I Shall Be Near to You (32 page)

I look at Jeremiah. His face. His eyes. He ain’t there no more.

‘Letters,’ I say. ‘He’s got letters. I can’t—’

Riflebutt unbuttons Jeremiah’s coat. I drop my head into my hands. Tears leak out. The featherweight of letters lands in my lap.

Wrinkled and smeared envelopes. One says my name,
Mrs. Jeremiah Wakefield
. My face streams. My hand shakes holding those letters. The soldiers grab Jeremiah’s feet, his arms. His jacket ain’t buttoned nice no more.

‘His jacket!’ I cry. ‘His jacket!’

And then I think of my letter for him. It should be with him.

Crawl to him. Take the letter from my pocket, push it inside his jacket so it will be with him always. Pull those buttons through. Make him look right, my hands to his chest, remembering the feel of him. Trying to make it be enough.

‘You’ve got to get up,’ Riflebutt says, rips my arm away, uproots me. They lift him. Every part of my body strains for him, his bones calling to mine. It is all I can do to let go, to follow where they take him, to the tree where I kneel and watch his eyes disappear under the dirt, my mouth clamped shut against the screaming. It is all I can do not to throw myself down into the hole where they bury everything I ever had.

W
OUND

NEAR SHARPSBURG, MARYLAND: SEPTEMBER 19–OCTOBER 6, 1862

‘We are now but a handful.’

—Corporal Thomas Galwey, Eighth Ohio
Infantry, after Antietam

CHAPTER
28

Don’t feel a thing. Don’t think. Legs move. Legs just up and walk themselves. Soldiers straggling. Dragging. Hobbling. Leaning against each other. Holding themselves together with arms tight.

Walk. Follow after them. Follow. Hold those letters, hold the only other thing.

I ain’t dead. Something worse.

Go up the low ridge. Pass that farm. Find our colors. Find the boys, what’s left of them. Every last one ragged and torn. No one fit for more fighting. Our flag in strips of blue and white.

Feet stop. Legs buckle. Sink to the ground. The Company a circle around the flag.

But not a face means a thing to me.

CHAPTER
29

Dull and blurred, like a photograph of everything moving. Smoke. Black specks moving across the fields. Patchworked fields that ought to be green. That pretty farm. Legs of men passing, then gone. Long earthen mounds. My breath rasping.

Someone says ‘Ross’ over and over. Far away. A dark blue shape in front of me, blocking the field.

Can’t see the field. Can’t move. Don’t ever want to move again. Something lands on my shoulder. Shrug but it won’t go. It squeezes tight, shakes me. A hand waves in front of me.

‘Ross!’

A voice I know. A kind face, a worried slant to the eyebrows.

‘Ross!’

Blink. Blink hard. Make myself see the face. I know that face.

‘Ross! You okay?’

No words come to say what there is to be telling. Shake my head.

‘You hurt?’

I only shake my head.

‘Where’s Sully?’ the voice asks. It is Will. Will is still here.

Shake my head.

‘Have you seen Jeremiah?’

Hold out my hand. Hold them out. Those letters.

Will sinks in front of me, his hand still on my shoulder.

‘No one,’ my voice croaks. ‘Not a soul but you.’

CHAPTER
30

Dusk falls. What’s left of our Company huddles close around a few small fires, not even half the boys from two days ago. But I can’t think on Jeremiah. Sully neither.

Hiram’s voice comes out of the night, louder than the rest. ‘We licked those goddamn Rebs! Got ourselves a fucking Union victory!’

Edward says, ‘Sergeant’s got word those Seceshes are turning tail and crossing the river, going back South where they belong.’

There’s low cheers. Someone laughs.

I drag myself away, feeling torn apart and empty. I lie in the open, away from the campfire, because I can’t think about being under a tent, talking, lying with Jeremiah. I stare up at those stars and try telling Jeremiah I am sorry we ain’t done all the things we said, how I wasn’t at his side when it mattered, how I didn’t keep him from getting hurt like I meant. I try telling him how it feels being left here, lying on this ridge, strange trees hanging their broad leaves over me and those fields below. I look toward the edge of the woods down there with him underground, but it calls up things in my head I don’t want to be seeing.

My heart just rips open.

This ain’t the life I ever wanted. This ain’t my life at all.

And the tears come running down my face, into my ears, drowning out almost everything.

CHAPTER
31

It ain’t even dawn. I can’t sleep, my eyes on stars disappearing one by one. I can’t stop thinking on Mama losing every one of her babies but for me and Betsy. Mrs. Waite seeing her husband’s name on that first casualty list, her baby close to being born. Joseph Brown dying in that hospital, his Mama reading his last letter. Henry laying his brother in the ground, Jimmy blanketed with dirt. And Jeremiah. Always Jeremiah.

I am still wearing my coat, sleeping in it because of the chill. Because Fall is coming on now. I reach inside my breast pocket and take Jeremiah’s letters from it. The one for his Ma and Pa and brothers on top, his coarse scrawl across the envelope. My hands shake putting that letter back in my pocket before I get to staining it. The other letter, the one saying
Mrs. Jeremiah Wakefield
, has got his family’s address on it like he is still trying to tell me what he wants. I wipe the tears away with the back of my hand so I don’t spatter any of them on the writing.

The sky gets lighter. There’s only a little more time before the sleeping boys start stirring, humped shapes rising out of the grass in broken lines, like the dead scattering the fields below.

Thinking don’t do me no good. The tears roll too fast and my nose runs. I’ve got to get hold of myself and keep quiet so no one wakes.

I wipe my nose across my sleeve, turn that envelope over. Jeremiah’s hands touched that paper and then I am crying again and smoothing his letter like maybe something of him is still there, my fingers slow and careful on the seal.

CHAPTER
32

I get hold of myself, will myself to do this thing, to open that letter, see these last words from Jeremiah, the last there is of his voice.

Mrs. Jeremiah Wakefield

Just the writing there, my name in his schoolboy’s hand, makes my eyes swim. My voice whispers, ‘I can’t.’ I can’t read any of that letter, what Jeremiah said. I can’t think about the things he might have put in those lines, not for a long time. Tears stream down my face. My knuckles go white from holding on to that envelope, ruining it, ruining the only thing left of Jeremiah excep’t—But I can’t think about that now. It is too much. I look up into the sky to stop those tears only it don’t work, not with God and Heaven and Jeremiah there already looking down.

Choking back sobs, my throat closed up and aching, I pull my knees to my chest and rock myself, the paper crumpling against me. I’ve got to stop this, I’ve got to get hold again. But there ain’t a thing to fill that lonesome wildness, that empty ache inside.

The sun is peeking over the low ring of mountains and I take that letter, clutching it. It is damp and the edges are going pulpy so I put it straight inside my pocket, over my heart. It is so light, like it ain’t even there. Like the other bit of him I carry.

I ain’t ever felt so alone. Will is just a little ways off, curled under his blanket.

‘Will!’ I whisper. ‘Will!’

He bolts straight up.

‘What is it? You need something?’ he asks, rubbing his hands down his face.

That letter is somehow back out of my pocket, and holding it out for Will to see gets my eyes filling again.

Will looks at that letter addressed to Jeremiah’s wife and then at me, but he don’t say a thing, he just waits.

He’s the only soul left in this Army knows my name, besides Sully who is missing and Jennie Chalmers who ain’t near, who I probably ain’t ever seeing again neither.

I can’t talk. I can’t stop with the crying. Will puts a hand on my shoulder and the heat of it makes me feel like a burnt-out empty shell.

His hand stays put. ‘You want company or you want to be alone?’

‘Company.’

He stands there next to me, his hand on my shoulder. It gets me tearing up again.

‘I’ve got to see him,’ I say.

Will looks at me. ‘See who?’ he asks.

‘Jeremiah. The place where he is.’

‘You want me to come along?’ he asks.

The sky is going pink but no birds sing. We ain’t got time before reveille.

I say, ‘If you can.’

‘I can.’

We march back on that field, just days since I dragged Jeremiah from it. My whole life. My dreams gone. Tumbled over. Passed. Like I already lived them in my head and now I’ve got to live another life without him only I don’t see how I can.

Our legs thresh the grass. Over torn ground, rocks, holes. There are ruined fields and ugliness everywhere. A magnet draws me to that place, to the tree where he is buried, where something of me went and now I’ve got to get it back.

Will keeps pace. We don’t talk, don’t stop, don’t look at what we pass. We don’t watch the burial details working their shovels into the earth, burying the Rebel soldiers still left all across the battlefield. Looking don’t serve no purpose but making me mourn even harder. The cornfield is gone. Nothing left but broken stubble and stalks like a scythe has been taken to it. I don’t know how any of us walked out of there with our lives.

The field. The woods. The log. The place where we were last together. Empty like he was never there.

I squat down, press my hand to the leaves where we laid, claw my hands into the earth, but all I feel is hollow, even though that can’t be. Will stands there on the other side of that log. I look around and it is the first time I even see where we hid, the bodies scattered like boulders around this place. There ain’t nothing but Rebel soldiers left here for days and the tree where Riflebutt took my whole life. The tree witnessing over the battle and over Jeremiah, keeping his body sheltered.

His mound ain’t far, at the edge of the woods, his place marked with a slat of wood carved with
JW
and
97NY
on it.

I kneel and wait to feel something, something to ease the bayonet through my heart.

I wait to feel Jeremiah, something of him still here, still with me in this world. Will kneels with me and he puts an arm around my shoulders. It is nice whether he means it in friendship or something different, but it ain’t the arm I want. We sit like that a long time, not a sound passing between us besides the wind rustling the leaves. Quiet. Not even a bird. Nothing but flies buzzing.

‘You want to say a prayer?’ Will asks after a while.

‘No. Past time for that.’

We sit some more. I don’t see God in this thing, I just wait to feel Jeremiah’s spirit touching mine.

Jeremiah. His blue eyes. The heat coming off him when he stands next to me, not even touching me. His voice whispering
Rosetta
. His body saying all the things he can’t.

I want to shriek. Cry. Throw myself on that grave like I’ve seen Mama
do. But I spool my nerves in tight because that ain’t who I’m supposed to be. I can’t even be Jeremiah’s wife in secret now.

Bugles call. The field echoes with reveille. But I can’t move, I can’t think of leaving this place. The woods are quiet. The grave is still and I have to turn away from Jeremiah laying buried under that tree spreading its branches to the sky, without even the company of crows.

CHAPTER
33

We line up for roll call in front of Captain’s tent, facing our flags flapping in the wind. We draw together to fill the holes in the ranks. There are all these men around me, but none of my boys hemming me in, keeping me safe, holding on to my secrets. There is Will to my right and Thomas on my left and they don’t even know what it is like where I come from. They didn’t see how my Mama smiled on my wedding day or the pride my Papa takes in bringing in the nicest hay in the whole county or the way my sister used to hold my hand walking up the schoolhouse steps. They don’t know none of those things about me. My eyes sting. I’ve got to keep myself from crying.

The list don’t take even half as long now when Captain don’t speak the names of the missing, the names I want to hear. I bite my lip, keep the tears from spilling over. My fingers clench onto my trousers. Hiram grumbles to Edward about McClellan only sending Porter’s men across the river to chase after the Rebs and how General Lee sent Porter running right back. If Sully were with us, he’d be saying the same. Even with all our dead, he’d be wanting revenge. But I don’t see how there is anything to make right what’s been taken from us.

Captain don’t pay no mind to those men grumbling, tells how General McClellan aims to get us fed and rested and supplied before we set foot chasing those Rebs, and after dress parade each morning, we won’t worry about drilling and such so long as we keep our rifles in working order.

‘Besides,’ Captain says, ‘Colonel Wheelock says we’ll be marching again in no time.’

A ripple of feeling, of excitement, goes through the whole Company, and I don’t understand it one bit. How they ain’t gagging at the soured milk and rotting meat smells coming off that field and knowing it is our own boys out there.

‘Some of the Regiments will be moving closer to the river, to the Potomac,’ Captain says.

My arms wrap themselves around my chest and my heart flies to bits just thinking on leaving Jeremiah. Will looks my way, silent. Jeremiah would tell me I am acting womanish. My arms fall but my fingers go back to gripping my trousers. I am raw as a skinned cow, thinking on all the holes I can’t fill. All the holes I can’t mend.