cousin Ann must have wanted this blue-eyed boy.
As he got closer I could see that he was handsome enough, about the same age as we were, and he wasn’t lame or missing an arm, or missing an eye. The War had been over for a year now, and them that was coming home had already made it back, but the fighting had left its mark on most of them one way or another. If this boy had been in the War, he looked as if the last four years had touched him but lightly, and I wondered how that could be, for I did not think he had the makings of an officer. Nothing about his clothes or his countenance made me think he came from the gentry. I had known officers in my time, and there was an air of command about them that this fellow didn’t have.
There wasn’t much meat on him, but that was true of everybody in these lean times, and in his case it just sharpened his cheekbones, and made him look taller than he was. I glanced past him at the clabbered sky above the pine woods. Today, his eyes truly were bluer than the sky. He was nice enough to look at, I’ll give him that, but I didn’t see anything about him that should set a woman’s face alight, the way Ann’s did when she caught sight of him. He wasn’t a rich man, if his boots and hands were anything to go by. He looked like an ordinary dirt farmer, fortunate in his looks at twenty, but another decade or so of drink and hard work would put paid to that, as it would to Ann’s. I told myself that there is some satisfaction in having less to lose.
Before he got within a civil speaking distance of us, Ann had pushed past me, and run out of the hen yard, flinging herself in his arms, and calling out, “Tom!”
He held her close for a minute, before he caught sight of me, and then he let her go, still watching me warily, the way a stray dog does, to see if you are going to shy rocks at him. We neither one of us smiled. I don’t like anybody unless they give me a reason to, which mostly they don’t. Maybe he was the same.
After a minute or two of stroking his cheek with her hand and ruffling his hair, she grabbed his hand and led him back to where I was standing. “This here’s my cousin Pauline,” she told him. “She has come to work on the farm a spell while she’s getting treated by Dr. Carter.”
He nodded at me, but didn’t smile, so for spite I said, “Would you be Ann’s brother, sir?”
They smiled at one another then, but they could not fault me for asking, for Ann did have a brother named Tom, but I’ll bet she was never half so glad to see him as she was to see this fellow.
Ann said, “He’s Tom Dula, Pauline. Lives with his mama ’bout a mile from my mama’s place on Reedy Branch.”
“You have the look of a soldier,” I said, not because it was true, but because men seemed to take that as a compliment.
He nodded. “Well, the 42nd North Carolina tried hard enough to make me one.”
Ann had linked arms with him, and she was leaning against him now, looking as proud as if he had won the War all by himself, instead of losing it in company with a hundred thousand other ragged souls.
“Tom was at Petersburg, and Cold Harbor,” she said.
“I went in as a company drummer, but by the end of it, the army needed fighters more than drummers.”
Ann hugged him closer to her. “And he got took prisoner at Kinston near the end, and finished up in a prison camp up in Maryland. Took him nigh on two months to make it home, and with me out here watching the road for him every day and worrying if he was safe, until my tears turned the dust on my cheeks to mud.”
Tom Dula turned to look at the empty road, and it was a moment or two before he spoke again. “I was lucky, I reckon. I lived through the Yankee prison camp, and I finally did get home. That’s more than John and Leny did.”
Ann nodded. “Strange to think of it that way, Tom. Them being dead and gone. And you were the youngest. I know your mother was near as thankful to have you back as I was.”
I just kept looking at the pair of them, neither one seeming to remember that I was standing right beside them. I kept quiet, because there wasn’t much I could think of to say, except to congratulate this fellow for outliving his brothers, which didn’t seem fitten. Besides, I was more interested in how the land lay between him and Cousin Ann, for I had not seen her sparkle with warmth or joy at all until this Rebel boy walked out of the woods.
“How long have you been back?” I said, thinking he must have arrived yesterday, from the way Ann was carrying on.
“It’ll be a year midsummer,” said Ann, but her smile faded as she looked at me, for my speaking up had reminded her that I was watching them. She narrowed her eyes, and said, “Well, this standing around isn’t getting your chores done, Pauline. When you see to that hen, there’s washing to be done.” She looked up at Tom. “James is in the house, cobbling right now. Let’s you and I go talk in the barn where it’s warmer.”
I went back into the hen yard, watching them hurry, arm in arm, toward the barn, and I was thinking, “It’ll be warm enough wherever the two of you fetch up.” But it was all the same to me who Ann chose to carry on with. I couldn’t see anything special about this boy, worth making such a fuss over. But a minute or two later, as I wrung that chicken’s neck, I found myself thinking of the two of them entwined together in the hayloft, and, when the wind eased up a bit, I fancied I could hear laughter and soft voices.
We finally did get around to visiting the neighbors. The early March weather was still harsh, but it was a fallow time for farms, and people were naturally tired of having been cooped up all winter. They began to host get- togethers at one house or another through the rest of the winter. These occasions weren’t fancy parties: just a couple of old fellows sawing away on a homemade fiddle or a mandolin, while jugs of corn liquor, clear as water, passed from hand to hand, to fuel the talking. There was dancing, too, but not enough young men to make much of a go of it. People wore their ordinary everyday clothes: there were no fancy ball gowns or silk cravats to be seen at a Happy Valley party. Why, even the soldiers’ uniforms I’d seen at a dance or two back during the War had been more elegant than this, and the gaiety seemed a notch below the soldiers’ merry-making, too, but I understood that. The soldiers were drowning out thoughts of the morrow, knowing that they might be dancing their last reel, or seeing a willing girl for the last time. Such darkness as that had forced them to raucous revelry. The fever pitch was lacking in the festivities of a winter gathering in a world that was now peaceful, but poor-and missing some of those boys who would never come home.
I wore my best calico, which was clean but faded, and had seen me through most of the War. There were some women better turned out than me, but I am twenty and tiny, which counts for much. I did not lack for partners when I cared to dance. Even the fat old ladies and the scrawny war widows were not left wallflowers, for there was no belle of this ball, except my cousin Ann, who was no favorite among her own sex, but by the menfolk she was much desired. I don’t say they thought well of her, but they would have taken any favor from her she cared to bestow, and no one seemed to mind James Melton’s presence among the watchers.
I did meet the other Tom-Ann’s brother, Tom Foster-among the congregation at the dance. This Tom was a gawky, raw-boned boy, a couple of years younger than Ann, and not a patch on her in looks, but then, knowing the reputation of Lotty Foster, their mother, the two of them might have had different fathers to account for the lack of family resemblance.
When the dancing commenced, Tom Dula played the fiddle alongside the mandolin player for a reel or two, which called to my mind that he had been a company musician in the army. He played well enough, I suppose, but not as if he’d practiced or cared much for the skill of it, but only because music-making happened to be a thing that came easily to him. I don’t think he ever bothered with anything that didn’t come easy. He didn’t keep at it long, and he seemed to prefer the moonshine to the merry-making, same as I did. I spent most of the evening within arm’s reach of the whiskey jug, and sitting on a bench with a gaggle of older ladies, because I wanted to know more about Cousin Ann, and I judged that not much went on in the settlement that those old cats didn’t know about, so I sipped ’shine and listened, and every now and then I would drop a word into the stream of talk, to set the current off in the right direction.
Once, when Ann hauled Tom to his feet and made him partner her in a quadrille, I remarked to no one in particular, “They make a fine pair, do they not? What a shame that Ann did not meet Tom Dula soon enough to make a match of it.”
With a short bark of laughter, the white-haired lady beside me said, “Why, they had ample opportunity. Those two have knowed each other all their lives.”
“And been sweet on one another near ’bout that long,” said Betsy Scott. “Lotty Foster used to tell about the
