“You’ll have to tell me about it again sometime, Mahailey. I must have my dinner and get back to work. If we don’t get our wheat in, those people over there won’t have anything to eat, you know.”
The picture papers meant a great deal to Mahailey, because she could faintly remember the Civil War. While she pored over photographs of camps and battlefields and devastated villages, things came back to her; the companies of dusty Union infantry that used to stop to drink at her mother’s cold mountain spring. She had seen them take off their boots and wash their bleeding feet in the run. Her mother had given one louse-bitten boy a clean shirt, and she had never forgotten the sight of his back, “as raw as beef where he’d scratched it.” Five of her brothers were in the Confederate army. When one
