Sisters of Shiloh (11 page)

She handed the flask back to him.

The light flashed on twice more and then faded into the mist.

“One time my friend and I got sick on this stuff,” she said. “Arden was his name. He lived next door. He died at Sharpsburg later on.” She felt grateful for the chance to talk about him, to say his name.

Lewis shook his head. “Sharpsburg. I never saw nothing like it. Dead bodies everywhere, and men sitting in blood eating pumpkins. Everyone was starving. You didn’t know whether you wanted to kill someone or pounce on an apple core.”

“I’m here to avenge him. Gonna kill twenty-one Yankees, so help me God.”

He took another long drink. “Twenty-one? Why that number?”

“That’s how old Arden was when he died. I’m gonna kill a Yankee for every year he drew a breath. There are twenty-one Yankee mothers stirring chowder somewhere that don’t even see me coming.”

“Twenty-one Yankees,” he murmured. “Hard to tell who you hit in battle with all that smoke and bullets flying around, but, hell, I suppose it’s possible.”

Something moved in the middle distance, and Lewis straightened up and squinted. He listened for a moment. “Ain’t nothing. You know, if Wesley got killed, I would shoot every Yankee in the world, and everyone that’s pulling for them, too. Like those bastards in Maryland who say they’re not on any side. And if I die first, I’m gonna come back as a red-tailed hawk and protect him. They’re fierce. They can take a man’s eye out. And they’ve got that orange underbelly.”

Something caught his attention. He raised his rifle and pulled the trigger. Someone fired back. The tree bark above Libby’s head exploded.

“Shoot!” Lewis screamed at her as he reloaded.

She threw the rifle up to her shoulder and yanked on the trigger. The gunshot exploded in her ears. In the near distance, something heavy fell through the brush and onto the wet ground.

“God almighty,” Lewis said. He finished loading his gun, took down the oil lantern from its perch on a branch, and motioned for her to follow him. “Shhhh,” he whispered. “Be careful. There might be more. But it looks like they skedaddled.”

The dead Yankee lay with his arms thrown out to either side, still clutching his rifle. The bullet had hit him cleanly in the face, and the hole it had made was the size of a child’s fist. The crater was filling up with blood and then spilling down the cheekbones. One eye was gone, and the other was glassy. Clouds passed overhead and blackened the blood. It turned red again when the lantern light fell across it.

Lewis looked down at the dead man’s gun and said, “Hot damn. That’s a Spencer repeating rifle. Check his clothes for coffee. Go on, do it.”

Libby opened the man’s coat and felt around inside it, her hands trembling despite the warmth his body still exuded. Finally she withdrew a handful of coins and a pipe.

“That’s all?” Lewis said. “And his shoes won’t fit. Damn Yankee.” He gestured toward the man.

“Well, anyway, there’s number one for ya.”

Libby vomited while walking back to camp and told Lewis it was the brandy. He nodded and said, “Well, its bad stuff, all right. Listen, don’t you feel sorry for that Yankee bastard. He got what he deserved.”

The soldiers gathered around Libby and slapped her on the back, and Floyd gave her a cup of coffee. Wesley took her hand and shook it hard.

“Congratulations. Got him before he got you.”

“Right in the face,” added Lewis.

Josephine was less sanguine when she ran to hug Libby, a girl’s embrace, frantic and close.

“Stop it. Let go,” Libby hissed in her ear.

She went to the tent and started to cry. Josephine tried to console her. “It’s not your fault, Libby. You had to shoot him.”

“I killed a man, Josephine.”

“It was self-defense.”

She wiped her eyes, but more tears came. “Half his face was gone. I did that.”

She couldn’t stop crying. She buried her face in her hands and wept inconsolably. Finally she heard Josephine’s small voice.

“Libby,” she said. “I wasn’t going to tell you this, but maybe it will help you.”

“What?” Libby managed.

“You’re not the only one in the family to kill a Yankee.”

Libby managed to stifle her sobs. She stared at Josephine through her tears. “What do you mean?”

“The Yankee soldier at our house, the one with gangrene?”

“Yes.”

“Father killed him.”

Libby stared at her, astonished. “What? He died of his wound.”

“No, he didn’t. The night the soldier died, soon after he was singing, I walked by the room. Father was inside the room. He was sitting on the side of the soldier’s cot. He had a pillow pressed over his face. The soldier’s arms were moving. I stood there and watched until the arms were still.”

“But why?”

“Father said it was a mercy, that the soldier was in terrible pain and would have died anyway. He told me never to tell a soul. But now I’m telling you.”

Libby felt a sudden surge of anger. “You waited all this time to tell me?”

“Father made me swear to secrecy!”

“What other secrets are you keeping from me?”

Josephine slept, but Libby could not. She lay in her rain-soaked clothes and shut her eyes, trying to think of something, anything, besides the sight of the gaping hole in the Yankee’s face. Rampant changes were taking place in her body: sorrowing of soul, tenderness of breast; the unraveling of hard-earned masculinity, and even a slight twitch in the muscle of grudge. She tried to comfort herself, whispering to herself, “He would have killed me had I not shot him first. I hated that Yankee and I’m glad he’s dead.” Her lips moved as she repeated everything, only faster this time. The wound in the dead man’s face drained of blood and then filled again. The air so warm between his body and his coat. The terrible moment replayed itself again and again. When she could stand no more, Libby turned to a solution of last resort, a memory she had never visited before, not even in dreams.

The lips of her husband were the color of a bisque doll, his forehead unwrinkled. His shell jacket was unbuttoned to reveal a wound that leaked intestines and swarmed with flies. They scattered when she waved her hands, but circled low and came back.

His hands were stiff with blood, so much blood that she couldn’t see his fingernails, and his wedding ring was clotted with gore.

Libby felt the reassembling of hatred, a man’s trait that called for a man’s constitution. Her eyes turned flinty and her body stiffened. A hardening of heart and an influx of bile. She spoke to him, making no sound.

Arden, I remember a summer day when we were young and you were lying on your back in the grass, and all I can think of now is that nothing in the meadow told you that in five years you’d be dead. No clues at all. Not from the daisies or the clover or the birds or the wind. Not from the clouds or the dog whose ears you scratched. Not from God.

There were Yankee boys, then, in the North. Lying in meadows. Scratching dogs’ ears. Time would pass and one day they would put on their shoes and come to find you.

Now I’ve come to find them.

October 17, 1862

Near Martinsburg, Virginia

Josephine saw the octagon house from where she stood on the tracks of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. The brigade had moved its camp to the area of Martinsburg and had begun the arduous task of sabotage. They tore up crossties, piled them together, and burned them. They heated rails and bent them around trees. They destroyed water tanks and bridges, all to stop the progress of General McClellan should he decide to venture into Virginia.

Josephine’s first march had been entertaining at first, the men calling out jokes and insults and quoting
Les Misérables.
Most of the lines came from the main character, Jean Valjean, but some were snatched from the middle of a page, just because they seemed beautiful or strange.

His mother died of malpractice in a milk fever.

Gillenormand was a kind of twilight soul.

All extreme situations have their flashes, which sometimes make us blind, and sometimes illuminate us.

Songs shimmered through the ranks, their rhythm discontinuous against that of the route step. The men sang “Ida” or “The Girl I Left Behind,” or simply chanted, “The devil is loose, the devil is loose” to the tune of reveille. Later in the day, the brigade grew tired and silent. The primrose was dead, as was the star thistle, but Josephine still noticed dandelions growing through the crushed limestone on the sides of the road. Many of the men still had no shoes. Wesley was wearing his brother’s brogans, and halfway through the march, Lewis cut his foot on a piece of broken glass and had to limp the rest of the way. When the brigade stopped for the night, Libby and Josephine could not muster the energy to set up their tent or even take off their haversacks. They wrapped themselves in their oilcloths and fell asleep near the fire.

Josephine woke up in the middle of the night and looked over to where Wesley slept next to his brother. She sat up, studying his sleeping face. She had tried to march near him, always comforted by his cheerful voice, and she loved listening to him play his guitar around the campfire. But only now, with the entire camp asleep, could she indulge fully in the sight of him, and she drank it in.

Once the brigade arrived at the new location, the discomforts of the march were forgotten in the zeal of destruction, as soldiers took gleeful bets on how many chops it took to bring down a telegraph pole with an ax.

The octagon house sat to the east of the railroad. The branches of pine trees obscured Josephine’s view of the roof and the rock fence hid the yard, but when she grew light-headed from the smoke of the crosstie fires, the house seemed to rotate, its windows glittering as it turned. To pass the time, she imagined decorating the interior, conjuring up ornamental rugs and furniture carved from exotic trees.

The crosstie fires sputtered with sparks. She looked at the house and added a grand piano to the parlor.

A bridge exploded. Fancy china and a spoiled cat.

The blade of an ax sank into a telegraph pole. Cordovan slippers. A velvet settee. Dried lilacs and teasel heads in a bull’s-eye vase.

“Don’t just stand there,” Libby scolded. “The lieutenant is coming. He’ll yell at you.” Libby’s face was sunburned and her uniform was stained. Josephine still hadn’t grown accustomed to the masculine register of her sister’s false voice, or that of her own.

The lieutenant stopped in front of Josephine. The long march only seemed to have made him shorter. He came up to her collarbone, whereas a week ago she would have sworn he had made it to her chin.

“Private Holden!”

“Yes, sir!” Josephine looked down at the broad, sweaty face and the incongruous dimple.

“Is there something in the woods that fascinates you, Private Holden? The sight of the trees, perhaps; a bluebird sitting on a branch?”

“No, sir!”

“What if
everyone
stared into the woods? Would that intimidate the Union army, to see the entire Jackson brigade frozen in fascination over the antics of a bird? Would they surrender in their terror? Would George McClellan weep like a girl at the thought of being conquered by an
army of statues?
”

“No, sir!”

“Then get back to work!”
The lieutenant spun on his heels and stalked away.

Matthew materialized by her side. “Don’t worry about that lieutenant, Joseph. You know he’s more bark than bite.”

“My cousin’s got a fire lit under his ass now,” Libby said.

Josephine gave Libby a look. Her sister had taken up swearing and poker, too.

“Matthew’s a good man,” Libby said as he walked away. “His girl is lucky to have him.”

Josephine didn’t answer. She had discovered a jaw-dropping secret about him, one she didn’t even have enough knowledge to fully understand. Matthew had gotten his hands on some new wallpaper, and that evening he’d started a letter, but the wind had pulled the first page away and carried it into the woods. Matthew sighed, lit a torch, and went to find the runaway love talk. He was gone for two hours and came back shaking his head. The next morning at dawn, Josephine went to look for it herself, ashamed and yet compelled.

She knew from experience that secrets hide themselves well and demand a meticulous search. It’s not enough to kick at a holly bush. You must separate the branches and look inside, deep where no mockingbird has ventured. Don’t just walk around a dead owl. Brush off the ants and lift its wings. And don’t ignore logs and dormant honeysuckle. They know things.

When Josephine returned from the woods, the tips of her fingers were full of splinters, and a mob of chiggers had crawled on her shoes and up her legs. Soon they would burrow into her skin and cause her endless torment. But she had found the letter, a discovery that served as chamomile for the itch of a mystery.

The single page was full of love and promises, and talk of fingers running through hair. Near the bottom, Matthew had begun to write a fervent description of night falling. But that was not the part that caused such astonishment.

The letter had been written to a man.

She had heard of such men, but so obliquely as to leave her more confused. It seemed that certain men had something in them—something to do with love—which was quaintly different from other men. Imagine, she was told, a set of clay pipes with one turned sideways.

She had intended to give the letter back to Matthew, but now such a plan was out of the question. She had folded it up and put it in her haversack. Now, as she pried up the crossties with a crowbar, she could almost hear the letter crackling in her sack like a locust molting its shell.

Just before dawn, the sound of gunfire startled the sisters from sleep, their bodies stiffening under the oilcloth.

“Listen!” Libby whispered. “The pickets are firing!”

Josephine’s hand found hers in the dark.