Sisters of Shiloh (12 page)

Another burst of gunfire. Their hands clasped tighter.

“I can’t do this, Libby.”

“Yes, you can. You must.”

“Fall in!” The lieutenant’s voice shrieked through their tent like a sudden gust of wind oriented at just the right angle for maximum force.

Wesley appeared out of nowhere at the front opening of their tent, already in uniform, his musket slung over one shoulder. Gone was the Wesley they knew. His eyes were dark, his face somber and slick with perspiration. The absence of his usual humor frightened them. He seemed to be guarding his best trait in the hope it wouldn’t die with him.

“Let’s go!” he ordered, pulling them out of their tent and helping them into their jackets, his hands shaking around the buttons. Men scrambled in the pale light, buckling on their leather cartridge boxes, checking their weapons, and tying their shoes. Some of them rifled through their knapsacks, removing dice, cards, and liquor so as not to die shackled to their glaring sins.

Libby and Josephine had no time to put on their shoes and had to carry them to the battle line that stretched through the thin woods, oak to birch to dogwood. Skirmishers ran out in front of them, disappearing into the gloom of the trees. Their fire intensified, then stopped, and an uneasy tension settled across the line of battle. They had been told to expect this, and that this period of ominous silence could last hours or even days.

The lieutenant approached the line, thrust a fist in the air, and shouted, “Death is the entrance into the great light!”

The soldiers recognized the line from
Les Misérables
and whooped, and the lieutenant’s face lit up. It darkened as gunfire crackled in the near distance.

The men wiped their faces and checked their weapons, and a tingling fear started at one end of the line and traveled to the other, caught a twitch, and came back again. They would have paid good money for mystical auguries foretelling their fate so they could just stop guessing. Many of them felt a sense of failure they couldn’t quite define. Something they hadn’t accomplished. Maybe it had to do with money or God, a stick half-whittled or a child unnamed, they didn’t really know—but they didn’t want to die without the answer. Some of the younger men had never touched a naked woman, and a false memory of such skin, so smooth, so soft, now brushed against their faces. As the fight approached them, they began to sweat and their stomachs cramped. One man threw up and blamed it on the fatback he’d eaten the night before.

Josephine’s gun kept slipping out of her hand, and she could not catch her breath. The sound of the approaching fight terrified her, as did the silent plans of God.

“Don’t take Libby,” she whispered under her breath. “You know what I did. So take me, take me.”

Libby peered into the woods from her own position. Matthew materialized at her side. He buckled her haversack, adjusted her belt, and moved her cartridge box around to the front of her body. All the while he hummed a little tune that sounded like “Hell Broke Loose in Georgia.”

“Why did you fix the cartridge box like that?” Libby asked.

“Protects your stomach, somewhat.” He walked away, still humming. Assistants of the quartermaster came around with ammunition. Libby put forty cartridges in the leather box at her waist and stuffed the rest in her pockets. She tore the cartridge paper with her teeth, tasting the acrid powder. The ramrod barely made a sound as it moved down the barrel. The wind was cold but sweat rolled down her sides, and she was conscious of the frailty of her body. Had Arden felt this way, in the green woods of Sharpsburg?

The firing had neared, and so had the screams of the wounded and dying. Her mouth went dry, and she could not control her trembling. War was for men, and she was a fraud.

“Aim low!” the lieutenant shouted.

Libby looked over at her sister, whose eyes fixed on her before they turned away. Josephine’s gun was slipping around in her hands; at any moment it could shoot a foot or a branch or an angel. Wesley materialized. He took Josephine’s weapon, wiped it with a cloth, and handed it back to her, leaning close and telling her something that seemed to calm her.

Floyd’s drum started up and the order for forward march was barely heard over the din of the approaching gunfire. Libby’s line began to move. Animals fled the opposite way. She felt as though she had no free will but was being drawn along by some mysterious force. The call of a bugle. The magnetism of grapeshot. Or Arden.

“Double time!”

Libby quickened her pace. Her uniform and haversack weighed her down, as did the full cartridges that bulged from her pockets, heavy as horseshoes. Her bayonet stuck in the wood of a poplar tree, and she had to stop and yank it out. The animals had vanished, driven by the same premonitions as the soldiers who had pinned letters to their loved ones on the inside of their jackets. Libby began to lose her breath.

Josephine ran a short distance away, keeping up with the others and holding her gun in the correct position. All of the training had finally kicked in, and Libby felt a rush of appreciation for the lieutenant, who had screamed her sister into soldierhood.

The line approached the edge of the forest, where the trees thinned and a haze of smoke filled the air. Dead bodies of Confederate skirmishers lay in her path. Some of them were still whole; others had been hit by shells and solid shot, and were missing arms or legs. She jumped the bodies and felt the squish of their scattered remains as she continued on. Flashes of blue uniforms were visible through the trees. Just before she burst from the forest, the soldiers running on either side of her faded into the light and the blue uniforms vanished, giving her the sense of a solitary, slow-motion run through a world that just happened to scream and burst. Her vision cleared again, though her head swam with a strange continuum of present and past. A branch cracked and fell, and Arden stirred molasses in his oatmeal, his hair in his face and his shirtsleeves unbuttoned. The scene faded and a new one appeared. Arden was struggling to land a fish. His fishing pole bent double, he lost his footing on the muddy bank and slid toward the water, laughing.

A wounded man crawled into a hawthorn bush.

Arden touched her face.

Something burned.

Arden kissed her throat.

She ran in an amber space of light. One last, small memory came to her with such intensity, its masculine smell banished all the others. Arden half-dressed, staring out the window in the bedroom of the house they’d shared so fleetingly. Sunlight coming through the window, Arden’s bare back so smooth and muscular. His hands by his side, wedding ring on his finger. His full weight on one leg, because his foot was still broken from his fall off the roof. He said nothing but suddenly turned and looked at her, still propped up in their bed, smiled as he limped over to her, that smile saying it was time, once again, for an act once taboo but now sanctified by marriage. No war talk. Just her name.

“Hold your fire!” the lieutenant screamed. “Wait until they come in range!”

Libby tripped over a dead picket, stumbled, and then managed to right herself just before she burst out of the woods, where the smoke burned her nostrils and her dreamy senses sharpened, noise so deafening it meant nothing. The Rebel yell sounded, growing by the moment, full of deadly hope and false bravado and the split-second decision not to live forever. Libby found herself screaming it, too, as a Confederate battery fired and its shell exploded over the enemy line. Body parts flew through the air, taking the broad leaps of bullfrogs, and torsos turned into ground-dwelling creatures that writhed in the dirt.

“Fire!”

Pain tore through her right shoulder when she pulled the trigger. The bullet flew into a locust tree, and she stopped to reload. Rain had started falling around her, the drops moving the grass blades. She blinked and the rain turned to minie balls, whining, buzzing, mewing, imitating the cries of small and helpless creatures even as they mowed down soldiers on her right and left. The soldiers died without a sound except for the thump of their bodies striking the earth and the settling of their haversacks atop their sudden corpses. An owl flight of Confederate artillery shells broke the Yankee line, but it formed again a moment later. The cacophony paused for a split second, and Libby heard the sound of a single curse, so absent of God it seemed to come from the idea of war itself.

She stood, raised her musket, and took aim at a Yankee, but the bullet went over his head. The soldier next to her noticed what she’d done and shouted: “Aim low! Don’t panic!”

As she paused to reload, she felt herself change from a frightened woman to a soldier facing down the same devil Arden had. She was Thomas Holden, a made-up name attached to a real fighter. And the force she represented was not the South; it was not gray or blue but the hot red of a woman compelled to live in a season full of ripening walnuts but empty of love.

The man next to her squinted down his barrel. Before he could fire, a whistling shell made a horrible thump in his chest and his rifle fell. Grapeshot tore the air above her head. A minie ball scorched past the lobe of her ear and hit someone behind her. She loaded and fired, loaded and fired, the gun growing hot in her hands, a voice inside her saying something about being alive, something about hatred, something about sassafras, something about a love that ends abruptly, something about what it means to feel jealousy and fear and loneliness, something about the faded light of a winter afternoon and the smell of pastureland and what it means to fight someone over all these things.

To the winner go the spoils, winner is alive, winner feels the worries and pains that are due later in the afternoon, later in the night.

She knelt in a bog that was dry earth before someone bled on it. The North took one step forward and two steps back, waltz of the temporary victory. A horse collapsed and someone screamed,
“Mother!”

Bullets zinged past her, molten bees that could hollow out a cheek in their frantic search for nectar.

Her sister was surely nearby, somewhere in the smoke, but she did not answer when Libby called her name. As she fought, she grew wilder, growling as she ripped the cartridges with her teeth. Black powder colored her hands, her lips, her face, and the cuffs of her shirtsleeves. She pulled the trigger. Smoke settled in her mouth. She shot a man’s arm off and tripped over someone’s boot. She shouted a question to a nearby soldier, but his only answer was a thump and a wet spray from his direction all over her face; when she turned, half of him was gone. His warm brains coated her sleeve, but she did not change expression. No more fear now, no horror, only a hatred so immediate it could take the place of the breath in her lungs.

Sharp commands and terrible screaming, someone falling to her right.

A lone tree splintering.

The wild eyes of a loose horse.

Matthew fought a few yards in front of his line, impaling a Yankee on a bayonet, pulling it out, and forcing it into the throat of another.

The bluecoats were losing. They left their dead and wounded and retreated toward the railroad tracks, the Confederates in hot pursuit. As Libby ran, she felt that someone was missing, someone she loved but couldn’t quite remember. This person might be here on the battlefield or back home in Winchester.

Her tongue had dried. The ache for water soaked the nub of herself, reaching the need for love, the wish to never be alone, wonderment about God, doubts and memories and unhealed abandonments. Her canteen was gone. She didn’t know how much time had passed.

And someone was missing. In heaven, perhaps? No, not in heaven. Here on earth. That much she knew.

Her jaw ached, but she managed to tear another cartridge. As she continued forward, her shoes turned to anvils and the air was black with gunpowder.

Someone was missing.

Libby reached the railroad bed, tripped on a pile of charred crossties, and fell down the slope into a pile of dead and wounded Yankees, their bodies so soft beneath her.

She held tight to her gun as she struggled out of the pile. Her uniform was covered in the blood of her enemy. She had almost freed herself when someone grabbed her foot and held on tight. She screamed and pulled loose, ran a few steps, and fell on the ground, coughing in the smoke. She crawled forward. She touched the gray sleeve of a shell jacket and pulled on it but received no response. She moved her hands to the collar and shook a body that was heavy and limp. The smoke cleared and the empty eyes of the lieutenant stared back at her. Cold ashes from old crosstie fires coated the wound in his forehead.

She struggled to stand but couldn’t. She covered her face and rocked back on her heels, screaming. A hand seized her shoulder. A stricken soldier was looming above her, eyes wide with horror. At last there was a name.

“Don’t die, Libby. Please.”

Josephine pulled at her clothes and then began to unbutton her jacket. “Where are you shot?”

Libby’s throat was so dry she could barely speak. “Nowhere,” she managed.

“Nowhere? There’s blood all over you.”

“Not my blood,” she said, and looked around the battlefield. The dead and wounded littered the ground, both Union and Confederate. Next to her foot, the flowering head of a bent weed pulled out of a puddle of blood and straightened slowly.

“I’m not hurt,” Libby said. “Are you?”

“I don’t think so. What’s wrong with your voice? It’s all scratchy.”

“I’m thirsty.”

Libby accepted Josephine’s canteen, unscrewed the cap, and took a long drink. Her throat hurt when she swallowed.

“The Yankees ran away,” Josephine said. Her voice quavered when she spoke. “Most of them escaped, but some are making a stand.”

The fight continued in the woods beyond the railroad. A cannon was swung in the direction of the octagon house, and the windows exploded. The Confederates had surrounded the house. Another window exploded. Two Yankee soldiers fell out of it.

Libby again tried to get up and join the fight in the near distance, but she was too exhausted. She passed the canteen back to Josephine and said, “We survived. And I killed a bunch of Yankees. Where are the others?”