When his wound heals they try to return poor Lige to the ranks. But turns out he can’t turn his head. That New Orleans Irish Bowie knife was a spanner in his works rightly. Anyhow since he ain’t no spring chicken he gets an honourable discharge in the midst of war and he tells us he will likely go back to Tennessee to tend his pa. Says they can be two old bastards together. His pa still runs three hundred acres so he might be needing fresh hands for that. Lige looks excited saying all this but also in me there is a natural sorrow. John Cole holds Lige in great affection and so do many. Only Starling Carlton looks scowling and says hard things but that’s just the same as him saying good things. Starling won’t be half of what he is without Lige, we know. I guess folk become joined at the hip over time. Can’t have a thought about Starling without Lige being in it like a squirrel in a tree. Big sweaty Starling going to have to find another buddy. That ain’t going to be easy in prospect. What Starling says to me is he’s worried that if Lige can’t turn his head he won’t see robbers creeping up on him. Seems to bother Starling mightily. Also he says Tennessee ain’t a peaceful country now. How can a bluecoat go back to Tennessee? Good question. Only, he won’t be wearing a blue coat. They give him some weary civilian clothing for himself as Lige goes off. Don’t look like no three-hundred-acre farmer in them. Looks like the robber Starling fears. We shake hands with Lige and he goes off and he has to walk to Tennessee more or less. Says he guesses there must be a road across the Blue Ridge. Must be. No one knows. Off he goes anyhow. Write us a letter when you can, says John Cole. Don’t forget now. I’ll keep in touch, says Lige, ain’t going to let you go. This makes John Cole very quiet. John is a tall man and thin and maybe he don’t have much painted on his face. He like to make his decisions and then do a thing. He has my back and he wants the best world for Winona and he don’t neglect his pals. When Lige Magan intimates his seeming love for him, John Cole does show something on his face though. Maybe remembers the old sick days when John Cole couldn’t move a muscle and that Lige danced attendance. Why should a man help another man? No need, the world don’t care about that. World is just a passing parade of cruel moments and long drear stretches where nothing going on but chicory drinking and whisky and cards. No requirement for nothing else tucked in there. We’re strange people, soldiers stuck out in wars. We ain’t saying no laws in Washington. We ain’t walking on yon great lawns. Storms kill us, and battles, and the earth closes over and no one need say a word and I don’t believe we mind. Happy to breathe because we seen terror and horror and then for a while they ain’t in dominion. Bibles weren’t wrote for us nor any books. We ain’t maybe what people do call human since we ain’t partaking of that bread of heaven. But if God was trying to make an excuse for us He might point at that strange love between us. Like when you fumbling about in the darkness and you light a lamp and the light come up and rescue things. Objects in a room and the face of the man who seem a dug-up treasure to you. John Cole. Seems a food. Bread of earth. The lamplight touching his eyes and another light answering.
That Reb army has made an awful mess of us and we are relieved and moved back a ways north. Colonel mighty pleased though that the Rebs was repulsed as he calls it. Guess they were, at a cost. At a spot called Edwards Ferry we crossed over and it were a strange and excellent feeling to reach Union land again. Shoes a terror though and John Cole got a raw underfoot from the mud and gravel living in his boots. I take ten moments to pull them off and wash his feet in the river. We never seen farmers all the trail up through Virginia. They flee away and hide every scrap. Now the farmers ain’t so chary and we get fresh food as we pass such as we ain’t pleased our gobs with for a long time. Pies still warm from the oven. If in heaven this be the cooking I’m game. We go into camp with a main army and there must be twenty thousand men shitting in the same bowl. Like a great strange city rose among the little hills and farms. If Maryland ain’t pretty country God’s a girl. We’re tired in our marrows and Captain Wilson wants to hone us back up. Draws the line when Starling Carlton finds a cherry orchard three hills over and thinks he’ll be best living there. We got to go over with a rope to bring him back. Find him sitting up in a cherry tree. What the hell you doing? says the captain’s orderly Joe Ling. I ain’t talking to you, says Starling, you just a private. So Joe Ling goes back to camp and the captain come out himself and he’s standing under the branches picking cherries almost by accident and chewing them and spitting out the stones. Good cherries, he says. Well got, Sergeant Carlton. Thank you kindly, says Starling, climbing down, I tries to do my best. You want me to tie him? says Private Ling. Tie him up? says the captain, no, I want you to take off your caps and fill them with cherries. So back we wend well laden. Starling Carlton very easy and go-free then, walking along beside me. There’s said to be storms coming over Maryland but just this day the day is one of those given to the earth as a reminder to what it can be. Pleasant and steeped in a kinda heat you can’t take against. And the fields and narrow roads verdant and pleasing and the cherry trees laden with those little red planets and then the promise of the apples and pears later if the storms don’t destroy them. Makes a soldier want to farm and stay in one place the rest of his given days. In plenitude and peacefulness. We’re going along well and Starling is talking about the country round Detroit in the summer and how as a small boy he wanted to be a bishop. Then Starling stops on the dry road and is staring down at the dryness and I think he won’t move again and maybe it is best to fetch the rope after all. I guess Starling Carlton is as mad as two puppies. I guess you’re a good friend to me, he says then, real quiet. Then the captain just a few yards ahead calls back, you coming on now or what? We coming on now, I say.
Every month if the paymaster’s iron cart finds us we send ten dollars to the poet McSweny for Winona Cole. She’s back working blackface for Mr Noone so she got her own fortune if three dollars a week be ever a fortune. Our fortune is twenty-and-some letters from Winona tied in a shoelace. She sends us all her news in her nice handwriting. She hopes for our return but she don’t want us to get shot by a) the Rebels or b) the colonel, for desertion. She says she hope we got victuals and that we get a good wash once a month as she always insisted. Guess a king couldn’t hope for better. Mr McSweny says she’s blossoming. Prettiest girl in Michigan bar none. I’d say, says John Cole. No surprise, ain’t she Handsome John Cole’s daughter? I say. Well. John Cole laughs when I say that. John Cole is of the opinion that we don’t got so many days of life but that one day on the old Bank of Time we draw the last one. He hopes he sees her again before that. That about as pious as John Cole gets.
It was ourselves heaved over to Tennessee then. We wrote a little missive to Lige Magan before we shipped out telling him to look out for us and got back a sad letter itemising the death of his pa. He was took off his farm by the Rebs and hanged for a bluecoat and all his pigs slaughtered. Didn’t even requisition the pigs. Guess they wouldn’t eat Federal pork. Goddamn fools and murderers. His pa had freed his slaves and had put them to sharecropping so they wouldn’t starve. Rebs said this were treason to the Confederacy. That’s right. Lige said he walked the whole way home from Virginia because he couldn’t use the railroad through Big Lick. I never looked back, he said, which was his little joke. Since his neck was fixed hard. Rebs were keeping the railroad to themselves, he says. His farm was in a place called Paris in Henry County but all he found there was bones and sorrow. We was saying all this to Starling Carlton since we reckoned he might like to hear the news but Starling got agitated and didn’t want to hear no more. Stormed out of the tent like he needed a big shit urgent. What the hell’s the matter with him? said John Cole.