All True Not a Lie in It by Alix Hawley Page B

fire. His eyes change. He falls without a sound, there is no sound for what seems a long time until his clean splash into the slothful water. He does not come up. The ripples smooth themselves away into green.
    As I stand looking it strikes me like water on hot metal. I am a murderer. This is what Israel wished to tell me. I think it is, I think this is what he was saying:
You cannot forget what you are
. Poor Jezebel has been sent to say it again. I have been a murderer all along. I think of shooting the deer after the fire-hunt with you, Israel. I killed it unfairly, too easy, and I killed the horse, and now a man, and perhaps I helped to kill you by taking away your luck.
    I walk on. More than ever, I think of getting away to another place. But I drag back to Carolina. I drown any thoughts of the death I have caused, I sink them as the Indian man sank beneath the slow current. I never tell of it. I try never to think on it again. The way the mind can rub out such things is a wonder. But only for a time. They do come back. You cannot forget, no. More than once as I walk I feel the horse’s breath on my cheek, all innocent.
    More than once too I wonder whether I would have killed Neddy that night had he been the one to break his neck and look up at me with sad eyes.

T HE REST OF the long walk home from war, I catch at it and I hold it in my mind to keep the ghosts from me, before I know who she is. Her profile, white against old Bryan’s dark barn, only her face showing in the frame of black hair like a painting of a face, still as still. Rebecca.
    She is a Bryan herself of course, with that whole band behind her. She does not forget it.
    —Do I know who you are?
    This is one of the things she says, always, in my mind. It comes with a slight lift of her brows as I watch her sweeping. Her eyes are black like birds’ eyes, all pupil. She turns away and says:
    —I am tired of looking at you. There are better views to the south.
    Her voice is deadly and I kiss her cool grimy hand and she gives me the twisted smile. Every time I see it my heart near stops. My wife.
    Months after I return to the Yadkin, I see her real face again when Hill decides to take Ned and Squire and me to watch girls cherry-picking in someone’s orchard. It will be cheering, he says. There is no cheering me, I know. But I go along. Much of the way, Hill offers his opinions of the accomplishments of the whores ofPhiladelphia and elsewhere. Ned asks questions and Squire walks along listening. I will admit that my memories of Maria the volcano whore have worn clear through, though they remain fond enough.
    I drop back behind Squire and pick up a root, I look up for birds to club it with. Hill is untiring on other subjects also. Some soldiers carried mutilated bodies from the Monongahela River battle all the way to Philadelphia and dumped them in a square to show that peace is impossible. He has heard of this. He now shouts back at me:
    —Did you see many men barbecued in the war?
    His face is cheerful. Somewhere he has heard that I killed several Indians as well as a few French on the battlefield. I do not know where he has heard this, it makes my flesh crawl. Other people have been giving me fond thankful looks and one old woman in Salisbury asked to touch the bold
hand
of a young one who blasted the filth from our
land
.
    Well I felt sick and ugly but I told her she was a poetess, and she rolled her eyes to Heaven before clutching at my hand and saying yes, she has written a poem. Indeed, more than one poem. She began to hurt my bones with her clutching. Her neck was all lollops of fat.
    Now Hill asks again:
    —See many scalped?
    —No.
    I am sick of his questions, I have no wish to think of the army or of anything I have done. The defeat is already infamous. Hill is writing a song about it, the General’s battlefield death, bleeding all over his red sash, and all the rest:
    The sad death of Braddock in fifty-five
,
    Soon there was nobody left