by Richard Peck
There we are, trapped in time, Delphine and me on either side of Noah. I stare straight ahead from under the bird on my hat like I’m resigned to being shot at sunrise. I’d thrown back my veils, but Delphine didn’t. She looks through them, forever a woman of mystery, and not quite sixteen. Her hands hide in the muff where the last of our money was living. She wears her cut-coral necklace and two or three of her best paisley shawls. She’s dressed to kill, as the saying went, though Noah really is.
He stands between us in his forage cap, proud in his big new uniform that he seems to be peering out of, not wearing. But his arms hang stiff at his sides, the cuffs to his knuckles, a soldier boy before the battle. There’s something missing in his eyes, a vacancy, as if he couldn’t wait and has gone on ahead.
In all the turmoil of that last day, we didn’t find Dr. Hutchings in time, though it would have made a better picture with him in it. Then not half an hour later we met him in the street. Even as he touched the bill of his cap, I had to look twice to know him. He was in uniform now, with a captain’s bars on his shoulders. He’d joined up in time to sail with Grant’s forces.
It was November 6, and the command came through to cook a day’s rations and prepare to embark. In the end, Colonel Logan could muster only a little over six hundred infantry, as so many boys were still down sick. But Noah was fit to fight. I’d seen to that.
The Thirty-first joined the other regiments marching under U. S. Grant, three thousand strong. They sailed that evening in a chill mist, and Delphine and I stood in the throng down by the wharves to see them off. Dr. Hutchings had urged us to go home to Grand Tower, to put Cairo and Mrs. Hanrahan behind us.
But I couldn’t go empty-handed, without Noah. It wasn’t me Mama wanted.
The streets were already a churn of red mud when the three thousand tramped past us, some of them staggering drunk, and singing as they came:
The Rebs have taken the best of me legs,
Bad luck to the chap that hit it,
If Uncle Sam gives me a cork for me stump,
I hope ’twill be one that will fit it.
We searched those marchers, rank and file, for Noah. But he blended with all that blue, vanished already. Did I look for Dr. Hutchings? I don’t remember now.
They set sail on four great transport ships. Noah’s Thirty-first marched aboard the Alex Scott. Two wooden gunboats, the Tyler and the Lexington, followed after. That wide stretch where the two big rivers boil together was crowded with turning boats. We watched them away in the night, hearing voices over the water singing “Yankee Doodle.”
We stood in the crowd of mothers and fathers, sisters and sweethearts, falling silent as the boats disappeared around that bend down by Wickliffe, Kentucky. The street lighting in Cairo was just about what you’d expect, but some of the men had fired torches to see the boys aboard the boats.
I looked at Delphine. The flames were dim, and she’d always been darker than I’d noticed. But in the flicker of torchlight, I read her face and saw her soul. She loved my brother. And she was mourning him already.
“Delphine, did you tell him who you are?”
“Perhaps I don’t have to,” she said, in a despairing voice.
Now I knew why she hadn’t lifted a finger to nurse him in the hospital tent, why she was always turning away from him to the others. She’d hoped he’d be too sick to die.
It was famous, the Battle of Belmont, Missouri. It sparked the career of General U. S. Grant and led him in time to the White House as President. It was the first struggle for the Mississippi, that great highway flowing between my Grand Tower and Delphine’s New Orleans. As in many a battle before it and since, both sides claimed victory. But no woman would have called it a victory.
People stood on the levees all day, hearing the thunder of the guns rolling up the river valley. In the afternoon, smoke drifted on the horizon as if a sizable place had been put to the torch.
On the next morning Delphine and me were on the wharf before daybreak, wound in our shawls against the damp morning as we watched for the returning boats. There came a flash of light as the first of them rounded the bend, then the others behind it. We heard music wavering over the water. It was a steam calliope, so one of the warships had once been a showboat. It was playing a funeral dirge, “O Rest in the Lord.” The sound of a showboat calliope sending this grieving music on ahead hung ever after in my mind.
We pushed forward in the mob when the first gangplank came down. The able-bodied carried the wounded on litters. Now we saw sights we’d been spared in the hospital tent. Blood soaked through the stretchers from the stumps of legs until the gangplank ran with it. We heard the cries of the torn and saw a boy who’d been shot full in the face. But it wasn’t Noah because this boy’s matted hair was black.
No one had witnessed the fruits of war till now. Men in the crowd wept like children. Women shrieked and keened and fell on their knees. But we didn’t. We might miss Noah.
What would we have thought if we’d known then how many of the wounded had been left behind on sandbars? I didn’t dream they’d leave a dying soldier behind, so I didn’t add that to my fears.
The sun stood high in the sky when Dr. Hutchings came down out of a boat. He saw us, and we fought our way through the surge of people. He and I were thrust together, and before I could speak, he gripped my hands and said, “I’ve brought him back, Tilly. But you’ll have to work to keep him.” Tears stood in his eyes, and I saw he was tired to the point of falling down.
Behind him on a litter borne by two ragged, dirty soldiers was Noah. His face was scraped and powder-burned, and he was a mass of stained bandages. The boys on stretchers went into a big warehouse there by the wharf, and we followed. They laid Noah on the floor in a growing row of the wounded. His eyes were open, but he didn’t know Delphine or me. A strong smell came off him.
It was rum. “I had to get him drunk to take his arm,” the doctor said. “It was nearly off.” Then I saw Noah’s left arm was gone. It was only a blunt wad of blood-soaked bandages, no longer than his elbow.
We hung over the feverish boy, and all I could think was that now he won’t die in a field somewhere. If he dies now, he dies in our arms.
They were dying all around him, up and down the rows on the warehouse floor. And others had lost their limbs.
“Where is it?” I asked Dr. Hutchings. “I want it.”
He looked blank.
“His arm. I want to take it home and bury it. I don’t want it to end up in a heap of . . .”
“We were on the boat when I took it,” he said. “I put it overboard. I gave it to the river.”
And I was satisfied with that. I had to be. And he’d been gentle in his telling. “I gave them all to the river,” he said.
They brought back three hundred wounded from the Battle of Belmont. There wasn’t a place for Noah in the regimental hospitals. The army had no room for a soldier who couldn’t be made whole to fight again. They let us have him.
We nursed him, Delphine and me, in the summer kitchen. Mrs. Hanrahan never come near us, but she had to hear Noah screaming through the night in pain from the arm he didn’t have.
We made a pallet on the floor, for he thrashed so, he’d have pitched out of bed. He was still on the battleground in his mind. We bathed him night and day in cold water straight from the pump to fight the fever, and still he didn’t know us.
The doctor come in the evenings, dead tired from treating the others, half-asleep in the trap, letting the pony find us. He dressed Noah’s stump and saw that the flap of skin that covered it was holding.
We couldn’t get any food down him, but Doctor Hutchings devised a kind of milk punch laced with brandy that seemed to nourish him, and quiet him.
We sent no word home. I dared not tell them that we had Noah before I could promise him alive.
“Besides,” Delphine said, “Calinda, she would not believe such a letter.”
“Why ever not, if I wrote it?”
“To her, Noah is dead. She read it in the cards.”
“Then she read them wrong,” I said, clenching my chin like a fist.
“She read death in the cards,” Delphine said as if I hadn’t spoken. “She see the coffin come up the river.”
Chapter Fourteen
As Noah grew less fitful, Delphine and I spoke more. We sat in the evenings with our work and talked across the sleeping boy. I couldn’t keep from asking her about her papa.
“Delphine, is it true? Does he have another whole family—a white family?”
“But of course,” she said. “He has three strapping sons, golden-hair like himself. And two daughters who—how do you say it? Simper.”
“Do you know them?”
“Mais non, chère. To them I do not exist. But they sit below us at the opera. They are in the first loge. We are in the second.”
She’d already made me see her maman in my mind’s eye. Now I saw how much brighter the diamonds blazed on her mother’s darker throat. I saw these two families, their faces lit from the brilliant stage of the opera house that I supposed was like a great showboat gone aground.
Questions bubbled up in me. “Your mama has brought you up to be like herself,” I said, “to find a white man to . . . protect you. But what about Calinda?”
Delphine’s eyebrows rose in that way they had.
“Does your mama want Calinda to find a white man too?”
Delphine shrugged off that entire notion. “Mais non. Our maman see early that Calinda has the gift of prophecy and is born with ancient secrets. Maman see that Calinda can make her own way in the world.”
Still, one question just led to another. “But what if you and Calinda had been boys? Sons instead of daughters?”
Her eyes grew huge. She was forever astonished that I didn’t know something she’d never told me. “But we have a brother. Andre. He is sent to Paris, of course. Papa sent him to perfect his French, to be educated.”
“What will he do when he comes back home?”
“Andre? He never will. He become a Frenchman where people do not ask questions.”
I tried to see him in my mind, this sudden brother.
“But not all your young men go off to Paris, do they? Isn’t there one you could marry? Really marry?”
Delphine looked away, uninterested. “Perhaps. But it is not what my maman want for me.”
“But—”
“Ah, chère, it does not matter now. We are doom the day the Yankees take New Orleans. It was always, how to say it? A delicate balance.”
“But if the South wins—”
She put up a thimbled hand to still me. “It will not. We lose the war. This year. Another year. I dream. I pretend, but it is in the cards. Calinda see it. Why deceive oneself? Her cards are never wrong.”
We spoke of Calinda, of course.
“When you first come, we thought Calinda was your slave, your servant anyhow. We reckoned you made her sleep on the floor.”
“Pffft,” said Delphine. “But we are sisters. We are born in the same bed. We sleep in the same bed. And she take up her full share of it too!”
But no, I misremember. She said that later, after the war. After Calinda had gone from our lives.
Into one of our murmuring, meandering conversations, Noah awoke one evening. He blinked up at us, and knew us. He knew too his arm was gone. I don’t know how because he could feel it right to the fingertips for years after. We swept down on him, our skirts collapsing on the floor. There came a moment of perfect happiness then, however much it had cost.
We hung there, waiting for his first words.
“I could eat something,” he said in a croaking voice, “if I could get it and it was cooked through.”
I laughed for pure joy until I wanted to cry. But when I looked deeper into Noah’s eyes, I seen the boy was gone, and so the perfect moment passed.
As quick as Dr. Hutchings said we could, we took Noah home. We packed our traps to leave Cairo forever. On the day we went, Mrs. Hanrahan sent down her handyman to take the crockery out of the summer kitchen and break every piece over the pump outside because Delphine had eaten and drunk from it.
We left that place. Lot’s wife may have looked back, but we didn’t. We had Noah strong enough to travel, and that’s what mattered. I changed the dressing on his arm, then—would you credit it?—he wanted to wear his uniform, bloodstained and mudstained, with the arm pinned up over emptiness.
Dr. Hutchings seen us off at the Cairo depot. When we parted, my hand lingered in his, just long enough to know it was where my hand belonged. But I saw no more of him for all the years until the war was over. He was good to write, from wherever they sent him. I kept the letters and read them over and over until I found myself marking time until their author come back to me.
We traveled in a chair car full of others like Noah, one-armed boys and one-legged boys who’d carved their own crutches. These were the ones who could afford the train fare home. The others struggled and straggled along the sliding gravel of the railroad right-of-way outside the window.
After I settled Delphine and Noah together, I perched across from them with the hamper and her hatbox. We were going home now, and the locomotive wasn’t pulling us fast enough to suit me.
Once, Noah reached across himself to touch Delphine’s hand and said, “I won’t be helpless.”
I held my breath for her answer. So much seemed to depend on it. Then she turned those vast violet eyes on him and said, “What is an arm? You have another.”
And so I suppose that began their courtship. How many, I wondered, began that way, in the wake of war? How many like Noah reached out with the only hands they had left to women who would help them heal?
We were getting north now, and the humpbacked hills had lost all their reds and yellows. Gaunt winter was on the way. At the Carbondale depot we collected Delphine’s trunks and paid a man with our last money to take us home.
Noah felt every jolt in the road. We seemed to make no headway whatever, after the speed of the train. But one last rise and there it was—the great, gray river rolling past Tower Rock on the Missouri side. Down the last dip was the scatter of houses around the landing, and the house astride the Devil’s Backbone, halfway up. The leaves were off the trees now, so we saw the smoke from our chimney.
The sight of it sent the blood hurrying through my veins. I’d been sent to bring my brother home, and here he was. So that was the very last time when I was truly young, young in my heart. That breathless moment in the rattling backboard, almost safely home.
How empty Grand Tower seemed, after the boom of Cairo. There was emptiness to our house too, a vacant, staring look about the windows. But then the kitchen door flew open, and out plunged Cass, down the porch stairs, pounding to us before we could get the trunks down.
My arms were out to her. But it was the old Cass before Calinda—whey-faced and wan. Her dress ought to be tight on her, but she was lost in it. Her eyes were big and haunted in their former way.
She flung herself at me, and there up on the porch Calinda was standing. She wore a black tignon. Evening was coming now, and there was evening in her face.
“Mon Dieu,” Delphine murmured, “what has happen?”
Cass had come out without her shawl. She trembled against me like a broken bird, then turned to Noah. Her eyes filled when she saw his pinned-up sleeve. She grabbed at her own arm because she’d known he’d lose his. She’d suffered its loss in her visions. She’d felt the doctor’s cleaving knife through more nights than I knew, there on the windowsill.
She took his hand and mine in a somehow formal way. From the porch Calinda gestured Delphine to her. And so it was only the three of us, my brother, my sister, and me, walking now around the house, above the chicken yard. We were making for the woodshed, dreaded through the summers because of the snakes.
Cass threw open its sagging door. I staggered against Noah. Inside on two sawhorses was a coffin. A plain wood
coffin nailed down.
A terrible howl began low in me. “Mama!”
“No!” Cass said. “Paw.”
I couldn’t think. Something lay on the coffin lid within the shadows of the shed. Noah went in there and brought it out—a gray forage cap and the buckle off a belt with some insignia on it, something military. I wouldn’t have known what it meant.
But Noah could read it clear. “He was in Polk’s army. He took up with the Secesh side. I fought against him and didn’t know.” There was wonder in Noah’s voice, and this was the first time he’d spoken of the battle.
“We drove ’em back through the woods, past their camp. I’d lost my musket by then. It never would fire. When we fell to looting the camp, Grant made us torch the place to learn us not to steal. The smoke drew Polk’s fire from across on the Kentucky side. That’s when I lost this.” He touched his sleeve.
All I could think was that they’d ship a dead man home, even a dead reb. But they’d let a one-armed boy find his own way.
I wouldn’t mourn Paw. He’d learned us long before how to get by without him. And all he’d left behind himself was there in Noah’s hand. It was fitting that Paw had ended up fighting on the other side. He’d never been on ours.
“They brought him back by boat,” Cass said. “They put the coffin ashore and sent word up from the landing.”
How dark the hollows under her eyes, like bruises. She looked deep at our brother. “Noah, Mama thought it was you, come home in the coffin. She thought it was you she’d lost.”
Cass seemed to shrink. There was fear of us in her eyes.
“Cass, where’s Mama now?” I said.
“Gone in the river.” Her voice was low and lost. “Before we could stop her.”
Gone in the river, when I’d been a daughter to her and done her bidding and brought my brother home.
He gathered us up in the arm he had left, and the three of us turned back to the house.
