I Shall Be Near to You (34 page)

They told me his body would not make the Journey home, so he is Buried here. He is Resting under a very Tall tree near to where we Fought. It is a Pretty place, with farms and trees all around and there is a Marker there so if you wanted to Visit you would know him. I have Gone to see him there
.

I am sending the Letter he wrote for you if the Worst should happen. He wrote it before we saw our First Battle and I Know he Never wanted to Send it. He was Always Thinking on Coming Home and the Farm. Now he is Gone to his Other Home and waits for us there. It is a help for me to know that and I hope for you too
.

I am Ever his
,

Rosetta

I don’t know if any of those words are right but there ain’t a thing to make the news better, except news I ain’t ready to share.

I fold that paper up and address the cover. I look at Jeremiah’s letter and wonder what words he might have set down, if he said a thing about me, if he told his Ma and Pa anything of me going home to them.

Maybe come morning, I will put my farm clothes on, Jeremiah’s old clothes, and desert the whole Union Army, walk away from this place, just like I walked away from home. This time I could keep heading West until Nebraska. Even now, I can cover near to twenty miles a day if I walk hard, maybe more if I find farmers willing to take me along in their wagons. Maybe I could make it there before the worst of the Winter weather and get myself settled in time for Spring planting, in time for the baby coming on. I can see it now, raising that baby up inside me and Jeremiah’s dream.

That lonesome wildness whirls about me again, to think of living without Jeremiah, with no kin or family beside me, my whole life stretching out before me. I could do it if it meant living as I have a mind to, being just the way I am with no one to answer for it. But there is not just me and Jeremiah now and I can’t go on living as Ross Stone. That path is gone.

A
LL
I
SEE
is blood. Lint soiled with blood. Flannel strips smeared with blood. Bed linens drenched in blood.

I gasp, my eyes flying open.

‘It’s only me,’ Will says, from where he is sitting on his blankets next to the fire, poking at the cinders with a stick.

‘You still got that Bible with you?’ I ask.

‘I do,’ he says.

‘Can you read Ruth to me?’

‘Course,’ he says, bringing his blankets closer to the fire, turning those onionskin pages slow and careful. And then there is his voice, saying words I ain’t heard since home with Papa reading.

Tears start and I wonder what I have done, asking Will to read this, but I don’t stop him. The words wash over me, his voice saying, ‘And Naomi said
unto her two daughters in law, Go, return each to her mother’s house: the Lord deal kindly with you, as ye have dealt with the dead.’

I try to think on the words, but I can’t. Home and Mama and Betsy sewing for my wedding get all mixed up with Jeremiah and his hands shaking as he took mine on our wedding day, and our wedding night and how I got the shivers.

But those words cut through my thoughts. ‘And Ruth said, Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee. For whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge. Thy people shall be my people, and thy God, my God. Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried.’

And then I can’t stop the tears from running and I try not to make any noise, but Will stops reading.

‘You’ve got to hear the rest,’ he says.

I don’t know how he can say what I’ve got to hear. I think how Mama wanted these words read to me before my wedding. I can’t tell if it is wrong of me to leave this place or wrong of me to stay.

Will reads, ‘… thou hast left thy father and thy mother, and the land of thy nativity, and art come unto a people which thou knewest not heretofore.’

And the tears keep falling.

CHAPTER
35

The sun is well up when Will drags me out of my blankets, saying, ‘Sergeant asked for volunteers to guard the hospital. I put us forward.’

‘I ain’t good for any of it,’ I moan.

‘We have to find Sully,’ he says, like he knows just what will get me moving.

It is late morning by the time we walk up to a farmhouse, a red H flag flying out in front. It was a good farm before all this, that much is plain. But now there ain’t a thing of farm about it except the house and its wide porch and the whitewashed barn and its weathered gray plank fences with crescent moons chewed into them. Men are all around, spilling out of the house, the open barn doors. Complaining, coughing, crying, sprawling, filling any shade, lying under tents put up quick. The boys outside ain’t the worst ones but they don’t look good. Wounds need tending. Letters need writing. Prayers need saying. The smells of fever sweat and old meat hang over the whole farm. I cover my nose. Boys lie in crooked rows, faces streaked with dirt and gunpowder and blood, lined with pain, eyes wide with fear or closed tight against it. Men too hurt to be hungry. Men too sick to get to the outhouse in time. Black smells. Black thoughts.

I search for a face I know and catch myself looking for one I ain’t ever seeing on Earth again, except maybe in the echo of some other face. I have to stop myself or there ain’t hope for me being useful.

Will is up the stone steps to the house. He walks through the door left open to catch any breeze and I make myself go after him. He turns from the dark hall and its stairs, all of it stained with blood that ain’t ever scrubbing out, and pokes his head into the parlor, moving closer to sounds I don’t want to hear ever again. I’m scared of seeing more hurts I can’t fix. This ain’t the right place for me, but Will is here. I’ve got no one else to follow.

He steps into that parlor, says something. A voice answers. His footsteps move away into another room. Inside it ain’t a proper house no more. The rooms and all the furniture are being used for the wounded. Taking up every bit of floor are boys and men, weeping and moaning worse than the boys outside. In here, surrounded by yellow walls, it is close and hot even with the doors and windows flung open, whatever drapes there were pulled down for bedding or maybe bandages.

A shadow moves in the corner, makes me jump out of my skin. A soldier stands up from a wooden chair, moving to a man calling for water. I nod and follow Will into the next room, what was the dining room.

Boys lie on the floor in rows, one along each side of the narrow room and one down the middle, making me think of the Judiciary Square Hospital. Most of these boys are missing something. Feet. Legs. Arms. Hands. Jaws. Or else those parts are shattered so bad, they’ll be missing soon. There’s whimpering and moaning and rasping breaths and praying, all of it calling up things I can’t bear, how there weren’t a thing to be done for Jeremiah.

Down the long side of the room, Will talks to a lady kneeling to pass a hand across a boy’s forehead, her skirts puddling around her. I stop in my tracks when I see who it is.

That thought don’t but last a moment. This woman ain’t Jennie. She might be my Mama’s age. She straightens up and moves to the next soldier with a stiffness, the way she holds herself apart telling me this house ain’t hers.

I march down that row of weeping wounds and dirty bandages, right to Will and that woman, my feet pounding, making the wood floor creak. He is speaking to her. She has a wide face, round cheeks, dark-circled eyes.

‘He’s with the surgeon,’ the woman tells Will, and that is all I need to hear.

‘You’ve got to give me something. Something to do,’ I say right over Will, hoping my stomach will hold for the work.

She looks at me straight on, an eyebrow raising. Then she stoops over the next soldier and says, ‘I’ve been working alone. The surgeons are kept in constant work.’

‘I can work alone,’ I say. ‘Just tell me what needs doing.’

‘There are rooms full of needs here,’ she says. ‘And the barnyard out there.’ She checks the soldier’s bandage. He groans at her touch and she lays the back of her hand to his forehead. She grabs supplies from a basket behind her, her own arm wrapped in gauze below her shoulder. Her sleeve, her deep blue dress, is blood-stiffened, stained to almost black.

‘We’ve only got our canteens,’ I say.

‘We want to help,’ Will says. ‘It’s better than what else we could be doing.’

She looks at us again. Lets out a short breath through her nose, like a sheep before it charges. ‘You.’ She points at Will. ‘You take both canteens and give water to those soldiers in the yard. They must be thirsty and there hasn’t been a spare moment for me to see to them. And you, you stay here. The wounded here need bandage changes and water. There’s water there.’ She points to a side table, pushed against the wall by the doorway. ‘I’ll leave my supplies,’ she adds, holding out the basket of bandages and lint.

From somewhere in the house, there is a sound worse than weeping and shrieking put together, and it keeps getting louder as the woman lifts her skirts and steps past us, grabbing a glass vial from her basket as she passes. ‘Sounds like the surgeon needs my aid,’ she says, whisking out the doorway.

‘You need anything, you come get me,’ Will says to me.

‘I can do this,’ I say, and give over my canteen, Jimmy’s old canteen,
and go to work helping the boy in front of me. Anything to drown out the feeling.

W
HEN WE ARE
let to see Sully, he don’t look like Sully no more. He ain’t got no spark, either from sickness or hurt or his leg already being gone. He lies long and lean on his pallet, his eyes closed, the place where his leg used to be a flat space under the blanket. He won’t be crisscrossing the fields anymore, or flushing birds from bushes, or making side trips on every march.

‘Sully!’ I say. His eyelids flutter open as I sink to my knees.

‘Rosetta?’ he asks, his pupils big from whenever they last gave him laudanum.

‘Yes, but it’s Ross.’ I don’t look at Will. Sully’s forehead feels hot under my hand.

‘I remember,’ he says. ‘Ross now.’

‘That’s right,’ I say. ‘We’re here now. Ross and Will. We’ve been looking for you.’

‘You took a mite too long,’ he says, coming round, a flicker of a smile on his face as his hand sweeps toward his missing leg.

‘Looks to be the truth,’ I say.

‘Got my adventure,’ he says. ‘Had to give the Rebs my leg for it. Still hurts.’

‘I can see,’ I say.

‘Where’s Jeremiah?’ Sully asks.

‘Just us,’ I choke out.

Sully looks at me, his eyes bright all of a sudden.

‘No,’ he says.

I nod, tears spilling.

‘The cornfield?’ he asks.

I nod again and he turns his face away. There is a long silence.

Will finally speaks. ‘You want to tell us what cost you the leg? We’ve been worried about you for days.’

‘You both know about that cornfield,’ Sully says, and we nod. ‘I was
coming out of that corn, like everyone was, and all those Rebs were right in front of me. Seeing them made me think about Jimmy and I wanted to bring his revenge on them.’

He stops talking, his Adam’s apple still bobbing. His fingers scrabble across his sheet. He sucks in a breath and then he talks again. ‘I ran out of that corn shooting, but you know how it was. I almost couldn’t see what I was aiming at. But I know I got some Rebs.’

‘But how’d they get your leg?’ Will asks.

‘Well, I saw our flag waving and that deserter—Levi?—carrying it shot right down and our colors lying there. I knew it was for me to go and raise it. It don’t take long to get shot when you’ve got a flag waving over your head.’ Sully’s smile ain’t a happy one.

‘It hurt something awful,’ he says. ‘Burning and crushing and tearing all at once. It wasn’t good right from the start. I would have laid where I fell, but for the fighting all over the field. I dragged myself off, got in a ditch, and prayed the whole night for it to be over and for someone to find me, praying I wouldn’t die like a dog.’ Sully’s eyes close, tired from talking.

At least I spared Jeremiah that, at least he had me with him ’til the last.

Then Sully looks right at Will. ‘I thought a lot about salvation. I ain’t never asked forgiveness so many times in one night, but I got a clean soul now.’

‘Well, that’s one good thing,’ Will says. ‘There’s more adventures coming for you.’

‘You saying this hospital is an adventure?’ Sully asks. ‘Because I ain’t about to argue on that.’

We laugh even though it ain’t really funny. I reach for Sully’s hand. He holds tight but he is so weary, he don’t say a word or even move. When Will holds out the opium pills, Sully takes them, holding on to my hand until he dozes off, his soul clean and his leg festering.

When the nursing woman comes back through the parlor, making her rounds, she tells us, ‘He only had a cornhusk wrap on that leg before I got here with my supplies. Looks as though that dressing ought to be changed again.’

She sets clean bandages, iodine, and a small cup half full of sugar down
next to me. I kneel and peel away Sully’s bandage. The flannel snags against his skin, making the stitches across his stump seep. My eyes swim to think on Sully with Jeremiah, with the O’Malleys. My cheeks burn and I don’t know if I am ashamed or angry. Ashamed I can’t ever bring myself to trust anyone but Jeremiah. Angry at Jeremiah for getting us into this war, for leaving me, for the baby on its way, at our plan that’s smashed to bits and moldering in the ground. I want to wail, thinking on how he tried to protect me. I want to scream at all of it. And then there is a tenderness in my heart for Sully that I ain’t never felt before as I mix a slurry of iodine and sugar and paint over those stitches until my hands are stained a burnt red.

I
KEEP VIGIL
over Sully. The nursing woman comes to kneel beside the young man on the pallet right next to us, a bandage wrapped around his head. The soldier’s chest barely rises.

‘He hasn’t woken since being found,’ she says, looking me over. ‘Every time I look on him, he’s worse than before.’