A week or ten days into this some boys on horses called of an evening at the edge of our property. They had a torch with them might have been one from that night. Any other time my mother would have seen them off like sick sparrows but she just sat crumpled at the kitchen table and it was me had to walk out to the edge of the property with her musket and back them down.
“Your fear will find you out someday too, daughter mine. It will find you out and use its wiles and crinkle your heart,” she said when I came in and put the musket down. I bit my lip. Did not answer. I knew it was true. She seemed to rouse herself some after she had said this. We worked at blade sharpening and spilled out some good sweat together in the yard. Bartholomew came over with another flower and my mother heated us up a jar of ham and green beans. “That’s a good boy you got ahold of there,” she said. She let me walk him halfway back to his house and he kissed me a minute in a ditch beside the fencerow. That night my mother told me the story about the princess and the dragon only at the end of the story it was the princess cut off the dragon’s head. It may be that Bartholomew had come back and was crouched outside the window and giving a listen. “Good night,” my mother said to me when she had finished. She touched my arm and held it when she said this. Later it was more than one time I would look down at my arm and think I could see a mark she had left in touching me. Who is to say that’s just folly? Who is to say what it is we have left on us after we have been touched? There is the world with its night-walking women and then there is what happens in it. A few days later my mother climbed up into the ash tree with a rope.
I do not know why it was this I chose to speak of that evening after dark when I had retrieved the Henry and put my dress back on and climbed up into the hayloft of our barn and found my Bartholomew lying under a horse blanket in the straw. I had not stood near him in two years that could have been twenty but when I leaned in close to his face and woke him, it was my mother I spoke of, my mother and her fear and her hand on my arm, her hand on my arm more than anything, and the neighbor woman walking off with her children, and my mother’s death in the ash tree. Bartholomew tried to speak more than once while I was talking but I did not let him. When I had finished I told him that the next morning early he needed to get down to the house and fetch my mother’s old musket and see it was charged and bring it to me. Then he was to go back down and put his apron on and serve all the boys their morning coffee in the yard. When they all of them had their coffee he was to go back inside the house and not come out. No matter what he heard. They had tried to take our land and used him poorly and spoken for Secession and now it was their turn to be used. It was simple. Simplest thing in the world. Simple as standing and not running. Walking with the turn of the earth instead of against it. He was to listen to me. I said this twice. He was not to disobey.
“Let me speak,” he said.
I did not answer. There was blood already dripping from my lips and my eyes and he did not open his mouth again, only looked at me a little queer, like he had seen his dream of me gone mad come now to crouch above him, and nodded when I repeated myself. Then I told him I was done talking and called him husband and made him lie back down.
Sleep without dream. Tunnel without end. Sky without stars. Rainbows burst to bloody colored bits. I did not know where I was when I woke and I stumbled around in the straw for a minute, imagined there was chained women sleeping around me, that there was minié bullets or a bucket of ice water and fists coming for my head. I told Bartholomew, who wasn’t there, not to fret, that we would fight the keeper and her ice bucket off together. Then I heard voices in the yard. I picked up the Henry, fed it all the way full of cartridges, and went to the hayloft window. It was still some dark out but you could smell sun in the purple sky and I could cipher well enough. Men in the yard. Metal in their hands. They were wearing hats and long coats against the morning cold and they were bunched and smeared together. It took me the only several seconds I had but I counted first four, then all five of them.
They had the barn to their front, the house behind, and forty fine yards on either side. It was like the door had been shut on them. Like when those boys got caught down in the crater and couldn’t climb up its sides. I didn’t like what I was about to set to doing, but I didn’t like them spending their days setting there on my chairs worse. I didn’t like Bartholomew fetching them their coffee worse. I didn’t like the deep fat on the back of Ned Phipps who some said was my father either. Ned Phipps who some said was my father who had helped scare off my mother and burn out our neighbor woman worse. It was him I shot first. I breathed and then hit him on the side of the neck and he fell out of his boots like a side of bad beef and went crawling off in the direction of his horse. The one I had fought with at the market took his in the forehead. The bullet stove out the back of his head and left a spray in the dawn light almost up to the house. The three of them left unhit needed to move but instead stood staring at Ned crawling off and at the boy had once troubled me now dead as dust sitting on the dirt beside them. I shot another twice in his chest and then into the middle of my fury came a goat up out of nowhere, crazed and hopping left and right, so I shot it too. It sat back on its haunches then folded up its front legs and dripped down its head.
When the goat went down the other two boys took it as a sign and dropped the guns they hadn’t once fired, cried mercy, went into squats and put their hands over their heads. At the minute they did this I heard a hard creak behind me and turned a little and saw a hat and a gun barrel coming up the hole into the shadow of the haymow. The hat came up and the gun lifted after it and I spun full around and shot as the black circle of the barrel found my face. I took the climber through his shoulder and he slumped over and set the gun down gentle in the straw.
Boys had been squatting outside started to run at my shot and I took the one trailing a step straight through his side. I would have taken out the last a short second later only the Henry jammed. I gave a quick try at clearing the mechanism but it wouldn’t budge and I saw the boy wasn’t shot running past Ned Phipps toward the corral. I didn’t like to be too rough but the one had tried to come up behind me was blocking my way so after I had grabbed up his gun I shoved him down the ladder. He hit barn dirt with a whump and groan. I was over him and out the side door when I saw what the son-of-a-bitch had meant to end my days with: I now had my mother’s musket in my hand.
Old weapon. Built for other fights and days. It hadn’t ever been rifled and wobbled its round balls like drunk babies but I could see even at a run that it had been well oiled and I knew that it would hit. The boy was already bareback on Ned Phipps’s handsome black horse and had the corral open when I came around the barn. He reined up a minute when he saw who it was in her skirts had been shooting at them. Just like that outlaw boy had done in the house in the woods. I didn’t say a word, only kept coming forward the way we had been taught in the Kentucky fields, the way we had done it in the Maryland pasture, the way we had fought with the cannon fire killing us into wet nothing in the Virginia woods. I kept coming so he kicked the horse hard and cleared the corral and lit out down the road toward town. I got my line of sight, kneeled, lifted my mother’s musket, lowered it a quarter inch, let out my breath, fired off my wobbly ball through the dawn, and shot him down. The handsome black horse galloped on a ways without its rider, then stopped, gave itself a shake, and set in to nibbling like it was Sunday afternoon. I had no urge to shoot at it. The goat had been a mistake. I felt bad about that goat and would not murder a horse.