Ryland put his pistol back in his belt and said, Now and then, though, it’s the exception that proves the rule. He said it very bright, trying to hold the corners of his mouth level.
Burton announced to the room, We need some sleep, and all of us will sleep right here by the fire. One of us will be awake all the time. I’ll take the first watch.
—You think you’re going to put a watch over us? In my own house? Elgin said.
Delrey said, No judgment as to need. But we’re going to do it the way we’re going to do it.
He raised the angle of his shotgun barrel about an inch and said, I bet we all need to visit the outhouse now that the lightning’s quit. I’ll stand guard outside and make sure everybody’s safe.
AFTER THEY’D ALL GATHERED back around the fire, Elgin said, I’d been wondering how in hell y’all up in Richmond managed to lose the war. Then you show up on my doorstep and it’s clear as day. Worthless people.
—Could have been they outnumbered us, Ryland said. But all the way down here, I’ve been thinking maybe we had it coming.
—Had what coming?
—Losing, Ryland said.
—Say that again, Elgin said.
—You heard me.
—I don’t like to kill people unless I’m sure they need it. So say it one more time and I will lay you down.
Ry said, You’ve not ever worn a uniform or killed anybody, and you’re not going to start now. Have you even had your first drink of liquor?
The boy reached to his waist and pulled out a little hidden Derringer. Silver-plated with pearl grips, three-inch over-under barrels.
Ryland and Bristol both laughed at him when he held it out.
V said, Boys, stop it right now. And you, Elgin, don’t say another word.
—I don’t let women run me, Elgin said.
He kept his little pistol leveled at Ryland.
Ry couldn’t pass up a jab. He said, Except apparently that woman over there is not long since finished nursing you. Diapering too probably. He gestured toward Belle, hovering nearby.
She said, Mr. Elgin, don’t pay attention to their rough talk.
Burton Harrison stood and spread his hands and said, Wait.
V stood too and said, Enough.
And then Elgin twitched a finger, almost a nervous impulse, and an awful instant of time later, Ryland was gone for good.
Bristol stood there, with a look of stunned recognition on his face at just the stupidity of it, just the damn overwhelming thoughtless ignorance and meanness and darkness of humans.
Ryland lay with a hole burned in the weave of his left jacket lapel, all the light gone out of him. Whatever fills the bloody mess inside our heads—the details that make us who we are, those threads of nerve and strange ugly tissues that make us different from each other—Ryland’s had quit working, shut down all at once. He’d transformed in a matter of seconds from being so busy living—fired up and blazing and tiring people down to a nub most days—to being a dead pile of meat and bones and gristle without a spark. Three or four swings of a pendulum and he was all gone.
Elgin shifted his little pistol slightly toward Bristol and sort of smirked.
In the instant it took Ryland to die, Bristol didn’t have time to think or to choose, as if something in him beyond thought didn’t wish to occupy the same world as Elgin.
Bristol drew his navy pistol and pulled two shots faster than the mind could register. One hole in the forehead and an ugly red mess blowing out the back onto the plaster wall. One heartbeat, and all that bragging falsehood Ryland made up on the rail platform in Richmond became prophecy.
Elgin wasn’t surprised any more than a candle flame is surprised when you lick your fingers and pinch it out. Light, then dark. He fell as if he had just suddenly decided to lie down. But he was dead before he hit the floor.
And before Bristol even recognized what he’d done, V wheeled and slapped him hard. A roundhouse blow to the side of his head. He still held his smoking pistol aimed toward the space the dead boy had occupied before collapsing. Ryland lay peaceful ten feet away as if asleep, and Bristol looked too stunned to form tears in his eyes.
V looked at the two dead boys and back at Bristol and began to view that arrangement of bodies anew, as a feature of her current world needing to be understood.
She said, I’m sorry I did that.
She tried to hug Bristol, but he wouldn’t stand still for it.
All the children, both groups, either cried and wailed or were too terrified to move. Belle’s people hushed their children and put themselves, their bodies, between their children and V’s people. Billy had burrowed up under the pile of quilts and lay sobbing. Maggie still had her eyes closed and held her hands over her ears, and Jeffy and Jimmie stared at the bodies in disbelief. V and Ellen and Burton got to their knees and hugged the children and patted heads and tried to turn the little boys away, but Jimmie and Jeffy kept looking back at the bodies and the blood. Delrey stayed where he was, with the shotgun ready and watching everybody closely.
When it seemed like the shooting was done, Belle went to Elgin and touched his neck where the pulse would have been, and then she took an indigo kerchief from her apron pocket and spread it over his face.
—What are we going to do now? Belle said.
—Sunrise, new world, Bristol said.
DAWN JUST A HAZE TO THE EAST, V and Ellen carried the sleeping children out to the ambulance in blankets while Delrey tacked and harnessed the horses.
Burton and Bristol dug two holes in the plantation cemetery. No boxes, just red rectangles cut deep in Georgia clay. Wide pine floor puncheons for markers, names and
