—Good, V says. Boys that age can never wash too often.
James tells her that the school had a big brass band. He played bugle. Sometimes they put on their uniforms and went out to the beach to greet passenger ships entering Boston Harbor, trumpeting marches to celebrate a successful crossing of the Atlantic. Passengers stood at the rails and waved handkerchiefs as they passed.
The island spanned enough land—good dirt—to grow orchards, hayfields, berry patches. The older boys each had a little flower garden to tend, and spring through fall, they kept the big house bright with reds and yellows and whites. Fat clams grew on the sandbars, and boys sometimes went out with buckets and spades to bring back dinner. Older boys lived in a sort of village of tiny white cottages with green shutters. They elected their own mayor and held community meetings to decide how to deal with problems, how to punish boys who wouldn’t work or who pilfered. One large room in the main building was the library, and James spent a lot of rainy Sundays in there. There were six long study tables, and the books were mostly donated, some quite old. He liked brown antiquated travel books describing trips that weren’t possible anymore—explorations of the Western Hemisphere back when much of it was still unmapped. Pretty days of spring, summer, and fall, he spent all his free time outside, either walking the island or sitting under a tree with a book.
—The headmaster and staff searched out our aptitudes, James says. And when I reached thirteen, I began teaching reading and arithmetic and geography to the youngest boys. In some form, it’s what I’ve done ever since.
Pretty days in late summer, though, he always volunteered for haying—forking the cut and dried hay onto an enormous wagon until the heap stood two shaggy stories tall, and then riding on top back to the barn, balancing on the shifting load, the fragrance of sun on cut grass swelling all around—itchy from the hay down your shirt, but feeling strong and tired and satisfied with the work.
He also tells her about winters when the wind blew in from the North Atlantic and the snow came sideways against the windows and the big house swayed and vibrated in the storms. How one winter the harbor froze solid and some of them walked over the ice to the shore, a mile away.
—So, not a bad place, V says.
—A very good place. A good school, plenty of teaching and learning, but also plenty of physical work. The boys learned how to take care of the buildings and the animals and the gardens and orchards. You were putting your food on the table. Literally. Not working to grow somebody else’s food, growing your own. Your responsibility, your work, your enjoyment. We sold surplus from the gardens and orchards, and the money went back into the school for our benefit and for boys to come. You felt part of something. Out of a hundred boys, fewer than a dozen weren’t white, but that rarely mattered. Teachers judged us by how much we learned and how much we contributed to the work, not on color. Boys who didn’t follow that same practice came and went quickly. Of course the teachers who ran the school and the rich benefactors who paid for it were idealists, and if you said that all of us—white and black—may have finished school at eighteen with a distorted and naive sense of the world off the island, you’d be right.
WHEN HE FINISHES HIS STORY, James says, I know your feeling about taking notes as we talk. But I need to write something down. It’s about me, not you.
—Please, V says. Scribble.
James opens his notebook and writes,
The island was a separate place, situated partway between America and the moon. Some clear nights out with the telescope—moon full or gibbous—I felt about equidistant between the sharp-edged craters and the sparkling lights of America across the harbor. I knew that off the island very particular rules and laws and customs about skin color and blood degree applied, that the entire stretch of country from ocean to ocean was a strange place with a very strict borderline, and that I didn’t exactly fit on either side of it.
Then across the bottom of the page—in a larger, more swooping hand—he writes:
The island felt like home to a degree I’ve never experienced before or since.
After he caps his pen, V says, You’re not even going to read it to me?
—Revision first. It makes us all better than we are. For now, tell me about our capture.
Place of DreamsMay 1865
THEY PASSED OUT OF SHERMAN’S PATH OF PUNISHMENT and went dragging down ordinary red Georgia roads, sloping south on their beaten way. Small towns and small farms lay wide-spaced among pinewoods. The horses and mules were as tired as the people, and they made fewer than their average ten miles a day. Florida still lay vague in the distance, and the only map forward might have been drawn in a crazy man’s hand, speculating on a place V would never reach no matter how long she traveled.
Most days Bristol trailed off the back, riding by himself. Delrey kept reminding him he would need to hang a right at some point if he was heading for Alabama, but Bristol said maybe he’d go all the way until they hit the Gulf and then he’d peel off west and follow the coastline around the curve to Mobile. Take his time.
V sat with him one day at their lunch stop and said, I know you’re hurting two directions. For Ryland and for having killed Elgin. I’ll point out that better
