I Shall Be Near to You (26 page)

Jeremiah stares, and it is the look he gets going into a battle, cold and far away. Then he says, ‘Don’t you for a minute think I can stop from keeping you in my sights and wanting you safe.’

He is schooling me, telling me something of his heart. It is a sweet thing, but that don’t keep me from saying the only truth I’ll let him believe.

‘I don’t need protecting. I can do this job as good as any.’

‘It ain’t about you doing the job. It ain’t never been about that,’ he says.

‘Then why—This whole time I’ve been trying to prove—’

‘I can’t remember a time you didn’t do whatever you lit onto, like it was just natural. I thought all I wanted was to keep you safe, protect you from this—but I wouldn’t change it for anything, you being so stone-headed, coming here, giving us this time.’

‘I lit onto you,’ I say as the Companies before us file out of the trees, ‘and the way opened up before me.’

A
S SOON AS
those boys march into the clearing, a storm of shells hails down all around them, blasting the tender thoughts out of my head. Those Rebel batteries keep up the fire so steady the Regiment can’t even advance a hundred yards to the trees on the other side of that grassy strip and our line can’t do a thing but move back to where we started.

When Henry don’t get none of his revenge, he is all over, pacing and sitting and then standing. It is plain he’s got too much feeling and nowhere to put it.

Ambrose comes to Henry’s side, taking hold of his shoulder and offering up that flask of his, saying, ‘I’m only trying to help. You can bear up better under it if you dull the pain a bit.’ But Henry don’t look at Ambrose and he don’t take that flask, even when Hiram shouts, ‘Do us all a favor and take the fucking drink, man!’

Finally Will goes to Henry, puts a hand on his arm, and says, ‘You want to write a letter home, or you want one of us to?’

That gets Henry sinking down to the ground, his head in his hands and his shoulders shaking. I ain’t ever been able to keep from crying when a person’s grieving, and I’ve got my own mourning to do for Jimmy. Jeremiah stands there, his face pinched, too proud to cry. Sully moves off a bit, looking away. But Will stays beside Henry until he takes out his papers, and there is one more thing in this world I wouldn’t know how to tell.

T
HE SUN IS
low in the sky when the Rebels come away from the embankment to test our lines. Directly before us, not two hundred paces across the small clearing, shadows start moving in the trees. There ain’t a single boy of ours that ain’t ready with his musket primed, and Sully wipes his cheeks with the backs of his hands, saying, ‘Come on, you goddamn Greybacks!’

It don’t take more than Sergeant saying, ‘Boys, I think they are Rebs! Fire on them!’

In the tiny space between Sergeant’s order and the hell blast of muskets, Henry yells, ‘For Jimmy!’

I aim careful in the dying light and fire two rounds and I can do it if I think on Jimmy, if I let myself think on what I’ve got to protect, not just me and Jeremiah, but all of our future balled up inside me. The first don’t hit a thing, but the second shot makes a space in the line advancing. Something heavy settles into my belly when the stain blooms on that soldier’s chest, the hole in the line, the tear in the fabric of some other family.

Yells of, ‘Cease Fire! Cease Fire!’ come down the line. ‘Those are our own men!’

It is a worse sick panic, thinking I’ve shot one of our own, but the men across the field keep coming. Only our artillery fires and still they are coming and they let out the same shrill howl we heard at the embankment and charge into the flank of the Companies to the right of us. Then men are running everywhere and bullets are hitting bodies again and all through the ranks is confusion and yelling, and it ain’t right, but in that moment a small
bit of peace comes over me that at least it weren’t someone friendly I shot down, that at least I kept some of those bullets from ever coming this way.

I
T AIN
’
T LONG
before that peaceful feeling is gone. Men start bellowing ‘Retreat!’ and our flag streams off into the trees. I yank Jeremiah’s sleeve and run.

We run until we put a low hill between us and them, until Captain reins his horse to a stop before us, nothing about him looking so sharp as the first time I saw him.

‘Boys,’ he says, his horse jigging back and forth in front of us, its breath as labored as ours, its eyes as white, ‘I know we’ve had losses and we have scores that want settling. But you have seen—we cannot move forward. We cannot fight this ground and win. For the protection of our Capital and for the continuance of this Army, we’re falling back to Centreville to resupply.’

After he says those words, he wheels his horse around and trots away, so he don’t hear the grumbling. Maybe I am the only one wanting to leave this place, wanting to be somewhere safe.

‘This ain’t how to end a war,’ Thomas says, shaking his head. ‘I never should’ve told my wife it’d be over by Christmas.’

‘The womenfolk knew. My wife knew none of it would come to good. She tried to keep Frank home—but I was supposed to look after—’ John Morgan says, his eyes glassy.

‘All this Army does is retreat!’ Sully says.

Henry sits on the ground, refusing to move. ‘All for nothing,’ he says. ‘All of it for nothing.’

‘It’s not for nothing,’ Will says.

‘How ain’t it?’ Henry goes almost to yelling. ‘How ain’t it for nothing when my brother is buried in that field and we ain’t a step closer to beating that enemy out there? What thing did he die for? He ain’t even got all the money we was promised.’

‘We’re still fighting for our country,’ Will says, ‘even if we don’t win. We’ve still got the idea of it, the idea a Republic can work. We can still
fight, even if we lose, and that doesn’t make it a thing unworthy of the fight.’

‘He never was fighting for his country,’ Henry spits.

He don’t say what we all know, that Jimmy was only here because of Henry. I have been fighting for my place by Jeremiah’s side, for a place to put my dreams, and maybe that is something like what Will is saying, maybe that is part of what Will was trying under that dogwood tree. Maybe he and Jennie and people like them who feel the principle behind this war are fighting for a place they want to live, for a country where they can do what feels right to them, a country they can feel good calling home. But what good is that place if there ain’t none of our friends left to share in it?

N
IGHT FALLS, THE
sky clouded so thick there ain’t a single star shining through. It’s only fitting when the drizzling starts and the whole of us, already low spirited, get rained on too.

There ain’t no talking as we march. Someone, Will probably, or else Thomas, starts humming the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic,’ but no one catches hold of the tune. I keep my feelings to myself, everyone does, and as we get farther away from the field, the only talking is lone men, calling for their Regiments by number, Second Michigan or Nineteenth Indiana or Fifty-sixth Pennsylvania, their voices coming out of the gloom like lost souls. Only when volleys of firing come from behind us does my heart get to pumping, but there is only a few rounds and then it is quiet again, except for the tramp of feet and the rattle of the artillery caissons over the rough road.

It’s pitch-black and I can only keep my way by holding on to Jeremiah’s shirt, him with his arms stretched out to keep from walking into something or to keep hold of the boy marching in front of him, I can’t be sure which.

I only know we’re crossing a bridge because there’s the sound of water running under us. The rounded edges of stones press against the thin soles of my shoes and there ain’t a blade of grass to brush across my trousers anymore. Jeremiah bumps into an overturned wagon left on the road, already picked clean by the soldiers gone before us. Those parts of me that have got
to move, keep on, but all the rest of me is frozen still, like I am lying next to an ice block in the hot Summer.

Sometime in the night we get to a town, or leastways I think it is a town from the dogs barking and the sharp tang of cows closed in. Ahead we hear men shouting and once I get over fearing they might be Rebels, I think it must be townspeople, waking late to cheer us as we come back. But then I hear their words.

‘We hoped you’d lose!’ a voice calls loudly out of the murk.

‘You only hoped? Hell, I knew Pope couldn’t win, that arrogant bastard!’ another voice answers, and then others laugh along with him.

Of course Sully is stung and from off to Jeremiah’s right he yells, ‘Who are you sons of bitches, to be laughing at us?’

‘We’re Franklin’s Corps, Army of the Potomac. And we’re damn pleased to be fighting for a General that knows something, instead of that fool Pope.’

Hiram yells back at them, ‘I don’t care if you’re fucking Jesus’ Army! Here I thought we was all fighting for the Union, but you must be some kind of special jackasses to be cheering for the goddamned Seceshes.’

It don’t do a lick of good. Even after we pass they keep jeering, making us feel low, and I hope Henry ain’t hearing the things they are saying. If I ever had any thought of us all fighting for the same thing, it is gone now, left on the road just like Jimmy on that battlefield, just like Will’s Bible wrapped up in that flannel.

O
UR LINE STOPS
.
All around me boys drop to the ground with groans and sighs. I stare into the night, trying to make out shapes, when someone moves in close to me. He don’t have to say a word. I know it is Jeremiah from the warm-earth smell coming from him, coming even when there’s other smells mixed in: blood, sweat, fear.

His arms pull me tight against his chest and I bury my face in his shoulder. He shakes and it is dark enough I can still say I ain’t ever seen him cry. My heart goes to cracking wide open, but at least I am alive to feel it. I am
a different kind of woman now, a wife who knows what this war really is. At least I am part of this war, part of the things Jeremiah’s done here, things that will always be hiding somewhere in his heart.

Jeremiah holds me a long time and my breathing comes as ragged as his, but the two of us made it. Our dream is still shining off there in the distance, and that is enough of a star to pull me through this black night, as long as I don’t count the cost of it.

CHAPTER
23

CENTREVILLE, VIRGINIA: AUGUST 31, 1862

‘We might’ve guessed at it, is all. Henry never was cut out to wade through any kind of grieving,’ I say to Jeremiah and Sully. ‘He ain’t got the determination.’

It’s the honest truth but I don’t say the whole of it, how Jimmy shouldn’t have been here neither, how he was too nice for a soldier. It ain’t the thing they want to hear. They want all cream-and-sugar words.

But we’ve been waiting for near to an hour, long after the fresh ration of sowbelly went cold, for Henry to come trudging out of the trees or from between the brick and clapboard houses, all sheepish and gruff at how we got ourselves riled up. Only it don’t happen like that because he never comes. At roll call Sully tells Sergeant that Henry must be lagging and even after Jeremiah opens his knapsack and finds Henry’s letter home stuffed in it and Will has already gone down the road looking, the boys can’t find their way to seeing that Henry ain’t coming back any more than Jimmy is.

‘Henry should’ve told me so I didn’t waste my time this morning,’ I say when Will goes to report him missing. ‘I could’ve given his ration to
someone who’d maybe appreciate eating something warm. It sure ain’t my idea of fun cooking in the rain for people without the decency to show up for breakfast.’ I don’t say how seeing that bit of salt pork burning in the pan was almost more than my stomach could stand.

None of my jokes is any good, but it’s either laugh or cry. It’s plain there ain’t a thing I can say to make it better, and I am just pretending it don’t touch me to have two of our boys gone. All of us lost ourselves in the haze yesterday, and there wasn’t one of us keeping close watch on each other. Not like we should. All we know is that Henry was with us when we bivouacked for the night and when we started stirring he wasn’t. Now he and his pack and his rifle are gone.

My throat closes and tears start coming so I try saying, ‘Cooking’s less of a chore now, I guess,’ but my fire with the mucket hanging over it, working on boiling water for coffee, almost does me in.

Jeremiah lifts his head up. ‘You ain’t helping, Rosetta. ’Specially not when we all know there ain’t any lost love between you and Henry these days.’

I ought to be yelling for his forgetting himself and using my old name, but everyone is too busy huddling under their ponchos and rubber blankets to be listening to a thing we’re saying. Staying dry and chewing on hardtack is already too much trouble.

‘How could he do it?’ Jeremiah asks. ‘How could he leave like that? Without saying a word? What if he ain’t all right?’

There ain’t an answer to those questions, and we go silent after that. What was Henry thinking when he knew the facts as well as any of us, when we all saw Levi Blalock cursing and fighting against Hiram and Young Frank, that glowing D searing through the stubble and into the skin on his cheek? A punishment like that ain’t easy to push aside, and even with the heavy burden Henry is carrying, to up and leave, risking such a thing? If he were smart, he’d at least have taken my map. But when I open my pack, it is still there on top and it is clear he ain’t thought the thing through to its end. Course, none of us thought this soldiering through to the end. I still can’t. Especially when I don’t know what my body is playing at and every day that passes I’ve got more to worry over.

There is a rumbling clatter as a wagon carrying more wounded soldiers drives up the road, and Jeremiah and Sully’s attention snaps to it. The wagon bumps to a stop in the ruts outside the gate of one of the plain houses across the way where piles of the surgeons’ handiwork grow outside the windows. The bay cavalry horse tied to the paling fence in front rests the toe of his hind leg on the ground. The warm rain drips down his belly and he’s too tired to even try for the short grass that’s nibbled down around the post, too tired to even flick an ear. The driver jumps down and another man runs up and opens the door to the house, calling inside before coming back to help lift soldiers out of the wagon. None of them is Henry.