I Shall Be Near to You (31 page)

Then Sergeant yells, ‘Forward, March!’ as we watch that first line of men disappear into the corn, the rows scarcely wider than their shoulders, the leaves swallowing them as soon as they are two steps in. We are not in reserve. We are being put forward, but there is nothing to do now because the next line steps forward and we do too and it is like I can feel the throbbing of every heart in the line stretching to my left and right.

‘Ross!’ Jeremiah yells, and I turn to him. ‘You’re sure?’

Something makes me think he knows what I’ve been hiding, but I just put my left hand on my heart and nod and then we step forward into the corn. In between the musket volleys and shelling, a dry rustling is all around me as every one of us pushes through the stalks. I can’t see Jeremiah and my heart goes to hammering in my ears so I keep my mind
on that. With each step the air changes, the light growing brighter. A new crack of muskets tells me our first boys are through the corn and that is waiting for us too.

And then there’s the last of the corn and volleys of gunshots come, but I step forward. Already there are boys lying on the ground screaming, a haze of smoke mixing with the fog still hanging over the ground, the smell of gunpowder thick in the air, mixing with shit and the rusty smell of blood. I’ve got to see Jeremiah, I’ve got to know he is there so I press forward, stepping fast over Union and Confederate boys lying on the ground toward the line of Rebels hiding behind the snake-rail fence. And then everything around me slows down and I can see it so clear. A dark shape moves and I aim. My rifle fires loud in my ear but there’s no way to tell if that bullet hits its mark. I look to my right but Jeremiah and Sully ain’t there. On my left, Will is hunched down next to me. I slap him on the shoulder, startling him into a run as more yelling boys crowd up from behind us. All I can think is to find Jeremiah. I fumble with my cartridge box and rammer and then I get the feel of it and load charge ram prime fire again and again. Bodies are falling around me—no, not falling, not dropping—they are knocked right out of the lines, men and things flying through the air.

We stand there plain as day for those Rebels to fire volleys into, them safe behind that fence, not three hundred paces away. As soon as that thought goes through my mind, I get myself low, crouching and firing, and then, moving through the smoke is Jeremiah, just up ahead.

There is a loud crack right in front of me and a wrenching in my hands and my musket spins away from me. My hands sting and burn but they look whole and then I get smart and throw myself flat on the ground, looking for my rifle. It ain’t anywhere but there’s a boy lying curled like he is a baby sleeping and I crawl to him on my belly. I yank his rifle away from him and he don’t even wake, and then I see that D brand on his face. At least dying like this means Levi’s family will never know what he done, and there ain’t time to wonder if that is better.

I stay low, my head almost against Levi’s belly, hiding behind him as best I can, keeping myself safe. His rifle is still loaded so I prop myself up,
firing over Levi into that fence line of Rebels and I load charge ram prime again faster than ever, the whole time wondering where Jeremiah has got to now. Everywhere are running boys and galloping horses and smoke and noise and the bullets coming fast like a hailstorm. They don’t even scare me no more, those bullets buzzing all around. You’ve just got to move as fast as you can and not let yourself think on them, not let yourself think on anything, and that is what I do.

I keep firing. I can’t quit working my rifle. Not even when an artillery horse gets to screaming and galloping across the field, dragging its harness and traces, but then I see I’m wrong and it is tangles of innards. Not even when a line of our men moves forward and every one of them gets cut down by those Reb artillerymen laying canister right in front of them. Not even when the shrapnel flies up into the lines behind them, tearing them to pieces, a whole arm flying up like a bird taking flight only to come flopping right back down.

I fire until my hands burn, the barrel of that rifle is so hot, and then make my way toward the fence, stumbling over the wounded and dead lying there, and maybe it is a marvel I ain’t been shot yet myself. Some of the bodies still have cartridge boxes and using what is there for the taking, I don’t know how many times I shoot. But then jeering starts up from those firing Rebels and our troops are falling back.

The panic hits me that I don’t know where anyone is or even where we came through that corn.

I yell, ‘Jeremiah! Jeremiah!’ and scramble back looking at each boy, only none of them are him. It don’t make any sense how that cornfield got so far away but I can’t even find it now and then I am tripping over the stalks, the cornfield stripped down to nothing. Jeremiah ain’t anywhere. All the worst thoughts spill into my head, but maybe it is just he has already quit the field.

A row of boys lie in the stubble, laid out by canister, their bodies twisted and torn. And then a lightning bolt goes through me. There, sprawled on the ground, is a lanky body, his kepi gone and that shock of hair I would know anywhere.

CHAPTER
27

ANTIETAM: SEPTEMBER 17, 1862

‘Rosetta,’ is all he says when I kneel by him.

‘I am here,’ I say, ‘and you are okay.’

His hand scrabbles across the dirt and I grab it in mine.

‘You are going to be okay,’ I hear myself tell him. ‘You have to be.’

The way I say it must catch his attention because his eyes find mine and they are so blue, bluer than any bluebell.

And then I say the one thing left to be telling, ‘There’s a baby coming and you have to be here. You have to see it.’

His look is raw then, and his breathing goes wrong.

‘Home,’ he says. ‘Home.’

I tell him hush and he don’t say a thing more. I press my ear to his chest, listening for him, for his heart, for his breath but the thundering coming from every direction is too loud. I don’t worry about the blurs of soldiers running past, there is only him, his face, his coat ripped open, his shirt stained with seeping blood, his knapsack and rifle gone. I grab him under the arms and drag him backward, keeping myself bent low, watching
his feet bump over the ground. It should be hard, he should be heavy, but he ain’t. The firing boxes us in, and men too, but I don’t care for a thing but getting Jeremiah out of the battle, to where we can’t be seen, to a hospital. I stumble over a body or a hole in the ground or the bent and flattened cornstalks, I don’t even know what because there is Jeremiah’s head bouncing against my knees as we fall.

I get myself right up and out from under him. We are near trees, not in the field we came through, some other place. I shove my arms back under his and now he is like lead and so still but he is just hurt and he is still bleeding, there’s lots of blood seeping from his belly and I’ve got to get us safe. The ground around us shudders as shells land. It is so loud, the whole world going to pieces and hell swallowing us up and hauling us down. I look for the safest thing and drag us behind a rotting log. There is some grass there and dead leaves to make a bed for him. We are clinging to the edge of the woods and maybe the trees will hide us.

I lean into Jeremiah. I try to hear him breathing, to feel it and I can’t but he is all right, this ain’t nothing but Doc Cuck could fix. I pray harder than I’ve ever prayed in my life for it to be safe to try for the hospital or for a stretcher bearer to come find us, but we are too far from our lines and too close to the Rebs for that.

I lie like that a long time, by that log in the dead leaves, Jeremiah’s head pulled against my chest. His dark hair slicked back like on our wedding day, but with sweat this time. I pet his hair like he is a small animal. I rock him. When the fighting swirls back around us, I hug him tight and pray until it swirls away again. And then I say all the nicest things to Jeremiah. I tell him about the size of my love for him and about our farm and everything we promised each other, the woods and cows we’ll have and the fields growing. I tell him about the baby growing inside me, how my pants don’t fit right no more. I trace the muscle in his neck that flutters and tremors. It is a long time before I see that his eyes are open wide, their bright blue turned to dull ice. There are drops on his shirt, and it is not raining so I know they are from me.

I work myself up to sitting when the field goes almost quiet, his head in
my lap. The trees crowd out the sky or the sky has gone dark, I don’t know which. The ground is quaggy with leaves, mud, manure, blood. Sometimes other men move past us, hobbling farther into the woods. We are there so long, the cannonading has stopped. The rifles have stopped except for way off in the distance. Only the screaming is like before. It has turned to a field of the wounded and the dead and ain’t none of them quiet. The wounded shriek and cry, and the dead hiss and pop. Except for Jeremiah. He is quiet because I said so, because I said
hush
.

I sit so long we get stiff. I try not to look. His face. I look at his face. The drops on his shirt, I try to rub them out. I rock him.

When he sighs I think
Maybe
but some part of me is smart and knows he ain’t Lazarus raised from the dead, and he sure ain’t Jesus. It is just his body doing what his mouth already done and saying its last words.

Someone close is making noise. Lots of noise and I am rocking and saying
hush
. It is not raining but there are too many drops on his shirt to count and my face is wet with something, blood or sweat or tears.

His belly is all wrong. It is all wrong and twisted into something else altogether and I will fix it. I must make it better but I don’t know what to do. His jacket is open. His shirt is ripped and his body underneath is so awful—torn, with inside things pressing their way out.

I don’t want to see it anymore, I want it to go away, I want him to be right. I try to fit his jacket around him, to button it, to make him how he was in the likeness I sent to Mama and Papa. But he is stiff and I don’t want to hurt his head, I don’t want to leave his face, I don’t want to see him like that. I almost can’t do it. He is so heavy, heavier than when he is sleeping, but I make his jacket right. Then I lie next to him and hold him, my head on his shoulder as he lays like we used to in the big bed at home. He is cold and he looks up to see the stars like we did before. I look too and between the black reaching fingers of tree branches there is the Big Dipper and the Seven Sisters and we just look and look. All night long we look until we are both so cold.

I
AM SITTING
on the church steps at the ice cream social, churchladies and their families dotting the yard. The door behind me pushes open and someone comes down the stairs. I don’t pay any mind until the footsteps stop right beside me but I don’t look to see who it is. I already know. He don’t wait there long before he gets tired of it. He clears his throat and I think maybe he will leave, and I want to grab him and stop him, tell him that he can’t, but then he holds out a Jacob’s ladder, purple-blue and bell-shaped.

‘For you,’ he says.

Ain’t no one given me a flower before but I don’t touch it at first. I wait until a look of worry comes over him, and then I’m done teasing and I take it from his hand and his smile back is the sweetest thing. That flower is still pressed at home in the Bible at the bottom of my hope chest so I could keep it always and now it ain’t right that the only flower he ever gave me was that one, how there ain’t no flower in the whole world that makes what’s happened right. And then his footsteps take him away, and I want to call out to him, to stop him, but it is too late. He is gone and I am left in a forever I ain’t ever dreamed.

S
OMETHING POKES ME
.
Shoves again, hard. Union soldiers, with dirt and blood and stains on them. They are checking the dead, they must be. That is how I remember.

‘We’re going to take him now,’ says the one closest to me, his rifle butt low to the ground, the one who’s been poking.

‘No,’ I say, real low.

‘You ain’t got a choice. You want him left out here?’

‘No! He can’t. This ain’t where—He don’t belong here!’

Riflebutt talks quiet. ‘No one belongs here. That ain’t him here no more, that’s just his earthly body.’

‘He belongs back home. He can’t stay here.’

The others start reaching for Jeremiah’s feet.

‘You stay back!’ I yell loud and strike out, scaring myself.

Riflebutt talks again, ‘Either you let us take him now and he gets a decent Christian burial, or he stays here by this log.’

‘No! You’ve got to send him home. Send him where I can find him! He can’t be here! He’s got no people here. His Ma and Pa …’

‘He your kin?’ Riflebutt asks.

All I can do is nod.

‘He won’t hold long enough to get home. You’ve got to let us take him now.’ Riflebutt squats down, lays his musket on the ground.

‘You got anything you want to take off him before we move him?’ he says.