The Last Full Measure (5 page)

The man was leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands. At his feet was a knapsack. In the light of David's lantern, I saw his gray hair under an old cap. And I recognized him in an instant.

I stepped forward. "That's Mr. Cameron," I told David. "From over to York Street. He's near ninety years old!"

"Stay back," David said. Then to Mr. Cameron, "Can I help you, sir? Are you lost? Can I help you find your way home?"

Mr. Cameron raised his eyes to my brother. "I know the way home, son. I'm not dotty. I just don't wanna go there. I live alone now and I'm scairt what with the Rebels in town and the war comin' here and all. I know your pa, the doctor, and I was wonderin' if you'd be so kind as to let me stay in your cellar for a few days, until the Rebs are gone. I'd be no trouble. Don't eat much at my age. Just need a blanket and a corner and some coffee. I do like my coffee. What say you, boy?"

Mr. Cameron saw me standing a bit behind David and smiled. "Nice little girl you got there."

"She's my sister," David said. "As I recollect, you have a son, don't you, Mr. Cameron?"

The face of the old man, which looked like a map of Gettysburg hastily drawn by a Union officer, went sad. "Yes, I do. He's in the army. Somewhere. Don't know where. Don't know which army. Haven't seen him in ten years. Don't expect to see him in ten more. What say you, now? Think your ma would let me in?"

David nodded. He went up the stoop, helped old Mr. Cameron to his feet, and guided him through the door.

I followed.

David locked the door behind us, held Mr. Cameron by the arm, then set him down in a chair. He told me to fetch a warm blanket. I did so. Then he bade me find some coffee on the stove in the kitchen. There was always coffee on the stove in the kitchen. I poured some into a cup, put some sugar in it, and brought it to Mr. Cameron, who accepted it gratefully.

Then David ordered me to bed.

As I was going up the stairs, I looked over the banister.

David was guiding Mr. Cameron down to the cellar, with the blanket in one hand and his other around Mr. Cameron's shoulder. The old man was still holding his cup of coffee.

I lay awake for a while staring at the ceiling, thinking of Marvelous sleeping under the blanket David had so tenderly wrapped around her in the church belfry, so high up, and Mr. Cameron sleeping under the blanket David had wrapped around him in a corner of our cellar, so far down.

The thought gave me a sense of comfort. And then I minded Pa, wondering where he was sleeping tonight. And
if
he was sleeping. And my mind wandered to my horse, Ramrod. Was she resting on warm, sweet hay, with her stomach filled with oats? Or was she starving someplace on some rough terrain, with scratches on her, and scars from some soldier's rough spurs, thinking of me and waiting for me to come and rescue her?

"God does not visit us with troubles we do not have the strength to survive," Jennie Wade used to tell me. She said that thought used to get her through the bad times.

Were these bad times for her now? Did she grieve over the fight we'd had as I did? Was she sorry? Did she miss our friendship? At the end of the day when Sam came home, did she ask him what had gone on at our house?

I knew she still loved David. How could she even think of marrying another man when she still loved David? Was part of my brother's bitterness born out of the fact that he, too, still loved Jennie?

Could I keep my own counsel and not tell David that Jennie still loved him? Did I have the obligation to tell him that? Didn't my loyalty belong to Josie, whose love was not fickle?

I cried myself to sleep.

***

I
N THE MORNING
I was hurled awake by the sound of gunfire.

I jumped out of bed, threw on my clothes, and ran downstairs.

Again, from the front windows, I saw people coming out of their homes all up and down the street. Josie was setting the table for breakfast. David was out back, yelling at Sam for something. Mama was with him.

Immediately, I went out on the front stoop.

"They're fighting," Mrs. Broadhead yelled at me from her front stoop across the street. "They're starting to kill each other!"

I could see soldiers up at the end of our street, in bunches, could hear the sound of musketry, dogs going crazy with frenzied barking, the whinnying of horses.

"Well, that's what they've come for, isn't it?" David's voice, behind me. His hands roughly gripping my shoulders and pulling me inside. "To kill each other?"

He yelled it across the street at Mrs. Broadhead as he pulled me inside, then slammed and locked the door.

***

T
HE FACT WAS
, our cow was gone.

Daisy, the sweetest creature known to mankind, after my Ramrod, had been stolen in the night by some demonic Rebel who'd come sneaking about.

That was what David had been scolding Sam for outside when I'd come down this morning. Sam had taken the brunt of it.

He'd neglected to lock the barn door.

"It isn't as if," Mama said at breakfast, once she'd stopped crying about Daisy, "the Rebs couldn't have broken through the lock and taken her anyway, David."

David was adamant. Once he laid blame it stayed on the accused. For the rest of your born days. "Yes, but it would have made too much noise, them breaking in. This way it was easy for them. It makes me madder 'n hell making things easy for them."

"We've got to get a dog," I said. We hadn't had a dog since our Beau died, half a year ago now. He was all the dog we'd needed, a faithful watchdog, companion, and friend. He'd been fifteen and died of old age. "Pa said we could get another one," I reminded my brother.

"This isn't the time," he told me. "Not yet."

This is exactly the time
, I wanted to snap back. Instead I said, "Do you think the Rebs will use Daisy for milk? Or kill her for meat?"

The minute the words were out of my mouth I wished I could reach out and grab them back. Mama broke into a new freshet of crying.

David slapped his hand down on the table. "Did you
have
to say that?"

"I'm sorry, no. I'm sorry, Mama." I got up and hugged her around the shoulders. "I'm sure they need fresh milk more than anything. Please don't cry."

A knock came on the front door then, thankfully, distracting Mama. Josie started forward to answer it, but David intercepted her. With his musket in hand.

It was Nancy Burns.

"Hello, Nancy." My brother let her in and my heart leaped inside me for a second, hoping she'd say nothing about our adventure yesterday. Then I becalmed myself. No, she wouldn't. She was more frightened of David than she'd likely be of God on Judgment Day.

"You shouldn't be out and about," David admonished her gently. "The battle is starting."

"Yessir, I know. But I just came to say that my grandpa ... he, well he's going off to fight. And my mama can't stop him!" She was starting to get tears in her eyes, and her voice broke as she looked up at David.

"So he's really doing it, is he?" David asked. His own voice was husky, which meant he was allowing feelings to creep into it, something he rarely did.

"Yessir, and he's going to get killed. And we don't know what to do."

We all watched in fascination as David put his hands on Nancy's shoulders, then gently said in the softest of voices, "Listen to me, child. Did you ever think of this? That if your grandpa doesn't go off to fight today as he so desperately wants to, that if he stands by and lets others go, that act alone may kill him?"

Nancy stood there round-eyed, considering the possibility of it. The thought had never occurred to her. Or to any of us.

But it had to David.

Slowly, Nancy ingested the thought and nodded her head. "I'll tell my mama that," she said. "Thank you, sir." She turned to go, but David restrained her.

"I'll accompany you," he told her. "I'll see you safely home."

***

W
HEN HE RETURNED
about ten minutes later, none of us said anything. But at breakfast when he didn't know I was looking at him, I stole glances at my brother. He'd gone right back to his surly, silent mood, and as I furtively studied him, I minded that the way he'd been with Nancy now, and with Marvelous and Mr. Cameron last night, was the way he used to be with me.

But he was two people now. He had a bad side and a good side. And he reserved the bad side for me. It broke my heart, realizing that. But for his sake, I was glad there was some of the good side left in him, at least.

After breakfast he took food down to Mr. Cameron, and made several trips up and down, attending to him. The man would not come above stairs. I even saw him taking him up the outside cellar stairs to the outhouse, then back down again, and instructing Josie to feed him about noon.

Up until now, the sounds of fighting had been far off, and looking out the windows, it seemed to me as if people were going about their regular lives. Some had already climbed onto the roofs of their houses. I saw men and boys walk toward the west of town. Then I felt David standing behind me.

"Where are they going?" I asked.

"To the ridges, to see the action," he said.

We heard bugle calls in the distance and then, about nine o'clock, a terrible, resounding boom.

"Cannon," David said.

Then more awful, awful noise that violated the soul.

"Artillery," David told me. "The Confederates on Herr's Ridge must be firing at the Union men near McPherson's Ridge."

How did he know so much? Then I remembered, he'd spent much of the day with the Union army yesterday.

In a short time the civilians from town who'd gone to see the battle came running back, and soon stray shells and bullets were finding their way into town. People were coming down from the rooftops. David pulled me away from the window.

"No telling where a stray missile will strike," he said.

The last sight I saw was a Union general and his staff riding down our street. "Are they retreating?" I asked David ' But he was no longer communicating with me. He had gone inside of himself, and all he said was "Stay away from the windows."

The crashing of shells increased steadily outside as the morning progressed. Mama took to baking bread with Josie. Soon the house was filled with the delicious aroma, and I wandered, fidgeting. David went about securing windows and doors, closing the shutters.

A courier came galloping up and down the street, shouting something.

David opened the front door. I heard him exchange brief words with the man. He came back in, crestfallen. "Our General Reynolds was killed this morning," he told us.

Mama turned from the kitchen table where she was kneading bread. "Oh, not John!" she wailed. "I always felt as if I knew him! Your father wrote of him frequently in his letters home. They became such good friends at Antietam and Chancellorsville! Everyone respected Reynolds so!"

"I'm sorry, Mama," David said. "I know Reynolds arrived here early this morning and led his infantry right into battle. The courier said he turned in his saddle to look for more troops and just fell right to the ground, from a bullet in the back of his neck."

Mama wiped a tear from the corner of her eye with the back of a flour-covered hand, nodded, and went right back to kneading her bread. "That other loaf must be done. Take it out of the oven, Josie."

"I only wish I'd had the honor of meeting him," she said.

"Tacy, go help your mother," David told me.

I did so, losing myself in the mess of butter and flour and other ingredients, near jumping out of my skin as every shell that crashed seemed closer to us, as the realization that the sound of wagon wheels outside were not civilians on a jaunt but ambulances bringing wounded to town.

David told us that, offhandedly. "Wounded coming," he said, the way one would announce that it had started to rain. Then he went out to the barn.

Taking advantage of his absence, I ran to the window, my hands covered in flour. I had to see. But the first wounded I saw was not in an ambulance. It was a man on a beautiful black horse, the kind a prince rides in a fairy tale. But this was no prince. It was Mr. Emil Watts, who ran one of the grocery stores in town. And he had, lying across his horse, a soldier with blood pouring out of one leg of his trouser, right down the side of the beautiful black horse.

Mr. Watts stopped in front of the house of Mrs. Broadhead, who sometimes helped in his store.

I opened the window to hear.

"Emily," he shouted. "Emily, come out here. You've got to help with this man!"

She came out, Mrs. Broadhead did. She stood there, hands on hips. "What do you want me to do, Emil? I'm not a doctor!"

"I want you to be a human being, is what I want!" he said. "I want you to take him in and help me mend him."

Together they carried the man inside.

And then scores of wounded came, some dragging themselves, some being led by comrades, supported by comrades, piled into ambulances, and holding on to horses.

They had gaping wounds, gashes, bloodied clothes, partial limbs. Some had hideous faces, some could not see. Blood flowed from parts of their bodies they did not even know they had.

Some cried for their mamas. Others just whimpered, while some did not seem to know where they were or who they were or, worse yet, why they were.

Girls and women lined the streets, handing them cups of water.

I heard the regimental band playing patriotic tunes. They played "Dixie," of all things. And "The Star-Spangled Banner."

David must have come in from out back. Before I knew what was happening, he was jerking me away, shaking me, and closing the window and shutters.

"I told you to stay away from the windows, didn't I?"

"The men are bleeding, David," I told him.

"Everyone's bleeding," he said.

So I went back to my stupid bread making.
Who is all this bread for, anyway?
I wanted to ask. But I dared not.

Around noon we heard a shell hit a roof. I knew immediately what roof it was. And I knew I was not mistaken.

It was the roof of Christ Lutheran Church.