Sisters of Shiloh (9 page)

“No, we didn’t,” Libby replied, her heart pounding. “You must be mistaken. I was in my tent all night.”

He gazed at her in a way that meant inner processes were sorting through his memory and testing it against her declaration. “I’m sorry,” he said at last. “I suppose it was someone else.” His shoelaces had come unlaced. He walked away without tying them.

“Thank goodness,” Josephine said. “He believed you.”

“No, he didn’t. He knows.”

“Why do you think so?”

“When he took my elbow, he cradled it lightly with two fingers and a thumb. One man doesn’t do that to another.”

Libby and Josephine played dominoes on the uneven ground as Floyd practiced his rhythms. Libby’s nervousness over the encounter with Private Abraham had left her preoccupied; she had just tried to join a two-dotted domino with a one-dotted one. Josephine pointed at the violation and Libby tried again.

A bugle sounded and Floyd stopped drumming.

“What’s that, Floyd?” Libby asked.

Floyd listened for a moment. His face darkened. He set his drum aside and said, “I was hoping it wouldn’t come to this.”

Josephine stood between Libby and Wesley. She had no idea why she’d been summoned here, to join the entire division in a three-sided formation; it was just another part of the army life she didn’t understand and would have to learn. Twelve soldiers marched into the center of the waiting men. An officer barked an order, and they stretched out in a line and came to attention. Several minutes passed, but the men remained motionless. An oak leaf, prematurely yellow, blew into the scene and skittered across the line, landing in succession on a boot, a hat, and the barrel of a gun. It tickled a man’s beard and then settled on his shoulder, balancing precariously. His hand shot up and seized the leaf, crumpling it and scattering the pieces to the wind.

A horse-drawn wagon came into sight and creaked toward the twelve men. A prisoner sat on the back of the wagon on a wooden coffin, his hands tied behind his back and his body shifting to keep its balance. He wore a white shirt, a butternut jacket, a pair of ragged gray trousers, and was barefoot.

The wagon stopped, and the man sat looking at the twelve men. The horses were more animated than the prisoner, betraying their nervousness with little snorts, their eyes big and troubled. The drivers of the wagon helped the man down, then slid the coffin out and set it down beside him. They propped open the lid and gestured for him to sit on the edge of the coffin. He obeyed after a slight hesitation. The drivers seemed relieved that their job was done. They climbed back onto their seats and shook the reins, and the wagon departed, leaving the man alone in the silence. Someone who saw his face out of context might assume him to be suffering the pains of an ordinary soldier on an ordinary day: the desire for a drink, the absence of a letter from home, the itch of a new chigger bite near the crease of the knee.

Another officer came forward to tie the blindfold. Thrice it came undone and fell away from his face, revealing by the third time an expression that had lost all its composure. Finally the handkerchief stayed in place. The provost marshal read from a piece of paper.

“Corporal Thaddeus Grant has been found guilty of desertion from B Company of the Twenty-Seventh Regiment and, by the penalties prescribed by the Confederate States of America, has been sentenced to death. A pardon request has been denied by President Jefferson Davis, and the punishment is to be carried out immediately.”

A chaplain stepped forward and read a passage from the Bible, then spoke to the prisoner in a low voice. The prisoner ignored him, and the chaplain stepped away.

Josephine couldn’t swallow. The wind shifted, carrying the odor of corn bread from the mess wagon and evoking a sudden memory of the freewoman cook of their childhood, stirring batter with a spoon.

The men on the firing squad looked frightened. Some of them moved their lips as if in prayer. The condemned man was shaking his head now. He almost fell back into the coffin before he caught his balance. Josephine watched his chest, imagining his beating heart. She felt an elbow in her side. Wesley nodded in the direction of the meadow. A horse and rider had appeared in the distance, the horse quite ordinary but the figure astride it unmistakable.

Stonewall Jackson.

Stripped of the clamor that usually greeted the sight of him, he seemed terrifying now. Had she touched his boot, her hand would blister. He was an angry king, his heart a crypt of dwindling mercies; he had ordered this execution. His was the bloodthirsty word.

An officer shouted an order. The firing squad brought their muskets to their shoulders.

“Aim! Fire!”

Josephine flinched at the deafening roar of the muskets. Her breath caught in her throat. The man on the coffin stiffened but did not fall.

“Oh God,” Libby murmured. “They missed him.”

Six scarlet patches appeared on his chest. He shivered as the wounds strained through the texture of his shirt.

He fell backward, and the men around the coffin slammed it shut, not even bothering to arrange his body into a pose, so that even his skeleton would speak of his shame.

Stonewall Jackson disappeared into the distance.

Josephine chased Libby through camp, pleading, “Come back! Come back!”

First the younger sister and then the elder one trampled a dead campfire and left black footprints across a poncho spread out on the ground for a game of chuck-a-luck.

Josephine was losing her breath.

“Wait! Wait!” She was too exhausted from running to hold her voice down in the manly register, and her words broke free into a girlish and desperate pitch. Libby plunged into the meadow and headed for the woods. Josephine drew in close, her breathing labored. Libby finally stopped and turned around.

“They killed him,” Libby said, crying. “They killed him.”

Josephine was so out of breath, she had to wait several moments before she could reply. “Just put it out of your mind. We’re here now, and we need to be strong.”

They heard footsteps in the meadow and turned to look.

Private Abraham marched alone, his gun resting on his shoulder, his feet moving in a perfect parade march. He went right past them without seeming to notice them at all. He reached the woods and disappeared in the shadows of the trees.

They both heard the gunshot at once.

They stared at each other, wide-eyed, then rushed into the woods. They found private Abraham sitting with his back against a poplar tree whose branches still shook. He cradled his musket in his arms, his legs straightening as his feet slid forward. A powder burn circled the wound under his chin. His lap was turning red. A bullet flattened by the top of his skull had entered the poplar at an angle; an insect with orange wings investigated the new hole.

Libby’s deceit kept Arden near. His gestures and expressions—his voice, his walk, his laugh, his way of holding a fork, and his position of rest—were practiced and perfected. Kept alive that way. She felt protected from discovery, and not just because of her growing skills in her role as a man. Arden was with her, so close that it was hard, sometimes, to understand where she ended and he began. He grew more substantial as the days went by. Flashes of him came to her. Slivers of conversation, a quick, apple-size burst of laughter that seemed to drop from a tree. The sight of his wedding ring on his finger. A bruise on an arm, a lizard crawling down his shoulder.

Glimpses, fragments, pangs. At times she could almost believe that the afterlife and the present tense could merge on earth and heal the lonely. Not often but enough, like the equinox and its perfect balance of sun and moon. See a lightning bug flash in a frosted month, and you can believe that miracles exist on a human level too. She had dreams that she reached him on the battlefield, and he was still alive. Looking at her. Whispering, “Thank God, you’re here. Help me, help me.”

The dust descended, flying into noses and mouths, coating faces and boots and brass buttons. It penetrated the eyes and mixed with the sweat on the faces of the stragglers who trudged toward the camp. Men trained inside grayish clouds, responding to the choked commands of the lieutenant. When Wesley played his guitar around the fire, the dust settled on the veneer and gathered in the letters of his name, which his brother had carved into the wood.

An Indian summer had suddenly arrived, bringing the kind of weather that tempts soldiers to throw away their blankets and trench coats and then kick themselves later, in the dead of winter. Lice proliferated. The men stripped off their shirts and held them over a hickory fire, evoking memories of popping corn.

“Have a go at it,” Floyd told the sisters. “Afterward, you can wear your shirt for a few hours before they crawl on you again. You’re not shy, are you? If I can show off my sunken chest, then you can. All right, then, suit yourselves.”

Josephine lay awake, scratching, more vexed by lice than the thought of battle, for the fighting seemed far away and the lice were right here among them, creeping through the grass, falling from the trees, moving through the buttonholes of trousers.

Pests and dust clouds weren’t the only concerns. One of the men in F Company developed lesions on the back of his hand. The surgeon’s diagnosis quickly permeated the ranks.

Variola.

Also known as smallpox. The soldier was quarantined from the rest of the division. A nervous volunteer left his rations a short distance from his tent, and no one could get past the guards to visit him, should they care to. Those soldiers denied furloughs from the smallpox threat blamed the quarantined man and threw rocks at his tent poles.

The surgeon ordered precautions. Few needles were available, so the soldiers passed around scabs peeled by the doctors from the soldier’s hand, inoculating each other with the tips of their knives. Josephine’s arm hurt when she saluted her lieutenant.

Strange cravings came to Josephine at odd times of day for peppermint and marjoram, lemonade and hot chocolate. All the treats of both hot and cold weather mixed together. In her mind, she ate watermelon and washed it down with hot cider. She missed the smell of her own skin, once made sweet by a clam-shaped bar of soap that had dwindled all summer. The wrinkles of her uniform were filled with dust. And her oversize trousers rubbed a rash the size of a grapefruit on both of her thighs.

A mannish odor crept inside her clothes at night and stayed. Her voice learned its lower register. Her fingers and hips lost their grace. And whatever thready charms she had were no longer required of her. They were only in the way, as heavy blankets were on a summer march. She had longed, all her life, to be noticed by a man. Now she had to actively plot, sweat, fight against it. Drill her invisibility into herself.

She felt terribly guilty about abandoning her parents. Although the note they’d left had briefly satisfied her, she knew that her parents must be desperate to receive further word from them. And yet she could not write them. What could she say? That they were not working in a hospital—worrisome enough, considering the diseases rampant in such places—but actually on the field of battle? She had terrible dreams about her mother and father, walking through the aftermath of a battle, among the dead and wounded, looking for their lost daughters.

She hid her tribulations from Libby, whose dreams had begun to worry her. Libby moaned in her sleep, perspired, and called out Arden’s name. Josephine couldn’t shake the feeling he was materializing somehow.

Which one of them had he come back to haunt?

On those days when Libby was caught up in herself, Josephine talked to Wesley Abeline. His easy laughter reminded her of the wounded Yankee soldier back in Winchester who had finally died in her house, and whose empty grave she imagined filling with water every time it rained, reflecting the birds in the sky.

Wesley’s older brother, Lewis, had broken Wesley’s arm once. Or so it was rumored. No one knew why, and no one wanted to ask. The story seemed strange to Josephine, since Lewis shadowed him constantly, attending to his every need. It was just another mystery in a war full of them.

One day, feeling lonely, she looked for Wesley and found him by a dead campfire, tuning his guitar. His sleeves were rolled up, his expression calm. He looked up at her and nodded.

“How are you doing, Joseph?”

Josephine hated her false name. Despised the way it pounded into her who she was now, stomping the name
Josephine
into the dirt like glowing ashes under the heel of a boot.

“I’m bored,” she said in the lower voice she had begun to use without trying. She hated the voice, too, and wondered if her real voice would come back healthy after the war, or wounded, or dead.

“Well, that’s the army, my friend,” Wesley said. “Bored, bored, screaming, bored, bored, dead, bored forever.”

“What is it like?”

“What is what like?”

“Battle.”

He didn’t speak for a few moments, instead twisting one of the pegs until a string told the truth and then going on to the next one. Finally he strummed twice and looked at her.

“It’s the worst thing you can think of. It’s terrible shooting a man. It’s terrible being shot at. It’s terrible watching your friends die, watching horses die. You crawl through blood. You can hear the bullets whistle, Joseph. You can hear them hitting people. And the screaming. The sound of a man screaming right in your ear. What’s it all for?”

“Don’t you want to beat the Yankees?”

“I don’t want to beat no one. I want to go home.”

She glanced at the bump in his arm where the skin was stretched over a crest of badly knit bone. Yet the bump looked soft, as though capable of flattening out under her fingers. Maybe he would escape from the war bearing that bump as his only injury. She wanted to ask him what had possessed Lewis to hit him, but her intuition told her to keep quiet.

Wesley followed her gaze and blushed. He stopped plucking at the strings and rolled his sleeves back down.

“Where’s your cousin?” he asked.