She arrived in the summer of 1865 when tobacco leaves were heavy, and peace felt strange on the tongue.
Sarah. The woman from the locket.
She stood backlit by a sunset, the color of blood on cotton. Josey’s hand moved toward a weapon that wasn’t there anymore. Combat habits die hard. But something in her eyes stopped him; they were exactly as they’d been in that silver-framed photograph he’d carried through four years of hell.
When Sarah stepped onto his porch, Josey realized photographs lie. She was a wildfire. Her long, raven black hair spilled down her back, a dark river flowing around a throat that pulsed with a life he hadn’t dared to hope existed outside the confines of his grief.
Her auburn eyes, twin pools of molten amber reflecting a firestorm, held stories his war-torn hands had only imagined during nights when death felt closer than breathing.
—Didn’t expect to see no one on this porch, she said, her boots scuffing the boards. Sorry for bargin’ in she said, taking off her hat.
—Josey, he grinned. And it seems like you’re the one who kept me alive, so don’t apologize.
His words caught between them, suspended somewhere between confession and greeting.
Her breath paused, not in surprise but from her confusion about what he had meant when he said she’d kept him alive.
Josey continued to explain while pulling a silver locket out of his pocket, a pocket that had worn a smooth hollow like a river stone shaped by worry and time.
—I know every curve of your face, his voice crackled like dry leaves. I studied it more than any map during four years of fightin.’
She looked up; the silver gleamed reflections of the late sun like a fragment of memory preserved. Her heart fluttered like a hummingbird in her chest.
—Found this in Walker’s Creek, he said, settling the worn object gently into her palm. Spring of ‘61, ‘fore Charlie and me rode out.
—Mama gave me this the night before… she whispered, her voice breaking. Lost it fetchin’ the doctor for Mr. Jenkins, crossin’ your fields.
Josey told her how he’d studied the photograph by campfire light, whispering prayers to a woman he’d never met, how the locket had willed him to survive through Pickett’s Charge when the world dissolved into smoke and screaming. During those endless nights, Josey had spoken to her photograph. Not prayers. Conversations.
When Confederate campfires flickered and men around him spoke of home, of hope, he’d pull out the locket. Whisper stories. Share fears. Tell the silent image about Charlie. About battles, about moments he was sure he wouldn’t survive. When bullets sang past his ears at Chancellorsville, when men fell like wheat before a scythe at Fredericksburg, her image remained constant. Unchanging. A small piece of humanity in a world gone mad.
Sarah’s hands were shaking. Not from fear. From something deeper. Recognition.
—Four years, she whispered. Four years you carried me.
Their connection wasn’t romantic. Not yet. It was something more profound. A spiritual recognition of its counterpoint in another. Two souls who had recognized each other before they’d ever met, bridged by a small silver frame and the impossible journey of survival.
They sat on the porch steps as evening settled around them like a worn blanket. Sarah held the locket tight and told her story.
—I take the long way to town, she said. Her voice soft. That place yonder, she whispered, her eyes flickerin’. Some nights, when the wind’s just so, you can hear what them Harrisons do to their freedman. That boy of theirs is pure devil. He’s the reason I cross the trail through your property. Ran into ‘em one day, and if I hadn’t had the knife my daddy gave me, they’d have had their way with me for sure.
—Reconstruction didn’t change everythin’, Josey said. He remembered the colored boys fightin’ fierce as any. Changed me right down to my bones.
The Battle of the Wilderness had been hell—a forest turned to flame, men cooking inside their uniforms. He’d been lost, half-dead, when he stumbled upon a group of colored Union soldiers. At any other time, they would have been enemies. By all the rules he’d been taught, they should have killed him on sight. A Rebel soldier, wounded, wearing gray—he was a perfect target.
—Mercy comes in strange packages, he said. Sometimes, from the very people, we’re taught to fear. Sometimes from, the ones we’ve been told are less than human. Instead, they shared their water. Dressed my wounds. Guided me back to safety. Coulda put me down right then, he said, eyes on the fireflies dancin’ ‘cross his fields. By all rights, they should’ve. Me in gray, fightin’ to keep ‘em in chains. But they didn’t. They showed me a mercy I didn’t deserve. After that, I didn’t see them as the enemy anymore. They were fightin’ for something more valuable: their freedom. I reckon I would do the same in them shoes; never fired a shot at another colored Yank, since then.
—We’re all just people, she said. She squeezed his hand, her touch warm as summer sunshine.
The sun had set, casting them into a gentle darkness more like a blessing than a shroud. The dirt path stretched between their farms like an old friend, soft and knowing. He walked beside her, their footsteps falling into a rhythm more like a whispered conversation than actual movement.
Twilight was bleeding a mystical palette of colors across the sky, and the crickets had begun their evening symphony.
—You’ll be all right the rest of the way? He asked.
She had studied these paths better than her own heartbeat—every rock, every subtle curve of the trail was etched into her memory.
—I know these woods like the burn scars on my hands, she said.
And he never doubted that she did.
He returned to his porch. The wooden steps creaked under his weight—a sound as old as the farm itself. He settled into the lone chair, watching shadows stretch across fields that had witnessed generations of moments like this. Beyond the creek that marked the boundary of his land, he thought of the Harrison plantation. A place where old rules still governed. Where some men believed they owned more than land.
Then, a noise pierced the night’s shadows. The woods between his land and the Harrison plantation ran thick with pine and shadow. He moved as silent as a hunting cat towards the noise that had caught his attention. His boots were careful against fallen branches.
The sound reached him first—a rhythm that wasn’t natural.
Crack. Pause. Crack.
Not the quick snap of correction, but something slower. Deliberate.
The man doing the beating wore boots with a scorpion branded into the leather. Expensive. Polished. The kind of boots a man wore to show he owned more than land.
Old Man Wilson stood tied to a post, back exposed—fifty-five years of living carved into skin that had seen more punishment than mercy.
His hands were bound, fingers spread against the weathered wood like a prayer that had forgotten how to ask for anything.
The whip moved with unemotional precision, each strike a calculated instrument of destruction. Wilson’s back was a landscape of brutality, old scars crisscrossed like pale rivers, now torn open by fresh wounds that wept crimson.
The first strike split skin like overripe fruit. Blood welled, not a trickle, but a sudden rush that painted his back with his blood.
Wilson’s body betrayed him. Each strike sent electric shocks of pain that threatened to pull consciousness apart.
Nerve endings shrieked, a pain so intense it overshadowed sound, becoming a white-hot blade of pure sensation.
—Them cornbread pieces your girl swiped from my kitchen, Thomas growled. Where they hidin’?
Wilson’s fingers dug into the post, not from restraint but from a primal effort to hold himself together. Blood ran down his sides, pooling at his feet.
Each breath was a negotiation with pain, lungs expanding against raw, exposed muscle, nerves firing like musket shots.
The whip came down again. This time, catching an old scar, reopening a wound that had long since tried to heal.
Skin separated with a sound like wet cloth being torn, hanging in ragged strips.
Droplets of blood sprayed with each strike, creating a bloody pattern against the wooden post. Underneath the physical agony, one thought burned bright: protect Beth, keep her from this moment, shield her from the world’s brutality.
His back now looked less like human skin and more like meat ready for butchering. The wounds weren’t clean cuts but ragged tears that told a story of deliberate, calculated destruction. Thomas stared, clinical and detached, as if studying an experiment.
Wilson’s body sensed something his mind could not comprehend. Survival. Each tremor and involuntary muscle spasm substantiated the human capacity to endure. To protect. To resist. He didn’t cry out. Not once.
Josey said to himself, watching—Ain’t no dignity in silence. But it ain’t my right to step on Harrison land.
—Ain’t gonna break, you reckon? Thomas paused, almost disappointed. You are stubborn and stupid as an old mule, Wilson.
His head was bowed. Josey looked at Wilson’s hands, fingers pressed so hard against the post they were turning white.
Holding something inside. Protecting something beyond his pain.
—Your daughter, Harrison said, Beth. She’s gonna understand why her daddy can’t work the fields after this.
Thomas untied him, each movement calculated.
He didn’t fall. Didn’t show weakness. He stood there, back as raw as new-turned earth, dignity intact.
—Git back to your quarters, Thomas commanded. And don’t forget your place here again, nigger.
—Yesuh, Masta Thomas. He replied.
The plantation absorbed the violence like it had absorbed a thousand such moments.
Quiet again. As if nothing had happened. As if everything had happened.
Josey walked back to his farm, each step carrying the anger of what he’d witnessed. Wilson’s dignity. Thomas’s cruelty. The unbroken thread of violence ran through their world like a river.
—Mercy comes in strange packages, he muttered to the night. Ain’t nothing in this world as simple as we was taught.
Charlie would have had something to say about this. Charlie always had words when Josey couldn’t understand.
While Josey lay in bed that night, he stared at the ceiling blankly, like an empty page with no words.
—Some wars never end, he whispered. Some just change shape.
These words he meant for Charlie to hear.
Memories pressed against him.
Like a coming storm.
Of before.
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Copyright © 2025 All Rights Reserved
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
