"Honor," Fightin' Joe's daddy had told the Augusta watch shop owner to engrave on the going away present. As she thought of that gifting nearly half a century past, her old grief was awakened. The hurt for her murdered daddy and big brother a lifetime ago was refreshed. She was surprised at herself when she found some sympathy for those unknown Yankees in that Georgia thicket. They were people and unfortunately for them they just happened to have had to pay Life a debt that their kind had made to her kind.
The pocketknife was wrapped and lay in a new once washed, bright, ironed yellow bandana when Lou packed for their pilgrimage. When Custer had met the consequences of his foolhardy arrogance the papers had went on about the color yellow as a symbol of the cavalry. Lou's mind went quiet and joyful when she remembered Solon's old war worn kepi with badly faded yellow band in the bottom of their old oak wardrobe. She saw again in her memories the discolored yellow-green piping on the general's tunic that day so long ago along the Tennessee at Courtland.
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The next morning after chores Lou saddled up a three-year-old big gray mule, "Moon". Pausing at her flower garden on the front edge of the front yard, she gathered purple iris, some hollyhock and edge trimmed marigolds. She rode over to Bee Springs Church. At Grand John L., Mama Bear, Nancy Bird, and Jim's resting places, each in turn, beginning with her boy, Lou touched her family's head stones. She placed a few of each of the colorful flowers on the ground at the base of the four granite monuments that recorded her loved ones.
"Folks," she said quietly aloud looking first at the deep blue beautiful cloudless sky over the top of a grove of pecan trees and then to the four green grass covered mounds. "I need y'all's help. They're both going. Abide with them and bring them home to me." She wiped her nose with a bandana from her work coat pocket. Tears seeped from her sad, forlorn and hollowed brown eyes.
On the way home, her spirit was chilled by fear and dread. She gradually became a bit resolved and knew what she had to endure. When she came to Bryson a whirl of brown activity caught the edge of her vision and she heard squawking and shrieking birds. Focusing toward a big live oak up the hillside, she witnessed a pair of Mockingbird's fluttering, singing frantically, and swooping at a good-sized chicken hawk who was making a small circle above the tree. Lou pulled Moon to a stop and sat for a few minutes until the contest was settled. She saw two brave, undersized and overmatched survivors keeping the much larger and dangerous flying predator from their tree.