by Murray Pura
“I see.” Clarissa had been holding her breath and suddenly expelled it in a rush. “Where … where do you think his regiment is located?”
“I can’t say. Perhaps more toward the trees? Those chestnut oaks of yours? If the flag I saw in that area is, in fact, theirs. As for Lee, well, he has Mary Thompson’s farmhouse on Seminary Ridge.”
“What?” Ann Ross stared. “Widow Thompson’s?”
“Yes.”
“Where is she?”
“I have no idea. Perhaps still in her home? Lee is a gentleman and will afford her every consideration. Oddly enough, I was told Meade has made his headquarters at Lydia Leister’s farm on Taneytown Road. Just back of Cemetery Ridge.”
“Another widow. With six children.”
He nodded. “Meade is there. If the information I received is correct. One of the Union wounded at Christ’s Church said it was so. Who knows? Wednesday was confusing for everyone it seems, soldiers and civilians and generals alike.” The clock struck one. “There. Time is getting on. Still quiet. No cannons. Nothing at all. Let’s have ourselves a meal and head along to the church. Ambulances continue to bring in casualties from yesterday’s fighting.”
For Clarissa—once they arrived at Christ’s Church—looking at the soldiers’ bullet wounds, Federal or Confederate, was like staring down at Iain’s wounds again. Her stomach and mind rebelled, and the stench in the sanctuary assailed her nose as well, but she fought it all down, just as she had fought it down when Iain lay half dead in the dust of the roadway. Whatever she was asked to do, she did. Washing wounds and bodies, trying to cheer up those who were aware and alert, fetching items for the surgeons—those were the things that took up most of her time. She thought about little else, not even Iain up on the ridgeline, until the loud crash of musket fire and artillery made everyone in the church jump.
She was free to rush to the door and look outside. Smoke was rising between Seminary Ridge and Cemetery Ridge, that beautiful valley where so much grew so well, and it only became darker and thicker, as if a storm cloud had fallen to earth. The din did not stop. She had hoped, Oh, only a skirmish, please, a skirmish, but she knew it was the sound of full-out battle. Did she hear men shrieking? Was that the awful Rebel yell? The same sort of wild and angry screaming she had heard for the first time the day before?
“Lee’s got you Yankees now,” she heard a soldier on crutches croak at her elbow. “Sorry to say it—you all have been mighty kind—but Lee will have at your blue-bellies this afternoon. They will be on a tear for Washington an hour from now. I’spect they will outrun their horses again.”
“They didn’t run for Washington yesterday, sir,” she retorted.
“Probably too shell-shocked. Another dose of Dixie cannon and musket oughta set ’em running flat-out. All they’ll need now is someone to help point ’em east. Wouldn’t want ’em getting that messed up and have ’em running straight at us, no ma’am. Why, we’d shoot and gut the whole barrelful.”
She turned quickly and went back into the church, refusing to listen to any more of his taunting, and refusing to get into an argument with a wounded soldier, Rebel or not. Someone propped open the doors to improve the circulation of air in the building, so the roar of combat followed her wherever she went. Now she could not stop thinking of Iain, certain Lee had his men assaulting Cemetery Ridge. What had he called it when he wrote her after Antietam? “I’ve seen the elephant.”
Well, she certainly couldn’t claim to have seen the whole elephant from the church steps just now, or from her bedroom window the day before, but she’d definitely caught a flash of its tusks, and it put a huge weight on her heart. She felt she could not get her breath. Rain showers that came and went all afternoon helped a bit because they brought a small measure of coolness and moisture. Once she went outside just to get her face and hair wet. Ten minutes later, the only wetness on her skin and dress was from the perspiration she could not control. It seemed that all she had left in her was prayer.
God, keep him safe. Please, please, have mercy.
How many women, she wondered, biting her lip, both North and South, have prayed that very same prayer a million times over since Fort Sumter?
An hour later, the noise of war had not diminished; if anything, it had increased and seemed wilder and more frenzied. Or was it just she herself who felt wilder and more frenzied? She swiped the back of her hand across her brow. Even with the doors open, the church was impossibly hot. How would the pitiless summer sun feel to the men fighting under it, canteens empty, faces grimed black from burnt powder, voices hoarse from shouting? How did Iain feel, with the bull elephant thundering at him, tusks bared, bellowing, kicking up acres of dust and dirt? Did he even think about the heat? Or was he too busy trying to kill the men who were trying to kill him to think about anything except aim, shoot, reload, aim, shoot, reload?
At five thirty, glancing at the spare watch her father had thrust into the pocket of the blood-spattered apron she had thrown on over her dress, she could sense that something more was going on, that suddenly more guns were engaged, more muskets were firing, more men were hollering than before. She couldn’t stand it—Iain was under attack; his life was at stake. She was helping other soldiers, and she was grateful she could help them, but she couldn’t do a thing for him. From one moment to the next, as the sound of firing swelled to a roar like wind in all the great oak trees of Gettysburg, or a hailstorm pounding against a thousand rooftops, or a tempest exploding in huge whitecaps off Boston Harbor, she thought she’d lose her mind imagining what might be happening at Cemetery Ridge—muskets, bayonets, broken bodies, death. The busier she could make herself, the better. It was the only thing, she knew, that kept her sane, that and the constant prayers she was hurling to heaven. Others took breaks. Her mother implored her to take a few minutes, get off her feet, and drink some hot coffee or tea. But she gave her mother what she knew must be her wild-eyed look, red hair unraveling over her face, every strand dripping with sweat, pushed back again and again by hands smeared with the blood of a hundred soldiers, blue and gray: “I can’t stop, Mother, I can’t. If I stop doing something for my man by helping these men, I’ll die. I swear, I’ll drop to the floor stone dead. Let me be, please, let me be.”
Five thirty was soon seven thirty, and the shooting had not stopped. When she went to the door at nine and looked out at a sun dropping down to the horizon, the crackle of muskets continued, and as dusk came on, huge flashes of gunfire were vivid just outside town to the south. Only toward ten, when she stepped out again as it grew dark and the moon was a massive ball of red and gold at the eastern rim of Gettysburg, did she sense the fighting was petering out, that thousands of muskets had become hundreds, then twenty or thirty, and finally, none. A breeze carried the rotten-egg stink of black powder to her nostrils, and she placed a hand over her nose.
At the same time as she stood there, a company of Rebel troops came marching along Chambersburg Street and passed by in front of her. For a flicker of a second, one of the soldiers glanced her way and their eyes locked. Clarissa instantly recognized that she was looking into a woman’s eyes and face, even though the woman was disguised as a man. The woman knew she knew. And it felt to Clarissa, as the female soldier marched down the street with her comrades, that she fired a brief plea Clarissa’s way not to reveal her secret.
“I won’t,” Clarissa murmured. “I don’t know your reasons, but my lips are sealed. And, if it’s for love, I understand. Believe me.”
“Miss?”
Startled, she turned to face a Rebel officer. “Sir?”
“I’ve noticed how hard you’ve worked in this hospital here. Even with my own men. I realize you must be exhausted at this point, but I wonder if I might beg a favor?”
“What is it, Major?”
“The day is at an end. And the day’s fighting. I’m sending several ambulances out to the battlefield to gather up wounded and bring them water since we won’t be able to collect every man at
once. You are young and strong and have the good eyes and ears that go with your youth. You may find wounded the ambulance drivers would miss.” When she did not respond, he added, “There is a truce right now. Both sides will be looking for any comrades who might still be alive. No harm will come to you. No one will shoot. And my men will treat you with honor and respect—you have my word. There will be other nurses on the field as well. But with your zeal, the zeal I have personally witnessed in the church this afternoon, and your attention to detail, I believe you can help us save lives. Might I prevail upon you?”
“Yes.” She nodded. “Yes, Major. Of course I’ll help. It would be my Christian duty to assist you and the ambulances. It would also be my duty as a human being. A human being made in the image of God. As every man, woman, and child is.”
He inclined his head. “The ambulances are just over here.”
“I will let my parents know.”
“Very well.”
She anticipated the arguments of her mother and father, and she reminded them how long she had worked with the Underground Railroad and of the dangers she had faced. Brought home the point it was her Christian duty to respond to the enemy officer’s request. Made the case that a truce to gather up the wounded and suffering would be honored by both Lee and Meade, as it had been in many battles before this one, and no one would be taking shots at her in the dark. Got them to admit she might well make a difference and find soldiers the others did not. And was soon seated next to a sergeant from Alabama and a driver from Georgia as her ambulance made its way to the valley between the two ridges and out among the grasses close to the southwestern end of Cemetery Ridge. What she saw was the Union army’s left flank, the Confederate army’s right. Lanterns floated all over the field like fireflies. As the moon rose and painted the land and the soldiers, dead and living, in silver, it seemed as if the lanterns were no longer necessary, though Clarissa still lit the candle in hers and carried it by one hand.
Immediately as she stepped down from the ambulance, the Alabama sergeant offering his hand, the cries and groans, even screams, of the wounded struck her ears and her heart and made her flinch. But she moved ahead, found a man at her feet with one arm twisted at an impossible angle to his body, directed the sergeant and driver to lift him carefully onto the stretcher—something she bent to help with even though both protested—and carried on while they were settling the wounded soldier into the back of the ambulance. She found another and another and another, and while at first she noticed which were Union and which Confederate, after an hour, the ambulance full, they were all simply soldiers to her—and sometimes, in her thoughts, not even soldiers but damaged souls—Americans, ordinary men who would die if she and the sergeant and driver did not get them into Gettysburg or up to the seminary.
She traveled back to Christ’s Church with them once, but the second time she refused because she had begun to go about with five or six canteens, giving the wounded she found a drink—“Even a sip of water will save some, Sergeant, so you can’t expect me to keep popping up and down from Gettysburg as a passenger when I could be here in the field rescuing a family’s father or brother. I won’t stray far, and it will be easy enough for you to find me again in this full moon.” They did not have any trouble making their way to her again, and when they did, she was holding a Rebel captain’s hand as he died, trapped under his dead horse, his chest crushed. She knew the sergeant saw the tears in her eyes; she did not brush them away in time. “I prayed the Lord’s Prayer with him,” was all she said. “He asked me for that.”
Often enough, she passed by Union troops with lanterns who were peering down at upturned faces already illumined by the moon. And, often enough, when the sergeant was not nearby, she asked the Union men if they knew the position of the Sixty-Ninth Pennsylvania. None ever did. Until eleven, when one lieutenant pointed back at Cemetery Ridge: “I don’t know how familiar you are with this place, miss, but the Pennsylvanians are just yonder, by a stone wall. There is a big bunch of trees. I think the Sixty-Ninth or Seventy-First are there.” And she looked up and to her left, to the north, and thought she could glimpse the line of the wall under the moon and the oak chestnuts back of it, but she wasn’t sure.
The truce was due to end after midnight. They were going to do one more collection of wounded. “The pickets will get almighty jumpy after that,” the sergeant said. As he climbed up to sit beside the driver, the ambulance full of soldiers, Clarissa handed him a piece of paper she had folded twice: “Please give this note to my mother.”
He leaned down and took it. “You’ll be seeing her again shortly. The truce is almost over and the pickets will be active. We’ll need to clear the field.”
“It’s something she’ll want to know about sooner than that. Thank you, Sergeant.”
He touched his cap. “My pleasure. We’ll be back for you and our final batch of wounded.”
“Of course you will.”
The ravaged peach orchard, its fruit trees riddled with bullets, made her feel like crying as she moved toward the ridge, frequently stopping and going to one knee to give soldiers water from her last two canteens. The crushed and bloodied stalks in the wheat field, its summer crop thick with mangled bodies, only added to the pain she was already feeling over the dead and wounded, while her anguish from the day before fastened into her heart like the claws of a bird of prey—a second afternoon of vicious fighting made it almost certain, in her mind, that from now on her beautiful town and its farms would be known for killing and destruction and as the place where two armies had blasted one another to pieces. Even if Lee or Meade withdrew Friday morning. But she knew in her bones neither of them would withdraw. The battle had not been settled. Two days of slaughter and the battle had not been settled. A man reached out with his stub of an arm as she came near, and begged for water, and she quickly went to his side.
Once the sergeant and driver left, Clarissa had waited until they were well gone then began her drift from the peach orchard and wheat field, to the right and to the south, until she was closer to Union lines, though she saw Rebel soldiers watching her, with her lantern and canteens, from the huge pile of boulders she recognized as the Devil’s Den. She avoided contact with them and walked to her left. About a hundred yards away, picking her way through twisted and rigid bodies as she searched for the living, she found a Union corporal gasping for breath and knelt. He took the water from her canteen greedily and asked her not to leave.
“I won’t,” she told him. “I promise.”
And she sat for ten or fifteen minutes with the dying corporal, the two of them hidden away among scrub and rocks, the spot where he had fallen that evening. They talked. At some point, without scarcely thinking it over, she asked if she might borrow part of his uniform, perhaps his kepi and his frock coat, so that she could join her husband on the heights and hold him in her arms and, if the battle continued in the morning, fight beside him.
“I would like that,” he whispered, struggling for breath. “The thought of me … fighting on after I’m dead appeals. And then, if you would, send my … uniform home. The address is sewn into the pocket of my tunic. Right … by the bullet hole. Can’t miss it.” He laughed, choking. “The Rebs didn’t.” He grasped her hand more tightly. “Sam Rutgers.”
“Mrs. Clarissa Avery Ross … well, Kilgarlin, it is, Mrs. Clarissa Ross Kilgarlin.”
“I’m the fool who goes into battle with his pack on. It’s hereabouts somewheres. Got a … spare tunic and pants stashed in it. Belt too. That’s how I’ve always … done things. Use those. Don’t be afraid. You have my blessing. Win this … fight, my girl. You and the boys, you gotta win this fight. You know … you know how to shoot, Mrs. Kilgarlin?”
“Yes, Corporal Rutgers.”
“Reload?”
“Yes.”
“Do me proud. Do my unit proud.”
“I will. Tell me what it is, Sam.”
“The 124th New York. Fine boys. Proud boys. We held the Rebs bac
k. Bought the army’s left flank time. Bought those hilltops up there time. We got shot all to pieces. Lost Major Cromwell … and Colonel Ellis…. They wouldn’t get down off their mounts…. Wanted us to see ’em and fight harder…. And we did, we surely did, Mrs. Kilgarlin.”
“I know you did, Sam. I won’t disgrace your uniform. I won’t. If Lee attacks tomorrow, I’ll fight for you. Just like you fought today. The 124th will be on Cemetery Ridge. You’ll be there.”
“Wish I could stick to see you. Wish I could. But … thank ye. Thank ye, missus.”
She prayed over him after he had passed, and let a tear cut down a cheek stained with dried blood and sweat and death. Then found his pack a few feet away and the clean uniform inside with its two chevrons, extinguished her lantern with her fingertips, and quickly stripped off her apron and dress. She folded her apron several times and bound it tightly over her chest. After that she slipped the tunic over her arms—it was several sizes too large and hung off her like a sack—and pulled on the pants, stuffing the extra length into her military-style boots and cinching the belt around her slender waist until it held up the pants. They were still loose, but she knew she could make it work. His bayonet was on his hip, and she took it and hacked at her hair until it was well above her ears. It was far easier than she’d thought it might be because he had kept it razor sharp—he’d been a well-organized and meticulous man. And now she was him as well as being Clarissa. The same way Iain had once been so many persons rolled into one.
Finding the address sewn into his tunic, she ripped it free, pocketing it. Then she took several minutes to arrange his body, as if for a viewing, and tied a kerchief under his jaw so it would not hang open. She found a twist of tobacco in his pack and decided it would help disguise her voice. Biting off a piece, she had hardly begun to chew before she gagged and needed to spit. “Sam! What draws men to this habit? Oh my!” Determined, she kept at it, grimacing at the taste. She managed to chew away for a full minute before spitting again.