‘I am here,’ I say, ‘and you are okay.’
His hand scrabbles across the dirt and I grab it in mine.
‘You are going to be okay,’ I hear myself tell him. ‘You have to be.’
The way I say it must catch his attention because his eyes find mine and they are so blue, bluer than any bluebell.
And then I say the one thing left to be telling, ‘There’s a baby coming and you have to be here. You have to see it.’
His look is raw then, and his breathing goes wrong.
‘Home,’ he says. ‘Home.’
I tell him hush and he don’t say a thing more. I press my ear to his chest, listening for him, for his heart, for his breath but the thundering coming from every direction is too loud. I don’t worry about the blurs of soldiers running past, there is only him, his face, his coat ripped open, his shirt stained with seeping blood, his knapsack and rifle gone. I grab him under the arms and drag him backward, keeping myself bent low, watching his feet bump over the ground. It should be hard, he should be heavy, but he ain’t. The firing boxes us in, and men too, but I don’t care for a thing but getting Jeremiah out of the battle, to where we can’t be seen, to a hospital. I stumble over a body or a hole in the ground or the bent and flattened cornstalks, I don’t even know what because there is Jeremiah’s head bouncing against my knees as we fall.
I get myself right up and out from under him. We are near trees, not in the field we came through, some other place. I shove my arms back under his and now he is like lead and so still but he is just hurt and he is still bleeding, there’s lots of blood seeping from his belly and I’ve got to get us safe. The ground around us shudders as shells land. It is so loud, the whole world going to pieces and hell swallowing us up and hauling us down. I look for the safest thing and drag us behind a rotting log. There is some grass there and dead leaves to make a bed for him. We are clinging to the edge of the woods and maybe the trees will hide us.
I lean into Jeremiah. I try to hear him breathing, to feel it and I can’t but he is all right, this ain’t nothing but Doc Cuck could fix. I pray harder than I’ve ever prayed in my life for it to be safe to try for the hospital or for a stretcher bearer to come find us, but we are too far from our lines and too close to the Rebs for that.
I lie like that a long time, by that log in the dead leaves, Jeremiah’s head pulled against my chest. His dark hair slicked back like on our wedding day, but with sweat this time. I pet his hair like he is a small animal. I rock him. When the fighting swirls back around us, I hug him tight and pray until it swirls away again. And then I say all the nicest things to Jeremiah. I tell him about the size of my love for him and about our farm and everything we promised each other, the woods and cows we’ll have and the fields growing. I tell him about the baby growing inside me, how my pants don’t fit right no more. I trace the muscle in his neck that flutters and tremors. It is a long time before I see that his eyes are open wide, their bright blue turned to dull ice. There are drops on his shirt, and it is not raining so I know they are from me.
I work myself up to sitting when the field goes almost quiet, his head in my lap. The trees crowd out the sky or the sky has gone dark, I don’t know which. The ground is quaggy with leaves, mud, manure, blood. Sometimes other men move past us, hobbling farther into the woods. We are there so long, the cannonading has stopped. The rifles have stopped except for way off in the distance. Only the screaming is like before. It has turned to a field of the wounded and the dead and ain’t none of them quiet. The wounded shriek and cry, and the dead hiss and pop. Except for Jeremiah. He is quiet because I said so, because I said hush.
I sit so long we get stiff. I try not to look. His face. I look at his face. The drops on his shirt, I try to rub them out. I rock him.
When he sighs I think Maybe but some part of me is smart and knows he ain’t Lazarus raised from the dead, and he sure ain’t Jesus. It is just his body doing what his mouth already done and saying its last words.
Someone close is making noise. Lots of noise and I am rocking and saying hush. It is not raining but there are too many drops on his shirt to count and my face is wet with something, blood or sweat or tears.