The summer of 1865 saw groups of bedraggled soldiers working their way home from the war. Howard and Clark Franklin had left home a handful of years ago, no longer young bucks feeling out their antlers. They returned older, wiser, and considerably more battered. The Franklin brothers were twins, sharing the same shaggy, almost curly, dark hair, warm brown eyes, thin, almost sharp noses, and slender, lanky build. Howard’s thin nose took a drastic turn to the right where it had been broken in an altercation nearly a dozen years ago and Clark bore a puckered scar on his right thigh where a bullet had caught him during the war.
The summer sun blazed in a sky so pale it was almost white. Only two miles separated the brothers from the homestead where they grew up. Two miles and a thrown shoe. Clark let go of the nondescript brown mare’s foreleg and backhanded the sweat from his forehead. “Well, Howard, she’s plumb lost it.”
Smoothing down his bushy mustache, Howard peered at the sun for a long moment, eyes squinted against the glare. “Yep, but I ‘spect we can still get there by dark.” He slid off his brown gelding’s back and took up the reins. “I’ll walk with you.”
“’Spect they’ve got dinner set down for us already, and us late.” Clark said.
“We’ll never hear the end of it from Bea.”
“T’weren’t nothing we could do about it.” Clark said, shifting his gunbelt awkwardly. Even after four years in the war, carrying a gun every day, they still made him seem like a bear in a tutu.
They walked on in silence, the comfortable silence of long acquaintance, a silence filled with the vague sensation that each could almost hear the other’s thoughts. Their roughspun cotton shirts and trousers were rumpled and stained from long days on dusty roads. Their faces were gritty and brown, where they weren’t streaked with muddy tracks of sweat. It had been a long, difficult trail since last they walked this road and while there was a certain amount of relief in homecoming, there was also a certain amount of worry.
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Would the homestead be the same as they had left it? Would their four sisters be safe and settled? Howard and Clark had kept a steady stream of letters sent homeward but receiving letters had been much more sporadic. Would their homecoming be as they had imagined it so often during the long marches or while eating the often unsatisfying rations? Neither Clark nor Howard had been grievously wounded in action, but war changed a man. And this so-called Civil War had not been the romantic image of war so many young boys dreamed. Instead, it had been a lot of blood and guts and pain with very little glory mixed in for balance.
The setting sun settled against the rolling hills to the west of the homestead as the Franklins crested the rising lane that put them smack in the dooryard of home. A half-dozen plump chickens scattered before man and horse alike, setting up a ruckus that brought a couple of children running out of the barn and would soon draw the adults as well. The children, sandy colored hair as untamed as their uncles’, squealed with delight.
James, the older boy, nearly ten, threw himself at Howard. “Uncle Howie! Didya kill lotsa injuns? Can I see yer gun?” These first two questions led to a veritable cascade which quickly inundated Howard in a sea of ‘yep’ and ‘nope’.
The younger boy, only six and not quite old enough to recognize his uncles, held back a bit.
“Run and fetch your ma, Charles.” Clark said.
Charles leapt to obey, glancing back over his shoulder several times to catch another glimpse of his uncles back from the war. He quickly vanished inside the house. Clark watched Howard drowning in the questions of a curious youngster, his neatly trimmed, but still bushy mustache handily hiding his smirk.
When Beatrice stepped out onto the porch, it was to a sight she had long waited for, but hardly dared hope to see. Her brothers both returned from the war, hale and whole. Though her green eyes filled with tears, she fought them back as she drank in the sight of them. She cleared her throat and said, “Dinner’s ready. James, take the horses into the barn and help your Pa settle them, then wash up.”
“Awww, but-,” James started to protest.
“Do as your Ma says, James, we can talk later.” Howard said, ruffling the boy’s hair with one big hand.
As the boy took the reins from his uncles and led the tired horses to the barn, Howard and Clark took the last few steps of their homecoming. Across the creaking porch and into the familiar main room of the only place they had ever called home.