—Ma’am? Delrey said. Our foraging didn’t turn up much. Or let’s be straight and call it begging and bargaining and stealing.
—Yes?
—I bought a sack of biscuits and a jug of milk. There wasn’t even a chicken to be had, never mind pig meat. And the people selling wanted a dollar each for a biscuit and a cup of milk, and even then they only sold them paired. Cup of milk and a biscuit, two dollars. But not two cups of milk and a biscuit. Or two biscuits and a cup of milk.
V interrupted and said, I understand the terms. Let’s split what we have and eat around the fire.
—There’s more to it, Delrey said. There’s been smallpox aplenty all around here. So we need to know who’s been inoculated. Or else already had smallpox and lived through it, but I guess we’d know that by the scars.
V said, Everybody but Jimmie and Winnie.
—I’ll get on it, Burton said.
AN HOUR LATER he returned to camp, a black boy riding behind him. Nine or ten, tall and skinny and hungry, his finger joints and elbows and knees rising like flower bulbs under the skin. He wore his hair cropped close, almost shaved. The boy stood before them neither scared nor comfortable. He watched all of them, wary and calm. Scattering all down his neck and arms and legs, a hundred fresh pox scars. Each one like the touch of a hot poker, a hundred healing burns, dimpled and silver with a starlike print at the center. Across both cheeks, patterns of scars the Greeks would have connected to make constellations.
He’d fought it off well. People who died had a thousand blisters and scabs wrapping their bodies, overlapped like reptile scales. Now, down around the boy’s calves and ankles, only a few brown dry scabs remained.
V said, What is your name?
The boy looked off to the woods line, judging distance. He said, I don’t have one.
—Yes, you do, Ellen said. Is it John? Benjamin? Samuel?
—No, ma’am. It’s Bobcat.
Ellen shrugged and went back to the fire.
—Well, Bobcat, V said, I’ll take your word on that. I see you’ve been sick.
He looked her in the eye and raised his chin and said, Better now.
—Yes, you are. You’re going to be fine and live to be a hundred. You’re strong. But those last scabs down your legs could help keep my children from dying. I’d pay you for a few of them.
The boy looked down at his scabby legs and bare feet and then looked up, more wary than before.
—They fall off in the dirt. Glad to get shut of them. But you want to buy them off me?
—It would be a favor, V said. I’ll give you three biscuits or three dollars for three of them.
Bobcat thought a second and said, Both. Three biscuits for now and money for later. Hard money, not grayboy paper.
V said, Three big dry ones and we have a deal.
Bobcat squatted and picked around at his shins and ankles until he found loose scabs, domed and puckered and brown, gritty as sandpaper. They lifted from the pink scarred skin underneath with the first pull of a fingernail. He held them in his cupped palm.
V reached out her hand, but Bobcat stepped back.
—We trading or what? he said.
—Yes, we are trading.
Bobcat looked around at the white faces aimed his way.
—Then fill your hand too, ma’am, he said.
V stacked the biscuits in her hand and held them out to Bobcat.
He shoved them in his pockets but kept his fist clenched around the scabs.
—Yes? she asked.
—I gotta have my money, he said.
V said, Of course. I apologize for my forgetfulness.
She counted out the coins and reached them to him.
Bobcat grabbed the money and dumped the scabs into her hand and took off running fast for the woods.
Delrey watched him go and said, That child can mortally fly.
V took the brown scabs and crushed them to beige powder in a teacup with the back of a silver spoon, and then spilled the powder onto a saucer and pursed her lips and puffed the powder up the noses of Jimmie and Winnie, knowing they would get sick and might possibly die. Many people reacted to the inoculation with a slight fever and that was it—no smallpox for them. Some raised a few blisters and quickly got better. A scant few percent became very sick and passed to the next world. Like everyone inoculating, V was figuring odds, gambling. If Jimmie or Winnie took the actual pox full-on, they had less than fifty-fifty odds of living. With the inoculation, nine out of ten lived. When V finished, Winnie howled in outrage. Jimmie blinked watery eyes and stood with his fists clenched until V kissed him on the forehead and sent him back to Billy and Jeffy, squatting by the fire.
V bowed her head slightly to the north and then to the east. Praising Boston and Africa. Cotton Mather’s slave Onesimus had taught him how to do it, how to powder the scabs and blow them up the nose. Or make a shallow cut in the skin and rub the powder in. Something they did back in Africa. Yankees put much stock in the famous Puritan witch-killer Mather, and V had read plenty of that crazy old man’s thoughts, all the fear and dread he cursed America with down to the tenth generation. But Yankees loved to claim relation with him and all those other fanatics that came over here to establish their own flavor of dictatorship led by preacher tyrants. Winchester had made V read their writings, and even at fifteen she believed the English were right. Those people needed to be locked up. But instead, they ran to the wilderness and found the freedom to be as crazy as they wanted and to
