by Tim Westover
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Pvt. Seth Anthony Jenkins—née Sarah Anne Jenkins—draws a ragged breath into her bruised lungs, smelling burning metal as Union cannons fire another round. Jenkins thought Peachtree Creek was bad, but Lt. Gen. John Bell Hood has gone and done himself one better here in Atlanta. Jenkins presses her fist harder against the blood welling from her side and closes her eyes to block the sight of a dead soldier a few feet away. She’d turn her head if she could, though the horse wailing its agonies in the bloody mud to her other side would surely be even more distressing than the empty open eyes of her fellow soldier.
This sure isn’t how Jenkins pictured it when she sheared her hair off in the cowshed, stole Jimmy’s Sunday best clothes, and marched down to the recruiting tent and made her mark, SAJ, proud of how she could form actual letters while so many of the other boys in line just put an X beside their names. But her mama had been from Texas and had always said no child of hers was going to run around as ignorant as a Georgia farmer’s child, not knowing even how to print her letters. Sarah Anne never had the patience to sit still and learn to string all those letters together like her brother William had, but she sure knew enough to write her monogramme.
A riderless horse thunders up, rising out of the noise and smoke like a ghostly spirit, eyes white and rolling, nostrils black and flared. Its flank and empty saddle are sprayed with human blood, crimson and slick. Jenkins squeezes her eyes shut as the massive iron-shod hooves come near her head, thinking it will be a relief to stop having to hold her own guts in place. A crushed-in skull would be a quick way to go. Quicker than dying of a belly wound in the mud outside Atlanta, surrounded by men who’ve already given up the ghost, butternut uniforms and blue ones indistinguishable under the muck of battle.
The terrified horse’s hooves pass so close, Jenkins feels the short fine bristles on her scalp tingle with the electricity of their nearness, like how wearing a clean woolen skirt on a cold winter day will sometimes generate a spark or make your hair stand on end. It seems a lifetime ago since Sarah Anne has worn a skirt, though she’s only been marching with the Army of the Confederate States of America for six months. Six months, and nobody ever caught scent of her as a girl, and now they’re going to find out when she’s dead and can’t have nothing to say about it.
After flying over close enough to ruffle her lashes, the horse disappears again into the billowing smoke. Atlanta’s burning, Hood having set fire to the supply depots and to eighty-one ammunition cars to keep them from falling into Union hands. Jenkins isn’t sure exactly how many soldiers have died this day, but it’s in the thousands. Thousands and thousands, on both sides; she’s fixing to be one of them, so she ought to know. She’s slightly cheered by the thought that maybe they won’t discover her secret after all. Maybe that fire burning Atlanta to the ground will just keep burning—burn through the buildings and the trees, burn the bloody grass meadow, scorch her flesh clean to its bones and then to ash, and leave nothing behind to say she was ever anything but Seth Anthony Jenkins, aged seventeen, big-hipped for a boy but as scrawny as the rest of them and a better shot with a rifle than most. Her daddy taught her that last bit before he went off to volunteer back in ’61 right after Jefferson Davis made things official. William didn’t wait too long to follow after him, and then it was just Mama and Sarah Anne left behind with only little Jimmy and the dog, Rascal, to look out for them.
Well, Jenkins doesn’t regret stealing trousers and signing up. She misses her mama a little, though she could never be the girl her mama wanted. She certainly doesn’t miss the skirts and the cooking and the strangulating unfreedom of being a woman, but she does miss her mama, and her dog. She loved that dog.
Sarah Anne is mortified to feel tears sliding down her grimy cheeks. All these months of fighting and eating sawdust and marching her feet bloody and raw without a single tear. And now, when she’s about to die with her perfect record intact, her eyeballs start leaking over a big old dog.
She clutches her belly tight with both hands as the sobs wrack her, rifle forgotten or lost someplace in the choking smoke and the smell of gunpowder and metal and death. She hears guns still pounding, but farther off. Everybody in her vicinity is past groaning or moaning, even the poor horse at last, thank goodness. Sarah Anne never could bear to see an animal in pain.
When she opens eyes bleared up with tears and dirt, she smiles, thinking her time has come. Rascal was an old dog when she left; he must’ve passed over to the other side by now. She knows he did because there he is, padding toward her through a gap in the smoke of battle.
“Hey there, ol’ Rascal,” she croaks when he stops to stand over her. “Nice to see you. You’re such a good boy. Always were.”
She raises one bloody hand from her side, keeping the other balled tight and pressed hard to staunch the blood. She reaches for his muzzle, her fingers seeming to pass right through, not connecting with anything, but moving the particles in the air so the thick grey smoke swirls and the dog’s image shimmers. But she tries again and this time her hand meets solidity, fur rougher and more wiry than she remembers, ears more pointy and more wide.
“You’re not Rascal . . .” Her voice rakes her parched throat. The dog licks her face, and her vision clears. For a heartbeat she’d imagined herself at the farm back home, just lazing in the field with her dog instead of stirring the boiling pot of laundry her mama always had her help Jimmy with on account of him being so small. But it’s not Jimmy staring lifeless at her from a few feet away, but some poor farmer’s child like her, Confederate or Union, doesn’t matter, dead, and probably far from home like her. And it’s not Rascal she’s staring up at, but some barrel-chested wolflike thing with a strange mottled coat like nothing she’s ever seen. His eyes glow at her past the smoke and the distant shouting and the scent of burning that always accompanies a battle.
The dog nuzzles her hand before bending down and grabbing a mouthful of the butternut wool of her coat. His jaws clamp firm but gentle on the homespun fabric, and he begins to drag her through the grass and mud, away from the fire and smoke.
Sarah Anne loses consciousness between one blood-filled gully and the next, but when she opens her eyes, it’s to the white canvas ceiling of a medical tent. Her body is pleasantly numb where morphine floods her veins, her mind floating too far away to be more than mildly alarmed when the doctor, with his fancy moustache and Union-blue trousers and grimy white apron, leans over her.
“You’ve pulled through, I see,” he says. “I’m sure your mother will be glad to have you back. I take it she’s already lost a son to this war? A brother you might’ve stolen some clothes from in order to sign up?”
Sarah Anne notices for the first time her nakedness beneath the sheets. Well, not naked: bandages wrap her in what feels like a hundred different places from knee to neck. “Jimmy,” she says, her throat still rougher than burlap. “I took Jimmy’s Sunday best.”
The doctor studies her, squints before nodding, then wipes his hands on his blood-smeared apron. “Well, you’ve got the grit, I’ll give you that,” he says. “Few soldiers wearing a uniform of any color with a puncture the size of yours and all those burns could’ve dragged themselves up that ridge to my infirmary tent. If you hadn’t, you’d be dead like the other twelve thousand poor souls.”
The doctor moves away to check another patient’s pulse, and Sarah Anne watches sunlight dapple the canvas ceiling overhead and notes the absence of pounding guns and knows Atlanta is lost, and the South is lost, but most of all she knows her secret is lost and she is a girl again.
