Ned Phipps was gurgling loud over at the corral fence. He had got about halfway up to standing. His hat had fallen off and his pants had slid loose down his legs in the crawling. When I got up on him he was dead. Father mine. The others in the yard were just as finished or aiming fast for it.
“Come on out now, Bartholomew,” I called. I got no answer. Called again. I looked at the musket in my hands, then I counted the corpses. My heart skipped a hard beat so I counted again. Five dead boys and a goat. The one inside made it six. Six was too many.
Before he died with his head in my lap at the bottom of the barn ladder where I had thrown him, Bartholomew asked me what it had been like down south at the war, and I told him it had been hot.
“It was hot here too, Constance, and I thought you were dead,” he said.
“Then, husband, you have been kissed and shot by a ghost.”
“I wanted to sell,” he said. “Sell and move on out of here. I lacked only the deed.”
“You could have done it without the deed. All you had to do was take their money.”
“I wanted to do it right.”
“You would have never found it.”
“I’d’ve kept digging.”
“You were my one true love; you put feathers in my letters, you left me a lilac bundle by my breakfast in the long ago.”
“Was I?”
“Always.”
“Every day I took up the shovel and dug for the deed. Ned made me a fair offer. He and his boys were helping me dig. There wasn’t any harm in it. You didn’t have to kill them all. You should have stayed down there a little longer at your war.”
“And you should have looked up into the trees, husband, not down into the dirt.”
“You hid it in the ash tree,” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
Then he died.
The scrawny sheriff was in his office, and when I told him I was Constance Thompson returned from my wayfaring, he said he had just that minute come back from my land. I started to make my speech and ask for my noose but he stopped me, gave me his condolences, told me my farm had been the site of a terrible crime. Once more I started in on my speech and once more he stopped me. He said a stranger had been in town asking questions about our farm. The stranger had been at the café and complained about some slight of hospitality out our way. The stranger, said the scrawny sheriff, was fresh back from the war and had had nothing but blood in his eyes. The last anyone had seen of this stranger was when he had walked out of town heading our way. You could put that all together. The other part to the equation, he went on, was that there had been some boys and a posse of flouncy women camping and carrying on out in the hinterlands had come into town sniffling about a missing Henry repeater rifle. They had told some that they had been in the war and others that they hadn’t but they had clammed up tight, and left soon after, when someone asked just how they had come to lose such a gun.
“You see any blood in these eyes I’m looking at you with?” I asked the sheriff when he was done telling me everything I already knew.
“You have had quite a shock and look road-weary and I will see to your husband’s arrangements if you like, madam,” is what he said.
“I killed them all, every one, even my Bartholomew,” I said.
“You will want to rest up now, Mrs. Thompson,” said the sheriff. “I will have a buckboard take you back home.”
“Take who home? There’s more than one of me here,” I said.
Before Bartholomew breathed his last I let his head down soft onto the dirt floor of the barn and I went out to the edge of the south field and climbed the ash tree where my mother had hung herself and where I had found her swinging on the last day of my youth. I climbed it and felt for the notch just above the branch where she had tied her rope. In the notch was an oilskin bag and in the bag was the deed to my farm. I brought the deed down out of the tree and I carried it into the barn.
“You want to sell, we’ll sell, there’s other buyers in the world,” I said to my Bartholomew. “We can move off away elsewhere. Make a new start. Try for a family together again.”
But he was already dead.
Not so long ago I was coming back from a trade show and passed a greenhouse made of glass from photographic plates. It was bigger but not better built than Weatherby’s, and it had been made along the same lines. This one had been standing some time when I saw it and all that was left of what the glass had shown was smudges of gray, swirls of brown. The woman had the greenhouse said it was a company out of Pennsylvania had built it for her. She said it had been pretty when they had put it up and the images had given off just the right speck of shade but now the sun had had its way and all the ladies and soldiers she had liked to look at were gone. I got the name of the company before I left and wrote them when I got home but they had gone out of business and said they couldn’t help me.
It took me a while but I tracked down three plates of that kind of glass in a likeness shop over in Lafayette and put them in our kitchen window here on the farm. Two fine ladies and one man. Spring and summer, the morning light catches them there, lights them each a minute out of their darkness, lets them glow. One morning these past weeks, as I was looking at them, there was a knock on my door. It was a woman dressed in plain clothes and scuffed shoes about my age had come to pay me a call. She had dust on her from the road and when I asked her she told me she was up from near Yellow Springs, Ohio, so I let her in. We drank hot tea at the kitchen table next to the fading pictures. She was housekeeper to a friend of the General and his wife and at one of the dinners she had helped serve, she had heard a story about a woman had fought for the Union army under the General’s command.
“He was a colonel when I fought for him,” I said.
“I did some soldiering myself, or a kind of it,” she said.
I looked a long while at her and she at me. I had never met another since that time on the road with the colored woman had put her knee to my chest, and I had wondered about it, like I expect all of us had put on pants and gone to war did.
“What made you go?” I said, facing away from her.
“There was two of us,” I heard her say. “It was the other one of us put on the colors. I just kind of rode along.”
“Do you smoke a pipe?” I said.
She said she did and we stepped outside and sat on my front steps and smoked a pipe and traded stories of our adventures in the war. I spoke first and said not very much at all, though it seemed to satisfy her. When it came her turn she told me that her name during the war had been Leonidas and that her friend’s name had been Leander. Leonidas and Leander had been together through the whole long days of the fight.
“We had started out,” she told me, “hauling wood and tending stock and working in the fields in place of all the boys who had gone. When we got tired of that and of our harping parents, we followed after them and saw the bullets fly and heard the cannons roar. We went out onto the fields after the fighting and walked among the dead men and helped take them to their graves. We saw the surgeries where the men were brought to have their limbs removed. We watched them chop a boy’s leg off and throw what they took straight out the front door.”
Dressed in pants, she said, they had attended a battle, and when it went bad and they had killed up most of our side, Leander had put on a dead boy’s uniform and took up his firearm and marched away barefoot with the rest of them. Leonidas had followed Leander through all the weeks and months that followed and even though she had not worn a uniform she had many a time lifted up pistol or rifle and brought the hammer down. After one battle, Leander had got thrown in a prison camp and starved and fooled with and beat for kicking in the teeth of the someone who had fooled with her. Leonidas had met Leander at the gate when they got tired of her troublemaking and set her free.