At times, quiet comforted Sam, and at other times it suffocated him. He was happy to be long past the proximity of cannon fire that most likely led to his hearing loss, something Margaret accused him of using selectively. But the thunder of guns might soon again be upon them and there wasn't a damn thing he, or anyone else it seemed, could do about it. Lord knew how he'd tried. He'd survived the Mexicans, the Comanches, the Rangers, even politics. It wasn't the battle he missed but its consequential aftermath and his piece of that legacy that carved a straight path out of tyranny. Now, the fools in charge had let notions of power and threats of war deafen their ears to any talk of compromise, and it had not escaped Sam's notice that old men and politicians suffered similar afflictions; stubbornness and trouble hearing.

He'd gotten used to the incessant ringing in his ears when everything around him was still and sometimes found it like listening to the cicadas singing praise to the summer's heat. He'd turned that harbinger of old age and approaching death into something cheery—even optimistic. After all, he was still a man who had something to do. But, when quiet washed over him like an inrush of flood waters, when it was the result of a shushing, when negotiations had broken down, or when Margaret was angry, it could feel like he was drowning in an ocean of silence.

Sam dragged his cane chair further out on the porch that morning after the sun steepened over the canopy and the breeze picked up over the bay. It was the perfect time of year, almost May, when the north winds wave a surrender flag until the Fall, and the southerlies hadn't yet picked up steam. It didn't matter much to him. He was used to it all. But the weather this trip had, so far, been grand, remarkable even. Just enough rain to keep the dust down and the sand out of the cabin.

Margaret was tending her garden and busying herself with remedies for the bandit jackrabbits that invaded nightly. The bitter brew she liked to call coffee had gone cold in his tin cup on the table beside him, resting atop a three-day old obsessively-read newspaper. His carving knife and the chunk of wood he'd been working kept the folded pages from blowing away.

He'd been outside in the breezeway since before sunup, whittling on a piece of pine, composing letters Margaret would later scribe, calculating the odds of this and that, working a mind that often kept him from a full night's sleep. He'd whittled on the wood chunk until the bones in both hands seemed to freeze up and turn to stone. He dropped the knife and wood atop the newspaper open to the article about the attack on Sumpter when he sensed he was no longer alone.

He turned toward the other side of the dogtrot from where he and Margaret slept and noticed the innocence and playfulness of a child's blue eye peering at him through a cracked opening of the cabin door. Their eyes stared at each other for a time longer than is comfortable for most. This was their game, and it was played almost every day since they'd arrived at the Point. The stakes were extremely high. Blinking, Sam had led Nettie to believe, was a damnable sin; cowardice that led to peoples' deaths. Even so, he would let her win sometimes. Sam was due a smile and gave one to her with a wave to come to him.

Nettie swung the door wide open and scampered toward the man most assumed was her grandpa. Her towheaded curls bounced in the sunshine as she took a running start to launch into his lap, something that happened often enough that Sam braced himself for the impact. Four thumps across the porch planks in her bare feet and she was effortlessly perched atop his creaky knees.

"How is Miss Nettie this fine morning," he said to her softly, the once great orator's throat dry and crackly from underuse.

"Doing just fine, Pawpaw. And it is a fine morning at that. How about yourself?"

Sam's heart soared at the way Nettie took to the ways proper folk spoke to each other. It was all Margaret's doing of course, since Sam's pursuits didn't typically put him in the orbit of home very often, and he was proud of her around acquaintances and strangers alike. She had become a likeable companion.

"Fit as a fiddle, now that you're here," Sam said to her, his smile broad as the distant horizon.

She pecked his whiskered cheeks and giggled. "Your sideburns tickle, Pawpaw."

"Then you best stop kissing my face, little girl, or you're likely to giggle yourself all the way to the asylum." And with that he poked a rib, and then another until she squirmed. Nettie slid down off Sam's lap and began pacing the porch, stopping to draw swirls with her big toe in the sand.

"What you got in mind for today, Pawpaw?"

"Well, young lady, I have letters to commence writing," he glanced at the folded newspaper flapping in the breeze from off the bay, "and I suspect I should get to them before too long." The subject was important, the recipients weeks away, and time was draining through the glass.

"Well, seein' as Mama usually does your scribing, and she's tied up in the garden, suppose we could visit the shoreline a while?" It hadn't been that long ago when Sam first laid eyes on Nettie, a useless speck of pink, wrinkly skin and spiky hair, as needy as a beggar with a fierce set of lungs. She'd grown to be quite a negotiator, and this trip to the Point he noticed her abilities to reason and persuade, with him anyway. Tantrums, she'd recently told him, were for babies.

"What on Earth is at the shore, Nettie? Water's a might chilly for a swim."

"There was a storm last night," she said looking at him with as much intensity as she could muster and still stay in character. She knew he responded to intensity. "Who knows what treasures could have blown out of the sea. Did you hear it?"

"Yes, I heard it," he said, though he hadn't.

"It didn't last long, but the wind blew hard for a little while. Maybe a ship washed up on the beach. Can we go have a look, Pawpaw?"

"I suppose. Go tell your Mama where we're goin' and I'll hook up the buggy."

Nettie held the reins under Sam's watchful eye down the trail to the beach. He told her she needed to practice her driving skills but, truth be told, his hands still ached, and it was extra effort making the knots in the rigging. Sam wasn't one to expose frailties to anyone, especially family, to whom his legend could be especially frail. The trip wasn't more than three miles or so but was slow going; sometimes because of the softened sand beneath the wheels, and sometimes because Nettie spotted something she hadn't before seen. A kit fox and its mother huddled in a hollow under a mesquite, shielded from the elements, or a cluster of teals in the marsh feeding on widgeon grass. The complex spider web of interconnected existence along the coastal prairie fascinated her, so much so their progress to the shore ceased while questions came in a deluge. Sam didn't mind. Taking time with Nettie seemed as natural as the environment she was so curious about.

Sam brought along his spyglass and taught Nettie the proper techniques to steady its heft and sharpen the focus. Unable to capture a discernible image, she grew impatient with the contraption, settling for her own young eyes.

"I trust my own eyes, Pawpaw." She collapsed the glass and handed the brass cylinder back to him.

"As you should," he said.

Once they reached the beach where treasure chests full of shells would be found, Nettie climbed down from the buggy, kicked off her moccasins and scampered off to where the water met the land. Sam watched her run sure-footed and free diagonally across the wide stretch of sand from where it was white under the sun to where it turned brown as mud, and the hem of her dress became dark and heavy with seawater. It was presently low tide. A constant, cooling breeze blew off the water providing some relief to the sun's ever presence. A bluster of wind caught the brim of Sam's straw hat and took it sailing toward the dunes. He retrieved it after some effort slogging through the sand and with the help of spindly yaupon serving as backstop. He was aware how foolish a man chasing a hat could seem to onlookers and hoped Nettie had been too preoccupied with her mission to notice. Sam led the mule over to a driftwood log and secured it.

"Bring my sack, Pawpaw," the girl cried across the open beach. Sam could not entirely understand her words, but could guess what she wanted. He reached behind the tailboard and lifted her burlap sack high over his head, the one she always used for such expeditions, and Nettie nodded approvingly. He made his way down the gentle slope to the water's edge. The previous evening's storm had deposited a trove of oyster, clam and snail shells some pulverized into brittle shards, a few whole, with colors glimmering just under the clear water awash in sunshine.

Nettie took the sack and laced her fingers into Sam's roughened hand to guide him where she wanted him to go. "We're looking for cocos today," she said bending and plucking an imperfect sample from the sand and holding it up for Sam to see. She laid it in the palm of his hand. It was pure white with speckles of brown and copper across the ridges. "Of course, we're looking for complete specimens, so you can throw that one back, if you please," she said, poking a likely candidate wedged in the sand with the tip of her toe.

"What do you plan to do with these, Nettie?"

"I'm going to make a necklace. I've saved a length of twine that will be perfect to string them together."

Sam recalled how wide Nettie's eyes became when they once stopped in town to chat with an old brown woman vending home remedies and whose necklace sparkled in the sunlight. The woman leaned over to dish some spices for Sam while Nettie, probably five years old then, reached out to touch the dangling shells. From that point on she'd been obsessed with seashells and what they could be transformed into.

"Like the old Indian woman's?"

She nodded.

"I guess we'll need plenty, then. Reckon your sack's big enough for this job?" he teased.

Nettie dropped his hand and gave him a look. Not disrespectful; she knew better—something sweeter and more playful, and wandered deeper into the gentle surf where she knew he would not follow.

Sam scoured the high ground while Nettie perused the verge of the sea going the same direction. She was quiet now, concentrating wholly on the chore of finding the rare and beautiful. It hurt Sam's eyes studying the white sand in search of white shells and he quickly distracted himself with glances back toward the dunes. A few feet further, he blinked at the sight in front of him—a bleached-white sand dollar, wholly intact, the star-shaped design in perfect symmetry. He carefully scooped it up letting the sand slide through his fingers until it was resting alone in his palm. He was about to call out to Nettie, knowing she would be thrilled at his find, but decided to pocket the treasure in his waistcoat, a surprise for later.

The hot, late morning became a boiling early afternoon and Sam coaxed Nettie into the shade of a mesquite to share sips of water and some biscuits and jam Margaret packed in a basket with some cured ham. She spoke incessantly about her finds with a story behind each shell she pulled from the sack, only one of them a coco. It was clear Nettie had veered off of her original design concept about what the necklace might look like. She was a good eater and devoured two entire biscuits and a nice chunk of the meat. Soon thereafter, her eyes were sleepy, her forehead and cheeks red as sugar beets and she was soon dozing on the blanket Sam put out for their picnic. A tiny snort meant she was out for at least the next little while.

Sam stepped from the shadows, lit his pipe and strolled down to the water's edge to smoke it. He looked across the bay toward the Gulf, gateway to the seas and the rest of the world. He thought about how all life at one point emerged from mother ocean and would eventually retreat within her. North, up the beach, battle lines were being drawn, and he knew the war would be long and hideous. South were the remains of his clashes. The husks of empty cannon, the bones of soldiers drying in the sun, seemed somehow less valiant now in his memory. In the prelude to a new, altogether different conflict, what would it all mean?

'You're always walking onto someone's battlefield,' he thought to himself, an image he'd tried shaking off but couldn't. The diversion of Nettie, a flower in the sunshine, a hermit crab stalking the beach, kept the demons at bay for a while, but they always knew the way home.

After supper, Sam stepped out to the breezeway for a pipeful and a look at the first stars. He'd just tucked his matches in his pocket and felt the edge of the sand dollar when Nettie called from the kitchen, 'goodnight.'

"Come out here, young thing. I've something for you."

He sat down in his cane chair puffing on his pipe waiting for Nettie to come to him. He waited a stretch he felt was too long and wheedled her again. "Come on now girl. It won't keep all night."

The door flung open and the light from the kitchen silhouetted the four-foot-tall figure making a beeline for him. "I'm here, Pawpaw," she cried, launching herself onto his lap just as he was retrieving the matches from his waistcoat pocket. Her hip met his pocketed hand, and he could have sworn he heard the delicate sand dollar crumbling in to fine bits within his pocket, that perfectly shaped lone star disintegrating into sand.

"Whatcha have for me, Pawpaw?"

He kissed the top of her curls and said, "All of my love, Nettie. I wish it could be more."