her side. Many things hidden in me were being hinted out, and I stared down at Jack Bull Chiles and dredged up all the farewell feelings I had. I bent over. I did something to him dead I had never tried on him alive. I kissed him good-bye, right where she had, just the same.
Holt humphed behind me. I looked up at him, and he watched me oddly.
“Did you see something that bothers you, Holt?”
His face was smooth, and he shook his head briskly.
“No, no,” he said and turned away. “I didn’t see it.”
I finished the funeral. The grave made a mound. No good verses came to mind, so it was a stoic ceremony.
“So long,” I said. “See you over the river.”
Outside it was gray. A late March storm was coming in from the north. The clouds looked soiled and the light was dull.
“Let’s get to Captain Perdee’s,” I said. “We’ll rally with the boys. It’s time to start the war back up.”
I claimed two of Jack Bull’s four pistols and gave the others to Holt. We hung them from our saddles and put the widow on top of Jack Bull’s horse.
I wanted to be moving and never in that dugout again.
“Keep an eye out for George,” I said.
“I am,” Holt answered. “But I bet he at Perdee’s.”
We kept to the timber. The day got colder, then it pitched snow at us. The wind shoved the flakes into our faces but we hunched over and rode on. By midday Sue Lee had surrendered to fatigue. Holt and me took a rope and tied her into the saddle. She uttered neither complaints nor praise. She was past that.
The horses sent plumes of breath from their nostrils and slogged through the snow. Some inches of the white stuff had gathered on the ground. The wind blew our tracks away as quick as we made them. No Federals crossed our path. If you weren’t desperate, you wouldn’t be out in such weather. I steered us toward Captain Perdee’s, where I hoped we would find plenty of comrades. Sue Lee would be sent to some safer southern haven. Me and Holt would fight another season. The deeds of winter demanded it.
I kept us rolling beyond nightfall, and the snow kept blowing and nothing much could be seen. We lumbered along blindly in the woods and did not speak.
Around midnight we came upon a burned house. Some weak citizen had lost all here. Two walls still stood and we took cover, huddling next to them.
I wrapped Sue Lee’s blanket around her and she slept. My body bid me join her. She shivered in sleep, so I spread my blanket over us both and lay against her. This warmed us but, tired as I was, I could not sleep.
So I listened to her breathe. The girl was good as double widowed and only seventeen. She’d seen a mirror of hell, I guess. Her breaths had a ragged rhythm. A bad sleep cadence. But her body was warm.
It was good to know her.
Curling up to her was a saving human exercise, as it reminded me that I lived, and diverted me from recollections of all I had lost, which was all there was.
BOOK THREE
Many cry in trouble and are not heard, but to their salvation.
—ST. AUGUSTINE
14
ALL THAT YEAR we were dying. The hairbreadth instinct some call luck had slowed on us. They killed us in groups and pairs and alone. We fell in timber, haylofts, fighting on the field and lying wounded helpless in borrowed beds.
Oh, we hit back.
Within sight of Kansas City twenty-eight Federals hauling grain made our acquaintance. They knew we rode under the Black Flag, so they fought to the end. Our reputation for thoroughness gave the Federals a kind of forlorn ferocity. “They know prisoners are not our style,” George Clyde said. This was true wherever we fought, and it was true of us when the upper hand was theirs.
When we all rallied at Captain Perdee’s in late March it was clear by the jumpy look in previously calm faces, the despondent gaze in unblinking eyes, that our struggle had carried us into a new territory of the soul, where we found new versions of our selves.
Cave Wyatt, Riley Crawford, the Hudspeths, Turner Rawls and Black John welcomed us all. There was much backslapping and sharing of tales, which led to sadness or guffaws. Several southern men would ride with us no more, but we didn’t dwell on that.
Sue Lee Shelley was not