‘That ain’t what matters!’ Jeremiah says, grabbing her feet, but he is wrong, he is only thinking about this moment and not what comes after.
That girl don’t answer, though, and there’s no sense in waiting. I hoist her from under her shoulders, listening to her shriek and seeing the shimmering of blood, her torn clothes showing gashes like small mouths gaping. With wounds like that, she ain’t keeping her secret if she gets to a hospital.
We bump back over the field, over the fence, our every stumble making her wail, and it is the hardest thing I’ve ever done carrying that girl screaming from the field until the moment when her crying stops.
Maybe the pain has got to her and she has fainted.
‘Jeremiah! Jeremiah. We ought to check.’
Jeremiah stops. ‘Okay.’
We lay her down gentle in the dirt and rocks sloping away from the battlefield. Jeremiah comes to her shoulders and I lean over her. Her eyes are wide open and when I put my ear to her mouth there’s no breath against my cheek. My fingers scrabble under her collar, feeling for a pulse, but there is nothing.
‘She ain’t breathing,’ I say. ‘Maybe—’ But then Jeremiah is on his knees, doing all the things I just did like he ain’t even heard and then he just sits back on his heels, his chest heaving.
There is only one thing else we can do, and so I open up her coat. Inside the breast pocket is a thin strip of paper, the name David Galloway printed neat across it. Jeremiah clutches that paper when I give it to him. There ain’t a single letter for anybody back home. Emma Davidson was thinking she was being smart, keeping her name safe, keeping her people from being shamed. But we ain’t ever going to find out another thing about her.
‘We can’t leave her here,’ I say, and prod at him, but he don’t move.
I take up Emma’s body again and try dragging her back to where some of the boys are digging shallow graves but she is cumbersome, her arms flopping like they are loose-hinged and her legs trailing, leaving marks in the dirt.
Seeing me struggling is what gets Jeremiah up. ‘You oughtn’t be doing this,’ he says.
I slowly lower Emma, laying her hands across her chest. ‘What else should I be doing then?’ I ask, only I ain’t sure I want to hear his answer. Maybe he knows something of my fears.
‘Not this,’ Jeremiah grumbles.
‘You help me then, if you’re so worried about it.’
Jeremiah looks at me and heaves a big sigh.
‘You get the arms,’ he says. ‘I’ll take the legs.’
We don’t get but a few steps when my grip starts slipping on her wet sleeve, and already there is a cold dampness to Emma’s body that makes me want to pull my hand away fast like touching Mama’s stove, that brings my sick feelings back. Jeremiah keeps walking over the rough ground while the body between us tips and swings.
‘You’ve got to slow down,’ I say.
‘What?’
‘Slow. Down. I’ve got no grip—’ I stumble and Emma’s right arm slides clean out of my hand. Her whole body sways and then my other hand slips and I ain’t never seen a thing so disrespectful as dropping that body, her head banging into the ground with a thud and then the whole motion of it making Jeremiah lose hold on those feet too.
‘Damn it, Rosetta!’ Jeremiah says, straightening up and acting more mad than he has a right to.
‘Don’t you speak to me like that,’ I yell back at him. ‘You’re walking too fast!’
‘You can’t be dropping people! It ain’t right, forgetting—None of this is right.’ He don’t yell, but he is working to make his voice stay quiet.
‘If you just keep your ears open, and listen when I ask you to slow down—or maybe if you take the heavy end, like you ought to—’
‘Like I ought to?’ he says. ‘Like you always do what you ought to? Is that what you’re thinking?’
We ain’t arguing about the same thing as we started. We’ve got ourselves into something else, only there’s boys around now so I don’t want to do this. I don’t want Jeremiah getting me so riled I tell him something I’m not ready for him to know, especially after seeing what happened to this girl.
‘I ain’t been thinking anything like that, except right now with moving bodies,’ I say. ‘I’ve got blood and stuff up here making me sick, and a face looking at me and you’ve just got to slow down is all. I ain’t talking about a thing else.’
Jeremiah looks at me for a long minute. Then he sighs and it ain’t a nice sigh like he is giving in, it is a sigh like he ain’t going to bother with me.
‘You got something else you want to say?’
When he don’t answer right off I stoop down and make myself touch that dead body again.
‘Switch places,’ Jeremiah says, and he is already halfway to me, with a look that says he means it, so we do.
When we lay that girl’s body down in the trench Edward and Hiram are digging, Jeremiah’s face has got too much sadness on it, and I can’t stop hearing that girl’s shrieks.
‘You put any soldiers named Davidson down there already?’ I ask.
Hiram shrugs, ‘Might’ve done.’