I Shall Be Near to You

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2014 by Erin Lindsay McCabe

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

Crown and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McCabe, Erin Lindsay.
I shall be near to you : a novel / Erin Lindsay McCabe.
pages cm
1. Soldiers—History—19th century—Fiction. 2. Husband and wife—Fiction. 3. Impersonation—Fiction. 4. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3613.C3233.I7 2014
813′.6—dc23           2013028670

ISBN 978-0-8041-3772-0
eBook ISBN 978-0-8041-3773-7

Jacket design by Alison Forner
Jacket photographs: (soldier) Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division [Reproduction Number: LC-DIG-ppmsca-27185]; (vintage paper texture) wanchai/Shutterstock; (flowers) Cecilia Bajic/agalma/iStock; (background paper) Alexander Novikov/E+/Getty Images; (map on spine) © The Protected Art Archive/Alamy

v3.1

For Douglas and Dallas
And, of course, the women who fought

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Home

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Camp

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Union

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Battle

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Wound

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

About the Author

PROLOGUE

All of us are clean for once, hair slicked back, our new kepis on, our trousers still creased, standing in the dim shop, a blue curtain draped across the wall behind us. The photo man, he makes us six press together like horses in a rainstorm. Jimmy and Henry stand on one side, then Jeremiah and me, then Will, and Sully on the end, looking even more tall and gangly next to Will. The photo man keeps telling Sully to stand still. Jeremiah’s hand rests on my shoulder and my arm is round his waist. My spine shivers like we’ve been caught kissing in church.

The photo man finally sees what the rest of us already know about Sully and his chances of staying put. There is a burst of light. None of us jump at that, but Sully ain’t still of course.

When I’ve given over four bits and am holding my tintype in my hand, I almost holler at Sully for ruining the picture, him nothing but a fuzzy blur leaning forward. Anyone looking will think we’re good friends, all of us joined up together. Anyone will see one boy shorter than the rest, younger too maybe with that smooth face, but just as hard when it comes to the eyes. Papa will see the only son he’ll ever have. Mama will see different when she gets that tintype in the mail. She will see us holding each other. She will see I still ain’t ever the daughter she wanted. But all I see is me and Jeremiah, his head leaning toward mine, his fingers tight on my shoulder.

H
OME

NEAR FLAT CREEK, NEW YORK:
JANUARY-FEBRUARY 1862

‘Sit still, my daughter, until thou know
how the matter will fall.’

—Ruth 3:18

CHAPTER
1

JANUARY 1862

I know it when I see them. Jeremiah. The boys, Henry and Jimmy O’Malley, Sullivan Cameron. The four of them in a tight bunch across the churchyard, a bushelful of excitement between them, looking sideways with smiles only half hidden, that handbill paper all soft from too much of their hands on it. I know right then they are planning on joining up. It makes me so mad I could kick shins, but I stay put next to Betsy, listening to Mama talking about Mrs. Waite’s baby, how sweet, how pretty, and her so young and her husband gone already, killed at Bull Run and his enlistment almost done.

And then I just can’t stand still. I march through the snow to the boys’ corner, watching their mouths clamp shut as soon as they see me coming. Jimmy hides himself farther behind Henry, always trying to stay out of a fight, and Sully snatches that paper out of Jeremiah’s hands and hides it behind his back, but it’s Jeremiah I want. I grab his elbow and yank.

Sully whoops, ‘I told you she’d be mad!’

‘It ain’t like it’s tough getting Rosetta riled,’ Henry laughs, showing all his crazy teeth.

I don’t pay them any mind. I just drag Jeremiah back around the church’s corner so none of them gossiping churchladies can see.

‘What you think you’re playing at?’ I ask.

He leans his long body against the church, reaching out to pull my hand off my hip, smiling the whole time like it’s nothing, his hand cool and smooth with calluses.

‘What do you mean?’ he says, like I don’t know. Like everyone don’t. Like the men ain’t been talking about the war for most of the year, my Papa standing with Mr. Cameron and Jeremiah’s Pa, their voices loud, their hands moving, complaining on Lincoln or McClellan or talking about how if we had more Generals like Grant the war would be over already. Now more than ever I am wishing it was.

‘What makes you think you need to be the one teaching those Rebels a lesson?’ I ask him.

‘Rosetta, that ain’t the only thing—’

‘You marry me then,’ I say, and I ain’t even scared.

‘What?’ he says, his back straight as the steeple.

‘Marry me. If you aim to go off and fight, well I don’t aim to be a spinster. You make me your widow before you go off and die, that’s what.’

‘I don’t aim to die,’ he says, eyes gone all to pupil, arrowhead shiny.

‘You do this, you might as well. Mr. Waite, he’s gone for sure. You want to be like him?’

‘Rosetta,’ he says, ‘you know a man’s got to—’

‘A man!’ I say, pulling my hand away. ‘You kiss me by the creek and make me think things and plan on leaving the whole time?’

He looks down, his jaw clenched. ‘Rosetta, it’s good money,’ he says, meeting my glare, taking up my hand again. ‘You know when I get back, we’ll have money enough for Nebraska, get ourselves that farm—’

‘No,’ I say to him. ‘No more dream talk. Don’t you leave me here like nothing. You marry me. Next Sunday. Or the week after. I don’t care when. But you do it before you go and join. Because if you don’t—’ I can’t even say it.

‘Don’t cry,’ he says, reaching for the handkerchief in his pocket.

‘You just marry me,’ I tell him, wiping my eyes with the back of my hand before walking past the boys, ignoring Sully and Henry pulling faces as I go back to Mama and Betsy.

B
ETSY
’
S BREATHING IS
so loud and my mind won’t quit.

All day I waited, but Jeremiah ain’t come by to help Papa fix tools or make rope like he always does. And me, staring out the window and slamming doors and clattering dishes the whole time ’til Mama threw me out of the kitchen for giving Betsy fits.

I kick at the quilts, sliding away from Betsy and the warmth coming off her. The floorboards are cold but I go to the window. Nothing. Not a thing but snow outside and my breath turning to mist against the inside of that glass.

Out there in the dark, the creek winds through the trees to our back fence line, to where it crosses over onto the Snyders’ land. The creek is where I first learned something of Jeremiah besides his name and that he didn’t read good for being two years older, the first time Eli got to bothering me on account of our papas’ quarreling. I was feeling easy that day, outside our grieving house, proud that Papa was trusting me with a job so grown up.

The water rippled past my shins, the trout darted past my ankles. But fishing always ends in pounding heads with rocks. My pail sat on the squishy mud by the bank of the creek, four trout in there, brushing the sides with their silver-brown tails. My toes old-man wrinkled from being in the creek since first light. Eli came crashing through the bushes behind me, his face red like a dried apple, and his friends, boys whose papas sometimes did day labor for Mr. Snyder, hanging back in the bushes, ready to run.

‘You can’t fish here,’ Eli told me.

‘I can fish anywhere I want. You don’t own this creek,’ I said, wondering if I should run or swim or scream, and standing frozen like a deer instead.

‘My Papa owns the pool where those fish hatched, and these fish are mine,’ he said.

When he picked up my pail I screamed, ‘No! Those fish are for my Mama! She’s sick!’ but he dumped my four brown trout in the calm water by the bank. They looked sad and stiff bobbing there in the water and I wanted to be everywhere at once, saving my fish before they floated away, pounding Eli’s head. Instead I ran at him, clumsy in the water, and stabbed into his belly with my pole. I didn’t know that was a mistake until too late.

‘How dare you!’ I said. ‘My Mama’s so sick and you throw away our supper?’ And then I said things that didn’t make no sense. ‘That’s for the baby! You take away everything and I don’t even have no brother!’

He grabbed my pole, making my arm jump like I’d got the biggest fish in the world on the line. I wouldn’t let go and he jerked and jerked.

I slipped and fell hard on the green slime creek rocks and when I came up sputtering, he shoved me back in the water before breaking my pole over his knee.

Only the splashing and yelling stopped me from the murder I was thinking.

‘You can’t push a girl!’ one of them boys was saying. It was tall and skinny Jeremiah Wakefield, sticking his chest out, stomping through the water, pushing Eli’s shoulders with both hands, pushing him away from where I was standing. ‘It ain’t right.’

I cried then, everything hurting so bad I sat back down in the water, watching a snot string dangling from my nose like spiderweb and then dropping in the water; I cried for the fresh mound on the hill and the new baby born dead and my Mama sick with fever, but I said, ‘The fish …’

I pull that curtain shut. What kind of fool have I been, thinking Jeremiah would want me for a wife with that as his first real memory of me?

Betsy sprawls across the whole bed. Maybe I ain’t leaving this house after all. Maybe I’ll be sharing this bed with Betsy until she’s the one getting married, until her husband is the one taking over Papa’s farm because a spinster daughter don’t get nothing if there’s a man around to claim it. Maybe Jeremiah didn’t mean a thing by making Eli leave me be, by helping Papa with the rope and the horses. Maybe he was only ever being neighborly and all those kisses I let him steal really were only for practice.