My Heart Belongs in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

by Murray Pura

  “How brave they are,” she said in a quiet voice.

  Iain barely heard her with cannons beginning to bark a few feet away. “They are fighting for what they believe. As are we. So we must be brave too.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “At every moment in the history of our republic, there have been many Americas jostling with one another for the right to define the one true America. It all depends upon which vision prevails during any given generation. Today, right now, we’re battling for our vision.”

  “And so are they.”

  “Yes. So are they.”

  The Confederates ran across the road and began to clamber over the second fence. Shells cut many of them in half. Clarissa looked away. She knew that once over the second fence they would start across the last stretch of field. She could tell that even more artillery had opened fire on them. She realized the Confederate infantry would not stop even if there were only a handful of them left. A count began in her head. It would not take more than ten minutes now. Ten minutes for them to reach the stone wall, the chestnut oaks, the zigzag angle in the wall, her and Iain, and the Sixty-Ninth. The colors were at the long line of stones now. The Stars and Stripes and the vivid green flag with its Irish harp.

  Horses’ hooves hammered the ground behind her. A voice bellowed not to fire until they could make out the whites of the enemy’s eyes. Twenty or thirty paces. Did they remember the regiment’s motto? Riamh Nar Dhruid O Spairn Iann? “Who never retreated from the clash of spears”? There could be no retreat. The regiment would stand its ground. The Irish would stand their ground. The Republic would stand its ground. They would die here, if they must, but they would not yield an inch of high ground to the enemy. It all came down to this—this minute, this hour, this destiny. The Irishmen would hold. The Americans would hold. There would be no surrender.

  She turned to look.

  Colonel O’Kane thundered off down the line with his retinue in pursuit.

  She looked back at the field. Her green field. The Rebels were close. So close she could see faces, could see eyes and noses and mouths, and the grip of their hands on their muskets. She saw puffs of smoke and cuts of flame as they began to shoot. Five minutes. Four minutes. Two. Artillery blasts continued to slash them to pieces. Still they came. Running now. Charging. Yelling. Shrieking. Coming at her. Coming at Iain. Coming at the wall.

  “FIRE! OPEN FIRE! FIRE!”

  Union muskets roared all along the wall in a burst of dirty smoke and jagged flame.

  The Rebels fell in rows.

  In row after row after row.

  And still they attacked.

  “FIRE! FIRE!”

  The Union line flashed like sheet lightning.

  Rebels were ripped to pieces.

  But other Rebels kept coming on.

  Shooting, hollering, waving their red battle flags.

  “The Fifty-Ninth has run!” came the shout along the line. “The Fifty-Ninth New York has broken and run! We are open on the left!”

  Another shout rose up from the right. “The Seventy-First Pennsylvania has fled the field! The Seventy-First has pulled back! They’re in retreat! No one has our right flank!”

  “Hold!” Iain spurred his horse along the wall. “It all comes down to this! Hold the line! Do not break! We do not break! You’re Americans now! You all are! Donegal, Kerry, Connemara—you’re Americans! Fight like it! We will maintain our left and right flanks on our own! We will hold this line! We do not break, and we do not run!” He pointed with his sword, the fine sword Clarissa’s father had bought him. “Close the gap! Get to that angle in the wall and close the gap! Lift the colors! The South do not take the day! Others run—we never shall! Push them back! Push them!”

  Clarissa saw two things happen at once—Rebels pouring over the gray wall, covered in clouds of musket smoke, and a bullet striking Iain and hurling him from his horse. She froze. Could not think, could not move. Until a bullet cut open the skin on her forehead and blood spurted into her eyes. She swiped it away with her hand and realized she was screaming: “No, Iain! Not a second time! No!”

  She galloped her mare to where he had fallen, and jumped from the saddle. Rebels raged toward her, howling, muskets and bayonets pointed. Bullets sliced past her head. She tore Iain’s revolver from its holster, aimed, and fired.

  “You will not take him! You will not take my country! My dream is as strong as yours! Stronger!”

  She saw Rebels pitch to the ground and continued to squeeze the trigger. The pistol was empty. She knew Iain kept a second one tucked in his belt and yanked it loose. A Rebel officer lunged, swinging his saber. It had blood on it. She fired point-blank. He went down. Three men came over the stone wall behind him, right over the crazy zigzag angle, shrieking, thrusting with their bayonets at Corporal Sam Rutgers, at Major Iain Kilgarlin, at all Clarissa Avery’s hopes and prayers. She kept firing. She could not stop. The soldiers fell one after another, and still her finger was on the trigger.

  She glimpsed a Rebel officer—with his black hat on the tip of his sword, swinging it and yelling—and took aim, but he was already hit and collapsing. She saw the regiment’s green flag and the red flags of the rebellion, the Confederate stars on their cross and the American stars on their patch of blue, men in blue and gray striking one another with the butts of their muskets, saw bayonets pierce chests, soldiers rolling in the dirt and hitting each other with their fists, saw them biting, kicking, choking.

  Somehow, in all the shooting and screaming, Clarissa had the presence of mind to cry out to God. A Rebel officer leveled his pistol at Pat O’Shea’s face. She fired. The officer was thrown backward by the force of the bullet strike. O’Shea saw it was her. She had no more bullets for the second Rebel who put his bayonet into O’Shea’s body.

  “Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg!”

  The shout went up all along the wall.

  Men hollered and cheered.

  The Rebels that were not on the ground twisted and broken and dying were gone.

  They were gone.

  She could hardly see through the thick battle smoke. It made her eyes sting; it filled her nostrils with its stench. She blinked and ran a hand over her eyes and was not sure if she was seeing right, was not sure of anything. She had to climb to her feet and look again.

  The Rebels lay on her rich July grass.

  They hung draped over her wall.

  They were bent into the posture they had held in the womb, only now they were bent and dead in the stone angle a farmer had built long ago.

  Her stone angle.

  She saw the few Rebels that were left limping back across her green valley to the Confederate lines, a dozen here, a hundred there.

  Leaving their red flags scattered on the ground.

  She saw that reinforcements had swelled the blue ranks on her left and on her right.

  She took everything in, all the time tightening Iain’s belt above the wound in his leg that kept bleeding and bleeding.

  His eyes flickered open. “It’s so quiet.”

  “Yes,” she told him. “It’s over and done, my love.”

  “Where are the Rebels?”

  “Gone.”

  “And we still hold the ridge?”

  She smoothed back his hair. “We hold it. We never lost it. And your men never ran, sir. They never broke.”

  He exhaled noisily. “Then the battle’s over. Maybe the war, in due time.”

  “Lee will attack again tomorrow.”

  Iain shook his head. “You saw what the cannon fire did. There is nothing for Lee to attack with. He left the Confederacy on the summer fields of Pennsylvania. He left it in your beautiful valley between the two ridges.”

  The blood had not stopped flowing, so Clarissa tightened the belt again. She knew it must hurt, the wound and the tourniquet both, but Iain did not complain. She looked over the wall at the retreating soldiers once more. Many used their muskets for crutches. Or leaned on their comrades
. They moved along slowly. No one was firing at them anymore.

  “What do you see?” Iain asked her. “What are you looking at?”

  “I’m looking at Gettysburg,” she replied. “My Gettysburg. The Gettysburg that was and the Gettysburg that has just been born. Born in blood. Like all births.”

  “In time, it will be washed, Clarissa, just as newborns are.”

  “It may be washed, sir. Yes, over time it may be washed and it may shine. But it will never be clean. It will never be what it once was. It has lost its innocence. We all have. However little of it we had left.”

  “Do you have your dream?” His voice was growing weaker. “Is my dreamer still holding on to her dream of a free country and an end to slavery?”

  She squeezed his hand. “She is. It’s ragged now, her dream, like one of these battle flags that have been shot through a hundred times. Tear-stained. Frayed. But its colors are still true. And I can’t throw it away. No, I will never throw it away. It’s more real now than it has ever been before.”

  July–November

  Gettysburg

  The heavens broke to pieces on Saturday, and neither army budged as rain struck like knives. Until the evening. On the evening of July 4, Lee began to retreat from Gettysburg. And Clarissa thanked God.

  She did not trust Iain to the surgeons. They were “saw happy.” She had prayed all day that Lee would swallow his pride and give the order to return to the South. Once the Army of Northern Virginia had fully cleared Seminary Ridge and trudged past the Union army on the roads leading south—it took hours—Clarissa, still looking for all the world like a ragged, tobacco-spitting Yankee corporal who had been kicked and trampled by cranky Rebel mules, made her way in the dark along Taneytown Road to Gettysburg. She had Iain on the saddle in front of her as Stranorlar trotted through the rain. Plum Run followed without being tethered.

  She’d told the Sixty-Ninth that, as his adjutant, she was getting Major Kilgarlin to the hospital in the seminary or, if that was overflowing, to the hospital at Christ’s Church, or St. Xavier’s, or St. James. In fact, she had only one intention, to get Iain to her own house, make peace with her parents, and nurse him back to health there. All of which she did. But she knew better than anyone that she poured the pain of her ten minutes of battle on Cemetery Ridge into dressing Iain’s wound—from which the minié ball had been removed Friday night—cooling his fevers, washing the sweat and corruption off his body, soothing his spirits and telling him that he would make it, he had to make it, and that she refused to let army surgeons remove his leg and toss it in a tin bucket.

  During the Saturday rainstorm, with Iain dry in a tent along with other wounded men, Clarissa had helped move the bodies at the stone wall and at the angle. She’d found Pat O’Shea there and had closed his eyes and said a prayer over him. Not ten feet from O’Shea, she found the Confederate female soldier she’d spotted marching by the church Thursday night. She had been part of General Pickett’s division. Her hair had not been cut, like Clarissa had cut hers, but pinned rigidly under her hat and even pinned to it. Bullets had made rags of the broad-brimmed hat and ripped the pins loose. Her hair tumbled long and ragged over her shoulders and chest.

  A redhead, just like me.

  Seeing her broke something in Clarissa. She sat on the stone wall in the rain and wept, her body shaking uncontrollably. No one bothered her. She guessed they simply thought she was worn out, leaning over with her head buried in her hands, the dead at her feet and all around, the deluge drenching everyone. After a few minutes, she got back up, arranged the woman’s body much as she’d arranged the body of Sam Rutgers, with more dignity than raw battlefield conditions usually permitted, wrapped her gently in a blanket, and got a private to help carry her to a wet grave.

  Goodbye, daughter of Virginia.

  The Mississippians never met up with Iain Kerry Kilgarlin of Natchez. Clarissa found out that Mississippi regiments like the Eighteenth, Thirteenth, and Seventeenth had clashed with New York troops far to the left of Iain and the Sixty-Ninth’s fight with the Georgians on Thursday. And that other New York units had battled the Second, Forty-Second, and Eleventh Mississippi on Friday as the Rebels clawed their way to Cemetery Ridge, but that had taken place far off on the right flank, nowhere near the oaks and the angle in the stone wall where the Sixty-Ninth had held the gap left by the Seventy-First Pennsylvania. Maybe Mississippi would never hear the whole truth about one of their own pushing the Confederacy back to Virginia at Gettysburg. Maybe all they would ever know was whatever Iain had written in his letter to his parents, supposing it had reached the Kilgarlin plantation in one piece.

  It took ten days for Iain’s fever to break. While Clarissa waited and fretted and prayed and nursed him, Ginnie Wade’s painful funeral came and went—killed by a musket ball that pierced the wall of a friend’s house where she’d been waiting out the battle. People suspected snipers—they had been dueling one another from the town and the seminary out to Cemetery Ridge and back again. Or maybe it had been a soldier in the street. Or maybe nothing at all that made any sense. It seemed impossible to Clarissa that she should survive General Pickett’s assault on the stone wall, with muskets going off all around her, and bayonets stabbing and sabers flashing, then come into town to find her friend dead from one single shot.

  Once Iain was sitting up and taking her mother’s soups, he and Clarissa were able to talk. She cried often, gripping his hands, because she knew she could have lost him in that maelstrom of gunfire and death that was Friday, July third. He wanted to know everything. She told him all that she could. That Colonel O’Kane was dead and Lieutenant Colonel Martin Tschudy as well. So were Pat O’Shea and more than thirty others, she guessed, including those who had died the day after, or were still dying in various hospitals around town. As far as she’d been able to make out, more than a hundred men of the regiment had become casualties. Lee started his retreat the night of Independence Day and was in Virginia now. Vicksburg had surrendered to General Grant the same day Lee withdrew, so the South had lost use of the Mississippi River as well as losing the fight at Gettysburg. Plum Run had survived, and so had Stranorlar; both horses were in the stable by the house. Herself? Oh, she was all right. She had not been detrimentally harmed, but yes, war had proven far more horrific than she had bargained for.

  “You’ve seen the elephant,” he said.

  She nodded. “It’s very big and very dangerous.”

  “When I can … I need to visit the wounded from the Sixty-Ninth … whether they’re at the seminary … or at a field hospital … or in one of the churches.”

  “Of course, Iain, but not yet. You have to regain your strength.”

  He lay back. Clarissa could see he was taking it all in, everything she’d told him, running it through his mind. She placed her head on his chest and listened to his heart beating, and she was grateful the two of them still had life when so many others did not.

  She laundered her corporal’s uniform and mailed it to the address in New York City Sam Rutgers had sewn into his pocket—she presumed Dr. and Mrs. Robert Rutgers were Sam’s parents. Her father bought Iain a sturdy cane of polished blackthorn, with a silver head and tip, and eventually he began to make his way around Gettysburg with Clarissa at his side. The surgeons declared him unfit for duty, and the word got around, so citizens expected to see him and doffed their hats, considering Iain their very own hometown hero of a battle the newspapers had made famous overnight.

  The two of them walked everywhere, farther and farther each day. But she hated to go to the seminary with him, where the halls were still slippery with blood and men of both armies still gasped their last. And she would not go to her beautiful field between the ridges the papers were calling the Valley of Death, or to her stone wall. Or her chestnut oaks, where so many had been slain in one side’s desperate fight to preserve the Old South and another’s desperate fight to end it, restore the Union, and set four million slaves free. They called the part of the
wall where she and Iain and the Sixty-Ninth had fought—and where she had played as a young girl—the Bloody Angle. The name repulsed her.

  Her mother had trimmed Clarissa’s hair to get rid of the frayed ends and the jagged line the bayonet had cut. Over her head she wore a white cotton cap close to her skull. On top of that, a sunbonnet of blue. She never took either off in public. It would take at least half a year to have any hair worth showing anyone. Or more than that. But Iain caressed her head in the evenings, when the bonnet and cap lay on her dresser, and kissed her hair and her face and told her she was the bravest and most beautiful woman in Gettysburg and the Union. No one could match her. No one. She cried.

  Was it normal to be haunted by three days of rough battle? she asked Iain. Did it happen to soldiers the way it was happening to her? Did the gun flashes repeat in their minds day and night? Could they still smell the smoke from the muskets? Still hear the cannons? Was the cry of dying horses and dying men never quite out of earshot? The way a person fell once they were hit never quite out of mind? And, if they killed, what then? How often did they have to watch those death scenes of those they slew replay themselves? Would her thoughts ever be free again? Ever be free of blood and pain?

  He listened but hardly spoke whenever she went on like that.

  However, one Friday evening in August, when they were sitting alone in the Ross family pew at Christ’s Church, she demanded an answer from him. “I need to know something, Iain. A big something. I need to know if it was worth it. The battle in Gettysburg was so terrible. It went on and on. So much death. So much slaughter. I need to know.”