Town was just waking up when I walked in. I stepped straight into the café and ordered coffee and biscuits. I had ordered that same thing regular in that same café all the grown years of my life but I was in my other clothes and they could not see me. When I had eaten I called over for more coffee.
“You been off to the fight,” said the can of corned beef brought it over and couldn’t recognize me.
I nodded. Said I’d had my discharge. Said I was passing through on my way home.
“Home where?” he said. He had leaned against the counter and crossed his arms, interested in the traveler going his way from somewhere to somewhere else.
I pointed out through the wall in the direction more or less of Marion and Noblesville. I took a sip of my coffee. Took a look at my fingernails, picked out a speck of grime.
“I paid a visit to a farm about three miles yonder yesterday evening, looking to beg a sup of water and some directions, found the welcome wasn’t any too warm,” I said.
“Which farm was that?” he said.
“Horse farm, to look at it. They’ve had some fire trouble and fence damage. Goats grazing wild and such.”
The man uncrossed his arms and gave out a laugh.
“That’s what used to be the Thompson farm. Gal and her husband. Gal ran off and joined the gypsies. Little fellow she left behind couldn’t fend off the wolves.”
“I heard some of those wolves are Secesh lovers.”
“I couldn’t speak to that.”
“I saw a little corncob serving them cups of coffee.”
“Bartholomew Thompson. He’s missing the fight because of a bad foot or eyes or some such. Boys that took his farm let him run their errands and live in the barn.”
I took another sip of my coffee. I looked the man in the eye a good while. He had aged but a little, had a few fresh wrinkles and only just a bit more yellow in his eye than before. He wasn’t any thinner than he had been either.
“Sounds like he could have used a hand in the fight. I expect there’s folks love the Union in the vicinity.”
If he heard the iron in my voice he didn’t show it.
“Time of war,” he said. “I reckon there’s more want him gone than want him to stay.”
“You among them?”
It was his turn to give me a good look.
“I reckon whether I am or I’m not isn’t any of your affair, stranger.”
We talked war and devils for a while and by the time I left I decided I had had the answer to my question and didn’t need to pursue it further. My next stop was the sheriff’s office. The man who had put his boot on the neck of that institution for many a year and who had stood shouting amongst the burning-out crowd two weeks before my mother hung herself one rainy morning from the ash tree on the edge of our farm was cousin to Ned Phipps, but the fellow built like a broke-string banjo I talked to there told me that old outlaw had gotten drunk one night the past winter before investigating some pranks at the rail yard and let a train take off his legs. They had him in a rolling chair up at the county home. This man, his successor, had only an unrifled musket in his arsenal to go with his badge and wasn’t going to gun for anyone took an angry interest in Ned Phipps.
“Where you heading off to?” he said when I walked back out of his sorry door.
“Home. Home is where I’m goddamn heading,” I said.
On my way out of town and back to the Henry I passed the very Ned Phipps I had business with. He was riding one of the horses he kept corralled on my property. Riding it grand like the cavalry officer he had never been. It was a crow-black racing horse about as handsome as they come. You could see it was on its way to having its back broken by the fat son-of-a-bitch sitting like a general on top of it. That fat son-of-a-bitch gave me down a green-toothed smile and a nod.
“You back from the fight?” he said.
“Traveling to it,” I said.
“Well, then, I wish you luck.”
In my dream of it there is no moon and there are no stars and I am lost in a crowd carrying torches to set the world alight. My mother’s voice and I cannot reach her. My mother’s voice farther away or me from it as the crowd grows closer and closer still. They turn giant and I rain my blows against their giant legs.
“Constance,” my mother calls out in the dream. Her voice sounds as thin as a piece of paper and twice as light. “Constance, come and stand up here beside me.” But in the dream I am afraid. In the dream I turn my back on my mother and run.
On that night it was different from the dream. We had heard there was to be trouble at the house of our neighbor the woman whose husband was gone and who had her two babies and nothing else but the peeling paper on her walls to protect her. My mother sent me to my room to sleep and told me to shut my eyes, but they stayed open and I climbed out my window as soon as I knew she had gone. There was stars and moon aplenty, in the memory and not the dreams, and I could see her up ahead stepping her long legs through the barley. There was a crowd of them already there and my mother walked straight through that crowd and went to stand on the neighbor woman’s front step and face them. She crossed her strong arms over her chest and yelled out to them that they needed to head home and look to their own business. Leave women and their babies alone. She had just yelled this a second time when I came through the crowd and climbed up the steps and stood next to her. In the house behind us the neighbor woman was sitting at her kitchen table with a babe in each arm. Her eyes were wild and she was singing a song I’d never heard before. Rocking a little on a chair wasn’t a rocker. There was upward of fifty of them holding their torches and stepping ever closer to the house and setting in to jeer.
“We don’t ever turn our cheek, do we, Mama?” I said and crossed my own arms and looked out at the crowd. The constable was at the front of it. Ned Phipps, who I had known of since I was five years old, was there. There was a woman in the mob holding a pitchfork and yelling out for the others to toss forward their torches and send us and all the gypsy niggers in the house to hell.
“No, we don’t,” my mother said and as she said this, her voice cracked. It was just a speck of a crack, the smallest thing, like a twig touched in winter, but I had never heard any crack come out of her throat before. I looked up and saw there were tears on her cheeks and that her lower lip was moving. A minute later she had set off away, first at a fast walk, then at a run. When she had left I found I couldn’t keep my arms crossed. They dangled at my sides like they’d been sawed down to the strings. Still, it was me helped the neighbor woman to leave, who took one of the babes and a bundle and walked her away through the crowd already set into their burning and off a long stretch down the road. When we got close to the Ohio border, about where I would cross it again those years later on my way to war, she told me I better get back and see to my mother, that whether she would confess to it or not, she was the one needed seeing to now.
“But where will you go?” I said, for she looked small and alone with her children and her bundle there on the midnight road.
“You go on now, go on back home,” she said.
I followed after her awhile but she would not speak to me any longer, was already striding away from Indiana and off into the sadness of the world. World woven from the wool of such partings.
My mother and I did not speak about that night on any of the days that followed even though the cinders of what had been the neighbor woman’s house smoked dark and slow through every one. I kept looking for my mother to find a piece of fine story to put onto the end of this poor one but she stayed quiet and no crown of justice came to her brow, no sword of vengeance crept into her hand.