The Soldier's Wife

by Cheryl Reavis

  That remark seemed to have ended the conversation.

  For a while.

  “I’m worried, Jeremiah,” she said, but he had lost sight of the path and wasn’t really listening.

  “That way,” she said, pointing over his shoulder. “I’m worried and that’s why I’m running on so. Well, I like to talk anyway, and I don’t get much chance except when I get down the mountain to church. So when I’m all vexed like this—well, it just comes out and I’m a sight. I’m right fond of all of them Garth girls—Beatrice and Amity and Sayer. If the Lord takes them, it’s going to break my heart—and I told Him that, too. Don’t know that He sets much store by what’s going to happen to my old heart if He does one thing or another, but I figured it won’t hurt for Him to know for sure I ain’t going to be happy. I been real good about not asking for things for myself for a long time now—didn’t even mention how bad my knees is been paining me. But then it come to me—right out of the blue—right when I was of half a mind to shoot you for a bushwhacker. I thought, ‘Quit your yammering, Rorie Conley. Get that boy with the horse and go see about ’em.’ So here we are.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, because she had stopped talking and seemed to be expecting him to make some kind of response.

  “Sayer, now, she’s a outsider,” Rorie continued when he’d obliged her by using the small space she’d given him. “She ain’t from these here mountains, but she tries. Thomas Henry’s mama showed her how to cook. And me, I showed her a couple of things about making soap and hominy and such as that. But there’s a lot of things she don’t know. There’s a lot to be said for trying, though. I didn’t reckon she’d last half as long as she has. Life’s hard enough around here when you got your man. When you ain’t, well...” She gave a heavy sigh. “Thomas Henry’s uncle—Halbert, his name is—he’s been plaguing her to death. If Thomas Henry knowed what that sorry uncle of his is been doing to Sayer and his little sisters, he’d kill him first thing he was home—blood kin or not. I know that for sure—but he’s dead, so what good is he?” She suddenly squeezed his shoulder. “I’m scared, Jeremiah. I’m scared we’re going to go in there and find them girls as dead as Thomas Henry.”

  He didn’t say anything to that. He could hear her sniffing from time to time.

  “No use worrying till we know,” he said, and he could feel the bonnet nod against his shoulder.

  “You better hang on to that horse now,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “I smell a bear.”

  “Maybe we ought to hurry, then.”

  “Well, my stars, Jeremiah. You ain’t nearly as simple-headed as you look.”

  With that, she gave the horse’s flank a dig with both her heels, not knowing that this particular piece of horseflesh would take such a gesture completely to heart and bolt to the top of the ridge, path or no path, whether they wanted it to or not. Unfortunately, the mount Ike had found for him was a seasoned warhorse whose war still continued at every turn—something Jack had discovered the hard way.

  Rorie Conley was hanging on for dear life, but he didn’t try to slow the animal down. He already knew how useless that would be. A charge was a charge to this horse, at least until it ran out of room. They finally broke into the clearing around the Garth cabin, and he had to work hard to rein it in. “Next time, you let me give this animal his instructions,” he said as he helped her swing down.

  He dismounted and looked toward the cabin. Someone had put a lot of work into building it. It was tall enough to have a good-size loft if the small window near the eaves was any indication. There were two more windows off the front porch—double-hung three-over-twos, the kind he would have thought would be too expensive and complex to build for a mountain farmer. Two straight chairs sat on the porch, and a glass jar with some kind of fading wildflowers in it had been placed in the middle of one of the windowsills. Apparently Sayer Garth liked the little touches.

  Rorie was still trying to get her breath. Her bonnet had fallen off her head and was hanging down her back, but she still had a good grip on the basket.

  “Did you hear what I said?” he asked.

  “Yes, Jeremiah, I reckon I did. And I’ll remember it. Another ride like that one and I’ll be simple-headed, too.”

  She untied her bonnet and put it on top of whatever she had in the basket, then stood for a moment, listening.

  “You hear anything?” she asked, turning her head side to side.

  “Nothing but the wind in the trees,” he said.

  “Well, I reckon I got to go see.”

  “I’ll go,” he said.

  “No, you won’t. How many times a day do you want to come that close to getting yourself shot?”

  “Used to be a pretty regular thing,” he said. “Of course, ‘wanting’ didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “Well, now it does. Sayer might be in there with a musket sighted on the door. She’s got those girls with her, and you’ll scare her so bad she’ll shoot first and then worry about what you was wanting.”

  She began walking toward the cabin, and he came with her. “Used to be she had a dog,” she said. “Good old dog. Wouldn’t let nobody come up on the cabin unless Sayer called him off. Something happened to him.”

  “Thomas Henry’s uncle, you mean?”

  She flashed him a look of what could have been appreciation for his powers of deduction or one that indicated she didn’t find him quite as “simple-headed” as she’d first thought.

  “You hear that?” Rorie said suddenly. “I hear crying.” She moved forward quickly. “Sayer! It’s me! I’m coming in!” She stepped up on the porch. “You stay out here,” she said over her shoulder.

  He watched as she disappeared inside. He could hear the crying clearly now, but he couldn’t be certain if there was one person in distress or two.

  He kept looking around for anything that might be amiss outside the cabin. He’d heard enough now about Thomas Henry’s uncle to think that the dead Reb had been right to worry about his wife’s safety.

  The horse began to prance nervously, something Jack took as a sign that this situation might not be safe for ex-soldiers. The crying coming from inside the cabin seemed to be tapering off, in any event. He pulled the horse’s reins forward and dropped them on the ground, because he had learned from an ex-cavalryman riding the stage to Jefferson that it would stay put as if it were tethered. Jack’s not knowing about the animal’s war training had seemed to satisfy the man’s mind regarding Jack himself and the all-too-obvious U.S. brand on the horse’s left shoulder. A man who hadn’t been a Union cavalryman and who had bought a warhorse cheap wasn’t going to know the fine points. The imaginary tethering and the fact that it would come whenever he whistled—unless it thought it was in the middle of another charge—thus far had proved at least somewhat useful.

  “She ain’t in here and she ain’t in the privy,” Rorie called after a moment. “The girls don’t know where she got to. That path yonder leads down to the spring. You walk down that way, Jeremiah. See if you can see her. I’ll tend to these young-uns. They’re still fevering and they’re both scared might near to death. I’m going to leave the back door open. You holler if you find anything—you can holler, can’t you?”

  She didn’t wait for him to say whether he could or not. “Watch out for snakes! We got some big rattlers and copperheads around here!” she yelled as she went back inside.

  Jack stood for a moment. He had thought Mary was accomplished at having the last word, but Rorie Conley was a true artist.

  He began walking through the tall and probably snake-filled grass to the path that led...somewhere. He kept looking for livestock. He would have expected chickens, at the very least, but what he took for a henhouse and a chicken lot were clearly unoccupied as was the pigpen and the barn. He could see a smokehouse and tobacco barn,
and there was a planted field on a slope some distance away—hay that needed cutting and drying. There was another field lying fallow with the rotting stubble of a corn crop beyond that one.

  But what was most apparent was that Sayer Garth had no animals to feed of any kind. Uncle Halbert didn’t seem to favor one species over the other. Chickens, cows or child’s pet, they were all the same to him.

  The path grew very steep suddenly, and it was difficult to keep his balance because there was nothing but tall grass to grab on to along the way. It occurred to him that if the path led to anything of importance, the grass needed to be scythed. If he was going to run into any snakes, this would be a good place for it. The path needed to be terraced and braced with thick planks, something he supposed Thomas Henry might have done if he’d lived.

  Once again he could hear water flowing, not the rushing of a stream in a rocky bed like the one they had crossed at the bottom of the hollow on the way here, but a steady, quiet sound of water hitting water.

  The path made a sharp bend, and as he came around it, he saw a woman lying on the ground next to an overturned bucket a few yards ahead.

  “Rorie!” he yelled, moving as quickly as he could down to where the woman on the ground lay, still trying not to lose his balance. He could immediately see a gash in her forehead that ran into her hair.

  He couldn’t hear Rorie coming, and he yelled again. “Rorie!”

  “Oh, no, what is it!” she cried from somewhere behind him.

  “I found her!”

  He knelt down by the woman.

  “Is she—?” Rorie called. She came down the path as far as she could make it without falling.

  “No,” he said. “No, she’s breathing. Looks like she might have hit her head on one of these rocks. I don’t think she’s been out here too long. The place is still bleeding a little.”

  “Get her up from there, Jeremiah. Don’t let her lie on the hard ground like that. Oh, no, I hope she ain’t snakebit. I’m going to get the other bed ready. You carry her in,” she said, and she was running—hobbling—away again.

  He grabbed the bucket Sayer Garth must have intended to carry back to the house and filled it in the small pool that collected the water running in a steady stream from a split in the rocks. She was very pale—and thin—unnaturally so. Hers was the kind of thinness he’d seen far more times than he’d ever want to count. It was the kind that came from starving.

  He took off his neckerchief and wet it, then began wiping the dried blood from her face. She stirred after a moment and caught his hand. Her eyes opened.

  “Thomas Henry... Oh, Tommy,” she whispered as her eyes closed again.

  He picked her up as carefully as he could and began the long climb back up to the cabin, going down on his knees once when his feet slipped. He didn’t drop her, but the jarring made her rouse again. She reached up her hand and grabbed on to his shirtfront, gripping it tightly, not because she was afraid of falling, he thought, but because she still believed he was Thomas Henry. He could smell her soft woman smell—soap and rosewater—and he realized suddenly that she was crying.

  “It’s all right,” he said quietly as he struggled to carry her upward to flatter ground. “I’ve got you.”

  “You’re home,” she murmured, pressing her face against his chest. “You’re home...”

  “Yes,” he said, knowing he shouldn’t.

  Home.

  * * *

  “Where is he?”

  “You rest easy, honey—”

  “Where is he!”

  “It weren’t him, Sayer.”

  “No! I saw him! I saw him!” Sayer said, trying to get up. The room swam and she fell back on the pillow. “I saw him,” she said again, hating that she sounded so pitiful. Tears began to slide down her cheeks.

  “Rest now,” Rorie said. “You got yourself a big knot on your head, but you’ll be all right. Amity and Beatrice, I think they’ll be all right, too. Their fevers’ done broke. They’re both right over there in the other bed, sleeping away like they need to be. They been washed up and the bed’s changed. I got the sheets boiling in the wash pot. Next time you wake up, I’m going to have some good healing broth ready for all three of you. Just let go, honey. We’re going to take care of things for you. Let go now. Sleep.”

  Sayer wanted so much to do that—let go. But how could she? She had seen Thomas Henry. But her eyes closed in spite of all she could do.

  We? she suddenly thought. She wanted to ask about that, but she couldn’t manage, somehow.

  Sleep...

  And perhaps she did sleep, but there seemed to be a noisy argument nearby. Rorie and...someone with a man’s voice. She tried to lift her head enough to see.

  “Now see what you gone and did? You woke her up!”

  “I told you. She ought not sleep for very long. I know a little something about head wounds!”

  “Well, all right! I’m willing to allow as how maybe you seen more than I have. What do you want to do about it?”

  “You need to talk to her for a little bit. Then she can sleep again—for a while.”

  “Who are you?” Sayer asked, and they both looked around in surprise. She realized that a good deal of time must have passed, because Rorie looked much more tired now than she had earlier.

  “Talk to her,” the man said, and he left the cabin.

  “Wait! Who is that?” Sayer insisted.

  “I...ain’t for sure,” Rorie said. “I reckon I just up and took him over. I needed to get over here to see what was happening with you and the girls. My knees— You know how my knees get. That old mule of mine, he ain’t about to let nothing ride him that’s heavier than a sack of corn. I knowed good and well I couldn’t walk it. So that boy, he rode me over on his horse. ’Course his horse ain’t much better than that hardheaded mule. That dang animal still thinks it’s in the war. Least little thing and off he goes like he was leading some battle.”

  “He...rode you over?” Sayer asked, trying to concentrate on the part that interested her.

  “I reckon I made him,” Rorie confessed.

  Sayer looked at her doubtfully, and Rorie shrugged.

  “Is he leaving now?”

  “Can’t say for sure,” Rorie said obscurely. “I’m hoping he’ll go get my cow. Want me to ask him?”

  “I want you to help me up so I can find—where Thomas Henry—” But the room began to spin again as she made the attempt on her own, and she fell back against the pillow. “I don’t—” She reached up to touch the place that hurt so on her forehead.

  “I reckon you fell and hit your head, honey. I reckon you ain’t been eating—ain’t been sleeping either, most likely, what with the girls as sick as they was, and the chore to get to the spring and back was too much for you.”

  “Thomas Henry...”

  “He ain’t here, Sayer,” Rorie said. “And we ain’t wanting to wake the girls,” she added, looking directly into Sayer’s eyes.

  “I know what I saw!”

  “You saw what you hoped,” Rorie said. There was something in her voice, something fearful, that made Sayer let it go. She turned her face away, and she didn’t press her anymore. She lay there in her narrow bed, her mind filled with dread, trying to understand. She had thought she might not recognize him when he came home, but she had. She had!

  She must have slept again, despite her need to look for the man she was still certain she had seen. She was aware suddenly that she wasn’t alone, and when she opened her eyes, Amity was sitting on the bed beside her.

  “Shh,” Amity whispered, holding a finger to her lips. “They’re asleep.” She held an oddly folded handkerchief by each of two corners, and she leaned closer so Sayer could see it better.

  “What is it?” Sayer whispered in return.

 
Amity made a small sound of exasperation, a sure sign that she was on the mend. Her hair had been combed and neatly braided, and her face was clean. She was thinner, apparently because of the fever she’d had, but she looked so much better than she had yesterday. Or was it yesterday? Sayer realized suddenly that she didn’t actually know.

  “Two babies,” Amity said. “See them in the cradle?” Once again she held the handkerchief closer to encourage Sayer to take another look and perhaps this time note the two rolls in it that must be what Amity called “babies.”

  “Where did you get them?” Sayer asked, still whispering.

  “Jeremiah made it. He used to make them for the little girls when they came to the orphanage. They never had any dolls or anything until maybe later when the Sisters would make them one.”

  Orphanage? What orphanage?

  “He made Beatrice one, too. She’s pretending like she’s too old for playing with handkerchiefs, but she likes it. He’s going to show us how to make one for ourselves when he gets a chance. All you need is a hanky and that’s one thing we’ve still got.”

  Sayer frowned. “Who is Jeremiah?” she asked in a normal voice.

  “He’s cutting wood today,” Amity said, pointing out the window. “The woodshed was almost empty. Rorie thinks somebody’s been stealing it. Do you think somebody’s been stealing it? The mountain’s got trees down everywhere. Why would somebody steal our wood?”

  “I don’t know that they would,” Sayer said, but she was very afraid that she did. Both why and who.

  “Jeremiah told Rorie we ought to make it harder to get to.”

  “Did he? What else did he say?”

  “Beatrice!” Amity suddenly called to her sister instead of answering. “Sayer’s awake!”

  Sayer looked to the bed on the other side of the room, expecting Beatrice to be there, but she wasn’t. She was coming in from the porch.

  “Oh,” Sayer said in surprise. “Look at you! You’re up and you’re all well. How long have I been asleep?”

  “We’ve been well for days. You haven’t been asleep very much,” Amity said before Beatrice could answer, swinging her handkerchief back and forth as if she wanted to keep the tiny pretend babies rolled up in it quiet. “You just didn’t know anything. You didn’t even know who we were. Jeremiah said you shouldn’t sleep too long even if you didn’t know anything. So we woke you up and woke you up. But now you woke up all by yourself. Thomas Henry’s not here,” she added pointedly. “Is he, Beatrice?”