“I dont know what you must think of me,” I said. “They aint nobody else I carry on with this way.”

“Dont you fret. One thing I’d never take you for is a loose woman.”

“I loved my husband.”

“I know it. But he’s dead, Carrie. Like Isom’s dead, and C.J., and Sam Gore, and my daddy and brother. Me and you, we’re still yet alive.”

I tickled his mustache with my fingertip.

“I never stopped loving you.”

“I know that too. Hit scairt me oncet, and maybe it still yet does. But I seen how easy things can be lost. Hit seems silly to push them away when it will all be took soon enough.”

“You still aint said you love me.”

“I aint sure I do. And I aint one to say things I dont mean. But I need you. I need you right now.” His arms tightened around me. “Now that there is something I understand, needing somebody. But love—they must be something wrong with me, but I just dont know what it is.”

“Didnt you love C.J. and Isom?”

“Them two, that’s different. They was just allays there, like the mountains is allays there. All I ever knowed of the world had C.J. and Isom in it. But with a woman it would have to be different, wouldnt it? It would have to be clean and pretty and clear, like that river running yonder, like this place here. I aint never lived in a place like this. I dont know it. Coal camps is home to me. Hit’s like a baby duck when it’s born, it takes the first thing it sees for its mommy. A baby duck spies an old ugly sow first thing, hit thinks, ‘That there is home.’ Hit’s the same with me. I look for an old rattling coal tipple, or a house covered with the black dust. I look for things to be tore up. I seen so much of death and destruction they feel like home to me.”

I couldn’t let him say any more. I put my hand to his mouth and then I kissed him until we made love again. I knew Albion did not mind. He was not dead to me, but murmured benevolently from the graveyard.

In the morning, I fried up eggs and potatoes and bacon, cut slabs of cold cornbread spread with apple butter. We ate quietly like an old married couple, then went out on the porch to smell the dew.

“I’ll leave tonight for Charleston,” he said. “I want you to come with me. Mind, I aint asking you to marry me. We need nurses.”

“What makes you think I’d marry you?”

“I’m just checking. Be sure and bring your uniform.”

“I aint even said I’d go.”

He hugged me. “They’s one thing in the world I trust right now.”