Sisters of Shiloh (21 page)

He found the object of his vendetta and threw the snowball in a perfect downward trajectory. The rival drummer boy looked up in time to catch it full in the face. He fell in slow motion and landed arms akimbo on his back. His drumsticks fell like spears into the snow and stuck there. The force of gravity caused his drum to fly up and land behind him with a muffled thump. He flailed a snow angel as he tried to extract his arms from the straps.

“That’s for Floyd!” Wesley called. He dusted off his hands, slid off the roof, landed in the position of a cat, and took off in the direction of the hospital tent.

Josephine scored hit after hit, making gains with the rest of her line, loving the way the eyes of her enemy widened when a snowball hit home. She found herself smiling. This was not grim work but the scuffling of children, half anger and half joy, then three-quarters joy, then joy full-on. She and Libby had fought like this against the neighbor children one epic winter after a gorgeous snowfall, tree by tree in the orchard, ambushes from the branches, advances into open land, sudden detente at the border of the cornfield. Sounds of a clean battle, whoops and shouts and exaggerated cries over timid pains.

She slipped in the snow and fell down, tried to rise and fell again. Libby stopped and helped her up.

“I got him,” Josephine said.

“Good for you.”

The other line broke and retreated, but were pursued mercilessly and struck in the back at close range. Some turned for a desperate last stand, fighting guerrilla style from hut to hut. In the midst of that battle, that happy chaos, that bloodless grudge-settling that should have spread throughout the war and left both sides stained with spheres of cold water but otherwise untouched, Josephine heard a sound. A sound lost in the din but as clear as a bell to her. Just for a moment and it was gone.

Libby’s laughter.

Not the laughter of a man but a burst of feminine laughter, unguarded and true, evocative of everything pre-war and even pre-Arden. In the same way that a low-throated rattle is indisputable evidence that death is near, that burst of high-pitched laughter could not have come from anything but life. Josephine could not help but imagine the day could come when that laughter would rise again, multiply, show itself, and her sister would come back to her with Arden’s ghost split like a locust shell and left clinging to a tree.

During a break in the battle,
Les Misérables
suddenly appeared in the hands of a prime suspect.

“Oh, looky here. I must have forgotten I borrowed this.”

“You bastard!”

The battle was over. Brother returned to brother and friend to friend. Flasks appeared and were drained, and drill was canceled because the one-armed captain was lying drunk in the snow. Stonewall Jackson was a god left behind as liquor washed away the tendency to worship and fear. Day turned into evening, and evening, night, and the reading of
Les Misérables,
instigator of the war, was canceled because so many of the soldiers were by now unconscious.

Libby and Josephine lay together, bodies entangled on a single cot, warm with liquor despite the continuing snowfall outside the shaky walls of their hut.

“I fought well today,” Josephine said. Her mouth was inches from Libby’s, her breath sweet with brandy.

“If only you could fight the Yankees with equal ferocity,” Libby said, but her voice was dreamy and forgiving.

“I could never kill a man, Libby.”

“Are you sure?”

Josephine blinked. Through her hazy drunkenness, a certain tone had broken through, like the slight reek of tar in cheap whiskey. “What do you mean?” she asked. Her heart began to beat faster.

“That day in the woods at Sharpsburg . . .”

Josephine’s breath caught. Her sober self was rising up to listen. That clarity brought by dread and fear.

“Yes?”

“I heard your voice calling me. And then it stopped. I rushed through the woods, looking for you. And then I finally saw you in the distance. The air was full of smoke, and there was such confusion. But as I approached you . . . I thought I saw you pressing something down on Arden’s face as if you were smothering him.”

Josephine knew she must answer, she must explain herself quickly with the version of the truth she had once found believable, but suddenly the truth was lost. She had spent the war burying it, and now in her molasses-slow brain she could not find its location.

“I have told myself many times that I was just seeing things,” Libby continued. “As I’ve told you before, I saw many impossible sights that day. But this one will not be banished, and it tortures me. Tell me, Josephine, surely you could not have hated him that much, to cause his death?”

“No, Libby,” she said. Her voice felt strange to her ears. Disembodied as though it belonged to someone else, half-man, half-woman, sober and drunk and truthful and lying and too young to know the things it knew. “Your eyes were playing tricks on you. I had no love for Arden, but I did not kill him. I told you. He was dead when I found him.”

“But he was still warm!”

“Then death must have taken him very shortly before I came upon him.” Her voice was calm, certain.

No answer in return but Libby’s slow breathing. The angle of her body or an incipient cold made a slightly whistling sound come out of her throat.

The next morning they both awoke with pounding headaches. Josephine had only vague memories of the night before, but that troubling accusation remained.

Tell me, Josephine, surely you could not have hated him that much, to cause his death?

She looked at Libby and could read nothing on her face but the pain of harsh light and loud noises. She must have misunderstood. Libby could not possibly have said that. Perhaps she should revisit the subject. A little hair of the dog that bit them. But she didn’t dare.

Had Lewis still been alive, he would have chastised his brother. “Damn it, boy. I told you to keep your distance from that old man. Now he’s better, and you’re sick.”

It started with a cough that would not go away. Later the weakness and the fever took over, and soon Wesley was in the hospital tent with the other sick men who thought they had escaped the worst of the war only to find that the enemy was inside them, not blue but the sickly yellow of a rogue infection. Wesley lay shivering under a thin blanket, his arms crossed, as Floyd paced around his cot.

“Come on, boy. Get up and play that infernal thawed guitar of yours,” he begged him, but instead Wesley grew worse. Floyd made the mistake of abandoning his post by Wesley’s cot to relieve himself in the woods, and when he returned, Josephine was in his place, applying a mustard plaster.

“Okay, then, Joseph. You can go. I’m here now,” Floyd said.

“You shouldn’t be in this tent. You almost died, and you could catch something again.”

“No, the boy took care of me, and I’m going to take care of him. You get gone. Go pretend to shave or something.”

But Josephine refused to leave, and eventually the old man gave up and relinquished the rickety wooden chair by Wesley’s cot to her, although he did return at all hours of the day to check on him.

“Ah, Joseph,” Wesley said weakly. “You ought to be playing poker or drinking somewhere. There’s nothing to do in this tent.”

But Josephine didn’t want to be anywhere else. Libby could not pry her away from Wesley’s side and began taking supper to her on a tin plate as Josephine administered Dover’s powder and more mustard plasters in a vain attempt to mollify whatever force was inside him, moving through a feverish body already wracked by the scourges of the war. The nurses had removed his clothes, and when the blanket slipped and she saw his bare chest, the heavy toll of his tribulations was obvious. Starved flesh, evidence of scurvy, old scars, and a surface wound, still healing, that he’d mentioned to no one. She dipped a wet rag in water and bathed his face as Floyd returned.

“Camp fever, probably,” he murmured. “Or the influenza. Or God knows what. I’ll go scout up some dogwood bark. It’s good for fevers. And put warm lard on his skin. Keeps it from itching.”

Wesley spent most of his hours asleep. The nurses had seen other men go through these stages, and they began avoiding Wesley’s cot and let Josephine do the work. “If you want to help,” one of the nurses told her, “you could lend us a hand with the other men.”

“I must stay with my friend.”

“You’re wasting your time. He’s going to die. Direct your efforts to the ones who might recover.”

Josephine recoiled from the woman who had said so bluntly what Floyd had said in the way he circled the cot, sighing, and Libby had said with the look she gave her when she brought in her supper.

“He is not going to die,” Josephine replied in such a gruff and masculine anger that the nurse turned away. Later in the afternoon, Josephine left Wesley’s side just long enough to rifle through her haversack and find some cigarettes she’d recovered on the battlefield of Fredericksburg and was saving to use for trade. She headed over to F Company and returned to the hospital with the two last volumes of
Les Misérables
tucked under her arm. That night she read by candlelight the scene where Valjean has volunteered to execute Javert, who has been exposed as a spy. Valjean approaches Javert, who is tied and blindfolded. He aims his gun . . .

Josephine closed the pamphlet.

Wesley’s eyes fluttered, then opened. Slowly he moved his arm out from under the blanket and touched her arm. “Go on,” he whispered. “Tell me what happened.”

“I’ll tell you in the morning.”

And so she continued that way, with the only medicine she had left at her disposal: that of the suddenly disconnected plot line. She could only hope that Wesley’s desperate curiosity to find out what happened next would cause him to live through another night.

Four days later, Floyd touched her arm. She moved her gaze away from his wet eyes and fought the urge to cover her ears and protect them from his quavering voice.

“You know I lost a boy in Kernstown,” he said. “But he wasn’t the first. I lost my youngest to typhoid fever. You’re gonna hear a rattle . . .”

“Stop talking, Floyd. Go away.”

“You’re gonna hear a rattle, and it’s not gonna sound pretty, Joseph. But when I heard my boy’s rattle, I knew it was the sound of a soul shaking out of its earthly chains before it flew to heaven. That’s what I told myself. Maybe it will help you, too.”

Near midnight. A single candle burning. Mutterings in the hospital tent of the recovering and the dying, two sides of the story told and retold all through that winter. She leaned forward, stroking Wesley’s hair. This was the moment she had chosen to tell him, in a voice so quiet only he could hear, something that had been running through her mind, again and again and again, the words chosen so carefully, like the words spoken at a wedding or a funeral or in the dead of night when the air is calm and pure and cold.

Wesley, remember when you told me that no woman would want to love you because you are scrawny and your toes are crossed? Well, I am here to say that yes, you are scrawny, but only because the war has starved you, and when they removed your shoes in the hospital tent, I saw that your toes were not crossed, merely bruised and gray from the cold. And you are handsome, as handsome as a man can be. And a woman does love you. And I am that woman. I am not Joseph. I am Josephine, and I love you. If you must die, then die knowing that a woman who longed to be your wife was by your side.

And yet she could not do it. Some nascent hope, wild in her body and eluding capture, would not let her speak the words that were only safe to say if death were certain. She could not welcome death that way. And so instead, she opened the pamphlet, leaned forward, and whispered into his ear:

It occurred to Jean Valjean that the grating which he had caught sight of under the flag-stones, might also catch the eye of the soldiery, and that everything hung upon this chance. They also might descend into that well and search it. There was not a minute to be lost. He had deposited Marius on the ground, he picked him up again,—that is the real word for it,—placed him on his shoulders once more, and set out. He plunged resolutely into the gloom . . .

Camp Winder, Virginia

February 4, 1863

To the Father and Mother of Pvt. Wesley Abeline,

My dear Sir and Madam,

It is with great regret that I write to tell you of the terrible loss of your son, Wesley, to the devastation of camp fever.

I had the honor to serve with Wesley and Lewis after losing my own son at Kernstown and joining their ranks.

Wesley had a lively soul and it spilled out when he played his guitar. He was ever kind and looked out for his fellow soldiers. I myself grew ill earlier in the winter, and Wesley tended to me and brought me back to health. I loved him like a son and am brokenhearted at his loss.

I felt duty bound to write to you of his passing. He was a fine boy and his actions, at all times, would have made you proud.

My sincerest condolences,

Floyd Cooper

Spring 1863

Camp Winder

Near Fredericksburg, Virginia

Violets had arrived, and white clover was coming. Colors blooming everywhere. Redbud, wild mustard, trillium. Dandelions spreading over the hills. The aroma of honeysuckle awakened the soldiers in a piercing way, reminding them they had survived to smell that honeysuckle and others had not. Now was the time, though, to heal. To assemble oneself back into the soldier barely remembered from the fall.