The Departure happened in June 1865, six months after Appomattox. My father died of fever two weeks before — a simple infection from a wound that should have healed and didn't. He was in the house when The Departure came. I was in the barn, mending a harness, and I didn't know until three days later when I went inside and found him in his chair, still wearing the coat he'd put on that morning to walk to the courthouse, with a letter half-written on his desk: To my son Asher, if I am not w

The letter was unfinished. I finished it for him, though he never read the words: or I am gone, know that I tried. It was a lie. I don't know if he tried. But the letter needed an ending, and I was his son, and sons end their fathers' letters.

I was sixteen. Old enough to hold a rifle. Old enough to understand that the war was over and the dead were dead and the living had to decide what to do with the land they'd fought over and failed to keep.

The Shenandoah Valley was a wound that hadn't scabbed over. Farms abandoned. Fields half-harvested. Roads blocked with broken wagons and the bones of horses that had belonged to armies — Confederate, Union, doesn't matter now, horses are horses. The river ran clear and cold and carried the reflection of mountains that had watched this valley change hands more times than either side could count.

I walked the valley for a week after The Departure. I went from farm to farm, house to house, looking for people who were still alive and couldn't find any who were old enough to tell me what to do. The ones I found were kids — some thirteen, some seventeen, most in between — standing in doorways or sitting on porches or wandering the roads with no destination, the way lost dogs wander when they've lost their pack.

There were hundreds of us in the valley. Hundreds of children and young teens, inheriting a world we'd been too young to break and too old to fix.

I found Clara Beaumont at the bridge.

The bridge spanned the Shenandoah River about two miles north of my family's farm. It was half-destroyed — a Union artillery strike, probably, or maybe just the weight of too many retreating armies. It was still passable if you walked carefully. I was crossing it on a Sunday morning when I heard someone shouting from the other side.

"Hey! You! Stop!"

I stopped. A girl stood on the north bank, maybe fifteen, wearing a dress that had been fine before The Departure and was now functional and frayed. She had dark hair pulled back in a knot and eyes that were either angry or tired — it was hard to tell which.

"This is Union territory," she said.

"The bridge is broken," I said. "There's no territory on this side."

She came closer, cautiously. "I'm Clara Beaumont."

"Asher Calloway."

She'd heard my name. Everyone had. The Calloway farm was one of the larger properties in the valley, and my father had been known — not well, not badly, just known, the way a man is known when he attends court and votes in elections and says hello to neighbors at church and doesn't make waves.

"Your father died?" she said.

"Six weeks before everybody else."

"Hmph."

That was her response. Hmph. I learned that Clara Beaumont was not a person given to elaborate responses. Her father, Colonel Beaumont, had been a Union officer who died at Gettysburg. Her mother was alive — or had been, until The Departure took her too. Clara tended her mother's garden, a small rectangle of vegetables behind the Beaumont farmhouse, and she tended her father's memories, which she kept in a separate room that nobody was allowed to enter.

We met at the bridge regularly after that. It was neutral ground — not Union, not Confederate, just a broken span over a river that didn't care about borders. We talked. We argued. We discovered that we were more alike than we wanted to be — both angry, both grieving, both pretending we knew what we were doing when we had no idea.

"The valley will starve," I said one afternoon. "We have cotton in the fields that nobody knows how to pick. We have corn that's half-rotted. We have rifles that nobody knows how to maintain. We're children playing at farming and failing."

"Then stop playing," Clara said.

"Stop what?"

"Farming wrong. Learn. Find someone who knows."

"I've been asking the old farmers — the ones who are sixteen or seventeen or whatever — and they don't know either, because their fathers taught them, and their fathers are dead."

"Then ask the women."

"The women are doing what they can, but—"

"Asher, my mother grew vegetables before my father died and after. She grew them alone, with help from a girl of fifteen and a dog that's now dead. She grew them because there was nothing else to do. That's not leadership. That's persistence. And persistence is more valuable than leadership when the leaders are dead."

I thought about this. She was right. She was always right, and she never announced that she was right, which made it worse — or better, depending on how stubborn you were. I was stubborn.

Colonel Preston Hayes arrived in August. He was fifty-four, one of the few adults who'd survived The Departure. He'd been in Richmond on business — meeting with government officials who were also gone now — and when he returned to the valley, he found it empty of adults and full of children trying to figure out what to do with land they didn't understand.

He set up in a fortified house on a hill overlooking the valley floor. He called himself Colonel though his real rank had been Major. Nobody corrected him. He began recruiting — telling the valley's teens that The Departure was God's test, that the old had been found wanting, and the young must carry forward their vision. He wanted to reunify the South under youth leadership, with himself as the Protector.

He had a small army — maybe forty teens, mostly from farms along the river, drawn by his authority and his weapons. He had muskets and ammunition that he'd taken from abandoned depots, and he distributed them to his followers with the gravity of a man distributing sacraments.

Clara's community refused to join. The Beaumont farm and three neighboring properties formed a coalition that was smaller than Hayes' group but more determined. They fortified the farmhouse, planted extra crops, and prepared for the possibility of conflict.

Isaiah Washington warned both sides. He was seventeen, a freedman who ran a general store near the valley floor. Pragmatic, neutral, the only person both sides came to for supplies. He sold flour to Hayes' people and salt to Clara's. He didn't take sides because he understood something the others didn't: in a fight between children, everyone loses.

"The valley can't sustain a war," he told me when I came to his store one evening. I was buying coffee — real coffee, not the chicory substitute people had been drinking since the blockade — and he was sweeping the floor, which was a pointless activity in a world with no customers, but Isaiah swept because it gave his hands something to do and his mind something to focus on.

"We're not planning a war," I said.

"Your side and his side aren't planning a war. But fear is planning one for you."

I didn't have an answer for that.

The gathering storm broke in October. Hayes announced that he would "restore order" to the valley — which meant he intended to take control of every farm, every field, every weapon, and distribute them according to his judgment. Clara's coalition refused to surrender their arms. Hayes said they would be treated as rebels.

I stood between them. Not metaphorically — literally. On the road that ran between the Beaumont farm and Hayes' fortified house, I walked out alone at dawn and stood in the middle of the road with my hands visible and no weapon.

Clara walked out from the north side and stood beside me. She had no weapon either.

Hayes' men arrived on the east side — thirty of them, muskets raised. Clara's people arrived on the west — twenty, fewer but fierce. Hayes shouted from the back of the group: "Step aside, boy. This isn't your fight."

I said, loud enough for everyone to hear: "It is now."

Hayes ordered fire. His men lowered their muskets. One by one, they lowered them. Not because they were brave. Because they were thirteen and fourteen and fifteen, and firing at a girl and a boy standing side by side in a Virginia road seemed, suddenly, like something they'd have to live with longer than the war.

Hayes screamed. Nobody listened.

Something else happened too — a third group, teens from Hayes' own side, stepped forward and stood next to me and Clara. They didn't speak. They just stood there, and their presence was louder than any speech.

The attack collapsed from within. Hayes rode away alone, his army dissolved not by force but by the simple, devastating act of refusal.

I was wounded — a cut on my arm from a musket butt that had swung in the confusion. Clara carried me to the Beaumont farmhouse, which was smaller and warmer and smelled of lavender and earth. She bound my arm with a strip of cloth and sat beside me on the floor and didn't say anything for a long time.

"You could have been killed," she said finally.

"So could you."

"You're stupid."

"Probably."

She leaned her head against my shoulder. We sat there in the late afternoon light, two children in a farmhouse in the Shenandoah Valley, listening to the wind move through the orchards and thinking about what we'd done and whether it had mattered and whether we'd do it again.

We would. That was the tragedy and the hope of it: we would do it again, because the alternative — letting someone else decide for us — was worse than the risk of getting hurt.

The cost of peace was written on my arm. It would scar. Clara had a bruise on her shoulder from carrying me. It would fade. Some things don't.

OTMES Code: M1=10 M2=1 M3=3 M4=8 M5=6 M6=3 M7=5 M8=0 M9=6 M10=10 N1=0.80 N2=0.20 K1=0.40 K2=0.70 Theta=45deg V=0.70 I=1.00 C=0.90 S=0.70 R=0.60 TI=75.60