by Murray Pura
Eventually, she made her way from the cemetery and began to walk the length of the ridge, which she knew to be about two miles. Now the town and seminary were at her back, to the north, though she could clearly see the snowy slopes of Seminary Ridge off her right shoulder to the west, despite the low clouds. It did not take her long to reach the stone wall that marched its way across the crest of the ridge. She loved the rough and ready scrambled look of the field rocks and had played on them when she was a child. Some parts of the wall had tumbled down. Her mind on her memories, she picked up a few of the loose stones and put them back. When she’d been a little girl in her crimson ringlets and dresses, the wall had seemed enormous to her, and she’d skinned her knees more than once climbing it, often enough drawing blood, alarming her mother, but refusing to cry even though it stung. Now that she was a grown woman, the wall didn’t quite reach those skinned knees of hers, one of which bore a scar of her misadventures on Cemetery Ridge. If only all scars were so pleasantly earned.
The grove of chestnut oaks had been her favorite haunt though, right where the hardscrabble stone wall zigged and zagged at what her father called “the fence built by the farmer with a degree in geometry.” He referred to the two ninety-degree angles the wall took by the chestnut oaks. The oaks had grown over the past twenty years just as she had grown. Bare of leaves, they still looked splendid to her. She made up her mind to return in June or July when the grove was in the full flush of green and all the leaves thick. Winter had its stark beauty though. It made the landscape look more like an engraving, with the pastel details one saw in summer totally obscured.
By the time she reached Little Round Top, and the big Round Top, at the end of the ridge—she’d played in those woods as much as she’d played on the stone wall, her mother always shouting at her to be careful—she was so chilled she felt like she imagined a snowflake might feel as it tumbled cold and perfect from the heavens. She gazed down, shivering, at the naked limbs of a peach orchard—she had often enough eaten fruit from that orchard when her father had purchased baskets of it for Mother to make cobbler and preserves—and the barren black-and-white field that grew wheat in the spring and summer. Yes, her town and its surrounding farms were lovely. She’d spent so many harsh hours on the Underground Railroad she’d almost forgotten how lovely. But now she needed a hot tea and a hot fire and her favorite moccasins lined with rabbit fur.
Clarissa climbed down from Cemetery Ridge, walked along the Emmitsburg Road until it intersected with Baltimore Pike, waved off offers of rides from well-meaning young men driving buckboards, then followed the Pike into town until it became Baltimore Street, which took her to York and, finally, her own front door. She discarded her winter coat and cape and bonnet, her scarf and mittens and boots—it felt like she had been wearing pounds and pounds of clothing, and she was exhausted—and stepped into the parlor, where a blaze was bright in the fireplace, making the room as cozy as summer.
“Have you expunged all your ghosts?”
She looked at the man in the large leather chair. “Not all of them. Not you.” She came over and took one of his hands to her lips and kissed it. “And I don’t ever want to.”
“Where did you go?”
“Cemetery Ridge. Did you ever walk over there from the seminary?”
“I did. I like the grove of chestnut oaks for naps, and I like climbing up Round Top to give the arms and legs something strenuous to do. And I’ve picnicked at Cemetery Ridge—all by myself.”
“Well, you don’t need to have picnics all by yourself anymore, my dear boy. Once you are back on your feet—”
“I’ll be good as new by the end of the month. The doctor was adamant about that.”
“Oh, he was adamant, was he?”
“Strict orders—get up and get going. ‘Three months convalescence is more than enough for a strapping young man like yourself.’”
“He said all that?”
“Well, something like that.”
“The sooner, the better. I have plans for you, sir.”
“I’ll bet you do.”
“And what shall I call you? Have you made up your mind?”
“I have.”
“So … is it Kyle? Is it Iain? Is it Kyle Iain Forrester Kilgarlin? Or something much more complicated than that?”
He laughed. “Something far simpler. Iain Kerry Kilgarlin. My name at my baptism. Kerry bestowed because that’s where my father’s side of the family is from, County Kerry in Ireland.”
“Are you quite sure?”
“I am quite sure they’re from County Kerry, and I’m quite sure that’s the name I’d like to be addressed by in the future. I wore a hood long enough. That one deputy who hailed from Boston recognized me. He met my father and me in New Orleans a few years back. The word will have gotten around by now. I intend to write my parents a letter. No more hiding. It will hurt them, I know that. But it will also bring them some measure of joy to find out I am alive. Even if I am a Yankee.”
“I can’t imagine it will be easy to write such a letter.”
“Perhaps not.”
“How is it going to be delivered? The mail service is notoriously unreliable between North and South these days. In fact, sir, it does not exist.”
“Captured Southern officers get paroled and return to their home states. I’ve already made inquiries by telegram. I can send my letter on to Washington, and they will see it gets into reliable hands that will carry it safely to Dixie.”
“Will your parents be harmed as the word gets around among the plantation owners?”
“I used to think so. I told you that when I was still under the hood. But I’ve been gone and presumed dead for two or three years now. And my parents had absolutely no knowledge of my actions, nor will they be seen to have been complicit in them. I believe their neighbors will feel sorry for them. There will be a certain amount of shame attached to the family because of who I have become and what I have done—of course, there will be that. But I don’t think they’ll be punished or publicly humiliated. Their son will be vilified. Not them.”
Clarissa sat down on an arm of the chair, facing him, and frowned so sharply her dark eyebrows came together. “I don’t want you to be vilified. It’s an ugly thing to think about. I have enough ugly things to think about.”
“You know what one of the most pleasant things to think about is for me?” He reached up and took a long tendril of her scarlet hair in his fingers. “Being able to touch you.”
“Thank you.”
“I was hoping you weren’t still having nightmares.”
“I’m not having nightmares. I think about what happened while I’m wide-awake. I almost lost you.”
“But you didn’t, Clarissa.”
“Holding you so closely as I rode. And I rode like a wild woman; I rode like I had escaped from an asylum. Hoping my body’s warmth would be enough to keep you breathing. The deputies pounding on the doctor’s door in Lancaster. Him not sure what to do. Fumbling around in his surgery like a drunk.”
“I know.”
“Me yelling at him. Someone going to get his assistant who had his house on the next block. The assistant getting the pistol balls out. Blood everywhere. As if we were in a slaughterhouse.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“You shaking like a tree in the wind, a tree that’s losing all its leaves. Wrapping you in blankets. Lying beside you on a cot to give you as much of my heat as possible. All the time staring at your face—am I looking at Kyle Forrester or Iain Kilgarlin? Who are you? Why all the games?”
“We’ve been through all this. I couldn’t let you get attached to Liberty, so Liberty was unkind to you.”
“Unkind? He was a monster at the beginning. You, sir, were an absolute monster.”
“And I had to make sure you broke off with Kyle,” Iain added.
“So you were mean to me again. Terribly mean. Even cruel. Why?”
“Clarissa, we’ve gone over this a dozen time
s now.”
“I still don’t understand why.”
“Because I had a price on my head. Because I didn’t think I had a long life ahead of me. Because I was having my own nightmares and premonitions of death. No, I couldn’t let you in on my secret. I didn’t want us to become intimate or romantically involved. I didn’t want you to grow too close to a man who was going to wear a bullet in his brain. And I was convinced that bullet was going to arrive very soon.”
“But then you cut a hole in your hood just so you could kiss me. How do you think that made me feel?”
“How did it make you feel?”
“It made me feel wonderful, you idiot.”
“And I felt wonderful too.”
“So, why did you make us feel wonderful if you had no intention of letting us fall in love with each other?”
“Because I fell in love with you anyways,” Iain admitted.
“When?” Clarissa asked.
“When you took the old man’s hat from your head at that wreck of a farmhouse in Chester County. And shook out all your long red hair. And unwound your scarf so I could see your perfect face. And told me in no uncertain terms you were not riding with the wagon. That’s when I realized I was a goner.”
“A goner?”
“And that I’d been a goner for a long time. But at the farmhouse, alone with you, with danger coming at us from across the border, seeing your courage, seeing your defiance, just as I’d been seeing it month after month as either Liberty or Kyle Forrester, and finally letting myself get pulled in by your astonishing beauty, something I had fought against for years as the scholarly seminary student who attended Christ’s Church and agonized over you each Sunday morning—well, I had no fight left in me. So I gave in, cut the opening in my hood with my knife, and kissed your hair and your face, even though I knew it was the kiss of death.”
“Kissing me was the kiss of death? Do you think I find that flattering?”
“It was the end of one life and the beginning of another. A better one. You resurrected Iain Kilgarlin. You made a new man out of the old man. The bullets didn’t change my destiny. You did.”
“The bullets almost ended your destiny. What a fright you gave me. I was sure you weren’t going to live, no matter how hard I prayed.”
“But I did live.”
“By the grace of God.”
He nodded. “By the grace of God and the grace of your heart and spirit and face.”
“Oh Iain Kilgarlin, you charmer.” She laughed and messed his hair with her fingers. “You always get out of this argument the same way. Always.”
“Luck of the Irish.”
“The truth is, you are a different man. You’re not Kyle. You’re not Liberty. You’re not even the Iain I knew before you were shot. You’re someone completely different.”
“And you like the difference.”
“Kyle and Liberty and Iain all had their moments. But Mr. Iain Kerry Kilgarlin? He has it all. Yes, sir, he has everything this Yankee girl could want. He makes her swoon.”
“Does he really make you swoon?”
She giggled and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. “No, not really. But if he tries a little harder, he might.”
“I’ll work on it. I’ll study hard.”
“You do that. Meanwhile, I’ll help Mother with dinner. Are you planning to assist Father at the shop this evening?”
“I am. Right after the peach cobbler.”
“Who told you we were having peach cobbler?”
“My Irish nose. Other Irish smell potatoes a mile away. Or stew. Me? If I were in the garden of Eden, you could have tempted me a lot more with a peach than with an apple.”
“I’ll bear that in mind.”
But what played in her mind—despite the happy banter with her new beau who was an impossible mixture of Liberty, Iain Kilgarlin, and Kyle Forrester, Underground Railroad conductor, Irishman, Southern aristocrat, seminary student, and Lutheran minister—was the night he almost died in her arms. It plagued her constantly. And she knew she never wanted to face an experience like that again. She dreaded the day he told her he was healthy enough to enlist in the Union army. For what could she say? She had pushed Kyle Forrester in that direction and demanded he put on Yankee blue, and she had insisted that if he did not, he was not a man. How much of that the Liberty side of him had taken to heart, she had no idea. But she was certain one of two things was going to happen once he was fully recovered from his wounds: either he would return to his dangerous work on the Underground Railroad, or he would join the Army of the Potomac. What she’d prefer was that he didn’t heal completely. That he would stay in Gettysburg and make boots at her father’s side until the war was over. That she could hide him here in her quaint little town until the minié balls stopped flying and the cannons stopped roaring in Virginia.
“It is safe here, my beautiful man,” she would murmur to herself when she was alone. “So safe. So protected. I love this place. I love you. Stay here. Let’s grow as old as America together. You do not have to win this war. You have won me, and that’s enough. No matter what happens, we can face it together. We’ll never be conquered. Please.”
But she was certain God would not answer her prayers and that he would recover. Certain Iain would not listen to her pleas and that he would enlist. Certain he would take the train for Washington one morning. Certain that once he left she would never see him again—not alive, not in Gettysburg, not at her side. He and she would be never again, never again.
May
Gettysburg
I have a commission, Clarissa. Can you believe it? The seminarian is a captain in the Army of the Potomac. What do you think of that, my fine, beautiful, feisty Pennsylvania girl? Your prayers are answered.”
Clarissa was sewing in the front room when he burst through the door and into the house, waving a letter in his hand. The stone, a heavy stone, sank into the pond in her heart so completely there were no ripples, no ripples at all. She got to her feet and tried to smile for him. He swept her up in a tight hug and spun her in a circle before setting her down. Despite her misgivings about what had just transpired, she laughed at his boyish enthusiasm. And then she immediately remembered what a bullet wound looked like on his body, and her laughter stopped.
She felt dead inside. Absolutely dead.
Iain did not notice her shift in mood. “I’m assigned to the Second Brigade, Second Division, Second Corps. Do you know what’s particularly significant about that, my love?”
“I don’t.”
“It’s the Philadelphia Brigade. They’re making a name for themselves. Despite all the Northern fiascos. They’re fighters, Clarissa.”
“That’s good.” Then she thanked God a question rose in her mind so that she was able to do more than just offer dull responses: “How could you be in that brigade when you’re from Adams County and not Philadelphia?”
“My papers show me as a resident of Philadelphia who lives in Gettysburg for the purposes of furthering his education. I started out in Philadelphia after I jumped ship in Boston Harbor.”
“I see.” Back to her dull replies. It annoyed her, but she couldn’t muster any true enthusiasm for his enlistment or officer’s commission. She had sung a different tune a year ago, she knew. But that was before she fell in love with Liberty Iain Kerry Kilgarlin, as she sometimes called him. That was before she saw his blood on her hands and heard his dying breaths in her ears. “Is there anything else?”
He grinned. “There is. I’m assigned to the 69th regiment. There’s the 71st, the 72nd, the 106th, and mine, the 69th. Do you know why they placed me in that specific regiment?”
“No.”
“It’s Irish volunteers. Born in Ireland or born Irish-American here. Isn’t that grand? I’ll be fighting alongside the lads.”
Despite her gloomy mood, she could not keep one corner of her mouth from curving up and producing her crooked grin, a grin she knew he loved. “The more you become Iain Kilgarlin, t
he more you begin to sound like an Irishman and the more you use Irish expressions. Soon you’ll be saying, “sure and begorrah,” like some New York City Irish police officer.”
“Ha-ha.” He kissed her quickly. “I love that face you make.”
“I know. Thank you. It comes and goes without my bidding, so I can’t take any credit for its sudden appearances and departures.”
“Once they saw my family hailed from County Kerry, my fate was sealed.”
She hated that expression. “Your fate was sealed?”
“I mean, there was no other Pennsylvania regiment I could be in but that one. Iain Irish Kilgarlin. You couldn’t put me with the Germans or Dutch, could you?”
“I suppose not.”
“I must tell your father. Won’t he be excited?”
“I’m sure. Men always are when it comes to war. Women? Not so much.”
“What do you mean?”
She saw that her words had put a halt to his headlong rush of enthusiasm.
“I’m going to miss you, Liberty Iain Irish Kerry Kilgarlin. What do you think I mean? That I’m happy to send you off so that you can return in a pine coffin, if you return at all? Do you know how many widows Gettysburg has already?”
“I thought … I thought you wanted a war to set the slaves free.”
“You know that’s not why the North is fighting, Iain.”
“Not yet.”
“You know Lincoln simply wants the Union restored at any price. And the boys in blue are fighting for the same reason, to retain the Republic. To keep it in one piece. No one cares about slavery.”
“Some do.”
Clarissa folded her arms over her chest. “Most don’t.”
“I recall you telling Kyle Forrester last year that attitude would eventually change.”
“Well, the 1862 Clarissa Avery believes otherwise. She’s read too many newspapers now and heard too many political speeches and looked over too many published reports from the battlefield. No one cares about abolition or emancipation. They just care about winning and bringing the South to heel. And we don’t appear to be doing very well at that.”
