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the soldier, he was squatting down next to Sarah, who was lying facedown in the creek. The surface of the water had frozen a crust around her face. When she picked up that tiny body, dressed in the white gown that was now ripped and stained with dirt, Ila Mae saw that Sarah’s face was wet, and she dried it with her hands, then wrapped the baby in her apron and carried her to the house. She could not cry, because her heart was too broken. Her mind was dull, and her stomach seemed as if she had swallowed a lump of clay. A voice inside her kept saying, “Sarah’s dead. Sarah’s dead.” And Ila Mae felt as if she were dead, too.
    The soldier wasn’t a Rebel, he told her. He was a Union man who’d been captured and escaped and taken the uniform from a dead Confederate. He was a good man. He built a fire in the hearth and cooked up some bacon for Ila Mae, then heated water so that she could wash Sarah. He told Ila Mae that his little girl was just about Sarah’s age. “I ought to never have left her, and your man ought to be here now,” he said.
    Ila Mae wrapped Sarah in a quilt to warm her, just as if she’d been alive. “Have you had her baptized in the Lord?” the man asked. “I’m a preacher and can do it if it would ease you some.” Ila Mae had been waiting until Billy came homebefore asking a preacher to bless the baby, so she told the Yankee that she’d appreciate it if he’d say the words over the child. Ila Mae drew fresh water from the well, and the man made a wet cross on the dead child’s forehead and said a Bible verse from memory. The words comforted her a little. Then Ila Mae dressed the baby in a clean gown, and they laid Sarah in a little grave that the Yankee dug in the burial ground out back where Billy’s people rested.
    After that, the soldier offered to walk Ila Mae to White Pigeon, but she told him no. She had to stay beside the grave. She couldn’t leave Sarah alone. Besides, if the home guard caught the Yankee, he’d be shot. “Take my husband’s clothes from the trunk. You’ll be safer in them than dressed like a Confederate. Throw your uniform in the fire.” She filled a pillowcase with bread and bacon and a sack of cornmeal. “Go west,” she told the Yankee. “That’s where they’re fighting. You’ll run into the Union Army. If you see a boy with one shoe, don’t shoot him. That’s my husband.”
    “I seen plenty of men barefoot but never one with one shoe. I’ll keep a lookout for him.”
    “I’ll say a prayer for you.”
    “The name’s Simon Smith, missus, but the Lord’s acquainted with me. I’ll keep you and yours in my prayers, too,” he replied, and was off.
    Ila Mae never knew if he made it.
    She wrote Billy to tell him Sarah was dead, although she didn’t tell him how it had happened. Time enough for that after he returned home, although he never did. After the war ended, a man came looking for her. He and Billy were pards in the army, he said, and they’d promised each other ifone of them got killed, the other would tell the family. The man couldn’t write, so he came all the way to Tennessee to find her. Billy was shot less than a week before the war was over. The man said Billy died easy, saying he’d given his life for a noble cause and wasn’t sorry, but Ila Mae knew that was what they always told the widows. She never found out where he was buried.
    In a day or two, after the soldier was well away, Ila Mae forced herself away from the little grave and walked into White Pigeon and told what Abram and his fellows had done. People believed her and wouldn’t speak to him after that. When the fighting was over and the soldiers came home, they ran off Abram, declared he had bemeaned the town and wasn’t ever to show his face there again. Not long after that, a soldier came to Ila Mae’s cabin and set $500 on her table. He said the men had had a talk with Barton Fletcher and told him that if he didn’t want to leave White Pigeon like Abram,