Sisters of Shiloh (18 page)

Wesley in the smokehouse. Soft touch of his lips to hers, dance of flour motes. Electric current, a spark out of place. And because time loves the drunk and allows itself to be looped around happy things, she saw Wesley again and again, kissing her, backing up and starting over again, sunlight filtering through the air, his hands his eyes a kiss a kiss a kiss a kiss, sewn together into many kisses, oh yes, she had been kissed. Years from now people would discover the old shirtless man dead in his rocker, rifle cradled in his arms, and they would go outside, open up the smokehouse, and find this day.

Josephine had been there, not Joseph, not this false ghost of a man forced to live without lace. Josephine, who could go where she wanted and drink what she wanted and kiss whom she wanted and laugh at things that were not funny. Josephine, who fell out of line. Josephine, soldier of the middle.

She shut her eyes, but the starlight came into the tent and burned through her lids, finding her headache. She and Libby lay shivering together under their blankets. She was twice as cold as she had been the night before, her uniform twice as heavy. Gone was the laughter. Gone was the spinning sky. Gone was the sunlight, the freedom, the peace.

Gone was Josephine. Back was Joseph.

Libby had paused in her hushed, angry lecture, but then gained momentum again. “And you made me look foolish and our friends look foolish and the brigade look foolish, and you were just lucky the sergeant didn’t happen by, and you didn’t even know what you were saying, and you were acting girlish, and what if you’d given our secret away?”

“I’m sorry.” Josephine shut her eyes tight in a vain attempt to block out starlight and sister. She didn’t dare tell Libby about the kiss in the shed. She kept it to herself, along with the night she spent playing poker with the Yankee pickets, another secret crime.

“You need to keep your distance from Wesley,” Libby said. “He gets you in trouble. And you need to stop looking at him so much. Do you know how much you look at him?”

The two women lay shivering, forced to share the heat of their own battle. The falling snow had accumulated enough to make a slight bulge in the ceiling of their tent. Josephine didn’t know why she said the words. Perhaps only because they were true, and her little sister had once been someone who could hear true things and even say them back to her.

“I love him, Libby.”

She expected Libby to fire back that loving a man in such circumstances was not only dangerous but futile, and when the response came, she was shocked by its gentleness and longing, as though the real Libby had both considered the remark and formed the answer, not this ever-hardening replica of Arden who usually inhabited her skin.

“I know.”

The light was feminine. Pink and beige and lavender. Bare-chested, shoeless, shivering in the cold, Wesley knelt on the ground and fiddled with his haversack. His eyes were red. A hank of hair stuck straight out in a spike. He paused and smoothed it absently.

The sight of him burst Josephine’s morning thoughts. Rolled blankets, cartridge belts, cold feet. All like motes of flour now, drifting toward the sky.

“Wesley,” she said.

He looked up at her. “Hey, Joseph.” His voice was flat. Without love or even recognition.

“Your head hurt?” she asked.

He shrugged. “A little.” His spike of hair stood up, and he smoothed it down again as he looked at her with guarded eyes. “Listen, Joseph. I’ve heard about those kind of fellows. I’m not that kind of fellow, understand?”

It took a moment for his meaning to register. Josephine felt as though she’d been shot. Right now some sniper in the trees was gazing with satisfaction at the hole in her stomach. In the drunken hours that followed their time in the shed, she had not considered that the memory of the kiss, so lovely to her, was confusing and shameful to him. And why wouldn’t it be? He couldn’t see her and didn’t know her. Her true self was lost like an acorn under the snow.

“I’m not that kind of fellow, either,” she said. She backed away from him, stumbling over someone’s iron spider and falling to the ground with a loud thump. He didn’t move as she picked herself up. The pink light hurt her, as did its lavender streaks. She looked around the camp. Soldiers were hurrying, packing their haversacks, and rolling up their blankets. Nothing about the brigade or the world had changed since the day before. It was exactly as they’d left it. She didn’t know if she could bear it anymore. She had emerged from the cold shell of her lie long enough to kiss the soldier she loved, and that moment had been so warm and true. She could not believe she was about to move down the macadam road away from it, leaving it behind. And she was filled with a certain after-battle kind of devastation, where the body stops to consider the depth of sorrow and the soul takes on an aching heaviness. Her companion was lost to her, not on a battlefield but in a smokehouse, not from a bullet but a kiss.

They marched twenty miles that day. She kept up listlessly, stone-bruised and brokenhearted. Wesley wouldn’t look at her. He didn’t join in on the marching songs or the jokes. Floyd told him he needed a haircut and a new face, too, then waited in vain for the counter-insult, like an old wolf listening for the returning howl of its pup.

“What’s wrong with that boy?” Floyd asked Lewis.

Lewis shook his head. “He don’t have no legs for liquor. Never has.”

That night Wesley played the guitar and sang, face tense and eyes flat. And yet his voice still haunted his listeners, sending them to a private space where they had no skin. Josephine sat with the others. On this night, her mind went through all the losses and then rested on the new one.

It was barely December, but winter had already taken hold of the mountains. The wind howled. The mules lost their footing. Stirrups froze to boots. Men who awoke at dawn had to chip themselves out of a layer of ice. Toes and fingers turned black.

Josephine and Libby grew too thin for their pants and had to cut new holes in their belts. Their lips cracked. They walked on the rubber of feet gone numb and whispered together under their oilcloths, united in a common shiver. Separately they thought of their parents and ached for their company and their comfort, but the subject never passed between them.

One night a deserter was brought into camp, starved and half-frozen. He was spared execution, but the letter C was branded on his left hip, which turned red as they marked him.

Wesley stopped playing the guitar. His hands would have stuck to the strings.

Libby’s skin turned pale, and the purple rings around her eyes grew darker. Her worried sister went from soldier to soldier, begging for dried meat or extra rations.

Floyd coughed.

The supply wagons bogged down in the slush. The hooves of mules split open. The teamsters applied dry calomel and caustics.

The pamphlets ran out after volume 3 of
Les Misérables,
leaving the soldiers to wonder what would befall Jean Valjean and Cosette, and themselves.

Josephine and Libby no longer needed to hoard rags or dart into the woods at odd hours. Their monthly flow had stopped.

Soldiers ate the leather of their shoelaces and the meat of dead horses. One man ate holly berries and died, and one shot a hawk and had to wrench it away from his friends.

Josephine caught Wesley’s eye, and he looked away.

She had kissed a man. So had he.

Floyd coughed as he marched, as he ate, all night as he slept, his face drawn and chest heaving with the effort.

“You stop that, old man,” Wesley said, and slept with his arms around him.

Lewis told his brother to stay away from him. “You’re going to catch whatever he has.”

“Don’t be a bastard. He’s cold.”

One night Josephine woke up and found that Libby had vanished. She lit a torch and followed Libby’s footsteps through the snow. She found her standing alone at the edge of the woods and took her by the arm. “Are you crazy?” she asked.

Libby’s lips had no color.

“I heard his voice.”

Waterfalls, pneumonia, clouds of breath, snow, ice. Mules straining. Men falling down dead, but not from bullets.

Wesley lay with his arms around Floyd, who had turned into a bony bag of heatless snores and unrelenting coughing. Floyd groaned in his sleep. Wesley hugged him tighter. This love he understood.

The Stonewall Brigade marched down into the Virginia Piedmont, toward Madison at the end of the first week of December. Rolling hills and farmland lay all around them, lulling them like the fields around Sharpsburg. Tall peaks rose behind them, the Massanutten and the Blue Ridge Mountains. The men had been told their destination while crossing the Luray Valley.

Fredericksburg.

Now it was midnight, and the army was marching as they slept, one animal now, a conflicted beast who sometimes smiled in its slumber, sometimes screamed in it, sometimes coughed and sometimes cried, sometimes sang, sometimes hoped; eyes open, eyes closed, it did not wake. Anyone witness to the phenomenon would not believe it. Men could not sleep and stay in formation, weapons on their shoulders, mile after mile. And yet they did. The road behind them was scattered with hats that had fallen from their nodding heads, and they emanated an intimate hum, as twenty thousand men shared their dreams, equal sunlight, equal soup.

Certain local farmers claimed they saw translucent men among the ranks, those who still lived and breathed, but who were doomed nonetheless. When these farmers looked out their windows at the soldiers of D Company filing past, they saw this mixture of fate in the sleepwalkers, some whose bodies were starved and yet solid, and some more insubstantial, just a shape of blue mist.

The moon was full through the branches. Libby stood picket in the woods, listening for footsteps, her heart thudding. Black oak trees all around her. Sounds of night animals. Fog churning low, through palmetto and Boston fern. The other pickets were quiet in the darkness. Strange shadows crept forward and darted back when they touched her arms, responding to the heat of her body in the manner of reptiles. She froze, listening.

Did she hear footsteps? A branch cracked. She thought she saw a figure gliding among the trees.

“Halt!” she demanded in a quavering voice, but the figure had disappeared.

She heard footsteps again, and her body began to tremble. She put the gun to her shoulder, trying to steady the barrel.

“Who goes there?” Her stiff finger rested on the trigger.

The figure glided out from behind the tree and stood there, a black outline against the forest. It took a step toward her, then another.

“Stop, or I’ll shoot, I’ll shoot!”

One more step.

She shut her eyes and pulled the trigger with all her might. The explosion rocked the forest. When she opened her eyes the figure was still walking toward her. Frantically she tried to reload her gun, but the ramrod stuck in the barrel. A burst of moonlight fell down over the stranger, illuminating the handsome face, the dark eyes. A patch of blood grew on his stomach, spreading outward in the shape of a canteen. A group of fireflies spurted out of the wound, blinking off and on. Arden staggered, straightened up, moved closer.

“Libby,” he said. “Do you not recognize your husband?”

“I’ve killed you, Arden.”

“No, you haven’t. You know who killed me.”

“A Yankee.”

“What did you see that day in the West Woods of Sharpsburg?”

“I saw many things. Things that could not be true.”

“Libby.” His face so close to hers, no smoke from his breath. “You saw it with your own eyes. Your sister killed me.”

Libby woke up. Her feet were still moving, the road stretched out to Fredericksburg. No Arden. Just all the other soldiers, rows and rows of men, heads bowed, marching in their sleep.

December 1862

Fredericksburg, Virginia

Campfires roared. Bottles of liquor appeared magically. The brigade had reached Fredericksburg and was making frenzied use of the final hours before the battle. They had just spent a week at Guiney’s Station, trying to restore themselves to fighting shape with fresh beef and warm fires. Members of F Company had been sent to Richmond to buy leather, and moccasins had appeared on the feet of shoeless men.

The impending battle had the same aroma as the skewered and sizzling meat. Soldiers drank whiskey by yellow light and traded actress cards of scantily clad young women. As the evening progressed, they grew raucous. Their eyes shone. Fire couldn’t cure what the winter had done to them, any more than snow cures thirst. But they couldn’t accept that. They wanted more heat, more. More sparks, more whiskey. The distant battle smelled good.

Confederate pickets tossed insults across the Rappahannock River and were insulted in return. An even trade. Like tobacco for coffee.

More rails were thrown on the fire, in violation of the rules set down by Stonewall Jackson. They had done nothing for weeks but march to another man’s plan, freezing, starving, blood on the ice behind them as far as the eye could see, nothing but blind devotion moving them forward.

Dysentery, measles, typhus, pneumonia, frostbite.

And yet when their leader arrived at the camp, his men stood and cheered him, filled up with adoration the way they’d once been filled with Sunday lessons, satiated in this war of scarcity, the weeks and months of being almost well and almost calm and almost asleep and almost brave and almost home.

“Old Jack! Old Jack!”

He took off his hat and his sorrel horse pranced through the snow, its tail stripped thin by the souvenir-hunting women of Martinsburg. The regimental band struck up the music to a deafening volume, breaking ice from the limbs of evergreens. Jackson rode away, but the band kept playing. The spirited men began to dance. Lacking women, they paired off in couples, one taking the female role and one the male. The strong found each other, as did the weak. The vigorous pairs spun around and around until they grew dizzy. The frailest dancers barely turned. Those who could not stand up sat on logs and cheered the others. Those who could not speak lay in the hospital tent and turned their faces to the sound.