Sisters of Shiloh (24 page)

They walked in silence, each with their own thoughts. Josephine felt a nausea sweep over her every time she thought of Libby. Could she live through another battle? What would happen to her without her older sister there to take care of her? But what choice had Wesley left Josephine but to flee? And yet she could not bring herself to be angry with him. In her bones she knew that she didn’t belong in this war, and that the ruse would lead nowhere but to a violent end. Still, she worried terribly about Libby. The war was dangerous enough for a soldier of sound mind. Perhaps she should have turned herself in, and Libby too. But she couldn’t bring herself to carry through with it.

The moon was half-full and sometimes could be glimpsed in the branches of the oaks. A hoot owl startled them and then went quiet. The crickets of summer were not out yet.

An hour into their journey, Wesley suddenly stopped.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Shhh.” He pulled her into the middle of a clump of shrubs. “Lie down,” he whispered, and covered her with his body.

It was then, face-down on the cool earth, she heard the voices. Soldiers were coming toward them.

“Ours or theirs?” she whispered.

“Shhh. Don’t matter no more.”

She felt his heart beating and the shivering of his body as the men came closer.

“Want a smoke, Christopher?” one of them asked.

“Sure, why not?”

The sound of a match striking and an inhalation. They were very close now.

“Warm tonight.”

“Yeah.”

“Tired.”

“Yeah.”

“Think there’s gonna be a battle?”

“Hell yeah.”

“I try not to think about it till I’m right upon it.”

“I was twist-legged drunk during Fredericksburg.”

“You’re joking.”

“Best way to fight.”

Josephine hardly breathed. The footsteps passed the bush and stopped. Nothing now but sounds that designated tobacco being drawn into the lungs and exhaled again. A peaceful sound, just men and their habit.

“Ever tell you about my old dog back home?”

“Don’t think so.”

“Barney was his name. Crazy dog loved to pull up things. Weeds, flowers, bushes. Anything with roots. Well, my old grandma had this peach tree sapling. For a year she’d been watering it and fussing over it. She built this little wire fence around it to protect it. Well, one day we were having breakfast, and there’s Barney standing there in the grass, and he’s got her peach sapling pulled up by the roots, and he’s got it in his mouth, the leaves pointing one way and the roots the other.”

Josephine felt Wesley’s body stiffen and begin to shake. After several moments, she realized Wesley was silently laughing. She squeezed his hand hard in warning and finally the shaking subsided, and they waited for the men to walk away.

But the soldier wasn’t done with his story. “Well, Grandma was a God-fearing churchgoing woman, but something came over her. The devil I guess. That old lady ran out there and yanked that peach tree out of his mouth and started chasing him around trying to beat him with it.”

Wesley was shaking again. His body rocking with silent laughter. Josephine dug her nails in his hand, but he couldn’t seem to stop himself. The bush began to rustle around them.

“And she kept swinging that peach tree, but that old dog just kept scooting out of the way . . .”

The branches of the bushes around her sounded deafening in her ears. Frantically she dug her nails harder.

“Hey, Clay, what’s that sound?”

“I don’t hear nothing.”

Wesley had finally managed to control his body. Josephine felt the tension of his held breath.

“It’s coming from over there. Probably some critter.”

“Well, shoot it.”

Josephine felt Wesley’s body seize and then the other voice said, “Naw. Tired of shooting things.”

Their footsteps faded into the brush. Wesley and Josephine disentangled themselves, and then he started laughing again.

“Wesley! What’s wrong with you? You could have gotten us killed.”

“I’m sorry . . . It was just so funny . . . that old lady chasing around that crazy dog. Made me think about the time our dog stole Lewis’s drawers off the line and Lewis chased that old dog for an hour.” Josephine’s anger faded, and she wished for that laughter to leap from his body and into hers, banishing terrible sights and healing guilt and regrets. Washing out the blue, washing out the gray. Until she was left, peach-colored flesh and green eyes and red heart, just the colors belonging to her.

Eventually they found a river and followed it along. They rested in a cypress copse the next day, hidden from the sight of both Union and Confederate soldiers, now an enemy to both. Here they spoke in whispers.

“How far do you think we’ve come?” Josephine asked.

“Not far enough. You hungry?”

Wesley had brought along some tinned meat and hardtack. Josephine shook her head but accepted a swallow from his drum canteen.

“Why do you look so sad?” he asked.

“I can’t forget the look on her face. She looked so betrayed. I’ve betrayed her, Wesley.”

“It was you or her, Josephine.” He slapped at his own face. “Something’s biting me. Couldn’t be a skeeter so early in the year, could it?” He looked over at her. “What did she mean, when she said you killed her husband? I thought the Yankees killed him.”

Josephine had never spoken of that day to Wesley. So much time had passed, it could easily be folded into a dream, put with those other dreams that fade in the morning and take their meaning with them. “They did kill him. Shot him. Arden could not possibly have recovered from his wound, Wesley. He’d been shot in the stomach.”

“Then, what did she mean?”

Josephine didn’t answer for a moment. Without such a question, she could almost forget she was a deserter and concentrate on the immediate discomforts of the forest: the heat and the itching and the buzzing.

“My sister is quite mad,” she said at last. “I imagined that the seeds of this madness were brought about by Arden’s death, but looking back, I think it started earlier. It’s as though Arden came in and took over her soul. Even before he died, I felt as though I’d lost her. And I suppose I hated Arden.”

Wesley didn’t say a word. Gently scratched his face as he listened.

“I suppose I hated him, Wesley. I’ve never hated anyone, but if you could just have seen the way he treated her . . . He took her away from us. I thought once he was dead, he’d let her go, but he never did.”

On the second night, they reached the edge of the forest, which opened onto a vast meadow. No Yankees in sight. No Rebels. The war had missed this place. This field seemed to go on endlessly, the middle of nowhere that people talk about, nothing but goldenrod, sheep sorrel, high grass, and sunflowers. Grasshoppers jumped away from the sound of footsteps. An apocalypse could start on some distant battlefield, and it would not affect a fawn’s curiosity or a bee’s satisfaction. They kept walking, heading west, hiding during the day. Even out in this wilderness, a few homesteads had established themselves. At night they trespassed onto these properties if the dogs didn’t warn them away. They drank from the wells and broke into smokehouses. They ate wild strawberries, experimented with dandelion leaves and cattail tubers. One night Wesley shot a wild turkey, and they cooked it on a spit.

The weather stayed fair.

As the days passed, their startle reflex softened, until even the sudden flight of a covey of quails jangled not a single nerve. One night Wesley flopped into the grass and pulled her down next to him. They lay there together, on their backs, looking at the stars.

“Do you feel yellow?” she asked.

“Yes. But it bothers me less and less.” A cloud appeared in the sky, suddenly, as though it had been thrown there by someone done with it. They fell asleep under its cover and didn’t move until the stars were bright. Wesley sat up and took off his jacket and tied it around his waist.

“You always claimed to be scrawny,” Josephine said. “That’s not true.”

“And you always claimed to be a boy.”

“We should be walking. It’s nighttime.”

“What’s the hurry?”

He made a small fire, using a pack of Federal matches and cupping his hand against the breeze until the kindling crackled. There was nothing to cook, and so they ate the last of the hardtack and fed the fire lazily. She studied Wesley’s face in the light. He had looked so boyish when they first met. Now he looked like a man.

“What are you thinking about?” Wesley asked.

“Things.”

“Happy things?”

“Some.”

“At last.” He plucked a piece of blooming grass and chewed on the starchy end of it. He had rolled up his sleeves, and Josephine ran her fingers over his wrist and then up his arm, finding the bump and checking to see if his new life had softened it.

“Lewis loved you,” she said.

“Libby loved you, too.”

“She did once. But she’ll never love me again.”

“You can’t just banish love out of anger. It’s hardier than that.”

They lay down together, abandoning the fire and its dwindling rations. Overhead the Big Dipper hung low, the same Big Dipper of their youth, their marches, their battles, and their birth. It had claimed its fixed place, and there it lingered.

“I wish you had your guitar now,” Josephine said. “Although it always made me sad to hear you sing.”

“Really?”

“It made everyone sad.”

“I didn’t know that.”

He put his arms around her and kissed the underside of her chin. His lips were soft for a man who had walked through freezing winters and bitten a thousand cartridges. “You belong with me,” he said. She lowered her lips to his, and he kissed her fully on the mouth. Josephine felt the strain of a tiny muscle in her neck and a shiver through the rest of her body. The tiny fire swallowed itself and plumed with sweet smoke. Night birds called out from their roosting places—locust trees and half-grown beeches.

He removed her jacket. She said, “Wesley,” very softly, but it seemed natural, under these stars, to be without jackets, and then without a shirt. Her white flesh amazed him. A secret purity lying under this war.

Kisses. The crackle of firelight. She was less a boy every second, and more a woman. And suddenly there was not enough time to get free of that cloth. She helped him until she was only Josephine.

He was naked, too. She couldn’t remember how he’d gotten that way.

They lay down together in the grass. He held her in the circle of his arms.

“Does it hurt?” he said.

“So much less than other things.”

By the time the last embers of the fire died, it didn’t hurt at all.

They fell asleep.

Josephine woke up crying.

“Oh, Wesley. What have I done?”

“You’ve done nothing wrong. We’re in love.”

“I meant, what have I done to Libby?”

May 1863

Chancellorsville. A battle that began in late afternoon and continued into the night. Libby was one of those ghosts who howled in the forest in those evening shadows. Libby killed a man, reloaded, and killed another as a tree burst near her head. She turned to make sure Josephine was untouched by the blast, but then remembered that her sister was gone, that vanished traitor. Even in the midst of the battle, screams and shots and the trampling of fallen men and dry leaves, she could not divorce her thoughts from her. Even though she was too tired and too afraid and too filled with rage to form the accurate sentences that spoke to her betrayal, the name
Josephine
stayed inside her.

Arden, though, was more than a name. He was a presence, an exhortation, the heaving breaths of his spirit keeping up with her, his voice shouting that unearthly Rebel yell right along with her. She shot the fleeing Yankees in the back. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen. And as the sun set, the gift of fifteen. The air filled with the scent of pine pulp and gun smoke and the smoke of the arrested fires. She stepped into a fallen Rebel’s chest, the toe of her boot emerging bloody from his death wound as she rushed onward. She could not say she was a woman or even a man. Just a killing, counting force.

The next day the battle resumed. Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen.

By afternoon the woods began to burn. The smoke was so thick Libby’s eyes streamed tears, and she held her shirttail over her mouth, trying to breathe. She heard a loud crack and looked just in time to see a man’s head crushed by a falling limb. Smoke covered over the scene and left the man’s death throes to the imagination, and Libby pressed on, leaves crackling under her feet. She came upon two Union prisoners, sitting tied back to back.

Arden appeared in the clearing smoke, his face black with powder. “Shoot them,” he said.

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“I can’t do that, Arden! They’re prisoners!”

“What difference does it make? Nineteen, twenty! They are merely blue numbers. Shoot them, Libby. Shoot them!”

Arden held his hands out to her. His red eyes filled with tears. “What is left of me but the cause? Are you going to abandon it, now?”

When the battle was over, Libby lay at last in the peaceful darkness of her tent, which had been set up on top of a patch of clover. She scratched her ankle and felt one of the blisters pop, splattering her skin with cool juice. A hickory log sputtered in a campfire, briefly scalding the song of nearby crickets. A soldier muttered something in his sleep. A dog padded by on three legs, from the sound of it.

Footsteps approached her tent and a voice called out.

“Libby . . . Libby . . .”

She sat up but didn’t answer.

“Libby, why did you not kill those Yankee prisoners? Don’t you see that they are devils? And should you not desire to kill them, since you are a soldier in the army of God? Do you think our wounded general, Stonewall Jackson, would have had mercy on them? What am I to think about that?”

Campfire light glowed through the tent, throwing a shadow across the cotton twilling as he spoke again.

“I’m so thirsty.”

“I have killed eighteen Yankees, Arden.”