She wore a cotton dress laundered almost thin as gauze. The fabric might have been a sort of milky chocolate at one time, patterned with leaves or flowers. Now it looked like parchment marked with script too faint to read. She carried a heavy black pistol, and she looked young to be mother to five. Pretty in an exhausted way. Much as V imagined herself to look, having birthed one more than Mrs. Wiggins, and really the dead ones batter you even more than the living, pull more out of you in their leaving than their arriving.
When they were close enough to speak softly, V said, Missus Wiggins, are you and your daughters all right?
Missus Wiggins lifted her left hand and wiped the prominent second knuckle of the forefinger three swipes against the wings of her nose and then swept her loose and mostly brown hair back from her forehead with the inside angle of her elbow.
—All right? she said. If we’re not, where could we go to be right? And what would we live on when we got there? Just breathe air and be fine? I’m not standing here to be judged by you or anybody else.
—I only meant . . .
—God hates lies, and I’m not going to tell one to you. We’re not any of us all right. We’re all about half crazy since the raiders started passing through. Wiggins and I didn’t carry slaves. Didn’t believe in them, and didn’t want them. Believed there would be a bloody reckoning for them, and we were right. We hoed our own rows, emptied our own night jars, cooked our own meals, taught our children to read, and when we could spare the money, we bought them books too hard for us to read. Our goal was simple. If every generation helps the next take one step up, imagine where we might all be someday. But those boys from the Northern army came after us anyway. Six or a dozen at a time in waves for weeks. Trying to take what they could carry and burn the rest. If we had a choice but to let them kill us or to put them down, I can’t see it. Every one of us killed at least a person, and two of the girls can’t lift the blame off themselves. They dream about it no matter how I tell them the load’s on those boy soldiers for their own dying. And on the old men who sent them here. You turn the other cheek too many times in this world, and before you can blink you’re wiped away. We didn’t go out to steal everything they had and burn their farms to ashes. They came here, and they stayed here. I’m sorry they believed whatever they believed about us that made it right to come try to kill us. They’re thirty-one of them. They don’t have markers, but we all went out in the pines to put them in the ground and say sad words over them about their delusions.
The pistol hung from her hand, pulling her down, a burden heavier than she could bear. The other women, all in their teens, hovered behind the front door and the flanking windows, watching. V pictured dark woods, a crescent moon riding across a deep indigo sky, a dark night procession of pretty girls and tall dogs lit by yellow pine-knot torches, tangled bodies of bloody young men heaped in a wagon-bed.
V said, Could I come inside and meet your girls?
THEY WERE INDEED PRETTY and strange and might have fallen from Venus for all they knew of the current outside world. They lined up to meet V, a receiving line. They were all the same size, and V imagined a common pile of worn and faded dresses from before the war—every morning each girl just drawing something from the pile without thought of possession or personal style. They had names along the lines of flowering plants and tragic heroines. Names like Daisy and Daphne and Laurel and Hecuba, though V couldn’t keep any of them straight. The girls flurried around preparing an afternoon tea, carrying their pistols and then setting them down on every horizontal surface in a percussive four-beat rhythm.
The tea was herbal, a sinus-clearing mixture that made a nice greenish-yellow cup. One of the girls set out a platter of cold breakfast biscuits cut into triangles and drizzled with honey and sprinkled with some brown spice similar to cinnamon but more piney.
By way of transition, V pulled her pistol out of her reticule. It rested in her hand so small and inconsequential compared to their heavy Colt’s army revolvers. V’s lay there unthreatening, prettier than it needed to be for its function. And too, at least while in her possession, it had killed no one. Hard to reconcile these lovely girls with Missus Wiggins’s statement that everyone in the family had killed at least one human being.
—This is a gift from my husband, V said. He meant me to kill myself with it if I found myself on the brink of being dishonored.
They all looked at the little thing, and then one of the girls said, Did he understand how a gun works? Somebody comes at you, you point it at them, not yourself.
—Well, V said, I always planned on using it your way, no matter what his intentions were.
They sipped tea a moment, and then V said, I understand this has been a hard time.
The girl who looked oldest—meaning maybe seventeen—said, They didn’t come marching across Georgia as one big army all together. They fanned out sixty or a hundred miles wide in little bunches of raiders. Sometimes only a few men, but one time more than a dozen. And then thieves and scavengers followed them. First bunch—four of them—it was clear you let them do what they wanted and take what they wanted or they would burn you
