She nodded.
“It becomes very personal. You fix on someone and you try to kill him, and it hurts you because up close you see that it’s just some fellow wearing a uniform. If your folks had moved a hundred miles away and settled on the far side of some invisible line, that might be you over there. It’s kids a lot of the time. Especially if the war goes on for a while. Boys who can’t shave who are being fed into a meat grinder.” Grey paused, shook his head. “There are these moments in a battle. No one sees them because everyone else is having their own series of moments. But it’s all about you in that moment. You. A guy comes at you and you fire your gun — and you miss, or maybe your powder’s wet, or maybe it hits his buckle and wings off. Then it’s you and him, up close. Hitting each other with your guns ’cause you don’t have time to reload. Maybe bayonets or swords or knives. Sometimes it’s just hands. And teeth. Dirty fighting. Gutter fighting. And you’ll do anything to live through it. To not die.”
She nodded again.
“I remember once, back was I was sixteen — no, seventeen. It was my third battle. We were down in Culpepper County in Virginia. I was with the 46th Pennsylvania Infantry. Papers called it the Battle of Cedar Mountain, though afterward most of the fellows I know called it Slaughter Mountain. Stonewall Jackson plumb beat us to death and nearly ran us all down. The battle was important, because it was the beginning of the South’s Northern Virginia Campaign. But on my level, it was me and this other guy fighting in a streambed. He was twice my age and he looked like my Uncle Farley. A lot like him, which still bothers me. Anyway, we were on the fringes of our two lines and we emptied our guns at each other. I could feel his bullets whipping by my head but nothing hit me. Then for a while we were swinging our rifles back and forth like gladiators with swords. Whanging them off each other, trying to bash in each other’s heads. It was right about then that the slope we were on crumbled and the two of us slid down into a stream. There we were, half drowned, no guns left, beating the pure hell out of each other. He tried to bash my head in with a hickory branch. I hit him with some stones I picked up. I’m telling you, this fight went on and on. We chased each other up and down the muddy slopes. We kicked each other in the privates. We beat on each other’s faces until our hands were busted up.”
“What happened?” she asked.
Grey shook his head. “He slipped on a mossy stone and fell. Hit his head on another stone and was just lying there in the water. So I… well, I…”
“What?”
He cleared his throat. “I sat on him and pushed his head down into the water and held him there for maybe ten, fifteen minutes. Long, long after he stopped moving.”
The night was huge and now there were thousands of stars. The teenagers worked like machines. Lowering, filling, cranking, dumping, lowering again.
“I never told anyone about it,” said Grey.
“It must have been awful,” said Jenny.
“No, that’s just it,” he said, “it’s always awful. It was awful for every man on that field. It’s awful for everyone in every war, on both sides and for everyone who lives in the path of the armies.” He pointed to the town. “This was awful for every one of them. Most of them will eat their pain and their horror. Like I did. I never told anyone because it’s not something you do. Not unless you save the day and you need the applause to help you win a promotion or an election. Like generals. Like heroes. They say history is written by the winners. That’s true to a point. I think what’s really true is that history is written by the ambitious.”
Jenny glanced over her shoulder at Mrs. O’Malley. “She’s not the ambitious type.”
“No.”
“She wouldn’t brag if she won a prize hog at a county fair.”
“A lot of people are like that.”
“Is it pride?” asked Jenny. “Or fear?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s just that on that level, killing is personal. It’s something you own, something you have to deal with.”
“Is that how you see it, Grey?” she asked.
When he didn’t answer, Jenny came over and sat next to him. So close that her body touched his, and despite the wet clothes she wore, he could feel her heat.
They sat together in a silence that was at first awkward but which became gradually comfortable. Even comforting.
“Those men tonight,” she began slowly.
He nodded.
“I knew most of them. Not just Perkins and the deputies, but a lot of the others as well.”
Grey turned sharply toward her. “What?”
“Most of them I knew only to see. They worked for the railroad. For Nolan Chesterfield.”
“Ah.”
“But the others? They were from here.”
“Here, meaning—?”
“Paradise Falls,” she said. “They were all men from right here in town.”
“Jesus.”
“Aside from the deputies, the rest were men who worked in the mines.”
“Mining for what?”
She looked at him. “What do you think? Ghost rock’s the only thing people care about, apart from water.”
“As I understand it, the mines are owned by two men. Some by Chesterfield and most of them by Aleksander Deray.”
“Yes,” she said. “Those men… some of them worked for one, and some worked for the other. But they all died. Mine collapses. Tidal surges into the caverns. And other stuff. Men gone missing and people talking about sea serpents and cave monsters. Crazy stuff.”
“Crazy,” he said, but it didn’t sound one bit crazy to him right then. And probably not to her, from the tone of her voice.
He steeled himself to ask the next natural question.
“Jenny…,” he began, but she cut him off.
“I know that was my pa,” she said.
He said nothing.
“He knew me, too.”
Fresh tears glittered on her cheeks.
“And I know he was a monster.”
“I’m so sorry…”
Her mouth was a hard, uncompromising line. “Somebody did that to him. You saw them. Those things. You saw the stones in their chests. Somebody did that to them. Which means they did it to my pa. They turned my father into a monster and they sent him to kill me.” She shook her head. Two slow, decisive shakes. “I can’t let that go. I never will. I need to find whoever did this — Chesterfield, Deray or someone else. I need to find them and I need to kill them. No… that’s not right. I will kill them. As God is my witness — if there’s even a God left in heaven — I will kill them.”
Grey reached out and took her hand. He entwined his fingers with hers and pulled the back of her hand to his chest. He wanted her to feel the strong, steady beat of his heart.
“And I am going to help you put those evil sons of bitches in the ground.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Even the longest of nights must end, and that night passed, too.
Grey found his horse, Mrs. Pickles, shivering under a palm tree half a mile from town. Queenie was a few hundred yards away along with a dozen other horses, cows, and sheep. Why the animals had come to this spot to stay safe was something Grey never found out. His horse nickered reprovingly at him, but when Grey produced some carrots from a pocket, Picky forgave him and even pushed against his chest with her long, soft nose.
Grey, feeling a bit like Noah leading the animals to the Ark, guided the mixed herd back to town.