Gazing out over the bowl of his small fortress, watching a wedge of geese tracking over the far ridge following the branch of the river south, Norman found himself thinking of Ballou: the man as wild goose pursuing his own course without concern of what others cared or thought of him. Norman’s father ever bastardizing his name even to his face, as if his unwillingness to commit body and soul to a patch of rock-studded ground was crime enough without the taint of otherness about him already; the French Canadian unreliable but content to live on the unclaimed wildland above the small gore. Ballou was out on snowshoes all winter long running traplines and felling trees if a market appeared on the horizon, the rest of the year happy to fish, hunt and attend horse races or run hounds. Ballou was among the first of only a few who paid out hard money in gold coin for substitutes for his three boys, not waiting for the draft. Offering no explanation, his smile tight and scornful as if he saw the others fools not to appreciate that life was short and bittersweet enough without being blown apart to serve some other men’s ideas of how things should be. Norman felt that he and Ballou had just executed a short and easy turn of dance with one another: firewood bought; money paid. And Norman now deflated with the effort as if it had stripped some layer from his soul. Knowing the worst men could do to one another wasn’t the clear gore of Marye’s Heights or the wreckage of Petersburg but the relentless small decades of generations of Sweetboro, North Carolina. Which all the efforts of battle might change but not erase from the thinking walking talking breath of the woman down the valley before him. What was he to say, Rest easy now? With both of them knowing however far the distance and unlikely the location she would never, and so neither would he, assume that some peace or ease was theirs to hold the way others assume that peace could be held. Live quiet, was what she’d said. But without knowing exactly what they were headed to, he knew while it might be possible it could never be certain. He wondered if that was why Ballou paid that gold money, as much to save his sons as to announce his intention to live quiet. Would make it so with all the fiber and gut he could string out of himself to ward off everything else. Whatever good it might do.