I GET HOLD of myself and dig inside my knapsack to find my letter paper. It is rumpled and I don’t have a thing to write on but my knees. I iron a sheet against my pants, but those wrinkles stay and I want this letter to be nice. I think about waiting, finding some fresh paper. But the paper don’t matter and maybe writing it I will feel something of him flutter through me again. I ain’t doing right by him, keeping the truth of things from his folks.
September 20, 1862
Near Antietam Creek and Sharpsburg
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Wakefield and family,
It is only because My Heart breaks to do it and is Broken already that I did not Write sooner. You will have heard, I think, how this Army met the Rebels at Antietam Creek and how we have had Victory. From what I saw there was Nothing that we won with this fighting and now we have Lost so Many. Our Regiment saw heavy fighting in a Cornfield and I was there with Jeremiah. I did not see how the enemy got him but with his Wounds I think it was canister. I Found him after it happened and he was still Living and he knew me and was Very Brave. There wasn’t a thing to be Done for him but I do not think he Suffered long. I Tried to get him to where it was Safe, but he was Gone too quick. I held him when he Passed to the Other Side and the Last words he said was, Home. Home. So you can know that his last thoughts were of You and of Good Things and He died in the Company of Someone who Loved him. There are others here who Miss him but that is not the same as what it is to lose a Son or Brother or Husband.
They told me his body would not make the Journey home, so he is Buried here. He is Resting under a very Tall tree near to where we Fought. It is a Pretty place, with farms and trees all around and there is a Marker there so if you wanted to Visit you would know him. I have Gone to see him there.
I am sending the Letter he wrote for you if the Worst should happen. He wrote it before we saw our First Battle and I Know he Never wanted to Send it. He was Always Thinking on Coming Home and the Farm. Now he is Gone to his Other Home and waits for us there. It is a help for me to know that and I hope for you too.
I am Ever his,
Rosetta
I don’t know if any of those words are right but there ain’t a thing to make the news better, except news I ain’t ready to share.
I fold that paper up and address the cover. I look at Jeremiah’s letter and wonder what words he might have set down, if he said a thing about me, if he told his Ma and Pa anything of me going home to them.
Maybe come morning, I will put my farm clothes on, Jeremiah’s old clothes, and desert the whole Union Army, walk away from this place, just like I walked away from home. This time I could keep heading West until Nebraska. Even now, I can cover near to twenty miles a day if I walk hard, maybe more if I find farmers willing to take me along in their wagons. Maybe I could make it there before the worst of the Winter weather and get myself settled in time for Spring planting, in time for the baby coming on. I can see it now, raising that baby up inside me and Jeremiah’s dream.
That lonesome wildness whirls about me again, to think of living without Jeremiah, with no kin or family beside me, my whole life stretching out before me. I could do it if it meant living as I have a mind to, being just the way I am with no one to answer for it. But there is not just me and Jeremiah now and I can’t go on living as Ross Stone. That path is gone.
ALL I SEE is blood. Lint soiled with blood. Flannel strips smeared with blood. Bed linens drenched in blood.
I gasp, my eyes flying open.
‘It’s only me,’ Will says, from where he is sitting on his blankets next to the fire, poking at the cinders with a stick.
‘You still got that Bible with you?’ I ask.
‘I do,’ he says.
‘Can you read Ruth to me?’
‘Course,’ he says, bringing his blankets closer to the fire, turning those onionskin pages slow and careful. And then there is his voice, saying words I ain’t heard since home with Papa reading.
Tears start and I wonder what I have done, asking Will to read this, but I don’t stop him. The words wash over me, his voice saying, ‘And Naomi said unto her two daughters in law, Go, return each to her mother’s house: the Lord deal kindly with you, as ye have dealt with the dead.’
I try to think on the words, but I can’t. Home and Mama and Betsy sewing for my wedding get all mixed up with Jeremiah and his hands shaking as he took mine on our wedding day, and our wedding night and how I got the shivers.
But those words cut through my thoughts. ‘And Ruth said, Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee. For whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge. Thy people shall be my people, and thy God, my God. Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried.’
And then I can’t stop the tears from running and I try not to make any noise, but Will stops reading.
‘You’ve got to hear the rest,’ he says.
I don’t know how he can say what I’ve got to hear. I think how Mama wanted these words read to me before my wedding. I can’t tell if it is wrong of me to leave this place or wrong of me to stay.
Will reads, ‘… thou hast left thy father and thy mother, and the land of thy nativity, and art come unto a people which thou knewest not heretofore.’
And the tears keep falling.
CHAPTER
35