a fool.
Then you had a devil of a time getting back on Ange.
Kirby plodded down the turn row on the east side of the field. Dust from the road caught his eyes. One rider pulling up to the house, leading a saddleless, riderless horse. A bay. The boy touched the smooth butt of the Navy .36 stuck behind his wide belt. A man just couldn’t be too careful these days, what with some of those Kansas Jayhawkers still around, killing and looting and raping. But, he reminded himself, some of the Missouri Redlegs were just as bad as the Jayhawkers. Seems like war brought out the poison in some and the good in others.
Kirby’s father hadn’t held much with slavery, but he did feel a state had a right to set and uphold its own laws, so he had ridden off to fight with the Gray. His Pa’s brother, up in Iowa, whom Kirby had not seen but one time in his life, was a farmer, like most of the Jensen men. But he had marched off to fight with the Blue. He had gotten killed, so Kirby had heard, in Chancellorsville, back in ’63.
At sixteen, Kirby didn’t believe a man had the right to keep another in chains, as a slave, although there hadn’t been much of that in this part of Missouri: everybody was too poor, just a day to day struggle keeping body and soul together.
But he did believe, like this father, probably because of his father, that the government in far-off Washington on the river didn’t have the right to tell a state what it could and couldn’t do in
Didn’t seem right.
Had Kirby been old enough, and not had his Ma to look after, he would have ridden for the Gray.
As Ange plodded closer to the house, Kirby could make out the figure in the front yard. It was his father.
One
“Boy,” Emmett Jensen said looking at his son, “I swear you’ve grown two feet.”
Kirby had slid off Ange and walked to the man. “You’ve been gone four years, Pa.” He wanted to throw his arms around his Pa, but didn’t, ’cause his Pa didn’t hold with a lot of touching between men. Kirby stuck out his hand and his Pa shook it.
“Strong, too,” Emmett commented.
“Thank you, Pa.”
“Crops is late, Kirby.”
“Yes, sir. Rains come and stayed.”
“I wasn’t faultin’ you, boy.” Emmett let his eyes sweep the land. He coughed, a dry hacking. “I seen a cross on the hill overlookin’ the creek. Would that be your Ma?”
“Yes, sir.”
“When’d she pass?”
“Spring of last year. Doc Blanchard said it was her lungs and a bad heart.” And grief, the boy thought, but kept that to himself.
“She go hard?”
“No, sir. Went on in her sleep. I found her the next morning when I brung her coffee and grits.”
“Good coffee’s scarce. What’d you do with the coffee?”
“Drank it,” the boy replied honestly. “Then went to get the doc.”
“Right nice service?”
“Folks come from all over to see her off.”
Emmett cleared his throat and then coughed. “Well, I think I’ll go up to the hill and sit with your ma for a time. You put up them horses and rub them down. We’ll talk over supper.”
Emmett’s eyes flicked over the .36 stuck behind his son’s belt. He said nothing about it.
“Pa?”
The father looked at his son.
“I’m glad you’re back.”
The father stepped forward, put his arms around his son, and held him.
Over greens and fried squirrel and panbread, the father and son ate and talked through the years that they had both lost and gained. There were a few moments of uncomfortable silence between them until they both adjusted to the time and place, and then they were once more father and son.
“We done our best,” Emmett said. “Can’t nobody say we didn’t. And there ain’t nobody got nothing to be ashamed of. I thought it wrong for the Yankees to burn folks’ homes like they did. But it was war, and terrible things happen in war. But the bluebellies just kept on comin’. Shoot one and five’d take his place. They weren’t near ’bout the riflemen we was, nor the riders, but they whipped us fair and square and now it’s time to put all that behind us and get on with livin’.” He sopped a piece of panbread through the juice of his greens. He chewed for a time. “You know your brother, Luke, is dead, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir. I didn’t know if you did, or not. I heard he was killed in the Wilderness, last year. Fightin’ with Lee, wasn’t he?”
Luke had always been Pa’s favorite, so Kirby had felt.
Emmett nodded. “Yeah. Tryin’ to get back to the Wilderness, so I heard.” Something in his eyes clouded, as if he knew more about his son’s death than he was telling. “I don’t see no sign of your sister, Janey, and you ain’t brought up her name. What are you holding back, Kirby?”
The moment the boy had been dreading. “She run off, Pa. Last year. Run off with a tinker, so he called himself.
