by Laura Briggs
The banister was scuffed, the carpet beneath their shoes faded here and there among the floral pattern. Glancing back at her, the nurse continued, “Mrs. Maudell doesn’t get many visitors these days. Your showing up this way has been good for her—gives her a chance to talk about the past with someone who’ll do more than nod and smile.”
“She’s the one helping me,” Jenna insisted, pulling a notepad from her bag. “Does Mrs. Maudell have any family left in Sylvan Spring?” she wondered, as they drew near a door that was slightly ajar near the end of the hall.
“Just some distant connections, I think,” said the nurse. “Her husband’s family, mostly. Her kin is somewhere over in Georgia last I heard.” She pushed the door the rest of the way open, revealing a spacious bedroom.
A fire crackled in the grate, heavy drapes pulled aside to shed light across the antique furnishings and rug.
Resting against the pillows in a four poster bed was Josephine Maudell, her bony frame wrapped in a quilted bed jacket. “Sit down,” she said, a frail hand patting the nearby chair. To the nurse she said, “Fetch the boxes from the wardrobe, Mollie. The two on the top shelf.” She picked excitedly at the comforter spread over her lap, gaze shifting to Jenna as she asked, “Do you take coffee, Miss Cade? I’ll have Mollie fetch some—”
“No, thank you,” she said. “I had some with breakfast.” Taking the offered chair, she hung her knapsack across the back. “I have so many questions to ask you,” she said. “All for the book, of course. I hope you won’t object to being quoted, since your ancestor was so prominent in the town’s history.”
“I won’t mind,” Josephine said, after a pause to consider. “I’m used to it, with the newspaper calling so often. If by some miracle I should live to be a hundred, they won’t have anything left to write about.” She chuckled at Jenna’s expression. Reaching to pat her fingers in a kindly gesture, she said, “Don’t worry. I’m not counting on more than a few months at best. The doctor thinks he’s smart, but I’ve read my future in the words and glances. Now it’s just a matter of the Lord’s timing.”
Jenna was saved from making a reply by the appearance of two flat storage boxes. The nurse placed them carefully in her lap and then withdrew to a wingback chair to take up her cross-stitch hoop.
“Open the top one,” Josephine said, shifting impatiently among the pillows.
Jenna did as instructed, moving aside the lid to find the contents shrouded in tissue paper. The layers folded back to reveal a jacket of gray wool, badly frayed and moth-eaten. The buttons were tarnished. A stain that might be rust or something worse spread across the left shoulder.
Lifting it gingerly from the box, she found a cotton shirt and trousers folded beneath. Both were full of holes and scarcely recognizable as any kind of historic treasures. Jenna’s heart beat as if they came from the Smithsonian collection, hands shaking as she held them up for closer examination.
“Sewed by his mother, I’ve heard,” Josephine said, touching the jacket’s edge. “Army regulation.”
“Arthur wore this. I…it’s hard to wrap my mind around.” She shook her head, searching for something more intelligent to say. All she could think of was how the patient described in the doctor’s notebook actually donned this uniform, wore it day to day through the camps and trails of a soldier’s life. Wore it into battle, too, she supposed, with an eye for the dark stain that marred the fabric.
“He must have been tall,” she noted, taking in the size of the clothes. “Muscular, too.”
Beneath the uniform, she found a stack of stationary bound together with an old ribbon. “These must be his letters,” she guessed, running a finger along the edges to count a dozen or so pages. Not as many as she hoped for, but posting mail had been a more difficult process for members of the Rebel army. Sliding the ribbon off, she unfolded the topmost sheet. “Dearest Mariah,” she began. Her lips ceased to read the tender lines that followed as she stared in disbelief. Mariah?
Slowly, she looked up to face the woman in the bed. “Your great-great grandfather,” she said. “He and the doctor…they were sweethearts?”
A slight chuckle escaped the older woman for her look of shock. “I suppose they must have been, for a time at least. He would have had many girls interested in him, a man of his looks and character. Including my great-great grandmother, who was a bit younger than him, I believe.”
Jenna glanced through the other letters, seeing all were addressed the same way. “It seems so strange,” she said. “Why would your family still have these? I mean, obviously things didn’t work out between them.”
“Perhaps she gave them back to him. In a quarrel, or some such incident. He married somebody else, you know.” Her hostess wore a troubled look, as if trying to recall something well out of reach.
Gently, Jenna suggested, “Someone in your family must have talked about it. Stories passed down, that sort of thing.”
“Oh, no one talked about those things back then,” she said, dismissing the idea with a wave of the hand. “People didn’t air their troubles for everyone to see. It was private and more respectful.”
Jenna wanted to ask more—to know why lovers who supposedly broke apart would later be buried beneath the same tree, especially when one of them had a spouse also buried in the same spot.
Her hostess seemed eager to change the subject, though, telling her, “There’s more papers in the bottom of the box. Things to do with his regiment and a few from the town.”
Digging deeper, she found a military discharge certificate that showed Arthur was sent home due to ‘chronic ill health.’ Yellowed newspaper clippings depicted events that took place long after the war, including the construction of the grist mill and later the county hospital.
There was an engraved county map that might prove helpful in tracing the background to the old homesteads. To her surprise, there were also photographs, sepia images of young people crowded in front of a whitewashed building.
“That was a one-room schoolhouse,” Josephine explained. She tapped a knobby finger against a tall, dark-haired youth in the back row. “That’s Arthur. He would’ve been seventeen or so.”
“Handsome.” Jenna smiled at the face that stared boldly into the camera. Beside him was a youth even more striking, with sharp cheekbones and a half-lidded gaze that made him seem a trifle arrogant.
They were the oldest members in a class of students ranging from teens to a boy still in short trousers. Plain, honest faces for the most part, with clothes to match. The gray-haired woman seated among the smaller children must be the teacher, the one whose headstone she helped clean the day before.
“Do you know why Arthur was buried in the old cemetery?” she asked, coming back to the question that continued to haunt her. “You said his grave’s location wasn’t known until I found it. You had told me he worked his father’s land until he died, and I got the impression their farm was close to the town, not the spring.”
Her hostess took a long sip from her water glass. “I can’t say I ever heard. His parents share a plot in the town cemetery, as does one of his daughters who died young. Perhaps it was his wife that connected him to the spring.”
“Maybe she lived there before they married,” Jenna mused, jotting the idea on her notepad. It didn’t explain everything, of course, but it was a start. If she could find more about the wife, the rest might eventually fall into place.
“Can you tell me anything about Mrs. Widlow? You said she knew Arthur before the war.” Pencil poised, Jenna waited.
“Yes, a local girl. I should have told you before. There was a picture somewhere of her...and something else, as well. I don’t know.” A foggy look had come over the woman. She closed her eyes, pressing a hand to her forehead to rub the skin in a worried motion.
This drew the nurse’s attention. Coming beside the bed, she placed a hand on Josephine’s shoulder. “Time for you to rest, Mrs. Maudell,” she said, voice soothing. “I’ll see our guest downstairs.”
“Take the letters with you,” Josephine said, “and the other papers, as well. The uniform is already promised to the festival display on Friday but not the rest.”
Carefully, Jenna packed the ragged clothing back in its box and placed it on the chair. “I’ll bring these other things back soon,” she promised, hoisting the smaller container in her arms.
The older woman seemed not to hear, face bowed against the wrinkled hand.
Back in her room, Jenna cleared away her laptop and research papers, switching the desk lamp on to illuminate the work space. As she slid the bundle of stationary free from its ribbon, bits of paper crumbled from the edges of the long-ago letters. History turning to dust in her hands, a notion that made her shake with a sense of urgency and excitement.
Carefully, she unfolded the pages to spread across the oak surface. She sank into the chair, one leg tucked beneath her, elbows propped on the desk as she leaned closer to study the artifacts with a sense of awe. One by one, she went through them, finding emotion that seemed too private for a stranger’s eyes, even those who read it a hundred and fifty years after the fact.
All were addressed to the same woman and echoed the same tone of a lover’s devotion. Love that stayed steady and even grew in strength when the rest of his thoughts seemed to turn to bitterness.
April 28th 1862
A camp near Corinth, Mississippi
Dearest Mariah,
We have been at Corinth only a week now, and already we have fought and lost two skirmishes. I could bruise my fingers writing to you of all I feel, knowing that hundreds of miles stretch between us. There are not words or paper enough to describe it, though, so I will not even try. Know only that you are in my heart at all times and in my thoughts as much as this stringent new army life permits.
All day, we shoulder our muskets and practice maneuvers that are mostly forgotten when we need them. In battle, all is smoke and noise. We fire blindly into the air, never sure if our aim finds its target. Commander’s shouts are lost to the boom of artillery, and every man focuses on loading and reloading his weapon, sometimes forgetting to fire in the moments between.
It is not until the smoke clears, and the cries of the wounded replace the sounds of ammunition, that we recover our ability to feel and think as we did before. Then, our senses are flooded with the notion that we are alive, still—tired, desperately thirsty, and in need of sustenance—but alive, nonetheless.
Being alive is all one can expect at times, yet I never fail to be surprised at the sound of laughter after weeks of grim silence. If I should die (and I know there is a real chance that I may), then there is little for me to regret except that I failed to make you my wife while I still had the chance. Already, I feel bound to you in my heart, as if a ring and promise had brought us together. I pray that someday it will, despite the obstacles we face.
Such obstacles seem too strong for faith even, at times, and I can’t help wondering if my will and God’s is ever the same. This is especially true at night when the darkness is close around me, and the silence rings loud as any battle yell. It is then I began to doubt Him ever so slightly, and often I don’t believe again until the first speck of light has touched the horizon.
Roll call was 5AM, breakfast at six. Corn cakes and salt pork washed down with coffee brewed from chicory, instead of the beans made rare by Union blockades. Then came drill session, hours of firing a musket, marching and forming ranks until the steps seemed automatic as a country dance. That was a soldier’s morning, not exactly the same as a farmer’s, as Arthur knew from years of rising early to break the soil in his father’s fields.
How different were the fields he looked on now.
Ground that was black and barren with the scars of battle. He’d seen men burn alive in the wildfires sparked by artillery—soldiers who were already wounded, too helpless to crawl from the foliage that blazed around them. Those who tried to rescue them bore the blisters in their hands and faces, their uniforms singed beyond repair.
“Never seen fire and brimstone on earth before,” panted one ragged soldier Arthur tried to bandage in the moments after such an outbreak. His breath came loud and harsh before it ceased altogether, his body turning slack in Arthur’s hands before he could speak a final word of comfort.
Death stalked those in camp, as well. Cases of “the shakes,” as they called it, overran the surgeon’s tent and consumed the fevered patients sometimes waiting in the rain for their medicine. Those who weren’t ill spent their days chopping wood and foraging food, since rations were hard to come by in the wilderness routes they often traveled.
Arthur was part of the group chosen to hunt game in the woods surrounding their summer campsite, a spot in rural Kentucky. They pitched their tents in sweltering heat, the sun bearing down on them with angry precision. Even this wasn’t enough to keep the sick from freezing, as men shivered beneath their wool uniforms, struggling to perform drill maneuvers on legs that threatened to collapse.
It was a miracle that he was not among them. The bronchial attacks of old should have weakened his resistance, the doctor barely pulling him back from the reaper’s grasp those weeks before he enlisted. To her gentle hands, he secretly gave the credit for this newfound immunity, though his letters to family members and the reverend back home spoke only of God’s merciful healing.
I am lucky to have the strength to do this, he reminded himself, fighting past thorns and bramble in search of something to feed the hollow stomachs of a dozen tent mates back at camp.
Birds shrieked at his presence, scaring off rabbits and larger animals his company could have boiled into a hearty stew. The wild peaches he found were a poor substitute for venison, but he tucked them inside his haversack anyway for sharing with others around the fire that night.
Biting into one, he swallowed down mouthfuls of pitted fruit, worms and all. Why should they bother him, when maggots hatched daily from the biscuit supplies, and lice crawled through his hair all night long?
He ate everything but the pit, which he tossed for the birds that were still squawking in the branches above. Two of them dove for it, black birds with plumage that glistened in the sun. They scattered as the sound of boots scuffed the ground. Arthur straightened his shoulders when a familiar gray-coated figure appeared suddenly from a side path.
Wray Camden carried himself more like a commander than a private, his stalwart build adding to the sense of authority. His skin was coated in grime, a knife sheathed in his belt. There was another tucked inside his boot, a pistol buried somewhere among the contents of the haversack that dangled at his side.
“C’mon up the trail,” he said, in a tone that would have seemed gruff to any but a friend’s ear. “I need your help with something.” Then he was gone without a glance back to see if the other man followed.
Arthur would never have considered doing otherwise, their allegiance to each other virtually unchanged since childhood games of old. Back then, it was tales of Daniel Boone and Lewis and Clark that drove them into uncharted territory, pieces of driftwood propped on their shoulders for imaginary muskets. Wray had been the leader those times as well, beating paths through the wildest parts of Crooked Wood, his steps turning wherever his instincts told them.
Now, wading after his friend through another overgrown trail, Arthur expected to find timber ready for chopping or a stream for catching fish. Instead, three bodies lay inside a dry creek bed. Their uniforms—what remained of them at least—were a deep shade of blue.
“What happened?” he asked, racking his brain for news of a skirmish before they arrived. No one had reported seeing Union troops within a hundred miles, their camps thought to be somewhere further north.
“Might have been a scouting group,” Wray said, crouching to study the nearest body. “They could’ve run into some militia members, or even some homestead owners. If anybody lives back here.”
Flies crawled over the scant remain
s, flesh picked apart by forest scavengers.
Wray stood and wiped his hands on a coat almost as grimy as those worn by the dead men. Disgust flickered briefly in his face, whether for the state of the bodies, or the meaning behind the uniforms was hard to tell. Wray seldom spoke of the enemy or his reasons for fighting them, even though he’d been among the first of Sylvan Spring’s citizens to lend his name to the recruitment roster.
“Let’s see what they left behind,” he said, with a nod to where a campfire’s ring had scorched the earth in past weeks.
Arthur combed the nearby weeds, finding some blankets and a knife that was broken off just above the handle. There was a haversack with tin plates and cups and a few pieces of silverware. An unfinished game of checkers was left on a cedar stump, the winning move just two spaces away.
Arthur glanced over the items, hoping to find something more useful for the men at his camp. Ignoring the previous owners proved difficult, however, his mind wandering in their direction no matter where his gaze was trained. He was used to his stench, and that of his campmates, from the limited bathing sources. A corpse was another matter. Bile rose in his throat the longer he searched the campsite. “We should bury them,” he said, after a while.
“All right,” said Wray, as if it made no difference to him either way, his pack dropping to the ground with a heavy thud.
They made a trench with a spade they carried for digging edible roots. Arthur covered the bodies with the blankets he found, Wray heaping shovelfuls of dirt over them. A funeral without ceremony or stone markers, like those on battle sites they’d left back in Corinth. Lonely graves for a lonely death.
He felt this way, even surrounded by rows of soldiers when the smoke billowed and artillery pierced the foliage they hid behind. Dying was a solitary nightmare, each man’s experience different from the rest. This much he learned, having witnessed the final breaths of more men than he could ever count or remember.
