have been one from that night. Any other time my mother would have seen them off like sick sparrows but she just sat crumpled at the kitchen table and it was me had to walk out to the edge of the property with her musket and back them down.

“Your fear will find you out someday too, daughter mine. It will find you out and use its wiles and crinkle your heart,” she said when I came in and put the musket down. I bit my lip. Did not answer. I knew it was true. She seemed to rouse herself some after she had said this. We worked at blade sharpening and spilled out some good sweat together in the yard. Bartholomew came over with another flower and my mother heated us up a jar of ham and green beans. “That’s a good boy you got ahold of there,” she said. She let me walk him halfway back to his house and he kissed me a minute in a ditch beside the fencerow. That night my mother told me the story about the princess and the dragon only at the end of the story it was the princess cut off the dragon’s head. It may be that Bartholomew had come back and was crouched outside the window and giving a listen. “Good night,” my mother said to me when she had finished. She touched my arm and held it when she said this. Later it was more than one time I would look down at my arm and think I could see a mark she had left in touching me. Who is to say that’s just folly? Who is to say what it is we have left on us after we have been touched? There is the world with its night-walking women and then there is what happens in it. A few days later my mother climbed up into the ash tree with a rope.

I do not know why it was this I chose to speak of that evening after dark when I had retrieved the Henry and put my dress back on and climbed up into the hayloft of our barn and found my Bartholomew lying under a horse blanket in the straw. I had not stood near him in two years that could have been twenty but when I leaned in close to his face and woke him, it was my mother I spoke of, my mother and her fear and her hand on my arm, her hand on my arm more than anything, and the neighbor woman walking off with her children, and my mother’s death in the ash tree. Bartholomew tried to speak more than once while I was talking but I did not let him. When I had finished I told him that the next morning early he needed to get down to the house and fetch my mother’s old musket and see it was charged and bring it to me. Then he was to go back down and put his apron on and serve all the boys their morning coffee in the yard. When they all of them had their coffee he was to go back inside the house and not come out. No matter what he heard. They had tried to take our land and used him poorly and spoken for Secession and now it was their turn to be used. It was simple. Simplest thing in the world. Simple as standing and not running. Walking with the turn of the earth instead of against it. He was to listen to me. I said this twice. He was not to disobey.

“Let me speak,” he said.

I did not answer. There was blood already dripping from my lips and my eyes and he did not open his mouth again, only looked at me a little queer, like he had seen his dream of me gone mad come now to crouch above him, and nodded when I repeated myself. Then I told him I was done talking and called him husband and made him lie back down.

Sleep without dream. Tunnel without end. Sky without stars. Rainbows burst to bloody colored bits. I did not know where I was when I woke and I stumbled around in the straw for a minute, imagined there was chained women sleeping around me, that there was minié bullets or a bucket of ice water and fists coming for my head. I told Bartholomew, who wasn’t there, not to fret, that we would fight the keeper and her ice bucket off together. Then I heard voices in the yard. I picked up the Henry, fed it all the way full of cartridges, and went to the hayloft window. It was still some dark out but you could smell sun in the purple sky and I could cipher well enough. Men in the yard. Metal in their hands. They were wearing hats and long coats against the morning cold and they were bunched and smeared together. It took me the only several seconds I had but I counted first four, then all five of them.

They had the barn to their front, the house behind, and forty fine yards on either side. It was like the door had been shut on them. Like when those boys got caught down in the crater and couldn’t climb up its sides. I didn’t like what I was about to set to doing, but I didn’t like them spending their days setting there on my chairs worse. I didn’t like Bartholomew fetching them their coffee worse. I didn’t like the deep fat on the back of Ned Phipps who some said was my father either. Ned Phipps who some said was my father who had helped scare off my mother and burn out our neighbor woman worse. It was him I shot first. I breathed and then hit him on the side of the neck and he fell out of his boots like a side of bad beef and went crawling off in the direction of his horse. The one I had fought with at the market took his in the forehead. The bullet stove out the back of his head and left a spray in the dawn light almost up to the house. The three of them left unhit needed to move but instead stood staring at Ned crawling off and at the boy had once troubled me now dead as dust sitting on the dirt beside them. I shot another twice in his chest and then into the middle of my fury came a goat up out of nowhere, crazed and hopping left and right, so I shot it too. It sat back on its haunches then folded up its front legs and dripped down its head.

When the goat went down the other two boys took it as a sign and dropped the guns they hadn’t once fired, cried mercy, went into squats and put their hands over their heads. At the minute they did this I heard a hard creak behind me and turned a little and saw a hat and a gun barrel coming up the hole into the shadow of the haymow. The hat came up and the gun lifted after it and I spun full around and shot as the black circle of the barrel found my face. I took the climber through his shoulder and he slumped over and set the gun down gentle in the straw.

Boys had been squatting outside started to run at my shot and I took the one trailing a step straight through his side. I would have taken out the last a short second later only the Henry jammed. I gave a quick try at clearing the mechanism but it wouldn’t budge and I saw the boy wasn’t shot running past Ned Phipps toward the corral. I didn’t like to be too rough but the one had tried to come up behind me was blocking my way so after I had grabbed up his gun I shoved him down the ladder. He hit barn dirt with a whump and groan. I was over him and out the side door when I saw what the son-of-a-bitch had meant to end my days with: I now had my mother’s musket in my hand.

Old weapon. Built for other fights and days. It hadn’t ever been rifled and wobbled its round balls like drunk babies but I could see even at a run that it had been well oiled and I knew that it would hit. The boy was already bareback on Ned Phipps’s handsome black horse and had the corral open when I came around the barn. He reined up a minute when he saw who it was in her skirts had been shooting at them. Just like that outlaw boy had done in the house in the woods. I didn’t say a word, only kept coming forward the way we had been taught in the Kentucky fields, the way we had done it in the Maryland pasture, the way we had fought with the cannon fire killing us into wet nothing in the Virginia woods. I kept coming so he kicked the horse hard and cleared the corral and lit out down the road toward town. I got my line of sight, kneeled, lifted my mother’s musket, lowered it a quarter inch, let out my breath, fired off my wobbly ball through the dawn, and shot him down. The handsome black horse galloped on a ways without its rider, then stopped, gave itself a shake, and set in to nibbling like it was Sunday afternoon. I had no urge to shoot at it. The goat had been a mistake. I felt bad about that goat and would not murder a horse.

Ned Phipps was gurgling loud over at the corral fence. He had got about halfway up to standing. His hat had fallen off and his pants had slid loose down his legs in the crawling. When I got up on him he was dead. Father mine. The others in the yard were just as finished or aiming fast for it.

“Come on out now, Bartholomew,” I called. I got no answer. Called again. I looked at the musket in my hands, then I counted the corpses. My heart skipped a hard beat so I counted again. Five dead boys and a goat. The one inside made it six. Six was too many.

Before he died with his head in my lap at the bottom of the barn ladder where I had thrown him, Bartholomew asked me what it had been like down south at the war, and I told him it had been hot.

“It was hot here too, Constance, and I thought you were dead,” he said.

“Then, husband, you have been kissed and shot by a ghost.”

“I wanted to sell,” he said. “Sell and move on out of here. I lacked only the deed.”

“You could have done it without the deed. All you had to do was take their money.”

“I wanted to do it right.”

“You would have never found it.”

“I’d’ve kept digging.”

“You were my one true love; you put feathers in my letters, you left me a lilac bundle by my breakfast in the long ago.”

“Was I?”

“Always.”

“Every day I took up the shovel and dug for the deed. Ned made me a fair offer. He and his boys were helping me dig. There wasn’t any harm in it. You didn’t have to kill them all. You should have stayed down there a little longer at your war.”

“And you should have looked up into the trees, husband, not down into the dirt.”

“You hid it in the ash tree,” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

Then he died.

The scrawny sheriff was in his office, and when I told him I was Constance Thompson returned from my wayfaring, he said he had just that minute come back from my land. I started to make my speech and ask for my noose but he stopped me, gave me his condolences, told me my farm had been the site of a terrible crime. Once more I started in on my speech and once more he stopped me. He said a stranger had been in town asking questions about our farm. The stranger had been at the café and complained about some slight of hospitality out our way. The stranger, said the scrawny sheriff, was fresh back from the war and had had nothing but blood in his eyes. The last anyone had seen of this stranger was when he had walked out of town heading our way. You could put that all together. The other part to the equation, he went on, was that there had been some boys and a posse of flouncy women camping and carrying on out in the hinterlands had come into town sniffling about a missing Henry repeater rifle. They had told some that they had been in the war and others that they hadn’t but they had clammed up tight, and left soon after, when someone asked just how they had come to lose such a gun.

“You see any blood in these eyes I’m looking at you with?” I asked the sheriff when he was done telling me everything I already knew.

“You have had quite a shock and look road-weary and I will see to your husband’s arrangements if you like, madam,” is what he said.

“I killed them all, every one, even my Bartholomew,” I said.

“You will want to rest up now, Mrs. Thompson,” said the sheriff. “I will have a buckboard take you back home.”

“Take who home? There’s more than one of me here,” I said.

Before Bartholomew breathed his last I let his head down soft onto the dirt floor of the barn and I went out to the edge of the south field and climbed the ash tree where my mother had hung herself and where I had found her swinging on the last day of my youth. I climbed it and felt for the notch just above the branch where she had tied her rope. In the notch was an oilskin bag and in the bag was the deed to my farm. I brought the deed down out of the tree and I carried it into the barn.

“You want to sell, we’ll sell, there’s other buyers in the world,” I said to my Bartholomew. “We can move off away elsewhere. Make a new start. Try for a family together again.”

But he was already dead.

Not so long ago I was coming back from a trade show and passed a greenhouse made of glass from photographic plates. It was bigger but not better built than Weatherby’s, and it had been made along the same lines. This one had been standing some time when I saw it and all that was left of what the glass had shown was smudges of gray, swirls of brown. The woman had the greenhouse said it was a company out of Pennsylvania had built it for her. She said it had been pretty when they had put it up and the images had given off just the right speck of shade but now the sun had had its way and all the ladies and soldiers she had liked to look at were gone. I got the name of the company before I left and wrote them when I got home but they had gone out of business and said they couldn’t help me.

It took me a while but I tracked down three plates of that kind of glass in a likeness shop over in Lafayette and put them in our kitchen window here on the farm. Two fine ladies and one man. Spring and summer, the morning light catches them there, lights them each a minute out of their darkness, lets them glow. One morning these past weeks, as I was looking at them, there was a knock on my door. It was a woman dressed in plain clothes and scuffed shoes about my age had come to pay me a call. She had dust on her from the road and when I asked her she told me she was up from near Yellow Springs, Ohio, so I let her in. We drank hot tea at the kitchen table next to the fading pictures. She was housekeeper to a friend of the General and his wife and at one of the dinners she had helped serve, she had heard a story about a woman had fought for the Union army under the General’s command.

“He was a colonel when I fought for him,” I said.

“I did some soldiering myself, or a kind of it,” she said.

I looked a long while at her and she at me. I had never met another since that time on the road with the colored woman had put her knee to my chest, and I had wondered about it, like I expect all of us had put on pants and gone to war did.

“What made you go?” I said, facing away from her.

“There was two of us,” I heard her say. “It was the other one of us put on the colors. I just kind of rode along.”

“Do you smoke a pipe?” I said.

She said she did and we stepped outside and sat on my front steps and smoked a pipe and traded stories of our adventures in the war. I spoke first and said not very much at all, though it seemed to satisfy her. When it came her turn she told me that her name during the war had been Leonidas and that her friend’s name had been Leander. Leonidas and Leander had been together through the whole long days of the fight.

“We had started out,” she told me, “hauling wood and tending stock and working in the fields in place of all the boys who had gone. When we got tired of that and of our harping parents, we followed after them and saw the bullets fly and heard the cannons roar. We went out onto the fields after the fighting and walked among the dead men and helped take them to their graves. We saw the surgeries where the men were brought to have their limbs removed. We watched them chop a boy’s leg off and throw what they took straight out the front door.”

Dressed in pants, she said, they had attended a battle, and when it went bad and they had killed up most of our side, Leander had put on a dead boy’s uniform and took up his firearm and marched away barefoot with the rest of them. Leonidas had followed Leander through all the weeks and months that followed and even though she had not worn a uniform she had many a time lifted up pistol or rifle and brought the hammer down. After one battle, Leander had got thrown in a prison camp and starved and fooled with and beat for kicking in the teeth of the someone who had fooled with her. Leonidas had met Leander at the gate when they got tired of her troublemaking and set her free.

“She wouldn’t speak a word when she left that evil place and so we walked the roads until she one day got her voice back. ‘Now, that was something and, goddamn, that was something, and goddamn all of it to hell’ is what she said.”

Leander had made this comment as they were walking through a pine forest. Every step in that forest had lifted up something soft and special to smell. You could, Leonidas told me as we sat smoking on my steps, have just laid down on that ground and gone right to sleep or died.

“But we didn’t die yet and there we went a-walking. We turned a corner and come upon a pool of water. When we stepped up close to drink we saw it was shallow and full of dead crickets. Leander looked at those crickets and the tears came climbing up. ‘Every one of them is dead,’ she said. We cried and cried.”

As they were returning home at last by paddleboat, Leander was taken by a fever and had joined the crickets, along with a number of others. The paddleboat captain, fearing further infection, had organized a burial party on a sandbar. Leonidas had tried as best she could to mark the spot but when she returned some while later she found nothing of her friend but the wide waters of the river. As for her subsequent life without Leander she remarked, “I made it back, sure enough, but never felt I’d made it home.”

In the days following this visit, which ended very soon after those last words, I wrote a letter down to Yellow Springs, to the General, to tell him that it was true that I had stolen food out of haversacks, that I was sorry for it and did not know why I had done it and wished I could put all that food I had stolen and eaten back. That maybe things would have turned out different and for the better if I had done so. Leonidas had asked me not to speak of her in any communication with the General, so instead I asked after Weatherby and Weatherby’s grandson and the General’s wife and told the General to send them all my regards.

My husband was long since deceased, I wrote him. By my own hand. I had seen him garbed but not disguised in cloak and hat and climbing up the ladder carrying my mother’s musket, and I had grown frightened — of what had been and what was there — and had seen him in my mind’s eye taking aim at me with it, even though he had not taken aim at me, and I had shot him.

He comes to me sometimes, I wrote. He comes and sits with me at my table or stands in my doorway after I’ve had one of my bad dreams or goes walking out on some business across the yard. I try to talk to him but he will not talk to me. Only sits or stands there. Not all things disappear quickly.

It was a long letter. I included in it too an apology that when the General had come to see me in the lunatic house, I had unbuttoned my dress and made to sit in his lap. I apologized for having scratched his face and hit him with the vase of flowers at the start of his visit and for having cursed him to his grave when he shoved me away. I told him I had since tried to do better but had not always done better.

Fear finds you out, I wrote. It always finds you out.

I have not had any answer yet.