Sisters of Shiloh (26 page)

A cream-colored dress lay across the bed. Decorative buttons had been sewn to the bodice. Josephine touched the fabric.

“Silk,” she said.

“Naw. Not silk. Some kind of fancy cotton. But it feels like silk, don’t it? Pauline remade it into something modern by following a pattern she found in
Godey’s Lady’s Book.
She was a bit taller than you, but it might fit otherwise. Sorry there ain’t no petticoats. I had to tear them up for poultices when she got sick. She died in this room, you know. So did the boy. But it feels peaceful in here, don’t it? Sometimes I sleep in this room when the other one keeps me awake. My husband died in that one. Too many rooms used for dying these days.”

Eleanor put the kerosene lamp on the stool. “Now go on. Put that dress on and enjoy it. I’ve seen enough girlie things wasted in this war. Like you.”

The door closed behind her. Josephine took off her robe and stood naked in the lamplight. One would have to look close for effects of the war. A thickening of skin in certain places, the elbows and the feet. Old scars and slightly sunken ribs. Tanned skin on the face and the back of the hands. She put the dress over her head and felt the cloth brush down her skin. She hooked the skirt and bodice up the front and adjusted the collar. The sleeves were a bit too long, and the hem of the dress brushed the floor. She held the lamp to the mirror and studied herself, amazed at how quickly the transformation had occurred, as though a magician had been called to rush the trick through. Joseph was gone. Josephine was back in the room. She looked a little bit more like Libby now, the angles of her face a little sharper and the eyes more intense, and she felt a rush of grief for her lost sister.

When they were young girls, the sisters used to look at themselves and move ahead in time to imagine their own maturity, the swell of breast and the widening of hips. Paling of throat, gentling of brow, fullness of mouth. In strong lights, they could even see themselves as mothers, each cradling a child.

The door opened. Wesley stood in the doorway. He wore a long nightshirt. His hair was wet and slicked back over his ears.

“My God, Josephine,” he whispered. “How could I ever have seen anyone else?”

Josephine woke up shouting, “Libby, Libby!”

“No,” Wesley said. “It’s me.”

Libby bolted upright in the tent.

“Josephine!”

“No,” Arden said. “It’s me.”

The dirt had crusted over the little boy’s grave, hardening like a shell. Eleanor knelt and patted it. “Yep, that boy did a fine job,” she told Josephine, and looked over at Wesley, who was feeding the chickens with handfuls of millet. “You love him, don’t you?”

Josephine followed her gaze. Wesley caught her eye and waved.

“I can’t help it,” Josephine said.

“Nor should you. Look. The hem of your dress is touching the ground.”

Josephine pulled on the dress until it slid up her calf and fluttered just below the knee.

“We’ll hem that today,” Eleanor said. “It’s been almost a week, and you shouldn’t have to keep tripping on it.” She picked up her spade and turned back to the grave. She had almost finished digging holes around the grave’s perimeter. Josephine held a bag of sunflower seeds, waiting.

“That boy loved sunflowers,” Eleanor said. “I remember when the tall ones came up to his chest.”

She smiled, exposing her rabbit teeth to the memory.

“That’s when he was but a little thing. His papa hadn’t left for war yet. His mama was alive. Then all of a sudden, his papa was gone, his mama was dead, and so were the sunflowers. He died before they came back in bloom.”

“You did all you could for him.”

“And more. No one could say I didn’t do everything I could think of trying to save that boy.” Eleanor stopped digging. “I didn’t have no quinine, no nothing. His chest felt like sandpaper, and his tongue turned white as snow. I tried every tone of prayer. Hand me those seeds.”

“My sister had blackwater fever when she was thirteen years old,” Josephine said. “Everyone thought she was going to die. My father even bought a coffin and kept it in the shed. He thought no one saw it, but I did. I can still smell the pine of it. When I opened the lid, it didn’t creak at all. That’s how well it was made.”

Eleanor gathered some dirt with the side of her hand and brushed it into the first hole.

Josephine kept talking. “I was only fourteen. But I’m a natural nurse. Everybody says so. I could do everything my father and mother could do for Libby. She wouldn’t take the quinine from anyone but me. After a while, my parents just let me nurse her alone. I saved her. Not them. I wasn’t going to let her die.”

Eleanor let some seeds slide from her hand into another hole.

“You’re a good sister.”

The bedroom was quiet but for the whispery sound the hem of Josephine’s dress made when it dragged on the floor. The old woman was in the kitchen, making dinner. Outside in the backyard, lumps of red earth circled the boy’s grave. Another week and green leaves would shoot out of the lumps. By August long-stemmed shadows would move across the dirt. Josephine stopped pacing and stood with her back to the mirror, looking at the bed and imagining a little boy on it, knitting his brow as he tried to decipher a fever dream. He could smell the dust in this room, the lingering varnish of a chest polished years ago. The shadows of late afternoon slid up the walls when his fever broke. Sweat coated his eyelashes. He sighed in his sleep.

Josephine could imagine him perfectly, drawing on the memory of her sister, who took the little boy’s place on the bed each time Josephine blinked. Now Libby sighed in her sleep and frowned at the chill of the wet compress. Now the shadows were hers. Now she coughed, and a half-swallowed sip of blackberry cordial sprayed out of her mouth. Out in the backyard, a tin shed held her coffin.

“I won’t let you die,” Josephine told the child on the bed.

“I won’t let you.”

Wesley was knocking on the door.

“Please, Josephine,” he begged. “Answer me.”

Supper came late that night. The old woman kept changing her mind, withdrawing jars from the cupboards, muttering to herself, and then putting them back. Finally she had Josephine bring some dried fish in from the smokehouse and boiled some turnips. They ate around the fire, and then she disappeared outside and returned a few minutes later with a bottle of whiskey. She said, “I’ve been keeping it in the root cellar for a special occasion.”

“It’s half-drunk already,” Wesley said.

“I’ve had a sip every now and again. I’m an old lady, and I’ve got a lot of aches and pains.” She took off the cap and tipped the bottle back, stiffened as she tasted whiskey, gulped, and sat breathing out her nose. The firelight moved down her dress, exposing stains of different kinds. Her eyelids slowly closed. For a moment she seemed to have fallen asleep, but she opened her eyes and passed the bottle to Wesley.

“Sing something,” she said after he’d taken a sip. “Go on. I hear you got a good voice. Your friend here told me when you were feeding the chickens today.”

“And what did you tell
her?
” Wesley asked Eleanor.

“Wesley!” Josephine said.

Eleanor blinked. “About what?”

“I don’t know. But she locked herself in the room all afternoon and wouldn’t talk to me.”

“She was just telling me about her grandson,” Josephine said. “That’s all.”

Wesley wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve. “Did any other names come up?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Josephine said.

“Libby,”
he said, leaning on the word. “What else would make you lock me out of the room? You blame me, don’t you, for making you leave her?”

“Wesley—”

“I
saved
you!”

“Stop it,” Eleanor said. “God’s sakes, if I wanted this racket, I’d invite the chickens in. Just sing, boy. You’d be surprised how much that helps just about anything.”

Wesley scowled.

“That’s the face my grandson used to make when his taffy burnt. Now, go on. Earn your supper.”

Wesley sighed and handed the bottle to Josephine. He took a breath and began to sing, moving his left hand as though reaching for the neck of a guitar and then catching himself. Josephine and the old woman listened as his voice caught its power and deepened in the crannies of the house. He stopped singing abruptly and put his head in his hands.

“Well,” Eleanor said at last. “Time for bed, I guess.”

The moon flushed light down into the room. Wesley and Josephine faced each other in a loose embrace, a dreamer’s reassurance that a lover remains. That very first night, Eleanor had said, “This morning one of you was a boy. Now I suppose you’re married. I don’t care. I’m not here to remind you of the laws of God. Sleep in there together if you want. I know nothing.”

Wesley moved. His eyelids fluttered. Josephine had been dozing, but now she awoke and watched him. His face was smooth. It had turned so rough and red on the long winter march. His lips had cracked, as had the back of his hands. And now all traces of privation were gone from his face, except for the dark circles under his eyes, which had appeared late in December and hadn’t faded in the spring. He seemed to have thrived the past week on the old woman’s peculiar brand of insults and corn bread, and already she saw in his face a different understanding of the hours. He was on picnic time now, kite-flyer’s time, whittler’s time. He did not have to march madly over the ice until he found the deadline of a battle, he didn’t have to hurry to reload, or to duck, or to pray, and if he had any conflict about deserting, it didn’t show on his face.

Wesley murmured something and turned to the wall, but Josephine could not close her eyes. She saw sunflower seeds dropping in fresh holes. She saw the sick boy sleeping. She saw the old woman washing his face. Perhaps the armies would never again come out this far to ruin things, but love had made it out here, long ago, and had never died. She imagined Libby standing in the room with sunken eyes and a uniform that hung on her like a sack. And Josephine, who had never felt the crisp outline of her own character, realized it now. She had been put on this earth to live her own life but also to love and protect, and that was something crafted and real and wild, like the texture of a nest. Take away the love and she would have been translucent, just a ghost in the shadows who aches to be alive.

“I won’t forget you, Wesley,” she whispered, and slid from the bed.

She paused in Eleanor’s doorway. The room smelled of an herbal indistinction that pointed to folk remedies. The old woman lay curled up in her nightgown, her covers kicked off and her bare feet exposed. She was unguarded now, her face slackened into a dreamer’s acceptance of a twisting narrative. Without her heavy shoes and her piercing looks, she was just another child too young for war. Josephine wanted to kiss her face or cover her feet, but was afraid she would step on a creaky place had she entered the room.

The dog was sleeping by the spinning wheel in the main room. He lifted his head but did not rise as she passed by. She knelt in front of the sugar chest near the kitchen and opened the bottom drawer, where Eleanor had put her uniform after it had been cleaned and folded. “We’ll need it for something,” she said. “Maybe some neighbor boy will want it.”

She found a long cloth in a kitchen drawer, suitable for binding her breasts. She slipped out of her nightgown and began to dress herself, gritting her teeth as she stepped into the old trousers. The uniform felt filthy, despite being boiled. Tears filled her eyes as she fastened the buttons.

Her brogans sat outside by the back door. Eleanor had been using them when she gardened. Josephine put them on and stood in the yard. She thought of the dress, folded back on the hope chest. She looked into the window of her bedroom, and a wave of love for Wesley overwhelmed her, a staggering amount that threatened to pull her down to a praying position. Her uniform itched. Her shoes felt heavy on her feet.

She was back in the army.

Wesley had taught her how to find her general direction by using stars and landmarks. She had a vague sense of where the army had last camped, and since they had been gone less than ten days, she figured the men were still resting and had not yet moved toward another battle. The cows in the fields paid her no mind, but lay like stones and slept as she navigated around them. Their lack of urgency calmed her. She was afraid to plunder storehouses by herself and had to be content with barely ripe cherries and anything that could be pulled out of the ground or taken from the edge of the woods. Once in a low valley she came to a streambed and found a little boy trying to catch minnows with a jar. She approached him cautiously and said, “Hello.”

“Where you going, mister?” the boy asked.

Libby had haunted her as she moved toward the mountains. Now, walking away from them, Wesley was the ghost, his voice always within reach, his laughter substantial among the lowing of cattle in the fields she trespassed. She could not revisit the memory of his song or his sleeping face. When either of these threatened to come forth, she concentrated on something else, the antics of a squirrel on a fence or the quack-sneeze call of some roosting bird. She slept in a field of low wheat one night and felt something heavy on her legs when she awakened. An enormous corn snake had coiled up on her shins. She screamed and it slithered away.

Sometimes, as she walked alone by night and the weariness of her lonely journey affected her, she imagined herself marching with her former comrades: Floyd, Wesley, Lewis, Matthew, and even Libby. Wesley told a joke, and the others laughed. Suddenly the ghost laughter vanished, leaving a breathing sound in its place.

May 1863

Hamilton’s Crossing, Virginia

The low branch of a sycamore tree was playing havoc with the new recruit. Each time the wind blew and the branch rustled, he would jump. Libby and he were standing picket together. She had stopped eating. Skin loose on ribs, pants loose on waist, vocal cords standing out in her throat. Feet numb, eyes weak and playing tricks on her. The torch listed, sending light into a stand of ferns, and suddenly before her eyes was a sight she’d seen in Chancellorsville, of a fallen Union soldier pulling up those same ferns to pack the wound in his thigh. The battles had returned to her that way, dead men suddenly appearing along a fence, the smoke of a fire dissipating and revealing a stack of severed arms. Screams and then silence in the middle of the day. Floyd had asked if she was ill, and she had shaken her head. Illness implied a cure, and there was no cure for this but another battle.