or smaller children.
The most delicious thing in Swan’s life was this one week every summer of wearing boy clothes and forgetting about modesty. She could scoot under barbed-wire fences and race across pastures without those confounded skirts getting in her way. She was little. She was quick. And she was just what Noble dreamed of being. Formidable. You couldn’t get the best of her, no matter how you tried.
“That child is a terror,” Grandma Calla would say to Willadee when she thought Swan wasn’t listening. (Swan was always listening.)
“She’s her father’s daughter,” Willadee would answer, usually with a small sigh, which indicated that there was nothing to be done about the situation, Swan was Swan. Both Willadee and Calla rather admired Swan, although they never would have said so. They just indicated it with a slight lift of their eyebrows, and the least hint of a smile, whenever her name came up. Which was often. Swan got into more trouble than any other child in the Moses tribe.
Bienville was nine years old, and he was another story altogether. He had a peaceable nature, a passion for books, and a total fascination with the universe in general. You just couldn’t count on him for things like surveillance, or assassinations. You could be playing the best game of Spies, and have the Enemy cornered, and be just about to move in for the kill, and there Bienville would be, studying the pattern of rocks in the creek bed or examining the veins in a sassafras leaf. He couldn’t be depended on to do his part in a war effort.
Noble and Swan had learned how to deal with Bienville, though. Since he never seemed to commit to either side, they made him a double agent. Bienville didn’t care, even though being a double agent generally meant he was the first one to get killed.
Bienville had just gotten killed for the fourth time that Saturday afternoon when Things Started Happening. He was lying on his back in the pasture, dead as a stone, staring up at the sky.
He said, “Swan, did you ever wonder why you can see stars at night but not in the daytime? Stars don’t evaporate when the sun comes up.”
“You’re supposed to be dead,” Swan reminded him.
She had just shot him with an invisible submachine gun, and she was busy digging an invisible trench with an invisible shovel. Bienville didn’t know it, but he was about to be rolled over into the trench, dead or not. Noble was still lurking somewhere out there in Enemy Territory, so Swan had to keep a watchful eye.
Bienville said, “I’m tired of being dead,” and he sat up.
Swan pushed him back down with her foot. “You are a corpse,” she told him. “You can’t be tired, you can’t sit up, and you cannot talk.”
She had forgotten to be watchful. Sudden footsteps behind her told her so. She whirled, brandishing the invisible shovel. Noble was running directly toward her, arms pumping. The area he was crossing had been designated as a Minefield, but Noble wasn’t looking for mines. Swan let out a ferocious roar and brought her “shovel” down across Noble’s head. That should have done him in, but he didn’t fling himself on the ground and commence his death agonies, like he was supposed to. He grabbed Swan and clamped one hand over her mouth, and hissed at her to get quiet. Swan struggled indignantly but couldn’t get free. Even if Noble wasn’t formidable, he was strong.
“I just—killed you—with a shovel!” she hollered. Noble’s hand muffled the sound into mushy, garbled noises. About every other word, Swan tried to bite his fingers. “No way—could you—have survived. That—was a fatal blow—and you know it!”
Bienville was looking on like a wise old sage, and he made out enough of what Swan was saying to have to agree with her.
“It was a fatal blow, all right,” he confirmed.
Noble rolled his eyes and clamped his hand tighter across Swan’s mouth. She was kicking up a storm and growling, deep in her throat.
“I said shhh!” Noble dragged his sister toward a line of brush and brambles that ran between the pasture and a patch of woods. Bienville flipped over on his belly and crawled across the Minefield after them. When they got close to the brush line, Noble realized he had a problem. He needed to let Swan go, which promised to be something like releasing a wildcat.
He said, very calmly, “Swan, I’m going to turn you loose.”
“Irpulmbfrmlmb, ustnknbzzrd!” she answered, and she bit his hand so hard that he jerked it away from her mouth to inspect it for blood. That split second was all Swan needed. She drove an elbow into Noble’s gut, and he doubled over, gasping for breath.
“Dammit, Swan,” he groaned. She was all over him. Noble drew himself into a wad, enduring the onslaught. He knew a few Indian tricks, such as Becoming a Tree. A person could hit and kick a tree all day long without hurting it, because it was Unmovable. He’d learned this from Bienville, who had either read about it or made it up. Noble didn’t care whether Bienville’s stories were true, just so the methods worked.
Swan hated it when Noble Became a Tree. It was something she had never mastered (she was not about to stand still for anybody to hit her), and it wore her out fighting someone who wouldn’t fight back. It made her feel like a loser, no matter how much damage she inflicted. Still, she had to save face, so she landed one last blow to Noble’s wooden shoulder and licked her sore knuckles.
“I win,” she announced.
“Fine.” Noble let his muscles relax. “You win. Now, shut up and follow me.”
John Moses was sitting under a tree, cleaning his shotgun and talking to God.
“And another thing,” he was saying. “I don’t believe the part about the Red Sea opening up and people walking through on dry land.”
For a man who didn’t believe in God, John talked to Him a lot. Whether God ever listened was anybody’s guess. John was generally drunk during these monologues, and the things he said were not very complimentary. He’d been mad at God for a long time, starting when Walter had fallen across that saw blade, over at the Ferguson mill.
John was pulling a string out of the end of his shotgun barrel. There was an oily strip of cotton cloth tied onto the end of the string, and the cloth came out gray-black. He sighted down the barrel, squinting and angry-looking.
“You expect us to believe the damnedest things.” He was talking in a normal tone of voice, just as if God were sitting two feet away from him.
“For instance, all this stuff about You being love,” he went on, and here his voice grew thick. “If You was love, You wouldn’t have let my Walter get split wide open like a slaughtered hog—”
John began polishing the butt of his gun with a separate rag that he’d had tucked away in the bib of his overalls. Tears welled in his eyes, then spilled over and trailed down his weathered face. He didn’t bother to wipe them away.
“If You are love,” he roared, “then love ain’t much to crow about.”
The kids were all crouched behind a thick wall of razor wire (blackberry vines), peering at the Enemy through the tiniest of openings between the thorny canes. They had a good, clear view of the old man, but he couldn’t see them.
Swan had a feeling that they shouldn’t be here. It was one thing for her and her brothers to spy on each other, since they only said things they meant each other
