I had come back, as had thousands of others, with nothing in my hands, and only a few days' rations accorded by the enemy in my haversack; had come back to a mass of smoking débris and a wide area of ruin which opened unrecognized vistas that puzzled, dazed, and pained the home-seeker.
By instinct, I suppose, I drifted towards my ante bellum quarters. My former landlord gave me a speechless welcome. To my inquiry as to the possibility of my reinhabiting my old quarters, he simply nodded and handed me the key. The tears that I had seen standing on his lids rolled down as he did so.
The room was cumbered with the chattels of the last tenant. There was no bed amongst them, but a roll of tattered carpet served me perfectly. I fell asleep over a slab of hardtack. That evening, on waking, I bethought me of Mammy.
My kind host allowed me to make a toilet in his back room behind the store. It consisted of a superficial ablution and the loan of a handkerchief. Mammy was not in. A neighbor of her sex and color offered me a chair in her house, but I sat in Mammy's tiny porch.
This part of the city was unchanged, but I missed a familiar steeple which had always been visible from Mammy's door.
It was late afternoon when Mammy came. She did not recognize me, but paused at the gate.
“Ef you's a sick soldier you must go to the hospital; you kain' stay here,” I heard her say before I roused myself sufficiently to speak.
“Mammy.”
An ejaculation of the name of the Lord that brought the neighbor to her door went up, and Mammy caught my hands and wept.
“Come in, my Gawd! Mahs William! you ain' hurted, is you?”