The Soldier's Wife

by Cheryl Reavis

  I won’t bite you.

  After a moment of forcing herself to return his steady gaze, she had been certain somehow that he was telling her the truth. He would never hurt her, and that belief was reinforced every summer because of the way his face always lit up when the train bringing her uncle and her aunt—and her—finally arrived at the railhead.

  Thomas Henry was the one person in this world she knew she made glad, not because of anything she did or didn’t do, but simply because she existed. All through her childhood he had never missed waiting for the train, and he’d always brought a secret gift for her—some dried apples and cherries or pieces of honeycomb wrapped in brown paper, and once, when they were both nearly grown, a pencil—just in case she might like to write him a letter once in a while.

  The pencil had alarmed her at first, but he had immediately understood.

  “You just write to me if you feel like it,” he said. “Tell me what it’s like living in a town. I’ve never even been to a big town with a railroad through it. I won’t write back,” he hastened to reassure her. “It might cause...” He hadn’t finished the sentence, but she had known what he meant. Her aunt would never allow it. She knew that, but she had already begun arranging in her mind all the things he might like to know about the place where she lived—the ferry that crossed the river and the trains. He’d especially want to know about the trains, what kind and how many. She could count the whistles she heard in the daytime and at night and give a good estimation of that.

  Remembering her forbidden enthusiasm for the plan suddenly made her smile. She had been pleased with all his gifts, but she had truly cherished that cedar pencil. What little was left of it she now used to write to him while he was away fighting in the war, because it made her feel some kind of connection to him, and she sorely needed that.

  She sighed. Why couldn’t she remember his face? Not long after he’d left, he’d written that he had had a daguerreotype made and had sent it to her. The daguerreotype had never arrived, and it seemed to her now that she very much needed it.

  She stood watching the path a little longer, until she was certain that no human had disturbed the mourning doves. A sudden snippet of memory came to her after all. Thomas Henry, leaving her almost immediately after the wedding ceremony, taking her hands and pressing a kiss on the back of each one, despite the onlookers. And then he’d winked, the way he often did when no one was looking, and pulled the blue ribbon from her hair, the closest thing she’d had to a bridal veil. He’d stuffed the ribbon into an inside pocket in his uniform. “Now, don’t go and forget me,” he whispered in that teasing way he had. It had made her want to laugh and cry all at the same time. And then she’d given him the only cherished possession she had—a small Bible that had belonged to her mother.

  “I can’t take this,” he said, clearly moved that she wanted him to have it.

  “It’s so you’ll know,” she whispered.

  “Know what?”

  “Know I won’t go and forget you.”

  No, she thought now. She would never forget him. It was only his face she had trouble remembering. She knew in her heart that she might not have survived her illness if not for God’s grace in the form of the gift Thomas Henry Garth had offered her. Marriage to him had given her a sincere hope for a better life. It was true that so far that life had been hard, but she thanked God every day for it. Thomas Henry had left for a seemingly unending war, and she had remained in the mountains, never regretting for a moment that she hadn’t returned to Salisbury with Uncle John and Aunt Cecelia on the train. She looked toward the cabin. Both of Thomas Henry’s sisters were dancing around trying to stay warm while they poured limewater into the pans of shelled corn to make hominy. Hopefully, some of it would actually hit the corn.

  Amity was eight, and Beatrice was ten, and they both had the Garth brown eyes and curling honey-blond hair. Since Thomas Henry’s mother had died, they had been both a great responsibility and a great help. Sayer went out of her way to make sure they were aware only of the latter. She didn’t want them to ever feel the way she had felt in her uncle’s house. Her real worry was that she was neither brave enough nor strong enough to keep them safe. She believed she might have long since given up trying to hang on to Thomas Henry’s land if not for them. They were the true Garth family legacy until Thomas Henry came home again, and she hoped desperately that she wouldn’t fail them.

  The winters had been particularly hard, and she had no doubt that they would have starved if it hadn’t been for old Rorie Conley, who lived atop the ridge on the other side of Deep Hollow. It was a short distance to Rorie’s cabin as the crow flies, but a hard trek down into the hollow and back up again to the other side on foot. The big sack of shelled corn she’d brought them on the back of a mule would last them for a while, and Sayer had taken great pains to make sure both girls understood that they were not to tell anyone—anyone—where the corn had come from, lest Rorie begin to suffer the same mishaps and accidents Sayer had: crops decimated by deer and other wild animals because of mysteriously downed fences; chickens and pigs stolen, supposedly by deserters from both armies hiding in the mountains; her one milk cow inexplicably shot.

  The only clue Sayer had as to the cause of these troubles was Halbert Garth’s overconfident smile. Thomas Henry’s uncle constantly urged her—in the face of all her “bad luck” and her ignorance of farming—to write to Thomas Henry about the supposedly generous offer he had made to buy the Garth land. Surely, he kept telling her, Thomas Henry would want her and the girls to go live “somewhere safe,” though the Lord only knew where that might be. He had already written to Thomas Henry himself, of course, but he thought that it would be better for him to hear the truth from her. Halbert Garth didn’t realize how much of the “truth” Sayer was actually privy to. She knew that he had expected to inherit all the Garth land when his father died and that he considered the acreage Sayer and the girls were living on his birthright, to claim and to dispose of as he pleased, despite the fact that old Mr. Garth had made it plain in his unbreakable will that he intended the land to be a family legacy for all the Garths who followed after him and not the ante in some high-stakes Louisville poker game.

  * * *

  “Sayer! Sayer!” the girls suddenly called to her, and she began walking in their direction.

  “Will you read to us after supper?” Beatrice wanted to know, twirling again around and around the pan of corn. Sayer suddenly imagined her all grown-up and dressed in a white gown with gardenias in her hair, dancing the evening away at the Harvest Moon Ball in Salisbury, the event Sayer had heard so much about when she still lived in her uncle’s house, the one she had known even then that she’d never be allowed to attend.

  Poor Cinderella, Sayer thought a little sadly, thinking of them both. No white dresses and gardenias for us.

  “What shall I read to you?” she abruptly asked, putting her fanciful notions about the social events in Salisbury aside. She smiled, because she already knew their answer. She had diligently tried to make sure that neither of them forgot their brother, despite the lost daguerreotype and the years that had passed, especially Amity, who had been only four when he left.

  “Read us a letter from Thomas Henry!” they both cried.

  Chapter Two

  “What’s wrong?” Jack asked. There were too many of his comrades still awake. All of them should have been lying exhausted on the ground save the two on watch, but it looked as if the entire group was alert and waiting—for him, apparently.

  “Nothing,” Little Ike said after a silence that went on too long.

  Jack sat down on the ground close to his blanket and haversack. He was emotionally and physically spent. He’d managed to get the dead Rebel wrapped in his blanket and more or less buried. Jack impulsively kept the man’s letters and personal belongings and stuck them inside his jacket. He took them out
now and began looking at them. Not a single man asked him what he had or what he was planning to do with whatever it was.

  He glanced in Little Ike’s direction. “You get your letter read?”

  “Oh! Well—” Ike said. “I— It was—” He stopped. He took his battered cap off and twirled it in his hands. Then, as if suddenly wondering how it had gotten there, popped it back on his head again.

  “You know,” Jack said after a long moment, “I didn’t think the question was all that hard.”

  “We got the canteens filled,” Ike said, clearly hoping to move Jack along to some other topic of interest.

  “Did you get the letter read?” Jack asked again. He looked at the soldiers closest to him—Boone. Donoho. Weatherly. James. All of them looked elsewhere.

  “Are we the Orphans’ Guild or not?” he asked. It was the name that had been given to them the first day the company mustered, one they’d taken for their own with a fierce kind of pride. They looked out for each other and they didn’t keep secrets, especially not from him.

  “Tell him, Ike,” Boone said finally.

  But Little Ike was fiddling with his hat again.

  “Tell him!”

  “It was in the letter,” Ike said in a rush. Most of the words went down his jacket front.

  Jack waited, but that seemed to be the only information Ike was willing to impart. He didn’t suggest that he continue, however. Jack had learned early on, from his days in the orphanage, that the quickest way to a revelation was not to demand it. He went back to looking through the dead Reb’s personal effects: a Bible, a clay pipe bowl, an empty leather tobacco pouch, a daguerreotype he couldn’t see in the erratic moonlight, a packet of letters tied up with a ribbon, the color of which he also couldn’t determine. He could feel the watchful attention of every man around him, but he didn’t look up. He pulled one of the letters free and tried to decipher the address. He could only make out part of the handwriting: Co. G Highland Guards. He had heard of the Highland Guards, but that was after what was left of the Orphans’ Guild had been shifted from the Army of the Ohio into an equally decimated company in the Army of the Potomac. Jack had been half convinced that the Guild soldiers had been the ante in some kind of high-stakes poker game. A general from the Army of the Ohio folded, and off the orphans went. Even so, he and the rest of them still thought of themselves as soldiers of the Kentucky regiment they’d volunteered for, regardless of what the generals said.

  He turned the letter over in his hands, but he made no attempt to read it. The Highland Guards had been at Sharpsburg and at Malvern Hill, just as he and the newly reassigned Orphans’ Guild survivors had.

  Sharpsburg.

  Malvern Hill.

  One thing he had learned in this war. Nothing qualified for cannon fodder more than a company with a true majority of bona fide orphans.

  “Jack?”

  He looked up.

  “She went and got married, Jack,” Ike said.

  “Are you going to tell me who ‘she’ is or do I have to guess?”

  “Miss Elrissa Barden,” Ike said, his voice full of misery. “My cousin...she says he’s rich,” he added helpfully.

  Jack reached for his haversack, rearranging the contents so that he could add the dead Rebel’s belongings. He might find a way to mail the letters, and then again, he might not. “His name?” he asked.

  “It’s...Vance.”

  Jack looked at him. “Farrell Vance?” he said, surprised by his response to the information. He should have been intensely disturbed, at the very least, but he wasn’t. After a short moment, it seemed...only logical. Farrell Vance had money—a lot of money—more money than good old Jeremiah “Jack” Murphy would ever have, even if a marriage to a wealthy store owner’s daughter had happened. Vance was a store owner, as well—among other things—but his real money came from the war, from army contracts. There was plenty of profit to be made there, especially if a supplier was willing to cut corners. He had no doubt that Farrell Vance fell into that camp.

  “That’s him,” Ike said. “My cousin, she wrote it was a really big wedding. Nobody ever seen anything like it in Lexington before, I can tell you that. Her wedding dress come all the way from Paris somehow or other. Must have been hard, what with the war and everything. It had all these...rosettes or some such thing. What do you reckon a rosette is— Ow!” he said, his report interrupted by his nearest comrade’s elbow. “What did you do that for, Boone!”

  “I did it hoping you might start using that head of yours for something besides parking your hat!”

  “Well, you said to tell him!”

  The argument, peppered with insults, continued, but Jack was no longer listening. Elrissa Suzanne Barden...Vance.

  Jack had never formally asked her father for her hand. She had wanted him to wait until he came home again, and he had agreed, thinking that Mr. Barden would be more apt to remember how important Jack had been to his business if he was standing right in front of him. He hadn’t really considered that Mr. Barden would say no. The man had set the precedent that his beloved Elrissa could have whatever she wanted a long time before Jack Murphy came along.

  But clearly Elrissa had changed her mind. It occurred to Jack that no one in her circle likely knew anything about his marriage proposal much less that she’d accepted him. And when this greater matrimonial opportunity arose, she must have realized she could marry Farrell Vance without consequence. With any luck at all, Jack Murphy would end up like all too many of his fellow orphans and wouldn’t be coming back from the war at all. Or if he did survive, he wouldn’t likely go around telling people he’d been taken for a fool. It occurred to him, too, that it must require many months to put together a wedding that included a dress from Paris with “rosettes,” and Elrissa must have continued writing to him until she was absolutely sure the better marriage was a certainty.

  “That’s that, then,” he said, realizing too late that he’d said it out loud.

  “That’s right, Jack,” Ike said. “Ain’t no use worrying about it.”

  “Whose turn is it to take watch?” Jack asked, ignoring Ike’s comment.

  “Fred’s,” somebody volunteered. “And Jacob’s...” The sentence faded away into a different kind of silence.

  “Mine, then,” Ike said after a moment. “And Boone’s.”

  “Well, don’t the two of you be squabbling like a couple of old women,” Jack said despite the fact that two more of the Orphans’ Guild were dead and gone. He was glad it was Ike’s turn. Ike couldn’t tell when he was putting a foot wrong and stumbling all over something socially, but he had finely honed senses when it came to anticipating danger, probably because of the years he’d spent hiding from his violent drunkard of a father.

  “No, Jack,” Ike said earnestly. “We won’t. I ain’t letting them Rebs sneak up on us.”

  “That’s good to know, our situation being what it is,” Jack said. “What’s that?” he asked because of a sound in the distance he couldn’t identify.

  “Sounds like singing,” Boone said.

  And so it was, but Jack couldn’t make out the song. It was something wistful; he could tell that much. A farewell for a fallen comrade, he decided, as more voices joined in, perhaps for the man whose letters he still held. He felt a burning in his eyes suddenly, an ache in his throat. He stuffed the letters into his haversack. His hands were beginning to tremble again. This time he wrapped himself in his blanket to hide them and turned his back to the others. He lay down on the ground and closed his eyes, but he had little hope of sleep. His body ached with fatigue, but his thoughts swirled around and around in his head so fast he couldn’t dwell on any of them. He tried to find some sound to concentrate on—the whip-poor-will, the singing, anything—so that he could shut out everything else, but it didn’t help. The more he struggled, the more his mind ra
ced. Eventually, though, as it had more than once, the sound he so needed turned out to be one inside his own head. After a moment, it rose out of the chaos: Father Bartholomew reading aloud to them on the cool upstairs porch on Saturday afternoons after their chores and their Saturday baths were finally done. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. It had been a favorite of the younger boys and, he thought, of Father Bartholomew. The ancient mariner. The man who could not pray.

  Jack concentrated on the poem, word by word, line by line, not caring if they were out of sequence or not. After a time he began to whisper random phrases to himself. “‘The praise be given...the gentle sleep from heaven...slid into my soul….’”

  But there was no chance of that happening this night.

  “Jack,” Boone said, shaking him hard.

  “What!” he snapped because he hadn’t been asleep.

  “They’re not singing now, Jack. Maybe you better come listen.”

  He sat up and struggled to his feet, wishing for the second time tonight that he associated with men who could speak in specifics. He looked toward the battlefield, keeping his fists clenched because the second episode of shaking hadn’t yet subsided. The soldiers he couldn’t see had stopped singing, just as Boone said, but what they were doing instead, Jack couldn’t tell.

  “You see anything, Ike?” Jack called.

  “Nothing!” Ike called from some distance away. “Whatever it is, it’s coming this way.”

  “Us or them?”

  “Don’t know!”

  “At the ready!” Jack shouted, and they all scrambled to grab up their gear. Then they waited, muskets resting on whatever prop they could find, all of them straining to see in the darkness. Every now and then Jack could hear the whip-poor-will in the tall pine at the edge of the field.