Sisters of Shiloh (20 page)

“Drink some water.”

“I’m fine.”

“Please.”

She watched as Libby gulped and handed it back to her. “Thank you,” Libby said, but Arden’s ghost had not left her voice.

“Have you seen Wesley?” Josephine asked.

“Over there.”

She rose and followed in the direction Libby had pointed, past more of the dead and wounded. She kept her gaze steady and straight. She could no longer follow the story made up of bodies on frozen ground, a blue-and-gray tale whose ending was too sad to bear.

Lewis sat on an ammunition box, his legs dangling, the laces of his moccasins double knotted on his feet, his rifle resting on his lap. Wesley stood a few feet from him, looking at him. Neither man moved as Josephine approached. Smoky breath came out of Wesley’s mouth, but no such breath emerged from the mouth of his brother. Lewis wore a quiet smile. Josephine stood between the two of them, her gaze moving from one man to the other, trying to solve the puzzle of the scene.

“Wesley,” she said. When he made no answer, she reached out and touched Lewis’s cheek, a knot of cold stone that held the smile in place. He did not blink when she passed her hand before his face, and the mystery—not a mark on him—took over her body, replacing the shock of the loss and concern for the survivor. This separation of scene and explanation vexed her. Her eyes moved down his body once again, and as she took a step and began to move around him, she saw that something—a bullet or a shell—had taken away the back of his skull and its contents, starting at the line of his ear, leaving some brain matter and a rime of frozen blood. Lewis still had a part in his hair, straight as an arrow and two inches long.

A heavy, windy rain began to fall that Sunday night, protecting the retreat of the Union army across the Rappahannock and driving the victors to shelter. No fires, just the relentless downpour and men determined to celebrate. The battle and its horrors could haunt them later. That night they would drink until they could achieve a kind of owl sleep in which the eyes don’t move, in which dreams are banished but the dead are beckoned forth as a living presence, eyes bright and death wounds covered.

As the retreating army pulled up their pontoon boats, an aurora borealis undulated across the sky. Sheets of celestial color wrinkled like curtains and cloaked the trees, giving the illusion they could be touched and tasted. Blue, red, green, and violet lingered in the black of night. To the drunken men, it meant something they could not quite define. A blessing or a curse, a visitation, proof of God or a quirk of the cosmos. Some of the men had lost faith in miracles. They had lost everything, and that destitution followed them everywhere they went, even down the muscular forgetfulness found inside a bottle.

Libby sat alone under an evergreen. She had emptied the remainder of a bottle of Old Crow someone had passed her earlier. The branches sheltered her for the most part, but her journey into this clearing had left her soaking wet. The rain stripped away the grass and drummed into mud. Rivulets of water started fruitless treks to the Rappahannock and disappeared into snake holes. She leaned against the tree trunk and listened to the booming thunder.

She thought she heard footsteps, but her heart didn’t skip a beat. She straightened, listening.

The footsteps came closer.

Arden said her name, or perhaps she said it herself. So hard to tell after all her time mimicking him. He emerged from the curtains of the rain and stood in front of her in his shell jacket and jersey pants. He ducked under the shelter of branches and knelt in front of her, so close that she could see water dripping from his eyelashes.

She reached out and touched his cool face, letting her fingers run down his cheek and across his mouth, then up to his wet hair. Every detail was true. Had she held a candle to his ear, she would have seen a small patch of freckles just above the lobe. The expression he wore was tender and sad, like that of someone watching a childhood forest cleared for lumber. He said nothing but whistled out quantities of smoky breath. The sharpest of memories could not replicate this vision. She touched his throat, the ridge of each vocal cord. When a drop of water rolled down his face and into his mouth, she felt the lump of his involuntary swallow.

His pupils shrank as lightning flashed. He took her hand. “You fought like a devil,” he said, his voice sounding kinder than it had in recent dreams. “You killed eight Yankees. You honored me eight times. Aren’t you proud?”

“Yes.”

Her voice imitated his so faithfully, it sounded as though he had answered his own question.

“Then, why are you crying? You don’t feel sorry for them, do you?”

“Arden, some of them were just boys.”

“Old enough to kill.”

“But the looks on their faces . . .”

“How about the look on my face?”

“One of them asked for his mother.”

“I didn’t ask for my mother. I asked for you.”

“It was so different than what I imagined. I could hear the bullets hit them. And their screams sounded so much louder directed at me. Their eyes . . .”

“That’s war, Libby. Most women only bathe what it leaves behind. But you had the strength to fight. Tell me you had no choice. Come on, say it.”

“I had no choice.”

“Them or you.”

“Them or me.”

“North or South.”

“North or South.”

“Now tell me you love me. Oh, there you go, crying again. We should be laughing like we always did. Want to see something funny?”

He opened his jacket.

“Look, Libby. Flies in winter.”

December 17, 1862

Dear Pa and Ma,

I cant hardly write this for my hands shaking so bad at telling you that our Lewis is killed. It was at the terrible battle we fought at Fredericksburg a few days past.

Know that he had no time to suffer, and met Jesus in no pain. I buried him myself proper and marked it good so someday we can come take him home to our family place. It is right that he should lie next to Grandpa, Aunt Eliza, and Sarah.

He died protecting me—like he did every day of this war, like you told him to when we left. He oftentimes went barefooted so that my feet would be covered. He would eat little supper so that I could have extra. He kept me well and safe even when I fought him over it. You should be proud of your boy, who loved us all so.

No doubt you will fret even more over my safety now, but I am out of harm’s way for the rest of the winter. We are to have more rations here than on the march, and I have shoes and a warm coat. There are many good men here with me and we aid one another. Floyd is the old rooster of our bunch and looks out for us, although we give him a terrible time. And two young cousins have joined us and I have become great friends with the older one, Joseph.

I know your hearts are broke with this news and I have no heart to go on soldiering without Lewis, but I know he would want me to continue the fight.

I will come back.

Your loving son,

Wesley

January 1863

Camp Winder

Near Fredericksburg, Virginia

Moss Neck. That place of bad water and sheltering pine. Stonewall Jackson moved into a manor whose furnishings stood out in stark contrast to the man himself. Bearskin couches, stuffed birds, and portraits of dogs all spoke gleefully of a life beyond the quest. But he had work to do, and these quarters itched of leisure. Jackson moved out the next morning.

There would be no more fighting that winter. While Jackson planned his spring campaign, his men had time to celebrate Christmas and build log shelters, complete with fireplaces and chimneys. Beds were bunk style, and any soft material—hay, leaves, or cloth—could find its place in a mattress. Chairs were made of barrel staves, and the outside walls were packed with dirt to shield against the bite of the wind. Now a soldier finally had time to rest and take stock in himself. Was that his face in the mirror? It couldn’t be.

The hut that the sisters shared with Wesley could have housed six men. But Lewis and Matthew were dead, and Floyd was still coughing up fluids in the hospital tent. The luxury of space seemed to mock them. Wesley had gotten in a fistfight with a barefooted Rebel who had tried to take the moccasins off his brother’s corpse. His lip was split, and he had a black eye. He wouldn’t sing or play his thawed guitar, and when he spoke his voice was flat as though it, too, had fared badly in the cold. When he wasn’t nursing Floyd, he sat in a corner of the hut and stared into space. His devastation moved Josephine, who wanted to join with him in that shared grief, and shower him with motherly comforts, and move her hands down the sides of his face, and press her lips to the top of his head. Once she found him standing under a tree, crying. He embraced her suddenly but wrenched himself free before she could warm him. Josephine herself could not tear free of the sight of Lewis, so calm and smiling and dead.

But even as Wesley withdrew and quieted and slowed in winter sunlight, Josephine saw encouraging signs in another loved one. The day after the battle, Arden’s voice left Libby and she began talking in the familiar lower register of her false identity; to Josephine, this was a blessing. Libby put her oak stick with its nine notches under her cot and didn’t take it out again. She seemed to be using the winter rest to draw on her reservoirs of strength, and slowly the color returned to her face. And though she still walked like a man, her feet coming down hard and her arms swinging wild, as though free of the memory of silk, her eyes had cleared and her expression had softened. She had worked tirelessly on the building of the hut, and once it was complete, she threw herself into her soldierly duties, drilling with precision, hunting rabbits, hewing logs, and helping to lay paths of split timber through the quagmire of mud that soon enveloped the camp.

But here and there cracks of her true self still showed. Something girlish in the way she folded a shirt in the darkness of the hut when they were alone together or moved her fingertips to her lips while listening to a story.

Once, Josephine woke up in the middle of the night to find that Wesley had not yet returned from his hospital vigil; Libby had sat down on her cot and was stroking her hair.

“Josephine,” she whispered, “how do you know for sure?”

“Know what?”

“About what you’re supposed to do.”

“Do about what?”

But Libby didn’t answer the question. Instead she told Josephine, “Say my name.”

“Libby.”

“Say it again.”

“Libby.”

“I like that,” she murmured. She leaned over until her body lay next to Josephine’s and fell asleep. Libby slept like a woman did, breathed like one, and was perhaps somewhere dreaming like one. This was the Libby who once lingered naked in deep water and remembered herself.

Like most wars, it started from a small thing, a seed of discontent that quickly grew and spread. The remaining pamphlets of
Les Misérables
had finally reached the camp, but before the readings could begin, they vanished. Accusations flew. Brother against brother. Friend against friend. Eyes filled with suspicion. Fingers pointed by firelight. The brigade had plenty of dried meat and even the occasional canned peach, but they did not have enough printed material to stave off the unrelenting boredom, and this dishonorable theft roused their warrior spirits.

In the midst of this tension, snow began to fall, at first turning brown in the mud and then piling up white.

The next morning, the fighting began.

“I tell you,” one soldier said to another, “I don’t blame that police inspector, Javert. Some say he was obsessed with his mission to capture Jean Valjean. But I think it was less a case of misguided passion, and more a case of a man trying to do his job.”

“Bullshit. He was motivated by hatred and jealousy. I could prove that to you, if I had the damn book, which your company stole.”

“Liar.”

“Thief.”

The first man packed a snowball and threw it at the second. It hit him clean in the face and exploded, leaving a red nose in its aftermath. The second man packed his own snowball and inflicted equal damage. Each man’s friends rushed to his side, and then were joined by their companies, then their regiments, then their corps. A civil war within a civil war. Earthworks of white powder appeared magically, and to loud swearing and Rebel yells, the men tensed for the fight.

Libby and Josephine had crafted their snowballs with a woman’s precision. Wesley joined them, still packing his snowball, his face red from running.

“Where have you been?” Josephine asked.

“With Floyd.”

“How is he?”

Wesley gave her the shrug of unchanging news.

“Hold your fire!” the captain ordered. His right arm had been shot off in the battle of Fredericksburg, and he now gave signals with the other. “Wait until they get in range. Thieving bastards left us nothing to read. I’ve been reading a
woman’s magazine!
”

The drummer boy of the rival corps came marching toward them with his line, rallying the enemy. He played so loud that snow fell off the roofs of the cabins.

The first snowball soared through the air, unleashed by a nervous new conscript who jumped the gun before the order, earning a rebuke from the captain. It landed ten feet in front of the other line and sank whole into the snow.

“Sissy!” someone called, and then snowballs filled the air in stark defiance of the officers, who muttered but could not court-martial.

“I got one!” Josephine cried, then received a hard missile in return that hit her shoulder bone and made her gasp.

Libby avenged her.

Wesley let the enemy snowballs hit him but did not throw his own, instead keeping it cocked in one hand as he marched toward the other line. He climbed up on the rooftop of a cabin and stood with his two feet planted and the original snowball poised in his hand, searching the teeming armies below him as Josephine paused in the battle to watch him from a low angle. The snow had turned to mud in places, and men were rolling in it, suddenly rising up with mud balls. One of the missiles hit Wesley in the knee, but he didn’t even change expression.