I Shall Be Near to You (12 page)

‘You found ways to touch me at home, before we were ever even courting.’

‘What do you want me to do? Hold your hand? Kiss you in front of everyone?’

‘I ain’t asking you to be stupid. But maybe you ought to treat me nice sometimes. Even Jimmy sticks up for me more than you do.’ I’ve got him at least a little bit with those words because he sighs and runs his fingers through his dirty hair.

‘The boys don’t like you being here,’ he says.

‘They ain’t ever minded me coming along before.’

‘This ain’t the same as fishing, Rosetta. And you’re my wife now. Henry don’t want your blood on his hands. He keeps saying I ought not either—he says you’re tagging along and flustering me—’

‘I don’t care what Henry thinks! You care about him more than me? Maybe Henry ain’t my friend if he thinks I’ve only ever been in the way.’

‘This ain’t about who’s being your friend, Rosetta! It’s about how you shouldn’t even be here! And you said you’d go back when it was time.’

‘It ain’t time,’ I say. ‘We ain’t even fighting yet.’

‘Well, I’m fighting all the time over something! I’m tired of it!’

‘Oh, and you think I’m not tired? You think I like being treated like my husband don’t even know me? Like I’m nothing? And all the while I’ve got to worry if anybody else will come to know what I am.’

‘We’ll be moving soon, to the Capital. Everybody says it. And then it won’t be long. Once the weather turns nice, we’re bound to fight. Ain’t no sense in you coming any farther.’

‘There’s plenty sense in it! If I desert now I won’t get a penny! I’ve got to at least stay ’til we get paid. I can’t go home now! What would everyone think of me, disappearing and my husband sending me home looking like this?’

‘Maybe you should have thought of that before!’

‘Turns out there’s a lot of things I should have thought before. But I’m here so none of that matters now.’

‘It’ll be harder to keep you safe,’ he says, quiet. ‘There’ll be more people, more men to see. The boys can’t always keep covering for you.’

‘Covering for me?’ I snort. ‘Aside from maybe Jimmy, ain’t none of you covered for me even once! Calling me
ma’am
and womanish and singling me out for cooking and shooting. Covering for me—’ I spit the words and Jeremiah almost looks sorry. ‘It’ll be easier when there’s more people. Ain’t no one going to notice me.’

‘Maybe you could be like Mrs. Chalmers. You could be a laundress or a nurse—’ he says, but he don’t look at me.

‘How can I do that now? How can I go from being a soldier to all of a sudden being your wife in a dress? You think Hiram would leave me alone then?’

He sighs before saying, ‘I heard how some Companies got a Daughter of the Regiment staying back at the fighting carrying the flag.’

‘Seems like carrying a flag ain’t a way to stay safe. This Daughter of the
Regiment gets the same pay? Or laundresses? You think they get paid the same?’

‘That I don’t know.’

‘Well, I ain’t interested if I don’t get paid. You forgetting about our farm? You even still want that farm with me?’ He flinches when I say it. ‘Well then, it don’t matter where I’m at, in the front or at the back, long as the pay’s the same and that’s that!’

‘I could turn you in.’ He says it so slow, looking right at me, like it pains him to say the thing.

‘You wouldn’t,’ I say, lifting my chin.

‘I might. If it keeps you from being in harm’s way.’

‘You can’t be rid of me that easy.’

‘It ain’t you I want to be rid of! It’s just—’

That is all I need, to hear that he ain’t changed toward me, and I reach out for his hand. ‘Can’t you find a way to still be husband to me sometimes? Ain’t this time here, this being together, ain’t that better than the nothing we’d have if I’d stayed home?’

He looks at me. And then he pulls me to his chest, his stubble catching at my hair as he says, ‘I’m always husband to you. But—’

I don’t let him finish. I kiss him full on the mouth.

‘You just keep thinking that then,’ I say, and turn on my heel in the slippery mud.

W
HEN
C
APTAIN FINALLY
gets around to making us look like soldiers, Jeremiah takes a moment from admiring his own outfit to grab my elbow and say, ‘Don’t be getting ideas, Rosetta. It’s just until there’s orders,’ like we ain’t even had that talk out in the woods.

I don’t let it make me sour, though. What gets me is how I thought it’d feel right nice to put on that blue coat, but the Army seems to have forgotten to notice the shape of any of us. My trousers are the most ridiculous articles I ever did put on. They hide my shoes if I don’t roll them, and the brogans are the most crooked things besides, but there ain’t no help for it.

Jeremiah fiddles with his coat. His uniform fits him true, and I want to grab his hands and stop them before he finishes with the buttons. He’s never looked so much like something, not even on our wedding day, and his grin has a pride to it I ain’t ever seen. There ain’t none of that confidence coming over me, wearing these clothes. Only maybe I ain’t got to be so careful now. Maybe these clothes will cover me better than the ones from home.

Jeremiah pushes his way out of the tent and I follow, my cuffs already coming unrolled and dragging in the mud. The whole Company is outside, strutting and posing in the sunny aisle, roosters with new feathers. Even Will looks like he is standing a touch taller in front of his tent, watching everyone else preening. Only Ambrose sits on his crate, always looking like he is grieved.

Sully tells everyone, ‘Getting uniforms must mean we’re getting our orders to the Capital any day now!’

‘You got that on authority?’ I ask.

‘Well, no,’ he says, some of the shine going out of him.

‘You are about the worst gossip I ever met,’ I say. ‘Worse than any woman!’

That sets Sully to sputtering and the rest of the boys to laughing. Still, it don’t take but a minute before they are back to fancying themselves.

I ask Jimmy, ‘How long are your coat sleeves?’

He shrugs out of his coat and even though they say they are the same size, when we lay our coats next to each other, it turns out the sleeves on his come down at least an inch farther.

‘You want to switch?’ Jimmy asks.

Henry watches us, shaking his head, and it is a wonder how one O’Malley got to be so nice and the other so mean.

‘No,’ I say. ‘You’ve got longer arms. Wouldn’t make sense, us switching.’

Even if they don’t fit good, all of us look dashing in our blue coats. I leave one button undone like the officers do and stand up tall and make my face serious. I put my hand in my coat the way Captain does sometimes and that brings to mind that sign back in Herkimer.

‘We’ve got to have our likeness taken,’ I say, thinking on finding a ribbon in town to send Betsy too. I almost fall over when Jeremiah and Sully and Will agree without me even trying. It takes more work to bring the O’Malleys around, but the next day being Sunday it’s no trick at all to get Sergeant’s permission to leave camp and go the few miles to Utica to find us a photo man.

U
NION

NEAR WASHINGTON, D.C.:
MARCH-JUNE 1862

‘Entreat me not to leave thee, or to
return from following after thee.’

—Ruth 1:16

CHAPTER
12

FORT CORCORAN, VIRGINIA: MARCH 1862

When I was staring at Miss Riggs’ big map of all the territories, thinking outside the tall window of the schoolhouse, past the bone-white church with a pale blue sky behind it, dreaming myself through Wisconsin’s rolling prairie, and across the wide Mississippi River, all the way over the Rocky Mountains and then to California where maybe there would still be some gold left for the taking, I never really thought my ideas would come to much. Now here I am, so far from home, more than three hundred miles on the map Jeremiah gave me. Only seeing Fort Corcoran the first time makes me almost wish I never left.

The fort is nothing but dirt and banks and ditches and telegraph wires strung up on poles, jittering in the cold wind coming off the river. We march along a tall fence looking like a row of trees with their branches peeled off and through a wide gate, slipping our way through the melting snow and mud, heading to the high ground, the whole Regiment together now, all eleven Companies, more than two whole villages of people.

‘We’re really soldiers now,’ Sully yells.

Jeremiah says, ‘You got that right!’ and he don’t even look my way. Instead, he somehow gets the boys talking about the war.

Edward is the only one louder than Sully and the two of them next to each other make a fine pair, Edward with his tree-thick limbs and Sully with his deer legs.

‘Don’t mean much, being a soldier in the Army when the Navy is doing all the fighting,’ Edward says. ‘Those damn Greybacks keep making the Union look like a pack of fools, sinking our warships!’

‘That ain’t what I heard,’ Sully says. ‘I heard the USS
Monitor
beat the Rebs’ ironclad down there in Chesapeake Bay!’

‘They say there ain’t even been any soldiers killed, Union or Confederate, on those ironclads,’ Jimmy says quiet.

‘Where you getting your news?’ Edward asks. ‘I like what you’ve been hearing!’

‘Maybe we should’ve signed on with the Navy,’ Jeremiah says.

‘Ain’t any grief in joining an Army that don’t fight much,’ I say.

‘You don’t see any grief?’ Edward shouts, turning on me. ‘I’d sure like to know what you’re doing in an Army if you ain’t keen on fighting! People are counting on us keeping those Seceshes from coming North, is what you mean. The Seceshes have got designs on our goddamn Capital, and we’re here to stop them. But I guess you’d rather let those Rebs run roughshod all over us on their way to Washington?’

‘I’m saying if the Union wins the war and I don’t have to fight—’ As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I live to regret them.

‘We got people counting on us back home, is all Ross means,’ Jeremiah says real quick, his hand on my elbow.

I keep on even though Edward’s eyes are trained on my face, even as he’s stepping closer to me, his shoulders back in a way that makes my hands go to fists. ‘I’m saying there’s all kinds of things I aim to do in my life—’

‘And what might that be?’ Edward says. ‘What you got to do that’s more important than winning this—’

‘The Navy keeps winning, maybe we ain’t ever going to get our chance
to fight—or even see a battlefield!’ Jeremiah steps right in front of me and shoots me a look withering enough to dry up a whole garden. Somehow his words are enough to get the boys talking about Rebels and when the next Union victory will be, and then no one is worrying themselves over the fool thoughts I can’t keep in my head even to save myself and I am left to be secretly pleased over Jeremiah protecting me like he ought.

No one seems to mind him, but old Thomas Stakely says the thing I like best. ‘All the Union needs is one good General and one good win. Then this war will be over and we’ll have our country back and be home to our kin before harvest time.’

No matter what Edward or Jeremiah says, there’s comfort in the idea that maybe we won’t ever see Rebels up close, that maybe they will just stay where they belong, and Jeremiah will stop trying to send me home without him. We might almost be to Nebraska come Fall. All I know is, looking at dirt and dead trees ain’t how I plan to spend my last days. This fort’s cannons don’t make me feel safe, but I sure ain’t ready to be marching across a field with only my musket between me and the Rebels.

S
ULLY IS ITCHY
to go with the millboys who keep talking war the loudest, but Jeremiah says, ‘We’ve got to stick close—look out for each other.’ It makes Sully roll his eyes and Henry mutter, ‘Watch out for Ross is what you mean,’ but still those boys come along.

We line up in front of a rough-hewn shed with chinks left between the timbers. Captain Chalmers is standing there, the Union flag flapping behind him, a strange officer next to him, a big man with sloped shoulders and a down-turned mouth to match. The only bright thing about him is his gold tasseled sash.

‘I heard that’s Colonel Wheelock in front of the blockhouse,’ Sully whispers.

‘Men,’ Colonel Wheelock booms, ‘this is our home until we’re ordered on campaign. I apologize there’s no proper barracks, but as you’ve already endured tents this past month, I expect it will be no great hardship.’ He
points to a wagon standing off to his side, stacked with big wooden crates. ‘Those are your tents there, to be pitched as soon as we have laid out the rows.’

While we wait, Sergeant Ames tells us our tents are big enough to fit four, but because we are the only Regiment at the fort, for now we only have to be two to a tent. Jeremiah winks at me. I’m thinking on the niceness of a tent to ourselves when Sully punches Jeremiah on the shoulder and says, ‘I need a partner. Think Sergeant’ll let me share with you?’

Will spins, a hurt look on his face, and Jeremiah don’t say anything at first. There’s buzzing all around us, boys saying, ‘You got anybody yet?’ and ‘I’m bunking with you!’ or ‘You need a friend?’

Sully says, ‘I’ll help you keep Ross safe, like you said.’

There is a long moment before Sully laughs and gives me a shove.

‘I got you good! Don’t worry, I’m staying with Will,’ he says, and Will’s shoulders relax.

When we finally get to work setting up camp, white canvas tents go flapping in the wind and there’s the sound of pounding and swearing up and down our Company’s row. Jeremiah is all concentration, and the only words passing his lips are orders like, ‘Turn it this way,’ or, ‘Give that here.’ He is everywhere at once, hardly letting me do a thing.

Captain walks down our row, giving commands: ‘Make this line straighter! Tamp that stake in more firmly!’

It can’t be this way, not with Captain patrolling. I’ve got to do my share, but Jeremiah pounds the steel stakes to hold the edges of our tent down and won’t let go of our only mallet. He aims for me to move our knapsacks inside that tent and lay out our blankets and string up our lantern so come night we’ve got an easy time of it. Things fit for a woman, things a wife might do.