Sisters of Shiloh (5 page)

“Arden,” Libby whispered.

“I’m sorry,” Josephine said. Libby looked at her while her words sank in, noting, as though from a great, fuzzy distance, a fresh scrape on Josephine’s cheek.

Libby returned her gaze to Arden, unable to believe the sight before her.

She ran her fingers through his hair, leaning down to kiss his face, his forehead and cheeks and brow. “Josephine, did he say anything?”

“Nothing.” Her older sister’s voice sounded strange, disembodied. As though this all was a dream from which only the trees would awaken.

Libby stroked her dead husband’s face. “But his body is still warm.” She touched the blood on the side of his mouth and showed Josephine her fingertips. “And, look, his blood is fresh!”

“I’m sorry,” said Josephine. “He was dead when I found him.”

Libby stuck her shovel into the earth, bending her knees to lift the load. The night was warm for September, and perspiration had soaked through her clothes. Josephine hovered a few feet away, pleading for her to please come back in the house. She had tried to stop her, making a lunge at the shovel handle, but Libby had roughly pushed her away, and she had retreated to the edge of the yard but continued to call to her.

“Libby, leave that Yankee’s grave alone! What good will this do? Please stop! I’m begging you!”

Libby ignored her. A breeze moved through the orchard, and two ripe apples fell in unison. Stars of different variants shared the sky, some so bright as to hurt the eyes, others unremarkable.

Libby hadn’t been able to bring Arden’s body home. Anyone with a wagon who lived within a ten-mile radius had already been bribed. Near the Sunken Road, a Parrott shell had hit an apiary, and the riled-up bees had poured out onto the battlefield. Libby had seen the aftermath, all those furious bees, and imagined herself as one of them, her anger never dissipating into the love of nectar or flight. This was an anger that stayed, a buzzing restless heat. Libby lifted the shovel again, the motion causing a deep pain in her chest. The dirt flew over the top of the pile and landed in a patch of wild bergamot that grew by the split-rail fence. The grave was thigh-deep now. Three feet down, her shovel hit cloth. She dropped to her knees and scooped out the dirt with her bare hands as the form of a body took shape.

Libby’s father and brother had been watching her work through the back window of the house. Neither could sleep and so they stood there together, Stephen appropriating a regal posture and Dr. Beale re-cocking his arthritic hip each time it stiffened.

“You should sleep, son.”

“It’s too hot.”

Dirt flew out of the grave in all directions. Finally Libby climbed out, holding on to a piece of winding-sheet and trying to tug the body after her.

“Stephen,” said Dr. Beale, “you told me you buried that Yankee deep.”

“I got tired.”

Out in the yard, the winding-sheet had torn. Libby held a piece of it in her hand.

“What do you suppose she’s going to do with him?” Dr. Beale asked.

“I don’t know. Probably drag him to Julia Caldwell’s yard.”

Dr. Beale sighed. “Well, she can’t pull that man out of the grave by herself. Go help her.”

“
Help
her? You’re not going to try to stop her?”

“You tell me, Stephen, why you think I can stop anything.”

Arden’s family held a memorial service for him in their back garden, under a lemon tree whose branches were empty. A row of cross vines bloomed orange along the back fence, bright and scentless like a sudden memory. The neighbors had brought over ginger cakes and cursed the war by shaking their heads. And the preacher from the First Baptist church, whose sanctuarial grounds were torn up with new graves, showed up with his Bible and tried his best. But his clothes were worn; his toes showed from the end of his shoes; his hair needed cutting.

To Libby, who said not a word but stood silently among the mourners, the preacher seemed much more suited to be a supplicant of God than a diplomat of His word, and the sight of him—Bible propped open under the light of early fall, eyes squinting through unbalanced spectacles—made her ache inside all the more, seeing in him a boy, a child, innocent in the world, vulnerable to the very things against which he claimed protection. She didn’t cry. The very thought of it terrified her, as the thought of an impending labor terrifies a narrow-hipped woman. She was still so full of rage that the night before she had contemplated sneaking into town and burning down the medical building where John Brown’s body was rumored to have been kept. But along with the rage now was an ever-growing exhaustion. She found herself nodding off and then jerking back to consciousness. And in those moments of quickly snatched sleep, she remembered him and he was real to her as though he were still alive: scent of the body, feeling of fabric, texture of oiled hair, shape of muscle under flesh, warmth of neck, roughness of a scrape on his arm. His lips touching hers in the dimness of their room. The urgency of his voice in her ear,
We will win this war, Libby, and we will have many children . . .

By the end of the service, she was almost too exhausted to stand. She went to her room, crawled into her bed, and stayed there. Her sister knocked on the door. Her plaintive voice came through the wood. “You have to eat. At least drink some beef broth.”

Josephine wouldn’t give up. She kept knocking.

Libby ignored the sound. A suspicion nagged her grief without explanation, like a pull in the fabric of a black coat. She was sure Josephine was keeping something from her.

Meanwhile, her older sister was growing frantic, recognizing that Libby was showing some of the symptoms she’d had when she nearly died years before, though she knew this time it wasn’t blackwater fever: the refusal to eat, the torpor and the sleeping, the lifeless voice and dull eyes.

“Please, Mother,” Josephine said, “don’t let her die.”

“She’s not going to die,” Violet assured her, as she applied witch hazel on a cotton ball to the slightly infected scrape on Josephine’s cheek. “She’s not the only one to lose someone in the war. Mrs. Fenley lost two sons on the same day.”

But late at night, from her bedroom, the sound of the more worried and fragile woman Violet let herself be in the presence of her husband floated up through the gravity vent.

“This is not just grieving, William. This is something darker. I fear our daughter is going mad.”

“Allow a few more days. Perhaps she will recover.”

“I don’t know what to do.”

“She’s a strong woman.”

“No, Libby is fragile. Not of body, but of mind. Even when she was a small child, I worried about how she took things to heart.”

After a week passed, Mrs. Beale made Libby get out of bed and took her to volunteer to help with the injured soldiers at the Taylor Hotel. Dr. Beale and Josephine argued that it was too soon, but Violet was adamant.

“She is not getting better. She can’t just languish away. She has to be strong. And taking care of others will keep her mind off her own troubles.”

“I’ll go with her,” said Josephine.

“No, we need you here. Let her do this alone.”

Winchester had no shortage of men that September. The Confederate army had abandoned its bold plan to invade the North after the carnage at Sharpsburg and slipped back across the river into Virginia a few days later. Stragglers lined the streets and glutted the parlors of houses, distinguished by their sunburned skin, tattered clothes, wounds and lesions. They looked surprised. They had thought for sure they were going to whip those Yankees. Somehow they had not, nor had they died in battle and gone to their glory. Instead they became men they had never dreamed of being—shot and stabbed and broken and missing limbs, tormented by dysentery and rising fevers.

Yankees and chiggers and fate. They had lost to everything. Those who weren’t bedridden moped around outside, no longer waiting for battle but news of one. They lounged outside the Taylor Hotel, which had been converted into a hospital, playing dominoes and whittling or staring into space, their vacant eyes matching those of the newest volunteer, Libby Tanner, who washed the floors and fetched bandages and cleaned instruments and barely spoke at all, dutiful, gentle—and, deep inside, somewhere else entirely.

Libby was soaking some instruments in a zinc tub, the water turning pink as flakes of clotted blood floated lazily to the surface, when she heard about the boy. She dried a Nélaton probe and listened as two volunteer nurses stood talking nearby. She had been here a few days and done a passable job, though sometimes, lost in dreamy grief, she had to be told twice to change a bed linen or fetch a curette. But at this very moment, she found herself quite alert and listening intently.

“Impossible,” one of them was saying. “How could they not know? The boy is twelve!”

“I suppose they didn’t care. He could hold a rifle, couldn’t he? That’s all that matters.”

“Will he live?”

“Probably. But his right arm is gone below the elbow.”

Libby listened as they continued to talk, so wrapped up in the conversation that the newly polished probe slid out of her loosened grip and dropped back into the water.

Due to his tender age, the boy had been taken from the main hall with its rows and rows of cots and sequestered in room 24 upstairs.

“But surely the doctors would have noticed how young he was during the medical exam?” one of the nurses asked.

The other one snorted. “I’ve assisted with those exams. They barely take their pulse.”

Libby didn’t know quite what plan or idea was forming within her. She opened the door to room 24 very quietly and found him propped up on pillows. His hair was dark and cut above the ears. His eyes were closed, his face pale and delicately featured. Libby eased up closer to him, listening to his shallow breaths, studying his face, and then taking in the bandages that covered the stump of his arm.

His eyes flew open. “What do you want?”

Libby thought fast. “I’m here to change your bandages.”

“Bullshit. They were just changed. Leave me alone.”

Libby sucked in her breath. She had never heard someone that young use that word, and with such defiance.

“Now, get out, get out!”

Cowed by the anger in the boy’s voice, Libby was turning to go when he suddenly closed his eyes tight and let out a fierce groan, his body stiffening under the sheet.

Libby turned, moved closer again. “What’s the matter?”

“What’s the matter?” He groaned again. More tears slid from his eyes, which were still tightly closed. The knuckles on his remaining fist stood out white. “My goddamn arm hurts, that’s what’s the matter. It feels like it is still there. I can feel my wrist, my hand, my fingertips. Oh my God, I can’t stand the pain.”

“I’ll get the nurse,” Libby said, and rushed from the room. She summoned the first nurse she saw and, half an hour later, tiptoed up the stairs again and entered the room, where the boy now sat complacently, lids half-open. He gave Libby a sleepy, satisfied laudanum smile.

Libby sat on the edge of his cot.

“How did they possibly let you join the army?” she asked. “You are obviously younger than the official requirement.”

He shook his head. “They didn’t care. They need men, and a boy is close enough. They asked how old I was. I said eighteen.”

“But didn’t a doctor examine you?”

“He looked in my eyes and listened to my heart. He checked to make sure I had two front teeth so I could bite a cartridge. Then he said, ‘Welcome to the Army of Northern Virginia.’”

“So they’ll accept anyone?”

“They don’t ask no questions, ma’am.”

His voice had a certain dreamy politeness now. Gone were the swearing and the defiance. The laudanum he’d been given had taken effect.

Libby was fascinated. She desperately hoped they would not be interrupted. “But why did you join up?”

The boy’s eyes focused slightly. “They killed my brother.”

“Who?”

“The Yankees, that’s who.” His words were slurred but full of slow venom. “I loved my brother more than anything in the world. So I decided I would join the Rebels and kill eighteen Yankees, one for every year of his life.”

“How many did you kill?”

He smiled, held up his remaining hand, showed her his five fingers. Slowly he curled them back down, then raised five more, then two.

“Twelve?”

“Kept count on a hickory stick. One notch for each Yank. Kept the stick in my haversack. Don’t know what happened to it.”

“And did you feel bad, killing men? Do you have regrets?”

“Oh, yes.” He nodded slowly. “I regret that I only killed twelve before I was shot. I don’t remember being hit. I woke up in the field hospital. They were sawing off my arm without no morphine.”

The door opened behind Libby and she jumped.

A nurse entered, carrying a tray with a dark bottle on it. Her white apron bore spatters of blood. She shot Libby a severe look. “What are you doing here?”

“The boy needed his bandage changed.”

“No, he did not. And you need to go.”

The boy looked at Libby, his saucer eyes calm. “It was nice meeting you, ma’am,” he said, and raised the stump of his arm to offer her an invisible hand, and so persuasive was his utter belief that Libby almost took it.

As she headed down the hallway, the words of the wounded boy came back to Libby:
They don’t ask no questions.
Before she reached the bottom of the stairs, her outrageous plan was perfectly formed. It was mad, to be sure. But how mad was the war? How mad was the North’s plan to take away the rights of the South? How mad was finding her husband still warm on a battlefield with his intestines spilling out when he was meant to come home alive?

Her new purpose drew the scattered parts of who she was back together. Someone watching her this past week would have seen a pale, thinning woman, barely substantial, like the ghosts all survivors become. Only the tangling of her hair animated her. Her quirks, her vagaries, blazes of temper, rock-hard loyalties, little hidden details of the self, were no longer attached to someone who found them endearing; they simply existed, grasping at something the way pine needles cling to a roof. But here, suddenly, she was whole again, consisting not of gauze or the misty fiber of a cloud, but pure granite. The perfect plan had dropped in her lap, something to marry her anger, her grief, and her love.