“You can’t!” Amélie cried.
“Shut up!” Cap'n snapped.
Ralph’s knife gleamed, tearing into leather and cotton batting. The men shuffled and jostled one another, eyeing Amélie hungrily.
“Nothin’,” Ralph said, “not a bean.”
“All right,” Cap’n said, “leastwise we got the buggy. Maybe the little lady has jools.” He turned to Amélie. “Hold out yer hands!”
She held them out. He pulled the gloves off. All she had on was a ring Royce had given her the first evening at the farm, a simple gold band inset with a tiny pearl that had been bequeathed to him by a grandaunt.
It was pulled from her finger. “What else you got?” “That is all.”
“Money down your bosom? Let’s have a look.”
She fought, slashing at his arms, beating at his head with her reticule. It was snatched away and her arms were pinioned behind her back.
“Gimme the knife, Ralph.”
For one tense, horrifying moment she thought he was going to kill her. But then the raised knife came down and neatly sliced her basque and camisole open. Her breasts sprang out and an upcry went up, shouts, hallelujahs, hoorays. The men were beside themselves, jumping up and down, howling, some clutching at their groins.
Cap’n thrust his hands down to her naked waist. Amélie shivered, sick with revulsion. She couldn’t believe it was happening, couldn’t believe that such a thing could happen. Oh, she had heard of indecent searches and, worse, tales of how the Yankees had raped gentlewomen, stories she had largely discounted. She had been all through a bloody war and never once, even when incarcerated by a brutal, lascivious jailer, been subjected to this.
Yet she mustn’t show her terror. “The war is over, you fool,” she said coldly, ignoring the look of naked lust in the bummer’s bloodshot eyes. “They’ll catch and hang you. As you deserve. You unspeakable—”
Cap’n swung his hand across her face, a blow that jarred her spine.
“Let’s parcel her out,” Ralph said. “I ain’t had a good lay since week ago Monday, and that old whore—”
“Button up! You talk like yer the only one.”
“We can draw straws.”
“Oh, damn yer straws!”
“Well, we can’t stand here arguin’. The others will be back terreckly.”
There were others. God in heaven! They were going to take turns. Again disbelief washed over her in cold, nauseous waves. She was about to be sick in front of these brutes.
“There’s plenty to go round. Quit shovin’.”
Hands tore at her, dirt encrusted, calloused, hairy hands. She opened her mouth to scream but the only sound that came was a helpless, gargled gasp. No nightmare had ever been so horrible. It was as though she were at the bottom of an evil smelling pit ringed with monstrous eyes while gluttonous fingers clawed and pinched and patted.
Suddenly above the commotion a voice shouted, “Amélie! Amélie? Here, let me through!”
The men, taken by surprise, were too stunned to protest as a new figure elbowed his way to her side. “Amélie, my God!”
Through a film of tears she stared at the man in front of her. Bearded, with long, matted brown hair, he wore a tattered Yankee uniform that hung loosely on his lank, bony frame.
It couldn’t be! She felt faint, sick, her knees threatening to give way under her.
“Amélie.” He took off his coat and drew it tenderly about her shoulders.
Voices murmured and growled. “What yuh doin’? Know her?”
“She’s my wife,” came the reply.
The feeling of unreality was wrapping itself around her in ever tightening folds.
“Thaddeus?” she whispered hoarsely, heart and lungs striving against a smothering darkness.
“Yes, darling.”
Fighting for air, she swayed. He steadied her. “Bear up, darling,” he spoke in her ear. “Don’t faint. They’d be on us like a pack of wolves.”
She swallowed. Her throat felt raw.
The Cap’n spat contemptuously. “Wife! That’s what you say. Want her all to yerself.”
“She is my wife!” Thaddeus exclaimed. “Damn you. My wife! Maryland born like me. You’ll have to kill me before I’ll let you touch her.”
Ralph brought his knife up.
“Yes, go ahead, skewer me, you bloody fool! Kill us both, take the buggy. You know what’ll happen? They will be after you like hounds after a fox. They’ll take you and hang every one of you from the highest tree. They are back from the war!”
The “they” didn’t have to be explained. The bummers knew he was referring to the planters whose homes they had pillaged and burned. Somewhere in their cunning skulls came the realization that these men were returning and might avenge their defeat on the battlefield by striking out at the looters.
“Well . . said Cap’n, wavering.
“You can have the horse and buggy,” Thaddeus said. “Just let us go.”
Amélie could feel Thaddeus shaking and she realized that underneath the bluster he was frightened, too.
“And have you tattlin’ and them out gunnin’ for us?” Cap’n said.
“You have horses. We’ll be on foot. That’s a good head start.”
The bummers muttered and argued among themselves. “Hell, he ain’t no damn good to us.”
“Never was.”
“Shoot the pair of ’em!”
Ralph waved his arms. “We was aimin’ to split up purty soon, wasn’t we?”
“Yes,” Cap’n agreed. He turned to Amélie and Thaddeus. “Make tracks! Git the hell out of here!”
They walked away, Amélie with her spine rigid, expecting at any moment to feel the impact of a bullet.
“Bunch of cowards,” Thaddeus murmured under his breath, holding her arm tightly.
“Will they shoot us?” *
“I don’t know.” He quickened his pace.
“Should we hurry?” Amélie asked, wanting desperately to do just that. “It might tempt them.”
“Maybe.” He glanced back over his shoulder. “It's all right. They’re leaving.” The pressure on her arm eased. “Where were you headed?”
“I’m staying at the Woodsons’ farm.”
“Is it far?” Thaddeus asked.
“I think a mile, perhaps two.”
Now that her nerves were no longer taut with fear, the feeling of disembodiment came over her again. She still couldn’t assimilate it. Thaddeus, returned from the dead. Her husband—alive.
“Oh, Thaddeus! Thaddeus! It all seems so incredible. I thought you’d been hanged. At Fort Donelsen. As a spy.”
“I was never a spy. Are you visiting these Woodsons? Who are they?”
“Friends,” she answered, not wanting to tell him that in two days she would have been married to Royce, making her a bigamist.
“Oh, Thaddeus!” she exclaimed again, turning to him. “I’m so glad. I—I just can’t believe it.”
“No more than I.” He put his arm about her shoulder, hugging her, laying his bearded cheek on hers. She was surprised at the heat of his skin, the bright red flush staining it. The excitement, she thought.
“I went to look for you,” she said. “Oh, there’s so much to say, so much to tell.”
“We’ll have the rest of our lives to catch up. But now all I want to do is go home. I’m tired, Amélie, so tired.” He stumbled over a stone, clinging to her arm more than she clung to him. A thousand questions crowded her tongue. What really happened at Donelsen? Why was he wearing a Yankee uniform? What was he doing with those disreputable bummers? And Damon Fowler, how did he fit into all this? But Amélie, sensing Thaddeus’s weariness, asked nothing. There would be time, the rest of their lives as Thaddeus said.
They came out of the woods to the wagon track and were nearing the house when a figure—in the distance looking like Mr. Woodson—emerged with a rifle.
“Halt!” he shouted, pointing it at them.
Amélie and Thaddeus f
roze, Amélie in stunned bewilderment. The next moment she realized that she had lost her bonnet in the struggle with the bummers and was wearing Thaddeus’s Yankee coat. She quickly got out of the ragged tunic and waved it frantically over her head.
Mr. Woodson lowered the rifle and when they drew a little closer, dropped his gun and came running.
“What’s happened, Amélie?”
“Bummers stopped me,” she said, replacing the coat about her torn gown. “And this is—oh, God!”
Thaddeus’s knees buckled and he would have fallen had not Mr. Woodson caught him.
“He rescued me,” Amélie said, hedging, unable at the last moment to confess Thaddeus’s identity. “We must help him inside.”
They put him on the sofa in the parlor. Mr. Woodson lighted the fire to take the damp from the room. Amélie pulled a throw rug over Thaddeus as he had begun to shake and shiver.
“You’re ill,” Amélie said.
“Only a chill,” he replied through chattering teeth.
Mr. Woodson hovered behind Amélie, a shot glass of scuppernong wine in his hand. He said, “I just came back to the house to get my rifle—there’s rabbits in the corn—when I saw you—didn’t mean to aim, but ...”
“It’s all right,” Amélie said. “Is there a doctor we can send for?”
“No. The only doctor we had, Mr. Thompson, went off with the Ninth. Killed at Gettysburg. But I’ll fetch Ma. She’s got a fine hand for sickness.”
Amélie ran upstairs to get out of her torn dress and to pin up her hair. She was too embarrassed to explain how close she had come to rape.
When she got downstairs, Thaddeus had slipped into a fitful sleep, his head moving from side to side. His forehead burned to the touch.
In a delirium, he began to mumble. At first the words were incoherent, but gradually his voice became louder, clearer.
“Walked away—yes, walked away. Too much. The damned war—all the noise, the banging, the shrieking and screaming. Nothing like what I expected. Nothing. And Caruthers, his guts spilling out. Can’t stand it. Not again. I can’t do it again.’’
Amélie wiped his brow. She thought, he’s reliving the war, poor darling.
“Walk away. That’s it. Just walk away. No one will notice. Amélie—what will she say?’’ He groaned. “God, I don’t want to die! Don’t want to die. Walk away.” He swallowed painfully on a sob, then went on. “Parade ground, a dead Reb, a dead Yankee. One shot, one hanged. One a deserter, the other a spy? Not buried yet. Who’ll see? No one around. Put your gray on him. Even exchange. Walk away. Just walk away.’’
Walk away. The meaning of those words hit Amélie like a fist to the midriff. Thaddeus had walked away. Deserted. There could be no other explanation. He had fled from his regiment and exchanged uniforms with a dead Yankee. That was why the records at Donelson had not shown his name. The Confederate who had been executed had really been Theodore Warder of Alabama. And because the dead Yankee in Thaddeus’s uniform was without identification he was not given official notice. Considering wartime rumor, mix-ups, and garbled word of mouth accounts, Thaddeus’s “death’’ was probably one of many reported in error.
Even the Maryland Rangers had thought him dead. Apparently it never entered his comrades’ heads that he had deserted. But he had. Thaddeus, her husband, was a coward, a deserter. And yet, curiously enough, she could not summon the anger she might have once felt. A year ago she would have despised Thaddeus, looked upon him as the lowest form of life. But she had lived through too much, had seen the guns belching yellow fire at Missionary Ridge, had known choking fear, the terrible urge to run. There in the midst of chaos, of shattering, earsplitting explosions, among the dead and dying, she had spent her own frozen moments in hell.
As she sat over Thaddeus the same haunting pictures went through her head as had plagued her so many times before: the woman weeping over her dead husband on the railroad bank, the amputated arms and legs overflowing a wash basin, young Jack Shelby in his coffin. She saw the emaciated prisoners at Gratiot tramping barefoot on the frozen ground, saw Belle Terre, places set in the dining room for a family who had fled, saw the thousands of women’s letters that began, “I have cried until no more tears will come.” She saw her own father’s white face, the father she had quarreled with because he hadn’t “gumption.”
She did not ask herself, Was the war worth it? She did not have the strength to grapple with such a weighty question. She could only go forward, taking each hour as it came, trying to understand. Looking down at Thaddeus, flushed, feverish, babbling on about the nightmare that must forever torment him, she felt only compassion, a pity that brought tears to her eyes. He might be a coward but she could forgive him. The Amélie Townsend who had argued so vehemently with Damon Fowler about secession and states’ rights, the narrowminded girl who had hurled angry words at her father, had vanished somewhere along a bloody trail that led across a shattered country seething with hate.
When the rest of the Woodsons came in Amélie was applying cloths soaked in vinegar to Thaddeus’s burning forehead. Mrs. Woodson took over at once. Brisk, competent, she gave orders to have her box of medicines and a pitcher of cool water brought and a bed made ready upstairs.
Amélie beckoned Royce aside for a few whispered words. “It’s Thaddeus,” she said, “my husband.”
His face paled under its tan. “But I thought—”
“It was a case of mistaken identity. I don’t know how he got here to Virginia. He was with a gang of bummers,” she added, feeling she owed him the truth.
“Amélie . . He took her hands in his.
“We must tell your folks,” she said, looking away from his eyes, stark with shock.
“Yes . . . yes. Amélie—I love you.”
“Oh, Royce, I know, I know.” She wanted to put her arms around him, to comfort him.
“Do you still love—-Thaddeus?” The name came out with difficulty.
“Of course. He is my husband. Oh, Royce, I’m sorry, so very sorry.”
He shook his head, wounded, unable to say more. Had he reached too high, wanted too much in wanting Amélie? He did not like to think so. That she still loved her husband he doubted. Honor held her to him, the honor that made her so unique a woman. Her love for Thaddeus he could challenge, try to overcome. But the honor that bound her to another he felt powerless against.
Thaddeus was lucid the next morning, though still burning with fever. They had put him to bed in the room Amélie had been using. She spent the night in a deep chair near the window, dozing, one ear cocked should he need her. Now she sat beside him, holding the back of his head while he sipped from a cup of broth.
“Have I been going on?” he asked, sinking back on the pillow.
“Yes.” She gave him a faint smile.
“Then—then you know about how I—”
“Yes.”
“You must despise me.”
“No, Thaddeus.” She lifted one of his wasted hands and kissed it. “I don’t despise you, darlin’. Please believe me.”
For a few moments neither of them spoke. He plucked at the patchwork quilt. “I suppose you want to know how I got to Virginia with the bummers.”
“It’s all right, Thaddeus. You needn’t tell me if you don’t feel up to it.”
“But I do,” he protested with burning eyes. “I want you to know. You see”—he swallowed and began again— “you see, after I got into the Yankee’s uniform I went into Nashville. It felt strange, but no one stopped me, no one asked questions. I had my wallet, but there was no money in it. But I still had my watch—the one Father gave me. I found a pawn shop and hocked it.”
“You what?”
“Hocked it. I got five dollars in gold.”
The watch, faithful to honor unto death. The gilded letters burned in her memory, to Thaddeus from his father, words that had damned Damon Fowler. But he hadn’t killed Thaddeus, he hadn’t stolen his watch. How he had come by it, she didn’t know. She hadn’t
given him a chance to explain. Instead she had been judge and jury, finding him guilty without letting him speak a syllable in his own defense.
“Then I joined up with another Yank,” Thaddeus was saying, “a deserter like me. From Nashville we worked our way south ...”
He went on recalling his experiences, a long, rambling story Amélie scarcely heard. She was thinking of Damon, thinking of the night they had spent together in Nashville, how he had told her he loved her. She was remembering the passionate, tender, wonderful joy they had shared, touching, kissing, binding body and soul. I loved him, too, she thought, despite our differences I loved him. And if I could have loved him enough to forget he was a Yankee why hadn’t I been able to give him the benefit of the doubt when I saw that cursed watch the next morning? Why hadn’t I waited?
“. . .fell in with the bummers—I was a hunted man. It was survival, Amélie.” He grasped her hand, his eyes moist with appeal.
“I understand, darlin’.”
Yes, she could forgive poor, weak Thaddeus. Never strong, he had broken under the strain. After Fort Sumter he had ridden off with the others, an eager young man with the best intentions. But when harsh reality failed to match patriotic illusion it had shattered him. In her heart she could not blame him for failing. But she could never forgive herself. She could never forgive her blindness, her quick, unreasoning judgment that had condemned the man she loved. How stupid I was, she thought with lacerating self-reproach. How utterly mindless to have walked away from the only real love I’ve ever known, leaving a lasting bitterness between us. We had no future, I know that now, but to have lost Damon’s love, to have him hate me, is my own fault, an act of folly I’ll always regret.
A short time later, while Thaddeus slept, Amélie stole out of the house and around to the far side of the barn. There, leaning her head against the rough wood, she wept tears of bitter desolation.
Thaddeus wanted to go home. Over and over again he begged Amélie to take him back to Maryland, back to Bancroft. She had told him about little Charles and he had wept brokenly, the child’s death making it imperative in his mind that he return.
Honor's Fury Page 29
