“How am I supposed to see, then?”
“Just look.”
“You want me to help. Don’t want me to help. .”
“Forget it,” he says and lets it go. It comes racing down the ladder, rocks forward, then slams back.
“You did it!” I say.
SOLEDAD DIPS HER spoon in her stew again, raises it to her mouth, catches her reflection in the sweating silver water pitcher on the table. Her face is misshaped from the silver’s bend. She notices the blood sprinkled on her cheek and large swipes of red across her forehead and neck.
Mr. Shepard gurgles from the floor. The stab wounds around his arms and hands were done after the chest wound that woke him from his nap, fighting. There’s so many now. So so many. The second-to-last wound was on his neck, the worst in his gut, twisted more than once. The knife’s still there.
Soledad say, casual, “I really did deserve better than you, Charlie.”
He gurgles.
“But you never could see me. Always somebody else. So I asked myself, when do I get what I need?” She yells, “What about me?” She stops herself from talking, clears her throat, pats the tortilla cloth over her face, her hands tremble.
A thin flow of blood rises up from his mouth, then down the side of his cheek. She bends down to him, fixes his hair, combing it with her fingers, slicks it back with the flat of her hand, smiles. “Aren’t you going to come and eat? I cooked this for you. Please, come and sit down.”
She sits at the table without him, sits over her bowl, pushing meats to the side with her spoon, as always. She puts a spoonful of broth in her mouth, swallows, then turns back to him.
Charlie’s eyes jot toward her, fix on her. She says, “You always did have pretty eyes.” She lifts her whole bowl of stew to her lips and drinks it down like water. Chunks of meat fall around her mouth and to the table. She picks up the pieces and throws ’em in her mouth, smacks on ’em, swallows, wipes her mouth with her backhand. “No one keeps their promises anymore. You should’ve kept yours, Charlie.”
An exhale like a man blowing his hands warm comes out of Charlie.
“Charlie?” Soledad say. “Charlie?” she say again, this time with worry in her voice.
ALBERT PUSHES HIS new cabinet against the wall while I pick through the bottles of wine and whiskey.
I can feel Albert looking at me, can tell he wants to ask me about Jeremy’s coming and going a few nights ago, but I ain’t got nothing to say.
“I understand if you still want to leave,” Albert say. “And be with him.”
“You worry too much,” I say. “What’s Jeremy got that you don’t?”
He smiles one-sided, all crooked-faced and ugly. Strangely beautiful, I think. I love him. But not the same as I did Jeremy.
“So I’m better than him?” he say. “‘Maybe I’m somebody worth spending the rest of your life with?”
I smile. “Don’t you gotta leave in an hour. If you stop talking now you could save your strength. It’s a long trip.”
“And if I gave my strength up now to ask, what would you say?”
“That Cynthia wants me to put all her liquor in order of their alphabet. But what do you think she’d say if I put the pretty ones up front?”
“MR. SHEPARD!” SOLEDAD cries, trying to shake him alive.
She goes searching through her house like she looking for something needed to fix him with — in her drawers and closets, the bedrooms.
She gives up and finally bursts out of her front doors, hysterical and screaming, her bare feet scramble down her porch, leaving red footprints. They get floured with dust as she runs up her dirt road toward the main one, her hair heavy with blood and whipping from side to side. Her closest neighbor, a quarter mile away, comes out his door from hearing her scream.
“He’s dead!” she say. “Mr. Shepard’s dead! That slave girl killed him!”
Part V
46 / HOMECOMING: 1869, Tallassee, Alabama
THE LAW PUTS a limit on the time a person has to sue somebody.
And if they don’t do it in that time, the hurt person has to drop the matter forever. And there’s a time limit on how long the law has to catch somebody for a crime, too, even if the person did it. And if the law cain’t catch him in that time, it means the criminal got away with it forever.
Not murder.
Murder has no limits. So the death penalty is always on the heels of the guilty. And there’s a lot of talk here about what to do with the treasonous, deserters, and war criminals. It’s how I know about limits. It’s how I know soldiers who desert are murderers according to the people here. Innocent lives were lost because of them. The death penalty, folks say, is the right punishment. But not according to newest president of the United States.
President Johnson signed an order giving “unconditional pardons to all Civil War participants”—on both sides — including war criminals. The order came too late for Henry Wirz, the commanding officer of Camp Sumter in Georgia where Union soldiers were starved, mistreated, and killed. Wirz was convicted of eleven murders and conspiracy and was hanged a war criminal.
He wasn’t the only one.
There were at least two war criminals punished, but there are thousands of deserters, hundreds of them being hunted down and killed and murdered, all off the legal record.
As many as one in three soldiers deserted. So, one in three were eligible to die as cowards. Those men say they were scared or said they were fighting to save their families not a nation; they didn’t sign up for this. It was the old president, President Lincoln, who said no to killing more deserters: “American people will not stand to see Americans shot by the dozens and twenties.” But not everybody agree with Lincoln. The Civil War is proof they didn’t. It’s been over four years since the end of the Civil War and folks are still angry, Confederate flags still fly. And it’s still true that the death penalty is always on the heels of a murderer.
Jackson came home three nights ago by surprise from the new war out west. Even with a son five years gone, Sissy’s first question was, “You told somebody before you left, didn’t you, son? Honorable?”
But Josey didn’t ask no questions when she saw him standing in the darkened doorway, a hero with the night sky behind him. She collapsed with all her burdens in the spot where she stood. It’s where his comforting arms would hold her ’til daybreak.
And now, they sit before the popping fire, Jackson’s arms around her still, her body slouched into him. It only took Rachel and Squiggy a half minute three nights ago to find themselves lost in Jackson, too. They’ve been hanging on him like cares. “This is your daddy,” Josey told ’em that first night, and now they move when he moves, follow him in and out the house, from one side of the room to the other. And right now, they’re a step away, busying themselves with a piece of coal, coloring tree bark, and forming letters, but they’re still keeping an eye on him. Sissy, too, in her rocking chair.
“And my daddy?” Josey say. “Any word from him?”
“I heard his regiment went north into Dakota territory the month before I made it to Texas,” Jackson said. “They call negroes like him buffalo soldiers,” he said.
“But you?” Sissy said. “You came home?”
“Negro fighters ain’t getting proper shelter out there, Momma. . food. Deal was we was gon’ get guns and ammunition, new shoes and quality goods. Instead, we got rotten Civil War rations and cheap blankets that fell apart in the rain. They’re the ones that broke the contract and don’t care if we die.”