At Home on Ladybug Farm - Donna Ball [16]
When the soldiers in the blue coats came, Pearl wanted to cry, because she was so afraid remembering how the gray-coated soldiers had stolen their horses. But Mother had fetched up her rifle and walked right out on the veranda to meet those soldiers with a real hard look in her eye, and Mama Madie came out the door and stood right up close beside her with her head high and her shoulders back. Pearl felt it was her place to stand tall, too. So she came between her mama and Mama Madie and stood up straight, and Mama Madie put her big bony hands on Pearl’s shoulders and squeezed so hard that she really did want to cry.
The soldiers’ horses tore up their yard and their wagons rolled over the kitchen garden, and they kicked up dust and noise something terrible. One of them rode up to the veranda and got off his horse and started up the steps until Mother raised the rifle at him. Likely he did not know Old Luke had used up the last of the ammunition shooting at a fox that was after their last laying hen. He’d missed him, too, probably because he was nearly blind.
So the man just stood at the bottom of the porch and took off his hat and said his name was Captain Somebody, and that his men would be camping here for a time, and Mother had said this was a peaceful house with no man soldiering on either side, and they wanted no part of their war. He answered that that was good to hear, because he was a man of peace himself, a doctor and not a soldier, and he had with him a bunch of folks just trying to get home, but some of them were wounded and bad sickening, and he was in need of the house and the beds, thank you kindly. Then he looked at Mama Madie like the color of her skin made him wonder if Mother had lied about this being a peaceful house, and her fingers tightened so that Pearl thought the bones in her shoulders would break, and she said, real cool like, “I, sir, am a free woman and I owe no man in this world.” And he said just the same would she mind pouring him a cool draft of water, and she told him where the well was and to get it himself. That made him smile, tiredly, but he did.
The soldiers started carrying their sick and their bleeding into the house, and Mother said to Pearl, “Be quick and gather up the valuables and take them to Mama Madie.” There weren’t too many valuables left, but Mama Madie stuffed a bag of coffee down her blouse and Mother gathered up her medicines and her Holy Bible, but it was Pearl who thought to rescue Mother’s treasure box from its place on the table near her sewing chair. She hugged it to her chest and was hurrying across the yard when a big soldier with small ugly eyes and tobacco juice in his beard stepped in front of her and said, poking at the treasure box with a dirt-nailed finger, “Whatcha got there, tadpole?”
She hugged the box closer and took a step backward, but her heart was beating hard.
The man made to snatch the box from her and she ducked past him, head low, the box wrapped tightly in both arms. She thought she would run free but he caught her hair, which was braided in a pigtail, and jerked it hard, and she screamed out loud because it hurt, and also because she was so scared he would steal Mother’s treasure box.
He had his hands on the box and would have twisted it away from her but at that moment the captain, who had come from nowhere, shouted, “Sergeant, attention!”
The man with the beard stepped back and stood straight as an arrow,