Chapter 20
20
Weybridge knew little about construction or nails, and this gap in his knowledge reminded him how he hadn’t known much about guns, marching, and musket drills as recently as a few years ago, either. Until he’d enlisted, he knew books, mostly. His childhood, as the son of a college professor in a college town, could only have been called precious. But this morning Joseph had amassed a variety of different kinds of nails, many that would usually be used for flooring, and had said they would have to do. He’d given Weybridge the same frame saw he’d used when they were working in the woodlot, because a man with one and a half hands could handle it easily. The Steadmans had used this corner of the gristmill as a workshop for at least a decade, and it was here that he and Joseph had brought planks, most leaning now against the stone wall, but two on the carpentry trestle. Joseph had sketched the coffin’s design, and now Weybridge was holding down the tape measure against one edge of a plank while Joseph ran the thin strip out to seven feet.
They’d been working largely in silence for the last two hours, Weybridge following Joseph’s directions, when he finally asked the older man one of the questions that had been gnawing at him since he and Libby were alone last night.
“The dead man,” he began carefully. “The one who was attacking Libby in the kitchen. Where precisely is he buried?”
“He is no candidate for this casket,” Joseph answered, making a mark where they were next going to saw.
“I didn’t mean that.”
“I know,” he murmured, his focus on the plank. Then he looked up and said, “Edge of the south woods. Not all that far from where we graze the horses and the cow.”
“Is he in a—”
“No. Just buried. We needed that body hid quick. No time for me to build him a coffin. But he’s deep enough that he ain’t been dug up by any animals. Deep enough that already buckthorn and weeds the animals don’t eat are spreadin’ over the dirt.”
“Who was he?”
Joseph put down his pencil and leaned on the plank on the trestle. “I don’t know. He had no papers on him. You think I shoulda let him go ahead and have his way with Mrs.Steadman?”
“No. Of course not.”
“Of course not is right.” He shook his head. “My plan wasn’t to kill him. I never planned to kill anybody ever in this life. But a Negro hitting a white man with a shovel? It don’t matter what that white man was doin’—especially since he was doin’ it to Mrs.Steadman. Wife of the man who set us free. A man can get used to many things in this world, but a body don’t take kindly to a rope around its neck and danglin’ a couple feet off the ground.”
“You have no idea who he was?”
“He was more’n likely one of Mosby’s rangers. Or was ’til even they couldn’t abide a scoundrel the likes of him. I believe he was livin’ with Mr.Covington. That’s my guess.”
“Ah, the Leveritt Covington I’ve heard so much about,” Weybridge said. He felt a strange and icy satisfaction.
“Yeah. Mr.Covington’s young kin is that Lieutenant Morgan who’s come ’round a couple times. I told you plain, Captain: when you were fightin’, you were fightin’ for the people Mr.Covington keeps in chains. He grows tobacco and wheat and corn, and while it ain’t a big plantation, it’s still a plantation: the backs of those folks there have scars they did nothin’ to deserve.”
He started to tell Joseph he agreed, that Joseph had no choice but to kill the rogue, but the words felt inadequate. Still, his hatred toward this dead man he had never met had grown like one of the massive pumpkins he used to see this time of year in the patches on the farms just west of the college. “Tell me something, Joseph,” he said after a moment. “When I’m gone, what will happen to Libby? What will happen to you and Sally?”
Joseph studied him, and Weybridge felt himself sweating, especially his armpits, where the crutches pressed hard through the shirt against his skin.
“I can’t tell the future and won’t try,” he said. “I pray every day for that boy, Peter Steadman. But Mrs.Steadman’s right: he probably ain’t comin’ back. We all know that. You know what you’ve seen. You know what you’ve lost. But, still, a person can pray. So I do. And I pray every day for Mr.Lincoln and U.S. Grant, even though Mrs.Steadman hates ’em both the way I hate any white man with a whip or chains or a noose. So, when you’re gone? What’s gonna happen here in the Valley? I see Genesis, chapter nineteen, verses twenty-four and twenty-five: Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire. He overthrew them cities, and all the plains around ’em, and all the people, and everything that grew up from the ground.”
A swallow flew into the gristmill, circled them, and then darted back out through a glassless window.
“Captain,” Joseph continued, “the Valley will become ashes. The buildings will be ashes. And this mill? Well, you can’t burn stone, but you can bring it down with cannons. You can tear up the sluice with axes and wreck the wheels. And they will. You Yankees will. You know what you’ve burned already. You know. Now, none of that will happen ’cause you’re gone. But you ain’t goin’ to see it, and you asked. Mrs.Steadman will live through that ’cause she’s a fighter. Sally and I are, too. But people in these parts will shun her for as long as she lives, first ’cause her husband was a turncoat in their eyes, and then ’cause of the rumors that she saved a bluebelly. That she saved you. Now, me? I thank you, Captain. I thank you with all my heart. But the rebels in this Valley who are about to lose the little they got left—and they asked for it, they asked for it, just as did the people who lived in Sodom and Gomorrah—they are never goin’ to look kindly on the Widow Steadman.”
Weybridge fought hard not to look away, to meet the steel that was Joseph’s gaze. He knew well that the Union plan was indeed to reduce the Valley to ash.
“And I’m glad you all are goin’ to do it,” Joseph continued. “Just as God did what he had to do, your army is doin’ what it has to do. Peter Steadman is—or was—a good boy. Like his father, he didn’t care that we all learned to read and write. And then, unlike his daddy, he set us free. But that don’t mean he wasn’t on the wrong side of God when he put on that gray uniform to fight just so his neighbors like Leveritt Covington could keep us in chains. That don’t mean this whole valley ain’t on the wrong side of God.”
“When you help here at the mill…when you help feed the rebels…”
“I am keepin’ that woman alive. I am keepin’ that child alive. If she didn’t? If we didn’t?” He brushed sawdust off the back of his hand. “The army don’t pay much, and their dollars ain’t worth the paper they’re printed on. But it’s something. And, more important than the money is this: so long as she grinds their grain, she’s safe. And my Sally is safe. And I’m safe.”
Abruptly Joseph grew alert and sniffed the air, and so Weybridge followed his lead. He could smell it, too. Somewhere, something was burning. It wasn’t the smell of brush or a whole forest on fire: Weybridge knew that terrifying stink well, the stench of great woods set aflame by muskets and cannon fire. But there was smoke, and Joseph ran toward it from the gristmill. Weybridge, though he couldn’t keep up on his crutches, followed him outside, moving as quickly as he could.
And there they saw it.
They saw her.
Libby was in the side yard, tossing her husband’s clothes into a small bonfire she’d built, as if the garments were brush brought down by a windstorm. For a moment, the two men stood and watched, both of them mute, unsure whether they should stop her or allow her to continue to feed the pyre. It was a scene that was almost too intimate. But then Joseph said to Weybridge, “Go back inside the mill,” and jogged over to her. Weybridge paused, uncertain whether to obey or follow him. Finally, he decided to disregard Joseph, and he hobbled over to the woman, too.
“You can’t be doin’ this,” Joseph was saying.
She ignored him and fed the flames with another of her husband’s shirts, careful to dangle it in first by a sleeve so she didn’t risk smothering the fire. Then she bent over for a collar and a cap, one in each hand, and tossed them in, too. Weybridge stood still, watching the collar turn black and shrivel, and the cap burn yellow and red.
“Ma’am,” Joseph began, but she didn’t even look at him. She didn’t look at either of them, her gaze intent on the flames.
Beside her was at least another armload of unburned pants and drawers and shirts. When she reached over for a pair of trousers, Weybridge considered whether he should rest a hand on her arm and slow her, perhaps try and get her to look at Joseph and him and see how they saw her. But he didn’t. It wasn’t his place.
Overhead he heard geese flying south and gazed at them, honking so very far above the black tendrils of smoke.
“I am guessin’ Sally has no idea you’re doin’ this,” Joseph said.
She dipped a pants leg into the fire, holding it by the waist as it caught, and finally turned to stare back at the two men. Weybridge was about to take the burning clothing from her hand and drop it into the flames so she didn’t scorch her own fingers, but she was a millisecond ahead of him and let the cloth fall into the small blaze, not taking her eyes off his.
“Libby,” he said, trying to console her, “you don’t know for sure that Peter’s gone.”
“I never did hear anything from Harper’s Ferry about him,” she muttered, almost as if she were speaking aloud to only herself. “Never really expected I would.”
“It would be hard to get word to you.”
“But I know. We know.”
“Even if he has died, there are plenty of men, in addition to me, who could use the clothes,” he told her.
“There are,” she agreed, though it was clear she couldn’t care less. “I could cut off the legs for some, like I did for you. I could cut off the sleeves for others. I could give the hats to the boys who’ve had their hair burned off and it won’t grow back over the scars. I could do all of that. But I won’t.”
She used the toe of her shoe to push a smoldering piece of what once was a shirt back into the flames.
“How is your coffin coming?” she asked. “Is it about done?”
Weybridge told her it wasn’t, and the words had barely escaped his mouth when she said, “Then I suggest you get to it. And, gentlemen? Don’t forget the holes for a gun. I suggest you bore holes on both sides.”
“I think you’re all worryin’ for nuthin’,” said Jubilee, running her fingers over the roof of the coffin. Already the gristmill was darker this time of the day than it was even two weeks ago. Weybridge thought the days felt longer than in Vermont, but not by much. “Someone stops you and asks who’s in there? Say it’s some ol’ Johnny Reb who was a friend of my uncle or my dad and lived in Charles Town. Say he got himself shot at the same battle where Jackal here got himself crippled.”
“And why wasn’t he in a regimental hospital?” Weybridge asked her, nevertheless impressed with her idea and wondering if there was a way to make the story work.
“Maybe he was before comin’ here. Or maybe, just like you, Jackal, he was a captain, and so the surgeon wanted him to la-di-da in a private home.”
He recalled the floor in that first house. The bedroom. The stink. It was hardly luxurious. But he saw her point. Joseph, sanding one of the sides before he joined it in place, seemed to be mulling over her suggestion, too.
“Or just say it’s me,” the girl said. “Why not? Say I’m the dead body in there. What do I care?”
“What if it’s someone who knows us?” asked Joseph. “Someone who knows you?”
“No one knows me. People know of me: that I’m stuck here ’cause I ain’t got no place else to go. When your friends are you, Sally, my aunt, and a jackal, I don’t think anyone should be frettin’ about someone knowin’ me,” she told him.
“Still, Joseph is right,” Weybridge said, though he felt a pang that he was so focused on the problem at hand that he’d ignored the child’s implicit admission that she was lonely. Quickly he added, “And even if four grown-ups are the extent of your circle, enough people are aware of you that they’d be sad to hear you passed—and then rather confused when, at some point, they saw you very much alive.”
“Tell ’em all I’m a ghost,” she argued, but now, after acknowledging for the first time in his presence her situation, she was pouting. It seemed possible to Weybridge that she might actually miss him.
“We should give the dead rebel in there a name and a story,” he told Joseph.
“And a wound. We should know what killed him,” the older man added.
Jubilee put her finger in one of the two holes that Joseph had bored into the plane before the girl joined them. One was for the Colt, and one was so Weybridge could peer out to aim the revolver. “Some people will see this and think you’re all showin’ disrespect for the dead. Puttin’ a body in a box with more holes in it than a soldier’s shoe? Boards from trees woodpeckers got to?”
“It’ll do,” Weybridge told her.
The child bent over, her hands on her knees. “?’Course it will. I know this ain’t the work of a woodpecker. Gun barrel goes here, and you see out right here. Someone you don’t like walks up beside the wagon? Boom! Jackal here puts a Minie ball in his guts. Or if it’s someone sittin’ on a horse, he shoots him smack in the kneecap.”
“I doubt it’ll come to that,” Weybridge said.
“Oh, it will. It will. These days?”
He waited.
“If there’s a way to get killed, you will get killed.”