—So you consider Elgin a war fatality? Bristol said.
—I don’t consider him anything. He pulled the trigger first, over nothing but words and ideas. But you pulled the trigger over something real—a mean bloody act that took your friend’s life. There’s a difference. Don’t let him weigh heavier on your mind than he merits.
—Yes, ma’am.
—Don’t you Yes, ma’am me. This is too important to fall back on manners. A lot of boys would be strutting around, bragging like they’d killed their first buck. But that’s not you, and that’s why we’re talking. I don’t want what happened to ruin you for the rest of your life. I’m assuming your family had some money or else you’d have been in the infantry instead of the academy.
—Some. My father has a business, not a plantation.
—Then go home, and when colleges open back up, finish an education. Do something that helps people get through the chaos. For a long time, it’s going to be like Noah after the flood—everybody, black and white, trying to understand what’s left when the water drains away. Bad enough without having your mind overly darkened by that one instant.
—So we’ve all got a load of guilt to haul? That’s my big lesson?
—Don’t get sarcastic with me. I’m saying most of the load is not yours to bear. It’s ours, the people who brought it on. When you get home, rest and start clearing your head from all this, and then go and do, Bristol.
AS THEY TRUDGED SOUTH, V kept Bristol close and watched his moods. She wanted him sitting at her campfire every night, not going off to spread his bedroll alone in the pines. She and the children and Ellen, Burton, and Delrey still usually sat an hour on low camp stools arranged around the fire no matter how tired they were. Some evenings they barely spoke and looked at the flames like they’d been dazed by a great blast of black powder. Cool nights, Jeffy and Jimmie and Billy sat sprawling against each other half asleep. Sometimes V would rouse up from such a moment of gloom and recite a poem. She would tell them all to attend, and then look off into the dregs of sunset and tell them the name of the poem and of the person who wrote it and then launch into something beautiful. V guessed Bristol and all the others were often too exhausted to listen close to the words, only the music of the poem, the tune of it. They could get all the meaning they needed right there in the rhythm without keeping up with grammar at all. That and the flow of light from the fire moving on their circle of faces as she recited.
At some point most nights she would decide her children looked or smelled dirty, which they all usually did. She’d take a pail of creekwater warmed over the fire, a washcloth, and a worn flat of fragrant pink soap and start scrubbing. And if Bristol was sitting there she’d scrub him too, forehead to collarbones. Push his hair back and scour his blemished teen forehead, run her finger covered with the soapy washcloth deep in his ears. When she was done he glowed red as firecoals, his neck and face chafed near to bleeding. He’d smell like roses and whatever fragrance that night’s creek carried—pine needles or rotted leaves or minerals in the rocks.
SOME NIGHTS V ASKED BRISTOL to tell a story—a tale from his time in the Naval Academy with Ryland or one of their adventures journeying south from Richmond with Jeff. One night he told about the remnants of the government in Greensboro, how some of the cabinet members and high officers had to sleep on pallets in boxcars.
From Greensboro on past Charlotte, nothing but confusion and bad weather, blown-up railroad bridges and muddy roads ahead, Sherman coming from the south and Grant coming from the north to rub out the remainders of the Confederacy. Before long, what was left of the Confederate government and army traveled by horseback and wagon train. Day by day, rank meant less, and even the officers lost interest in giving and taking orders. The powerful men became too consumed with the deluge sweeping over their own personal worlds to worry about controlling underlings like Ryland and Bristol, who floated on, rode the tidal wave.
They made themselves useful to Judah Benjamin and General Basil Duke, who had both so fully let go of rank that the boys weren’t sure how to address either of them. Benjamin had occupied almost every position of power in the government short of president. Call him Mr. Attorney General, Mr. Secretary, Mr. Senator and he would laugh and say, Oh that’s all gone. Call me by my first name. A band of outlaws should travel as equals. So that’s what the boys called him. Mr. Judah. He traveled down the country roads the most cheerful outlaw since Robin Hood. His trunk must have been at least half full of fat Cuban cigars—big, dark coronas. From midday until bedtime he always had one fuming, and he gave them away like penny candy to keep the Yankees from taking them if he was captured. He said he was Havana bound and would restock there.
Similar attitude with Basil Duke. He looked like an actor playing the part of a young general. He was smart and handsome and knew it, but he didn’t go around puffed up and stiff. He cracked jokes and shared tobacco and rum, and said outright that he thought it a good thing to abolish slavery. Said, Great God, imagine if we’d had the sense to abolish it fifty years ago. He shrugged off the title of general with the ease of a man who expects life to be unpredictable and defines himself anew almost daily.
When Bristol called him General Duke, he said, The country that issued
