by Ann Rinaldi
The Last Full Measure
Ann Rinaldi
* * *
Harcourt
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Boston New York 2010
* * *
Copyright © 2010 by Ann Rinaldi
All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this
book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
Harcourt is an imprint of the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
www.hmhbooks.com
Text set in Adobe Garamond
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rinaldi, Ann.
The last full measure / Ann Rinaldi.
p. cm.
Summary: In 1863 Pennsylvania, fourteen-year-old Tacy faces the horrors of the
Battle of Gettysburg while trying to stay out of the way of her brother David, who is in
charge while their father serves as a doctor in the Union army, and to keep her friend
Marvelous, a free black, safe from rebel soldiers.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-547-38980-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Gettysburg, Battle of, Gettysburg,
Pa., 1863—Juvenile fiction. 2. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Juvenile
fiction. [1. Gettysburg, Battle of, Gettysburg, Pa., 1863—Fiction. 2. United States—
History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Fiction. 3. Family life—Pennsylvania—Fiction.
4. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 5. African Americans—Fiction. 6. Pennsylvania—
History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.R459Lar 2010
[Fic]—dc22
2009049980
Manufactured in the United States of America
DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
4500261631
* * *
For Gil Spencer,
a newspaper person's newspaper editor who taught me much about writing
CHAPTER ONE
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania June—July, 1863
"WHERE ARE YOU GOING, TACY?"
Sam was on me again. He was always on me, spying, watching my every move, hoping to catch me at some misadventure so he could report it to my mother or my brother David and make winning points for himself.
I was in trouble all the time on account of Sam Wade, the twelve-year-old hired boy. Even though Jennie Wade, his older sister, was my friend.
I was halfway out the back door when he caught me, near out into the sweet June evening, the fireflies beckoning me invitingly.
There was nothing for it. I had to tell him. "Marvelous hasn't come home again. Her daddy was around, asking if I could fetch her. She only comes if I fetch her."
"Damned darkie—why do you care?"
"She's my friend."
"Friend?" He made a scoffing sound. "How many times already have the lot of them made riots by rushing through town at the slightest rumor of the Rebs coming, tearing and wrecking as they go?"
"They're scared is all, Sam. Wouldn't you be if you were black and the Rebs were coming? They're scared of being sold into slavery."
"They're free, ain't they? All hundreds of them we gots here."
"They won't be when the Rebs arrive. Now get out of my way. I've got to fetch Marvelous home before dark comes down."
He grinned. His freckled face, the blond hair falling over it, the confident attitude, plagued me. He liked to act as if he had more assurance than I did in my own house. "I'm gonna tell your brother."
"Go ahead. I don't care." I broke past him and ran down the back path, through the horse pasture, and toward the woods. I knew the way to the hiding place the darkies had outside of town, where they took refuge when they thought the Rebels were coming.
And they were coming. Telegrams said that they had already taken Fairfield, eight miles away. Many citizens had closed up their houses and left on the trains. Merchants had hidden most of their goods because they heard the Rebs were coming. Governor Andrew Curtin had issued orders this month for fifty thousand additional troops for the Pennsylvania Militia.
And the last time Pa was home, after doing his doctoring at Antietam and all those other battles in the South, he and David had had the argument.
With David shouting yes, he was going to enlist in the militia. And Pa saying no he was not! Not with that twisted leg of his, he was not! He was staying right here at home and taking care of the place and his mother and sister!
And then Pa adding, "Go, if you want, go and try to enlist. Don't listen to me. See if they take you."
After Pa left, David did go to enlist. And they turned him down. So he lost his final chance to become a Union soldier like my other brothers, Brandon and Joel, who are both officers with the Second Pennsylvania Cavalry.
That last fight between David and Pa embittered David even more than he'd been up until now, so that, though he'd been slowly turning away from me since the war started and Pa wouldn't let him go for a soldier, in the last few weeks he scarce spoke to me at all. Oh, he still spoke to Ma. He was still respectful and kindly to her, but mostly he kept to himself, staring off into some middle distance, smoking his cheroots, or reading or strumming his banjo.
He no longer talked with me about my books or schoolwork from the Young Ladies' Seminary, although school was out now. He no longer read poetry to me. Whatever we had between us was broken, strewn into bits and pieces on the ground between us, like broken glass, keeping us from getting any closer to each other, from reaching out and remembering what we once had. And we had a lot, though I am only fourteen and he is twenty-one.
He growls at me now. He orders me around. "If I'm to take care of you as Pa wants, I'll take care of you," he says.
It's a threat, not a promise. I stay out of his way.
There are different ways the war can take a brother from you.
When Ma receives letters from Brandon or Joel and reads them aloud, David excuses himself and leaves the room.
And I've had to go to Ma. For David's sake, not for mine. To Ma, who still believes in everything: that the sun will rise every morning, that God has His eye on the sparrow, that her boys will be protected in the war, and that General Robert E. Lee, when he comes, won't really do us any harm. Because, after all, he's a Southern gentleman, isn't he?
Ma and Pa both come from Virginia.
"Ma, David's been imbibing rum in the barn at night."
"He'll be all right, darling. David's a good boy."
"Lots of rum, Ma. Sometimes he's really in his cups."
"David can hold his liquor, like all gentlemen can," Ma said. "He's just trying to hide his sorrow at not being able to go to war."
David didn't always have his twisted leg. He got it when he was about fourteen, when he was out riding and his horse tripped and fell on him. Pa operated on him and tried to right the leg, but too many bones were crushed. Pa sent him to Philadelphia to important doctors there. They could do nothing, either.
Ma still insists the leg "will be right again someday." Ma refuses to see what she doesn't want to see. It's a gift. I wish I had it.
It took me about twenty minutes to get to the darkies' hiding place. I'd been there before. Marvelous had shown it to me. The darkies, and we had at least four hundred of them in Gettysburg, lived southwest of town. They worked on farms, or for families. Basil Biggs, daddy of Marvelous, had a two-horse team and worked on a farm. His wife, Mary, did our laundry. There was also a shopkeeper and a shoemaker, and many were laborers in town.
The hideaway they had chosen was in a thicket of woods north of us. Here they had tents s
et up, caves dug in the hills, fireplaces made of stone, provisions hidden, wood stacked, everything needed to live in the open for days, even weeks. It was deserted now, of course, because no Rebs were here yet.
I wandered about, calling her name. "Marvelous, it's me, Tacy. You must come out now. It's getting dark. Your daddy wants you home. He's powerful worried about you."
She came in her own good time, a small quiet creature holding her own lantern, whispering my name, saying how glad she was to see me.
She was a beautiful girl, compact, neat in her person, her dark curly hair in tow with a ribbon, her round face bright with hope, her eyes sparkling.
We hugged. "Oh, Tacy, how good of you to care about me. Do you think we can get home before dark?"
The dusk was giving way to darkness. The last vestiges of sun were a sloppy streak across the western sky. The angels would soon wipe it away. "Come, we must be quick about it," I said.
But when we turned around the path blended in with the landscape. There seemed, as a matter of fact, to be two paths and too many bushes all over the place. And then there were voices where there should not be voices.
Of a sudden, out of the bushes and shadows, two figures loomed.
"So, there you are, you disobedient little wretch. Out of the house without permission. What did I tell you about that, eh? What did I tell you I'd do next time you did that?"
God in heaven, my brother David! And, grinning behind him, holding a lantern, Sam.
Then my arm was pulled, unceremoniously, by David, and the next thing I knew he had hauled me across his middle and was whacking me on my bottom, one, two, three, four, five, with a hard, unforgiving hand, and a harder, unforgiving heart. I could not free myself from his grasp. He'd never hit me before. No one had. And I knew somehow that the strokes were not for me or what I had done but for the world and what it had done to him. For his twisted, ruined leg. For the fact that he was home when his brothers were off fighting. For Pa refusing to let him go.
I cried out. I screamed. He stopped. Then he shook me and called me a disobedient little wretch again and let me go. I near fell over, then caught myself.
"Pa should have done that a long time ago," he said. Then, without another word, he turned. And if Marvelous and I had not followed he would have left us, lost.
Once home, he bade Sam take Marvelous to her house, then he sent me to bed.
"I'm going to tell Ma," I said.
"Have at it" was his only reply.
"Pa would never countenance you hitting me."
"He told me to do whatever I had to do to keep order."
He was secure in his rights. My heart was breaking. This was not my David anymore.
I flung one last charge at him. "What's happened to you?" I appealed.
He lit a cheroot, spit a bit of tobacco off his lip, and eyed me sideways. "I said go to bed."
I went.
Not because I was afraid of him but because I was afraid of what I would say to him if I stayed, what unforgivable things, what words I would never be able to take back once I becalmed myself.
I knew, at fourteen, what he obviously did not know yet at twenty-one. That when you committed an act of meanness to someone you were supposed to love, the angels carried away that act of meanness on the spot and marked it down somewhere forever. And the angels would never be able to give it back, once you were sorry for it.
CHAPTER TWO
I WOKE THAT last Friday in June determined to tell Ma what David had done to me, but when I got down to the kitchen, Josie, our hired girl, already had breakfast on the table and Mama was waiting on me for morning prayers.
"You're late," David said. He was in full mettle, in charge.
I slipped into my chair. Mama was nothing if not intent about prayers, and they were extra long these days because we had to pray for Pa and the boys while the ham and eggs and Josie's fluffy biscuits sat there and waited.
Josie stood by and waited, too, joining in the prayers. She was practically a member of the family. She was a handsome woman, Josie was, only twenty-one, with dark blond hair and blue eyes. She lived alone with her mother, a few streets away. I know she favored my brother David. I often saw her casting admiring glances at him from a distance. But he paid her no mind.
I figured that's what my brother David needed right now. Someone like Josie to take his mind off his anger. And I was waiting for the right moment to tell him that she was smitten with him. If he was too dense to see it himself, someone needed to let him know.
Mama was just asking the Lord for "the Divine favor to watch over our lives and our homes" when two things happened.
First we heard gunshots in the distance. Second, Mr. Hugh Scott, who operated the telegraph office, burst through our front door.
He stood there, out of breath, hat in hand, in the hallway.
David was out of his chair like a shot, grabbing his musket from the corner and going to greet Mr. Scott. "What's happened?" he asked.
"Nothing you'll need that for. Yet," Scott said, pointing to the musket. "And I'm sorry to barge in on you folks, but as a friend of your pa's he'd want me to tell you first."
"What is it?" David demanded.
"Some Confederates have entered town."
"Where?" my brother asked.
"Lower Chambersburg Street, headed toward the square."
David made ready to leave.
"No, David," Mama protested. "Captain Bell has charge of local defense. Isn't he handling it?" She looked at Mr. Scott.
"He is," Scott affirmed. "I just came to inform you. The Rebs are White's Thirty-fifth Virginia Battalion of Cavalry. They look like a sorry lot. They're badly clothed, screaming, and firing guns into the air, intent on frightening the citizens, is all. They're cursing and petrifying the women. But their officers have given orders for them to capture horses. Myself, I've closed the telegraph office and taken my apparatus to a safe place. I've got to get on now. Be safe, folks."
And in a minute, he was gone.
David saw him out, then stood there. "Damn," he said. "I had Sam take two of our horses to the blacksmith this morning to have them reshod."
"What horses?" I asked. But I knew. You know such things in your bones.
Centipede, Mama's horse. And Ramrod, my own beloved Ramrod.
"I'm sure they'll both be all right," Mama assured him. "Now come back to the table, David. We've still got to eat breakfast. I've asked God to watch over our lives and our homes."
"You should have asked Him to watch over our horses," David grumbled. He secured the front door, came back to the table, and sat down. I noticed that he did not set the musket far from where he was sitting.
Then he raised his coffee cup to his lips and glared at me over it. "You will not go outside the house at all today," he said with quiet sternness, "for any reason."
***
ALTHOUGH SHE was six years older than I was, Jennie Wade, older sister to pain-in-the-neck Sam, our hired boy, had been my friend for the last two years now. I suppose it was because I had no sisters, because I had three older brothers and dreamed of having an older sister. Jennie filled that empty space in my heart.
She lived half a block away. She had an older married sister, Georgia McClellan, who had just given birth to a baby boy, and she herself was already betrothed to a young man named Johnston Hastings Skelly, who was serving with the Eighty-seventh Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry.
She had worldwide knowledge already, at the age of twenty, without ever having left Gettysburg. And she taught me things most girls my age did not know and had no way of finding out. I was the wiser for having known Jennie Wade.
We went to lectures together at the college, to concerts, to teas. I helped her sew her trousseau. Of course, David never approved of my close friendship with her, saying she was "too old and worldly" for me by half.
But that was not the whole cloth of the reason. Just part of it. The whole cloth of it was that before his horse had crushed his leg, Da
vid and Jennie had been sweethearts, always lolling around together, going to strawberry festivals and church parties and taffy pulls and the like. Always together.
Then, after his horse crushed his leg, she came around less and less. Part of it was David's fault, of course. He did not encourage her to come. He wallowed so in his self-pity, seeing himself as less of a man, and Jennie did not know how to contend with this. She is not one for wallowing, so she finally stopped coming and David never forgave her.
Then, when she and I became friends, he disapproved.
Mama, who only saw good in things, did not object to my friendship with Jennie.
***
THAT MORNING, following the orders of their officers, the ill-clad and half-in-their-cups men of White's Thirty-fifth Virginia Cavalry charged through town stealing horses. They came upon several young boys leading horses for various and mundane reasons.
One of them was Sam Wade leading Centipede and Ramrod back from the blacksmith. Three men from the Thirty-fifth Virginia had Sam and the horses in tow, and as the procession came past Jennie Wade's house, she came running outside, trailing after them and yelling at the top of her voice.
"Don't you dare take that boy. You release him this minute! Do you hear?"
First they ignored her. Then they laughed at her. Then they said something rude and vile to her.
You did not speak that way to Jennie Wade and live to tell the world about it. She kept following them and yelling and threatening.
When they came near our house we were all out front, under our giant sycamore tree. I was allowed outside only because I was with Mama and David.
"If the Rebs take our Sam," Jennie shouted at us, "I don't know what I'll do with you folks. I'll hold all of you responsible. I will!"
And she looked directly at me.
"Jennie!" I appealed.
"Quiet," David ordered me.
"You especially," she flung at me.
I dared not open my mouth again.
Mama spoke to the Rebs. "You don't want the boy," she told them. "He's our hired boy."
"No, we don't want the boy," one of the Reb soldiers answered. "You can have him. We are only after the horses."
