“I got to go home and pack,” he replied. “I reckon I’ll be in prison for a spell.”

Carrie and I spent the night in a barn on Hewitt Creek that belonged to a Holiness preacher who’d joined our fight. They are tough old birds, the Holiness, not scared of a thing. This one had been in the sun so long and worked so hard he looked to be made out of rope. We told him we were married and he offered us his bed but we said no, we’d not put him out. In fact, we wanted to be alone. But although no one else was in the barn, I touched her self-consciously. I was aware of the men camped around us, ready to climb the mountain in the face of the machine guns. I heard them breathe, felt their hands supporting me as I rolled atop her. Afterward I waited, quiet, for her to speak, to fret aloud over the danger I was in and beg me to be careful.

Instead she asked, “What’s your idea of heaven?”

It was a typical Carrie question, and just the sort of thing I didn’t want to think on right then.

“Never considered it before,” I said grumpily. Then I relented, remembered the thrill of fear when it occurred to me on the train that she might be one of the women endangered by the police and the gun thugs.

“What do you think about heaven?” I asked, not really wanting to know.

“Heaven is where everyone you love is all in one place.” She said it quickly, like she’d thought about it before.

“Sounds like a damn cemetery,” I said.

She nipped my ear lobe with her teeth and I yelped.

“Ifn you’re so smart-alecky, how come you’re scairt to answer my question?”

“I might die tomorry,” I said. “I dont like to think on it.”

She pressed her face against my shoulder. “I know it.”

A tenderness filled me. I kissed her hair and it clung to my dry lips, tickled.

“Hit’s this here,” I said. “Heaven is this here. Hit’s all these men together, and you, and knowing this here is the way we was meant to do. But it only lasts a minute. Then hit’s gone.”

She kissed me. “I love you,” she said.

The response leaped to my lips and died there. I turned my head away, shamed.

Her thin arms around my chest never loosened their hold. “You dont have to say. I know as much as I need to.”

She never did beg me not to go. It was then I knew what I had in her. She’d throw out no snares to trip me and slow me, to keep me from giving everything up to what was coming. It takes a hell of a woman to be like that.

Twenty-two

CARRIE BISHOP