THE HOUSE quieted down in the thin afternoon sun. Everyone went about their business. Martha made a pie. Maxine ironed clothes.
Sue Mundy (for she was in a nightdress again) called me into her bedroom.
“I would speak with you.”
“Seth wants to, too.”
“Seth can wait. He’ll have you all his life.”
I went into the bedroom as she ordered, closed the door, and brought a chair up to her bed. She was made up to be a woman in case the Yankees came ’round, and it never ceased to amaze me how she succeeded at this.
“Child, you saved my life. He was about to take me away. They wouldn’t have bothered with a trial. They’d have hanged me as a traitor.”
“But you’re not a Yankee,” I pushed.
“They think I’m a double agent.” That was all. They think. She refused to explain any further and I did not ask.
“So I am beholden to you. You saved my life,” she said again.
“You saved mine. Twice!” I said. “It was the least I could do.”
“But you shot a Yankee! A little girl like you. And likely you saved all of them in this house, your brother included. Did you ever think of that?”
I nodded my head yes.
“Juliet, listen to me. I’m going to get better. If I take some laudanum, the arm doesn’t bother me. I’ve got to get back to my work. I’ll probably leave here within a day or so. I’ll likely be back this spring, but the war will start to move forward fast now. The South talks victory, but reality is the word of the day. People are talking about how the South is to be welcomed back into the Union. All they talk about in the North is the abolition of slavery and the expansion to the west.”
“How do you know?”
“I have contacts. Darling girl, one of these days it will be over. Your brother will be given a pardon and you’ll get back to your lives. You may never see me again, so I wanted to tell you how much I think of you. How plucky I think you are. And I wanted to tell you always to remember these days and never to blame yourself for shooting that Yankee. It was something that had to be done to save many lives. And you did it. And someday you can tell your grandchildren about it. So don’t be sad. I know it hurts now, but it will go away. Just be proud. And oh, one more thing. Be good to that brother of yours. He’s trying to do right by you. And he’s a sweetheart. Remember, I said so.”
She kissed me then, on the side of the face. And she gave me something. A ring she wore on her right hand. It had a red ruby stone in it. “To remember me by, child,” she said. “Now go. Your brother is waiting.”
SETH WAS waiting for me in his office, going over his account books. He looked up when I came in.
“I’m sorry I kept you waiting,” I said, “but I had to say good-bye to Sue Mundy.”
“You mean Lieutenant Flowers, don’t you?”
“No.” I stood in front of his desk, looking down at him. “I mean Sue Mundy. She says she’s leaving in a day or so.”
He understood. He nodded his head and didn’t press the matter. He pushed his chair back, looked at me, and gestured that I should sit. I did. “I think it’s good that you should put whatever meaning on all of this that you want if it helps you get through,” he said.
“I’m not lying to myself, Seth. It’s just that, to me, she’ll always be Sue Mundy.”
He nodded again. I know he was waiting for me to bring up the Yankee I’d killed. I leaned back in the chair. “Did you bury the Yankee?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t want to know where.”
“You don’t have to.”
“That’s what you can really call ‘cleaning up after a mess I made,’ isn’t it?”
“You did what had to be done, Juliet. He’d have arrested your Sue Mundy, Martha, you, me, and god knows who else. They’d have come and fired the house. And it would have been back to step one all over again.”
“So you’re not angry at me?”
“Honey, how could I be? I’m not happy that you had to shoot him, no. I’m far from happy that my little sister had to be the one to pick up a gun and end a life in order to save the rest of us. It just shows what an all-out messed-up world we’re living in. At your age, all you should be worried about is clothes and boys and reading Moll Flanders.”
He was right. How far had I come that I didn’t recognize this truth? That I didn’t rebel against it?
“The best part of your life,” he said, “is being wasted in war. Your father being shot, your house being burned, you spending time in jail, then nearly being killed when it collapses, losing your friends who were killed, a man you trusted kidnapping you, having to give away your mother’s pearls in order to get a cow that gives milk, Yankees occupying this house, having your pets shot, and now having to shoot somebody. Juliet, I’m sorry, honey, for what we grown-ups robbed from you. And if I could restore it to you, I would.”
“It’s not your fault, Seth.”
“And now this business this morning. You having to make a split-second decision whether or not to shoot a man or let him prosecute and possibly kill us all. How are you holding up, Juliet? Last I saw you in the kitchen, you were shaking like a bird in a cat’s paws.”
I shrugged. “How am I supposed to be, Seth?”
He hesitated. He looked down at his account books. “It’s like—,” he said, and then he had to start again, “—it’s like these books I keep. There’re two columns, profit and loss. You enter the killing and then you enter what profit it did to people and then you enter the loss. Lots of times you don’t think there’s any profit. But that’s only because it’s too big a thing to fit in the profit column. Understand?”
I said yes.
“You live with it, sleep with it, eat with it, and walk with it every minute of your life for quite a while, Juliet. And then one day you find you aren’t eating with it anymore and you think it’s disappearing, but then it comes back just when you sit down to a good meal of steak and eggs.”
“Seth, can I ask a question?”
“Sure.”
“How many men have you killed?”
He hesitated only a minute. He meditated. “I’ve never told anybody this,” he said softly. “I’m not like Bill Anderson who had to make notches in a ribbon to show everybody how many he killed. I’ve got the notches inside.”
He bit his lower lip, then continued. “You tell nobody this. You hear?”
I said I heard.
“Thirty-seven.”
I couldn’t swallow for a minute. Thirty-seven!
“Except for five in Lawrence, Kansas, all were going to kill me. I’m not proud of Lawrence, Kansas.”
We were silent for a while. “Honey,” he said, “you have an advantage. You’re a girl. You can cry.”
That tore into me when he said that. I didn’t know what to do, so I got up and went around the desk and put my arms around his shoulders and hugged him. I kissed the top of his head, as if I were the older.
“I’m going to rescind your punishment,” he said. “You no longer have to milk the cow.”
“I don’t mind, Seth.”
“But I do. Martha told me how Bill came into the barn that morning and you were alone there. I never thought about that danger. I was foolish. So beginning tomorrow you can sleep as late as you want. You’ve served your time.”
He looked up at me. “If this business about the shooting gets too much for you, come to me. Anytime. And do me a favor, will you?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t grow up too fast. I need somebody to teach, somebody to bawl out once in a while, somebody to look at me just the way you’re looking at me now and who doesn’t see how scared I am most of the time. I have to say, the look is even better than the ones you were giving Sue Mundy.”
“You were jealous.”
“Course I was.”
I thought, If he’s scared, then how can I hope not to be?
But I knew. I’d be all right, scared or not, as long as I did as well as him.