He said, “I am a member of the council.” His face felt very hot, and he wondered whether the rebels would understand that flush, and know what he was thinking.

The lieutenant wore an untrimmed, black mustache which drooped heavily, hiding his mouth. He stood with his feet apart, his gauntleted hands clasped behind his back, and in each of his boot toes there was a broad crack through which the skin showed wet and pink. “What’s your name?” he demanded.

“Julius Orcutt.”

The officer said a word; butts of the guns dropped to the limestone, k-kab. Orcutt’s sleeve brushed one of the rigid bodies as he went past. He wondered whether Benjy had ever pointed his bayonet at a man’s stomach … the long room was damp, shadowy. It smelled of cigars and rusty stoves and wet woollen clothing. A kerosene lamp flickered at the end of the table, and Doctor Kendlehart sat in its blurred circle, writing, with men standing behind him and peering over his shoulder.

Manasseh Pock, the grocer, came sidling around the corner of the table … cheese, Orcutt thought, that’s it—cheese: his face is sculptured from the rich yellow cheese he sells, and somehow I never realized it before … he offered a limp paper which had been many times folded and re-opened. “This is the enemies’ requisition, Mr. Orcutt,” came his hollow whisper.

I will not whisper, the lawyer vowed to himself. I am a good Union man, my only son is before Vicksburg, my wife’s brother wore white cross-belts and was killed at Buena Vista, and we have his picture at home on the mantel-shelf.

“I regret that I was delayed. My wife has been indisposed—”

Outside, one of the rebel sentries moved his feet. Orcutt lifted the dirty foolscap sheet before his eyes, then lowered it and shook his head. “My specs are at the office.”

Mr. Pock took the requisition from him.

“Headquarters Early’s Division, Second Corps—” corpse, he read it—“C.S.A. In the field near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, June the twenty-sixth, eighteen sixty-three—”

“Louder, please,” Orcutt snarled at him.

Pock whispered closer, shaking his head sadly. So much of this, he seemed thinking between the reading of the items, will come out of my store. Sixty barrels flour, seven thousand pounds pork (but they would take bacon, they say), twelve hundredweight sugar, six hundredweight coffee, one thousand pounds salt, ten bushels of onions, one thousand pairs shoes, five hundred hats.

“Is that all?” asked Julius Orcutt.

“Or—ten thousand dollars in money! They place this levy on the whole of the borough and county.”

The lawyer took the paper from his hand, and looked at it. The script was a twisting fuzz … so many years, he thought. I should never have tried to memorize English Common Law by one candle … He let the requisition fall from his hand to the table. “The concensus of opinion, gentlemen?”