My Heart Belongs in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

by Murray Pura

  “I do.”

  “To have and to hold?”

  “Yes.”

  “In sickness and health? For richer or poorer?”

  “And till—” he began.

  “No.” She put her fingers to his mouth. “No.”

  Iain remained silent.

  She snuggled into him and closed her eyes. “The only other thing that remains to be said is I take you to be my lawfully wedded husband.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.”

  “And … you may kiss the bride.”

  “I like that part.”

  The kiss, the first to bring their lips together, was soft, heartfelt, and brief. She placed her fingers on his cheek when he wanted to continue.

  “When you come back,” she said. “When you come back to me.”

  “I’ve waited this long. I can wait a little longer.”

  “I’m glad you feel comfortable waiting, sir. I don’t.”

  “Then …”

  “Hush. Once you return.” She played with the brass buttons on his frock coat. “I take this seriously, you know.”

  “What?”

  “Our little ceremony here by the altar. No minister, no witnesses, no Bible, but to me it’s real, to me it’s true, to me it just happened. You’re my husband. My man.”

  “Avery …”

  “Shh. Don’t go all Union officer on me, please. When the day arrives, there will be flowers and a reverend and my parents, and maybe crossed swords we can walk under once we leave the church and head down the steps. It will be a magical day. But it won’t be any more meaningful to me than this, right here, right now. So far as I’m concerned, something amazing happened in this church over the past few minutes. Amazing and eternal. God saw it. That’s all I care about. I can’t let you go without having this. Do you understand? I had to have this. I had to have you.”

  Iain nodded and stroked her hair. “I do understand. And it does matter to me.”

  “You’ll be back, Iain Kilgarlin,” she whispered, and her words had the quiet fervency of a quiet prayer. “You’ll be back. There is no other possibility that I will accept.”

  December

  Christ’s Church

  Gettysburg

  Clarissa was bundled in her warmest cloak and bonnet and stood at the foot of the steps leading up to the doors into Christ’s Church. Snow was falling thick and fast and silent, and the ink on the small envelope in her gloved hand began to smear with melted snowflakes. She had walked to the church specifically to open the letter addressed to her. But several things made her hesitate: there was blood on the three-cent postage stamp affixed to the envelope, the writing on the envelope was not Iain’s or that of any of the three seminarians still serving with the Army of the Potomac, and the terrible slaughter of Union troops at Fredericksburg earlier in the month made her fear the worst.

  His name had not appeared on the casualty lists in the Philadelphia or New York papers, but that didn’t mean anything. Several Adams County families she knew had breathed a sigh of relief after fathers and sons and brothers and cousins did not end up on the lists after the vicious fight at Antietam in September, yet news had come in November, in the form of letters written by their commanding officers, that several of them had died in the battle or succumbed to their wounds in the hospital. She knew she should have asked her mother to be with her, that she should be opening the envelope at home and in the parlor by the fire, but if it was the most terrible news possible, she wanted to be at the church so that she could run inside to the altar and throw herself down to weep and pray.

  It is the only spot in town that will afford me any comfort at all. God, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. September was bad enough. But Fredericksburg! What has become of my high hopes of ending the war and ending slavery? What has become of the man I wed, with God as my witness? This is too hard. War is too cruel.

  Slowly, she peeled open the envelope.

  Tugged out a sheet of paper that had been folded two or three times so that it would fit.

  Spread it open.

  The writing inside was not Iain’s either.

  She thought she was going to faint, but she gritted her teeth and, blinking her eyes against the fall of snow, forced herself to read the untidy scrawl.

  Dear Miss Clarissa Avery Ross,

  You will forgive the tone of this here letter. But it’s the best that can be done under the circumstances, Miss Ross.

  My name is Billy O’Malley and I am from Co. Derry. I came over with my family when I was four. We settled in Philadelphia. I joined the Philadelphia Brigade and here I am.

  The Captain ought to be writing this. But a Reb sharpshooter got him.

  “I said so!” cried Clarissa, tears bursting from her green eyes. “You and your slouch hat! Oh Iain!”

  She dropped the hand that held the letter to her side. “I can’t read anymore. I can’t.”

  But she steeled herself and brought the letter up again.

  The ink was running as the snow struck it.

  She squinted and struggled to make out the words, tears ruining her sight.

  His sword took a licking from the first ball, and the second bounced off the hilt and took some meat out of his hand. There was a third that plugged his fancy hat. But there weren’t no more after that because Tim O’Hearne knocked that sharpshooter fellow out of the tree with a bullet of his own.

  That was the Captain’s writing hand, so I am writing for him. I can say his hand is healing up right as rain and I guess he will do a January or Febr’y letter on his own. The boys all expect him to make Major. Merry Chris’mas and it was a pleasure meeting you, Miss Ross.

  O’Malley

  Clarissa dropped like a stone and sat on the church steps in the snowstorm, laughing and crying and thanking God all at the same time. Passersby picked up their pace once they saw her slumped there and heard her cries. She didn’t notice them or the looks they gave her, and even if she had, she wouldn’t have cared. There was a final paragraph at the bottom of the sheet of paper, where the handwriting was even worse than that which had preceded it. She was having a hard time deciphering the letters, but she was so full of happiness and relief now, she didn’t care what the note said. Until she began to comprehend what she was reading and who had penned it.

  I am heartily sick of Virginia weather and Virginia campaigns. Maryland fall weather was a respite—did you receive the letter I wrote in October? But now we are back to this soggy mess. The sky and the Rebs and the mud are the same color. Fred’burg was the devil’s own, no doubt about it, but we shall prevail. I told the boys that we must, for I have marching orders from my belle to reach Richmond this July or August. I showed them the photographic image your mother gave me that was commissioned when you turned nineteen. Imagine, you are wearing a twelve-hoop dress. I didn’t think you had such a creature in your wardrobe. Now the lads are all enchanted and wish to write you. I told them to write away. I warned them you were as redheaded as secesh cannon fire, and just as fiery, but they don’t care. My hand is cramping. I will close and get this off. I love you, Avery, I love you to the extent no Reb bullet can kill me because you slew me long ago. All this to say, I am alive, Avery. Liberty is alive, Kyle Forrester is alive, and because of that, Iain Kilgarlin is alive too and in love, very much in love.

  The minister left the church five minutes later and was startled to see a woman on the steps, hugging her knees and rocking and quoting verses from the Bible as if she were a child reciting her Sunday school lessons. He came down to her.

  “Ma’am, are you all right?” he asked. “Is there something I can do?”

  She turned her face to him, and although she looked to have been crying, her smile was so bright and her face so wet, he was certain it must have been melting snow and not tears.

  “Reverend,” she greeted him. “The Lord bless you.”

  “Miss Ross.” Her features were unmistakable to him. “I trust I find you well? You must be chilled to the bone sit
ting here in the snow.”

  “Forgive me. I had a letter to open. It was urgent, so I just planted myself on the church steps to read it.” She began to climb to her feet, he extended his hand, and she took it. “Please excuse me, Reverend.”

  “I hope the letter was welcome news, Miss Ross?”

  “Oh, most welcome, Reverend.” She laughed. “He’s alive, he’s alive, sir, he’s so very much alive.”

  She hopped down the steps as if she were ten and half skipped, half walked along Chambersburg on her way to her house.

  “Good day, Reverend,” she called back. “Thank you.”

  “For what, my dear?”

  “For your prayers. For your prayers for all the soldiers. God answers them, you know. Not all of them, I suppose, and not always the way we like, but today His response has been more than sufficient, and I take heart from that, and now I have an enormous appetite again, ha-ha.”

  The minister continued to watch her until she disappeared in swirling snow and top hats and black carriages with whirling wooden wheels. “The lark’s on the wing,” he heard her singing, “the snail’s on the thorn; God’s in His heaven—All’s right with the world.”

  May and June 1863

  The Ross House

  Gettysburg

  What news from Virginia, Father?”

  Clarissa’s father had employed three men at the beginning of the war to help meet the military’s demands for his boots. Then he had added another four. Now, in the spring and summer of 1863, there were twelve workers, and he’d had to build another section to his shop, which was a block from the Ross house. It became the perfect place to hear news from Union officers about the war, often before papers ran the stories.

  She never got enough letters from Iain to suit her, and as busy as she kept herself by earning money with her sewing, or learning to read the Greek New Testament, or even doing some of the fine stitching on the popular Ross cavalry boots, she would find her father in the parlor and ply him for information on troop movements, especially those that involved the Army of the Potomac and the Philadelphia Brigade. Once she got his attention, she always began with the same query: “What news from Virginia, Father?”

  His responses, of course, were always different, and about the middle of May he replied, “Since Chancellorsville? Nothing, my girl, nothing. Lee may have won, but I am told his dead and wounded were as great in number as our own. A Pyrrhic victory, I would call it. So the armies are resting. Licking their wounds for a time.”

  “I’ve heard nothing from Iain.”

  “It’s too soon for that.”

  “His name isn’t on the casualty lists. He could be a prisoner.”

  “It’s my understanding his brigade was not heavily involved in the fighting. Not like they were at Fredericksburg or Antietam. I am sure he’s fine. You’ll get a letter in June or July.”

  “What if … what if we keep losing the battles? What if we lose another one?”

  “I’ve been following the reports from Vicksburg. It’s too early to tell, but I think this General Grant may win the day yet. If he does, the Confederacy loses control of the Mississippi River. That will go hard on them.”

  “But … our battles here in the east … in Virginia. What if we keep getting beaten? What if Washington is threatened? What if Lee can’t be stopped?”

  “McClellan stopped him at Antietam, my dear—no matter how the Richmond papers howl that it was a draw. The Army of the Potomac fought Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia to a standstill. And then Lee withdrew. He retreated back to the South. Think about it: Lee invades Maryland, Lee is stopped, Lee retreats to Virginia. How is that a draw? He lost and then he skedaddled. He certainly didn’t gain any ground, and he certainly didn’t continue to press north, did he?”

  “But Fredericksburg was a disaster for us.”

  “Yes. I won’t argue that point.”

  “And Chancellorsville was another disaster.”

  “I won’t argue that point either.”

  “What happens if we experience another defeat like Fredericksburg or Chancellorsville? What then?”

  Her father shook his head, opened his book—David Copperfield—looked down, and began to read. “Then I suppose we would make peace. They would go their way and we ours.”

  “And they would keep their slaves and their cotton fields and their plantations.”

  Her father continued to read. “I imagine.”

  The conversation was over.

  Iain had last written her in March and had talked about President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. It had not made much of an impression on the Irishmen of his regiment. They fought because they hated the South and its plantation owners, aristocrats who reminded them of the cursed English nobility who had oppressed Ireland for hundreds of years. In fact, the English lords and ladies openly supported the South and its wealthy planters, so the lads of the Sixty-Ninth liked nothing better than ripping into the sons of the Southern nobility and putting them in their graves. That’s why they fought. And for their new country, the United States of America. As for the slaves? Well, they didn’t like others being enslaved any more than they liked seeing Irishmen enslaved by Englishmen. But they weren’t fighting the war for the plantation slaves. And they didn’t want them crowding north and taking their jobs, because freed slaves would work twice as hard for half the pay.

  Abolition and emancipation have a long way to go yet, Avery. My boys don’t sing the last verse of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” the one about dying to set men free. So then, winning the war must be the first step. All the other steps will have to be fought for after that. Every single one. But the first fight to win will be this war. I reckon you will have to pray much harder for that. Everyone will.

  But the Army of the Potomac had lost again, Union prayers or not, and lost badly, little more than a month after she had received Iain’s letter. In Chancellorsville. In Virginia. At the beginning of the month of May. She sensed Iain was still alive—she had no ominous feeling warring against that belief in her soul. But the stone had sunk again into the deep, dark pond of her heart. They were losing the conflict and all the dreams and visions of a free and beautiful America that went with that loss.

  Yet there was William in Union blue. He had enlisted in the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts—what they called a colored regiment—after reading a speech by Frederick Douglass in the New York Times that, as he put it, “has struck fire in my bosom and an almighty blaze in my soul.” No one in the household dissuaded him. Clarissa agreed with Mr. Douglass that an armed freedman who fought bravely for the Republic would alter people’s opinions of the African Americans and hasten the end of slavery in America, ensuring the slaves’ freedom, citizenship, constitutional rights, and—down the line—enfranchisement, the liberty to vote their conscience.

  “Do you remember the night you rescued me from the slave catchers, Miss Ross?”

  She and her parents had stood with William on the railway platform in Gettysburg in early March. He wore a dark suit and a coat against the chill, a white shirt, a tie, and a hat with a low crown. The train to Boston was departing in ten minutes. If selected, his training would begin at Camp Meigs in Readville, just outside the city.

  “It wasn’t just me, William.” She smiled. “About a dozen of us stopped those men in their tracks.”

  “It’s you I remember most of all. Though I thought you were a stocky old man then with a bone to pick with every person on earth.”

  Clarissa and her parents laughed.

  “Surely not me,” teased Clarissa. “Though I do have bones to pick with various people from time to time, I suppose. It’s my constitutional right as a redhead.”

  William grinned. “None of them argued with your pistol.”

  “No. Nor with our shotguns.”

  His face sobered suddenly. “Lee and Jackson let their men scoop up any person of color they laid their hands on when they retreated from Antietam—freedmen, ex-slaves, men a
nd women who’d been born free, those who had bought their freedom … it didn’t matter.”

  “It was wrong,” said Mr. Ross. “And the Union’s General McClellan didn’t care one whit. He’d have helped chain them up and deliver them to Lee as a parting gift, if he’d thought of it.”

  “They say the war isn’t about slavery,” Mrs. Ross spoke up. “Yet Generals Lee and Jackson countenance that sort of behavior from their troops. And the one a good Episcopalian and the other an upstanding Presbyterian. Clearly, enslavement matters.”

  “Of course it matters.” Clarissa narrowed her eyes. “They can howl about states’ rights in their newspapers all they like. What they ought to say is their most important right is the right to run their economy on the backs of those they hold in bondage. That’s what they don’t want anyone interfering with. ‘You’re trying to destroy our way of life.’ Some way of life for those in fetters and under the whip.” She turned her flashing green eyes on William. “You give it to them, William, do you hear? Don’t you back down from a fight, sir. Give them your ‘rows of burnished steel. Loose the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword.’ Show those sons of Mississippi and Georgia and Alabama how a freedman can march and shoot and bayonet. Show them.”

  She was seething, but she didn’t care how contorted her face must look to others on the platform. Her Scottish was up, and she felt like traveling to Boston herself and enlisting in the Fifty-Fourth. Her mind raced with ideas on how to darken her skin and how to cover up her womanly form with a Union uniform that was three sizes too large. It could be done. She had done it on the Railroad. They had all thought she was a man. She could do it in the army.

  William looked at her with wide eyes. “Pardon me, Miss Ross.”

  Clarissa blinked. “What is it, sir?”

  “I’m not sure I heard you correctly, Miss Ross.”

  “Heard me correctly say what?”

  William went silent.

  Her mother put her hand on Clarissa’s arm. “Um. You asked him how he thought you might look in Union blue and with skin as dark as his.”