Smiling, she picked up her glass and lifted it to her mouth. I glanced away as the wings of a bird taking flight caught sunlight.
After the shot, I realized it had been quiet for some time. Night birds, frogs, none of them were calling. And I had missed it.
The sound of the glass shattering came close upon the shot. Val sat straight in the chair, her mouth opening twice as if to speak, then slumped. I went to her, expecting at any moment a second shot. As I held her, she pointed at the wine running slowly along the floorboards. The second shot came then-but from a shotgun, not a rifle.
Nathan stepped into the clearing, from lifelong habit extracting the shell casings and replacing them even as he moved forward. In moments he was there and had Val on the floor. We'd both seen our share of shootings, we knew what had to be done.
Later I'd learn that the kids up at the camp weren't the only ones Nathan had been keeping an eye on. He'd arrived after the man had taken his first shot and was preparing for the second. Must of heard the click of the safety release, Nathan said, 'cause he for damn sure didn't hear me, and looked round just in time to see both barrels coming at him.
No identification on the body, of course. Keys for a Camry that turned out not to be a rental but stolen, thick fold of hundreds and twenties in a money clip, full whiskey flask snugged in one rear pocket of his jeans. In the other they found a Congressional Medal of Honor.
J. T. came back to the cabin to tell me this.
'We might be able to trace him by it,' she said, 'assuming of course that it's his.'
But tracing him was dancing in place. We all knew that. We all knew where he came from. One dead soldier more or less, named or nameless, mattered little in the scheme of things.
'Dad?'
Only then did I realize I'd made no response.
'Are you going to be okay?'
Of course I would be, in time.
'You shouldn't be out here by yourself. Come on into town and stay with me, just for tonight.'
But I declined, insisting that being by myself was exactly what I needed right now.
Again and again people say everything's a blur at these times, but it's not. For all that it happens fast, each single moment takes forever to uncoil in your mind, each image is clear and separate and rimed with light. Somewhere in my memory Val will always be sitting there slumped forward in the chair with a surprised expression on her face pointing to the spilled wine.
Lonnie showed up not long after, then Don Lee with Doc Oldham in tow. At one point Lonnie threatened to slap cuffs on me and haul my ass back to town if he had to. He didn't carry through on it, though. Most of us don't carry through; that's one of the things you can usually count on.
Eldon was the last to turn up, after the rest had gone, even Nathan-though for all I knew, Nathan was still out there skulking. Eldon sat on the edge of the porch.
'I'm sorry, man,' he said.
'We all are.'
'You have no idea.'
I didn't have much of anything.
'Rain heading this way.'
'Good.'
After a moment he said, 'I loved her, John.'
After a moment I said, 'I know you did.'
'What the hell are we gonna do now, man?'
'You're going to go on, to Texas and all those places you two had talked about, and you're going to play and sing the songs you and Val always did together.'
I went in and got the banjo.
'She told me you were learning to play.'
'I don't think you can call what the banjo and I do together play. It's more of an adversary relationship.'
When I handed it to him, he said, 'I can't take this.'
'Sure you can. It needs to be played, it needs to be allowed to do what it was made for.'
We argued about it some more, and finally he agreed. 'Okay, I'll take it, I'll even learn to play the thing. But it's not mine.'
'That's what Val always said: that instruments don't belong to people, we just borrow them for a while.'
'What about you? What are you going to do?'
I'm going to sit here on this porch, I told him. And once he was gone that's what I did, sat there on the porch looking out into the trees and back at the label on the wine bottle and thinking about the ragged edges of my life. About daybreak I saw Miss Emily walking at wood's edge with young ones in a line behind her. 'Val,' I said aloud, and as her name came back to me in echo from the trees it sounded very much like a prayer.
Somewhere deep inside myself I'm still sitting there, waiting.
