IT HAPPENED RIGHT AFTER HARVESTTIME—Sherman’s raiders burned their way across Georgia. Corncribs full, fodder and forage stacked high in conical piles around eight-foot poles, apples all picked and stored fresh in root cellars for the fall or sun-dried in leathery rings for the winter. Onions and potatoes and turnips in root cellars, beans dried in the sun and ready for winter soup, cabbages still green in the fields almost ready for cutting. Fat hogs that you didn’t want to have to feed for the cold months ready to slaughter and feast on fresh or salt and smoke for later. A winter’s food wiped out and people left starving.
—Where did they all go? V asked as they passed a tiny ghost village surrounded by farms—only one house with light in the window, smoke coming from the chimney.
Delrey said, Somewhere else. Wandering refugee. Or off in the woods eating squirrels and grabbling trash fish out of creeks.
AT A RIVER FORD, a blond child sat alone on the far bank and shouted directions to them as they began crossing. Gee and haw. She claimed there were holes in the river widely known to be bottomless and able to pull down entire wagons and their teams.
When they reached dry land, V reached her out a few coins, but the girl looked at them and said, Ain’t nothing to buy around here. But if you’ve got clean water, I’ll pester you for a swallow of it. That river’s nasty. It’s got dead people in it, just laying there spoiling.
She tipped her head upstream.
MIDDAY, V WANDERED into the pinewoods for what all in their caravan delicately agreed to call a natural break. Men and women both scattered into the trees on opposite sides of the road, though the men only had to step casually behind a largish trunk a few feet from the roadbed and reappear a few seconds later looking at ease. V and Ellen trekked far beyond sight and had voluminous garments to deal with—awkward squatting and arising and so on.
Off in the woods in her moment of privacy, V thought about Winchester. He mostly taught mathematics by way of Euclid and Pythagoras. Winchester especially loved Pythagoras and his genius in understanding the ratios that order the universe, his declaration that number was God, and also his craziness otherwise, such as his rule that one should always answer the call of nature with back to sun, which was how V had aligned herself.
Walking back to the caravan, watching out for snakes, V plucked new growth from the center of a grassy plant, slid the innermost stalk of it free with a squeaky friction, a feel of suction. She put the white tip and the first pale green of the blade into her mouth like a farmer sucking on a wheat sprout. Her weed was an ugly nameless thing, except she believes that nothing is nameless. The weed’s bitter green beautiful taste carried with it an essential question. Will this thing help or hurt? Be medicine or poison? Thusly, the earliest herb doctors sounded out the world in endless experiment. How many thousands of generations cascaded down through time just to find the healing power in goldenseal or ginseng or coneflower root? But surely only three or four to note the poison in pokeberries or green parasols or false morels. The urge to graze in spring abides, the need for something green after a winter of dried beans and potato. Country people called spring greens a tonic. Medicine.
Back at the caravan V said to Burton, We need a huge pot of greens, any kind you can find.
—Yes?
—And meat to flavor the pot. We all need it. We’re starting to look pasty as corpses from traveling and living too much on white food. Biscuits and grits and flour gravy.
She multiplied people, counting children as half a person, figuring at least a quart per person for a good strong dose of greens and meat broth.
She said, We’ll need about three bushels of greens. A couple of chickens or a pound of bacon or ham will do for the broth.
THREE HOURS LATER, Delrey and Bristol and Ryland came back from foraging with comically big tow sacks paired behind their saddles. The bags bulged with various cresses and mustards and a great deal of dandelion and dock and plantain, even a few beautiful fiddleheads and wild leeks. But no meat, not even a skinny squirrel.
—I found a place with aplenty of hogs, Delrey said. This man’s shaped his farm like a fort. Long pine logs axed to a point on either end and piled onto each other in a jagged circle with the hogs and the smokehouse and a pretty, white farmhouse in the middle of it. Like he’s trying to live inside a brier-patch. He’s got a pack of big dogs. The dogs and the hogs are all brown and black and some of them wear their colors in spots and some go striped, and all of them are so long-legged you have to get up close to tell the difference. I tried to buy some hog meat off him, but he wasn’t selling. The man said he and his
