“Who is still living?” she asks him.
Bob snores lightly with a smile. Cat looks around the room, taking us in. The woman, the once-slave, myself.
“Wash yourself of that,” she says. “Give yourself a good washing. Do only what can be done.” She stands up, pulls him up beside her, takes him to the basin in the corner of the room. She tilts his head above the bowl and pours a jug over his hair, and then digs her fingers into his scalp, pulling out the wet tangles. I expect him to protest, but he stands limply. She is not gentle with him. “Guilt is a dead weight,” she says. “Get it on out. Hup, hup.” His head jerks with each rough motion of her hands. He murmurs something that sounds like a white man’s prayer. Our father.
When she is done, he stands up straight, his hair smooth and plastered against his skull. She holds her tiny face in her hands with pride.
“Feel nicer?”
Bob has woken up with all the splashing. “What’s he getting the fine treatment for?” he asks me. “I wouldn’t mind a scrub.”
Cat, with wide-open hoping eyes, formally kneels on the ground. “I don’t want to have done what I did,” he says.
Bob snorts and shakes his head. “All you did was go swimming.”
“I don’t want to have done it.” Cat is still gazing up at the woman.
“We’ve got a half dozen bodies on our souls,” Bob says, “and you just went paddling around that creek like it was a summertime swim hole.” He pulls his knees up, looks at the woman to convince her. “We’re the ones who killed them all, who got shot for it. He didn’t touch them. He who’s probably the murderer they’re looking for, who knows how to murder, and him even carrying the gun. Just went swimming!” His laugh is uneasy.
I am seeing all this sideways, my head down on the quilt, and I see how much Cat’s jawline is like Bob’s, how their elbows both jut. Their waists meet their hips in a skinny bend. Everyone’s shoes are collapsing.
The woman folds herself down on the floor and pulls Cat’s head into her lap, fidgeting her fingers through the last knots in his hair, and he lets her do this and closes his eyes as he collapses into the puddle of her skirts, beneath which is just a pile of thin bones.
“I let people die,” he says.
“Shh,” she says. “I know.”
Bob sighs and settles down again.
We fall asleep in crooked shapes on the floor.
IN THE MORNING, the woman — wearing the same dress, unwrinkled, but capless — pulls the crows from beneath the bed and sets their ruffled bodies on the table and with the strength of someone younger, she tears the birds to pieces. She pulls their wings until they pop darkly and rip free; she twists their heads off, the brimstone paste sending a foul burned smell through their open throats; she yanks at their feet until they come off like fleshy twigs in her hands. Then with grace she gathers the broken pieces and takes them into the garden, where she ties them to sticks with twine and plants them around her fresh stalks of young corn.
She washes her hands from the barrel of rainwater and makes us a pan of fried potatoes for breakfast. The salt smells like everything is all right in the world, or at least in this embrace of a house. When she changes Bob’s bandage, we see that the hole in his skin is starting to scab. Cat touches it.
“What’s it to be, my bandits?”
We are lazily sprawled around the house, waiting for the next task she assigns us. I blink at her slowly, thinking I will offer to find us fresh meat for dinner tonight, something wilder than her hogs.
“I can’t keep you forever. A bunch of highwaymen and a spinster like me, how do you think the neighbors would gossip? No, sons, I’ve my own business to be about.” She digs in her shelves now, pulling down new powders and ground roots.
Bob is the first to sit up. “I don’t mind,” he says. “It’s time enough for us to be heading on.” He looks at Cat. “Time for me, that is. Right? My shoulder’s fixed, or will be, so— This is how we said it would be.” He stands up and starts sorting his belongings, scooping out a small hand of silver for the woman pounding a poultice in her bowl. “I thank you much for what you’ve done.”
“So you’re just splitting up like strangers?”
“That’s what we are,” I say.
Bob turns to me, determined. “If you go back and take over your town or whatever it is you hope to do, and if you find yourself trading down Pensacola way and you see my woman on my master’s land, tell her that I’m free now, that I know what it is now, that if it means death, I’ll pay. And tell her I’ll come for her.” He looks at Cat again. “And you. There is no crime so black that God don’t see the goodness in us, though it be deep and buried.”
Cat rises and takes Bob’s wrist in his hand and then drops it. He says something so quiet we make him say it again. “I’m not ready.”
“You’ve got the map, don’t you? Aren’t you going to give that letter to the captain’s lady and woo her, or serve her, or bed her, or whatever the plan is?”
“I want to do that after.”
“After what?” I ask.
“Bob,” he says. “Probably can’t buy a farm without a white man’s X. I can do that.”
“You want to come west with me?” After their arguments, I would’ve thought Bob would be happy to let Cat go, but we have let too many people go. Bob’s face and Cat’s face match, both open. None of us have the language for saying what we need.
We’re all standing now, the woman slowly stirring and smashing, and the safe, sleepy air is being pulled like smoke out the windows.
“If you were to ask me,” she says, pulling her hands from the bowl, wiping them on her apron and rumpling them through her woolly white hair, “and some men don’t, I’d say this is no time yet to be carving yourselves into bits, especially with one of you still healing.” She looks particularly hard at Cat. “Carry on west, I say, keep putting miles between you and the men out there, and when you’ve gone as far as you can without squabbling, without one man saying, ‘I’ve got to be heading the other way entirely!’ then you fall into your separate selves. But you ask me, I’d say you’re still all mushed together.” She funnels the powder into a small glass jar and then brushes her hands over the braided rug, the anonymous dust drifting in a faint cloud to the ground. Would mice later find it and turn to stone?
I falter on the edge of something. After all I’ve done, wanting now to do better.
“At the very least,” she adds, “someone needs to change Bob’s plaster.”
We look at each other, and maybe it’s the sureness of the woman’s voice, how strong it comes out of her small body. Maybe there’s a new weakness in us, or a resistance to do more wrong. We sort our bags, pack them, feel their heaviness on our shoulders again. Cat gives me back the gun.
He folds himself onto the woman, stoops down, small as he is, to wrap her frailness in his arms, and she laughs and pats his back. Her dark face, pocked and pitted, sits like a bird in the crook of his neck. Bob pulls him away.
We have left her with a supply of wood and a basket of dug vegetables, and her garden now is orderly, except for the bits of stinking crow strapped to poles and flapping in the breeze.
Our shadows slide west between the white oaks and hickories as the light catches in the brambles. All that’s left after the shepherding of these men is to rule my people, and it is the greatest thing I will ever want, and it is the only act that can redeem the blood I’ve spilled and the blood I’ve witnessed, and though I wait for months or years, I will come to it and become a white, white sun for my nation. History is like a map for where to go.