NEXT THING I knew we were at the Andersons’ place. One of the prettiest farms in Jackson County, after ours.
The girls, all at different stages of attractive, came out to meet us. Martha was eighteen, Mary, sixteen, Fanny, fifteen, and Jenny, fourteen. Their older brother, Bill, twenty-four, also fought with Quantrill but hadn’t come home with Seth.
The girls crowded around me and Seth, their questions about the Yankees urgent and half scared, until Martha insisted we be ushered into the house and given some vittles and hot tea.
Their mother had died a few years ago while giving birth to a baby who had died, too. Their father was shot last year by a man named Baker, who had been courting Martha, but who, at the last minute, refused to wed her. Martha’s father went to the man’s house with a double-barreled shotgun the day Baker was to marry his new love, a schoolteacher. That’s when Baker shot him.
The wedding went on.
Martha never got around it. Her embarrassment and shame at being put aside by Baker knew no end. And Seth, with whom she’d always been friends, was there to comfort her. I think that’s when she became smitten with him.
Maxine told me all about it.
“Your brother gots his wild side,” she told me, “an he gots to find women to satisfy it, even while he love Martha.”
I didn’t understand it all, of course. I was only ten or eleven at the time. But the words stayed with me and I always looked for, and never found, this wild side in Seth. I’d watch him when he didn’t know it, when he was cleaning his rifle, or strumming his fiddle, or brushing down his horse, or just leaning back in a hammock in the sun, and I’d wonder: How do men go about showing their wild side? If Martha knew about this wild side, she never complained.
“I know,” she told me once, “that he loves me. And I’ll wait for him.”
In all of this, she’d made me her confidante. I was to tell her if Seth spoke as if he was getting serious about somebody. I promised her I would.
“They’re a caution together,” I’d once told Maxine. “They pick up each other’s thoughts and finish each other’s sentences. It’s as if they’re married twenty years already.”
“You got that right, honey.”
“So why don’t they go and do it, then?”
“Bad times right now. Martha still has to work off some of her guilt”—she was counting reasons on her fingers—“an’ that wild side o’ your brother must still be lookin’ at somebody.”
“Who? He sees just men in his unit.”
She looked at me and I at her. And then the notion came to me. And I thought, Oh Lord God no. I waited for Maxine to say the name, but she didn’t. So I did to myself.
Sue Mundy.
MY HEAD was pounding and I wished the Anderson girls wouldn’t cackle so. But I sat decorously on the couch in the parlor and sipped my tea and ate my meat sandwich.
Seth had pulled me close to him because I had started crying again. And I heard his words like a rumble in his chest. “Pa dead. House and barn burned. Negroes run off.”
“Well, you can stay here, of course. We have room,” Martha was saying in that voice of hers that always sounded as if she were telling a story to a child, so melodious and comforting.
It was Maxine who put her hand to my forehead. “She burnin’ up, Master Seth.”
He took the tea and sandwich from me and lifted me into his arms. “Show me where to put her,” he asked Martha. And then I passed out.
WHEN I AWOKE, I was in a pleasant room with organdy curtains and a canopied bed. In spite of the fact that it was early August, a low fire burned in the grate. I was up to my chin in sheets and a light blanket, and at the foot of the bed Seth and Martha were conversing in low tones, as if they were my mother and father.
I wished they were. I wished they were wed and I was living with them.
Seth came over to the bed. “You’re awake,” he pronounced.
Outside the sun was setting. He’d taken off all his guns when we came in, allowed himself to be petted and fussed over by the Anderson girls, but now he had the revolvers on again. From downstairs came the whiff of food. He’d been fed and rested. He was ready to leave.
“You’re going back,” I said.
“I have to, Juliet.”
Tears came to my eyes. He reached out a hand and wiped them away. “You stay here and mind Maxine. And Martha. They’re both good people. Help out. Make yourself useful. I’ll be coming home from time to time. You hear?”
I took his hand in both of mine and held on to it. “Don’t do anything funny,” he warned.
“Like what?”
“You know what I expect from you. I gotta go now.” He leaned down and kissed my forehead, then took Martha by the elbow and led her out into the hall. From my bed I could see him kissing her, long and not just once. He’d end the kiss and they’d say a few words and he’d start in again, and then they commenced to walk down the stairs.
I was proud of my brother. He sure knew how to kiss. He wasn’t rough with her. He was tender.
And now he was gone. I went back to sleep.