His belly is all wrong. It is all wrong and twisted into something else altogether and I will fix it. I must make it better but I don’t know what to do. His jacket is open. His shirt is ripped and his body underneath is so awful—torn, with inside things pressing their way out.
I don’t want to see it anymore, I want it to go away, I want him to be right. I try to fit his jacket around him, to button it, to make him how he was in the likeness I sent to Mama and Papa. But he is stiff and I don’t want to hurt his head, I don’t want to leave his face, I don’t want to see him like that. I almost can’t do it. He is so heavy, heavier than when he is sleeping, but I make his jacket right. Then I lie next to him and hold him, my head on his shoulder as he lays like we used to in the big bed at home. He is cold and he looks up to see the stars like we did before. I look too and between the black reaching fingers of tree branches there is the Big Dipper and the Seven Sisters and we just look and look. All night long we look until we are both so cold.
I AM SITTING on the church steps at the ice cream social, churchladies and their families dotting the yard. The door behind me pushes open and someone comes down the stairs. I don’t pay any mind until the footsteps stop right beside me but I don’t look to see who it is. I already know. He don’t wait there long before he gets tired of it. He clears his throat and I think maybe he will leave, and I want to grab him and stop him, tell him that he can’t, but then he holds out a Jacob’s ladder, purple-blue and bell-shaped.
‘For you,’ he says.
Ain’t no one given me a flower before but I don’t touch it at first. I wait until a look of worry comes over him, and then I’m done teasing and I take it from his hand and his smile back is the sweetest thing. That flower is still pressed at home in the Bible at the bottom of my hope chest so I could keep it always and now it ain’t right that the only flower he ever gave me was that one, how there ain’t no flower in the whole world that makes what’s happened right. And then his footsteps take him away, and I want to call out to him, to stop him, but it is too late. He is gone and I am left in a forever I ain’t ever dreamed.
SOMETHING POKES ME. Shoves again, hard. Union soldiers, with dirt and blood and stains on them. They are checking the dead, they must be. That is how I remember.
‘We’re going to take him now,’ says the one closest to me, his rifle butt low to the ground, the one who’s been poking.
‘No,’ I say, real low.
‘You ain’t got a choice. You want him left out here?’
‘No! He can’t. This ain’t where—He don’t belong here!’
Riflebutt talks quiet. ‘No one belongs here. That ain’t him here no more, that’s just his earthly body.’
‘He belongs back home. He can’t stay here.’
The others start reaching for Jeremiah’s feet.
‘You stay back!’ I yell loud and strike out, scaring myself.
Riflebutt talks again, ‘Either you let us take him now and he gets a decent Christian burial, or he stays here by this log.’
‘No! You’ve got to send him home. Send him where I can find him! He can’t be here! He’s got no people here. His Ma and Pa …’
‘He your kin?’ Riflebutt asks.
All I can do is nod.
‘He won’t hold long enough to get home. You’ve got to let us take him now.’ Riflebutt squats down, lays his musket on the ground.
‘You got anything you want to take off him before we move him?’ he says.
I look at Jeremiah. His face. His eyes. He ain’t there no more.
‘Letters,’ I say. ‘He’s got letters. I can’t—’
Riflebutt unbuttons Jeremiah’s coat. I drop my head into my hands. Tears leak out. The featherweight of letters lands in my lap.
Wrinkled and smeared envelopes. One says my name, Mrs. Jeremiah Wakefield. My face streams. My hand shakes holding those letters. The soldiers grab Jeremiah’s feet, his arms. His jacket ain’t buttoned nice no more.
‘His jacket!’ I cry. ‘His jacket!’
And then I think of my letter for him. It should be with him.
Crawl to him. Take the letter from my pocket, push it inside his jacket so it will be with him always. Pull those buttons through. Make him look right, my hands to his chest, remembering the feel of him. Trying to make it be enough.
‘You’ve got to get up,’ Riflebutt says, rips my arm away, uproots me. They lift him. Every part of my body strains for him, his bones calling to mine. It is all I can do to let go, to follow where they take him, to the tree where I kneel and watch his eyes disappear under the dirt, my mouth clamped shut against the screaming. It is all I can do not to throw myself down into the hole where they bury everything I ever had.
WOUND
NEAR SHARPSBURG, MARYLAND: SEPTEMBER 19–OCTOBER 6, 1862
‘We are now but a handful.’
—Corporal Thomas Galwey, Eighth Ohio
Infantry, after Antietam
CHAPTER
28
Don’t feel a thing. Don’t think. Legs move. Legs just up and walk themselves. Soldiers straggling. Dragging. Hobbling. Leaning against each other. Holding themselves together with arms tight.
Walk. Follow after them. Follow. Hold those letters, hold the only other thing.