After she’d wrung that water from each piece of laundry, she’d fold it into the basket in my arms until I couldn’t hardly carry it down the steps into the yard, where I pinned the underclothes and dresses to tight lines running between two black locust posts. I’ve got some clear memories of walking the rows of billowing sheets while the image of the porch and the outline of my great-aunt’s body stood stamped upon the sunlight. Her soft voice carried down the steps and trailed out into the yard, where it disappeared between the folds of white cotton.

“Those Confederates were starving, Addie.”

I stepped from between the sheets and dragged the basket through the high grass and up to the porch. I stood by her waist and listened and waited for her to pile the heaps of wet clothes into the basket.

“They must’ve been wandering the hills for days and didn’t know no better than to eat that jimson fruit. That stuff can make you crazy until you almost want to die.

“This was back when they used to carry all the baccer into Hot Springs to cart it down the turnpike to the Asheville market. I was in town with my daddy and his crop the day those boys came down from the hills, shooting up everything and carrying on like nothing you’ve ever seen. I remember that wildness in their eyes, and my daddy told me it was jimson sure enough. He said nothing else could make a man act like that.

“By the time those soldiers were done, they’d shot some folks in town, and the folks they didn’t kill had killed all but one of them soldiers. The one who’d survived was a boy from Gastonia who’d caught a bullet in his thigh. Folks said he’d been the only one of them Confederates without a gun, said he didn’t even look old enough to handle a rifle. He was about out of his head by the time all the shooting stopped. Some folks in town took him in and cared for him and kept him safe and hid away.

“A few days later a posse of Confederate home guard rolled through looking for those outliers who’d shot up the town, and a few days after that a band of Union came through looking for rebels. But folks kept that boy hid. They weren’t going to give him up, no matter who was looking for him. When news came from Raleigh that North Carolina had withdrawn her troops and the war was over and done, they took that boy out to the middle of town and strung him up. They hung him. Just like that.

“I saw that boy’s face when they done it. I think I’ll remember it for the rest of my life.” She quit her washing, and I watched her wet hand lift a big old grasshopper from the rim of the basin. She tossed it into the air, and I saw its wings open and catch the breeze before it disappeared.

“Why’d they kill him if they thought he was innocent?” I asked.

“Because,” she said, “he was someplace he shouldn’t have been, and sometimes that’s enough.” And now, when I think about what happened to Christopher inside that church, I think the same thing.

F

OURTEEN

IF SOMEBODY WOULD HAVE WANTED TO, AFTER CHRISTOPHER was born, they could’ve just stood by and watched Julie and Ben grow apart from each other real slow. It was like a tree had sprung up between them, a tree that was just too thick to throw their arms around. Julie had always been a strong Christian woman, and she got herself believing that her little boy’s being touched was a gift from God. But Ben wasn’t no mystic about it, and I reckon he saw his own quietness in that little boy, and he loved him all the more because of it. He figured silence marked Christopher as being his son in a way their blood never could.

But that tree that grew up between them was just a gnarly old thing with thick roots that ran deep and wild and tore at the ground until it opened up, and, once it did, Julie found herself clear across a great divide from Ben, so far apart that they couldn’t even see each other from where they stood. Julie looked around and saw that she needed her faith to help her understand God’s plan for that little boy and for her family. It was like Ben’s lack of faith inspired her, and his turning his back on God and the church worked on her belief and made it that much stronger. She never missed a chance to teach her boys a lesson about the Lord, especially after Jess was born. He was a curious thing, and once he lit into asking you questions about God and Heaven and Jesus you’d better have him some answers ready, or it just wouldn’t do. But his daddy was somebody different altogether. There were two things that man just wouldn’t talk about: his heavenly father and his own daddy. I reckon he figured that once he cut his ties with his earthly father, any substitute, whether holy or not, was going to be judged with the same thorough measure he judged just about everything else in his life.

And the Lord knows that when people don’t get what they need they take what they can find, and Julie wasn’t no different from most women about such a thing as that. What she found was a Christian family that welcomed her and her two little boys and never asked one question about why her husband wasn’t joining the rest of his family on Sunday mornings. I reckon it was just about good enough for her, but I know there were still times when that loneliness for the way her and Ben used to be would come over her, and with it’d come a fear of him that I couldn’t ever quite put my finger on. I ain’t saying that Ben was the kind of man to hit a woman, because I can tell you that he wasn’t. His daddy was, but Ben just didn’t have it in him the way some men do. He wasn’t the kind of man to let a woman get him riled up enough to go and make a scene and take to swinging his fists. But he was a brooding soul, and I believe the way he carried himself in all that quietness hurt Julie more than an open hand ever could. It got to where those two didn’t hardly talk to each other at all, not even about the most important things married folks are supposed to share.

It turns out that the tree I’d imagined growing up between those two wasn’t no tree at all. What I took for being roots were actually stories and lies and promises that festered deep into Julie’s heart to where there wasn’t anything anybody could do to pry them loose. Those thick limbs and branches that kept Julie and Ben from seeing each other when they needed to the most weren’t nothing but arms and fingers that held Julie back, covered her eyes, and took her hand and led her to a place she never had no intention of going. Looking back now, it wasn’t no tree at all; it was Carson Chambliss.

IT MUST HAVE BEEN A YEAR OR SO BEFORE CHRISTOPHER DIED THAT I was out in my backyard gathering my laundry off the line when I saw Julie about as bad off as she’d ever been. It had come up a little rain, and I was trying to get all my laundry in before the sky opened up and took to pouring. On my way out back I looked across the valley and saw the dark clouds gathering in the distance, and I figured they were getting a good wash just a little piece up the road. It wasn’t doing anything but drizzling now, but I knew better than to think that it wasn’t going to come up a storm some time soon.

I took to unfastening the laundry from the line and tossing it into the basket when for some reason, and I can’t tell you what it was, I knew that somebody was watching me. I turned around, and that’s when I saw Julie standing up in the corner of the yard by the house. She was standing there in the rain and watching me with her arms folded across herself like she was freezing, but it was a warm summer day, not a bit cool at all.

“Lord, girl,” I hollered up at her. “You just about scared me to death.” I turned around and went to unfastening the rest of my laundry from the line, but when I looked again I saw that she hadn’t moved an inch. “You all right?” I hollered. She didn’t say nothing to that, and she didn’t make no move to come down to me either, so I dropped the clothes I was holding into the basket and walked up the yard to where she was standing. When I got close up to her, I could see that her hair was damp and her skirt was wet where it had caught some high grass on her walk over to my place. She had on a pair of rubber boots that were covered in mud up to her ankles.