The Last Full Measure (17 page)

Brandon thanked him and we went on our way.

I wanted to ride Ramrod home, but Brandon said no. "You're not strong enough," he said. "You just hold on tight to me."

So he tethered Ramrod to his own horse and David's horse to Joel's.

I gave him no mouth.

I
SHIVERED AND
cried on the way home, unable to believe what all had happened. I leaned my head on Brandon's back. Joel was ahead of us, and I could hear Ramrod's hoofbeats and her snorting behind. I clung to my brother because he was the only real thing in the world right now.

"What are we going to tell Mama and Josie and Pa?" I sobbed out at one point.

"Don't worry about it," he said. "Joel and I will handle it."

"It's my fault, all my fault. I encouraged him to go up there and finish Pa's work."

"I don't want to hear that out of you
ever
again, Tacy."

Brandon's voice was as stern and severe as it had ever been with me. It stunned me into silence. I'd forgotten he was a captain in the cavalry and could summon forth a voice like that. But I did not know how to respond. And when I did not, he asked, more softly, "Did you hear me?"

"Yes, Brandon." I hiccupped. "I hear."

He reached a hand down and touched mine where it held his waist. He said nothing, but for a moment he covered my hand with his own, gently, and we went on in silence. I was crying more now, silently, and was glad he could not see.

In time we were home. The boys went right to the barn, as if they had discussed things ahead of time. Brandon lifted me down from the horse and told me to stand right where I was. It was soon apparent to me that they did have a plan.

Joel untied David's body from his horse and set it on the floor. Then they took off the horses' tack and put the horses in the stalls. They fed and watered them, as if we had all night. I just stood and stared. Then, the tasks done, they looked at each other.

"Pa's surgery?" Joel asked.

Brandon nodded. "That'd be best. You got keys?"

"Always have 'em."

Brandon nodded again. "Don't disturb him too much. The authorities will want to see..." His voice trailed off.

"I understand. You going to tell them?"

"No. We'll all do it together. I'll wait for you. But we have a problem first."

"What?"

"Tacy here. Look at her. She's full of blood. All over her dress. We go in with her looking like this and Ma will faint dead away before we open our mouths."

Joel took off his hat and scratched his head. "Yeah." He mused a bit. "Only one thing to do. You two come in the surgery with me. You take her up the back stairs, while I'm laying David out, and get her changed. Then come back down, quiet-like, and we'll go in together."

It was agreed upon. I looked down at myself. I hadn't realized it, but the front of my dress was full of blood. David's blood. I started to shake all over again, seeing it.

Their plan worked fine. I supposed their plans always did. Brandon and I heard voices in the parlor—Pa's and Mama's and Josie's—as we crept up the back stairs from Pa's surgery. That was good. We wouldn't run into them upstairs.

I'd taken off my shoes and Brandon, his boots.

His cavalry boots went up over his knees. He carried them now. In my room he set them down on the floor, then went right to work.

"Take off the dress," he said.

I just stared at him.

"Oh, come on," he said. "Dammit, I bathed you when you were a baby."

"I'm not a baby anymore."

"Yeah, I know—you're all grown up." We were whispering, and he came over and unbuttoned the back of my dress and pulled it over my head. I stood there in my petticoat, the one I hadn't had to rip up, and my chemise, which showed the tops of my new bosoms. I was always so proud of them, yet now I was embarrassed. But Brandon paid no mind.

He went to my closet and pulled out a dress, a blue one. "Put this on."

I slipped it over my head. It, too, buttoned in back. He did the buttons for me.

"All right, let's get out of here and get this over with."

We crept back downstairs to Pa's surgery, where he put on his boots and I my shoes. Then we went out of there and around the house to the back door, the three of us. And, for some strange reason, maybe because we did not want to just walk in on them and announce out of the blue,
Here we are, we're back—and, oh yes, by the way, David is dead
, because of that, we knocked.

***

T
HE NEXT DAY
or so is a blur to me. I recollect that I fainted once. I do not recollect at what juncture it was. It could have been anytime between when we went in that back door and started telling Mama and Pa what had happened and the time we came back from David's funeral at the cemetery of Christ Lutheran Church.

But somehow now that it comes back to me I distinctly remember that it was before the funeral. It was when I was standing there between Brandon and Joel, telling Mama and Pa the whole story of how David had come to be shot. Josie had been put to bed with laudanum, in shock already. Pa had asked question after question of me, until we got to this. And it was then, when I was telling him what David had done to provoke the shooting, that I felt myself getting wobbly.

"Because he wouldn't dig up the body? That's why the man shot him?" Only Pa didn't say
man
. He said a cuss word.

I leaned against Brandon for support. It was all flashing in front of me again. "Yes, sir," I said. And I heard the shot again, echoing through the torn woods. I clutched Brandon's arm and looked up at him appealingly.

He glanced down at me, saw what he saw, and said, "Pa, I don't think she can bear any more."

Pa scowled. "Sit down," he told me.

I turned to go to the couch behind me, still holding Brandon's arm.

That's all I remember. I don't think I hit the floor, because both Joel and Brandon saw what was about to happen and caught me first.

Brandon picked me up. Somebody, likely Joel, shoved something under my nose and I came to.

"She's been in a bad way since we found her, Pa." I heard this from a distance, as if it was coming through a tunnel, from Joel. "She sat there alone with him for some hours. She was in shock when we found her. I think she still is. She needs something."

"Go in my surgery," I heard Pa say, "and get some—" And then his voice was lost in the tunnel and I was carried upstairs, likely by Brandon. My dress and shoes were taken off and I was put to bed.

I opened my eyes once to see Joel leaning over me with some kind of a powder and water, telling me to take it. I did so. I heard them agree to "take turns through the night."

I woke a lot through the night. I woke crying, sometimes screaming, "Please, David. please—give him what he wants. He's got a gun."

Or I'd say, "The wind, David, the wind is taking you away."

Or, "No more mouth, David. I won't give you any more mouth. I promise, you come back to us and I won't give you any more mouth."

Once I clutched Joel's sleeve and begged him, "I promise I'll be good if you come back. You must come back. Josie is waiting for you."

In between these outbursts I tossed and turned, but every time I woke one of them was in the big armchair beside my bed. Just the sight of a figure there comforted me.

When I opened my eyes in the morning, the sky was blue and sun shone in the windows. Joel was sleeping in the armchair. Outside birds sang.

I slipped out of bed, just a bit shaky and aware that I was still wearing only my chemise and petticoat. I reached for my summer robe and went over to him. I touched the side of his face. He opened his eyes and smiled at me.

"You all right?"

"I'm middling well."

He took me on his lap.

"How," I asked, "can God give us a blue sky and sun and singing birds, like it's an ordinary day, when David is dead?"

He shook his head as if to rid it of cobwebs. "I haven't even had my coffee yet," he told me.

I waited.

"Maybe," he said then, "it's David's job up in heaven right now to wind up the handles that start the birds singing and the sun shining and make the sky blue. You wouldn't want him to fail in his duties on his first day there, would you?"

Only Joel would come up with something like that. I buried my face in his chest and he patted my head. "That doesn't make any sense," I said.

"It doesn't? You know that for a fact?"

"No."

"Makes as much sense to me as anything else does these days. Maybe more. Now let's go downstairs. I need my coffee."

M
Y BROTHERS
' cavalry unit was called back to the army on the twentieth of July. Where they were going off to we did not know. I cried and hugged them both when they left. I had baked sugar cookies and gave each a package for their haversacks as they sat their horses in front of the house.

They promised to write, then rode off to where the rest of their men were bivouacked at the southeast outskirts of town.

The only brothers I had now. I went back into the house.

Pa was going back to his doctoring tomorrow. There would be no men around. I would miss David more than ever. He was a hole inside me.

***

T
HE HOUSE
was haunted, but the resident ghost was not David after all. It was Josie. She went about silently, scarcely there, gliding from one room to another, doing her chores, the same chores she'd always done.

At one point after the boys and Pa had left, I heard her ask Mama, "Do you want me to stay? Do I remind you too much of David?"

"Of course I want you to stay," Mama assured her. "If you want to. Do we remind you too much of David?"

"No. This is like my home here, and—"

"And what, child?"

"Nothing." But she'd been about to say something important, then stopped, changed her mind. I knew Josie enough by now to realize that she had a serious matter on her mind. I also knew that she would come out with it when the time was right. And it was not right yet.

"I can go home to my own mother if you want me to," she added.

"Nonsense." Mama was firm. "Your mama was going to sell the house here and stay with her sister, wasn't she?"

Josie lowered her eyes. "Yes, when David and I married. But now she's keeping it for me, for when I want it."

"Do you want it, Josie?" Mama asked carefully.

More lowering of the eyes. "Not just yet. I'm not ready to be alone yet."

Mama hugged her. "Neither are we, are we, Tacy?"

I said no, we weren't.

***

M
ARY AND BASIL
Biggs sent Marvelous back to live with us. They had to repair their house and had lost a lot of money in damage of possessions they'd owned, so Mary was living with one of the church women. And Basil with Sam Weaver, who'd given him the contract to carry bodies from the field to the cemetery.

So it was that Marvelous came again to be with us.

Mama gave her the room Josie had used, for Josie now had David's chamber.

The whole house was askew. Or was it my brain? I still was not sure. All I was sure of was that I would never be right again.

In early September I went back to school. Mama insisted upon it although I saw no sense in French or elocution or dancing classes, and did not care about the proper pitch in which to sing "The Star-Spangled Banner" or that
sugar cain
was supposed to be
sugar cane
, and when it is absolutely unforgivable not to curtsy.

As for geography, in times before we'd been studying the states, which were states and which were still territories. Now nobody knew what states still belonged to us. I'd forgotten, and did not care to remember, what territories were slave or free. Nobody wanted to know.

As for manners, must one curtsy when a man takes his leave after shooting one's brother?

Was it indelicate to raise your skirt in front of your brother to rip off pieces of your petticoat to stanch his blood when he was bleeding to death?

And what if your best friend is a Negro and she is living with you and you start to have doubts about the friendship because you realize of a sudden that the Negroes are the reason for the war. All along it never bothered you that she was a Negro.

But of a sudden it did. Around the tenth of August it did. When they sent the telegram that brought the news that your pa had been killed.

Your
pa!
Who was supposed to be around forever! A doctor! The person who fixed other people when they got hurt or sick. Which was why they'd sent him somewhere in Virginia along with the Union cavalry. The Union cavalry, which meant the Second Pennsylvania with them, Brandon and Joel's unit, to ferret out the Confederates in the area of Brandy Station for some insane army reason.

Joel had told me that most of the army's reasoning was insane, that there had been nothing but insanity behind Lee's reasoning for Pickett's Charge.

So there on the tenth of August, Josie and I had Mama on the floor in the hallway, having fainted with the telegram in her hand that told her Pa had been killed. And Josie and I were kneeling over her. All because the Union army had to go south of the Rappahannock with the cavalry to mark the end of the Gettysburg Campaign.

They had to mark its end?

They hadn't had enough?

No. A whole week the Yankees had to run after them, the cavalry with swords flashing, to have what they called "action," which was their fancy word for killing.

And Pa had to go along. We found out later that it was his own idea. That he'd volunteered to go. Oh, this family is wonderful in the art of volunteering. Josie and I figured out that he went along to be near Brandon and Joel because he'd lost David and he was blaming himself for that. Oh, this family is wonderful in the art of guilt, too.

So there was Pa, all set up with other doctors in a tent hospital. But unlike the other doctors, he volunteered to run out of the tent when the fighting died down to help bring the wounded in.

Because he'd heard one of the wounded was Brandon.