None of my jokes is any good, but it’s either laugh or cry. It’s plain there ain’t a thing I can say to make it better, and I am just pretending it don’t touch me to have two of our boys gone. All of us lost ourselves in the haze yesterday, and there wasn’t one of us keeping close watch on each other. Not like we should. All we know is that Henry was with us when we bivouacked for the night and when we started stirring he wasn’t. Now he and his pack and his rifle are gone.
My throat closes and tears start coming so I try saying, ‘Cooking’s less of a chore now, I guess,’ but my fire with the mucket hanging over it, working on boiling water for coffee, almost does me in.
Jeremiah lifts his head up. ‘You ain’t helping, Rosetta. ’Specially not when we all know there ain’t any lost love between you and Henry these days.’
I ought to be yelling for his forgetting himself and using my old name, but everyone is too busy huddling under their ponchos and rubber blankets to be listening to a thing we’re saying. Staying dry and chewing on hardtack is already too much trouble.
‘How could he do it?’ Jeremiah asks. ‘How could he leave like that? Without saying a word? What if he ain’t all right?’
There ain’t an answer to those questions, and we go silent after that. What was Henry thinking when he knew the facts as well as any of us, when we all saw Levi Blalock cursing and fighting against Hiram and Young Frank, that glowing D searing through the stubble and into the skin on his cheek? A punishment like that ain’t easy to push aside, and even with the heavy burden Henry is carrying, to up and leave, risking such a thing? If he were smart, he’d at least have taken my map. But when I open my pack, it is still there on top and it is clear he ain’t thought the thing through to its end. Course, none of us thought this soldiering through to the end. I still can’t. Especially when I don’t know what my body is playing at and every day that passes I’ve got more to worry over.
There is a rumbling clatter as a wagon carrying more wounded soldiers drives up the road, and Jeremiah and Sully’s attention snaps to it. The wagon bumps to a stop in the ruts outside the gate of one of the plain houses across the way where piles of the surgeons’ handiwork grow outside the windows. The bay cavalry horse tied to the paling fence in front rests the toe of his hind leg on the ground. The warm rain drips down his belly and he’s too tired to even try for the short grass that’s nibbled down around the post, too tired to even flick an ear. The driver jumps down and another man runs up and opens the door to the house, calling inside before coming back to help lift soldiers out of the wagon. None of them is Henry.
Just when I can maybe wipe my mind clean as a slate, Will comes back from reporting to Sergeant. He slows to help another soldier stumbling up the road, stooped and filthy like every single one of us, stained with blood and dirt and gunpowder and who knows what else.
Will ain’t long hefting that man up the steps into one of the houses and then he is before me.
‘You think you might want to help at one of the hospitals?’ he asks. ‘Pretty near every building in this town has got wounded in it.’
I think of new casualty lists posted in every town in this whole country, of Jennie Chalmers keeping her worries at bay nursing over a new stream of boys at the Judiciary Square Hospital. There is sadness everywhere now.
I shake my head and tell Will, ‘I can’t muster up the energy just now,’ but really I can’t touch those wounded and not think on Jimmy, not think on John Morgan holding his dead son’s hand, cradling his face, or that soldier I aimed at so careful.
Will looks at me through narrowed eyes before shrugging. ‘I’ll be checking on how Thomas is, ministering to John, and then I’ll be over at that house, if anybody needs me,’ he says.
I nod. Across the way, the bloody hands and feet and legs and arms keep spewing through the front window. Those parts land in a big heap, and bodies lie out in the front yard and we watch like steers waiting our turn for slaughter, listening to the crying and groaning while the surgeons carve our boys up into cuts of meat, hoping that ain’t what’s coming for us.
CHAPTER
24
FORT CORCORAN, VIRGINIA: SEPTEMBER 4–6, 1862
Fort Corcoran ain’t much to look at and I never thought it’d feel at all nice to see those dirt piles and telegraph wires. But after days of rain and mud and mourning, anything meaning shelter and rest where we can pitch tents and live almost civilized makes me feel a tiny bit better. We don’t know how long we’ll stay here, and I know it ain’t anything worrying on can fix, but that don’t stop me.
Now we’ve seen action, Captain’s lost his keenness for drilling all the time and that is just fine by me, except away from the battlefield, my mind won’t stay easy. I wake before morning, remembering dreams of mouths filling with dirt, of blood wrung from soiled cloths, of embroidered names I can’t read, of Papa burning bloody sheets. I reach for Jeremiah, thinking to hold his hand, but we are spread as far apart as can be. He twitches and grinds his teeth until they squeak.