And One Wore Gray (30 page)

“Then I will be hanged,” she finished for him. She smiled. “Don’t get killed, Colonel.”

He swept her a low bow. “No, ma’am. I will not get killed.”

She lifted a hand in a salute. Daniel returned it, and Billy and Davie followed his lead.

The wagon began to clip-clop away, the sound seeming to echo in the stillness of the night.

“Well, boys, we are almost home free!” Daniel said. “Shall we walk?”

“Walking seems mighty fine to me, sir!” Billy told him.

“Yessir,” Davie agreed.

Daniel paused suddenly. A breeze had picked up in the night. He turned to the northwest. Maryland. He wanted to go back. For a moment the ache was so strong he could scarcely bear it. And it had nothing to do with revenge. It had everything to do with wanting to touch her.

He swallowed hard, then grinned to his men. “Well, gentlemen, this is home for me.” He started walking, the others behind him.

Twice in the night they heard the sound of horses’ hooves. They melted into the trees, off the road. Yankee patrols rode by.

In the morning, they found a cove and slept. By afternoon, the pangs of hunger were tearing at them. Though Davie convinced Daniel he could catch a rabbit with his bare hands, Daniel convinced Davie that they couldn’t light a fire. They had to settle on some wild berries.

By night, they walked again. With careful scavenging, Billy managed to slip an apple pie off the window-sill of a small farmhouse.

Some small boy was probably going to take a licking for a crime for which he wasn’t guilty, Daniel reflected. They were in Virginia, but he wasn’t ready to test the loyalty of the farmers yet. One day, he’d come back and pay for the pie.

They had been on the road for four days and nights when they heard horses’ hooves and jumped into the foliage for what seemed like the thousandth time. Daniel tried hard to see through the brush. His heart hammered hard.

The uniforms were gray. Peering through the bushes, Daniel frowned. They weren’t just gray. They were familiar. As were some of the faces.

“We’ve got to keep looking,” an officer said. Daniel knew the voice. “Our intelligence is certain that they’ll be coming this way, down toward Fredericksburg.”

“What’s that?” someone demanded.

Daniel stepped out of the bushes, grinning broadly, his hands raised. They weren’t just cavalry men. They were cavalry men who had been in his command at one time. “Don’t shoot, my friends. I believe we’re who you’re looking for.”

“Daniel!” someone cried. A man slipped down from his horse. It was Captain Jarvis Mulraney, a neighbor from the peninsula, a good friend under Daniel’s command since the war had begun. Red-haired, freckle-faced, he looked too young to be in the war, but he was the captain of a crack group of horsemen.

Daniel embraced him.

“Thank God, you’re home!” Jarvis told him, beaming. “Jesu, we thought that we’d lost you for sure back in Sharpsburg!”

“No, I’m back,” Daniel said. “And yessir, thank God. I’m home.”

Men were dismounting from their horses all around him, embracing him. Harry Simmons, Richard MacKenzie, Robert O’Hara. He called Billy and Davie from the bushes and introduced them all around. It almost seemed like a party, right there in the road.

Yes, he was home, he reflected.

But there had been a piece of him lost for good back in Sharpsburg.

The days seemed to pass endlessly for Callie. October rolled into November.

She went into town for supplies, and she visited there with friends, but she felt strangely isolated, as if she wasn’t really a part of the community anymore.

She received letters from all three of her brothers, Joshua, Josiah, and Jeremy, and she was grateful, for all three of them were alive and in good health. It seemed forever since she had seen them. She wrote to them frequently, but she never knew just how often they actually received the letters that she wrote.

She never mentioned Daniel. She wouldn’t have known what to say.

She did tell them about the battle that had been fought in her front yard, and she carefully minimized any danger to herself. She was determined to be cheerful, and she told whatever stories about the antics of their neighbors that she could embroider upon.

The letters she received in turn were too much like those of the young man who had died in their barn. They all knew that they might meet death any day and they stressed emotions and feelings. Mainly, they
stressed love, and the appreciation for the quality of the lives they had already lived.

On Thanksgiving, Rudy Weiss appeared very early at her door with his wife at his side. Surprised to see them, Callie stared at the pair for a moment, then quickly invited them inside.

Helga, Rudy’s wife, a tall woman with a broad, ample bosom and truly apple-red cheeks, brought in a big basket and offered it to Callie with a shy smile. “Thanksgiving. And you are alone. You should not be alone. We have brought you a goose and corn and mein own apple sauce. It is good.”

“Well of course, it’s good! I’m sure it’s wonderful. I thank you very much.”

They stayed with her, and they shared the goose, and before he would leave, Rudy wanted to know if she needed anything done that she could not handle herself. She told him that no, she was fine. She’d had the windows repaned soon after the battle by glassworkers from town, and she felt that she was really in very good shape.

All of the Sharpsburg area was slowly healing. What remained of the corn was all in. Winter was coming to cleanse the rest of the landscape.

“Thank you for coming,” Callie told them at the door when they were leaving. “I know that you—I know that it is important for you to remain with your own people, and so it is doubly good of you to come to me.”

Helga clicked her teeth. “We are a plain people, not a mean one!” she assured Callie. She kissed her cheek, just like a surrogate mother, and she and Rudy quietly walked down the steps.

Callie wondered whether she might spend Christmas with Rudy and Helga, but just a few days before the holiday, she saw a soldier walking down the path toward the house, leading a handsome bay horse. Something
about the way that he moved drew her attention, even while he was at a distance.

She dropped the feed bucket that she had been carrying for the chickens and started to run. She ran as fast as her feet would carry her, and then she threw herself into the soldier’s arms.

“Jeremy!” she cried, delighted. The youngest of her brothers had come home.

“Callie, Callie!” He held her face between his palms, staring into her eyes, then he crushed her to his chest once again. “God, it’s so good to see you! I’ve missed you so much! And home. Callie, I can’t tell you what it’s like to be away from home like this!”

“But you look wonderful, Jeremy, wonderful! What a mustache! That’s one of the finest mustaches I’ve ever seen!”

And it was. Rich, dark red, full, well-manicured, and twirling nicely.

His eyes were silver-gray. Quick to burn, quicker still to sparkle, as they did now. “You like it, huh?”

“Well, it makes you look old. Very old.”

“Old enough to be a lieutenant?”

“You’ve been promoted! Oh, how wonderful!”

He shrugged. “Callie, we have an atrocious death rate. It’s horrible to say, but sometimes the Rebs are better fighters. Not many Yanks can deny that Bull Run was a ‘skedaddle.’ There have been lots of battles like that. We fare better in the West than they do in the East, but not much. Callie, those Rebs are fighting for their homeland. We’re marching all over it, stripping everything from it. And they’re killing us right and left. Promotions come quickly in wartime.”

“Jeremy, I’m proud. And I know that Pa would be proud, and glad that he made you all go to military school, even if we are farmers. But I don’t care about that right now, I’m just so glad that you’re home. And on leave. You are on leave, aren’t you? Jeremy! You
didn’t desert, did you? I heard in town the other day that desertions were pouring in from both sides, that men were trying to go home for winter. You didn’t just pick up and walk off, did you?”

“No, no, I’m on leave. I have until the day after Christmas, and then I’ll have to start back. But Josiah couldn’t come now, and neither could Joshua. They’re outside Vicksburg, Mississippi, and there aren’t many leaves being given there. I reckon I’ll have to report there, too, once I get back. Lucky for me, this promotion gave me Christmas.”

“I’m so grateful!” Callie exclaimed.

The days that passed were wonderful for her. She loved all of her brothers, but Jeremy was her favorite. They had been closest in age. They had fought in the haystacks, they had tried to tear out each other’s hair.

They had banded together against their older brothers, against their parents, against anyone who would dare say something ill of the other.

It was so good to have him home. Somehow the nights were a little easier. Her sleep was still plagued with dreams, but during the day she was no longer alone.

She wanted to tell him about Daniel, but she knew that she couldn’t. She wanted to tell him that he was going to be an uncle, but she couldn’t do that, either. She couldn’t send him back to war upset or angry or worried about her.

On Christmas morning Callie presented him with a beautiful navy blue scarf that would help keep him warm in the brutal winter weather. It was a fine, handsome piece of clothing, and his gratitude for it showed in his eyes.

“I didn’t have time to be anywhere near so creative, Callie,” he told her.

“Your being home is gift enough, Jeremy.”

He smiled. “I said that I wasn’t creative. I didn’t say that I didn’t have anything at all.”

He presented her with a box wrapped in silver paper. She opened it to discover a beautiful cameo. She stared at her brother.

“I bought it. Legitimately.”

“From?”

“A lady in Tennessee,” he said softly. “She had four children and a husband dead at Shiloh. She wasn’t doing well feeding the children with her Confederate paper money. She wanted Union dollars. I gave her plenty of them, I promise you.”

“But you took this brooch from her—”

“Callie, she didn’t want charity. I told her about you. She said that she’d be happy if you wore it.”

He took the pin, and carefully set it on her bodice. He stepped back, smiling. “Callie, I promise you, I paid her much more for it than it was worth.”

Callie smiled. “I’m glad.”

She hugged him, then pushed him away. “We have to get into town for church, and then I’ve got one of the biggest chickens for the fire that you’ve ever seen.”

“And apple pie?”

“Of course.”

They sat through the Anglican service in town. Callie kept her head bowed all through the service, certain that she should be praying and begging pardon for her sins.

Up by the altar was an old crèche. The Christ child lay in a cradle of straw, tiny arms outstretched. As she watched the crèche, she felt a warmth almost overwhelming her. She closed her eyes tightly. She could almost envision the baby, feel the softness of its flesh, see the tiny fingers, hear the squalling cries. Perhaps she had been wrong, perhaps she had sinned. A war was going on. The “war of the rebellion” as Jeremy was calling it—or the “civil war” as Daniel had referred
to it. No matter what was going on, there could be no evil in a precious babe, and she was convinced of it. She felt like crying, and she felt incredibly happy.

She must have been crying, because Jeremy pressed a handkerchief into her hands.

When they left the church, Callie stepped back as Jeremy was greeted by the townspeople. The men shook his hand. Women kissed his cheeks. A few of the more brazen—or lonelier—of the ladies left behind were so bold as to kiss his lips. Callie just leaned back against the church building, watching and enjoying.

They headed back home at last.

Callie thought that she had been well over the sickness. She had felt wonderful for days before Jeremy had arrived home. But right in the middle of setting the table for their meal, she suddenly felt a violent upheaval.

Jeremy, putting out the forks, looked up at her strangely. “What’s the matter?”

She wanted to answer him; she couldn’t. She tore out the back door and leaned over the railing, then choked and spilled out the apple and the porridge she had eaten that morning.

“My, Lord, Callie!” Jeremy cried, concerned, his hands on her shoulders. He pulled her around. He touched her forehead. “No, no, you’re not feverish. Come in and lie down. I’ll hitch the wagon back up and head to town for the doctor—”

“No! I don’t need a doctor.”

“Callie, I won’t leave with you being sick like this!”

“I’m not sick, Jeremy.”

“I just saw you—”

“Jeremy, it was nothing. Trust me. I’m not sick.”

She didn’t know when something he had learned about women suddenly dawned in his mind.

“My Lord, Callie, you’re—why, you’re in a family way. Oh, poor Callie, with Gregory dead these many,
many months—” He broke off, staring at her, his mouth gaping for a moment. “Callie, Gregory’s been dead way too long.”

She stared straight at him. She tried to feel the coolness of the breeze.

“The baby isn’t Gregory’s.”

“Then whose baby is it? I’ll find the man, Callie. He’ll do right by you, I swear it.”

She shook her head. “Jeremy, I don’t want you finding anybody.”

“It was a soldier?”

She hesitated.

“Why, those bloody bastards! Callie, you were”—he couldn’t quite seem to spit out the word, and then he did—“raped?”

She shook her head again. “No.”

He lifted his hands, at a loss. She’d never seen him more hurt.

“Callie, I can’t help you if you won’t let me.”

“I don’t want to be helped.”

“Callie, any Union soldier would be proud to come back here—” He broke off, his eyes widening, then narrowing sharply. “My God, it wasn’t a Union soldier. It was a goddamned Reb!”

“Jeremy—” She reached out a hand to him.

He backed away. “A goddamned Reb. Pa’s dead, and Gregory’s dead, and hell, you’ll just never know how many others. You don’t get to see your friends and neighbors explode daily! My God. My sister’s having a Reb bastard. My own sister! Goddamned, Callie, I don’t even want you in my house anymore!”