Woe to Live On: A Novel Read Online Free Page A

a level of temperament he had never before displayed. It made me fonder of him.
    The women set us a fine table: chicken fried the way mothers do it, and ham with sweet potatoes, biscuits and coffee. I was zealous about the ham and sweet potatoes, and soon had my fill. Having my fill made me sleepy, so I went onto the porch. It was a fine, sunny day and I decided to count the nailheads in the porch ceiling. To do this I lay on my back, but quickly I lost the count.
    Sneezing horses awakened me. I sat up, but they were there: Four militiamen stared at me from behind carbines. A good distance off there was a larger gaggle of bluebellies.
    The house had gone silent.
    “Where’s the other, you devil?” asked one of the militia. He had puppy cheeks and foam at the mouth. He gestured at the two horses we had left out front. “Speak up and maybe you’ll live yet.”
    This brought haw-haws from his brethren, who were a pink-jowled lot of bad citizens.
    My comfort was diminished. The full gullet made me feel slow and perhaps stupid.
    “Get his guns,” the foamy man said. One of the others acted as if he would come forward to disarm me, but hesitated. “Halloo inside! Come out and show your parole or surrender.”
    Southern men who would not fight could post parole bonds to walk about with a little freedom. I had no parole, and I was armed, as no paroled man could be.
    The main body was now coming forward, and a quick scout told me there was fifty or more of them. The numbers were not favorable.
    “I am alone,” I said. “That’s my daddy’s house. He was shot off it three days back.”
    “He lies,” said a shrewd militia. “Let’s parole him to Jesus, and right now.”
    I was still seated, and that saved me. The house exploded in the militia’s faces, and four saddles were instantly unburdened. I pulled to my knees and grabbed the reins of our two horses and began to run to the rear of the house.
    “Get in here!” voices called to me, but I knew we needed the horses, though neither was mine.
    My course was changed when the troop of militia opened up on me. I heard the enchanting whack of bullet on meat. Both horses screamed and spasmed, one dropping dead while the other spun in a tight agonized whirl, the rear legs useless.
    The bullets were coming in gangs, as I was a lonely target. The little finger on my left hand, a fairly useless digit, was cleaved from me. I saw it land pink and limp in the dust of the chicken pen but made no move to regain it.
    Two more strides put me in the house.
    At every window there were guns pointing out. Black John stood at the front one, a man cool and plausible.
    The women were on the floor and not in the right spirit for the adventure that had befallen them. Turner Rawlscrouched nearby his family, pistol pulled, as if the center of the floor was his last stand.
    “Do you kill women?” Black John called out the window. “There are women in here!”
    The militia was on three sides of us now, and from the house to the wooded ravine and horses there was a clear patch of fifty yards.
    Running it would be hot.
    “You know we don’t,” came back a bossy honk of a Yankee voice. You might fight a voice like that for any small reason, let alone for invading your neighborhood. “Send them out now and they’ll be safe passaged!”
    A bone-and-pulp nubbin was all of my finger I had left. My blood spotted the floor and walls. Someone told me I was hit, as if I might have overlooked it myself. I took a rag and wound it firm about the aching nubbin. The pain was shrill enough, but the idea of a finger of mine twitching about, lost in chicken-pecked dust, was more terrible.
    “Please, Ma, you got to go,” Turner Rawls was pleading.
    Ma Rawls looked at him somewhat berserkly, then waved a hand in his face.
    “We’re goin’, son,” she said. “You best believe we’re goin’. There ain’t no way we’re
not
goin’.”
    She and the sisters were soon on the porch. We watched as they