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"Confederate and federal soldiers fought all up and down this bayou."
"That's the war Alafair say you was in, Mr. Dave?"
"Do I look that old to you guys?"
"How much it worth?" Poteet said.
"You can buy them for a dollar at a store in New Orleans."
"You give me a dollar for it?" Poteet said.
"Why don't you keep it instead, Po'?" I said, and rubbed the top of her head.
"I don't want no nasty minié ball. It probably gone in somebody," she said, and flung it into the cornstalks.
"Don't do that. You can use it in a slingshot or something," Alafair said. She crawled on hands and knees up the row and put the minié ball in the pocket of her jeans. Then she came back and lifted Tripod up in her arms. "Dave, who was that old man?" she said.
"What old man?"
"He got a stump," Poteet said.
"A stump?"
"That's right, got a stump for a leg, got an arm look like a shriveled-up bird's claw," Poteet said.
"What are y'all talking about?" I said.
"He was on a crutch, Dave. Standing there in the leaves," Alafair said.
I knelt down beside them. "You guys aren't making a lot of sense," I said.
"He was right up there in the corn leaves. Talking in the wind," Poteet said. "His mouth just a big hole in the wind without no sound coming out."
"I bet y'all saw the scarecrow."
"If scarecrows got B.O.," Poteet said.
"Where'd this old man go?" I said.
"He didn't go anywhere," Alafair said. "The wind started blowing real hard in the stalks and he just disappeared."
"Disappeared?" I said.
"That's right," Poteet said. "Him and his B.O."
"Did he have a black coat on, like that scarecrow there?" I tried to smile, but my heart had started clicking in my chest.
"No, suh, he didn't have no black coat on," Poteet said.
"It was gray, Dave," Alafair said. "Just like your shirt."
"Gray?" I said woodenly.
"Except it had some gold on the shoulders," she said.
She smiled at me as though she had given me a detail that somehow would remove the expression she saw on my face.
My knees popped when I stood up.
