Sisters of Shiloh (2 page)

Josephine stood at the end of the bed and watched them play. The cards fanned out, shuffled, flew onto the bed one by one. Arden and Libby studied the cards, then each other.

“I’m going now,” Josephine said.

They didn’t hear her.

That night Libby was led downstairs, leaning on her father’s arm. Her hands trembled, but she was able to sit with the family for dinner. Arden had been invited to eat with them. Libby picked at her food. Arden goaded her on. “Come on, come on, you’re so thin. How can we play unless you get strong again?”

He had finally begun to nurse her, now that she was well.

Mrs. Beale looked down the table at Libby, her expression tentative and warm. “Arden is so glad to have you back,” she said. “He was so worried about you. Weren’t you, Arden?”

Josephine saw them together in the shadows of the orchard. It was dusk. They had been there all day with their secrets and were now emerging, hand in hand. She glided into shadows of her own. By that cover, she watched them kiss. And like something suddenly noticed in the world, a color or a scent, she saw the kisses everywhere. Lightning quick and furtive. Covered in shadows or sheltered by the blinding light of noon, they went unnoticed by the rest of the world. She tried to turn her eyes away, but the kisses seemed attracted by her torment. When she could not see them, she heard them. And when she could not hear them, she imagined them. She wondered if a kiss could live in her own mouth, or if she was broken beyond repair, not a girl or a boy but a ghost, offering nothing to the world but a glow and a rustling.

One day, as she was on her way to the dry goods store, at her mother’s orders, to buy a bolt of cloth and some needles, she met Arden coming the other way. His hair was getting long; he needed a haircut. Certainly her father would never let her brother Stephen’s hair grow past his ears. His hair made him look even more girlish with his high cheekbones and delicate brow.

They stopped a few feet from one another, no greeting or wave. Just the stare of enemies.

“You’ve been spying on us,” he said.

“No, I haven’t.”

“Yes, you have. You saw us kissing.”

“Libby’s too young for kissing.”

“She’s thirteen now. Maybe it’s not that you think she’s too young. Maybe it’s that she’s kissing me.”

The sun was bright overhead. The coins in her hand felt sweaty. His voice was not angry. Just matter-of-fact.

“That’s true,” she said. “I can think of better boys for her to kiss.”

“You think about her too much. Where she goes, who she kisses. And I know why.”

She didn’t answer him. She tried to step around him, but he blocked her path. She went the other way, and he blocked her again. His eyes looked straight at her. There was no one on the road.

“It’s because,” he said, “you have no other friends, do you? Not a single one.”

The statement burned inside her. She wanted to run away, but she knew he would catch her arm. Something about his voice told her he’d been waiting for the right moment to say these hurtful things, and he was going to force her to listen.

“And you are always alone,” he added. “Because you are strange. You’re not like Libby. You don’t know how to talk to people. You have nothing interesting to say.”

Josephine tried to deflect his words, not wanting him to see the hurt welling in her eyes. She looked at him directly and said coolly, “I do have interesting things to say. I just don’t say them to you.”

Arden took a small step forward, looking at her with intense, unblinking eyes. “You know what you need? You need a sweetheart. But you won’t ever have one. You will never even get one kiss. No one will ever love you. You are invisible.”

Josephine felt her face flush and a tiny hole form in her stomach, as though she’d been shot there. The cruelty in the remarks was the cool dispassion and the utter confidence with which they were spoken. It was true, sometimes she felt as though she were invisible, as though people drank in the sight of Libby and that was enough, that her place was in the shadows and her fate to be unseen. She stepped to the side of him and made her way to the store, trembling with rage and shame, the clenched coins digging into the flesh of her hand.

July 20, 1862

Outside Gordonsville, Virginia

Dearest Lib,

We whipped that old peacock McClellan good in Richmond a few weeks back. The boys say he will lick his wounds and come right back at us. Now we are marching again, this time we hear another Yankee army is headed for Richmond again. I’ve heard so many stories this past year that never came about that I am never sure what to believe. But it doesn’t matter, I suppose. I just march and fight and know that I am on the side of God.

The marches are so long and I am half-starved and bone-weary, but every night I look at the tintype of you I carry next to my heart, and I remember my purpose.

I wish I could draw strength from your latest letters, but they are so short. You talk of only town news and your difficulties with the Yankee occupations, and say little of your love or all I sacrifice for you.

You must always remember your devotion to me. Knowing you are waiting for me, and thinking only of me, keeps me strong in my fight for Southern rights.

Your husband,

Arden

September 1862

Libby stood at the back of the Beale property, near the barn and facing the new sun, letting its light focus on a letter from Arden. This latest had been written on a scrap of wallpaper. His supply of stationery must be running low, and on account of the Union embargo, she couldn’t buy him any more.

We don’t have proper shelter. Last week I had to sleep in a tent with eight men, Lib. Every time someone turned, we all woke up.

She looked up from the letter and cast an irritated look at the brightening sky. It was time for another day. The passageways and pale rooms of the house were filling with light, smoke rising from chimneys. Coffee steaming, yellow flames crackling inside the stove, heating the bottom of a pot, and sending a bubble through a batch of fresh grits. Her father arranging his dental instruments.

After Arden had left for the war, she had moved out of the humble A-frame they had shared together on Kent Street and back under her father’s roof. It was oddly comforting to once again be part of the family that had sheltered and adored her, although she had waited every day during the past year for some news of Arden or the movements of the Stonewall Brigade.

He had been desperate to join the Confederate army as soon as war broke not a month after their wedding, but he had taken a bad fall from their roof and broken his foot, and spent two months hobbling around on a cypress-wood crutch, reminding Libby at every opportunity that it was she who had hounded him to fix the shingles that day.

He had joined up that June of 1861 with the First Virginia Brigade under Thomas Jackson. It was during the Confederate victory at the Battle of Manassas that July when the brigade and its beloved commander earned the famous new name of Stonewall.

“There is no greater feeling, Lib,” Arden wrote to her, “than to know that God fights beside you.”

He had been an adamant supporter of Secession, and during the course of their courtship had slowly influenced Libby, whose family was moderate. One night three years before, they had met secretly late at night and talked over the news of John Brown’s slave rebellion and the murders at Harpers Ferry, only thirty miles to the northeast of Winchester. Arden’s warm breath touched her face as he spoke. His hand held hers.

In that darkness, they exchanged rumors: A dozen victims had been drawn and quartered; John Brown had eaten their flesh; slaves were rising up everywhere, holding secret meetings in an old cemetery at the edge of town. Arden had heard that the first sign of the uprising would be the discovery of all the dogs in Winchester piled in a heap at the edge of town, their throats cut. Even families like the Beales who owned no slaves would not be spared. Revenge would trade color for color; whites would die for no other crime than being white. At that very moment, John Brown’s disciples were trying to free him from jail before his execution.

“Every one of those murderous slaves should be executed, too,” he had said.

“But were they not fighting for their freedom? Slavery is wrong, Arden. My father’s always said that and I agree.”

“You are missing the point, as always,” he had said with a sigh. “If you would take the time to educate yourself, you would see quite clearly what any smart person could—this is about the cold-blooded slaughter of innocent white people. These murderous Negroes who would gladly kill you and your family, even though you own no slaves. Is that what you think is justice?”

“No, no, of course not, Arden.”

Libby had reached out and touched his hand, finding it cool and steady. He was ready for the war.

Now Libby returned to the letter, reading it again slowly. The words made Arden’s experience so clear that she felt the mud in his boots and tasted the salt pork in his mouth. Transported to some dark clearing, she lay in a tent packed with soldiers and smelled the broth that half a dozen odors make.

Libby’s love for her husband had only deepened since his departure. Once, in late summer, when his brigade had bivouacked near Winchester, he had received a pass from his lieutenant and come to see her. Together they had gone back to the little house they had once shared as man and wife, bursting into it hurriedly, straight to the bedroom, where they had made love on the pencil-post bed in a room frozen in time, under the motionless gravity clock, among the odor that neglected houses put off after many months. Arden’s clean-shaven face hovered above her, his eyes looking down, full of war fever and husband fever, and she felt terrified for a moment, that there was no Libby anymore, that she would collapse into his beliefs and his fervor and his boyhood and his birth. She loved him that much, in a way that made no space for herself, as though he were a full glass of tea and she was the piece of ice that would cause an overspill onto the tablecloth.

She read the letter again. A breeze dried her moving lips. She had arrived at that same troubling paragraph.

My rifle no longer shoots straight, half the time. I think the barrel warped. I keep telling the captain I need a new rifle. He says if my gun shoots straight half the time, those are pretty good odds.

Sacrifice was the duty of every Virginian. The preacher at the Methodist church on Braddock Street had said as much, in a shrill voice that did not lower during Yankee occupations of their town. The right to secede was written into the Bible, or at least implied in the Gospels, and God’s approving smile started at the northern border of Virginia and extended all the way to the southern coast. Perspiration ran down the minister’s face. He wiped it away with the back of his hand until the cuff of his sleeve wore a faint yellow stain. As his sermons grew longer and louder, the congregation noticed that his shirt had a strange bulge. When the Yankee provost marshal had him searched, the bulge turned out to be the socks of his dead son.

Libby looked up at the clouds and took a deep breath. She heard the chickens rustling in their coop, imagined them gossiping about the brightening sky. She put her hair behind her ear, but a breeze came out of nowhere and undid the fix. A snort came from the direction of the stables, where a bay stallion had spotted her and was looking for a treat. She threw him a distracted look and returned to the paragraph about the defective rifle. She knew why the captain would not replace it: their regiment had no spares. The Southern troops were ill fitted in every way. Unlike the Union army, they didn’t have sutler wagons or new shoes, and they had been reduced to stripping their dead enemies of clothing and supplies. Occasionally, they could find luxuries like tinned lobster in the haversacks of corpses.

The horse snorted again.

She folded the letter and stood breathing in the odor of straw and manure, and another sweet fragrance she could not identify. She walked toward the stables, passing the grave of a Yankee soldier who had died at their house the previous spring, after the occupying army and its new provost marshal forced the citizens to take in their wounded men. This Yankee had been shot in the leg. Despite the amputation done by a field surgeon, by the time he was carried into the Beale house, the wound was infected and leaking green pus. It sent out the overwhelming odor of rot, leaking through the halls and the gravity vents, drifting into cold fireplaces, infiltrating curtains and even soap. Anyone entering the sick room had to first stuff their nostrils with cotton balls soaked with camphor.

Dr. Beale had made an honest attempt to nurse the man back to health, but he was only a dentist. One night the dying man’s screams woke up the family, and when they rushed into the room, he smiled at them and said he’d been playing chess and had trapped the rival king. Within an hour, he was dead. The house was scrubbed down with homemade soap and vinegar, but the pungent smell remained for days, moving into the backyard through open windows and settling on the profusion of yarrow growing out of the soldier’s grave. Within a week, the yarrow had disappeared, and no other weeds replaced it. The Beales implored the Confederate soldiers to dig up the corpse once Winchester was retaken, but no one paid them any mind. Unwelcome bodies were buried everywhere, and there wasn’t enough manpower to do anything about it.

That damn Yankee shouldn’t be in your family’s backyard,
Arden had complained in one of his letters.
The minute I come home, I’m going to dig up that son of a bitch.

When Libby reached the horse, whose name was Ralph, she stroked his mane while he nosed the front pocket of her dress, still holding out hope for his old treat of peanut brittle.