May the Road Rise Up to Meet You: A Novel (31 page)

The command comes to fire when you’re confronted by a Reb company out in front of the Sunken Road, poor lads they are, and the whole Brigade opens up and fires its volley. But the greenhorn beside you panics a little, stepping to the side and dropping to one knee, and it’s all you can do not to waste your shot as you’re stumbling over him. When the smoke’s settled a little, you can see the Reb company drawing back into the Sunken Road with the rest of their boys, except for a few fellas near a tree they use for cover. The lead man fires and has two men behind him reloading and handing him their muskets, and you stop, just as the smoke is clearing and the Brigade is getting ready to move forward again. You aim your musket. Twenty, maybe thirty yards away, you breathe out the way the drill sergeants taught you, see that Reb doing the shooting by the tree and aim right at his nose, then let go. And you see his head snap back, see the way his boys around him don’t even bother to drag him along with them as they retreat to the Sunken Road. And that’s three, for sure. Three you’ve killed, counting the two at Malvern Hill. An odd thought in the midst of all this.

The command comes to move forward again, fix bayonets on the move, and get ready to take the Sunken Road hand to hand. But you don’t get more than three steps when you feel a ball of fire pop into your right leg, and before you can tumble from it, another goes through the same shoulder where you got it with the bayonet, making the same, terrible, sickening sound of flesh giving way to metal the way it did when you stuck your bayonet into that man at Malvern Hill. And you’re down in a rush, collapsing upon yourself, limbs flopping aimlessly like the
pages of a book thrown facedown onto the ground, and there’s nothing but the noise beginning to meld into one vast pop and rumble and shout.

You can see the lines march past, then another horrible barrage coming from over by the Sunken Road, and plenty more falling around you. There’s a bugle call for retreat, and another from the Brigade behind you to move forward, and then there’s Harry, standing over you and cussing and calling to Finny, and you smile a little at the sight of them both, knowing they’re all right. And then they’re lifting you up with the pain bursting through you again as you feel everything going gray for a while … see your blood spilling out of your leg and onto Finny’s arms as he carries your lower half. Then Harry’s yelling at you,
look at me Perfessor, look at ME, Ethan
, and it’s coming from behind you … straight above you since Harry’s got you by both arms … and you smile halfway at him … not from seeing his face upside down in this odd manner, but from hearing him call you Ethan for the first time in maybe ten years, maybe more …

When you open your eyes you’re back on the ground, only under a tree, and the fighting sounds farther off than before. Finny’s saying how they
cleared out the Sunken Road at last
, and he’s laughing nervously, thinking the best thing he can do is tell you this, that it wasn’t all for naught this time around.
At least we showed them Rebs how to fight
. Then Harry’s telling him
it doesn’t matter now Fin
, and tells him to go off and get the Division Commander and see if he’ll send his surgeon for the fella that took his portrait back in Washington. Harry’s pulling off his belt and wrapping it around your leg just above the wound, like you’d learned you shoulda done from the Doc that had to take Smitty’s arm. It hurts like hell but Harry keeps saying
sorry, Ethan, just a little tighter
 … then pulls with all the strength he’s got, and the pain makes everything go gray … then altogether black.

When you wake up again, Harry’s kneeling beside you … 
Yer gonna be fine now Ethan
, he says, and it worries you that he’s still calling you that … but it’s hard to get the air to tell him so. Finny’s back before long and it sounds like the battle’s done, or shifted over to the left part of the lines. The sky’s turning dark and you remember that it must be this late by now, that you’re not dying yet, that it’s merely the sun
setting in its universe the way Isaac Newton says it should, and at least that’s still the same as ever. Finny’s got a canteen and he pours some of its contents into your mouth and you swallow it down along with some of the red spit that’s still forming from inside you. It burns like water isn’t supposed to and you start to cough in gasps of breath.

Finny!
Harry shouts.
Ya gotta water it down. You know he’s not an OBJ man
.

Then you recognize the putrid taste of Oh! Be Joyful on your tongue. It’s a foul concoction of potato peels and whatever else the men can ferment down to this rubbish, and you can’t imagine how they love it so.

Sorry Ethan
, Finny says, and you stop coughing before long, thinking,
Et tu, Fin?
not ’cause of the OBJ but because now
he’s
calling you by the name your Mam gave you, too. Finny’s gone for a few minutes and as soon as he’s back, there’s the surgeon standing over you. Fin tries again to pour some of the stuff from the canteen into your mouth, and the surgeon grabs it from him.

I watered it down Doc
, Finny says, but the Doc’s not happy.

He looks at your leg and shakes his head some, then pulls Harry’s cap off your shoulder and seems not as unhappy as he is with the leg. He hands the canteen back to Finny and tells him to pour some on the shoulder,
just a bitta shrapnel there
, he says,
went clear through
. Finny’s dripping it down in little drops that sting, ’til the Doc grabs hold of it and lets it spill out in a rush, and you feel the fire pour through you.

You boys’ll drink this down like it’s water
, the Doc says,
but when you finally find something this shit is good for, you get scared
.

He pours even more of it into the wound in your leg and now it’s on fire again, and the grayness starts setting in. It’s only when he tells Harry to hand him
that instrument there
that you shake off the gray enough to try and see just what instrument he means … if it’s the little scalpel or the saw …

Hold him down!
the Doc shouts at Finny, who presses your shoulders back before you can see.

The Doc pours some of the OBJ on whatever it is he’s fixing to operate with, then more into your leg, and everything starts to turn grayer than before.

Give him another sip of that, the Doc says to Finny, who’s tipping the canteen into the side of your mouth. Then Harry’s placing a stick between your teeth, and the Doc’s looking right at you now, not more than a foot from your face.

Bite down on that now, son
, he says.
This is gonna hurt
.

Good Lawd, dis mus’ be some ’potant work we doin’ here if’n they sent Yo Majesty down to do it wit’ us.

Mary’s heard the comments from her fellow slaves before. It’s the price she has to pay for the comfort of her life and the chance to speak French, wear pretty dresses in the shop, and pretend she isn’t just a common slave girl from the tobacco fields of Carolina. It doesn’t get any easier when Miss Juss decides she simply
hasta
volunteer in the army hospital the way Sally Henridge does. Sally’s still just seventeen and almost a full year younger than Miss Juss, and the thought of Sally havin’ those boys all to herself is enough to drive Juss into fits like she used to have when she was no more than ten years old. Of course, the only way Mista and Misses Kittredge’ll hear about Juss workin’ at the army hospital is if Mary goes with her every mornin’ and stays to walk her home again at midday. Juss spends some time every mornin’ readin’ letters to the soldiers, but with all the nurses and white ladies workin’ at the hospital, there isn’t much left for Mary to do. So they send her off to wash sheets and bandages down by the stream with some of the other slave gals, and that’s the beginning of the makin’ fun and callin’ her
Yo Majesty
and all.

It starts straight off the very first day she’s sent down there, with her fancy dress and the way she walks real straight, with her hair set back in pins and barrettes the way the white ladies do it. Truth is, it isn’t Mary
puttin’ on airs so much as it’s that she doesn’t have any other dresses, but try tellin’ the slave gals that. Besides, Misses Kittredge’d never let her walk through town lookin’ like a common field hand, where some of the society ladies that come into the shop might see her, and that’d ruin the whole idea that Mary’s something special. So it isn’t Mary’s fault that she looks so out of place down by the stream. Not that it matters much to the other women, who have their fun pickin’ on her when they aren’t ignorin’ her altogether. Mary could tell the Misses about hangin’ sheets on the line, and the Misses’d tell the people at the hospital to have Mary do something else. But she doesn’t want to feel like this work is beneath her, and doesn’t want Gertie thinkin’ less of her, like she’d got uppity, and start scoldin’ her in her dreams.

So for four hours every day it’s hangin’ up the sheets and bandages the women clean, and noontime can’t get here fast enough when she can go and get Miss Juss from the hospital so they can walk home together. Juss spends the whole walk talkin’ about this officer or that and what so-and-so says in this letter or that one, and they have just a few minutes for something to eat before Juss goes upstairs for lessons with Miss Randall. Juss was supposed to be done with her lessons once she turned eighteen, but Miss Randall kept sayin’ that there was a whole lot more for her to learn, so that’s another year of long afternoons for Juss. Mary’d like to still be studyin’ with Miss Randall in the afternoons, learnin’ more about history and literature and such. But she’s in the shop every afternoon instead, meetin’ with all the ladies who’re buyin’ dresses again, now that the Yankees’ve been chased off away from Richmond.

Between all the work and all the teasin’, not to mention the way Juss is growin’ up and seems more interested in officers than she is in her, it’s a sad time for Mary. But a little more than two weeks in, things begin to change, just a little bit at first, then a little more each day. It isn’t that the gals stop teasin’ her, or that the shop gets any less busy, or that Juss is any less interested in officers, but that now Mary’s got a distraction of her own.

There’s a new work detail set up just down the stream a piece, where a few slaves are brought in to build a levee to steer some of the water off the stream for washin’ the sheets and bandages. Farther downriver there’ll be another levee, where the waste from the hospital can get
washed downstream and out to the river once or twice a day. There’s a white overseer and seven slaves doin’ the work, but it doesn’t take long to see that the overseer isn’t there to do anythin’ more than make sure six of the colored men keep up with the other one, the one who’s
really
runnin’ things. Mary doesn’t recognize him straight off, what with him downstream a piece, but when noontime comes and she heads back past the men to the hospital to get Juss, she sees him lift his hat off his head as she passes. The six other slaves stare at her and smile and make jokes to each other, and not a one of ’em takes off his hat. Micah doesn’t say anything, but that’s nothing new for him, as far as she can remember.

When he worked at the dress shop the year before, he went about it like he was practically in his own world … nothing but sawin’ and hammerin’ and measurin’ as far as she could tell. But he’d always stop and take his hat off whenever Mary or the Misses or Juss or even Cora walked past. Never said nothing then, but took his hat off all the same. He built that extension on the dress shop in three and a half weeks, working only in the very early mornin’s and late in the evenin’s. Mr. Kittredge said it was well worth the high cost Mr. Longley charged to rent out Micah since he’s about the best carpenter in the city, white or colored, he said. And if there’s ever another job to get done ’round the store, it’ll be Micah he hires to do it.

Mary didn’t pay too much attention to Micah back then, what with the store plenty busy and her tryin’ to remember who she could speak French to and who she had to be that Carolina field hand with and everything in between. Besides, she still wasn’t in much of a mind to take any more notice of men than she had to back then, and when she’d talk to Gertie at night, she’d sometimes wonder if maybe Mista Grant had ruined her toward thinkin’ of men altogether. But that was a year ago, and seein’ Juss growin’ up more every day, talkin’ ’bout officers like she used to talk about dresses and hair ribbons, it’s made Mary start to do some changin’ too. The dress shop’s been seemin’ more like a
job
lately than some kinda adventure, the way it used to, and soon enough Juss’ll find a young man to make the most important person in her life, and Mary realizes she’ll be alone as Cora … or like Gertie was before she took Mary in. And somehow that’s got Mary wantin’ for something
more, somebody who might understand her the way Juss and Cora, and Gertie even, can’t. Somebody who knows what it’s like to be an island.