I Shall Be Near to You (30 page)

‘You got something else you want to say?’

When he don’t answer right off I stoop down and make myself touch that dead body again.

‘Switch places,’ Jeremiah says, and he is already halfway to me, with a look that says he means it, so we do.

When we lay that girl’s body down in the trench Edward and Hiram are digging, Jeremiah’s face has got too much sadness on it, and I can’t stop hearing that girl’s shrieks.

‘You put any soldiers named Davidson down there already?’ I ask.

Hiram shrugs, ‘Might’ve done.’

‘What about Galloway?’

‘Like I said, might’ve done.’ Hiram glares up at me.

‘Ain’t you checking for names?’ Jeremiah asks.

‘It’s Pennsylvania men in here. Knowing beyond that is officer’s work, you ask me,’ Hiram says. ‘But if the two of you got such a keen interest, I’d be happy to give up this shovel. Edward too, I bet.’

I am halfway to grabbing it from Hiram when Jeremiah puts his hand on me.

‘Let’s get back to work,’ he says, and with his hand pinching my shoulder he steers me back out to the field, back to where we found Emma. I
crouch at the first body I find, and as I unbutton that soldier’s coat, Jeremiah gives my arm a squeeze before moving off a few paces.

This soldier don’t have a scrap of paper pinned inside. But neither one of the names Emma gave might mean a thing to finding her kin. Maybe when I get clear of this Army I will find some way to get word of Emma back to her people, but I don’t know how and anyway that ain’t enough. Without the letter in my breast pocket, anyone reading the name
Ross Stone
stitched in my coat wouldn’t have a way to tie me to
Jeremiah Wakefield
.

My hands hover over the buttons of that soldier’s coat. Emma’s blood is drying into the cracks of my skin and my mind won’t ever be easy or let me get a moment of peace again. I don’t know how I can ever get clean. It makes me retch and gag again thinking on other people’s blood on me, of myself in Emma’s stead, Jeremiah’s baby gone with me.

It is all I can do to keep from shaking my hands and running down to find the first creek. I just want to walk into that water, any water, and wash myself clean, my clothes, the lot of it, letting the blood and everything swirl away.

‘I’
VE GOT TO
wash,’ I tell Jeremiah as we march along the National Road, with nothing but heat and dust and sweat, and trees closing out the sky, the patchy light of late afternoon coming down through gathering clouds. Past a big old stone mill, four stories high and clinging on the edge of a twisting creek, I shove off the graveled road, not caring how it looks to anyone else. Artillery pounds from somewhere ahead of us but I make my way down to a wide crossing, water running in small ripples under a stone bridge with two arches. The creek bank is overgrown with tall grass and too steep to walk down to the water. I shrug out of my knapsack and my coat and crouch to slide down the last little bit, through the brambles snatching at my clothes and pricking at my hands. My feet land straight in the creek, cold water splashing up onto me and seeping into my boots, cold enough that I ought to be sucking in my breath, but I don’t. The green of the grass, the trees just thinking on turning, the rocks making up that bridge, all of it
shows in the creek. Horses’ hooves shod in steel clatter on stone as Colonel Wheelock and Captain Chalmers lead our Regiment over the creek. Soldiers’ feet tramp across the bridge and on the road, hundreds of tin cups hit against belts and rifles, almost drowning out any of the boys’ voices. Little fingerling fish dart away from rocks along the creek bed and a water skeeter dances across the surface. I don’t care about none of that. I don’t care that my boots are soaked through. They’ve been soaked with worse things.

‘What are you doing?’ Jeremiah asks, pushing through the brush, coming down to the water. He teeters at the edge, his canteen in his left hand, his right hand unscrewing and screwing the cap. ‘We ain’t got time for you to bathe.’

‘I can’t keep on with all this death on me,’ I say, scrubbing my hands and arms. ‘I ain’t going one more step until I’ve got my fingernails clean, at least.’

‘Rosetta,’ he says, his voice low but creeping toward warning. ‘You okay?’

I nod.

‘Well then,’ he says, ‘this bathing, it’s womanish.’

‘I don’t care if it is.’ My voice wobbles. I shove my hands back down into the water and I don’t know where the words come from but they won’t stop. ‘I ain’t going to my death unclean like this!’

‘You’ve got things to ask forgiveness for?’ Jeremiah asks.

‘Course I do! How could any of us not?’ I cry, rubbing at my dirty sleeve hems. ‘I’ve got more sin than most, what with the lie I keep living, the same lie as that girl we left buried on the mountain.’

Jeremiah is silent, but barely two breaths later he wades into the water upstream from me, pushing his canteen under the lazy current. Seeing him in the water beside me puts a warmth in my chest and foolishness spreads across my cheeks because the lie ain’t the part I regret. Maybe it’s the truth I’ve been hiding from him that’s hardest to bear.

‘I’m okay. I don’t have to do this now. It’s just—We’ve got to have a plan,’ I tell Jeremiah.

‘What are you talking about?’ Jeremiah asks. ‘We have a plan.’

‘I ain’t talking about the farm,’ I say. ‘I’m talking about if we get to another battle.’

Jeremiah looks off in the distance, like he ain’t heard.

‘I don’t like getting separated,’ I say. ‘What if one of us gets hurt?’

‘That ain’t going to happen.’ Jeremiah shakes his head.

‘There ain’t no way to tell a thing like that. You know it. You’ve seen how it is when the shooting starts. That girl—’

‘I don’t want to think about that!’ Jeremiah says, his voice getting louder. ‘I don’t want to think about any of it!’

‘Well, we’ve got to. We ain’t got a choice. If you push me down like you did at Bull—’

Jeremiah cuts me off. ‘We can’t ever go back home after all this,’ he says low. ‘It won’t ever be the same, not after—not without Jimmy and Henry.’

‘I thought we weren’t planning on more than visiting,’ I say real quiet, trying to look him in the face, but he keeps watching the current.

‘It ain’t only the one soldier, Rosetta. On the field—He was just like Jimmy—Our families, how can I tell the folks back home?’ He looks at me then, his hands up in the air.

‘That’s why I’m here,’ I tell him. ‘So we ain’t got to tell anyone. I’ve done the same as you. We all have.’

‘I never thought it’d be like this,’ Jeremiah says.

‘We’re too far into all of it. Ain’t a bit of it that can be undone now, so we’ve just got to do accordingly,’ I say—for myself, too. ‘I want to be with you when things happen. That girl we found—I don’t want to be like that.’

‘That won’t be you,’ Jeremiah says. ‘And there’ll be time for bathing after.’

I don’t have to ask what he means by
after
. I clamber out of that creek, slipping in the mud and wet grass, and sling my knapsack and coat across my back. Jeremiah hauls himself up out of the water and rests his hands on my shoulders. The look that comes over his face ain’t peaceful, but it ain’t the same drawn look he had before, and that is something.

‘We’ll make ourselves a good life,’ he says, leaning toward me, his eyes
open, his lips brushing mine, and then he moves past me and we make our way to the road. My heart aches, thinking how the life we dreamed on is already something different than what we started with, how there is already more to it than he knows and he won’t ever forgive himself for not sending me back if something happens, how maybe I won’t either.

CHAPTER
26

NEAR ANTIETAM CREEK, MARYLAND: SEPTEMBER 16–17, 1862

We make our bivouac on a treed ridge, the rattle and bang of skirmishing echoing below us. Me and Jeremiah walk off a little piece from the rest of the boys, looking for a place for our tent. We find a sheltered grassy spot under a poplar where the boys’ hushed talking almost doesn’t reach us, and Jeremiah stares down at the valley of farms spread out below. The closest one is a farm so pretty it makes my heart ache. I know Jeremiah feels it too from the way he stares at the cluster of whitewashed barns with their stone foundations and plank sides. I dream how many cows and how much hay will fit, anything nice.

‘You ever think what we’d be doing if we ain’t left Flat Creek?’ I ask.

‘There ain’t no way around the war.’

‘Maybe,’ I say, even though he is right. ‘I just wish we could have seen this countryside without the war being the cause of it.’

Nothing takes my mind off the jittering coming from the boys all around us, not even when we busy ourselves with setting up our tent. My
hands shake as we unfold the canvas pieces of our tent and snap them together in the gentle rain that’s started up. We’re stringing the canvas across two poles when Sergeant comes round.

‘There are to be no fires tonight,’ he says. ‘Not with the enemy so near.’

There’s some groans from the boys about a cold supper of teethdullers and coffee grounds, but the words alone get my stomach riled up, thinking of carrying a baby into battle or leaving Jeremiah’s side. It is too much to ask, judging the worth of one for the other.

We settle on our blankets, the long night stretched out before us, listening through the patter of rain on canvas to make out the sounds of Rebels coming, counting how long between the rolling thunder of artillery firing. When Jeremiah talks it ain’t like he’s keeping me from sleep.

‘How you feeling?’ he asks.

‘I feel like myself,’ I say, thinking he means after washing.

‘We’re fighting hard tomorrow for sure,’ he says.

He’s thinking of me standing in the creek washing away that dead girl, so I say, ‘My place is with you.’

Jeremiah leans over me. ‘Lord knows I love you. But if anything happens to you …’

And then he kisses me and clasps me to him tight and my heart grows so it might burst right through my rib cage.

‘I love you more than anything,’ I say, and there is my answer. More than anything.

‘If we don’t fight, our plans, our farm … I don’t know what will come of it,’ Jeremiah says in the quietest whisper, and it’s the truth.

‘I don’t know what will come of our lives either way, if we fight or if we don’t. But when this war is over, we don’t have to say one word or think one thing about it ever again if we don’t want. You heard Will. God will forgive us what we got regrets for, even if we ain’t the same new husband and wife that started away from home.’

‘There’s some things ain’t changed,’ Jeremiah says, and then his mouth is on mine again, his hands roving across my back, kissing down my neck. When he unclasps my belt, his hands hover over my belly, like he is feeling
something different about my person. But I find the buckle on his belt and work his trousers open too and that is the end of it. Then we are crashing together and I have to clamp my mouth against his until the next roar of artillery comes.

B
EFORE THE FIRST
light even hits my face, battering artillery echoes through the valley and into my bones. I roll over to see Jeremiah gazing on me, his mouth starting on a smile, but there is another bang of the cannons and that smile fades as he reaches to hold my hand. We ain’t got words for each other and we just stay like that, alone for a little while, our eyes saying what needs to be told before the Company gets to rustling itself together for reveille. When we drag ourselves out of our blankets there’s patches of fog hovering like ghosts over graves. Rising above the low woods to the South is a twisting line of black smoke, thick enough that it ain’t coming from a campfire or stove.

The Company is scattered under the broad-leafed trees, hardly a soul talking. Me and Jeremiah make our way to Will and Sully. Sully sits quiet on the ground, his eyes dull and hard, and he ain’t a dog straining at his tether no more. Seeing him so still gets me wondering what changes the boys might see in me, if they’re even looking. We’ve all seen things we never hoped or dreamed, done things we ain’t planned. My life back home weren’t near so bad as I thought.

As soon as me and Jeremiah sit down, Will says, ‘There’s something on my heart, making me think of how, before the Battle of Jericho, the Lord told Joshua: “Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest.” I feel the Lord in this day.’

‘I don’t know about the Lord,’ Ambrose says. ‘I’ve found it more expedient getting my strength elsewhere,’ and he pats the pocket where he keeps his flask.

Will’s words don’t make me feel better either. Especially not once we get our orders before it’s even past milking time and my only hope is that
they keep us in reserve again this time. We shoulder our muskets and get into formation, our Company blending in with the lines of all the others, rows and rows of blue soldiers. Our Regiment and two others march across a ragged field, moving toward the woods ahead. The horns of the Regimental band out in front float back to us through the fog, through the noise of cannonading, but what I listen for is the swish of our legs through tall grass. Then the swish is gone and we are marching through plowed farmland, our feet quilting new lines in the harrowed soil. The sound of artillery gets louder and our own batteries blast over our heads. It is too much to think we ain’t going to battle now when they are working to clear the way for us. My heart pounds and my mouth is so dry but I’ve got to keep moving, and anyhow my feet wouldn’t stop now even if I told them to, they’ve got to keep themselves lined up right next to Jeremiah’s; as long as I am with him, it will be all right. It has always been all right.

At a field of corn grown up taller than any of us, the ears ripe with browning and drying tassels, Sergeant orders us into line of battle, and we stand like our own crop, waiting, wondering who is going to be picked off.

Up and down the rows of corn, men check their rifles, making sure they’ve got them loaded, and I do the same. Every swallow turns to a gag. Jeremiah’s face, drawn and more pale than ever, brings sorrow crashing through me. I look straight up to the sky and hope Will is right.