brow and warm brown eyes. The way your cheeks crease when you smile. It makes me crazy, but I most miss your tender red-faced turtle head atop that sweet length of neck. I dream of petting him so special that he drools into my palm and I lick my fingers for a taste of you.’ ”
The boys about shattered themselves with rude laughter upon hearing this.
“My Lord,” said Arch, all manner of unpleasant glee reflected in his face. “Them Yank gals! Them Yank gals! Why, only a whore would say that.”
The Federal now thrashed about some. He may have understood. It was pitiful.
“No southern woman would say such a thing,” Pitt Mackeson said. “Ho, ho! I cain’t wait to be in charge of Iowa!”
I couldn’t stand it. The Federal gurgled and the boys said, “Tender turtle head! Tender turtle head!” real loud.
So I shot him where he lay and put a period to the letter. My act was sudden and it stalled the boys’ laughter.
I walked off with my Colt cocked and my step steady.
Not a word was said to me.
Later on I lounged about, trying to dredge up the tart taste of a jenniton apple in my memory, and the perfumed-sweat smell of real ladies waltzing all night with someone else at a levee dance, and the gushing warmth I’d always felt when Asa Chiles had tousled my hair and called me lucky.
But all that past was a sluggish slough, and I could not flow it up to me at all.
My thoughts were just of now or tomorrow.
Jack Bull Chiles was near me but did not speak for a great stretch of time. He had been a bystander to the day but never an active part of it.
“Say, Jake,” he eventually said, “what are you knowing?”
“I feel I am knowing too much.”
“Ah. Well, forget it. Throw it down.”
“Once you are knowing it, that is hard to do.”
“Oh, hell, Jake. Too much knowledge is only a form of torture. You can do nothing with it but recognize a wider variety of agonies.”
As a philosopher my near brother was aimed in always on the practical. If a notion will pass the night for you, and lead you into another day, then believe it.
“Dogs fight,” I said. “We fight, as well. It could be we settle too many squabbles by the dog method.”
“Hah,” Jack Bull said. “Hah, young Roedel, you are sounding like some terrifically moustached old kraut groveler at this moment.” He slapped a hand on my boot. “And that is not you. That is not you. You are an American.”
I felt like this meant I had the farm but not the crop.
There would be more harsh errands to be done, this I knew, and I would do them. I knew that as well. I was in this fight to fight.
“We could have merely shot them,” I said. “No gain would have been missed if we had merely shot them instead of whipping them raw.”
Jack Bull called up a glob of crud and spit it out. He rubbed his nose and looked away, then shrugged and looked back.
“That was not the plan,” he said. “There may seem to be no rhyme to it, but that was just plain old not the plan.”
What else could I say but, “You are right.”
6
THAT NIGHT A certain sort of apology, or so I chose to view it, was tendered me as a result of my earlier oration. Arch and Pitt and Turner ambled over to me and dropped at my feet all the letters they had plundered.
“You might read ’em,” Arch said. “I won’t.”
“Can’t,” said Pitt.
“Won’t ’cause I can’t,” Arch admitted.
“Take these with ’em,” Pitt said. He dropped a cloth satchel of mail they’d found when they first took the prisoners. “There’s not a thing of use in here, Black John says. Just home letters and relative talk.”
This gift was an outlandish gesture for my comrades to make.
“Why?” I asked. “Why give the letters to me?”
“Oh,” Arch said, and stammered around on his feet a bit. “Oh, we just figured you might find a thing or two of use in them. That’s all. That’s what we figured.”
“I don’t know what it would be,” I said.
“Aw, hell!” Pitt snapped. “Read ’em or burn ’em, Dutchy! Whatever you want to do, you do it!”
Turner sat beside me then, and Arch and Pitt walked away. They seemed to think I had not been gracious.
Rustling his hand in the pouch, Turner found a letter that he pulled out. He