Dow

Title: Deployment
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Just at the first fail of light we came upon a farmhouse. We watched it for movement. Finally, Sergeant Pembrooke said he thought he saw a whiff of smoke slip from the chimney. We reconnoitered.
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Bill Parsons was the first to reach the extended porch. After he crept around and peered into a broken window, he motioned the all clear. I called for a defensive perimeter and we investigated the cabin.
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Inside, three were hanging from the exposed rafters: a handsome woman and two old men. One of the old men was missing digits and there was a dark cavern where one of his eyes had been. “That’un didn’t go quiet,” Sergeant Pembrooke said as he studied the corpse’s sallow face.
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Parsons stood transfixed before the female, clicking his tongue. “Woman like that,” he mused, “would like have been soiled by ourn enemy.” He’d taken his hat off and was holding it over his heart in some elemental show of respect to her beauty.
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“These fiends aren’t interested in the sensual,” I said. He extracted something from the woman’s waistband and studied it.
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“Sir,” he said, offering the object to me. It was a crude doll dressed in a homespun frock coat. The angle of the bulbous head on the doll matched the odd expressionless death masque of the hanging woman. A banner of colors crisscrossed the doll’s chest, and the ric rac at the cuffs of the frock coat bore the red and blue colors of the partisans. “Does this mean there was a child?” he said.
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“Yes, they have other uses for the children,” I said, not wanting to continue the exchange in the same vein. “These colors are what the mother died for,” I said, running my fingers over the coarse cloth on the doll. “It’s what they all die for.” I tucked the doll into my haversack.
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We buried the lot of them in the vegetable garden where the soil was malleable and fecund. Then we burned the cabin, the flames lashing out into the darkening night. A rat ran out of the burning edifice, its tail aflame as it sped through the grass. Sergeant Pembrooke found some humor in that.
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As the flames died away, some of the enlisted men dragged coals out of the rage with forkening hooks and began to prepare the evening meal: Johnny cake and grits ever the standard of the working soldier. We mostly ate in silence as a moon crept across the empty sky, each man lost in the thoughts of home, weary of burying the innocent dead in this land fraught with the danger. I took the doll out and placed it on my knee. Its black eyes told me nothing.
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We all waited for the woodland sounds of the hideous things we sought, eager to silence as many as we could before our deployment reached it denouement. I was eager to flash the colors before the face of those we dispatched. Eager to reunite the doll with the child who had made it.
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Fiction by Dow Ford