And what saw Jackson there in the shadows? He did not die of his wound. His left arm is lost—buried here in Chancellorsville. It was a heaviness in the lung that took him. We stood outside, ready to run messages or fetch water. Anything to help. We heard him call out orders from the window above, commanding men to move here, follow there. Then a quietness fell. The wind rustled the trees, which were fully leafed out in the deep green garments of spring. We heard, softly on a Sunday’s gentle breeze—he said, “Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.” Those were his last words as he passed, and I sit here writing this letter beneath a waning Virginia moon, wondering what it was he saw. Did he hear my bird? Did he cross the river Lethe, taking up a bowl and drinking deeply from it, leaving the sorrows of this war forgotten?
So this day and this letter, I have come to my last brass button, Juliette. I hesitate to send it, as now I shall have none to see me home. Jeb’s mother thought it superstitious and nonsense but these buttons hold my family’s past; they secure me to my place in this world as surely as the Reverend’s buttons secure the jacket on my back. Until this moment, I have not felt so bound to them. Today has made it difficult to let the last go. Yet, I must—I must trust Providence to be my guide, for to carry this one further is to risk its loss from the set. I should not create another orphan of this war. They have no home but with you and now you hold my future and my past. You hold the full of me.
My love, know an hour does not pass when you are not on my mind. Your dark hair and gray eyes look deeply into mine as we dance on a summer’s night. I have no feeling but you in my arms, spinning around the floor as the moon dances with the earth. Days shall follow days. Months shall follow months. And all the while, I am returning to you, following the path that leads home across the river to dance once more beneath a Virginia moon.
Ever yours, devotedly,
Samuel
Chapter 27
The Caretakers
Ginger sat next to her son, who slept in the hospital bed, resting as only a child can do.
She hadn’t brought Samuel up from where he rested. On the contrary, she skittered away from his bones as quickly as possible, nearly jumping from the hole in three lunges up the rope. She said nothing to her father, and when meeting her son’s wide, hopeful eyes, she simply mouthed, Later, as she lifted his makeshift stretcher into the boat.
They left Eli, Miriam, Osbee, and her mother on the other side of the Shenandoah and, together, Ginger and her father crossed the river. With the help of Henry and Bea, they carried Oliver across the covered bridge and through the orchard to the waiting ambulance that was surrounded by all of the neighbors. Into their care, she left her children and her family and climbed into the ambulance with her son. Sitting beside him, she let go, watching the EMT work on her boy. Now and then, she glanced up to the window to find her father following in the truck.
When they arrived, the emergency doors swung open and Oliver was whisked away into Woodstock ER. Ginger followed where she could and was left to wait when she couldn’t, just like any mother who brings her child to the ER. She knew everything in the place, yet all of it was unfamiliar, as she had never worked in Woodstock. And she had reasons not to.
She had always made it a point to work far from her home. Working locally meant knowing the people who entered your ER. They’d be on your children’s soccer teams or would wave to you in restaurants or smile at you in the grocery stores. Private matters pass through the doors of an ER and, through her life, Ginger never wanted to know intimately the people she served. Her service was intimacy enough. She wanted the freedom of a separated life—of knowing her neighbors only with the information they were willing to share. Thus, her service called her from home and now that she sat next to her son, listening to the morning chorus rise again, as she and Oliver had now been in Woodstock Hospital for twenty-four hours, she was grateful she had always done so. No nurse knew her. No doctor was her familiar. For the first time in her life, she was simply a woman with CKS with GACP—“Cute Kid Syndrome” with “Gravity Assisted Concrete Poisoning” (falling/jumping down a far distance). She didn’t have to take care. She was taken care of.
The door opened slowly and on the other side of it Ginger found her parents.
“Good morning, Mom. Dad was supposed to go home to sleep.”
“I made him bring me back. I decided I’d sit with Oliver. You need to go home,” her mother replied.
“I can’t leave him.”
“Why not?”
“I want to be here when he wakes up.”
“I know, Ginny Moon,” her father said. “But he’s fine. His throat is stitched. Nothing’s hurt in his neck and back. He only has scratches and a broken rib. They’re just keeping him overnight to monitor him and, look, it’s already day. Nothing to worry you and Mom will call us when he wakes and is ready to go.”
“I can’t leave him,” Ginger repeated.
“I’ll be here,” Monica said, sitting on the arm of the chair where Ginger sat. She wrapped her arm around her daughter’s shoulders. “Let someone else take over.”
“What if he calls for me?” Ginger asked.
“I’ll call you.”
Ginger’s father reached down and grabbed her hands, pulling her from the chair. “We’ll eat and shower and if we feel okay, we’ll just come back. It’s not far. Come home with me, Ginny Moon.”
Reluctantly, Ginger followed her father out the door, led by his steady hand holding hers.
“We’ll take care of him,” Nurse Mary Lou said as they passed the nurses’ station. Ginger nodded and, without a word, climbed into the elevator, went down a floor, and came out into a beautiful spring day.
They said nothing as they drove. Ginger simply looked around the green, misty morning still in the fog of her son’s injury. They passed the field where Samuel had once sat for a picture, down the road where Ginger had driven for lantern fuel, onto the lane where her husband last traveled away from his home, and as they pulled up the gravel drive, Ginger found Osbee standing in the cemetery.
Without another thought, she climbed out of the truck and walked through the orchard, the morning dew cold on the bottom of her jeans. Rooster gobbled to her as she passed the paddock. The chickens were up already, pecking the ground and chattering to one another of yesterday’s events.
The wrought-iron gate creaked a little as Ginger entered. When it did, Osbee stood up, freshly pulled weeds in her hands. “You look tired, daughter. Go rest. Oliver is well.”
Ginger nodded and looked around. “Should we have brought Jesse home here?” she asked, wishing she had his grave to care for. To stand alongside Osbee and work with love—Ginger could think of nothing more she’d ever want to do.
“He belongs where he is.”
Ginger bent down and plucked at the skeletons of weeds, their lives long gone with last year’s winter. As she worked around the bottom of a small stone cross, Osbee moved next to her and did the same on the headstone to her left.
“I didn’t know there was stuff of Jesse’s in the springhouse,” Ginger said, her fingers turning muddier with each weed she pulled. Her back hurt as she thought of Oliver and Samuel lying in that narrow space within the mountain.
“There’s a lot of stuff in there from times past. It was the only building to survive Sheridan’s march.”
The grass and weeds pulled from the small cross revealed an engraved name covered with mud. Squatting down, Ginger followed the letters with her dirty fingers, pulling the dirt from within them.
“Seen a small box that fits the gold key?”
Osbee stood up, snickering. “You still have that key?”
Ginger smiled up at her with a nod.
The name she’d uncovered was smeared still with mud but free to be touched by the light of the sun. When she sat back and read it, her heart rolled with a thundering
sound in her ears as if a boulder had moved away from a far place.
“Juliette Marie Smoot,” Ginger whispered.
“Mmm. My great-great-grandmother.”
“She didn’t die.”
“What’s that, daughter?”
Ginger jumped to her feet, startling Osbee, who fell in the wet grass on her bottom.
“Samuel!” Ginger yelled as she flew out the cemetery gate.
“No one has seen him,” Osbee called after her but she didn’t care. She knew exactly where he was and she raced through the grass, the thundering in her chest echoing in the bridge as she passed it.
“She didn’t die in Strasburg!”
Crossing through the copse of trees, she stopped abruptly. Jesse’s ash was gone.
She covered her mouth, gazing up and down the river, searching for her husband’s tree.
“No,” she breathed, and as she stepped to follow the river downstream to find it, Ginger spotted Samuel standing on the other side.
His eyes were as soft brown as the day they met. A wind picked up his hair. How was the wind touching his hair? Was he here now or was she looking there then?
She stood gazing down to the river’s bend, which had taken Jesse’s tree in its wash, and then across to Samuel. She had never wavered. She was her husband and he was she. They were one together and neither of them failed to serve. She closed her eyes, faltering in her own mind, not knowing what to do.
The Shenandoah babbled at her feet, its breath now cold, now warm, kissing her neck and caressing her hair. Then she heard its voice: duty. The voice of duty falls weighty on the soul; it is imperative. It must be followed. Anyone who hears the call of duty knows this. But in its carriage, duty lightens the path. In its weight, it gives purpose and meaning. In its lightness, it gives roots.
Ginger felt her root—not her husband’s, not Osbee’s. She knew her duty and, gazing around, she found Jesse’s boat sitting next to the boulder with the rope and oars resting within. As she walked over to it, Osbee, Bea, Henry, and her dad barreled through the trees.
“What are you doing, daughter?”
“I’m bringing him home from war,” she replied quietly.
Without a sound Ginger pushed the boat toward the river. As she did so, she found Osbee bending to help. “Please, Osbee. This is a duty for me and Henry and Bea. Can you take Dad, find a couple of shovels, and go dig a spot near Juliette.”
Osbee stood up straight, shaking her head.
“It is a long, sad story, I think,” Ginger added. “Come on, guys. Time to bring Samuel across the river.”
With a frown of confusion, Henry and Bea hopped into the boat without a word. Ginger sat facing her father on the shore as she pulled on the oars. “It’s a river, Dad. Not a light.” She chuckled.
Her father smiled through serious eyes and shrugged.
The Shenandoah took hold of the boat, slowing now to let them cross without a battle. There was no need to talk—no need to ask directions. She simply looked into Bea’s and Henry’s eyes. They were fixed on a point on the opposite bank and she knew if she rowed in that direction, she would come to Samuel.
When the boat bumped the shore, her children climbed out, their demeanors as solemn as the day they stood on the hill in Arlington.
“Hi, Samuel,” Bea said quietly.
“Good day, Bea,” he replied.
As Ginger bent down to grab the rope, she closed her eyes, feeling the warm wind turn cold and warm again. She hurt, feeling the oncoming loss like the water of a growing flood.
“This isn’t loss,” she whispered to the river. “This is found.”
Turning around, she found Samuel’s eyes upon her. They were steady and moist at their edges. His hair was tousled by a wind.
“You are here,” she stated.
“I am,” he replied.
“The wind touches you now?” she asked.
“Not the wind you feel,” he whispered.
She inhaled sharply, refusing the loss, and said, “C-can you see the other side?”
He nodded, his chest rising, deepening with breath.
Ginger said nothing as she passed him. Together, Bea and Henry followed their mother up the steep embankment. The only sound was that of little pebbles rolling away underfoot, dislodged from their spot in the earth and heading down to the muddy bank. No bird sang. No wind breathed. No river flowed.
When they came to the crevice, Ginger tied the rope to a tree and with a firm nod to her children she lowered herself into the cavern. Her feet hit the floor and, squatting, she crawled down to the right. Her son’s blood on the stone had dried and was deep brown. Stretching out on her stomach, Ginger slithered inside until her arms could just touch Samuel.
“It was Oliver, Virginia. Oliver was there and then, wearing my own cap on the opposite shore. I thought—”
“You thought him living then.” Ginger lifted his skull from its place by his left hip and placed it in the crook of her arm so it didn’t roll away in the deeper part of the crevice.
“The pine that fell that brought me across the river to you had grown old these one hundred and fifty years. Yet it still wore my hat that I placed on top of it when it was but a sprout.”
“It was Oliver’s bird that called to you.”
“It was my bird that called to him.”
“All of it to bring you here, now.”
“And you. Can you reach me, Virginia Moon?”
“I can. And I know where Juliette is,” she said as she gently moved his bones around in his uniform so she could pull him from the hole.
“Where is she?”
“She’s waiting for you.” Ginger removed his feet from their tattered boots.
“A-are you taking me to her?”
“Yes.” She rolled the boots up in the pants and tucked it all in a ball. “You will rest with her this night—where you belong.”
Slowly, she pulled Samuel from the crevice and held him to her aching chest as she crawled back up the cavern. When she reached the rope, she wrapped it around him and Bea and Henry pulled him out. Ginger then climbed out after him, and as they walked down the hill Bea held Samuel’s shoes, Henry held the rope, and Ginger held Samuel and her breath. They climbed in the boat and floated into the river.
Ginger rowed toward the opposite shore and when she was halfway across she gazed up and found Samuel sitting in the boat, his solemn face staring down at her children. Their shaking shoulders told of tears, though they made no sound. Instead she heard the Shenandoah singing, its voice rolling deep, quenching all who came to her shore. She thought of her Jesse dream, of floating weightless on the water. She wanted that; Ginger wanted her dream, so she pulled in her oars. Gently, the Shenandoah took hold of her children and slowly turned the boat north.
“Did you know,” Samuel said, “that I met your father?”
Bea sniffled. “You did?”
“It took me a while to realize you belonged to him, but then, Bea, you did look so familiar when we first met by the barn. Do you remember?”
Bea nodded. So did Ginger. It seemed so long ago that Samuel had crossed on the fallen tree, but it was no more than two weeks. A lifetime had happened in two weeks.
“He crossed the river, thinking to run away. It was time to go home to his parents and he wanted to stay here, so up the mountain he climbed and as the violet hour came on he lost his way. I helped him bivouac and we spent the night, as the violet hour turned to rain, speaking of war and sloosh and VMI. Of honor, duty, service. To find what is right when in wrongness. To honor family though you disagree. Honoring does not mean to agree. It doesn’t even mean you have to like your family. But you do need to acknowledge that your parents brought you into this world.”
“That’s what Daddy taught us!” Bea declared.
The Shenandoah shifte
d in her bed, bending as she flowed north. The boat eased with her and when Ginger looked over she saw the western shore and home drawing closer.
“And he taught you sloosh and bivouacking on rainy nights,” Ginger added, thinking she should grab the oars and row them farther out into the river.
Henry asked, “That was you?”
“That was me. I never knew I raised a boy.”
The muddy bank crept closer.
“A man does not die if his dream yet lives, if his love lives.”
Ginger gazed over to Samuel as the Shenandoah reached for the shore. Wanting her dream to continue a little longer, Ginger shook her head and as she reached for the oars she stopped. How long had Samuel waited? How long had he dreamed?
“My dream was to love—to raise children on a farm and find a place at the table.”
“Wait a little more,” Ginger whispered. As tears rose in her eyes, so they flowed from Samuel’s.
“And I have done so. I have lived my dream.” The wind flowed across Samuel’s shirt, billowing and dissipating like a cloud.
“Don’t go.” Bea wept.
“I am with your daddy and we are just on the other side of the river. We’ll always be there.”
The bottom of the boat scratched the shallow bed of Shenandoah.
“I love you all,” Samuel said softly. “Tell Oliver.”
“We love you, too,” Henry whispered.
The boat came ashore, and as Samuel disappeared, they heard his voice singing softly, “Let me cross over the river and I shall rest under the shade of the trees.”
Here and Again Page 32
