Caleb said nothing and continued down the lane, the sound of the birds still mingling in the melody of the air, the naked spring sun just bright enough to cast a golden glow onto the lane like some premonition of encouragement from above, as if to suggest that the day ahead of him might just go his way.
*
They had opened his face with the butt of a rifle. He’d cupped his face with both hands, but no amount of dabbing at the wound could prevent the blood from slipping through his fingers and wetting the ground. That night he’d cried, not from the pain but from the fear of deformity, the image of himself as another mangled relic of the war, a curiosity for children, fit for a circus. Later, as if it might cheer him up, they said the blow was more for the desertion than for anything else—even if it wasn’t from their side, the action itself was worthy of punishment, regardless of the colors of his uniform.
He had simply been relieved they hadn’t shot him the second he jutted his head out from the trenches where he and the others had taken cover. The pull of August’s father was strong enough to keep them from the front lines—or danger in general, really—and until they came upon that string of muzzles bursting so hot the smoke assumed the look of a forest fire, he’d yet to see a bullet fly. He was certain they’d encountered a full-scale attack, the sort that would make for lore when they were back home, the stuff to tell one’s grandchildren. But later the blue-clads would slap his face playfully, laughing as they polished their rifles with ash from the fire and stuffed tobacco into the bow of their lips. “That,” they told him, “is what we call a skirmish.”
He hadn’t found any shame in his desertion—to him it was merely pragmatic, with survival in mind—but he knew how it would be perceived by others. His only regret was that he had abandoned August. There was solace, though, in the fact that August was the only other soldier from back home to witness his cowardice. Again with Mr. Webler to thank, they’d been assigned to a company wholly separate from the one the other boys from Old Ox had ended up in. Where so many were losing life and limb, he and August had been kept to guarding the railways, off in the distance, spending their nights with little worry, wrapped up in childish pranks and games of draughts, such that the whole enterprise had the air of a tour.
Until the company took to the woods and got themselves lost. That had been the irretrievable mistake, a refrain he repeated to his escorts as the days passed. The entire business was terribly wrong, he said, he wasn’t supposed to be there with them at all. But if he imagined they might release him, it was nothing but wishful thinking. His only good fortune was that when they got sick of his complaining, they aimed for his groin and let his face go on healing.
Ridley carried him along now, and the first sight that greeted him in Old Ox was an aging whore revealing herself on the walkway to a gang of horsemen. She slipped on a streak of mud, gathered herself, and returned to the brothel from which she’d come, laughing all the way. The town had grown in his absence and there were few faces out that assured him it was even the same place from the year before. One or two folks took notice of him but their stares quickly went from his face to the ground, and he could not be sure whether it was his battered features or the fact that he had come back from the grave that brought him attention.
The Union soldiers had occupied a number of storefronts, and from their posts out front they eyed him suspiciously, more with weariness than disgust. The schoolhouse near the roundabout appeared to be their headquarters. One woman seemed on the verge of a fistfight with a soldier over rations he did not have, and Caleb could not help wondering which punishment was worse: his own, for having been made a captive after proving himself a coward; or that of these poor souls who were stationed so far from home, surrounded by so many who despised them.
He turned off with Ridley where the traffic began to slow and the lean-tos were replaced by real, sturdy homes—the sort that might survive a rainfall or two—refined dwellings with slanted rooftops and swings hanging from the trees in their yards. The tilted sun cast its favor on two girls beside their home playing battledore and shuttlecock, one hand on their rackets and the other on their bonnets. A smaller boy sat on the lap of his mother near them, struggling against her grip to be let into the game. The other homes were empty, their front doors shut with families going on with their business as if this day were like any other, which for them, Caleb understood, it was.
Where it seemed the town might up and end altogether, the land came into its own and expanded, with great swaths of fresh grass giving way to larger estates tucked in before the start of more woods beyond. Counted together there were no more than ten in all, and the townsfolk called this bundle of homes Mayor’s Row.