“Just a highway for armies going up or down the Wire Road, and for guerrillas to hide out between bushwhacking each other. We’d a never hung on if’n I weren’t a hunter.”
“So … what are you thinking? Just hide out up here until the war’s over?”
“Think it’ll ever be over?”
Danny laughed, took a swig from the bottle. “Reckon so. The way people is killing each other, sooner or later, won’t be no farms nowhere. No mills to grind flour. No tanyards to make leather. No powder mills, lead mines, nor textile mills to make clothing. And then, finally, the last Yankee will kill the last Rebel with a rock, and he’ll win. Standing alone in some field.”
“Him and me,” Billy said, taking the bottle and tilting it to his lips. After he’d swallowed, he added, “That’s when I’ll come down from the hills and start farming again.”
“Where are you gonna get the seed corn?” Danny took the bottle and gestured with the neck as if to emphasize the point. “Without roads and railroads and steamboats, ain’t none coming from back East.”
“Might have to go to Mexico!” Billy laughed in a hysterical way Sarah had never heard. “Hey! Sis! Come dig up this hyar venison, and let’s eat us some.”
Trembling with rage, she pushed off the wall, saying, “Dig it yourself, you son of a bitch.” Then she stalked off into the growing gloom.
As she did, she heard Billy say, “What the hell’s got into her?”
Long after dark, she slipped back, shivering, and found the pit dug up, but still radiating heat. The brown-glass whiskey bottle lay on its side, empty. The door hung open a crack, and she slipped in, hardly surprised to find Billy passed out facedown on his blanket, still fully clothed with his boots on.
Danny lay wrapped in his blanket on the dirt floor, snoring like a bucksaw cutting hardwood.
She stepped around him, pulled her blanket from the bed, and tugged her gingham dress—the only one she’d saved from the house—down from its peg. Easing back out, she unhooked the holstered Colt from its peg by the door and, careful not to bang the powder flask, looped the pistol belt over her shoulder.
The blanket she folded; then she grabbed up the still warm remains of the venison haunch. The two men hadn’t left more than a pound or two of meat clinging to the bones, but it would take her a ways. Once the last of the meat was chewed off, she could break the long bones for their marrow.
The gray horse fought the bridle and bit, but she managed. Then she turned, leading the gelding down the trail. The farm was little more than a mile away down the trapper’s cabin draw. Once she reached it, she’d turn south on the Huntsville Road toward the ruins of Van Winkle’s mill.
She’d leave the road at one of the creek crossings, walk the horse upstream through the water, then take one of the forest trails to the Wire Road. From there she’d head south to …
Well, it didn’t matter.
If she was going to be a pariah, she would be one someplace where tongues wouldn’t wag, and the gossips wouldn’t delight in chewing her up like a slab of fresh meat. Where people wouldn’t look at her through eyes eloquent with revulsion and pity.
Damn you, Billy. I trusted you!
46
May 2, 1864
“Peut-être. You gonna carry yo’self over to the mess an’ see what commissary dey got?” Sergeant Kershaw asked. “Bin getting used t’ them vittles.”
Butler lay in his bunk, his wasted body still recuperating. Hard to believe that he’d actually gained weight on the gruel and weevil-ridden flour the prison provided.
“It ain’t like I used to get at home where Missy makes that roast ham, biscuits, and hominy! Bet you never had hominy with red pepper in it.” Pettigrew folded his arms, elbows sticking out through the ragged holes in his sleeves. He shot a challenging glance at the rest of the men who crowded around the barracks bunks. They were illuminated by slanting light that came through the window with its broken panes.
“You and that wife of yourn,” Phil Vail said with a shake of his head. He sat on Brewster’s bunk, whittling on a piece of wood with a pocketknife.
“Oh, stop,” Butler chided them as he sat up on his bunk. “It’s a prison camp.”
“Cap’n,” Jimmy Peterson reminded, “you was the one said y’all was gonna take us home.” He stood back in the shadows, looking uncertainly at the other men.
“Told the Yankees,” Butler replied sullenly. “Ordered them to go home, too.”
“And since when, Cap’n,” Kershaw’s deep Cajun voice asked, “do dem Yankees ever do anythin’ you tells ’em?”
“Sergeant, Yankees are beyond my ability to fathom.”
“What ch’all mean? Fathom? What’s dat?”
“It means to understand.”
“Butler!” Doc’s sharp voice brought him up, and Butler blinked. His men were grinning where they lounged around, not even making room as Doc walked up, his face concerned.
“Hello, Philip. We were just discussing the obstinate intransigence of the North and why—”
“You were raving,” Doc insisted wearily, seating himself across from Butler on Brewster’s bunk. Next to him, Vail gave him a sidelong look before peeling another sliver from his whittling.
“Not raving. That implies an emotional quality, a rising of the voice that—”
“All right. Not raving.” Doc studied him from under lowered brows. “The men are back, aren’t they?”
Butler pursed his lips, staring down at the floor, rocking slowly back and forth as he did so. Rocking helped. It soothed him when he knew Philip was going to lecture him. The men were always present, but Philip didn’t want to hear that. When Butler concentrated, he could converse silently with his soldiers. But it took so much effort. And they didn’t always understand.
Doc sighed, slapping his torn pants. The man was mostly skin and bones,
