“Just like with a teaippe,” she told him. The word meaning “baby.”
Now Butler smiled down at his father. “I’ve been telling the men how ironic life is, how the way we care for—”
“I wish you’d stop that!” Paw snapped.
“Stop what?”
“Talking to nothing like some lunatic. It sends shivers down my spine. It’s not bad enough that I’m in this fix? I have to watch you acting like the village idiot? What the hell is wrong with you?”
“Doc, um, Philip, calls it the fatigue.”
Paw made a face, glancing away. “Your high-and-sanctimonious brother. Gone off to Boston. Well, it was good riddance. Hope he used my money to set himself up.”
“I told you about Philip, what happened to him. And about Maw, and the squatters. About the graves behind the house. Do you remember?”
Paw kept his head turned away, nodding. “I was a little woozy. Think you said you thought the two graves were Maw and Sarah, but no idea about Billy?”
“He was in the hills last time I was able to visit. That was back in…” He frowned, trying to remember.
“Back in sixty-three, Cap’n,” Parsons told him from the side.
“Thank you, Private. Yes, back in sixty-three. Winter. Before Prairie Grove.”
“There you go!” Paw griped. “Looking off and talking to the air. Man Who Talks to No One. You’re a lunatic! My crazy son of a bitch of a son! I won’t have it! From here on out you’re—”
Butler changed the subject. “Your fever’s broken. The delirium has passed. You can finally understand the question. Why didn’t you contact us after you ran from Shiloh?”
Paw’s lips bent into that old smile that always presaged a lie.
“Don’t even think it,” Butler ordered. “Shiloh. Remember? You were with a Mississippi regiment. I know you marched into the fight. Talked to some of the boys when we got back to Corinth. They said sometime around mid-afternoon, you disappeared.”
Paw’s expression fell. The crafty look was back, but when Butler narrowed an eye and pointed with an accusatory finger, it faded.
“Tell the truth, Paw. You owe me that.”
“Disappeared?” Paw stared off toward the distant Big Horns. “Hell no. Ran. Hid in the brush in a creek bottom, and come nightfall I did a crawdad outta there.”
He swallowed hard, voice dropping. “You had to have been there. Like nothing I’d ever seen. Not even in Mexico. It was the boys being shot down all around me. Falling, bleeding, scared and dying. The smoke and stink and sound of it. God, the sounds. The minié balls whizzing, singing by my head. I couldn’t take it. That voice in me screamed, ‘Run!’ and by thunder, I did.”
“Because you were scared?”
“Scared like I ain’t never been.” Paw looked at him, arrogance twitching his lips. “If you ever got close to that fight, you’d know.”
Butler lifted his hands. “I don’t understand. You’re not a coward. You shot men in duels! You had half the men in Benton County scared of you.”
“What are you? A Papist priest?”
“Just tell me!”
Paw started to rile, then snorted in self-derision. “What the hell. All right. Here’s the way of it: first one I shot was Pat Phillips. He was so drunk he couldn’t find his pecker, let alone the sights on a pistol.” Paw shook his head. “Second one, Brandy Hayes, I bullied into it, knowing he couldn’t hit a barn from three paces. Eli Johnson? He was shaking so hard, he wet himself just before I blew his brains out. After that, I never had to fight another duel.”
Butler sighed and rubbed his forehead. “Thousands of men ran that day. You weren’t the only one. But what about Maw and Sarah and Billy? What about me? Why didn’t you send word you were alive? If you’d gone home—”
“Maybe all this wouldn’t have happened? Maybe you wouldn’t be a goddamned raving lunatic? Maybe Maw and Sarah’d be alive? Or maybe they’d have shot me for desertion, and it all would have worked out the same. Except that you’d have had to live with the reputation that your father was a coward and a deserter.”
“Why here?” Butler asked, gesturing around.
“Won’t make no sense to you.”
“Try me. I read Kierkegaard at the academy.”
Paw actually smiled, then said, “Here in the mountains was the only place that I wasn’t a lie. For a while, at least.”
“You saved Tom Hindman that night he was going to be beaten, maybe killed.”
“Ha!” Paw almost spat. “I’d lost every cent I had at the poker table. Hindman was just another gamble. I knew the ruffians who beset him. Dangerous chuckleheads as long as they had the advantage. When I whacked ’em from behind, it put the scare in ’em and they run. See, Hindman thought he owed me his life. Good temperance man that he was, he still bought me drinks all night long.”
Paw raised a finger on his mangled left hand. “That’s the thing, Butler. You can always game a ‘man of honor.’ Just like those canny politicians gamed all those thousands they sent into battle. I recognized that on the first day at Shiloh. I shouted ‘Death before dishonor!’ and my boys all cried huzzah and marched headlong into massed Yankee fire.”
He shook his head. “Not me. This child ain’t no man’s patsy for a cause.”
“Why even enlist, then?”
Paw shot him a look like he was an idiot. “I didn’t think the fools would keep fighting, killing, and tearing up the country. Anyone with sense would have said, ‘We ain’t dying like flies in a tannery. Stop this nonsense.’ And it would have been over.”
Paw grinned. “Hell, boy, I didn’t figure it would last six months. When it was over I’d be known to have been a Union man, but I’d go back to Arkansas having served as a Southern officer. Down in the legislature, I could have played both sides. Maybe even been governor.”
Butler glanced at
