“Hand it to me.”

She brought over the frame and the cylinder, holding them clumsily. He dropped the rammer, pulled the pin, and put it on half-cock. He slipped the cylinder into place, secured it with the pin, and slowly lowered the hammer on the empty chamber. He reached down to lay the big revolver under the bed. This cost him some moments of lying perfectly still, waiting for the pain to subside again, especially in his left hand, where it radiated out of his first knuckle and crawled burning up his arm. She firmly placed his splinted hand on top of his head again. He watched as she dipped the glass rod into the bottle of laudanum and dripped thirty drops one after another into a glass of water. He drank it down.

“Darling, there is a ring in my fiddle case. Where’s my fiddle case?”

“Here.” She pulled it from under the bed. She opened it and saw the ring box, lifted the top to see the ring with its tiny peridot. “Simon, it is very beautiful!”

“Give me your hand.”

He struggled to hold the ring and push it onto her finger. He got it on upside down but didn’t seem to notice. She quickly turned it so that the stone was uppermost and leaned to kiss him again.

“There,” he said. “Finally. Darling girl.”

The night of the city fell in liquid sequential curtains, shadow after shadow, from the slow drowsy army horses in their paddocks on Government Hill who stood in silence under the alders there, and then over the ruins of the Alamo and then the river itself cast in deep shadow where a few canoas with a lamp at the prow made their way home. St. Mary’s answered San Fernando as the old bells sang out over the plazas. A groaning noise as the millstones of the upper mill were disengaged for the night and the Guenther waterwheel lifted and poured, lifted and poured. Bats sailed out of the Bat Cave. Down Obraje Street a lone horse walked slowly. Laughter and clashing pans from the kitchen of this small house, the smell of woodsmoke.

He touched her face. He moved his hand like a block of wood. “You are brave,” he said. “Brave and conniving. I love you. I love you so much.”

She lay her head briefly on his chest and closed her eyes and said that she loved him as well and always would. They listened as the horse with its rider walked on by and the bells subsided. She took a long quavering breath. “By God it has been a hard day.” Her eyes were shining with tears. He put his hand on her shoulder, beside her throat, and with his thumb he could feel the pulse of her heart.

“Darling, it’s all right now. We’re all right.”

“Yes. In a moment I am going to undress and put on my nightgown.” She cleared her throat and said this in a rather determined way, as if he might object. “And so, this is not to affright you with women’s underthings.” She sat up.

“I won’t be affrighted,” he said and smiled at her; that round small mouth, her candlelit skin. He thought of her light body beneath the severe dark jacket and its skirt, which drifted over his bedside in rumpled yards of material, and that she was his now and no one could ever take her away, not ever. The basin of hot water at her feet smoked in the cold.

“They are mysterious and complicated.” She cleared her throat again.

“Sweetheart.” He couldn’t stop looking at her, her candlelit face. “Maybe I should tell you I have seen them before.”

“No, don’t tell me,” she said. “Not now.” She laid her hand on his arm and her hand had a slight tremor. She said, “Tell me about the alligator.”

“Tomorrow. The alligator tomorrow.”

She got up and stepped behind the calico curtain. He bent up one knee with a small involuntary noise and moved to relieve the pain in his hip. Thirty drops of laudanum and the pain was still there, but the secret of that drug was that he didn’t care if it was. When she came out she was in a white nightgown that trailed on the floor; it had a high neck and long sleeves and an immense amount of lawn pouring out of a lacy yoke. She seemed lost inside it.

“Oh, Simon, I got the pattern size all wrong. It’s a tent. It’s a circus tent.” She stood with her toes curled up against the cold floor and plucked at it, looked down at all the vast white yardage in dismay.

He laughed and then tried to stop himself. He bit his lips together and tipped his head back against the pillow and the roll of his old Confederate trousers. “Oh God, my ribs,” he said.

“It’s too big!”

“No,” he said. “Could it be?”

“Well,” she said. “I didn’t get a chance to try it on, you see.” She came to sit on the far side of the bed and laid her palm on his forehead to check for fever and trailed it down to rest on the bones of his shoulder, as if he were made of china, broken and only recently repaired.

“I see.” His smile was slightly crooked. “This is not much of a wedding night, darling.” She regarded her bare feet. Said nothing. When she raised her head again he saw a different expression on her face: unsure, apprehensive. “It’s all right,” he said. “I would like to throw myself upon your maiden body and ravish you, but the ravishing business will have to come later.”

“Well, curses anyhow.”

She gathered up a fistful of the white material and wiped at her eyes and her hands were shaking with nerves, with the events of this long and terrible day suddenly crashing down upon her dark head. He reached for her, ran his swollen, bruised hand up her arm. After a moment in which they could hear the singing whisper of the night wind at the window he said, “Let down your hair.”

By this time the drug had left him vague and nearly wordless. She unpinned her hair and it came down in a beautiful tumble, thick and glossy. It was like rain. His eyes slid shut. At some time she fell asleep tucked in beside him. The lamp oil burned low. He awoke in the small hours before dawn and he lay awake and at first contented with the warmth of her body against him but then all the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe came back to him without any effort on his part, the dark-haired women who died or were spirited off or were themselves spirits. To make this go away he put his left hand on her head, felt the silky mass of hair beneath his splinted fingers. She slept and dreamed.

He saw all the hard road before them unrolling like a scroll and their names there, for better or for worse, written in the Book of Life.