“This is your…?” I said.
“My husband,” she said.
I had in my hands a picture of the Colonel, my Colonel who had become a General.
“Then you are not the wife of the man lies yonder under the pink stone who was the General’s cousin.”
“The General’s younger brother.”
“His brother.”
“My husband called him his cousin so that the connection would not be too clear. Neither too clear nor too close.”
I sat silent. My brain making its rearrangements.
“He was not well, of course, and he would not be parted from the General. The General was good to him. Very good.”
“Very good,” I said, my brain still trying to make the new shape.
“Yes,” she said.
“Yes,” I said back.
Then I had it all. Nothing was any different.
“I never spoke to him but once; still, I saw him many a time. Like I said it a minute ago, he did his duty.”
“Just as you did yours.”
I looked at her. She had her eye on me again and was smiling. It was a kind smile. There wasn’t any shivering.
“Has the General changed, in your reckoning of it?”
“Yes.”
“Yes,” she said. She crossed her feet in front of her and sipped her tea. She looked hard at me again.
“I know you did not do any laundry and wagon-driving down in Maryland and Virginia, unless it was your own laundry and the wagon-driving was in your official orders.”
I did not answer her, just sat holding the likeness of the General carefully in one hand and my glass carefully in the other. She took a letter out of a clever pocket sewn with crimson ribbon onto the front of her dress. She unfolded it and read.
My Dear,
There is a young woman who disguised herself and fought bravely and indeed with considerable distinction for a time in my regiment. She was badly treated upon her discovery. By myself not least of all. After paying me a visit earlier this afternoon to leave me a warm coat she no longer required, she is gone away from us now and I hope has left war behind forever. I do not know why I think this, and so hesitate, my dear, to write it, but I somehow expect she will be coming to you. Look for her along the road. Treat her well if she arrives. Give her your welcome. Let her know she has mine too.
She showed me the letter and I looked a little at it. There was a brown thumbprint on the left side of the page where someone with dirty fingers had held it. The bottom half of the page had been torn off. The General had a long, tall hand looked something like he did. He had written in a kind of purple ink that bled here and there around the letters, making some of the curlicues look like chrysanthemums.
“He knew it about me long before anyone else,” I said.
“I can well imagine that he did,” she said.
“But he said nothing.”
“No, he wouldn’t have.”
“Why wouldn’t he have?”
“I don’t know.”
“What was he a professor of?”
“Greek and Latin.”
“I am very tired.”
“Then you must come in the house, Private Thompson, and lie down.”
I stayed at the house of the General still away at war and of his wife, who was good to me, for longer than I would have thought, for the crops were up and it was deep on into summer when I started to think about setting back out on my road. I had stayed all that time in the big room that had been the General’s brother’s and as I began at least in my mind to step away from the house and make north and west for home, I thought considerably about his soft eiderdown and good feather bed. It had been the kind of bed you could bury yourself down into and let the warmth and softness smother your dreams. There was something about that bed had to do in my mind with the Indian mound and the chair in the madhouse and the General’s brother’s grave and my mother’s grave and the one I had waiting for me soon or late whether I did or I didn’t keep on. It was that trick of did or didn’t got me slowed and looking slow one way and then the other and then no way at all. In the middle of that no way I found a bucket. Filled up with tears. The bucket was leaking. I wiped my cheeks with the pillowcase. There was some more leak came out. I had never cried beyond getting my eyes damp before. Or any good crying I had done was past my remembering of it: scrawny child in her mother’s arms. I did not like that I was doing it now but couldn’t see any way to stop it. My bucket was still leaking when the General’s wife knocked on my door one warm late morning and told me to come down, someone needed my help.
“I fear I am indisposed, ma’am,” I told her.
“Well, dispose of your upset and come on down,” she said back.
It was a wagon with an old man looked an awful lot at first glance like my beau from the road. This man didn’t have any chaw dribble in his beard, though, and when I walked up with the General’s wife, he took off his hat and gave a nice nod. He was soft and green of eye to the point that they watered what looked like tiny green leaves and after I had made my own head nod back at him I could see he was missing an arm.
“I can do it all but I can’t shift boxes,” he said.
“Glad to help you,” I said.
The General’s wife gave us each a good smile and we left, or that’s how it seemed as I thought about it later as the old man’s mare went trotting along. There had been the General’s wife’s smile and then there was us, me and the old man, his watery eyes and my leaky bucket, and the open road leading us out of town.
“You take snuff?” the old man said, reaching into his waist pocket, pulling out a turquoise bag, and fetching out a pinch.
“No,” I said, then I said, “Yes,” thinking it might help wake me up away from my reveries.
“Those are strong-looking hands you’re wearing there,” the old man said after I had stopped my sneezing.
“My name is Constance,” I said.
“I know it,” he said. “We got introduced back there in town.”
I didn’t say anything to this and we rolled on a ways in silence, up a flower-topped hill and down its other side. The old man had been casting me quick glances with those watery green eyes and after another minute of rolling he said, “Weatherby. Weatherby is my name.”
“Nice to meet you,” I said.
“Meet you again, is what you mean.”
We rolled some more and hit a patch of crows working a deer carcass, and Weatherby said it looked like they were having a grand time. That there was few things happier than an animal had found its midday meal. He said the General’s wife had packed us sandwiches and after we had picked up our load we could have a picnic under a shade tree. There was nothing, he said, like a picnic under a shade tree, a picnic under a shade tree in the summertime couldn’t be beat if you worked at it a year. Then he said if he had a handkerchief he would offer it to me. I hadn’t realized it but my bucket was back at it, leaking tears out of my eyes, brown ones. Dead leaves. Creek mud. Falling down my face and off my jaw.
“I understand you’ve had some scare out along the road and seen some things of the war,” Weatherby said.
“I am sorry,” I said. “I do not know myself, I do not know myself at all.”
“I lost this arm in a fight fifty years ago,” he said. “My son is gone and my grandson is still down there in the Shenandoah.”
“Then I pity you,” I said.
“Pity the whole wide world while you’re at it,” he said. “But what I meant by that remark was that I’ve done my share of letting it leak out too.”
I wiped my face on my shirtsleeve. It did not strike me until later that he had used the word leak in referring to his tears. I did not cry ever again after those days of care and comfort in Ohio, but forever after when I saw someone at it, large or small, I thought of buckets dripping their contents.