“That’s very good, Ted.”
The embers had died in the bowl of Ted’s pipe. He turned it upside down and tipped the tobacco out, then gave the backside another thump of his hand. He was pondering something. It took him a moment to gather the words.
“You know,” he said quietly, “I ain’t have nothing to do with that fire. Gail neither. Wade put out that call but we ain’t answered it. No, we ain’t.”
She’d lived through that night once. No part of her wished to do so again.
“It’s over and done with, I suppose.”
“I s’pose. I just knew it wouldn’t change nothin’。 Thought it silly, really. Things’ll carry on. Them Yankees with their little uniforms and swords won’t be here forever. They’ll go back where they belong. Them Negroes will keep working as we see fit. And whatever that hubbub you got goin’ on back at your property, well, folks’ll see to ending that, too. Just like it’s always been done before. We got ways about us. Ways that don’t need no fixing.”
She looked upon his face once more, drubbed by time, scored and pitted by the elements.
“Ted,” she said, picking a bit of dirt from her nail. “Let’s end this here.”
He snorted back phlegm and nodded his head, though it was more of a craning—a thorough investigation of just what it was that stood before him. This being. This woman.
“I’ll get on,” he said.
“And I will do the same. Send my regards to your wife.”
*
The road was empty once more as she returned home. She thought of Ezra, of all people, and the last time she’d seen him before he went off to visit his sons. A squandering. Total dissipation. That was how he’d referred to her plan: the farming, the cause, as she considered it to be, and she could only face him then and confess that this was possibly true, but if her life was to stagnate, or begin its descent toward the inevitable final act, she would take pride in knowing that George’s land, her land now, would continue to prosper after she was gone. Others would carry on in her stead. And she felt quite certain that, for all his talk, no one as foolish as Ted Morton was going to do anything to stop it.
When she walked up the lane, the cabin was cloaked in the shadowy mist of the winter afternoon; the upturned V of the roof was like a flag announcing her safe passage. Mildred’s carriage sat in the roundabout. Smoke from the chimney relinquished itself to the mist, disappearing as it emerged. A stooped man was leaving the stables, his hat crooked atop his head, his boots soft against the ground—Elliot returning Ridley. Perhaps he had knocked and Mildred had told him she was out, or perhaps he’d thought he would be a bother. His body rocked as he took each step, and Isabelle imagined how much like George he was, joint grinding against bone, bone against joint, a solemn dignity in the way he hid his weariness. Someone like Elliot had taken thousands more steps in his life than she ever might. If there was a set allotment for each person before surrendering to time, he would run out of them far quicker than she ever could. There was nothing right about it. It just was. Before long he had vanished into the mist, like the smoke, rejoining his family, his crop, his day.
She thought of Caleb—the cruelty of his absence. How on days like this in his boyhood, rife with silence, they had once huddled together on the couch, suspending all else in store for the day in favor of each other’s company. Before long coffee would be brewed, and the house would find heat as though created purely by the words they shared, the laughter between them, and the day would draw to a close without either noticing. The fact that her only son was somewhere unknown in the world, somewhere lost to her, felt like the ultimate defeat. A defeat no mother could ever conquer. No matter how much purpose, how much meaning, the world might offer her otherwise.
Perhaps the only saving grace was his letter, which had finally arrived. It was months late, by her estimation, and of course far shorter than she would have liked, but he had kept his word. He had sat down to write his mother and in doing so had delivered to her the greatest gift she could possibly have asked for. She had read the note so often, inspected it so closely, that she worried the parchment might crumble to bits. Still, even with the closest reading of each sentence, each word, it never revealed the information she wished for most. They had arrived in a Northern city, but he would not reveal its name, lest the authorities catch wind of where he and Prentiss were located （and how like Caleb, to imagine the sheriff still waiting eagerly to intercept his mail, to punish him for a crime forgotten and put to rest）。 There was no note of his feelings, no note even of whether he was happy. But there was routine to his day, he had written, a feeling of gratification. They had money to feed themselves, to dress themselves.