Sisters of Shiloh (4 page)

What a traitor she was.

The battle had started without them, raging fierce for one day, and was over before they could reach it. That day after no one could say yet who had won—the killing so terrible for all, and both sides trying to piece together the remains of their army. Lee’s troops still sat north of the river, and both sides contemplated a renewed attack while they tended to the dead and wounded. The sisters had traveled all night and then bribed the Confederate pickets guarding the river. One of them had said, “Go back. I barely made it out of that battle, and you don’t want to see what it looks like now. There are things on that field I can’t describe.”

Josephine touched Libby’s arm. “Please, let’s go home. There is nothing we can do.”

“You go home. I am going to find Arden.”

“It’s dangerous. We could be killed!”

“Don’t be so melodramatic. The battle is over.”

Josephine knew that any further protests were useless, and she wasn’t going to turn back without her sister. And so they pressed on, terrible visions in Josephine’s head and a fear rising inside for what they might see. They crossed the river at the ford, then dismounted and led their horses down a road crowded with soldiers, ambulance wagons, and local farmers who rented out their own wagons to the keening families of the dead.

The bay stallion and the chestnut caught an odor as they neared the battlefield. They snorted, planted their hooves, and would go no farther. Sweet talk in the ear of Josephine’s horse and threats in the ear of Libby’s finally got the beasts moving again.

The tired, dusty soldiers who stopped to answer questions always pointed to the west. “Jackson’s brigade? They fought in the woods across from the Miller farm and around a white church on that same side of the road. Or maybe it’s a school. But it’s white.”

A hundred yards from the white church, they had no choice but to hitch their increasingly reluctant horses and walk the rest of the way. They reached the turnpike and looked down the road. The war entered their eyes before they could cover them. The real war, not the one they’d observed from Winchester.

The fields and farms past Sharpsburg lay under a blue sky, the full warmth of the September sun opening the petals of flowers and swelling the stomachs of soldiers. Blood ran down posts and crusted the fence line, coated the grass, and splattered a cornfield whose stalks had been razed by gunfire; famished soldiers had sickened themselves on the green corn and were vomiting right and left. Blood covered the wounded and dying as they writhed on the ground and begged for water. It tricked the eye with its colors: scarlet in places, orange in others, black and brown, gray in certain lights, purplish on dead Yankee’s coats.

Josephine fought the urge to turn and run. Blood stained the sides of her boots, the hem of her long dress.

She turned and noticed Libby’s face was pale, and concern for her little sister replaced that for herself. “Keep walking,” Josephine said, touching her shoulder.

They passed a man’s head lying in thistles and covered with ants. The smell of gunpowder and spoiling flesh hung in the air, punctuated by the neighing of loose horses and the cries of the wounded men. Shells had torn farm animals apart, and the flesh of burst pumpkins had slid down the sides of the walls. Burial details were trying to hack out graves in the rocky soil. Soldiers hung on the split-rail fences, killed on their way over the top and now frozen in gestures that varied in profundity. Face to the sky, head in the arms, one finger pointing, hands together as if in prayer, knees buckled, legs twisted, legs straight. A prankster had put a biscuit in a Yankee’s open mouth. As the sisters watched, a Rebel soldier pulled it out and ate it.

They wandered in the wrong direction, directed by a confused Confederate sitting beside a fence. When they passed a sunken road, Josephine couldn’t help but look at the piles of Rebel bodies that filled the road and stretched into the distance. Living men worked among the heap. One tried to use his rifle as a fulcrum to separate two corpses. She took Libby’s arm. “Don’t look,” she hissed in her ear, and pulled her along.

Outside the white church, some of the soldiers who had escaped injury sat near the building, chewing tobacco, counting their unspent cartridges and cleaning their weapons, seemingly unconcerned about the carnage around them. Inside, field surgeons worked quietly. Stretcher-bearers carried the wounded into the church, whose walls were pockmarked with grapeshot. Outside an open window, a pile of amputated limbs crushed the wild grass. An arm flew out the window, landed on top of the pile, and rolled toward the bottom until it caught on the curled fingers of a disembodied hand.

Two stretcher-bearers carried a litter out to the field. Libby hurried up to them and asked, “Did the Stonewall Brigade fight around here?”

They nodded.

“Thirty-Third Regiment?” she asked.

“Got some boys here from the Thirty-Third,” one said.

Libby tried to ask another question, but they were gone.

“I’ll go into the church and see what I can find out,” she told Josephine. She pointed to a field scattered with bodies and limestone rills. “You look over there.”

“No, let’s stay together.”

“We’ll never find Arden that way. There’s too much ground to cover.”

The sights in the church were worse than those on the battlefield. The doors had been taken off their hinges and laid across the pews to serve as operating tables. Blood-covered surgeons dressed wounds with cornhusks, sawed off limbs, and sewed wounds shut with hurried stitches. An exhausted-looking woman comforted a man who’d been shot in the thigh.

Libby tapped her shoulder.

“I need to find my husband,” she said when the woman met her eyes. “He’s in the Stonewall Brigade. Thirty-Third Regiment. D Company.”

“I’ve treated men from the Thirty-Third here,” the woman said. “That regiment took a lot of casualties.”

“Have you seen a soldier named Arden Tanner?”

“Oh, sweetheart. I forget their names as soon as they tell me.” She turned away and helped the man drink something out of a tin cup.

Libby walked among the pews, looking into the faces of the men. Some of them screamed, and some lay quietly under the spell of morphine.

She accidentally jostled the arm of a doctor.

“Get out of here!” he screamed.

Soldier by soldier, Josephine worked her way toward the West Woods, kneeling by bodies torn in pieces. Arms and legs gone, heads ripped off. One body was opened as though from a scalpel, the flesh and muscle laid back to expose the lungs and the heart. Josephine saw that the heart was still beating, and suddenly felt the ground rush up to meet her. She opened her eyes a few moments later, face-down in a patch of bloody grass. No one tried to help her. She stood up and kept going, determined not to faint again.

Throughout the afternoon, the odor of the dead grew more intense. She found a handkerchief caught up in the low branches of a locust tree and held the fabric over her nose to make breathing easier. The bodies of those who had died early in the battle had already begun to blacken and bloat, but the ones who had lingered into this day still had their natural features. Scattered among the older men were boys who looked too young for war, their adolescent beauty untroubled by beards or scars.

A man who had been shot in the chest stirred when she touched him.

“Emily, is that you?” he asked.

A bee landed on his sleeve. Josephine waved it away.

“Answer me, sweetheart.”

“Yes. It’s me,” she said, because he seemed to want this Emily so badly.

He smiled. “I knew you’d come. Emily, hold my hand.”

His palm was warm and callused.

“My sweet girl. Listen to me. There’s a hundred and fifty dollars in the bank. I want you to buy a good horse, not some old scrub pony . . .”

His voice trailed off, then he took a breath and began again.

“And don’t let that corn go bad. It’s getting time. Make the boys help you.”

“I will.”

“Stay away from that bull, you hear me? That bull’s crazy. I love you so much.”

Josephine hesitated.

“I love you, too.”

He held her hand tighter.

“Damned bull. Kiss me.”

The man’s lips were cracked. A rattle was growing in his throat. She looked around to see if anyone was watching. Smoke and gore had blinded the world.

She leaned over and kissed him. But he spoke no more. She withdrew and looked at him. He was dead.

To distract herself, Libby thought of her favorite scents as she knelt down and peered at face after face. Cinnamon. Lavender. Lemon rinds. Even the harsh scent of lye could have hollowed out a breathing place. Black powder covered the skin, and the lips were black from biting cartridges. She had always been squeamish about the sight of blood. Now she could find something to make her shriek every second step, and this gout of horror left her bewildered, each image colliding with the next one: every possible variety of shocking wound, every pose of a dead man, every body part that could be separated, every sad story. She had seen a boy, a flag-bearer not past eleven or twelve, his skin the color of milk, scattered freckles, a death wince that revealed a chipped tooth. Her senses began to shut down, the wounds no longer shouted out a story but retreated into pattern, more of an explanation for the stillness of a body or the blankness of an eye. Her body felt cold, her hands and feet numb. And the stories and the wounds dwindled down to nothing, to just the task: not Arden, not Arden, not Arden.

Libby dropped to her knees, trembling. The battlefield went silent, and all its characters retreated back as though swept away by a gust of wind. The dead man had Arden’s blond hair and high cheekbones, but his face was so black with gunpowder that Libby couldn’t be sure of his identity. She took a breath and searched his pockets, finding a pint bottle filled with brown liquid. She unscrewed the cap, poured the pungent contents of the bottle onto her handkerchief and washed his face, the skin clearing from the whiskey bath until she saw the pale features of a stranger. Her body slumped in relief.

The dead man’s eyes flew open, and he seized her wrist.

She gasped and tried to wrench herself free, but he tightened his grip, pulled her close, and pleaded,
“Write down my name!”

The Union soldiers had tried to enter the West Woods but had been met with withering gunfire from the Stonewall Brigade and had fallen in a line. From a bird’s-eye view, the position of their bodies suggested a tidiness of fate. The landscape, a testament to the limitations of shelter: dead men behind skinny trees or hunkered down behind outcroppings of limestone. It was late afternoon. An hour before, Josephine had left Libby searching at the edge of the woods and ventured alone farther within it. The birdsong had fallen from the trees, and the animals had vanished. All that remained were the fallen men. The dead had begun to bloat, and the wounded still waited for field surgeons, calling out in agony.

Josephine peered into face after face, beginning to believe that it was impossible to locate one particular soldier in such a large theater of chaos and death. But something caught her eye in the near distance, in the center of a circle of trees. A soldier lay on his back, his head resting on a log and his hat off to one side. She approached the man and dropped to one knee. She could not believe the good fortune, or the bad, of finding him after all these hours.

Arden.

He was still breathing, but he’d been shot in the lower belly; his intestines were pushing from the wound and covered with flies. She waved her hand frantically and the flies scattered.

He opened his eyes and studied her. “Josephine.” His voice held no familiarity for her. He could have been saying her name or simply three syllables in a row that sounded similar. There was no love in his voice, no hatred. His lips trembled as he struggled to speak. “What are you doing here?”

“Libby and I came to find you.”

“You are both mad,” he mumbled. “Did you put Libby up to this?”

“Of course not. She came by her own stubborn will.”

“Where is she?”

“Also in these woods somewhere.”

Josephine craned her neck, searching for Libby through the dim woods. “Libby!” she shouted. “He’s here! Come here, Libby!”

He touched her arm, stopping her.

“Wait.” He closed his eyes as a wave of agony swept through him. He coughed and a line of blood ran from his mouth.

“How do I look?”

The question caught her by surprise. He was a ghastly sight: the fresh line of blood moving in a trail away from the corner of his mouth, the crusted blood of his stomach wound, the flies, the profusion of intestines—his condition would cause even a man to faint with horror and would have made Josephine faint had she not already seen worse sights all afternoon.

She forced herself to look into his eyes, still blue and still—for the moment—sharp with light.

“Fine,” she said.

Libby thought she heard Josephine calling her.

“Josephine!” she called back, but got no answer. She had made it fifty yards into the woods and was standing near the dead body of a young Rebel she had already ascertained was not Arden. She sidestepped the corpse and began running in the direction of Josephine’s voice, confused as to how to proceed.

“Josephine!” she called. “Where are you? Answer me, Josephine.”

A terrible certainty had started up inside her. Some agonizing premonition that would not let go. She began to run deeper into the dim woods, past trees gouged with grapeshot, fallen branches, strewn haversacks, dead and dying men.

“Josephine! Josephine!”

She passed by a fallen soldier, and as she ran by, he grabbed her dress, halting her progress.

“Please, ma’am,” the soldier said. “May I have some water?”

With all her strength, she wrenched her skirt free of his desperate grasp and ran on, increasingly frantic, her stomach in knots and the woods crackling beneath her feet.

Finally, up ahead, she saw the clearing and her sister and the fallen man. She knew it was Arden before she reached them. Josephine said nothing as she leaned down and took his hand. His lips were parted, his blue eyes wide open, staring at the sky between the leaves of the oak trees.