Sisters of Shiloh (22 page)

Josephine missed herself in the same aching way the men missed their wives. Somehow it had seemed tolerable to let her true essence be lost under snow during the winter months. But now that the snow had receded and the air had warmed and the birds had returned, she found herself dwelling on that carefully detailed fantasy. On this day she had realized that the time was right, even if the deed was wrong, outrageous, crazy, and after what happened with Wesley, she was not going to wait a moment longer. And so she gave into the mad thought, let her actions carry her away as she walked, that calm late afternoon, across a field overgrown with clover and down a gentle slope. At the bottom lay a gurgling creek short on frogs but sparkling with minnows. The stones covering its bed were clean as though scrubbed that way. The light of the lowering sun played upon the currents and caused the color of the stones to change from pink to lavender and then to a brief powder shade of blue. Shaded by white oak branches, the bathing hole was only ten feet in diameter; but on this early evening it was empty, for the rest of the camp was at supper. Josephine expected no companions here but one.

Love grass lined the banks of this creek, so lush and soft as to invite a never-ending nap. Josephine sat in the grass, the slope of the hill kept her hidden from sight. She took off her filthy shoes and socks and put her feet in the water. Two bees flew by in their quest for pink trillium, but their buzz was gone and they were quiet as ladybugs. A band of silvery minnows lingered in a slow-moving eddy before making a sudden departure. She unbuttoned her jacket and pulled it off, then removed her shirt and sat there, bare from the waist up except for her cotton binding. It came off slowly, revealing breasts that were pale but still full. The months of privation had not taken them from her.

The wind brushed at her skin. A single bee came back and circled one aureole before flying away. She pulled off her trousers and drawers and settled back naked on the grass. A cloud of gnats appeared, drawn by the scent of sweat or perhaps just the sudden appearance of a body so pale and warm. They settled on her private hair, scattering as she waved her hand.

A few minutes later, she eased herself down to the creek until she stood in water that came to her navel. Immediately she felt the hidden currents that came swirling from different angles, tickling the backs of her knees and the insides of her wrist as she balanced herself. She sank into the creek until only her head was left uncovered. She looked toward the hill, watching the clover and a single rogue dandelion waving within it. She could not hear the sounds of camp. She heard nothing. It was as if camp did not exist, nor did the war, that this creek was an extension of her homestead lot back in Winchester, and this day, the sun easing down, was like any other spring day.

She could have rushed from the water and put on her clothes and gone back to camp as though nothing had ever happened. But she did not. Instead she watched the hill and waited.

Ghost.
He hated that nickname. The old man, Floyd, had taken to calling him that, and the other soldiers had picked it up. Now when they glanced at him from their faro games and card playing, that’s what he heard. With winks and cackles of laughter, as though coming back from the dead was a thing of merriment. Somehow, Wesley had survived when others hadn’t. He was past the point where the nurses had given up, and, he learned later, Floyd had even penned a letter of consolation to his parents. Somehow he’d turned around and come back again. He remembered patches of time, but others just collapsed into some unaccountable space, like the air between dreams. He remembered the old man circling his bed, and Joseph sitting by his side, reading from
Les Misérables,
stopping those passages at their most urgent and tantalizing points.

He did feel like a ghost. Coughed out by a winter that should have held him forever. By all rights, he should have gone the way of his guitar, silent even when thawed. And yet, here he was. Alive, in the spring. Without his brother. And more of the ugly war still out in front of him.

When his fever was at his highest, he could swear his brother was leaning down to him, whispering in his ear, “Ain’t so bad. Get up, boy, get up, get up.” And he was comforted by that hallucination. The worst part of getting better was the realization that Lewis was gone forever. Wesley could picture him perfectly as a boy, twelve years old, back when his laugh was free and his scowl reserved for cats and math. Doing some pointless thing. Adding an empty can to a trash fire, or digging a hole in the ground with the end of a stick. Nothing a boy could do back then had huge repercussions. No passion was demanded of him, no depth of commitment. That was before Harpers Ferry and Fort Sumter. The South and the North rarely crossed paths, and when they did, they wanted less from each other. Wesley insisted on remembering Lewis this way. He could not stand to think of him sitting there with a smile on his face and nothing but eternity behind it, and would have given anything to see that smile change into something darker, or angrier, or more selfish, and then back into a smile again, the turbulent moods of a living man.

Grief, he thought, would have an ending, but it was a black cat that ran across life, through good conversations and orange firelight and endless drills. It sat on his shoulders and made his knees creak when he stood up. It balanced in the crook of his arm as he cleaned his rifle. And he could not banish it; it was loyal as a dog.

He wanted to tell Joseph all of this. Every now and then, he would muster his courage and approach the slender boy, his soul aching for a friend, but as soon as he entered Joseph’s proximity, new pangs entered him. Confusion, self-consciousness, and an ache reserved for the gentler sex. Strange notes of pleasure and pain, guilt and redemption. Girls had made him feel like that, and sometimes whiskey, but never a fellow soldier. To love this way was like trying to paint with a slingshot. It wasn’t just wrong—it was impossible. He looked at the other soldiers and wondered if they knew. Wondered if Lewis had known.

Wondered if Joseph felt it, too.

The night before Fredericksburg, Wesley had taken a drink to steady himself and asked him to dance, because all the men were dancing, and on this night such a proposition was normal and proper. Spinning around with Joseph in his arms, he had felt something that went beyond drunkenness and celebration and defiance and the false bravery men feel around fire, drums, and whiskey. What he felt, in fact, had nothing to do with war. Then the sudden death of Lewis and the drudgery of winter camp before the illness dragged him down. He lay on the floor of the hut on his blanket and longed for two souls out of reach—one in heaven, and one breathing from the cot across the room.

Lewis and Joseph: a knees-on-the-ground devastation and a hands-in-the-air bewilderment.

And he had thought, perhaps, that he would emerge from his long and ferocious illness cured of his alarming fondness for Joseph, and that this young soldier would turn back into a mere companion. And yet, despite his best efforts, his gaze still lingered when he looked at the boy and found himself wanting to touch him. Not a friendly punch in the shoulder but to stroke the side of his face, to come closer, to breathe the odor of his neck, and this filled Wesley, in a springtime teeming with flowers and birds, with the shame of the November before, when he had, for reasons unknown, allowed this boy to drunkenly kiss him in a smokehouse and then spent the rest of the march in a circling, angry interrogation of himself.
Why did you do that? Why?

And yet he could not find another single reason for going forward into the next march and the next battle, because now that Lewis was dead, every part of his body yearned for escape. He was not like the others. He did not believe in Stonewall Jackson or his plans, and did not see himself as an angel in his avenging army. He was simply a fighting cock, doomed to slash and peck at his opponent—who looked just like him—as North and South placed bets. He did not want to kill anymore. He wanted to find another guitar and stun the enemy with song. He wanted to keep the springtime for himself and what was left of his family and not share it with this war. He was weary beyond belief, too weary to even bathe, as Floyd had pointed out over breakfast.

“Ghost, when’s the last time you bathed that filthy hide of yours? October? Get on down to the creek and get yourself a bath before some digger wasp tries to build a nest on you.”

Joseph, who was darning his haversack nearby, had glanced at him but said nothing.

“I don’t feel like bathing,” Wesley said. “And stop calling me ghost. It’s not like you don’t have one foot in the grave yourself.”

Floyd tossed him the remains of a cake of soap. “Come on. Gonna be a nice spring day. You’ll feel better.”

Wesley caught the soap. “All right then, old man, just to shut you up. But I’ll bathe later on, when everyone’s at supper. Don’t want no one to see how scrawny I’ve gotten.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” Floyd said, his eyes softening. “You weren’t but skin and bones lying on that cot. I still say it’s a miracle you’re still with us.”

Now Wesley made his way down the hill as the sun began to fail and his own shadow lay out in front of him, moving through the clover. He was not looking forward to his bath. Lewis always used to tease him about moving into cold water one inch at a time, holding his breath, when Lewis would simply belly-flop in with a holler. He did not wish to cry today, here in this stolen moment of spring, by evoking that memory of Lewis in midair, that silly smile on his face, but here it came anyway, and Wesley felt his eyes grow wet and his heart hurt fiercely; as he stood a moment to let the feeling pass, he thought he saw something in the creek below. Something that moved in the shadows.

He came closer. He reached the bottom of the hill and glimpsed, in the mud of the creek bank, a pair of footprints that led to the water. He moved to the water’s edge and found himself looking into the face of Joseph, who was silent, in water up to his neck.

“Joseph?”

“No.” Something was strange about the voice, causing Wesley to move forward so that the toes of his moccasins dampened in the cool water of the creek.

“No?” he asked. The air was charged with something, a before-battle or after-kiss prickle that warns of silence.

Joseph rose, his pale neck revealing itself, then the shoulders . . .

Wesley’s eyes widened . . .

Then the breasts . . .

Then the smooth belly . . .

Wesley’s jaw fell open. His heart stopped.

The brush of light hair where the legs met. Proof of something he’d felt in his bones and beyond but that his mind had refused to confirm.

And it was not Joseph but some other creature that stood dripping in the creek as the mystery split like the last crack of a tree before it falls, and Wesley felt dizzy and pure as the answers to his questions flooded him. Of course, of course, of course. His body seemed to have lost itself. His hat fell out of his hand, and he plunged into the creek, the chill of the water unfelt as it moved up his trousers. He reached her and put his arms around her, holding her, kissing her mouth, his hands moving up to her breasts, affirming the solution and then moving around to her bare, wet back. This could not be what it was. Tears filled his eyes and fell down his face for what he’d found, what had been given him by a merciful God after all this time. Finally what he felt and what was true matched up like a green lizard on a green leaf, and he held and stroked the soft wet skin as the shadows moved around them.

“What is your name?” he whispered.

“Josephine.”

He looked into her eyes and saw her there. “Of course,” he said. “Of course.”

April had arrived, and a new secret lived in the camp. A masquerade within a disguise. Love as the uninvited third party invading this war. Passion, silent and covert but growing every day. Josephine, revealed as a woman to the only person who mattered, now found that freedom raging within her, and it took all her strength to climb into those filthy, manly clothes, to lower her voice, and to breathe beneath her bindings. Only on certain occasions, when she used the excuse, late at night, of the call of nature, could she meet Wesley in the darkness of the woods, to be held and known.

“I can’t sleep,” Wesley said, stroking her face, “knowing you are so close by. This is torture for me.”

“We’re together now, though,” she said, kissing his lips.

“It’s not enough, Josephine. I love you. This is not how we were meant to be.”

“I have no option.”

She had recounted the tale of the sisters’ deception to Wesley, shocking herself when remembering exactly how they’d managed to fool everyone around them. In those dark woods, the story seemed ludicrous.

Libby wasn’t stupid. Her eyes narrowed when she looked at the two soldiers, the real one and the fraud, leaning toward each other and whispering. Even on opposite sides of the drill, their eyes would find each other. Wesley stopped teasing Josephine about her continued confusion about the proper way to clean a gun. And once, Libby caught Josephine brushing something off Wesley’s jacket. They seemed to be caught in their own world, some kind of time out of keeping with the others in camp, untouched by the limbo that spring imposed while they waited for Jackson to find their next burial ground.

Libby had come so far and accomplished so much. Her cause was in danger.

“Josephine,” she said in the darkness of the log hut, modulating her voice so as to rise above the crickets but preserve discretion, “why have you been spending so much time with Wesley?”

“His brother died. He’s sad.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, his brother died months ago.”

“He can still grieve, can’t he? Don’t you still grieve?”

“Don’t compare my loss to his. Arden was a brave, noble man, and Lewis was a dirty, shifty piece of vermin.”

“He was Wesley’s brother, and just as brave and beloved.”

“Ridiculous,” Libby murmured, and then fell silent for a moment before speaking again. “Wesley might discover who you are. Then what will happen to us?”