The Last Full Measure (11 page)

Marvelous held me. I cried on her shoulder. "I want David," I sobbed.

"He be right back, sure 'nuf," Marvelous promised.

Corporal Halpern came over and knelt beside me. He took out a clean handkerchief and wiped my face dry of tears. "You want some hot coffee?" he asked.

I looked into his clear blue eyes and he smiled at me. "I want to run away with you," I said. "If we leave now, before my brother gets back, nobody can catch up with us. Will you run away with me? We can go north. I know a place where we can go to get away from here. Do you want to get away from here?"

"I would love to get away with you, Tacy." He reached out and took my small cold hand in his big soft one. "And maybe someday, when all this is over, we will. But right now, if we did, your brother would be behind us with a shotgun, honey, and I want to come through all this alive. And see how beautiful you will be when you grow up."

"I'm grown up now," I told him. I knew I could scarce speak. I was trembling so. The tears were still coming.

Josie was back with something ruddy-colored in a glass. She made me drink it. "This will calm you," she promised, "at least until David comes back."

I drank it. Horrid stuff.
Why do men like spirits so?
"Maybe the angel won't let David come back," I told them all.

"What angel?" Josie asked.

"The one with the sword," I explained, "that went with them when they went out into the street."

They stayed with me—Corporal Halpern, Josie, and Marvelous. Mr. Cameron just went back to sleep as if nothing had happened. My three companions kept listening to my ravings about the angel and Jennie Wade, and eventually David did come back.

"Did the angel have to go back to heaven?" I asked him. "Or was he needed someplace else in Gettysburg?"

He immediately carried me upstairs and set me down on the couch. Mama wasn't coming home till later, he told us. She was staying with Mrs. Wade.

He looked frightened because of the state I was in, David did. So when Cassie climbed on the couch and nestled close to me, he allowed it. He asked Josie not to go home that night, but to stay. And when Corporal Nelson Halpern asked his permission not to go upstairs to his room right off but to sit next to me and keep watch, David said yes. And he said yes, too, to Marvelous, who sat on the floor beside the couch and held my hand.

When our grandfather clock struck one I heard what I identified as two Confederate cannon go off. Then came a barrage of Confederate artillery.

"We never should have come up from the cellar," I heard David say.

But none of us moved. We all just sat in our appointed places, listening, our senses deadened by now. Once again shells screeched over town. At one point David came over to the couch and reached out his arms.

"Come on—I'm taking you back downstairs."

I turned over, putting my back to him. "No, go away. I don't care if I die here!" I screamed it.

He picked me up and I held my face to his shoulder. "Put me back down," I begged.

So he did, gently. And I stayed there, covered with a light comforter while the shelling went on.

The house shook. The dishes in the cupboards shook. My bones shook. Cassie trembled and, at one point, howled. I hugged her close. Then, after about an hour and a half, it stopped, as suddenly as it had started.

Then there was a lull and we heard nothing.

David opened the front door and stepped out onto the stoop, just for a minute. He came back in. "Lotta smoke over the fields south of town," he said. "Can't see anything else. But I've got a feeling something's about to happen."

He went into Pa's study and came out with Pa's binoculars, then ran, in his peculiar limping gait, up the stairs. I heard him running that way all the way up to the garret. After about half an hour he came back down.

His face had a look on it as if he had been given a glimpse of the future.

"What is it, David?" Josie asked him. "What did you see?"

"Can't quite name it," he answered. "Maybe they will name it in the future. Maybe they never will give it a name. But when I looked through these"—and he shook the binoculars—"what I saw was not to be believed." He stopped talking for a moment and looked at each of us, one at a time, then recommenced speaking.

"Confederates," he said. "Thousands of them. All lined up in perfect formation on Seminary Ridge. Marching as if in a parade, shoulder to shoulder, across an open field that must be at least a mile across. Came right out of the woods, they did. Like toy soldiers. Marching right into federal guns. Never wavered. Just kept marching. Wave after wave of them, getting mowed down."

David put his hand over his face and paused for a moment. Then he put his hand down and looked at all of us again in disbelief. "Thousands of them," he said again in incredulity. He shook his head in amazement. "They walked right to their deaths! Right into our guns!"

None of us said anything.

"I never," David finished, "saw such brave men. Or such foolish ones. And I hope to God never to see such again."

Then he turned and walked into the kitchen. "Josie," we heard him plead, "could you please put on a pot of coffee?"

"G
OD
," D
AVID SAID
, "has a sense of humor, you have to give Him that, anyway."

That's what my brother David said when Mama came home that evening and told us that Jennie Wade was going to be buried tomorrow on the Fourth of July.

"Don't be blasphemous, David," Mama told him sharply. "God had nothing to do with Jennie's being shot." And she would hear no more of it, not of God's part in it anyway, if indeed He did have a part in it.

It was near seven when she got home. Not dusk yet, though it seemed as if dusk had been with us all day. The dusk of something, if not the dim part of twilight. The dusk of civility, I suppose, with us this whole third day of July. We did not know what to call it.

We ate the supper Josie had made for us, in near silence. There seemed to be a quiet stillness out in the street. Mama insisted Josie sit at the table with us, and when she did, Josie and my brother scarce looked at each other. We were a sorry group. David was downcast, Mama simply worn down, Josie wary and giving David sidelong glances. Corporal Halpern was quiet, too. I picked at my food and continued to gulp back tears. Marvelous was the only normal one at the table, and she kept giving me encouraging looks to keep me going.

"You are not going to the funeral tomorrow," Mama said quietly to me.

"I have to go," I said.

"You are not," Mama said firmly. She could be worse than David when she wanted to be.

My voice quavered. "But I never got a chance to say goodbye."

"None of us did," David reminded me. "Now bide what Mama says. No arguments." His voice was low but firm.

After supper there came a knock on the front door, and when David answered, a Reb soldier stood there, bedraggled, humble, and gloomy.

He looked at the musket in David's hand, which had the barrel pointed to the floor, then at all of us, who stood a distance behind David, and took off his hat. He had a head full of yellow curls. "Sir," he said. "I'm from South Carolina. I don't wanna fight no more. I don't wanna be a soldier no more. Sir, all'st I want is some civilian clothes an' to run off. Please, sir, could you all give me some civilian clothes?"

David paused for a moment before answering.

"Sir," the soldier went on, "I saw Pickett's Charge this afternoon. All those godforsaken soldiers marchin' across Seminary Ridge into those Union cannon. I can't, I just can't, sir, be part of an army that does such to its men."

I saw my brother nod his head. Heard him say, "Come on in."

His name was Rucker, Private Allen Rucker. His family owned a plantation right outside Charleston, he told us. "My two brothers are officers, but I would not go to war at first. My pa was one of the leaders who made the pledge that if a Republican was elected president, the state would leave the Union. Because I wouldn't go for a soldier, Pa near threw me off the place. So I went and joined up as a lowly private. I didn't want to be made an officer because of his influence."

"But what will happen to you now if you run away?" David asked. "You can't go home to your pa's plantation."

Mama had rustled up some civilian clothes for him and was feeding him at the kitchen table.

Allen Rucker just looked at us. "You all gonna win the war," he said. "I could see that today. There won't be a plantation left to go home to."

He left a short while later. He would not stay awhile to rest, as Mama had asked him to. Rebs were trickling back into town, he pointed out to us. Didn't we see? He showed us, out our own front windows. Sure enough, he was right. We saw stray soldiers in tattered gray, not prancing about confident and overbearing as they'd been in the last two days, shouting orders, but almost slinking, muskets at the ready, ducking into doorways or forcing open cellar doors.

Mama fixed Allen Rucker a cloth bag of vittles and David gave him some Yankee greenbacks and directed him a safe way out of town, and he left. I stood at the back door, watching him go. For some reason I started to cry again, and David came over to lead me back to the couch.

"What have you got for her, Ma?" he asked.

Whatever she "had for me" she gave me with a cup of tea, and David sat over me while I drank it. The last thing I remember was him saying, "So they've already got a name for it, have they? They're calling it 'Pickett's Charge.'"

Next thing I knew he was carrying me upstairs to bed and taking off my shoes. I awoke the next morning in all my clothes.

***

F
IRST THING
I heard through my open window was somebody in the street yelling.

"Move, move, hurry up, we are retreating!"

I jumped out of bed. From my window I saw Confederate soldiers running up the street, hurrying toward the Diamond, the central square in town. A Rebel officer on a horse was yelling at them. "Let's get the hell out of here, before we're captured. Can't you see the damned Yanks?"

There was a lot of confusion and cussing and shouting.

The courthouse clock chimed six. As I ran downstairs, my mind felt like a picture puzzle, and I shook it to put the pieces into place.

Today is the Fourth of July
.

Jennie Wade was killed yesterday
.

Her funeral is today and Mama is not going to let me go
.

By the time I reached the kitchen I had a reasonable scene of events before me, and I hoped I did not look as confused as I felt.

They were all dressed and at the table for breakfast already—Mama, David, and Marvelous. Even Corporal Halpern. Josie was serving coffee. All looked up as I entered the room.

"Tacy, how are you?" Mama asked.

"I'm tolerable," I told her. "I heard the soldiers in the street say they were retreating." I slipped into my chair. "Is it over? Is it all over?"

"Just about," David answered. "But we can't run about the streets just yet. There are still Reb snipers about."

Well then
, I wondered,
if it is over, if we won, why is he so solemn? What is it he isn't telling me? Is there more? Something terrible more I don't know about?

"What time do we go to the funeral?"

"
We
go at nine o'clock," Mama answered. "You aren't going. You are staying here."

"But I told you, Mama, I'm tolerable fine."

"You aren't going! I'm still in charge around here and that's that!" David's voice was as stern as it ever had been to me.

I bit my bottom lip and looked down at my plate. "You mean I have to stay here alone while you all go?" I felt tears coming. His rough voice could always do that to me.

"No," he said. "I'm staying with you."

Mama gasped. "You're not
going
, David?" She could not believe it.

"No." He would not look at her.

Josie stared at him now.

He would not look at her, either. And then it came to me then. He was in a foul mood this morning. Not even the Yankee victory over the Rebs here in our town could cheer him out of it. Why?

Josie and I exchanged a secret glance across the table.

Nobody said much of anything through the rest of breakfast. Afterward I saw Mama go over to David as he stood looking out the window in the parlor.

She touched his shoulder. "Darling," she said.

He turned his head toward her. "I'm sorry, Mama. I didn't mean to be rude."

"It isn't that. I worry for you. I think it would be better for you if you go."

"I can't, Mama. I can't bring myself to go."

I was drying dishes and Josie was washing, her back to this scene. Marvelous was wiping off the table. Only I was privy to what was going on. And listening when I shouldn't be.

I turned away from them then, but I still heard Mama say, "All right. I'll make your excuses. But do this for me. Be kind to Tacy, will you?"

"She needs discipline," he said. "Why can't she just obey without making a fuss?"

"Not today," Mama said. "Not today, David."

He said something, real low. I don't know what it was, but it sounded like some kind of a promise.

T
HE FIRST THING
David said when Pa had told him he was in charge of me, responsible for me when Pa left for the war, was "I don't know if I can do it, Ma. I don't think I can do it."

I heard him say it. I was listening when I shouldn't have been, like I always do.

"Of course you can, dear," Mama told him.

"But what if something happens to her? I'd be responsible. You know how Pa cherishes her. His only girl. The youngest. The baby. I'd have to answer to him."

"What could happen to her, David? You're being silly now."

"You know how capricious she is. Always running about and getting into things she isn't supposed to be getting into. She never listens to you. I tell you, Ma, she's spoiled. You and Pa and the boys and I—yes, even I—spoiled her. And now I have to take over. It isn't fair."