The Last Full Measure (14 page)

"At least four hundred Confederate soldiers," he said. "And guess who's got the honor of guarding them? Colonel R. B. Price's Second Pennsylvania Cavalry. We're commissioned to guard the field, all the prisoners, wounded or not, and stragglers, with one hundred infantrymen to assist us."

I stared at him. "You'll be near home then, Brandon. Mama will be so happy."

"Yeah. That's one good thing about it," he said.

He left shortly afterward. "If Ma was home my visit would be longer," he explained, "but now I'm going over to the church to see her."

He went upstairs to his old room, to look around, I supposed. He came down with some books for himself and Joel. Then he went to the barn for his horse.

When he came back I had some cookies and biscuits and slices of ham and cheese wrapped up for him and Joel.

He put on his sword and coat and hat, hugged and kissed me. I went outside with him.

He mounted his horse. "Orders," he said, "from your commanding officer: Don't grow up too much more. Not yet. I may still want to sit you on my lap."

His horse was anxious to go, but he held the reins taut. He made a fine figure, looking down at me steadily, as if he wanted to imprint something on his brain. And then he winked at me, raised his hat, and was gone.

I stood there alone, feeling as if some spark had gone out of my life. I'd forgotten how wonderful life could be with my eldest brother, Brandon, around, how he always made everything all right. We never argued, never fought. To do such would be unthinkable.

If I did something that displeased him, he'd say something in a kindly, joking way, and you didn't realize until after he had said it that he'd admonished you in such a way that you were bleeding inside where your heart was supposed to be.

And it wasn't because he had hurt you; it was because you had hurt him by whatever you had done. And all you wanted was to be forgiven.

But now he was gone and the world had turned cold on this hot July day. And it was as if he had never come.

I
T SEEMED THAT
by that afternoon there were more people in town than ever before. The
Adams Sentinel
, which had started publishing again and which Mama brought home with her, said the town had twenty-one thousand wounded from both sides and not enough surgeons or nurses or volunteers.

"All kinds of people are coming into town to help," Mama said, "by wagon, by rail, any which way they can. All kinds of people. Not to mention the relatives of the wounded. And there's no lodging for them."

She stood there in the kitchen, sipping coffee I had ready for her. I also had a chicken roasting in the oven. It was the least I could do. She was exhausted but happy. She'd seen Brandon.

"Oh, he looked wonderful," she'd told David, glowing. "Oh, I thank God he and Joel are alive!"

Now she'd made a decision and she wanted advice about it. "David, what do you think about us giving lodging to some needy people? There are people coming to town who have no place to stay."

"No," David said without even thinking about it.

"But David," she protested. "We have such a lovely home!"

"Ma." He was weary, too. He'd been volunteering all day with the Sanitary Commission. Now he was delivering supplies to the army field hospital and, at the same time, casting an eye out for Pa. He still hadn't come across him.

"Ma," he said, "I may be asked to bring a wounded case into our house. I'd rather do that if it's all the same with you. And anyway, we don't know what all is going to happen in the next few days, do we? Let's wait and see."

"All right," Mama agreed. She always minded what David sa id.

***

W
HAT DID HAPPEN
later that day was that Marvelous came back to us. Her mama had gone home for a spell, she told us. Just for a spell, to see if the house they'd been living in was still standing. It was the tenant house on the Crawford Farm, but a battle had taken place on the site and the house had been used as a Confederate aid station.

"My daddy gettin' together a whole lotta men," Marvelous told us proudly, "an' with his two-horse team an' wagon he been hired to bring coffins to the battleground where the dead bodies be. He can haul nine filled coffins at a time. Mr. Warren, he only gots a one-horse team. An' he can haul only six coffins at a time!"

"Marvelous!" Mama was horrified. "Don't speak of such things now. We're glad to have you back, child, but little girls should not speak of such matters."

David, who had fetched Marvelous from the church, disagreed. "Ma," he told her, "there are no little girls left in Gettysburg anymore."

Within less than an hour, Pa came home.

***

M
ARVELOUS AND I
had been sent to bed. I had two single beds in my room, and when she stayed with us Marvelous slept in the other one.

She was already sleeping, but I was not, when Pa came in. I heard his voice, jumped out of bed immediately, put on my robe, and ran downstairs.

He stood in the hall, kissing Mama, his valise on the floor next to him. I stood on the bottom step, hushing Cassie, who sat trembling next to me.

I waited while they embraced. Then David shook hands and answered some questions, and Pa hugged Josie and looked around. "Where's my little girl?" he asked.

I ran to him, into his arms. Mama had taken his coat and I nuzzled my face close to his shirtfront. Seeing this, Cassie came wriggling over on her stomach, wagging her tail.

I started to cry on Pa's shirt front, unashamed of my tears. "Oh, Pa." It was all I could say. What else was there to say? And then, of a sudden, I could not stop crying.

"Come on, Tacy—what kind of a welcome is that?" David was saying in the background.

But Pa did not care. He took me by the arm over to the couch in the parlor, sat down, and held me in his lap, close to him, and let me cry. He kissed my forehead, wiped away my tears, and then finally I
was
ashamed of myself. I sat up and smiled at him.

"I don't mean to be such a baby, Pa," I said. "I'm not a baby anymore. Really, I'm not." I slipped off his lap and clung to his hand for a moment.

He smiled up at me and I saw wrinkles around his eyes that I'd never taken mind of before. Lines around his mouth.
He looks like Brandon will look someday
, I told myself.
Yes. Why did I never notice before how much Brandon resembles him?

"You can always be my baby, Tacy," he said. Then he took the drink David offered him, sipped it slowly, and began to tell us where he'd been for the last few days.

"On Culp's Hill," he said. And for some reason he did not look at us when he said it. He looked instead into the glass of amber liquid, as if that was the only place he could bear to look while speaking of what he had to tell us.

"Before that I was in a field hospital a little outside town, near a battlefield. A hospital made of tents, near some barns. I worked there during the battle. Then, after it was over, I heard a rumor that my boys had fought on Culp's Hill. I suspected it was false, but I had to go and see for myself. I thought, suppose they were and they're wounded? I was so tired by then that anything seemed possible."

He paused, took a sip of the drink, and went on. "So I went up there. Well, once you entered the woods, you right off got feelings of gloom and felt that you should turn around and go back, because if you didn't, you'd never be the same.

"But I went on. First thing I saw was a corpse, and next to it a torn and bloody pocket Bible. Everywhere I looked there were torn-apart bodies, and personal belongings. Letters, photos, shoes, blankets, haversacks with their contents spilled about. Bodies piled up all over the place.

"And the people who were not dead were walking around looking for relatives, looking like ghosts themselves in the mists. There were some soldiers who'd been sent up there to bury the dead. But they had to identify them first. Then dig the grave and leave a marker telling who they were."

Pa fell silent, shaking his head. "I stayed and helped them. For two days. In my haversack there, I have, in my
Physician's Handbook
, the names of those we buried and the location. We buried many of them by the breastwork built by the Twelfth Corps. But then I took sick. The sun was so hot and I had naught to eat, and I figured I'd best come home before they had to bury me."

He set his empty glass down and rubbed his eyes.

"Come to the table," Mama said softly. "Josie's got some good food. Then you should go to bed. You need rest. You're exhausted, Brandon."

David helped him in to the kitchen. I was allowed to stay up and sit quietly at the table, too. But there, mostly we talked of things that had happened at home in his absence. He devoured his food. And then David helped him up the stairs and into bed.

Pa slept past noon the next day. And when he woke he was still weak and what Mama called only middling well. He wrote a note, which David delivered on horseback to the field hospital where he worked.

***

D
AVID RETURNED
with a note from a Dr. Robert Schell, who was a lieutenant colonel and head of the tent hospital, saying that Pa was suffering from extreme exhaustion and ordering him to stay in bed for at least a week.

Pa slept, on and off, for most of the week. When he wasn't sleeping, he was talking about going back, about how they needed him.

John Will, proprietor of the Globe Inn, came to call. Pa had once brought his son John through a fearful bout of pneumonia.

We sat and listened while John Will told Pa how people were being arrested for collecting lead bullets and unexploded shells from the battlefields. "Young boys," he said, "have learned that ammunition manufacturers are paying thirteen cents a pound for lead bullets, and so they're on the fields scavenging."

"It's so hot," he told us, "that the provost marshal issued an order prohibiting the exhuming of graves on the field. People!" And he looked at me and David. "Do you believe that people are already coming to dig up the graves of soldiers just buried?"

"I'd believe anything," David said.

"Well, no more, son. It's against the law now!"

***

B
Y THE MIDDLE
of the week Pa came down with a fever. He did not want to eat, so Mama tried feeding him special foods, and she sent me about town with David to try to find the makings of it. To special places like Dr. Robert Horner's house, which was a mini-depot, where relief goods went for the Second Corps hospital. Dr. Horner had worked with Pa at the tent hospital outside town. When he heard of Pa's illness he sent around a note inviting us to go to his house on Baltimore Street Hill for beef tea and wine. So we went there, and to the confectioner's store for the sugar and lemons Mama needed for her special recipes.

By the end of the week Pa was in delirium, and David took another trip to the field tent hospital for a remedy from Dr. Schell.

While David was gone, Pa was raving about the dead on Culp's Hill and how he needed to get back there to help bury them. And put the names in his book.

In his ravings he was talking to David. "We've got to go, David," he said. "I can do it, if you'll help me. You'll help me, won't you, David? Won't you?"

He was saying such when David came into his and Mama's room with the medicine.

"What does he want me to do?" David asked Mama. She'd been sitting there the whole time, holding Pa's hand, and when she wasn't doing that, setting cold cloths on his brow.

"Nothing," she told David. "Nothing to worry about. Just help me get this medicine in his mouth and settle him down."

I left the room as they did so. I waited out in the hall for David to come out.

W
HEN DAVID
came into the hall and saw me there waiting, he gestured with his head that I should follow him downstairs. And when I did, he asked me in the parlor, "What does Pa want me to do, Tacy?"

"I'll tell you," I said, "if you'll make me a promise."

"Don't play games with me, Tacy. This isn't the time for games."

I had done some quick thinking while waiting out in the hall upstairs for my brother to come out of Mama and Pa's room. And I knew what I wanted. Furthermore, I knew I had half a chance of getting it from David, who was, at this moment, glaring at me.

"Tell me right now what Pa wants from me."

I wanted to do for Pa. I saw no reason why David and I could not go up to Culp's Hill and do the job that he had been doing. David could bury the bodies and I could make note of them in Pa's
Physicians Handbook
.

Why not? It would help Pa, make him feel better, and it would help us.

Somewhere along the way I had decided that while Pa was suffering from fever and delirium, all along David and I were suffering from a disease, too, only there was no medicine for it.

We were both suffering from guilt. About Jennie. And about having done nothing for the war effort. Hadn't David been just about killing himself these last few days trying to make up for not going for a soldier? And I? What had I done? Marvelous had done more.

"Tacy!"

"What?"

"Tell me what Pa wants from me. Now. No more shilly-shallying."

His tone brooked no argument. After a tone like this, David took action.

"He wants to go up to Culp's Hill to bury the dead. And he wants you to go along and help him."

David scowled, thinking, and nodded his head. "When?"

"Now. Soon as possible."

More scowling. "He can't go. Be a long time before he can do anything that strenuous."

"I know, David."

"What else did he say? Anything else?"

I nodded, inventing my lie as I went along, thinking that this was all too good to be true. "He said that it would take two to do the burying job, you and him. And one more to record the name and location of burial in his
Physican's Handbook
. And that should be me."

Now he
really
scowled.

"You!"

"Yes, David, that's what he said. Me. He said I could be trusted to write the names in his book. That he didn't want anybody outside the family writing in it. You know how he feels about that book, David."