Touching Stars (20 page)

“So what’s the story?” a girl asked. “So we’ll know.”

“I had some help with that,” Travis said. “I asked a friend of mine to take everything I’ve learned myself and write a play about it. You’ll meet her when you get to the high school. Carin Webster—that’s Miss Webster to you. She worked on it for several weeks with some of our campers. Tonight you get to hear the prologue. Then, as camp goes on, you’ll get to hear the rest of it.”

Gayle could tell the kids were interested. There was whispering, as if they were trying to guess which campers had been involved in the play. But Gayle was satisfied she knew the answer.

“So that’s what Dillon and Caleb have been doing,” she told Eric. “No wonder Dillon’s been so excited.”

“Who’s this Miss Webster?”

“I haven’t met her. I guess none of our kids have had her.”

Travis stepped forward. “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Dillon Fortman and Caleb Mowrey, who will take you back in time to this very place where you’re sitting. It’s 1865, and Sheridan and his troops have already stormed through the Shenandoah Valley to burn whatever they can. I told you about Lee and Lincoln. Now it’s time to let Dillon and Caleb tell you the rest.”

Travis turned and began to clap. The kids took it up. And on cue, the two boys came to stand in front, one from each side. Gayle saw they had changed their clothes. Dillon wore a collarless shirt tucked into loose jeans and covered by a vest, along with boots and a dark felt hat with a brim. Caleb was dressed similarly, although he wore a straw hat and no shoes.

Dillon took out a notebook and opened it, holding it in front of him like a tenor in the church choir. He looked confident and, if anything else, excited. Caleb looked less assured, but he folded his hands over an identical notebook and waited.

Dillon looked out at his audience, waiting for the buzz of excitement to die down. At the exact moment when it did, he began.

“My name is Robby Duncan. I don’t know why I’m trying to put everything that happened this past spring on paper. I don’t think anybody who finds this will believe what I’m about to say. I don’t even know whether
I
should believe it or not, so why should you? I just know that what my ma and I have been through these past weeks is worth this paper and ink and the time it will take me to tell my story. I guess you’ll have to decide for yourselves if the time you spend listening is worth it to you.”

Caleb opened his notebook and stepped forward. “I was born fourteen years ago, during better times, when the farm where you’re sitting was a place my family could be proud of. My father, Lewis, had two wives. The first, Nellie, died soon after they married. I don’t think Pa wanted to go through that again, because he waited ten years before he married for the last time. His second wife, Miranda, is my mother. I am my father and mother’s only child. So I have no choice. It’s left to me to tell their story.”

Gayle looked down at the students and realized they had grown still as the two boys took turns narrating Robby Duncan’s story. She hadn’t realized that Travis had come around to the back until he joined her on the other end of the log.

She grabbed his hand and squeezed it. “Thank you,” she whispered.

“My pleasure,” he said, and squeezed back.

Then she gave herself up to the joy of watching Dillon and Caleb entertain their fellow campers.

1865

I
was a fat baby. Aunt Cora, who lives with her husband Ebenezer and his brother Ralph in a cabin close to the river’s edge, once told me that I was
so
big, I like to have killed my mother getting born.

Aunt Cora has a way of putting things that leaves no doubts. “You was so fat, your skin folded up like some old pumpkin left in the field too long to make a pie. I could take a whole handful of it…” She extended her fingers like claws, and milked the air in front of me. “And you never even knowed you’d been pinched!”

When she said this, she nodded with almost every word, the loose skin under her chin flapping in demonstration. Cora isn’t really my aunt. She and Uncle Eb have worked for my father’s family since long before my parents were married. Now she’s an old woman, or at least she seems old to me. If the truth were told, since the war began, nobody looks young anymore. When I glimpse my own narrow face in the still waters of the stock pond, my arms as thin as cornstalks poking out of shirts Aunt Cora patches for me, I glimpse the old man I will be someday.

I’m not fat anymore, but I remained round-faced and doughy almost until the day my father mounted the roan gelding he raised from a colt and rode off to join the Muhlenberg Rifles of the Tenth Virginia Infantry. I wasn’t yet eleven, and despite feeling frightened, I stood at my mother’s side, the Virginia sun prickling my scalp. I remember the way the air smelled, the way the dust from the gelding’s hooves became a fine, punishing grit I couldn’t scrub away for weeks. The way my mother’s mouth tightened into a long hard line, as straight as the blade of an ax.

My father packed his own supplies, but at that last moment Ma fingered the quilt he had chosen to bring with him. She told him the pattern was called Devil’s Puzzle, and she thought his choice of it appropriate. This terrible war belonged to the devil, and it remained a puzzle to her that any good man would choose to fight in it.

She would not kiss my father goodbye. He was already dead to her, she said. She would not kiss a corpse.

I tried not to cry. I knew better than to cheer. I remember tears and pride being locked inside me, fighting a battle that ended in defeat for both. When the dust settled and hoofbeats were overshadowed by the squawking of one of Pa’s prize roosters, I remember Ma telling Uncle Eb to find the bird and wring his neck. We would have chicken and dumplings for supper while we still could. We did, too, but nobody was hungry.

Not long after that we were hungry almost all the time.

They say now that Lee has surrendered and the war is over, even though some soldiers are still fighting. I wonder if saying this makes it true? When I was younger, I searched for a way to make the war end. I prayed, but nothing came of it. I wished on stars and on the first toad I saw in the spring until the day we learned my father had died trying to take Culp’s Hill at Gettysburg. Then I stopped wishing and praying, because if those things hadn’t saved my father, why would they save anybody else?

They sure didn’t save Abraham Lincoln. A lot of Unionists have been praying for their president since the war began. But early in April somebody killed him anyway. When it happened, the only thing I could think of was that maybe the man who pulled that trigger was like me. He’d stopped knowing what was real and what wasn’t, what to believe and what to do. And whether anything he did would make a difference anyway.

Aunt Cora says that when men are intent on killing each other, the Lord above has to look away to keep from striking all of them dead. I think this time he didn’t look away. Because even the men who are still living, the men who take the back roads of our county to avoid detection, men who stop by our farmhouse and beg for food or a place to sleep, look like dead men. I know because I have seen men laid out in their coffins, and if they have any look at all, they have that same sad surprise on their faces. Men in their coffins have copper pennies weighting their eyelids, but the eyes of the men who ask us for help are as blank and cold as copper. Uncle Eb says they have all seen hell and wonder why now they’re walking through a land of cool, clear water and sweet green leaves.

Our land was not so cool or green last year, when Sheridan and his men came through, burning houses and barns, destroying fields and crops and whatever animals the Union army hadn’t already stole from Valley farms. Ralph, who helps tend our fields, told me Sheridan’s men burned anything that might serve as food for the Confederate army. I guess it didn’t matter that those of us left at home need food, as well. Uncle Eb and Ralph saw smoke in the distance and guessed what was about to happen. We had prepared, and we hid what we could, leaving just enough so the invaders would feel they had accomplished their mission.

But no soldier crossed the river to burn our house or barn. A month earlier the barn had nearly burned to the ground anyway, the fire set by a pipe still smoldering in the hand of a deserter who had fallen asleep in our hayloft. Lucky for us a heavy rain spared us the worst. Luckier still when Sheridan’s men, intent on destroying everything that could be shipped elsewhere, left us mostly alone. Too far off the Valley Pike and the Back Road, on a shallow river with so many bends and twists that ships avoid it, we were of little interest.

Now I find it curious that Sheridan’s generous and unanticipated gift of the food we had expected him to steal or burn might have destroyed us anyway. Because our wealth, measured in grains of corn and the peeps of hatchling chicks, has brought brigades of strangers to our door.

Mostly they are men mustered out of service, on their way to somewhere and worried about what they will find. Saddest of all are the wounded and shattered who hardly remember their names. Like others throughout the countryside, my mother takes them in, feeding and sheltering and nursing whenever she can.

We are still poor, even if we have a little food. In return for whatever we do or give, Ma accepts help in our fields, wood chopped to keep us warm in winter, coins, coffee, tobacco or sugar to hide away. A man with nothing to offer sleeps beneath the half-charred roof of our barn. A man with something to give fares a little better, although he never receives encouragement. Ma is still young, even if she has aged five years for every year my father has been gone. Men look at her with an expression I have learned to recognize, but those who move too close find themselves staring down the barrels of Uncle Eb’s shotgun.

Until April when Blackjack came to us.

The morning he rode up on his pale bay horse, we didn’t know the stranger’s name, of course. Uncle Eb and Ralph, too old to serve in the army but still strong enough to serve as our guardians, heard a horse and left the porch where we had been drinking Ma’s coffee. We had long since run out of real coffee beans, although a time or two soldiers staying with us had a bit to share. But two years ago Ma took to roasting dandelion roots until they were as dark as dirt, then grinding them to brew and sweeten with sorghum or honey.

April on the river can be hot, the mist that rises from the water settling against our flesh like steam from Aunt Cora’s Monday washtub. This year April wore her second disguise. Frost crunched under our boots in the mornings and etched spiderwebs on our windows at night. The morning air was cool enough to prompt thoughts of a retreat to the kitchen, where the cookstove provided welcome warmth.

The man on the horse put those thoughts from our minds. I wrapped my wool shirt tighter around me. The shirt was an old one Pa had not taken with him, gnawed by moths and reeking of lavender and wormwood to discourage them. Ma does not like to see me wear it, but she’s never told me not to.

Uncle Eb and Ralph were on the ground waiting for the stranger to arrive at our porch when Ma stepped out with the coffeepot. She paused just beyond the doorway, gazing into the distance as the stranger rode toward us.

“Not another,” she said, almost to herself.

“He’s alone.” I stepped to the edge of the stairs and squinted into the rose-hued dawn. “He won’t cause you much work.”

She joined me there, coffeepot still poised in her hand, as if she was about to pour. “At least we aren’t closer to town. If we were, we would have more of them.”

“If Pa were alive, he would be on the road now, too.”

“Yes, but he isn’t.”

A cold wind blew through her words. From the beginning, the idea of war had angered Ma. When Virginia had seceded to the Confederacy, she’d been angrier. When my father had reluctantly chosen to fight, her anger had turned to ice.

It seems I’ve always known that my mother married my father because he was the best of bad choices. Neither of them ever told me this, of course. But even as a small child I knew how to stay silent and listen, how to move quietly in shadows, how to make myself even smaller so that others forgot I existed. From this and from Aunt Cora, I pieced together the past.

My mother’s parents acted on the stage until my grandfather took a job as schoolmaster in town. My mother claims her parents were rich in education and conversation but poor in every other way. When they died of putrid fever she was left with little but her clothing and their many books.

From gossip in the churchyard, I know there was a suitor, a handsome young man from the town’s leading family, and Ma fell in love with him. I know that although she expected to marry him, he wed another woman. With no alternative, she took her father’s place at the school, a job she did not relish, and watched as the world passed her by.

My father was nearly twenty years older than my mother, and at first he refused to court her. But Ma was golden-haired and smooth skinned, with eyes that even today are so large they seem to take in the whole world. By then her unhappiness was growing. Although a patient, warmhearted teacher with her only son, she herself has told me that teaching the children of strangers was like walking into a room with no windows.

Rejected by a man she thought she loved, orphaned by the deaths of her parents, forced into an occupation for which she had no calling, I believe my mother surveyed the limited supply of men she might marry and decided my father was the best of the lot. She is a persuasive and, if need be, a demanding woman. However it was accomplished, one year after the death of her parents, my father and mother were wed.

I once heard Aunt Cora say that my mother set her sights on my father most deliberately. Ma chose a man who would support and adore her. The Duncan farm was successful, and my father had proved himself a hard worker with a head for business. Lewis Duncan was a man known for his loyalty, faith and steadfastness.

If my mother had few thoughts of love when she repeated her wedding vows, I’m afraid that in the years that followed she had no thoughts of it at all. If my father understood this, he never gave a sign in my presence.

On that morning in April, however, thoughts of the past were fleeting. The stranger approached, leaning forward over the full, dark mane of his horse. Ma finally turned and set the coffeepot on the table beside the front door.

“Another man trying not to die, Robby. Eb may need you.”

I was halfway down the steps by the time she finished. Ralph and Uncle Eb were not as strong as they liked to pretend. Each year since the war began, the fields we cultivated grew fewer and smaller as the forest at their edges devoured them. Ralph, a white-haired, stooped man with only one good eye, rested after each turn of the plow. Uncle Eb, the younger of the two brothers and the slighter, did the farm chores with no spring to his step. Every day the chores seemed to take longer.

I waited beside the others as the horse slowed to a halt just beyond us. The man in the saddle tried to straighten, but the effort cost him dearly. As we watched, he slid to one side and fell from the saddle.

We caught him just before his head hit the ground. The horse, a mare of a quality only seen these days under a uniformed officer, was streaked with sweat and glowed under the light of the rising sun. She danced away from us, uneasy at our presence. Uncle Eb caught the bridle and held her still as Ralph and I finished lowering the stranger to the ground.

“Is he dead?” my mother asked from the porch.

“Nah, still breathing,” Ralph said, his fingers at the side of the man’s throat. “Could change, though.”

“If he dies, I suppose we’ll keep his horse,” she said. “If he doesn’t? We can be proud we aren’t yet animals ourselves. Bring him inside.”

Ralph squatted and put his hands under the man’s armpits. I slipped my arms under his knees, and together we lifted him from the ground. He groaned, and only then did I really take note of him. He was a young man, fine featured, with a strong, square chin and jutting brow. His dark hair waved over a broad forehead, and he had a luxuriant mustache and several days’ growth of beard. His clothes were travel stained, but they seemed of good quality. There was nothing suggesting a uniform about them. Not for one side or the other.

Ma had lit a lamp in the parlor, and Ralph and I took him there. She carefully spread a quilt over the sofa, and as gently as we could, we laid him on it. She fetched a basin of water and several cloths, and proceeded to wipe his face.

“Can you hear me?” She rubbed a little harder. “Can you tell us if you’re wounded?”

He became aware again all at once, gasping as if all air had abandoned his lungs. He tried to sit up, but Ralph firmly forced him down.

“You’re safe,” Ma said. “And the war’s nearly over.”