Velda Brotherton

Traitor

Ma always said there wasn’t no bad men just men that had to do bad things ‘cause of what was going on. Us being created in the image of God, and all. But that was before the bushwhackers came while we was at church and burned down our house and took our old milk cow, Bessie.
Ma cried a lot after that. I’d come on her when she didn’t know I was around, and she’d be crying like her heart had cracked as wide open as granny’s blue glass pitcher them men throwed down on a rock. The only purty thing Ma had, even before the war they called Civil came along.
We was standing there, not knowing what to say or do, staring at the smoking pile of logs and our old bedstead, burned black as tar, when Pa laid his big hands on my shoulders. They shook and that scared me.
“It’s okay, Lem, go on and play with Lizzie. Go on now.” Then he went to Ma and knelt beside her where she sat on that old stump that was at our back door when we had one.
“Ellie, honey,” he said in a faraway voice I’d only heard him use once before. That was when Lizzie was born. “We’re gonna come through this. I promise. But I need your help.”
“Help?” Ma sounded like someone had stepped on her foot. Then she said it again “Help? Doin what? If we build it back they’ll only come and burn it down again. I couldn’t take that, Josiah. Why has this happened?”
“It’s war, Ellie, that’s all. In war even good men are fearsome bad sometimes. And there’s nothing that can be done about that.”
I wasn’t supposed to be watching but couldn’t turn away. It was as if someone had a hold on me, making me look on and listen. Ma and Pa didn’t see me there or they’d have run me off, cause youngins ain’t supposed to know what their elders do most times.
“Josiah,” Ma said, and her calling his name like that made me want to bawl like a little baby. But I been seven years old since summer and now the leaves are falling off the trees, so I’m too big for that.
“Josiah,” she said again. “I want to go home.”
Pa’s shoulders squared and he pulled her close. Easy to see by his face the plea cut right through him like a knife.
How many times she’d teased how he took her away from her folks’ big old plantation home in

Louisiana and dragged her into the wilderness of the Ozarks, and how she’d come because she loved

him. What kind of love could that be? And why didn’t Pa have it so he could stay with her there?

How nice it would be to live in one of those big old plantation houses with white pillars and

slaves doing all the work. ‘Stead we come up here to Arkansas where everyone worked hard and not

hardly anyone had slaves. Fact is, Pa said often enough how we was all poor as slaves, sometimes

more so, but didn’t nobody own us. And they sure wasn’t going to fight no war to make us rich.