"No, no, don't get up," Robert said, resting his arm across McCain's shoulders. "Those are peashooter rounds in there. I doubt they could do any serious harm. Let's see what happens."
The derringer rested between two red-hot logs, which were crumbling into ash. One cartridge detonated and a bullet clattered through the top of a tree. The recoil flipped the derringer backward, burying it in a pile of soft ash.
"Don't know where it's aimed now, do we? I guess it's a bit like attacking across an open field against a rifle company that's set up inside a woods. You feel a terrible sort of nakedness, not knowing which fellow is about to park one in your liver," Robert said.
McCain pushed himself to his feet and jumped back into the darkness. The pistol popped again, this time driving the bullet into a log.
Robert stared silently into the flames,
the list of names pinned between his arm and thigh. The other men formed a semicircle behind him, looking at one another, kicking at the ground, their food forgotten.
"How about a drink of liquid mule shoe, Robert?" one man said.
"I think I'll be having no more of this, but thanks just the same," he said.
He picked up the list of names and held it loosely in his fingers. The breeze puffed the fire alight so that he only had to lean forward slightly to drop the list onto the flames.
"You're our friend, but don't challenge us, Robert," another man said.
Robert flattened the sheet of paper on his thigh and removed a pencil stub from his pocket and blackened out one name on the list. Then he folded the paper and stuck it under the log.
"Good night and God bless you all," he said, rising to his feet. "But the man who brings injury to my pal Willie Burke will wish Billy Sherman had heated a train rail and wrapped it around his throat."
PERHAPS obsession had sawed loose his fastenings to a reasonable view of the world, Willie thought. Or maybe he was diseased and pathologically flawed, to the extent he was no longer repelled by death and mortality and defeat and was instead drawn to the grave, to leaf-strewn arbors and green-stained markers fashioned from field-stones, where the air was vaporous and tannic and the light always amber and the voices of friends rose from the ground, whispering lessons he wanted to reach out and cup in his hand.
And what a companion he had chosen for his return to Shiloh-a one-eyed, barefoot, British-born minstrel named Elias Rachet who constantly plucked at a banjo and twanged on a Jew's harp and wore his shoes tied around his neck, in case, as he said, "we have to walk in nasty water and through cow turds and such."
The two of them stood in the early morning haze at the bottom of an incline that was dotted with wildflowers. At the top of the rise was a clump of hardwoods, dark with shadow, the canopy denting in the breeze. Willie thought he heard the iron-rimmed wheels of caissons knocking across rocks and the popping of flags in the wind, the jingle of a bridle and the nicker of a frightened horse in the trees. He yawned to clear his ears and turned in a circle and saw only the vastness of the forests and the dark, metallic-blue dome of sky overhead.
"Jim Stubbefield died right where the gray stones are at. See, there's five of them, just like big Indian arrow points that's been pressed down in the ground," Elias said, pointing. He leaned over and spit tobacco in the grass, then plucked at his banjo. The tremolo from his strings seemed to climb into his voice. "Lordy, I can still hear all our boys yelling. Would you go through it again, knowing what you know now?"
"Maybe."
"I tell myself the same thing. I always reckon God forgives liars and fools, being as He made so many of us," Elias said.
Elias was slat-toothed when he grinned, his face crinkling with hundreds of tiny lines. He looked away at a tea-colored creek that coursed through the edge of a woods. The wrinkles in his face flattened and his solitary eye became a blue pool of sadness. "I kilt a boy out there in them trees maybe wasn't over fifteen. He came busting down the hill and I whipped around and shot him right through the chest. A little bitty yankee drummer boy, much like your friend Tige."
Elias sat down on a large rock, his legs splayed, and picked at his banjo. His callused feet were rimmed with mud, his mouth down-turned, his jug head silhouetted against the pinkness on the bottom of the horizon.
"You're not going to cut bait on me, are you?" Willie asked.
"Both Jim's folks is passed?"
Willie nodded.
"Then I don't reckon they'll mind. I wish I was a darky," Elias said.
"Why's that?"
"'Cause I'd have an excuse for taking other people's orders all my life." Then he slapped the tops of his thighs and laughed and stomped his feet up and down in the grass. He laughed until a tear ran down from his empty eye socket. "Ain't this world a barrel of monkeys?"
"Take me to the grave," Willie said.
"Jim don't hold it against you 'cause you lived and he died."
Elias started to smile, then looked at Willie's expression and got up from the rock and arched a crick out of his back, his face deliberately empty.
The water in the creek was spring-fed and cold inside Willie's shoes as he and Elias waded across, a freshly carpentered, rope-handled box strung between them. The trees were widely spaced on the far side of the creek, the canopy thick, the ground gullied, crisp with leaves that had settled into the depressions scattered through the woods. Up the incline Elias studied an outcropping of rock that was cracked through the center by the trunk of a white oak tree.