A Place in Time Read Free Page A

rustling of the corn and the singing, the moonlight fell as if a greater silence were thus made visible.
    And Rebecca saw too, following the narrow road up the rise from the church, another of the little bands of hostile men that in those years crisscrossed the neighborhood, leaving it each time, it seemed to her, worse than it had been before, just as they crisscrossed also her own mind, leaving it each time sadder and yet stronger and less to be fooled.
    There was no question who these were, for the people of Port William had come by various ways to know for certain. These were Confederate cavalry, six men and an officer. Their presence was perhaps accountable by some minor event or accident of the war, and yet, to her own mind, it was factual without being explainable. They simply were there, alien and unbelonging, as they had been wherever they had come from, as they would be wherever they would go, like all the others who had been displaced by the unaiming destiny of the bunch.
    As they came up along the corn rows and into the sound of the Negroes’ singing and understood it, that word rising as if by nature out of bondage, the officer abruptly spurred his horse, put him to the rock fence beside the road, and neatly cleared it. He rode in among the crew of workers—they were scattering, running like quail into the standing corn. Drawing his pistol, he shot the eldest of them, a slave man named Tucker, point-blank in the side of the head.
    It was no wonder that her time to marry came late for a young woman of Port William. It came when she was twenty-four, seven years after the formal, the “historical,” ending of the war. The nighttime reprisals of vengeful men—the unofficial violence set loose and still nominally justified by official violence—were still terrorizing the country. Her own repugnance and disdain persisted in those years of official peace. She would not be wedded, she could hardly bear to be looked at, by the young men of her own place, every one of whom seemed to her to bear the taint of what she called ever after “that awfulness.” She married instead an Irish immigrant who, to escape the bunch-violence that ruled his own land, had come to America and, hearing that a “shoe cobbler” was needed, finally to Port William.
    Though she was old enough in that summer of 1864 for a Port William girl to be married, the awfulness already had driven any thought of courtship or marriage from her mind. She had instead taken a defensive stand on the side merely of the helpless and the threatened. On their behalf she distrusted all the creatures of the bunches and the weapons. That was why she sat still in her fear and watched as the alien riders, in the absence or invisibility of the entire membership of the town, occupied and ruled over the empty road.
    And then, seeing nothing easily to be taken or enjoyed, they began to give the place up. They gathered again in the road and formed raggedly a line, resuming the direction that would carry them on through the town and finally into the river valley.
    Looking away then in the direction they were going to go, she saw hanging over the river a single small white cloud just touched by the gold of the weakening sun. And then she saw, as if wonder must now be added to the new normality of outrage, the figure of a walking man emerge intothe open concavity of the road as it came up out of the valley and turned toward the town. She knew immediately who it was, as she might have recognized at a distance too far for reading the character of her own script. It was Eli, her mother’s slave, with a split basket on his arm, bringing to her and Dicey, she supposed, some gift of food. Alone, old and ambling, visible against the bare horizon as the chimney of a burned house, he would be at the mercy of the riders, who had not yet seen him, though they would see him as soon as they looked. They would surround him on their horses. They would