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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
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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."
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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.
He set down his end of the box. "We didn't have time to dig deep. Don't be
surprised if animals has had their way with things," he said.
Willie opened the box and removed a shovel and a large square of sail canvas.
He spread the canvas on the ground and began to dig at the base of the
outcropping. The ground was carpeted with toadstools and mushrooms with purple
skirts and moist from a spring farther up the incline. Overhead, squirrels
clattered in the white oak and he felt himself begin to sweat inside his
clothes. The soil he spaded to the side of the depression was dark and loose,
like coffee grinds, and was churning with night-crawlers and smelled of decay
and severed tree roots. The tip of Willie's shovel scraped across metal.
He got to his knees and began brushing the dirt from a copper-colored belt
buckle embossed with the letters CSA, then his fingers touched cloth and wood
buttons and the skeletal outline of a rib cage, wrist bones, and fingers that
were like polished white twigs.
"His shoes are gone. When we put him in the ground I was sure his shoes was
on. I didn't let nobody take Jim's shoes, Willie," Elias said.
"I know you didn't," Willie said.
"Maybe it ain't Jim. There was shooting going on in the trees and people
running everywhere."
Willie hollowed the dirt away from the corpse's shoulders and arms and sides,
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