Sisters of Shiloh (10 page)

“In his own world. Where’s everyone else?”

“Oh, scattered around. Matthew’s over yonder.”

Josephine looked around and saw Matthew with his head lowered, writing furiously on scratch paper. He’d barely talked to her since her arrival. In fact, he barely spoke at all.

“He’s at it again,” Wesley said. “He ran out of stationery right after Kernstown. Then he ran out of wallpaper. Then he started ripping out pages of his novels and writing on the margins. He loves those novels, but I guess there’s someone he loves more.”

“A sweetheart?”

“He’s crazy about her. Writes her every day. God knows what news he can dust off here.”

Josephine envied this girl, imagining her reading the margins of the novel pages by a window, turning them three times to follow the love talk.

“We’ve all given up so much for this war,” Josephine said, meaning she had.

Wesley had gone back to tuning but the F string, increasingly high and then perfect, seemed to agree with her. The dust cleared for a moment. Dress parade was coming soon.

Josephine watched Matthew’s writing hand preserve some feverish thought. She turned to Wesley and said, “You got a girl back home?”

He nodded slowly, but she realized he was simply satisfied with the tune of the fifth string.

“No, I don’t got a girl,” he said at last. “But sometimes when we march through a town, they’ll come and talk to us. Sometimes they’re not too happy, because we’re robbing their smokehouses. But they look so pretty, I want to kiss them, even the ones in Frederick who called us filthy Rebel dogs and dropped cantaloupes on our heads. I worry that they’re all getting married, and by the time I come back home there won’t be any left.”

“There will still be plenty, I imagine.”

“But who would love me? I’m not handsome like Matthew. I’m scrawny and I’ve got crooked toes.”

“Women can surprise you. After all, one of them married Abraham Lincoln.”

Wesley smiled slightly, then said, “Sometimes I want to make a deal with the Yankees. I want to say, ‘Listen. I won’t shoot you. You won’t shoot me. We’ll forget about this war and go find us some women.’”

“My cousin would kill you if he heard you say that,” Josephine said.

“So would Lewis.”

Wesley looked sideways at her.

“How ’bout you? You got a girl?”

Josephine hesitated, considering the question. “No,” she said. “But when I get back home, I’ll find someone.” She had tried not to torture herself by imagining her homecoming, but like marjoram and chocolate, the thought evoked the heated pleasure of the out-of-reach craving. One day, if God were willing, she would slip off her uniform and put on a new slat bonnet. And new crinolines. And new shoes. The lice would carry away her uniform, and she would wave it farewell.

A breeze blew in, catching a dog in mid-step and moving its long ears forward. Wesley gave his guitar a final strum and tapped his carved name. “All done,” he said.

“Play something.”

“Nah.”

“Be a sport.”

“If you’ll get off my back.” But he smiled as he said this and began to strum, at first the discontinuous chords of rehearsal and then a song that favored neither Rebel nor Yankee, but lived independently by the side of a river, in a bank of bloodless ferns.

Josephine knew that something about her puzzled Wesley. A shadow would cross his face and then vanish, as though he could see her just for a fleeting moment before he saw Joseph again, just another boy in the Rebel cause, dusty, lice-eaten, hungry, and male. Josephine lived for those moments when she caught Wesley’s glance by firelight or during sing-alongs or the interminable drills as the chubby lieutenant yelled at her mistakes.

“Private Holden! Do you understand
right face?
”

“Yes, sir!”

“Do you understand
left face?
”

“Yes, sir!”

“Then turn when everyone else turns, you idiot!”

Only Wesley’s occasionally searching looks kept her from completely losing herself and drowning in her maleness. She thought about him late at night, scratching herself in her tent, Libby dreaming by her side and sometimes crying in her sleep. She did not find him plain or scrawny at all, and found the angles of his face and the darkness of his eyes increasingly pleasing. She knew it was dangerous, feeling this way. One slip and she’d be out of the war and so would Libby, and Josephine was convinced that a broken quest would kill her sister, that all she was living for was revenge and that was the soup that kept her breathing. And so Josephine remained vigilant, talking to Wesley as she imagined a boy would, without fondness, without any appreciation for the sound of his voice or his laughter or the words of his songs, or for the desire in his heart to trade the war for a swimming hole.

She envied Libby for having been seen half-naked by the mad Private Abraham before his suicide, for this was an affirmation, a knowing and confirming, if demented, glimpse. Josephine could only make do with seeing herself, feeling herself, on certain furtive bathing trips in the river at night, running her hands over her naked body, her filthy clothes on the riverbank, free now of shell jacket and the binding cloth and the heaviness of a flintlock on her shoulder. Just herself, just a woman, breasts still there, skin and lips and the hair between her legs and what it guarded. Knee and shin and elbow. The delicate fingers of her hands. Her brow, cheek, neck. She ran her fingers through her hair and felt tears coming as the hair let her fingers go after the blink of an eye and there was no more hair left to caress. But it was soft hair, female hair.

She sank down into the slow-moving river, sat down on the silky bottom as the water flowed up to her breasts and the moonlight lay on the water. Beneath the surface she was real. When it grew too cold to bathe in the river, where could she find herself?

She had not yet seen the worst of the war, the middle of a battle, when anything soft is banished in favor of raw instinct and the will to survive. She had held the long, heavy bullets and couldn’t imagine them cutting her flesh, tearing through her lie and gutting the truth. She imagined being buried where she fell, her secret preserved forever.

Was all of this her punishment for the wish for Arden’s death? Or for what she’d done at Sharpsburg? In the panic of the moment, she had made a decision that seemed more right than wrong. But in the passing days and weeks, the rightness of it, like the woman in her, was starting to slip away. Perhaps it was a fiendish deed after all. She didn’t know, and there was no one she could ask. Sometimes, as she watched her sister sleep, Libby would open her eyes and look at her with such a rank suspicion that Josephine was sure she knew. But then her gaze would soften and she would fall asleep again, breathing in, breathing out, and, during those brief, motionless pauses in between, look for all the world like her husband in his deathly repose.

Josephine would move away to the very edge of the tent, dragging her eyes away from Libby’s face. If God had invented this torture to punish her, then He was a brilliant God indeed, twice the genius of Stonewall Jackson, and she never wished to meet Him.

The dust died down, but then a scourge of a different sort took its place that October. Rain fell from the sky in drops big as plum pits. It leaked through woolen uniforms, plastered hair against heads, and soaked the visage of Jefferson Davis off the backs of playing cards. Horses tried to buck off their riders when thunder rolled. Drills continued during pauses in the deluge, but the rain fell again. The lieutenant would look at the sky and shake his head in disgust. The soldiers huddled under their oilcloths and jury-rigged shelters out of canvas and the low branches of willow trees.

Poker and faro continued, as did cockfights, held in secret places. Bloody rain flew off the wings of the birds as they fought in standing pools; the wind blew tinted water into the faces of the betting men. Once, the winning bird drowned the loser.

Dog-eared pamphlets of
Les Misérables
had been passed around Company D for weeks. Socialites were reading it in the cities, and cowboys out west. Even the farmers put down their newspapers and picked up the harrowing tale of Jean Valjean—prisoner, thief, fugitive, and consulate—a man whose fortunes rose and fell as often as those of the South. On rainy evenings, soldiers crowded into a Sibley tent and elected someone who was halfway literate to read aloud, usually Floyd, the most dramatic. He would clear his throat and the tale would begin, as the odors of the unbathed bodies in the tent faithfully approximated the smell of a hunted man’s fear.

The rain slackened one night, but not so the chase. Javert, the obsessed police detective in
Les Misérables,
had learned of Jean Valjean’s whereabouts and was rushing over to arrest him and send him back to the galleys, where he had been a slave. Jean Valjean saw an avenue of escape—a high wall that formed part of an old building. He himself was strong enough to scale the wall, but what would become of Cosette, the orphan girl he’d taken in and loved as his own?

The slush lamp fell to the ground, blackening the tent, and the shock of the broken-off tale evoked a collective gasp.

Floyd’s voice accused the unknown culprit who lurked at arm’s reach in the darkness. “What idiot knocked down the lamp?”

“Not me,” said Wesley.

“Oh, I bet it was. You probably hit it with your dumb, ugly head.”

“You hit it with your stupid old waving arm.”

“Pipe down and find a candle.”

Libby and Lewis stood picket in a copse of red oaks, two hundred yards removed from the argument about the fallen lamp. The rain had finally stopped, but they were both soaking wet. Water dripped off broad leaves that would have shown changing colors in the daytime.

“They’re reading
Les Misérables
without us, I reckon,” Lewis said.

“Probably,” Libby said. “I sneaked ahead a few pages this morning, when no one was looking. Believe it or not, the French inspector—”

“Don’t tell me.”

The sky had cleared of the boil of night clouds, and Orion shone with the energy of the moon. Libby was thinking about Josephine. A memory kept coming back to her, one she wasn’t quite sure was even real. She tried to push it from her mind. A drop of rain slid down her face.

She looked sideways at Lewis. She’d heard he was a brave fighter whose aim was true, but he was also a man of swinging moods, generous with hardtack rations but quick with his fists. When his brother played the guitar, Lewis would sit cross-legged next to him, his shoulders hunched and face intense, his coiled body resembling a wolf tied down by the tenuous rope of a song. Anyone who dared interrupt Wesley was subject to his brother’s ominous stare.

Low, thin fog drifted through the saplings, and damp heaven light hung close to the ground, giving honeysuckle bushes the look of skulking monsters and making serpents out of fallen vines. Branches creaked and twigs snapped. The rain dripping from them was of different temperatures, warm and ice-cold. Lewis had pulled a two-foot dogwood sapling out of the ground, stripped it of its branches, and snaked it down the back of his shirt in search of chiggers or lice or some unnamed vermin that attacked on wet nights. He finally gave up, withdrew the sapling, and tossed it into a tangle of elderberry. “Rain’s gonna come back. Give it thirty, forty minutes, and we’ll be treading water again.”

Libby saw a flashing light and raised her gun.

Lewis grabbed the barrel. “That ain’t nothing. They call them things northern lights. God’s way of teasing pickets. No one knows what makes them. All I know is that they’ve scared soldiers into blasting away at Yankees that ain’t even there.”

He ran his hand inside his coat and pulled out a rolled cornhusk. He unrolled it and applied a thin line of tobacco from a pouch around his neck, and then rolled the cigarette tight. She looked at him in surprise. Arden had always said that only sissies smoked cigarettes. Real men chewed tobacco or smoked a pipe.

Lewis put the cigarette against his nose and inhaled deeply. “You think I’m a girl for smoking these?” he asked, as though he’d read her mind.

“No.”

He fished in his pockets for a match. “Well, let me tell you something. These ain’t cigarettes. These are cigaritos. My father smoked ’em in the Mexican War, and there ain’t nobody more man than him.”

“My father was a colonel in the Mexican War,” Libby said. “He rode with Robert E. Lee.”

“So did mine, in fact he wanted to sign up this time, once he heard Lee was gonna be fighting. But he’s too old, and besides he took a shot to the pelvis and can barely get around the house.”

“My father wasn’t wounded. But now that he’s older, his hips are stiff. He can’t even ride a horse.”

“Well, our fathers best stay at home this time.”

A gust of wind put out his cigarito. He swore and found another match while Libby set the stock of her gun on the ground, balanced the barrel in the crook of her arm, and rubbed her hands together.

“You’re getting better handling that gun,” Lewis said. “I gotta tell you, the first few days I thought you and your cousin were never gonna make it. But you boys have come a long way in a few weeks, ’specially you. And I know that you believe in the cause as much as I do.”

Libby flushed with pride. Her approval of Lewis went up three notches.

“I just wish they’d let us target practice,” she said. “It’s strange to spend all day drilling and never fire your weapon.”

“Well, you know, same old story. Not enough bullets.” His cigarito went out again.

Another orb of light appeared in a thicket of poplar.

“Lewis, look!”

“Just like I told you, ain’t nothing. You’ll learn to tell the difference between nothing and something, but it’ll take time, and meanwhile you might get killed. A friend of mine thought he shot a Yankee one night. Next morning, he found out he’d blown his own friend to kingdom come.”

Lewis took a flask from his pocket, unscrewed the lid, and passed it to Libby. “Take a swig.”

She put it to her lips and caught a whiff of brandy. She’d once tried it with Arden, back when they had first met. They’d gotten drunk and jumped in the haystacks for a while, then threw up in the stall of a bored palomino. This brew tasted thick and bitter, like the milk that oozes out of the veins of high weeds. It bit her hard in the stomach, and she broke out in a sweat that felt good in the cold.