“No, I reckon not. Portius, anyway, but Clem …” She shot her brother another look. “Do you wish you were out there, with them?”
He stared back at her then glanced at Lydia, the children, and Pa in turn. “A man was made for fightin’ for those he loves,” he muttered, at last.
“A man is also made for caring for those he loves,” Pearl said. “Which means sometimes staying put.” At the spark in his eyes, she went on, “And sometimes staying put is the harder work.”
“Sometimes,” he snapped back, “a man hasn’t any choice.”
The echo of Josh’s words from the night before whispered through her. “I wouldn’t go if I didn’t have to.”
She rose from her chair, gave Sally a last squeeze and kiss, then set the child down in her own place. There was nothing to hold her in the house today. No one to tell her she couldn’t wander alone, were she careful.
“Where are you going?” Jeremiah asked.
“Out. Probably to Mama’s grave. I’ll be back.”
With her shawl wrapped about her head and neck, Pa’s overcoat around her shoulders, and one of the revolvers in her pocket, she escaped out into the misty cold.
Her steps took her, as before, over the pasture and up the rough slope of the ridge. With all the leaves fallen, there was less cover than that day she had last been here. The day she’d been caught unawares by a Union soldier.
No, two. Because Josh had taken her as unaware, even more fully than that rascal who’d meant her harm.
The thunder of distant battle grew stronger. At times, the very ground beneath her feet trembled with it. Carefully, making sure she stayed alert to anyone following her—although who was there to do so now?—she picked her way up the path to her favorite lookout point. Climbed the rocks, until she stood at the top.
Scattered clouds and fog obscured most of the valley beyond, but she had a decent view of Missionary Ridge. Smoke rose from here and there—houses in between and beyond the edges of the camps. If she had a spyglass, she could see more.
And somewhere, there off to the right, beyond the point of Missionary Ridge, lay Chattanooga. Had Josh and the others made it safely? Where was Clem in his journey back? Although her younger brother’s continued absence was worrisome, she felt a curious lack of the urgency which had infused her earlier prayers.
Maybe—just maybe—that was a good sign.
A day had never dragged on so.
Josh should have been grateful to be back behind Federal lines. Glad he was provided food, and with more abundance than they’d sometimes enjoyed these past weeks. Thankful to see Thorsson’s wound dressed and the man resting comfortably.
But it all seemed cold, impersonal, unreal even, compared to being served supper and tended in the warm lamplight of the MacFarlane house, under the brisk ministrations of Pearl and Portius.
Clem stuck to him like a burr, hardly saying a word, the blue eyes overlarge but not missing a thing.
Most of the men remaining behind the fortifications in Chattanooga wanted to be out of doors, staring off at the mist-shrouded hulk of Lookout Mountain, where flashes of light punctuated the gloom and the roar of guns rolled across the river like thunder, and had since daylight. Josh felt equally restless but for different reasons.
An attending doctor finally found time to examine the stump of his forearm. Pronounced it “healing well enough,” though he gave but a grunt at Josh’s admittedly shortened account of the scrap where three fellow Federals helpfully stomped it and added cracked ribs to Josh’s list of things to contend with. “Once the Rebels are dealt with,” the doctor said, “we’ll see about finding you a wooden hand. And either a clerk position, or something similar.”
“I could still hold and load a rifle,” Josh said. “And nothing wrong with my ability to sight and fire. Or lead others into battle, if necessary.”
Another grunt. The doctor scrubbed thoughtfully at his bearded cheek. “Might be so, but any regiment commander would have my hide for letting you back out there today, unproven.”
Josh clenched his teeth on a curse. This was the very thing he’d feared, being dismissed as useless and relegated to the rear with those too scared to be out on the front lines. And he’d already not admitted how much his ribs ached today after the exertion of getting here and having to help Thorsson.
The doctor rewrapped the stump, and as he moved on to other patients, Josh slipped his blouse back on, tucking the dangling sleeve up inside itself.
“Now what?” Clem asked, watching as he finished dressing.
“Well,” Josh said, “I guess we go back outside and watch smoke rise on the mountain, like everyone else is doing.”
They made their way back to the breastworks, though by this time almost all the best vantage points were taken. Clem stayed close at Josh’s heels as he wandered the fortifications, and oddly enough, no one challenged him, after a glance at his shortened coat sleeve. Most met him with a nod, and the general mood was one of cheer and even in some cases, jubilation.
Josh did not share their mood.
At the moment, he didn’t even care to try.
“Wheeler, is that you?”
Josh turned and, for an instant, wasn’t sure he knew the face attached to the voice greeting him, but then recognition flared to life. “Elliot! Good to see you. What are you doing here rather than out there?”
Dark hair and beard, with brown eyes, the man shook Josh’s hand and laughed. “Oh, trivial matter of a wound. You know how it is.” He nodded toward Josh’s left arm, chagrin suddenly clouding his gaze. “Don’t look like you got off so lucky, though. Man, they told us you’d gone missing! We’d given you up for dead.”
“I was taken prisoner and tended in a private house.” Josh lifted the arm. “It’s decently healed, but Doc still won’t release me for duty.”
“Well. Come over here and have some coffee, man. You can tell me what you’ve heard and I’ll catch you up on the rest.”
Josh and Clem trailed him to where a can hung suspended over a small fire, and Josh handed over his own cup to be filled then passed it to Clem. Elliot eyed the boy as he slurped the brew with obvious relish. “Somehow I’m guessing you’re a new recruit. Or not a Federal at all.”
Clem froze, eyes wide.
Elliot gestured with a second cup he’d filled, then handed it off to Josh. “You’re enjoying that a little too much.”
Josh chuckled and accepted the offering then inhaled deeply. It wasn’t bad. Likely smelled better than it tasted, but he wouldn’t complain. Not after two long months without any at all.
And it had been longer than that for the MacFarlanes, he was sure.
Clem had buried his nose in the cup again, his cheeks pink but otherwise making no comment. At least the boy was making good on his promise not to speak.
Josh sipped, let the bitter brew roll across his tongue. It tasted much better than he’d expected. “Mm. Definitely has been too long.” He sighed and met Elliot’s questioning gaze then nodded toward Clem. “His family cared for us. Showed a lot more kindness than one would expect from Rebs, and he’s the one who guided us safely back. I told him to go home but—you know how it is. He wanted to see the elephant.”
Elliot grunted and glanced away, eyes narrowing as he surveyed Lookout Mountain and the valley between it and Missionary Ridge, stretching away to the south and still occupied by Rebels. “Seems like there’s just as much elephant to be seen by climbing the other hill and joining up with the Rebs. Never been a better time to be one, after Chickamauga.”
“Maybe.” Josh sipped again. “Were you as short rationed as was rumored?”
Elliot bobbed his head. “Yes and no. Some regiments suffered more than others, sure. We had a few uncertain weeks there before Grant arrived. But many would argue that Old Rosey was doing everything he could at the time, and forage wasn’t too bad, at least at first.”
They spent a companionable hour and more, discussing all that had taken place over the p
ast couple of months, while the battle raged on. But Josh’s gaze kept being drawn over to Missionary Ridge, and his thoughts to the small farm beyond that, sheltered by a smaller ridge, where he’d foolishly left his heart.
It felt like years ago, and a thousand miles away.
Sleep came but fitfully that night, despite the ranging Pearl had done for half the afternoon. And when it did come, it was with the most troubling of dreams.
She found herself walking through a field where every bush and tree stood at odd angles, stripped and shredded, and the shadows of rocky outcroppings lay interspersed with torn bodies of men and the bloated shapes of horses and mules.
And the blood … everywhere. The ground was dark with it.
Pearl could not look away. An unspoken need drove her as she went from body to body, examining the face of each man. Looking in particular at the color of the hair and beard, first for the browns of her brothers, but then as she went on, for something else—
Wait, she knew what she was searching for. And for whom.
She stopped and gazed across the field. So much blood. So much red. But none of it the particular fiery shade adorning a Yankee who had grown too dear for words.
She had to find him. He was here somewhere—and his life might depend upon her finding him in time. “Some of these men have lain on the field all week,” came the echo of Travis’s voice. Could any of those in this vast field of slaughter even still live and breathe? Yet she had to search.
She tried to run, but puddles of red dragged at her feet. “You—you are responsible for this horror,” the blood itself seemed to say. “Were it not for you, for the stubbornness of the Southern race, none of this would have been needed.”
“No!” she cried out, aloud. “This is my home! I had nothing to do with it—no decision was ever mine to make. It was the men who decided. Who said that they needed to go, regardless of what we womenfolk wanted.”
She stared about, seeing now how blue and gray lay heaped together. The ruination of an entire nation riven in two. Not a breath of life stirred, and she could find no shred of anyone she knew or loved.
“God—oh God, have mercy.” She fell to her knees, sobbing, as the crimson flood soaked into her skirts.
A hand, small but strong, settled on her shoulder. “Pearl Katherine. Get up, right now.”
Pearl choked back her weeping. “Mama?”
Her mother stood there, clad in Pearl’s best dress, clean and blue, with dark hair immaculately arranged and the cameo brooch at her throat. Matching blue eyes shone, more vivid than Pearl had ever seen them in life, then crinkled with her mama’s lovely smile. “Get up, Pearl. This is not the end.”
She could only gape, the aching in her breast still dug in deep.
“I know you feel like it is. But what our Lord has for you lies out there”—Mama leaned close, pointing past Pearl, and a gust of wind, sweet as honeysuckle, blew away the stench of death—“through this field, and beyond.”
“But Mama—so much hurt, so much loss—”
Mama’s hand slid over Pearl’s head and cupped her cheek. “I know, darling. But over yonder, it’ll all make sense. Our Lord is too good not to fix it all … when the time’s ripe for it.”
Pearl could only weep, again. “Mama …”
“Shh, now. Get up and go. It’ll all be worth the journey—and the fight. I promise.”
Then she was gone, leaving Pearl alone in the field of horror once more. A wail tore itself from her lips.
She awakened into the silent darkness, lungs heaving and face wet with her tears.
I ain’t never seen anything like it,” Clem breathed in tones of awe from his place beside Josh at the fortifications, for their second day in a row. “Look at that—all that blue arrayed for battle. Man alive! If I were born a Unionist, I’d be glad to be out there amongst ’em.”
Josh nudged him. “Watch how much you admit, even here,” he murmured.
“Oh.” The youth went crimson. “I forget.”
The irony of it, the Rebel boy longing to be out there with Federals, while Josh wanted nothing more than to be back enjoying the hospitality of said boy’s Confederate family.
But especially the company of a particular Rebel girl.
“Please … stay.”
Could such a thing even be possible? Could a son of the Union and a daughter of the Confederacy find common ground enough—peace enough—to make a union of their own? The question had circled endlessly in his thoughts through the past day and two nights.
The outcome of the fight brewing there before them would decide it, no doubt.
Most gracious God, please answer us in this. You know how I long to hold Pearl again. I know it was no chance circumstance that put the two of us together. But You—You must be the One who makes a way for it to come of anything. I am completely powerless here.
Perhaps … perhaps that was precisely where the Almighty wanted him.
He’d thought the day before had worn away without end. Today was even worse. As the sound of battle echoed across from Missionary Ridge to Lookout Mountain and back again, the troops arrayed in the valley between grew more restless, even to Josh’s unaided eye.
Out on the field, the Fourteenth Corps were given the order to move ahead—take the trenches rimming the lower edge of the ridge. Josh leaned out over the log-lined edge of the breastworks, though he knew he should stay down. Thomas’s men were a sight to see—and well he remembered their valiant stand just two months past.
Beside him, Clem hung over the top of the fortification as well. “So that’s—”
“Old Pap Thomas. The one you heard the others tell how he held Missionary Ridge during the Battle of Chickamauga back in September.”
Josh pointed out the others as he recognized their flags. Another man came up and filled the gaps where he needed them.
While they were explaining, and discussing the lines, something almost beyond credibility happened. The forward line of Federals not only broke through the entrenchments at the foot of the ridge, but in ones, in twos and threes, in clusters of men, they began pushing farther up the ridge.
A great collective gasp and outcry went up from not only the men watching at the breastworks but all around the rim of the valley.
“Who did that?” someone exclaimed.
“I dunno! I never saw any signal go out from Grant, across the valley, for them to take more than the entrenchment!”
But the blue, in wave after wave, pushed straight up Mission Ridge. Gray and brown began to break and run in the face of that relentless tide.
Clem tipped his head and scanned the ridge above, tears welling in his eyes. “I can’t believe it,” he muttered. “Does this mean the Confederacy is done for, Josh?”
“It’s too early to say for sure,” Josh murmured soberly.
He put his good arm around Clem’s shoulders and held on as, amid cheers and shouts and the silent weeping of one Confederate youth, the Federals gained the ridge and swept the Rebels away.
“Pearl. Read to me, Pearl.”
Pa’s fretful, childish voice called out from his bedroom and tugged her from her reverie. She’d kept busy all day, stripping beds, washing linens, sweeping the entire house. The thunder of battle rumbled closer than ever and seemed to grow nearer as the afternoon wore on.
Lydia had taken the children and gone to fetch some things from her house, and Jeremiah likewise slipped away to see if he could find Clem, or at least spy out what was happening on the Confederate lines, so Pearl thought to steal a few moments to sit and do some mending.
Heaven knew there was always something in need of it.
“Pearl?”
“Coming, Pa.”
Despite Jeremiah’s effort to see Pa up and about yesterday, Pearl had returned from her ranging to find Pa sagging and exhausted. She’d helped Jeremiah get Pa to bed, then sometime about supper found that he’d soiled his linens. With a long, mournful look between them—it was a last, terrible i
ndignity that they’d always hoped to avoid—they plunged into the task of cleaning and changing him. However matter-of-factly they’d been able to carry it out, Pearl had gone out back afterward, alone, and wept bitterly.
This morning, Pa had been unable to get out of bed. He’d slept most of the morning while she worked but now, obviously, wished for diversion.
She stepped into the bedroom, relieved to find the room absent of malodors. “I want to read Psalms,” Pa said. “Where is that young man with the red hair who used to read for me?”
Pearl’s knees nearly buckled, right then and there. “Oh Pa.”
“He had a fine voice. A mighty fine voice.”
She released a long breath. “Yes, he did.”
“Reckon he’ll be back to read for me?”
“I don’t know, Pa. But I’m here. I’ll read for you. Just let me fetch the Bible.”
Pa snorted. “I don’t know about that. You’ll take hours before you come back.”
She stifled another sigh. “I’m right here, Pa, getting it now,” she called, dashing across the sitting room for the tome.
Settling in the chair beside his bed, she opened to the middle. “Which psalm would you like, Pa?”
“Thirty-seven,” he said, eyes tightly closed.
She found the page and began to read. “ ‘Fret not thyself because of evildoers, neither be thou envious against the workers of iniquity. For they shall soon be cut down like the grass, and wither as the green herb. Trust in the Lord, and do good; so shalt thou dwell in the land, and verily thou shalt be fed. Delight thyself also in the Lord: and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart.’ ”
She stopped, the words clogging her throat. Or was it, for the hundredth time that week, more tears?
“Read,” Pa said.
“How can that be?” She shouldn’t question scripture, but the inquiry pushed its way out of her. “How can He promise us this?”
“ ‘Delight thyself also in the Lord,’ ” Pa said.
She almost couldn’t breathe. “I—am trying, Pa.”
The Rebel Bride Page 22