"To do what?"
"Someone said they're hiring washerwomen."
"Did you eat anything today?"
"Maybe. I don't remember."
Abigail pressed her hands down on Flower's shoulders until Flower was sitting in a chair at the kitchen table. She smoothed Flower's hair and caressed her cheek with her hand.
"Wish you wouldn't do that, Miss Abby."
Abigail's face flushed. "I'm sorry," she said.
Then she fried four eggs in the skillet and scraped the mold off a half loaf of bread and sliced it and browned the slices in ham fat. She divided the food between them and sat across from Flower and ate without speaking.
"What are you studying on?" Flower asked.
"I was thinking of my father and what he would do in certain situations. You two would have liked each other," Abigail said.
Ten minutes later Abigail went out the back door and removed a spade from the shed and walked through the dappled shade along the rim of the coulee and began scraping away a layer ot blackened leaves from under an oak tree. She dug down one root to a tin box that was wrapped in a piece of old gum coat. Then she gathered her purse and a parasol from the house and walked down Main Street, past the Shadows, to the hardware store.
Todd McCain walked out from the back when he heard the bell tinkle above the front door. He and two black men had been restocking the front of the store with the inventory he had hidden from looters, and his shirt was damp at the armpits, his greased hair flecked with grit.
"Yes, ma'am?"
"You offered to sell a revolver to Flower Jamison for six dollars, provided she'd go in the back room with you," Abigail said.
"Sounds like somebody's daydream to me," he said. She pulled open the drawstring on her purse. "Here are your six dollars. How much is it for the ammunition?"
He touched the inside of one nostril with a thumbnail, then huffed air out his nose.
"You got some nerve insulting me on the word of a nigger," he said.
He waited for a response, but there was only silence. When he tried to return her stare, he saw a repository of contempt and disgust in her eyes, aimed at him and no other, that made him clear his throat and look away.
"It's ten dollars for the pistol. I don't have any balls or powder for it," he said.
She continued to look into his face, as though his words had no application to the situation.
"Seven dollars, take it or leave it. I don't need any crazy people in my store," he said.
He waited while she found another dollar in her purse, then picked up the coins one at a time from the glass counter. "I'll wrap it up for you and throw in some gun oil so you don't have no reason to come back," he said.
"Don't presume," she said.
"Presume what?"
"That because I'm a woman your behavior and your remarks won't be dealt with."
He felt one eye twitch at the corner.
After she was gone he returned to the storeroom where he had been working and walked in a circle, his hands on his hips, searching in the gloom for all the words he should have spoken. She had made him play the fool, he told himself, and now his face felt as if it had been stung by bumblebees. Without his knowing why, his gaze rested on a saw, a short-handled sledgehammer, a can of kerosene, a barrel filled with serpentine coils of chain, a prizing bar with a forked claw on it.
One day, he told himself.
Down the street Abigail walked along the curtain of bamboo that bordered the front yard of the Shadows. The azaleas were a dusty purple in the shade, the air loud with the cawing of blue jays. The iron gate swung open in front of her, and Ira Jamison, the cotton trader, and two Union officers stepped directly in her path.
"Miss Abby, how are you?" Jamison said, touching his hat.