Read Online The Widow of the South by Robert Hicks - Free Book Online

sketch of their mother that Becky had drawn when she was little. It had been three years since Mrs. Griffin had died, and they still prayed for her safe passage to paradise whenever they sat down to eat at the table. She had never bothered to teach Becky her special recipes—probably because she hadn’t figured on dying of the cough—but Becky had made up a few of her own, and Eli never thought to complain about the food.
    When Eli came to the door, Ab told him loudly what he’d seen earlier that morning: thousands and thousands of Confederates marching up the pike with guns and sabers and all sorts of things warlike. It looked like the end of the world, Ab said. Without a word Mr. Griffin hurried out to move the cattle, forgetting that he’d told Eli to do it, and Becky, who had also been listening while she put away the dishes, disappeared upstairs to her bedroom. For the first time in recent memory Eli had been left alone. He didn’t bother to wonder about it.
    Guns! Men on horses!
Ab handed him a biscuit, and they were off, out the front door and down the path that led to the Griffins’ well, and then past the well. They ran fast and recklessly, howling and leaping around like they had been released from someplace stuffy and dark, where all anyone ever did was pray nothing would happen. Something was happening now, by heaven, it was.
    They ran for a long time through the fields that lined the road, occasionally stopping to fondle things the soldiers had left strewn along the way. Eli picked up a bone-handled knife with notches on the hilt and stuck it in his pants. Ab held a jar of some sort of confection high above his head to see what the sun looked like when filtered through the glass, and then he threw it down against the road where it broke with a pop, spreading tendrils of peach jam in every direction. They wrestled over a pack of cards, and Eli won. Ab settled for a dented brass spyglass with a couple big scratches and a crack on the lens. Then they paused to catch their breath.
    “Well, where are they? Thought you said there were thousands of ’em.” Eli wondered if it had all been a figment of Ab’s imagination, the litter on the side of the road notwithstanding.
    “They gone up the road, probably to town by now. They’s moving fast, faster than you can run, slug. I bet they taken the town by now, and we missed it because you too busy eating and not minding what’s goin’ on.”
    “You saying you didn’t eat lunch, fatty?”
    “I’m saying I don’t eat lunch all leisure-like.”
    They wrestled some more, and then, without saying anything, they started running up the road toward town. Each had only the vaguest idea what they would find up there, which was the main reason they were so eager to see it for themselves. By fits and starts they spent the next couple of hours traveling the five miles to the foot of Breezy and Winstead hills, on the east and west sides of the pike, respectively. To the west they could see a number of people on top of Winstead Hill, men and women, who had gathered to watch whatever was about to happen. A few of the ladies sat in chairs that their husbands had brought in the buggies Eli and Ab found parked on the south side at the bottom of the hill. A couple dozen people milled around up there like they were at a party, and Eli and Ab climbed up to join them.
    “Let’s make like we’re spies,” Eli said.
    “Hard to be a spy with all them people around. They catch you right quick.”
    “We’ll sneak around ’em, jackass. They’re right there on top of the hill, and they can’t see us if we sneak around the side all the way to the front. We’ll stay in the tall grass.”
    “I don’t know, they look like they got a good view up there, and they right comfortable. I think there’s a whole mess of them, if I ain’t mistaken.”
    “We are well provisioned, Private Willis. Let’s go.”
    They crawled crouched low and climbed halfway up the back side of the hill