Sisters of Shiloh (27 page)

The smell of honeysuckle grew stronger in the heat. Crickets sang, locusts rattled, birds called, that peculiar form of orchestra emerging from its narrow season to cover the sound of the other soldier’s breathing. She did not speak to him. Didn’t care what he had to say or what he believed.

A voice called her name out of the darkness. It was difficult for her to see if the voice was real, and so she looked to her companion, who, unconcerned, rolled a cigarette.

The voice came again. “Libby.” Just a little louder now.

Libby moved into the forest, her rifle raised, leaving her torch behind her, farther until the shadows covered her. Farther still until, in a place where moonlight came down in a sheet in a small clearing, her sister stood.

Libby’s rifle did not dip in response to the recognition. It held steady, pointing at her. Libby’s heart was beating faster, and her body was chilled. She had not seen Arden all night, but she knew that the tension of this meeting would summon him. It was only a matter of time before his body was next to hers and his voice was in her ear.

“Why did you come back?” Libby asked her. In the disguise of the man, Joseph, Libby had trouble seeing her sister. It was as though Josephine and all the love Libby had for her had disappeared.

“I came back for you,” Josephine replied, her own gun loose at her side. “I love you, Libby. I thought I could leave you, but I couldn’t. You’re my little sister.”

“You are not my sister anymore,” Libby said. “You’re a traitor to the South. You’ll be arrested and shot, as will Wesley.” Libby peered into the darkness, trying to see him. “Where is he?”

“I left him behind.”

Libby was shocked at the thought that Josephine had done such a thing for her. “You did?” she whispered. But then Arden was there, his elbow brushing her arm. “She’s come back to destroy us. She’s a traitor. She’s no better than a Yankee. In fact, she is a Yankee. Shoot her, Libby.”

“Shoot her? I cannot shoot her!”

“Libby?” Josephine said. “Who are you talking to?”

“Do it for me,” said Arden. “Do it for Stonewall Jackson. Do it for love and for justice.”

“But she’s my sister.”

“She is number nineteen, Libby. An enemy soldier. Ask her if she killed me, Libby. Ask her one more time.”

“Libby,” said Josephine. “Please put the gun down. You are frightening me.”

Libby did not move. Her aim was true. Her finger moved to the trigger, and it didn’t feel like her finger at all. Perhaps Arden was right. Who was right and wrong anyway, at this angle of darkness, at this fraction of war, and in this moment in time?

“I’m asking you one more time, Josephine. Did you kill Arden?”

Josephine set her gun down and let it fall into the leaves. She held her hands at her sides. The moonlight scattered her shadow behind her. It did not fit her anymore.

“Yes,” she said. “I killed him.”

Arden, death-wounded and crack-lipped, stared up into Josephine’s eyes. “Where . . . is my wife? I have to say goodbye.”

“I’ll go find her.” Josephine started to rise to her feet, but Arden grabbed her wrist. “Wait,” he said, then paused to ride out a wave of pulsing agony before he could speak again. His grip weakened. “I have changed my mind. I cannot make her watch me die.”

“She would want to nurse you.”

“You know how the gut-shot die. It would kill her, too. Do it, Josephine. Finish me. Hurry.”

“Arden, no!” Josephine cried. “I could never kill a man.”

“Even one you hate?”

Josephine couldn’t answer.

“Please. You know that your sister isn’t strong.”

“She is only not strong because of you!” Josephine was immediately horrified by her own words, but Arden nodded.

“Then, do it because you hate me.” His breath was coming hard and fast. His teeth were clenched, and his body seized in agony.

“I don’t hate you, Arden.”

“Then, do it because you love her. Please, please.”

With no time to think further on the subject, with just a moment to obey whichever side of her soul was winning an argument whose points were fragmented and shooting out in all directions like bees from a broken hive, Josephine picked up the leather haversack lying near his side and held it over his face as his eyes registered pain and fear and gratitude. Only toward the end, after his eyes had rolled into the back of his head, did he suddenly begin to struggle, one hand jerking up to scratch her face, but she grimly held on and finally his body slackened and he lay there motionless, calm, and warm. That is the way Libby found them. That was the beginning of the lie and the secret. And she was going to take this to her grave, but now, in this moment, facing her sister and her pointed gun, she just spoke the truth. She wanted some kind of true thing with her there in that clearing. Even if it was her own worst deed.

“I know you don’t believe me, Libby. But I did it out of mercy. So shoot me, if you must. But you should know that at the moment I felt Arden’s life draining away, I didn’t hate him. I loved him. Because, for the first time, I realized that he loved you.”

Libby felt stunned by the confession, as though a cannonade had blown her all the way back to Sharpsburg and now she was touching her dead husband’s cooling face as his death wound poured its hot scent into her nostrils.

“I told you,” Arden whispered in her ear, and she was back in the woods around Chancellorsville. “She killed me. She admitted it.”

“She chose me,” Libby said. “She chose me on that battlefield. She chose me when I went to war. And now she has chosen me a third time, when she has come back for me.”

Libby lowered her rifle.

“And I choose her.”

“No!” said Arden. But he was fading, dissolving.

“Libby,” said Josephine, her real voice breaking, “I came all this—”

An explosion rocked the woods, and Libby felt a searing burn on her face and a rush of hot liquid. Her knees collapsed and she fell to the ground. As more shots were fired and shouting filled the woods, she lost consciousness.

When she came to her senses, Josephine was leaning over her. “Libby! Libby!”

Libby opened her eyes. “What happened?”

“Yankees ambushed us.”

She looked over to where Rebel pickets bent over the body of a Union soldier. Josephine tore the sleeve off her shirt and pressed it against Libby’s face. “One of them shot you, Libby.”

“Who shot him?”

“I did.”

The pickets had turned to them. One of them peered at Josephine. “You’re the deserter!” he exclaimed, and seized her gun. Two of the other pickets took her by the arms.

“We got you now,” one of them said.

“Take him to the captain,” another ordered, and they began to drag her away.

Libby was still dizzy and blood still ran from her wound, but she managed to raise her head and say the only words she could. The words that would save her sister and damn herself. The words that would end her quest forever.

“Stop. She’s no deserter. She’s a woman.”

Brigade Headquarters

Hamilton’s Crossing

May 20, 1863

Dr. James Beale

Dear Sir,

I write to inform you that your daughters, Josephine and Libby, are made safe and in transit to you presently. I ask you to collect them at Manassas Junction by month’s end, as the Army can escort them no further.

I understand you must be fraught with worry, and hope my assurances of their safety can ease your mind and that of your family.

Their experiences throughout the past several months I cannot begin to adequately convey, but will leave to them to express.

Suffice it to say that I have never encountered two young ladies such as your daughters. And while I cannot officially condone their actions, I would be dishonest to say that they have not earned my deepest regard.

Yours truly,

Gen. James A. Walker

Josephine rode on the buckboard of the horse-drawn wagon next to her sister. Two officers’ wives had volunteered dresses for them to wear, acting out of their strong belief that women, no matter how mad, should not be seen in pants. After the revelations of the night before, the other soldiers had treated them with confusion and awe, mystified by the fact that two members of the weaker sex had survived eight months of a brutal war with no one the wiser about their true identity.

How strange that the same soldiers who had eaten and drunk and swore and fought beside them now offered them their hands to help them into the wagon. Their eyes taking them in, shocked to the core. The astonished captain had escorted them to the new brigade commander, who had ordered them sent back home immediately, and word was being sent by horseman at this very moment to Dr. and Violet Beale. Libby’s wound had been cleaned and an isinglass plaster applied.

Floyd came up with his hat over his chest. “I’ll be damned,” he said. “If this don’t just beat all. I didn’t know you were of the female persuasion, and I suppose that is a compliment to your skills. I’m just happy to see you leaving this war with all your arms and legs. It’s terrible enough for a man but unholy for a woman to be here.”

Then he moved close to Josephine and said into her ear: “I’m not saying you know where that boy is, but you tell that boy he ain’t yellow any more than he’s purple. Tell him I’m gonna find him after the war. Tell him I got his guitar and I’m treating it with all the respect a wounded veteran deserves.”

They were on their way to Manassas Junction, where their father would meet them to take them back to Winchester. The horses were subdued, the driver quiet. The road was deserted. Nothing but early summer here on this section of Virginia the war hadn’t bitten. In fact, war was nowhere. Not in the fields, not along the wormwood fence that existed in fragments, not in the dust or the heat or the sky. It was as though the war was a puddle and a gentleman had laid his coat down on it so they could pass.

Libby had not spoken a word since the ambush in the woods, neither in her false voice or her true one. She had simply stood before the general, eyes on the ground, as Josephine spoke for both of them. One of the field nurses had examined the women and confirmed that what was claimed was true. Unfathomable, but true. Now Libby rode next to her in a borrowed dress, and Josephine wondered if the sensation of the soft cambric chamois next to her skin even reached her, or if her mind was still only capable of feeling roughness of cotton and canvas and twill. Arden’s ghost had left her, and perhaps it would be later in the summer or the fall when Libby could reassemble the pieces of herself into the girl she had once been long ago. But for now, Josephine was content to ride beside her on the road that would eventually connect to another, then another, and lead them back to Winchester.

She turned her thoughts to Wesley, and the memory of his sleeping face the night she left him filled her with such overbearing love as to take her out of her immediate circumstances and put her on a road made entirely of that feeling. She wondered where he was, if she was ever going to see him again. If he had made his way back to their unit and been arrested as a deserter. Or if he was still out in the world somewhere, living off the land, waiting for her. She knew, though, that she could not align circumstances herself, and that no amount of worrying could stand up next to what fate had in store for her. Still, she could not help thinking of him each time her thoughts wandered from her sister. Couldn’t help going back to the smokehouse where their first kiss had taken place as they hid there together, on that day that was still there, across the fields and through the woods and past this moment. Waiting for her.

Late September 1863

Winchester, Virginia

Josephine poured the tea into the china cup and reached for the jar of honey.

Her mother came into the kitchen, nodded at the tea, and said, “Is that for Libby?”

She nodded.

“Make sure she doesn’t spill it on herself,” she said, in a voice that had softened over the past year. After Josephine and Libby were sent home from the war, their parents had met them at the train station, and the looks on their faces as the train neared the station had broken her heart.

Josephine stirred some honey in the tea.

Dr. Beale was in his parlor. A boy had shown up with not a tooth problem but a broken arm, and her father had gone about trying to set it with a hickory splint and the strips from a torn-up sheet. She’d been tempted to help. But she had another patient who needed attention.

Weeks had passed before Libby had said anything at all. Their mother thought the problem lay in the terrible diet she’d been forced to subsist on. Fresh fruit would take care of her, she believed. Beef stew and boiled potatoes. “We need to get some weight on her,” she said, as though Libby’s true self would fatten back into shape.

Dr. Beale, though, had the keen and sober vision of a veteran, and he recognized the look, a starker version of the one he still saw in the mirror. He took Libby to a doctor in Frederick who shook his head and said, “I’ve seen men like this. But never a woman.” He gave Libby a tonic for her nerves and sent her home. And there was nothing to do but wait.

As the summer faded, Libby had started talking again, but she still spent hours alone in the backyard, sitting on a wicker chair and staring into the orchard. Josephine understood more than anyone the sacrifice that Libby, three Yankees shy of her goal, had made for her. She shadowed Libby, reading her dime novels and brushing her hair. She hunted down every color of flower she could find and laid them in her lap. Libby pulled the blooms off, one by one, and let the wind carry them away, watching them in that way the bereaved do, fixing unknown meanings to small and colorful things.