“Lay down there,” she told them.
“Their real ages?” Allen asked.
“Seven and ten.”
“Yes,” he said, looking at them. “I guessed about that. Had my son and daughter lived, they would have been only a couple of years younger.”
Rebecca hesitated, then spoke.
“I know,” she said, “about their dying I mean. It’s said you blame men here for it.”
“They are to blame, they terrorized my family.”
The sergeant knocked and opened the door.
“Your orders have been carried out.”
Colonel Allen nodded and the door closed.
“The commendation from General Buckner,” he said, nodding at the fireboard. “It speaks well of him as a soldier, and the letters speak equally well of him as husband and father. I regret that I had to peruse them, but it was necessary. I ask your forgiveness for that and for what has occurred today. I, we, will attempt recompense. We have sugar, and if you need more wood cut...”
“No,” Rebecca said. “I want nothing from you but what you and your men came here to do.”
“Your anger at our ill-treatment I understand, Mrs. Penland, but had you simply told us what we now know.”
“And after you’ve left Shelton Laurel, what do you think will happen if you and your men leave this farm as if you’d never come?”
Colonel Allen’s mouth tightened into a grimace. The only sound was the fire’s hiss and crackle. Rebecca looked down and saw that Hannah’s eyes were already closed. Ezra’s too were beginning to droop, though his mouth remained in a defiant pout.
“What would you have us do, then?”
“What you came here to do, as I’ve said,” Rebecca answered, “that and not tell what’s in the letters, not even to your men.”
He nodded and stepped to the doorway.
“Corporal, go get the ham.”
“But sir, you said...”
“I know what I said. Get the men to catch three chickens, no more. You can kill them. We’ll eat them when we’re out of this godforsaken valley.”
“That won’t be enough,” Rebecca said.
Allen turned.
“Yes, it will.”
“No,” Rebecca said. “It won’t be.”
“What more, then, would you have me do? You have no well to foul.”
“The barn, you must burn it.”
“I will not do that, Mrs. Penland. Your husband died for our cause. It would be a dishonor to him. The ham and chickens will be enough. Tell your neighbors we were here only minutes. Say we set the barn afire but did not stay to ensure if it fully caught. But those letters, they should be burned. If one of your neighbors were to come upon them....”
Colonel Allen stepped out of the door and gave orders to mount.
The clatter of the men and horses leaving did not wake the children. Rebecca went outside, not looking toward the way fare the soldiers had come on or looking up at the ridge. She looked down the valley and saw that smoke still hovered above the two farms. A thin skein of smoke, nothing like the billowing plumes that rose a year ago at Brice and Anna’s place, last June at Ira’s. Everyone in Shelton Laurel would soon know the soldiers had come. They would hear or see them passing on the pike that led back to Marshall. Some of the men might have time to fire a few shots. Then they would come and see if Rebecca and the children were safe.
But they would not arrive for a little while, so Rebecca went inside the cabin. Not wanting to waste a match, she pulled a half-burned piece of kindling from the fire and walked to the barn. Nine years, Rebecca thought, remembering how Ezra was already kicking in her belly when she and Aaron had arrived from Buncombe County. The cabin had been here but not the barn. Ira had come first to help build it, then others bringing axes and oxen. In a week the barn had been built. She remembered Aaron’s warning the night before he left for Asheville — Always say Union.
A thick matting of straw lay in an empty stall. Rebecca dropped the kindling and soon flames spilled into the adjoining stalls before laddering up gate posts and beams. Only when flame blossomed in the loft did Rebecca leave. Frost still limned the ground and that was a blessing. It would keep the fire from spreading.
When she returned to the cabin, Rebecca opened the firkin and saw Colonel Allen had not put the button back. It could have been placed inside a mud chink where it would have been impossible to find. Not even his button, not even that, she thought as she took out the letters and held them before the flames. Foolish not to have done it before, Rebecca knew, and told herself to open her hand and let them go.
But she couldn’t, so Rebecca put them in the firkin and placed it back in the cubbyhole. She went back outside and saw that the barn had crumpled except for the locust beams. The thick smoke that had clouded the sky minutes before was now no more, signaling that the Seccesh were now gone.
By the time Ira and Brice arrived, the fire would be no more than a smolder. The two men would kick the ashes, hoping to find a locust beam with only its surface charred. They’d douse the beam with water from the spring and drag it from the rubble. The Ledford and Hampton men would arrive next and soon after whole families. The Galloways and Smiths, then the Moores and the Sheltons. The remaining chickens would have to be saved for their eggs, so there would be no meat come winter, but the women would bring peas and potatoes enough to get the three of them through the winter. Men would bring axes as well as muskets and rifles. The surrounding woods would sound like a battlefield as the cold metal struck in the early November air. All day the women would cook and tend fires. Children would gather kindling and scuff among ashes for the iron nails that had secured the shingles. Everyone would work until dusk, then return the next day to help more. Ira Wilkey might or might not say We will get through this together but that was understood. They were neighbors.
Amanda Rea
Faint of Heart
from One Story
I. June, 1969
That morning, Nora Stevens left a sink full of breakfast dishes and walked outside to investigate the barking of her father’s dog. It was an old dog, one that hadn’t mellowed with age, and many nights it had kept them awake barking at a strip of tin flapping against the barn, or coyotes singing in the distance, their voices carried on the wind. It was a terrible summer for wind, even for southern Colorado. It wailed down the river bottom and blew grit into everybody’s eyes. It made hairdos impossible. Many women Nora’s age still wore bouffants, and she planned to wear one herself at her wedding to Ron Whitehead in the fall — a voluminous updo half-hidden by a shoulder-length veil. She’d planned it down to the last detail. Having reached the age of twenty-six unclaimed and having grown up without a mother to instruct her in beauty and manners, she felt a certain duty to prove herself as a bride, to show Ron’s family she was as sweet and ordinary as any other girl he might’ve wed. In this campaign the wind had begun to feel like a sentient foe. It would rip the veil right out of her hair. It would howl around the church like wolves.
At her approach, the dog didn’t calm down. In fact, it got louder, interrupting one bark with another until she swatted its head with her open hand.
“Quiet, Rascal!” she said. Her father’s dogs were always named Rascal — a long line of them going all the way back to his boyhood. This one was barking at its own doghouse.
Sighing, she bent to look through the little arched doorway. She didn’t expect to find anything inside, really — a cornered skunk at the very worst. But there in the darkness she discerned the form of a huddled child.