Then I swept the air clean of cobwebs and wiped down the gun racks with oil. When I had the place good as Hilde would’ve done it, I gathered my stuff and tapped on the door.
“Don’t forget the latrine,” the guard at the door said, thumbing toward the rear of the Arsenal.
I headed back there, but I walked right past it and kept going.
That night in my room, I found a little piece of cobweb in my hair. I took a towel and rubbed myself clean, then lay down on top of the story quilt, remembering the smile on Denmark’s face when I’d showed up and pulled a bullet mold from my basket. When I drew out the second one, he’d slapped his leg and said, “You might be the best lieutenant I got.”
I waited for sleep, but it didn’t come. After a while, I went and sat on the back porch steps. The yard was quiet. I eyed the room over the carriage house and wondered if Goodis had looked for me after supper. He would be asleep now. Denmark, too. I was the only one up, worrying about the bowl on the end of the bullet mold, the place they pour the lead. How many people would those musket balls kill? I might’ve passed one of them on the street today. I might pass one tomorrow. I might pass a hundred people who would die cause of me.
The moon was round and white, sitting small at the top of the sky. It seemed the right size to sit in the bowl on the bullet mold. That was what I wished. I wished for the moon instead of lead.
Sarah
I arrived in Charleston wearing my best Quaker frock, a plain gray dress with a flat white collar and matching bonnet, the picture of humility. Before leaving Philadelphia, I’d been officially accepted into the Quaker fold. My probation had ended. I was one of them.
Upon seeing me for the first time in over a year, Mother received my kiss on her cheek and said, “I see you’ve returned as a Quaker. Really, Sarah, how can you show your face in Charleston dressed like that?”
I didn’t like the garb either, but it was at least made from wool, free of slave labor. We Quakers boycotted Southern cotton. We Quakers—how strange that sounded to me.
I tried to smile and make light of Mother’s comment, not yet grasping the full reason for it. “. . . Is that my welcome home, then? Surely you’ve missed me.”
She was sitting in the same spot where I’d last seen her, in the fading gold brocade wingchair by the window, and wearing the same black dress, holding her infernal gold-tip cane across her lap. It was as if she’d been sitting there since I left. Everything about her seemed unchanged, except she appeared more dilapidated around the edges. The skin of her neck folded turtle-like onto her collar and the hair at her forehead was fraying like an edge of cloth.
“I’ve missed you, dear, of course. The entire household suffered because of your desertion, but you can’t go about dressed like that—you would be taken at once for a Quaker, and their anti-slavery views are well known here.”
I hadn’t thought of this. I ran my palms down the sides of my skirt, feeling suddenly fond of my drab outfit.
A voice came from the doorway. “If that’s what this hideous dress of yours means, I’ll have to get one myself.”
Nina. She looked like a whole new creature. She was taller, standing inches above me with her sable hair swept back, her cheeks higher, her brows thick and her eyes black. My sister had become a darkly beautiful woman.
She threw her arms around me. “You are never to leave again.”
As we clung to each other, Mother muttered, as if to herself, “For once, the child and I agree on something.”
Nina and I laughed, and then astonishingly, Mother laughed, and the sound the three of us made together in the room created a silly joy inside of me.