“Don’t you have any family you can go to?” I asked when the show was over.
“Such as they are, they are up in Cleveland,” said the oldest.
“That’s quite a way you have of talking,” I said to her.
“But we like it here,” said the middle one. “We want to stay here forever.”
“Forever and ever,” said the youngest.
“That’s a long time,” I said.
“Don’t you like it here?” said the oldest.
“I do,” I said and gave the youngest another tickle. Then I walked outside, pulled the bucket up out of the well shaft, and retrieved my dress and shoes. When I had put them on I found I had the barrel of a pin-fire pistol trained on me. It was in the hands of the oldest girl. I walked over to her and placed my hands on top of hers and held them there a minute, then let them go.
“You have to fire that thing to make it work on a person,” I said.
“I know how to fire it,” she said.
I nodded and thanked the girls for their hospitality, accepted the bundle of food they had packed for me, told them I wouldn’t stand for any crying or carrying on, and left off down the road.
An hour later I crashed through a small wood had set a squadron of deerflies after me and came across a place where the earth swelled up like a giant’s dinner bell. There was a tree or two on the flanks of this swollen place but the ground underfoot was spongy and mostly it was just high grass and scrub. I walked up this swelling and paused on its top. I had heard about mounds like these, heard there were whole dead cities buried in each one of them, that no one now alive could say for sure how they had come to be.
I crouched a minute and scraped at the soft surface. I lay on my side with my ear to it. Sun for a blanket. Tune one of the girls had sung on my lips. The dirt below me felt heavy. Like it might whisper. Whisper some secret. I fell asleep and dreamed the world had run to its end.
I don’t think I would have done anything much more than imagine a visit to Yellow Springs, Ohio, if a tinker selling bedsheets and colored socks hadn’t asked me was I bound there. I hadn’t been, hadn’t even had any idea I was near it, but after he had taken out a sample of his wares, and I had told him I did not at that present time need anything he had to offer, even if the red of his socks was, as he had said, very fine, I followed his direction over a hill and down a good road and took myself into town.
It was a handsome place. Good, quiet streets and neat houses had squared about each one of them its own pretty yard. There was a well-made church and churchyard with more than a few fresh graves. I found the General’s cousin, buried beneath pink granite and a young almond tree fluttering its first raggedy blossoms in the breeze. The stone had careful carving you couldn’t see from afar. There were stars and birds. There was a bright harvest moon. If you looked close you could see a river curling off toward heaven. Under the cousin’s name were his dates. Under his dates was the word Unafraid.
It didn’t take much asking to find what had been the cousin’s house. I meant just to have my look from afar but there was the woman of the house chopping hard at some rosebushes spoke to me and told me I had to come in. I said I had been scrabbling with outlaws and orphans in the countryside and wasn’t fit for stepping in a fine house, but I had known her husband and, if she liked, would sit with her a minute on her porch. She took off her garden hat, wiped a hand through her hair, sat me down, and bade me wait, then five minutes later brought out cool tea and sandwiches on soft bread. She brought a whole stack of those sandwiches, which had ham and sweet pickles swimming in fresh butter, and I worked hard at not eating them too fast. Once or twice as I ate I started to speak but she held up a hand. She was as fine to look at as her town. Into her middle years but elegant along with it, maybe more so for her age, soft and flinty both, gentle at the same time as hard. She sipped quietly at her tea and looked out over her garden. She had pink and purple hydrangeas blooming, white lilacs, a pale-trunked line of peach and apple and sour cherry trees. There were maples everywhere well into leaf and you could see the church steeple shining white beyond.
“Where did you know my husband?” she said when I had eaten the last sandwich and wiped my hands on my napkin. I didn’t like for her to look at my fingers for they were nothing but dirt and chewed-down nails. Even if I had tried to scrub at them some at a well on the way over to her house.
“I knew him to look at in Maryland and Virginia and some earlier in Kentucky too. He was about as brave as they make them. He would just stand straight up through a battle, calm and quiet. Like it was Sunday afternoon and we’d all gone home from church to eat these sandwiches of yours.”
She smiled and she shivered. You could barely tell which was which.
“He did his duty, no doubting that. There wasn’t a man in his company would claim the contrary,” I said.
“Were you attached to his regiment?”
“I did laundry and sundry jobs. Drove a wagon now and again. I can cook a little if I have to. Helped the sutlers spread their wares.”
She had a sharp eye and she looked a good while at me. If I had had on my uniform, she would have seen straight past it like it wasn’t there.
“And now you have left that service and walked all the way up here from Virginia?”
“I’m heading back to my husband, who stayed home for the war.”
“Ah,” she said. “A young married woman, far from her home, traveling with an army at a time of war. That’s an extraordinary image.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
“Penelope gone to the war and Odysseus staying home.”
“Ma’am?”
She was quiet awhile and sipped her tea. I did the same. It was good tea. Plenty of sugar and more of mint. There was birdsong in the air. Robin. Cardinal. Wren. One or two I didn’t know. Some yelling to add to it from a jay. It was a big brick house and just the porch would have done for fifty. We didn’t have a porch at home, though we had often set our chins toward the subject and talked about building one.
“Please excuse me a moment,” she said.
She stood and went into the house and came back out with a green velvet sleeve. Out of this sleeve she took a gilt frame. She held it close to her. The gilt had been well wrought and looked pretty against her dark blue dress, like a window onto the other world.
“We had this likeness made before he left on his orders. He was still a professor then, finishing up his spring term.”
“A professor,” I said.
“Here at Antioch, of course. The college is shut down now. We expect it will reopen after the war. It stands just over there.” She waved toward some poplars. There was a hint of stone through the trees, a pair of peeping towers, the corner of a wall, the mossy curve of a well. She handed me the frame and asked me if her husband had still resembled his likeness. If the war hadn’t ravaged his fine looks away entirely. She had seen him after he was wounded, she said, and had not liked what she saw and had begged him to stay at home with her after his recovery.