5. What Awaited Without

“I saw pistols on him, and saddlebags and coils of rope on his horse,” Anshel said as I tried not to issue sounds of female alarm against this new interference. “He’s a fully clad man of war. He might be looking for deserters.”

I thought of the man in the barn. If the man on the porch was out for deserters, and the man in the barn was a deserter, then reason hinted that the man on the porch, armed to his horse’s teeth, would prevail over the man in the barn, who might not have had any teeth of his own beneath his beard.

“We’ve got to let him in.” Anshel spoke with some urgency as the visitor rapped on the door with the insistence of someone who believes the homeowner is loitering in the bowels of the garret. “He knows we’re home. He must. The lamps are lighted, and there’s smoke coming from the chimney. Besides, if we don’t let him in, he might break down the door.”

“If we do let him in, we’ve got to keep him away from the barn,” I said.

“He’ll want to put the horse in the barn.”

“The deserter is in the barn.”

“No, Loydie, a man we think is a deserter is in the barn. He might not be a deserter, after all. We don’t know. We didn’t ask, and he didn’t say.”

Again, the visitor banged on the door. We could hear his boots as he walked along the porch, perhaps trying to peer in through an opening between the poorly drawn drapes.

Mama’s face went as dim as the expression in a portrait by an artist who can’t paint people. I knew what she was thinking: One interloper was enough. Two were a catastrophe. She couldn’t support it. She turned to Anshel. “Tell him to wait a minute. You can’t come to the door that fast.”

“Me?”

“He’ll think twice about doing mischief if he hears somebody other than a woman.”

Anshel shouted from where he stood. “Wait, wait! I can’t walk …”

I hoped the stranger was more convinced than I. At least acknowledgement by someone in the house seemed to stifle him. He returned to the door. Silence suggested he waited. We all supposed he wouldn’t wait very long. I hoped to push Mama into a decision by whining “Maaaaa!”

The aural excoriation moved her to advise me to be quiet and to direct Anshel to open the door. We would all greet the man, she instructed, so he would know he was outnumbered. Then Anshel himself would bring the visitor’s horse to the barn.

So Anshel opened the door. We tensed, anticipating a grizzled tree-trunk enhanced by a collection of hardware associated with his occupation. But rather than look up to encounter the visitor’s face, we had to look straight ahead, into the visage of a youth so pretty, I thought he was a girl in disguise. The long, luxurious hair beneath his snowy gray kepi was the color of clover honey; his eyes were as blue as the relieved sky after a vicious downpour.

Looking back, I think the fellow might have been thinking Anshel, too, was a girl, because of the sidecurls, which were the envy of any female who had ever struggled with a curling iron. After a moment in which youth and youth beheld each other with the kind of look that shrouds a pup upon first seeing itself in a mirror, the new arrival became aware of Mama and removed his hat with a crisp motion that could have been attained only through years of signaling respect for the gentler sex.

“Begging your pardon, ma’am. I’m lost in the storm. Your hearth led me here. I smelled it.”

Mama's smile was the one that bloomed whenever she encountered a small child or a small furry mammal. She swept aside her skirts as if she were wearing a moire ballgown instead of a calico, opened wide the door and welcomed the lost warrior to a place by the fire. Her nephew, she said, would be delighted to install our guest’s horse in the barn.

“That’s right kindly of you, sir,” the soldier said to Anshel. “First, however, allow me to relieve you of some of my necessities. I wouldn’t want you to trouble yourself to carry it all the way back here.”

“Some” of those items were two saddle bags; a roll of thick fabric we couldn’t tell was an extra greatcoat or a bedroll; a rather long musket; a rather short musket; rope; a shovel; an ax. He arranged it all in a clanking heap in the corner of the parlor, amid Mama’s towers of books.

Only then did he proceed to set himself in front of the fire and accept a cup of coffee. His name, he said, was Boniface Antony Smithson, of the Smithsons near Richmond. He was a cavalry lieutenant, scouting for deserters under orders of T.J. Jackson, Lieutenant General , Second Corps, the Army of Virginia. “It is my deepest desire that your home, the sole outpost of succor in the wasteland of this unnatural event, will attract the traitors as surely and swiftly as it had attracted your humble servant.”

It seemed to me that he spoke like a schoolboy trying to be a bad poet. Mama's mouth quivered. I wondered if she was amused or if she pitied the youth for his airs. “What will you do with the deserters if they come here?”

“What I’ve been ordered to do, of course: exact justice with speed and economy of measure."

“How many deserters do you expect to find?”

“A number sufficient to render my presence in such a purpose and at such a time as essential.”

“More than one, Lieutenant Smithson?”

“Many more than one, ma’am.”

“But you are by yourself. How will you bring all the deserters back to your encampment, or to General Jackson’s headquarters?”

“I’m not to bring them back, ma’am.”

“Surely, you can’t mean to imprison them indefinitely on the premises.”

“Oh no, ma’am. Rest assured, I shall burden you with not one living soul underfoot.”

“You should understand, Lieutenant, that I have no carriage or wagon, if you were hoping to borrow one.”

“No, ma’am. As I said, I’m not to bring back deserters.”

“What, then, do you mean to do with them?”

“They are a threat to our country, ma’am. My orders, therefore, are to exact justice with speed and economy of measure. These are desperate men,” Boniface Antony continued as the hints entrenched in his narrative sealed our lips with horror we dare not express if we dared to dwell upon the horror he implied. “I cannot convey to you the degree of danger you are in once they come under your roof.”

“I see,” said Mama, though she later confided that she truly could not see how a being so attractive should appear to relish the use of his person as an instrument of death and vengeance.

She asked the sapling officer if he would like some fried eggs. He agreed, so long as it did not pose an inconvenience for his gracious hostess.

“Not at all,” Mama said, and asked me to join her on the hunt for the freshest eggs. I could stay downstairs, if I wished, while she retrieved our warmest shawls from upstairs. Of course, I went with her, desiring to converse with her about this startling trick of fate. But she said nothing. She dug amid the armoire, and tossed over her arms not merely a heavy shawl, but Papa’s trousers, shirt, and waistcoat , which she concealed beneath the shawl until we were away from the house and hidden by the storm.

Exertion and the promise of all that could savage our house in the hours to come must have played upon her, for when we reached the barn, I and our deserter inside had to support her before she sank to the floor on her knees.

All the while, she pressed the pile of Papa’s clothing at the soldier, saying, “There’s a man sheltering in our house who would murder you, sir! These are my husband’s things. Put them on, I beg you, and come into our home as one of the family.”

It seemed to me the soldier’s eyes twinkled. “Now, who on God’s great earth would want to murder me?”

“A cavalryman. His name is Smithson, B.A. Smithson.”

“Confederate or Federal?”

“Confederate.”

“Begging your pardon, ma’am, but with a name like that, he don’t sound much like danger to a mouse, never mind to me!”

“He looks like an innocent babe, but believe me when I say he would eradicate you with a piece of the arsenal he’s unloaded in my parlor. Now please! Again, I beg you! There’s no time. My daughter and I are supposed to be getting eggs from the henhouse. He’s expecting us back without delay.”

Only the soldier’s assurance that he would indeed put on Papa’s suit gave Mama the strength to gather the eggs and return with me to the house.

We were watching Boniface Antony gorge himself with fried eggs when we heard someone at the back door, and Anshel cried, in greeting, “Onkel Dovid!”

With those two words, my cousin flung a fistful of my life against the wall and made me grovel among the scattered shards, bleeding, cut, and making believe that nothing had changed.