Caroline had sewed every stitch of the impossibly small dress and beribboned bonnet, made them sturdy, so they could be worn by all the children to follow.
No, Jacob cried inwardly, hating his helplessness.
“Well, now,” the man murmured. “Ain’t this a pretty little family? Maybe I’ll just look them up sometime, offer my condolences.”
Had he been able, Jacob would have killed the bummer in that moment, throttled the life out of him with his bare hands, and never regretted the act. Although he struggled with all his might, trying to gather the last shreds of his strength, the effort proved useless.
It was the worst kind of agony, imagining this man reading the letters, noting the return address on each and every envelope, seeking Caroline and Rachel out, offering a pretense of sympathy.
Taking advantage.
And Jacob could do nothing to stop him, nothing to protect his wife and daughter from this monster or others like him, the renegades, the enemies of decency and innocence in all their forms.
With the smile of a demon, the bummer snapped the case closed and reached for his rucksack, ready, at last, to flee.
It was then that a figure loomed behind him, a gray shadow of a man, planted the sole of one boot squarely in the center of the thief’s back, and sent him sprawling across Jacob’s inert frame.
The pain was instant, throbbing in every bone and muscle of Jacob’s body.
“Stealing from a dead man,” the shadow said, standing tall, his buttery-smooth drawl laced with contempt. “That’s low, even for a Yank.”
The bummer scrambled to his feet, groped for something, probably his rifle, and paled when he came up empty. Most likely, he’d dropped the weapon in his eagerness to rob one of his own men.
“I ought to run you through with this fine steel sword of mine, Billy,” the other man mused idly. He must have ridden ahead of his detachment, dismounted nearby, and moved silently through the scattered bodies. “After all, this is a war, now, isn’t it? And you are my foe, as surely as I am yours.”
Jacob’s vision, unclear to begin with, blurred further, and there was a pounding in his ears, but he could make out the contours of the two men, now standing on either side of him, and he caught the faint murmur of their words, a mere wisp of sound.
“You don’t want to kill me, Johnny,” the thief reasoned, with a note of anxious congeniality in his voice, raising both palms as if in surrender. “It wouldn’t be honorable, with us Union boys at a plain disadvantage.” He drew in a strange, swift whistle of a breath. “Anyhow, I wasn’t hurtin’ nobody. Just makin’ good use of things this poor fella has no need of, bein’ dead and all.”
By now, Jacob was aware of men and horses all around, though there was no cannon fire, no shouting, no sharp report of rifles.
“You want these men to see you murder an unarmed man?” wheedled the man addressed as Billy. “Where I come from, you’d be hanged for that. It’s a war crime, ain’t it?”
“We’re not ‘where you come from,’” answered Johnny coolly. The bayonet affixed to the barrel of his carbine glinted in the lingering smoke and the dust raised by the horses. “This is Virginia,” he went on, with a note of fierce reverence. “And you are an intruder here, sir.”
Billy—the universal name for all Union soldiers, as Johnny was for their Confederate counterparts—spat, foolhardy in his fear. “I reckon the rules are about the same, though, whether North or South,” he ventured. Even Jacob, from his faulty vantage point, saw the terror behind all that bluster. “Fancy man like you—an officer, at that—must know how it is. Even if you don’t hang for killin’ with no cause, you’ll be court-martialed for sure, once your superiors catch wind of what you done. And that’s bound to leave a stain on your high-and-mighty reputation as a Southern gentleman, ain’t it? Just you think, sir, of the shame all those well-mannered folks back home on the old plantation will have to contend with, all on your account.”
A slow, untroubled grin took shape on the Confederate captain’s soot-smudged face. His gray uniform was torn and soiled, the brass of his buttons and insignia dull, and his boots were scuffed, but even Jacob, nearly blind, could see that his dignity was inborn, as much a part of him as the color of his eyes.
“It might be worth hanging,” he replied, almost cordially, like a man debating some minor point of military ethics at an elegant dinner party far removed from the sound and fury of war, “the pleasure of killing a latrine rat such as yourself, that is. As for these men, most of whom are under my command, as it happens, well, they’ve seen their friends and cousins and brothers skewered by Yankee bayonets and blown to fragments by their canon. Just today, in fact, they saw General Jackson relieved of an arm.” At this, the captain paused, swallowed once. “Most likely, they’d raise a cheer as you fell.”
Dimly, Jacob saw Billy Yank’s Adam’s apple bob along the length of his neck. Under any other circumstances, he might have been amused by the fellow’s nervous bravado, but he could feel himself retreating further and further into the darkness of approaching death, and there was no room in him for frivolous emotions.
“Now, that just ain’t Christian,” protested Billy, conveniently overlooking his own moral lapse.
The captain gave a raspy laugh, painful to hear, and shook his head. “A fine sentiment, coming from the likes of you.” In the next moment, his face hardened, aristocratic even beneath its layers of dried sweat and dirt. He turned slightly, keeping one eye on his prisoner, and shouted a summons into the rapidly narrowing nothingness surrounding the three of them.
Several men hurried over, though they were invisible to Jacob, and the sounds they made were faint.
“Get this piece of dog dung out of my sight before I pierce his worthless flesh with my sword for the pure pleasure of watching him bleed,” the officer ordered. “He is a disgrace, even to that uniform.”
There were words of reply, though Jacob could not make them out, and Jacob sensed a scuffle as the thief resisted capture, a modern-day Judas, bleating a traitor’s promises, willing to betray men who’d fought alongside him, confided their hopes and fears to him around campfires or on the march.
Jacob waited, expecting the gentleman soldier to follow his men, go on about his business of overseeing the capture of wounded blue-coats, the recovery of his own troops, alive and dead.
Instead, the man crouched, as the thief had done earlier. He took up the rucksack Billy had been forced to leave behind, rummaged within it, produced the packet of letters and the leather case containing the likenesses of Jacob’s beloved wife and daughter. He opened the latter, examined the images inside, smiled sadly.
Then he tucked the items inside Jacob’s bloody coat, paused as though startled, and looked directly into his motionless eyes.
“My God,” he said, under his breath. “You’re alive.”
Jacob could not acknowledge the remark verbally, but he felt a tear trickle over his left temple, into his hair, and that, apparently, was confirmation enough for the Confederate captain.
Now, Jacob thought, he would be shot, put out of his misery like an injured horse. And he would welcome the release.
Instead, very quietly, the captain said. “Hold on. You’ll be found soon.” He paused, frowning. “And if you happen to encounter a Union quartermaster by the name of Rogan McBride, somewhere along the way, I would be obliged if you’d tell him Bridger Winslow sends his best regards.”
Jacob doubted he’d get the chance to do as Winslow asked, but he marked the names carefully in his mind, just the same.
Another voice spoke then. “This somebody you know, Captain?” a man asked, with concern and a measure of sympathy. It wasn’t uncommon on either side, after all, to find a friend or a relative among enemy casualties, for the battle-lines often cut across towns, churches, and supper tables.
“No,
” the captain replied gruffly. “Just another dead Federal.” A pause. “Get on with your business, Simms. We might have the blue-coats under our heel for the moment, but you can be sure they’ll be back to bury what remains they can’t gather up and haul away. Better if we don’t risk a skirmish after a day of hard fighting.”
“Yes, sir,” Simms replied sadly. “The men are low in spirit, now that General Jackson has been struck down.”
“Yes,” the captain answered. Angry sorrow flashed in his eyes. “By his own troops,” he added bitterly, speaking so quietly that Jacob wondered if Simms had heard them at all.
Jacob sensed the other man’s departure.
The captain lingered, taking his canteen from his belt, loosening the cap a little with a deft motion of one hand, leaving the container within Jacob’s reach. The gesture was most likely a futile one, since Jacob could not use his hands, but it was an act of kindness, all the same. An affirmation of the possibility, however remote, that Jacob might somehow survive.
Winslow rose to his full height, regarded Jacob solemnly, and walked away.
Jacob soon lost consciousness again, waking briefly now and then, surprised to find himself not only still among the living, but unmolested by vermin. When alert, he lay looking up the night sky, steeped in the profound silence of the dead, one more body among dozens, if not hundreds, scattered across the blood-soaked grass.
Just so many pawns in some Olympian chess match, he reflected, discarded in the heat of conflict and then forgotten.
Sometime the next morning, or perhaps the morning after that, wagons came again, and grim-faced Union soldiers stacked the bodies like cordwood, one on top of another. They were fretful, these battle-weary men, anxious to complete their dismal mission and get back behind the Union lines, where there was at least a semblance of safety.
Jacob, mute and motionless, was among the last to be taken up, grasped roughly by two men in dusty blue coats.
The pain was so sudden, so excruciating that finally, finally, he managed a low, guttural cry.
The soldier supporting his legs, little more than a boy, with blemished skin and not even the prospect of a beard, gasped. “This fella’s still with us,” he said, and he looked so startled, so horrified, and so pale that Jacob feared he would swoon, letting his burden drop.
“Well,” said the other man, gruffly cheerful, “Johnny left a few breathin’ this time around.”
The boy recovered enough to turn his head and spit, and to Jacob’s relief, he remained upright, his grasp firm. “A few,” he agreed grudgingly. “And every one of them better off dead.”
The darkness returned then, enfolding Jacob like the embrace of a sea siren, pulling him under.
TWO
Caroline
Washington City,
June 15, 1863
Nothing Caroline Hammond had heard or read about the nation’s capital could have prepared her for the reality of the place, the soot and smoke, the jostling crowds of soldiers and civilians, the clatter of wagon wheels, the neighing of horses and the braying of mules, the rough merriment streaming through the open doorways of plentiful saloons and pleasure houses.
She kept her gaze firmly averted as she passed one after another of these establishments, appalled by the seediness of it all, by the crude shouts, the jangle of badly tuned pianos and rollicking songs sung lustily and off-key, and, here and there, fisticuffs accompanied by the breaking of glass and even a few gunshots.
More than once, Caroline was forced to cross the road, a gauntlet of ox carts and ambulance wagons and mounted men who took no evident notice of hapless pedestrians.
A farm wife, Caroline was not a person of delicate constitution. She had dispatched, cleaned and plucked many a chicken for Sunday supper, helped her husband Jacob and Enoch Flynn, the hired man, butcher hogs come autumn, and worked ankle-deep in barn muck on a daily basis.
Here, in this city of poor manners, ceaseless din and sickening stenches, the effects were, of course, magnified, surrounding her on every side, pummeling her senses without mercy.
Runnels of foaming animal urine flowed among the broken cobblestones, and dung steamed in piles, adding to the cloying miasma. On the far edge of her vision, she saw a soldier vomit copiously into a gutter and felt her own gorge rise, scalding, to the back of her throat. The man’s companions seemed amused by the spectacle, slapping their retching friend on the back and chiding him with loud, jocular admonitions of an unsavory nature.
Seeing the disreputable state of these men’s uniforms, intended as symbols of a proud and noble cause, thoroughly besmirched not only by all manner of filth, but by the indecent comportment of the men who wore them, sent furious color surging into her cheeks. Only her native prudence and the urgency of her mission—locating her wounded husband, lying near death in one of Washington’s City’s numerous makeshift hospitals, or, if she had arrived too late, in a pine box—kept her from striding right up to the scoundrels and taking them sternly to task for bringing such shame upon their more honorable fellows.
How dare they behave like reprobates, safe in the shadow of Mr. Lincoln’s White House, while their great-hearted comrades fought bravely on blood-drenched battlefields all over the land?
She was mortified, as well as grieved, but anger sustained her. Kept her moving toward the rows of hospital tents just visible in the distance.
Toward Jacob.
She thought of the long-delayed telegram, tucked away in her reticule. She’d read it over and over again from the day it had been placed in her hands, read it during the long train ride from Gettysburg, the small, quiet town in the green Pennsylvania countryside she had lived in, or near, all her life.
By now, the missive was tattered and creased, an evil talisman, despised and yet somehow necessary, the only link she had to her husband.
The information it contained was maddeningly scant, indicating only that Corporal Jacob Hammond had fallen in battle on May 3, at Chancellorsville, Virginia, and had since been transported to the capitol, where he would receive the best medical attention available.
As the granddaughter of a country doctor and sometimes undertaker, Caroline knew only too well what Jacob and others like him had yet to endure: crowding, filth, poor food and tainted water, too few trained surgeons and attendants, shortages of even the most basic supplies, such as clean bandages, laudanum and ether. Sanitation, the most effective enemy of sepsis, according to her late grandfather, was virtually nonexistent.
The stench of open latrines, private and public privies and towering heaps of manure standing on empty lots finally forced Caroline to set down her carpetbag long enough to pull her best Sunday handkerchief from the pocket of her cloak and press the soft cloth to her nose and mouth. The scent of rosewater, generously applied before she left home, had faded with time and distance, and thus provided little relief, but it was better than nothing.
Caroline picked up her carpetbag and walked purposely onward, not because she knew where she would find her husband, but because she didn’t dare stand still too long, lest her knees give way beneath her.
Thus propelled by false resolution and a rising sense of desperation, she hurried on, through the mayhem of a wartime city under constant threat of siege, doing her best to convey a confidence she did not feel. Beneath the stalwart countenance, fear gnawed at her empty, roiling stomach, throbbed in her head, sought and found the secret regions of her heart, where the bruises were, to do its worst.
She had no choice but to carry on, no matter what might be required of her, and she did not attempt to ignore the relentless dread. That would be impossible.
Instead, she walked, weaving her way through the crowds on the sidewalks, crossing to the opposite side of the street in a mostly useless effort to avoid staggering drunkards and street brawls and men who watched her too boldly. Having long since learne
d the futility of burying her fears, she made up her mind to face them instead, with calm fortitude—as well as she could, anyway.
As she’d often heard her grandfather remark, turning a blind eye to a problem or a troublesome situation served only to make matters worse in the long run. “Face things head-on, Caroline,” the old man had lectured. “Stand up to whatever comes your way and, if you are in the right, Providence will come to your aid.”
Lately, she had not seen a great deal of evidence to support the latter part of that statement, but, then again, Providence was under no discernible obligation to explain itself or its ways to questioning mortals, particularly in light of the stupidity, greed and cruelty so far displayed by the human race.
One by one, Caroline confronted the haunting possibilities, the pictures standing vivid in her thoughts, nearly tangible. In the most immediate scenario, she could not find Jacob, even after the most arduous search imaginable. There had been a mistake, and he had been taken to some other place entirely, or died in transit, and been buried in an anonymous grave, one she would never be able to locate.
In the next, she did find her husband, but she had not arrived quickly enough to hold his hand, stroke his forehead, bid him a tender farewell. He had already succumbed, and all that was left of him was a gray, waxen corpse lying in a ramshackle coffin. When she touched him, in this vision, his flesh was so cold that it left her fingertips numb and burning, as if frostbitten.
But there was one more tableau to face and in many ways, it was the most terrible of all. Here, Jacob was alive, horribly maimed, helpless, forced to bear the unbearable until death delivered him from his sufferings in days, weeks, months—or years.
The thought tormented Caroline.
If only she knew what to expect, she might be able to prepare somehow.
But then, how could one prepare for the shock of seeing a beloved husband, broken and torn? Suppose Jacob was so disfigured that she did not recognize him or, worse yet, allowed shock or dismay to show in her face, her manner, her bearing?
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