by Julianne Lee
She considered that for a long moment, and a bit of color returned to her cheeks. In fact, quite a lot of color came to her face. Finally, she said, “Nobody will think less of us?”
“Nope. Well, not much, anyway. There are some folks who would get pissy about it, but not anyone who matters. I mean, who do you know in this century who gives a damn about Mary Beth Campbell?” One hand clapped to her mouth, and she bent forward as tears sprang to her eyes. Uh oh. “I mean...” Oh, shit, what did he mean? “...I mean, everyone here thinks you’re Shelby. What you do here will reflect on her instead of you.”
The tears continued, running silently down her face. She looked up at him, so lost it broke his heart.
“Listen, Mary Beth. Just sit right there. I’ll go in the kitchen and see what I can find to eat. I’ll turn up the heat and maybe make this place a mite cozier. We’ll get something to eat, you can take a nice, hot bath, then decide what you want me to do. How’s that?”
Still too overwrought to speak, she nodded.
“Fine.” He took off his jacket, wiped the tears from it as best he could, and hung it on the coat rack that stood by the hall door. After nudging the thermostat up a couple of degrees, he went into the kitchen and looked around.
Shelby may have been lazy about unpacking, but at least her kitchen was well-kept. Electric stove, though. He hated those. It took a little rummaging around in the cabinets and refrigerator, but eventually he found frying pan, spatula, bowl, fork, butter, eggs, bread, mushrooms, cheese and green onions. He smiled to himself. Omelets were his specialty. He began breaking eggs into the bowl, and noticed Mary Beth lurking just outside the door, watching him.
“Come on in and sit down.” He gestured to the table of blonde oak in the nook, where windows looked out over the snowy street. An occasional car went by, slowly with a hiss of tires on slushy pavement. Mary Beth slid onto one of the chairs, facing him, and her fingers nervously flicked the edge of a place mat woven of dried reeds.
“Are you a chef?” Her face had cleared up some, and she sounded less frightened than she had been. “Were you one?”
He shook his head as he whisked the eggs with a fork. “Nope. I cook because I’m thirty years old, I’ve lived alone for three years, and got sick of eating fast food all the time.”
“Which food?”
He had to think a moment about that one, then replied, “Food in restaurants. Places where so many people come to eat that they can make the food beforehand and wrap it up, then they just swap it out for cash like in a store and you take it to a table to eat it.”
“I can’t imagine that would taste very good.”
“It doesn’t. That’s why I got sick of it.” He began cutting up the mushrooms and green onions. She watched him silently, and the expression on her face was so unlike Shelby he wondered how he could have ever mistaken her. There was an air of quiet about Mary Beth that he’d never seen in Shelby. A calm that suggested they could spend the entire evening in silence and it would be all right. He accepted that, and nothing more was said while she watched him prepare the food and serve it in the nook.
“This is delicious.”
“Thank you.” He’d discovered years ago that his omelets were the quickest way to a lady’s heart, and tonight he began to hope it would be true for Mary Beth.
They cleaned up the kitchen together, then he drew a bath for her and showed her how to set the right temperature. While she bathed, he repaired to the living room and cracked one of the dozens of books lying about. He began to think about her future, and how she would live from now on, and realized just how frightened she must be to live in a time and place where she had no skills and no family to support her.
There was rummaging in the bedroom, and it seemed to take a long time for Mary Beth to get herself squared away. But finally she returned to the living room and he gently closed the book on his lap to look up at her. She was muffled head-to-toe in flannel pajamas and terry cloth robe. She held the front of the robe closed with white-knuckled fists.
“If you please, Jason, I would like you to stay with me.” She added hastily, “On the couch.”
He nodded as if to say, Of course.
“I’ve found some blankets and linens in this cabinet in the bathroom. Perhaps they would make the couch more comfortable.”
“Thanks.”
“They’re right in there, on the counter.”
“All right.”
There was a long hesitation, as if she didn’t know what to say next. He waited. Then she said, “Goodnight, then.”
“Goodnight. I’ll see you in the morning. And I’ll be right out here if you need me for anything.” He bit his lip as he realized that could have sounded like a come-on, but it apparently went straight over her head and she nodded before disappearing into the bedroom.
He rose and put the book away, then went to the bathroom for a quick shower. It would have been good to have gone back to his house for some fresh underwear, but he didn’t want to leave Mary Beth alone. He also put his shirt back on. Then, passing her door on his way to the living room, he had an idea and knocked for her. “Mary Beth?”
“Yes?” She hadn’t fallen asleep, and he wondered if she would tonight.
“I have an idea. Tell you what. I’ve got some stuff packed away that might give us some answers. Maybe we can find out whether ol’ Lucas Robert married you or someone else.”
There was silence on the other side of the door. Just when Jason was about to take that as a No, thanks, she replied, “Thank you, Jason.”
He returned to the living room with the linens and spread them on the sofa, then slipped under the covers as he thought hard about what they might find tomorrow. He also thought hard about what he hoped they would or would not find.
Chapter 19
September 1863
A twig snapped in the forest, and the roan snorted. Shelby’s hand went to her loaded gun by her side, and she lay very, very still. The fire was low, for she preferred not to attract strangers or insects with the light. Supper had been a handful of raw greens and a fish she’d taken an hour to catch just near sunset. She was wet and cold, and glad for a dry piece of ground and a blanket to roll up in. Sleep would have been most welcome after a long and not very productive day, but now she was wide awake and peering into the mountain darkness near Monteagle.
Alert for every sound and every shadow in the suddenly silent forest, she sensed one presence. The horse was also very definite about which direction lay the danger, and jerked against the rope that secured her. Shelby peered deep into the trees, and was able to discern a man-shaped shadow as still as herself.
She drew her pistol and pointed it at the shadow. Her thumb drew back the hammer. The cocking click resounded in the silence. Nothing moved.
After a long moment, she said in the lowest, toughest voice she had at her disposal, “Get out of here.”
There was a moment of hesitation, then the shadow melted back into the forest. Ever so slight sounds of brushing leaves and footsteps in loamy ground marked the intruder’s progress away from Shelby’s fire. Then silence.
“Damn.”
Quickly and quietly, still alert for the intruder, she pulled together her pack and saddled her horse. Sleeping wasn’t going to happen tonight, for she would be a fool to fall asleep in a place where she’d been seen. She neither knew nor cared who that had been in the shadows. What she did know was it had been a stranger, and trusting the good will of strangers in these parts was an incredibly bad idea. It was now time to move on, and quickly. And to hope that man had been on foot.
The rest of the night she rode, not stopping until nearly dawn. Then she slept a short while before picking up again and moving on in search of breakfast. South and east. Always headed south and east, following but rarely using the road to Chattanooga.
She’d been gone from home a week and a half. Though she was well inside Confederate territory there were always risks, for loyalty was never a sure thing
regardless of who was in power. But at least for now there was little chance of running into a Lincolnite in uniform. She’d have to be a little closer to Chattanooga before she would see many men in blue. The first week of travel had been uneventful.
The Tennessee countryside southeast of Nashville was gently rolling hills, dotted with trees and an occasional forested area, and the road to Chattanooga was a pretty fair straight shot. Well within territory that was more or less friendly, Shelby’s main difficulty was to find enough to eat for herself and her mount. Each night she found a thicket of trees in which to camp, and each day she located pasture for her horse and a farmhouse or town where she could purchase sustenance for herself. Though she avoided people as much as possible, there was no getting around the need for food and every few days she was forced into contact with folks along the route. Some days she went hungry, and with her lithe build she didn’t have the fat to burn. She lost what little she had, and returned to a constant gnawing in her gut.
By the second week, she found herself thinking of food all the time, and going out of her way to locate patches of greens or apple trees with late fruit. One such tree sustained her for three days, and by the time she’d eaten the last of her lucky find she was not only hungry but sick of apples.
Eventually the landscape began to rise before her and around her, and she knew she needed extra care in avoiding bushwhackers in these parts. Mountain men in East Tennessee were more than just reclusive and xenophobic these days. Depending on the particular political leanings of a given one, he might consider it his bounden duty to shoot whoever came by in an inappropriate uniform. And there was no telling which way any of them might lean. Many such men were just plain cantankerous and would shoot anyone they took a fancy to shooting, and let God sort out who deserved it. Not the kind to be trifled with. Up here, there was no taking to the back trails for there was no telling who she’d run into, and getting lost was a strong possibility.
She learned to read her horse’s behavior. The animal could hear and smell people coming from a good distance, and whenever her ears twitched Shelby hurried to find a spot in the trees where she could hide until the unknown person had passed. In this manner, she traversed the mountains between Monteagle and the Tennessee River, winding between peaks and into valleys, and struggling to not lose her sense of direction. Fodder for the horse was scarce here, and the going slow. She pushed herself and her mount harder as the days ticked off toward September 20th.
Not far from the Tennessee River, she found a crossroads where a small store stood, and she dismounted to go inside. She scuffed her bare feet against the wood floor, hoping to seem tough and boyish.
A woman was helping another woman put together an order, and as Shelby listened she realized many items were in even shorter supply here than they were back home. The proprietress looked to her and said, “Help you, boy?” The woman’s accent was thick and eastern. Shelby had come a long way.
She looked up, and laid on the backwoods accent, hoping it didn’t sound forced, and gruffed up her voice a little in hopes of sounding like a teenage boy trying to sound like a grown man. “Got any bread?”
The woman shook her head. “Ain’t none made. Et the last at dinner. You’re not begging, are you boy?”
“I got money.”
That brought a smile. “Confederate?”
“Union.”
The proprietress smiled even wider, but the other woman’s eyes narrowed and she said, “Where’d you get Yankee money, young man?”
The truth sprang to Shelby’s lips; that she’d just come from occupied territory where everyone used Union cash, but a gut feeling about these two told her this might not go over well. So she replied in the toughest voice and the thickest accent she could manage, “Stole it off a dead Yankee.”
Both women chuckled. The proprietress said, “You the one killed him?”
Shelby thought about expanding on the lie, but instead simply shook her head. Bragging on killing people wasn’t for her. “Found a body. Had it hidden in his boot.”
The women nodded, as if searching dead bodies for cash was an everyday pastime in these parts. Proprietress asked, “What’s your name?”
“Shelby. Shelby Douglas.” It felt strange to give her real name after going by Mary Beth for so long.
“Well, I’ll tell you, young Mr. Douglas, I got a mite of jerky here for you, effen you want it. Near half a pound. Cost you but a nickel.”
Shelby suppressed a groan. A nickel was nearly half of what she had left of the cash, and half a pound of meat for a nickel was robbery. “Make it three cents?”
“I can give you three cents’ worth.”
That meant she’d charge her three cents for half the jerky. “Nah, I’ll take the half pound. Thank you, kindly, if I could water my horse?”
“Trough is around back.”
Shelby nodded as she dug for five pennies to pay the woman, and took three fairly hefty pieces of dried meat. As she tucked the jerky into a pocket and stepped back toward the door, she said, “Either of you two got any idea where the fighting is?”
The customer’s eyes narrowed again, but the proprietress said, “Nope. Not the slightest notion. Don’t care, neither. Just so long as it stays well clear of me, I’m happy. I’ve seen few enough Yankees around here, and I expect I’ll never want to see another.”
Shelby nodded, then bade the women good day before making her exit. These folks would be seeing way more Yankees than they ever wanted to soon enough.
Taking the roan around back to the trough, she noted a small haystack near an outbuilding behind the store. She removed the horse’s bridle and wandered over by the stack as she drank from the trough, knowing the horse would come that way to snag some of the hay. Shelby had been held up for the dried meat, so she would take it out in hay. Sitting at the edge of the haystack, she pulled out a piece of the jerky to assuage the knot of hunger in her stomach. As she chewed, and she thought of how careful she’d have to be with the rest of it, she let her mind wander to foods she wished she had. Things she hadn’t eaten since the switch: ice cream; French fries; pastrami; pizza; egg rolls. The irony of not being able to have those things now that she had the metabolism for it gnawed at her and put a keen edge on her hunger. But she looked forward to the end of the war, when things would improve and there might be enough to eat once more even though it still wouldn’t be ice cream. She eyed the roan who came over for the hay as predicted. Then she held up the end of the jerky and said in a badly exaggerated Georgia accent, “As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again!”
That struck her as hopelessly funny, and she fell back to lie in the hay and giggled to herself while her horse chewed.
Along on her way, she asked questions of other folks nearby, but everyone she encountered was either ignorant or closed-mouthed. Often it was hard to know which. Try as she would to obtain information about the whereabouts of Lucas’s unit, she was a stranger and therefore was told nothing of value. She couldn’t blame them, for she wouldn’t have told, either, and so she went on her way to where she knew the unit would be soon.
After crossing the Tennessee, it was an easier trek on into Chattanooga, tucked in among the hills near Lookout Mountain. Now she was forced to reveal herself, for the town was large and there was no hiding from everyone. Cutting south and skirting the mountain wasn’t an option, for it would take far too long to reach the battlefield then and she would be approaching it from the wrong side. Her only hope of saving Lucas was to find him before he reached it. She had to ride straight through to find the Chickamauga Creek on the other side. Once or twice she was approached for her horse, but was able to slip from the clutches of the Army by shouting excitedly about an emergency dispatch for General Rosecrans and kicking the roan to a gallop. Nobody ever followed her when she did that.
She found the creek on September 19.
All day she followed that creek, knowing she was making the route longer by sticking to the curves, but
also afraid of missing the battle entirely if she wandered too far away from the water. She knew nothing about the place, or how the fight would play out, except that the blood from the thousands of men killed would run as freely as the creek. Soon, though, she was finding evidence an army had passed recently: wagon ruts, trampled brush, discarded items. Her pulse picked up and she followed the trail, hoping she was tracking the right army.
Near sunset, just as the shadows began to overpower the light, she heard a cannon fire in the distance. She jumped in the saddle, startled, and her heart leapt to her throat as if she hadn’t been waiting to hear that very sound. A frisson of surprise and excitement skittered up her spine and out to her fingertips. It was impossible to know whether she’d doubted the history or hoped it was wrong, but there it was. More cannon shots thudded in the distance, and as she came nearer and the forest grew darker, there was added the pop of rifles.
The sound was off to her right, and she spurred her horse toward it. A road cut through the woods, and she followed it because it happened to be going the direction of the shooting. Soon she could make out shouts, and the screams of men came clear. Shelby’s resolve faltered. Those voices cut through her soul. Men were dying, in horrible pain, and she absolutely did not want to go where they were. But she urged her horse forward and the animal carried her.
Shouts came from behind. There were men all through the trees. Shadows running toward the shooting.
“Hey!”
Either nobody heard her, or they didn’t want to stop.
“Hey! Hey, you!” Shelby dismounted and tried to stop one of them. It was dark, and nearly all she could see were muzzle flashes and shadows. Shadows within shadows, among the trees. It was as if she weren’t there.
She was grabbed from behind. “You, boy!” The man was not large, but he was awfully strong and shook her hard. “Where’s your rifle?”
