I saw boys in the war had legs some like hers but you wouldn’t have traded hers for theirs. There wasn’t ever anything I saw she couldn’t lift if she got her legs under it. Her arms weren’t any too thin but it was the legs on her that set her apart. She talked about britches some. We’d have a hired man now and again to help at a chore and we would sit down to lunch and she would chew on her cucumber salad and squint and remark that if the hired man had stacked more hay or climbed a ladder more quickly than she had, it was because he didn’t have skirts to get tripped up on. One of these times she told me about how her mother had one whole summer risen up every night and put on her father’s work pants and cinched the waist and gone out to do moonlight work on her roses. We did not have any pair of britches in our house but after this story I borrowed a pair off a line outside town and when my mother was asleep one night tugged them on. It was a close night and I did not at all like the feel of the rough wool on my legs but I jumped a puddle and climbed a fence and understood the principle quick enough.
After we had decided that I would go to war, I made a pair of pants out of sackcloth and again went out in the moonlight to practice in them. This time I went out in my britches after dark not because I feared the comment of others but because I did not want anyone beyond Bartholomew to know what I was planning, didn’t want anyone to puzzle on it, to speculate. There was and are plenty around could put two and two together and not get nervous to see the sum come out as five.
A time or two of my moonlight parades, Bartholomew came out into the dark with me. We ran barefoot races through the rows. We took a turn at what we thought marching might be and stepped together across the yard. We went scampering down the lane and one night climbed all the trees in the grove. It didn’t strike me a second on that night that I might one day think about doing just exactly the opposite, think about taking off my pants and putting on a dress and going out to gain advantage in the dark.
There was no place for dresses that night back home. After we had done our climbing and racing, Bartholomew and I shucked off our britches both of us and lay down together at the edge of our yard. There were mosquitoes out in some number but we thrashed and rolled so eagerly that they barely got a chance at us. Bartholomew came up close on his completion and told me he wanted to stay. “Stay close now,” he said. But I didn’t. I wouldn’t. I pushed him away. Saw his fine face in the dark. We had done our trying I told him and look what had come of it.
“I do not want you to leave,” he said.
“Don’t you?” I said.
“Constance,” he said.
“Ash, love,” I said, already knowing what to be called.
“You are my Constance,” he said.
“Ash is my name. I will not answer now to any other.”
And when I saw he had no reply to make and wasn’t going to get up, only lie there in the yard in his mosquito-bait nothings, I got up myself and pulled on my pants and pushed him aside, a little harder than I like to think of now. Then I went running off away from him, speeding up and slowing down until I felt sure it was starting to come natural and there wouldn’t be anything could stop me, like it was to be running races and fence-jumping and tree-climbing from one end to the other of the war.
The son-of-a-bitch with the Colt was drowsing and the Akron boys were asleep and tucked safe away from their troubles a minute in their dreams when I pulled that pile out of the closet and saw that it would do. It was two dresses, one green, one red, owned once by a stout lady gone down the road or into the earth or who knew where. I picked the darkest corner, shrugged out of my clothes and unwrapped myself, and put the green dress on. It was snug in the chest and loose in the waist but I unstrung my belt off my britches and gave it a shape. There was some stain on it but the stain would work to my favor. I tore a stretch of the other dress off and wrapped it around my shoulders in the idea it might approximate a shawl.
Then I drew up the little window, dropped my blues down soft onto the ground, and climbed out. First thing I did was make my way to the bushes where I hadn’t gotten to go in what felt like a week. I sat there with that dress on and did my business and a shiver came up over me. I hadn’t felt my legs free under a dress in a year, hadn’t even so much as held a piece of crinoline let alone have it crawl all over me. I got prickly bumps up to their ends. That image of my mother’s legs unspringing themselves out of her bath came back to me. Tornadoes coming up out of the waters. I imagined I had tornadoes under my skirt when I went rustling over in that stout lady’s dress to where that son-of-a-bitch lay sleeping his own evil sleep next to the magnolia tree. He had that clay jug on the ground next to him that I had watched him sip out of until he nodded. I picked it up slow then dropped my knee hard onto his chest so that his head popped up and as it did I smashed that heavy jug down. I smashed it down again, and then a third time, and then I put my hand into the blood I had made and brought it back up to my face. I brought some more of it up to my neck, then stood and draped my shawl over my head. Then I took his fine pistol, checked it, cocked the hammer, held it behind my back, and walked around to the front door.
It didn’t take but a minute to rouse them. Like I thought it might happen, one of them leaned up at the front window and took a look at me and when he saw me he gave a grin. His teeth didn’t look any better than his dead son-of-a-bitch friend’s. I said I had been set upon by rogues in the forest, that I needed his help. He opened the door and called me “honey doll” and I shot him in the mouth. His friend had his gun to hand and he lifted it but got stuck a second too long wondering what it was was happening. What this woman wearing the face of one of their prizes was doing shooting people dead. He took his first bullet in the neck. When he stood and tried a step sideways I put one in his chest. He fell over in the pile of rebel grays. You almost couldn’t hear him land. I went over to see if I had finished my work, saw I hadn’t, and shot him again.
I put the fine Colt pistol down on the table, then stepped out the front door. I stood a minute and looked down the pale lane ran away off into the dark. Looked like a thought you’d had and then lost. After I had stood I sat down on the front steps. Exactly what Bartholomew had done, the morning I set out on the road that had taken its many windings and had now led me down this pale lane and again into a dress. I had had it in mind that morning of my leaving that despite our troubles of the past year he would give me some fine Bartholomew word of parting, then wave at me as he wiped away a tear. Would stand tall and wave. Instead, he had looked one last time at me, wrapped his arms hard around his chest like he was afraid his lungs might leave him, and sat down.
“You had better get to marching because I can’t stand it to see you any longer when you are already gone,” he said when I came over.
“I am not gone yet, husband,” I said.
“Constance is gone,” he said.
He had a far-off look in his eyes, like he had to see through a thousand miles even then, when I was standing right next to him, to find me.
“I am here,” I whispered, bending close.
“Off to war with you, Ash Thompson,” he said.