said, that edge in her voice like a knife blade she held
between them as a way of protecting herself.
Karen turned her attention to the boy.
“What’s your name?” she said.
At first he simply stared at her.
“You deaf?”
He shook his head.
“I’ll give you another biscuit with honey on it if
you tell me your name.”
He looked at the biscuits, at the jar of honey.
“Stephen,” he said. She gave him the biscuit, split
it apart, and daubed honey onto it and watched him
eat it then lick his sticky fingers.
“What’s yours?” he said when he’d finished licking
the last finger.
She swallowed hard. She didn’t aim to get familiar
with this child.
He waited, refusing to take his eyes off her.
“Karen,” she said finally.
“Karen,” he said, repeating it. “You seen my ma?”
Jake could see the pain in Karen’s eyes. Toussaint
could see it, too.
“Time to go,” Jake said.
The boy looked from her to him then back at her.
“Come on,” Jake said, standing first, then lifting
the boy into his arms.
“No.”
“Have to take you into town.”
“No!”
He whimpered and started to squirm in Jake’s
arms, all the while Jake repeating that it would be all
right, telling him, “You be a good boy and I might let
you take the reins once we get started.”
This seemed to do the trick.
“I’m sorry I had to impose on you.” Jake set the
boy onto the saddle.
She didn’t say anything and he couldn’t read what
she was thinking.
“You sure you don’t want me to bring you back
some supplies?” Toussaint said, hoping she’d change
her mind, let him come back out again, just the two
of them so he could talk to her, see if he could start
building something with her again, start over, maybe.
“No, I don’t need anything, Marshal. I’m fine,”
she said, as though it was Jake who asked her and not
Toussaint. Toussaint felt the sting of her rejection and
didn’t say any more, but mounted up and turned his
mule’s head out toward the road.
She stood and watched them leave and it felt some-
how not what she wanted.
Karen saw the gray flycatcher sitting on the pump
handle as though lost.
9
They were three men with weary but similar trail-
worn features: Zack, Zebidiah, and Zane Stone.
Tennesseans by birthright, but long removed from
that place since the end of the war when they’d come
home as downtrodden rebels with naught but a single
mule and two muskets between them, thanks to the
good generosity of one General U.S. Grant, goddamn
him and his Union.
The farm they left to go off and fight in such places
as Day’s Gap and Hatchie’s Bridge and Bristoe Station
wasn’t much of a farm to start with—forty acres of
rocky hillside in the highlands of eastern Tennessee.
But whatever the little farm had been when they left
was a lot less now upon their return and they were
disinclined to be farmers having been soldiers. They
were none of them content to walk behind the mule
with a single-blade plow tearing up rocky ground just
to plant corn seed they couldn’t afford and live in a
leaky-roofed cabin that time and marauding Yankees
had misused. Such was the work of common men, of
men who didn’t know any better, who hadn’t gone
off to see the elephant. They had, all three, and they’d
liked what the elephant looked like.
And so the eldest of them, Zeb, said, “Guddamn,
what if anything has this war taught us but the power
of a gun and to be men who ain’t afraid to use it? A
gun and each other is about all any of us can count on
in this old life and I’m ready to head on out to Texas
where men such as we can make a go of it. And you
all can by gud join me or stay here and fit your hands
to that plow yonder, and that mule, too. You can eat
brittle corn till it comes out your ears and asses and sit
around here and get old and wait for something to
happen: gud’s grace or the whatnot, but by gud, not
me. I done seen the elephant and you boys have, too,
and we all lived to tell about it.”
“What you have in mind?” the youngest, Zane,
asked. “Once’t we get to Texas? Becoming highway-
men? Because all we know put together you could put
in a snuff can. Hell we can’t even raise corn if’n some-
one was to stick a gun in our ear and say ‘grow corn
or else.’ ”
“No sir, we ain’t gone be no guddamn highway-
men unless’n we have to; and I ain’t saying it might
not come to that someday. But our folks taught us
