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"I done told you."
"Yes, you did. You certainly did," Willie said. He went inside the house and stamped around in all the rooms. The beds were made, the washboards and chopping block in the kitchen scrubbed spotless, the pots and pans hung on hooks above the hearth and woodstove, the walls and ceiling free of cobweb, the dust kittens swept out from under all the furnishings. He slammed out the back of the house and circled through the side yard to the front. He squeezed his temples with his fingers. "Where is she buried?" he said. Tige shook his head. "You don't know?" Willie said.
"No, suh."
Willie pulled his blanket roll off his shoulder and flung it at the gallery, then winced and clasped his hand on his left collarbone.
"There's blood on your shirt," Tige said.
"A guerrilla gave me a taste of his sword," Willie replied. He sat down on the steps and draped his hands between his legs. He was quiet a long time. "She went to the Yanks to get paid for her livestock?"
"I reckon. Miss Abby said 'cause your mother was from Ireland, the Yankees didn't have no right to take her property. How come they'd have the right if she was from here? That's what I cain't figure."
"This war never seems to get over, does it, Tige? How you been doin'?" Willie said.
"Real good." Tige studied the failing light in the trees and the birds descending into the chimney tops. "Most of the time, anyway."
"Will you forgive a fellow for speaking sharply?" Willie asked.
"Some folks say my daddy got killed at Brice's Crossroads. Others say he just run off 'cause he didn't have no use for his family. I busted a window in a church after somebody told me that. Knocked stained glass al
l over the pews," Tige said.
"I doubt Our Lord holds it against you," Willie said.
Tige sat down beside him. He aimed his broom into the dusk as though it were a musket and sighted down the handle, then rested it by his foot. "Miss Abby done bought a big building she's turning into a schoolhouse. Her and a high-yellow lady named Flower is gonna teach there. She talks about you all the time, what a good man you are and what kind ways you have. In fact, I ain't never heard a lady talk so much about a man."
"Miss Abigail does that?"
"I was talking about the colored lady-Miss Flower."
Chapter Twenty-two
ROBERT Perry was released from prison at Johnson's Island, Ohio, two months after the Surrender. The paddle-wheeler he boarded without a ticket was packed with Northern cotton traders, gamblers, real estate speculators, and political appointees seizing upon opportunities that seemed to be a gift from a divine hand. At night the saloons and dining and card rooms blazed with light and reverberated with orchestra music, while outside torrents of rain blistered the decks and the upside-down lifeboat Robert huddled under with a tiger-striped cat, a guilt-haunted, one-armed participant in the Fort Pillow Massacre, and an escaped Negro convict whose ankles were layered with leg-iron scars and who stole food for the four of them until they reached New Orleans.
Robert rode the spine of a freight car as far as the Atchafalaya River, then walked forty miles in a day and a half and went to sleep in a woods not more than two hours from the house where he had been born. When he woke in the morning he sat on a tree-shaded embankment on the side of the road and ate a withered apple and drank water from a wood canteen he had carried with him from Johnson's Island.
A squad of black soldiers passed him on the road, talking among themselves, their eyes never registering his presence, as though his gray clothes were less an indicator of an old enemy than a flag of defeat. Then a mounted Union sergeant, this one white, reined up his horse in front of Robert and looked down at him curiously. He wore a goatee and mustache and a kepi pulled down tightly on his brow and a silver ring with a gold cross on it.
"What happened to your shoes?" he asked.
"Lost them crossing the Atchafalaya," Robert replied.
"We've had trouble with guerrillas hereabouts. You wouldn't be one of those fellows, would you?"
Robert stared thoughtfully into space. "Simian creatures who hang in trees? No, I don't know much about those fellows," he said.
"Your feet look like spoiled bananas."
"Why, thank you," Robert said.
"Where'd you fight, Reb?"
"Virginia and Pennsylvania."
Cedar and mulberry and wild pecan trees grew along the edge of the road, and the canopy seemed to form a green tunnel of light for almost a half mile.
"I have a feeling you didn't sign an oath of allegiance in a prison camp and they decided to keep you around a while," the sergeant said.
