Shad River by Mawyer Gary

Author:Mawyer, Gary [Mawyer, Gary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-09-27T00:00:00+00:00

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James McRay was already home. After driving a half-empty wagon behind four skeletal horses for many months, he jumped down during the retreat from Richmond and walked straight home. He never found a soul who’d heard of Horace McRay.

Darius moved into the Marr house and Leonidas bedded down in Judith’s store. Hazard McRay was the next to return, riding a mule. He gave his parole at Appomattox but managed to retain a brace of Colt revolvers. Lewis Ryland came back, impossibly skinny. His brother was dead in Tennessee. Charles Perry came back. He brought the news that Jenks McRay was alive and in his old house at Shadmouth, but lost his right leg in Chimborazo Hospital.

In May, Virgil came down from the top of Coonrod’s Hollow. At first he found it hard to talk to other people. In the same month Jefferson Swift returned from a Maryland prison-pen. He found his house empty and possessions scattered in the mud of the yard, where they had lain for months. The last to return was Monroe Damon. He reached Shad River in July, after working his passage across from Edinburgh on an English merchant steamer. The longest waited-after was Peter DeBaptist. It did not seem reasonable he was gone. But like Horace, he vanished in the war. The graveyard seemed full of fresh earth even without the missing, even including the two Yankee cavalrymen Judith tended to death.

Hazard had a good mule. He dusted off the harness and greased the plow. It was late in the year, but Ginny and Becky were used to fieldwork. When he ran out of seed corn, Hazard planted oats from the barn sweepings. A rough-and-ready crop appeared.

Jefferson Swift raked up his trash and looked at his orchard, just going out of bloom and buzzing with bees. Some of his beehives still contained swarms. No one looted his bees. Violet looked in on them from time to time. The distillery was broken down, but all the parts were salvageable, including the boiler and the copper coils. In McRay’s Hollow, Virgil now slept with his eyes open—a disturbing sight. Curiously, his father James perhaps benefited from the war. As James regained his strength, he seemed to become younger.

The Simmons cabin lacked farmable land, but the Damon farm had good fields that had lain fallow. After marrying Rose Damon, Jack Junior put in every kind of crop he could. He sowed salad greens and harvested poke. Beyond the top of the hollow, Dry Run swarmed with game.

Everyone assumed that Monroe, with his education, would rebuild Damon’s Mill. The mill buildings were burned to their foundations, the dam and spillway exploded. Nothing to speak of was left of Damon’s Mill but some broken stone piers, but if an ignorant cuss like Monroe’s grandfather could build a mill, surely Monroe could. However, the commonest thing Monroe was seen doing seemed to involve a metal tripod with a heavy piece of glass in it. He would put a dead bug on a

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