Sisters of Shiloh (19 page)

Libby’s stomach had shrunk during the long march, and she had to stop eating after just a few strips of beef and some hardtack soaked in a cup of broth. But at least she was warm now. She sat on an ammunition box and watched the dancing men. They’d grown drunker as the night had progressed. Some of them had fallen down and crawled away. And yet there seemed more of them now.

A week of rest and warmth had cleared her senses. She was thinking about Josephine again, trying to bury that old, vague memory from the woods of Sharpsburg and yet reliving it again and again. She knew Josephine had never cared for Arden—had said as much many times—but could her sister, so gentle and kind, possibly be capable of such an act?

She looked up as Lewis approached. Her muscles coiled, but Lewis sat down next to her and stretched out his feet in a companionable gesture.

“I got some new moccasins,” he said after a while.

“I see that.”

He took a pint bottle out of his pocket and unscrewed the flask. “I think I got cheated on this hooch.” He held the bottle up to the light. “It looks awful weak.”

Libby glanced at the bottle and then went back to watching the dancers.

“Want a drink?” Lewis asked. “It’s so watered down, a minnow could live in the damn stuff.”

Libby shook her head.

They sat in silence for a bit. Lewis took a long gulp from his flask and then tapped his fingers against the glass. “I have a feeling you’re gonna get some tomorrow,” he said.

She looked at him, confused.

“Some what?”

“Yankees, I mean. Hell, maybe seven or eight.”

Lewis took another gulp and swished it around before he swallowed.

Josephine stood by herself just outside the circle of swirling men and roaring fire and loud and raucous music from an increasingly drunken band. She had been largely alone on the march, Libby in her own world and Wesley close by but never close anymore. He was too kind to openly avoid her, but he kept to himself, speaking to her only when it would seem rude not to. His absence had been the worst part of the march, worse than the fear and hunger and pain. She wished she’d never met him, never cared about him, so that the privation could be evenly spread from one edge of the war to another. Misery from the beginning.

“Joseph.”

Wesley’s voice startled her. She had rehearsed a thousand things to say to him, one each more daring than the last, until she reached the height of her daydreamed confessions.

Wesley, I’m a woman. Now you understand everything.

“Joseph,” he repeated.

The sound of two-thirds of her name was painful to her. A lie that one more syllable would make right.

She looked up. He cradled his guitar in his arms. It had frozen one night and thawed into a different instrument. She’d seen him tuning and retuning it, trying in vain to restore the old sound.

“Everybody’s crazy tonight,” he said, in a way that invited conversation.

She didn’t know whether to feel angry or overjoyed. She touched the hot collar of her shirt. “Where have you been?” she asked, and realized, too late, that he may have taken her question in a larger context than she meant.

“Oh, I’ve been looking after Floyd. I brought him some soup and tried to play him a song, but this guitar is ruined from the cold. It’s firewood now.” He thumped it with his fingertips as though the hollow sound proved something to her.

“How is Floyd?” she asked.

“He’s got a fever, and he’s coughing up a storm. Crazy old man. What’s he doing in this army, anyway?” Wesley looked out at the dancers. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said, pointing into the swirling crowd. “My brother is dancing with your cousin.”

“I thought they hated each other.”

“Seems like everyone loves everyone tonight. And tomorrow we’re gonna start killing each other without missing a step. What a war.”

He held out his hand. “Let’s dance.”

“I can’t dance.”

“That’s not stopping anyone else. Come on, Joseph, don’t be a chicken.”

The music blared. The fires crackled. Wesley and Josephine spun around and around, crashing into other dancers. The dancing warmed her own body, warmed his—she could feel it through his shirt, but she could not smile as he was smiling, nor laugh as he was laughing. The next battle was looming, and God could take anyone in the blink of an eye. Dancers and laughers and drinkers of whiskey and players of cards. And people burning with love.

Libby and Josephine lay behind their earthworks on a wooded hill that looked down on the flat plains stretching to the river. The Confederates were two lines deep, the Stonewall Brigade forming the second line. A heavy fog blanketed the plains, obscuring their sight, but for three hours they had been listening to the bustle of a terrible preparation somewhere underneath that mist. Wagons, bugles, drums. Artillery shells came soaring in from the direction of the river, exploding in treetops, and raining bark down on the Confederate lines.

“Missed me!” Wesley kept shouting.

Floyd had been too sick to join the battle. A drummer without his passion had stepped in for him. The sun was burning the mist away. Another few minutes would reveal what lay beneath their promontory. Josephine wasn’t sure if she wanted to know what was coming. As a child, she had been taunted by the other children for covering her eyes when she heard stories of ghosts.
Cover your ears if you’re afraid, ninny,
they said. But her visual imaginings had always seemed more frightening than the tales themselves.

Another shell whistled. She closed her eyes and saw darkness filled with an uneasy red static, an effect of the sunlight penetrating her lids. She waited. The shell burst a low branch, and she heard Wesley shout, “You’re getting warmer, you sons of bitches!” She heard Libby breathing beside her and felt her sister’s clarity of purpose. The night before, after the dance, Libby had sat up in the tent, staring at nothing and moving her lips. Josephine had awakened in the dead of night to find her in the same position.

Josephine opened her eyes and drew in her breath. A ghost story had been lurking out of sight, and the fog had just broken open to reveal the terrifying climax. An endless sea of Yankees moved away from the river and toward the Confederate earthworks. Bayonets by the thousands glinted in the sun. Batteries and ambulance wagons filled in the gaps between the blue coats. Josephine had never imagined so many soldiers, legions of them, marching in ranks of three. Regimental flags waved by the hundreds. All around her, Rebels were silently counting the flags, doing crude multiplications and shaking their heads.

“This isn’t possible,” Wesley said. “They must be playing tricks on us.”

Josephine leaned close to her sister and whispered, “Libby, am I seeing things? There aren’t that many Yankees, are there?”

Libby looked at her evenly. “Fire your gun.”

The blue sea shimmered and advanced.

Libby’s failure to kill a single Yankee in the last fight had tormented her the entire march, and now her only fear was that the great army before her was merely an illusion, and that it would disappear before she could begin to count the dead. Here was a grand opportunity for vengeance. A blue gift coming.

The Confederates had been ordered to hold their fire and let their artillery do their work. Shells from their batteries raked the left lines of the advancing troops, tearing out pieces of the beautiful parade. Stonewall Jackson sat watching the bombardment, seemingly unconcerned about the shells flying over his head. His sorrel snorted in bored contentment. Jackson’s perfect faith kept him calm. The horse was just stupid.

The gray guns went quiet, sending up an after-cloud of smoke. The Federals regrouped and began their advance, encouraged by the certainty that they had destroyed the Confederate batteries. But they fell in Jackson’s trap, and thus God’s.

When they drew to within eight hundred yards of the earthworks, Jackson gave a signal, and artillery fire tore through the enemy. Union soldiers died in waves. A cannonball fell into their ranks, tearing off a man’s head, blowing out the chest of someone behind him, and, at the lower end of the arc, severing the legs of the third man.

Battle flags fell. Blood collected in pools. Horses screamed and ambulance wagons overturned. Soon a new mist gathered over the heads of the armies, this one made of niter.

Throughout this bombardment, the Confederates along the earthworks had held their fire, but a sudden reversal of fortune let the Union soldiers regroup. They were charging now. The Rebels gripped their muskets.

“Don’t shoot yet!” the captain screamed. “Wait for my signal. And don’t be cowards! You are the men of the Stonewall Brigade! Do you want to live forever?”

Libby looked at her sister. “Fire your gun,” she repeated. “Do you hear me, Josephine?”

Josephine put the rifle to her shoulder and touched the trigger, drew back, and then touched it again. “I hear you.”

Union soldiers streamed through the trees, breaking one Confederate line and heading toward the earthworks of the Stonewall Brigade.

“
Charge! But don’t fire!
Wait for my signal, damn you!”

The brigade jumped from the earthworks and gave the Rebel yell as they rushed down into the swampy part of the woods, passing a fallen officer who was wounded in the spine.

The captain put his fist in the air.
“Fire!”

Libby aimed and pulled the trigger. A Yankee’s eyes widened as he lost everything above his brow line. He went down jerking and twitching. This time it was not her imagination.

A loud cannonade landed to Libby’s right, followed by the screams of the dying. She turned her head, and the soldiers were right in front of her, but she was ready, teeth clenched and blood boiling and Arden not near her but inside her. She would avenge him; she would express love as a burning hatred; she was not afraid—they were fearless together, ghost and survivor, man and wife. A bluecoat pointed his gun at her, and she shot him, his throat exploding perfectly, as though its seams had been designed in the womb to burst that way. She watched him fall, his white breath pouring out through the hole in his throat, and she fought on, firing, reloading, minie balls falling around her and making hot pits in the snow. She saw another bluecoat taking aim, and she killed him, too; suddenly another was leaping at her, and she pushed the blade of her bayonet to his chest, and he was killed by his own momentum, his eyes shocked and a slight smile on his face he’d worn somewhere as a boy and was wearing now to heaven. Lewis had the regimental flag of the enemy in his hands, and he was running back to his line showing no fear at all on his face, just a joy so transcendent he looked like he was coming back from an altar call.

“Give ’em hell, boys!” the captain shouted. “Give ’em hell, give ’em—”

A whistling sound interrupted his command as a minie ball took off his right arm. His body hit the ground with a thump.

The Federals began to retreat, but the Confederates pursued them. There was no captain left to scream at them. The line of Rebels was in chaos, splitting into separate grudges and prayers, chasing the Yankees back into the woods. So many soldiers whose blue uniforms had been spotless were piled up dead, blood pulsing out, steaming as it melted the snow. Libby found herself caught between the lines, heat at her back and heat at her front. Only the top of her head was cold.

The fighting was hand to hand now, so close that rifles were being used as clubs. Another Yankee rushed toward Libby, and she swung her gun like a club. He went down, and she speared him in the back; the number
six
came out of her mouth in a cloud of spiteful mist.

Josephine stood frozen, gun unfired and senses overwhelmed. She had the feeling of standing in the center of some insatiable stampede. The screams around her didn’t sound human, and the odor of sweat was of a more ghastly intensity than any found on a work shirt or neck of a mule. Even if she had been capable of shooting someone, she could not distinguish enemy from friend.

“Libby!” she called. “Libby, Libby!” Her mad sister was off somewhere, counting and possibly being counted.

A figure rushed toward her through the clearing smoke.

It was Wesley.

“Give me your rifle!” he ordered. “Give it to me!” He took her cold gun and shoved his hot one into her hands.

Because the South held the field, certain amenities were provided for the Rebel corpses. They were handled gently and were the first to be buried. Wounded men lay on the ground, waiting for the field surgeons. Unbearably thirsty from the loss of blood, they cupped their hands to drink from gory pools of melted snow. Some of them had torn at their clothes, searching for the place the bullet entered. Josephine, unharmed and in a post-battle daze, wandered the field looking for Libby, past Rebel dead who had fought like demons in battle but in death had turned back into men, or boys. Pranksters, dog lovers, virgins, duck hunters, gamblers, teachers, tillers of the earth. The fabric of their long underwear showed through the holes in their pants. A Rebel sat motionless against a fallen tree, his rifle still in his hand, one leg taken off by a Coehorn shell. On the ground next to him, two Union soldiers embraced, their death wounds matching. Josephine began perspiring, trying not to absorb any more of the sights. She had had enough of it a hundred yards before, but still more awaited her.

She found Libby calmly sitting cross-legged on the ground, still holding her gun, her eyes blank. Josephine knelt beside her. “Libby, are you wounded?”

Libby looked at her. “I killed eight of them.” She held up her fingers to show Josephine, as though they were reinforcements coming in to bolster the spoken words.

“That’s good, Libby. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

Libby stared at her a moment.

“I have to find my stick.”

“What stick?”

“The one I put notches on for Arden. I’ll have eight new notches now.”

Josephine didn’t like the sound of her voice. It did not have an echo in their childhood or church. It had been at a lower register for weeks now, but at this moment, it sounded like someone entirely different, very close in cadence and tone to that of her dead husband. Josephine found herself repelled by it. She unscrewed the cap of her drum canteen and handed it to Libby.