Philip and Anthony followed Butler’s finger as it pointed here and there. Anthony actually shivered and backed away.
“We don’t see anyone,” Doc told him gently, unsure what to make of it.
“You don’t?” Butler seemed genuinely distraught. “Most people don’t. We’re used to that. But you, Philip, you’re my brother.”
“Butler, there’s no one there.”
“They’re not phantoms. They are my men. I’m taking them home. My responsibility. I promised them.” Butler tried to smile, only to have it flicker and vanish. “I think it was Caesar, perhaps Napoleon, who said an army marches on its stomach. Can we see about rations?”
“Doc?” Percy Anthony asked. “You really know him?”
Doc felt the world reel, as if the ether that the scientists talked about had just spun around him. “He’s my brother,” Doc said hoarsely. “Butler Hancock.”
And his mind is broken. Something I can’t fix any more than I could cure James of his consumption.
45
March 21, 1864
Sarah tended the pit fire before the trapper’s cabin. The day was blustery, rain having fallen earlier. The log structure, not ten by ten feet, sat back under the trees. The branches, so stark against the bruised gray clouds, were budded, about to flower. The first blades of spring grass had come up on the hillsides and in the flat before the cabin.
She tossed another broken branch—collected from forest litter an hour’s walk up the small canyon—onto the fire. They’d scrounged most of the easily available wood from the little valley, and between the bucksaw and ax had cut up most of the smaller dead stuff.
She’d become adept at pit roasting, having dug a hip-deep hole, dropped in stones, and built a snapping fire. When a thick bed of coals had covered the glowing rocks, she’d shoveled in four inches of dirt, laid a venison quarter wrapped in burlap atop the steaming dirt, and shoveled another four inches atop the meat. Finally, she had built a fire on top, sandwiching the meat between layers of fire to slow-roast through the day.
Beyond that their diet consisted of leached acorns, cattail roots, and processed countie root, sassafrass tea, occasional corn or wheat that Billy procured. When he did manage such a treat, Sarah pounded the kernels with a homemade wooden pestle to make coarse flour. And finally, just about anything that walked, crawled, flew, or scampered in the forest was fodder for the stew pot.
Such bounty—after a full winter of scavenging and hunting—had become scarce enough that her belly had shrunk. Hard muscles contoured her thin arms and legs. She hated being hungry all the time, but knew that with spring greenup, a passel of new foods would grow.
Could that old life before the war have ever been possible? Had it all been a dream, or did those days of full bellies, roasting breads, bacon, pork, chicken, and hot buttered corn bread really exist? Were her memories of family, a warm hearth, sugar, molasses, and salt and pepper real? Had Butler once reclined in the rocker, his eyes alight as he read aloud from Xenophon or Shakespeare? Had Paw presided at the head of the table, pulling on his pipe, a smile on his bearded lips? Were Maw’s looks of idle amusement as she kneaded bread dough but a figment of imagination?
Had Sarah once dreamed of a prominent husband, a fancy house in Little Rock, and gas streetlights? Were the velvet and silk dresses she had once imagined but flights of a spoiled little girl’s fancy?
God, I was a fool.
Life consisted of before the rape, and after.
Sarah took a deep breath, stretching her ribs; she pressed a hand into the hollow of her abdomen. She had lived on the precipice of terror after the rape. Dewley’s burning blue eyes still pierced her dreams—and sometimes her waking moments as well. She’d hear the ripping of her clothes, feel his body on hers. Her insides would curl at the memory of his penis probing inside her.
At odd times, just popping into her head, she would relive the moment when different men had thrown themselves onto her. She would hear the distinctive sounds each man made as he cooed endearments.
Endearments, for God’s sake!
Then her skin would crawl at the memory of how differently each had reacted as he shot his seed into her. How odd that her damaged soul insisted on remembering their individual peculiarities. And then there had been Tucker, the virgin who had come the moment he’d entered, and then lay atop her crying.
The images, the sensations, possessed her with such clarity. How could that be? The actual event was months past. If God were truly merciful, shouldn’t they be fading?
She laid her hands against the sides of her head, pressing, as if she could pop the memories from her skull. In the following weeks she had had the horrible certainty that they’d impregnated her. Night after night she’d lain awake, a hand pressed above her womb as if she could expel their seed.
Desperately she’d counted the days to her next flux, the fear rising as day after day her loins remained passive and the certainty, fear, and disgust grew.
Until the morning she’d been savagely chopping wood; a terrible cramp had doubled her over. She had sat down in the snow, grabbed her belly, and felt the hot wet rush between her thighs.
Unable to even stand, she had lain there until a final cramp—like something tearing inside—triggered a gasp from her heaving lungs. She felt when it finally passed. Weak and shivering, she’d pulled off her bloody pants and stared at the little blob of tissue—a thing that reminded her of a naked and bloody mouse.
Sobbing, trembling, she’d stumbled down to the trickle of a stream and washed herself in the cold water. Then she’d scrubbed out Tucker’s pants with sand and wrung them out. Shivering in the cold, breath puffing, she pulled
