Bittersweet

by Anita Mills

  He’d finally be the husband Liddy wanted. He wouldn’t have to lie on a hard army cot, burning for her, anymore. Now he could give free rein to his memories of her whispered words, of the intoxicating scent of her skin, of the ecstasy of fulfilled desire. After four years of hell, he was going home to heaven on earth.

  But right now, the spectre of violence still hovered, fed by despair, humiliation, and a desire for revenge on the gloating, swaggering Yankees who’d plundered and burned the heart of the South. Just yesterday, a drunken bunch of bluecoats had blocked the road, telling butternuts they had to salute the Stars and Stripes before they could pass. Provoked, the former rebels had linked arms and sang “Dixie” at the top of their lungs, and forced their way through the jeering Yankees. When the ensuing fight was over, two Union soldiers lay dead in the road, and a dozen others were running for their lives.

  He kept trying to think of the good things, but his mind was wandering, scattering his thoughts like buckshot. He was so tired, but he couldn’t stop. At Charlotte, he’d write Liddy, letting her know he was on his way home, then he’d sleep as long as he could.

  As unsettled as everything had been in those last weeks before Johnston surrendered to Sheridan, mail delivery had been pretty spotty, with little getting through. The last word he’d heard from her had been more than two months ago, but the tone of it had been better. Ross’s presence had been a big help.

  “Get his gun!” somebody yelled.

  Before he realized what was happening, a figure darted out from a copse of trees to grasp his horse’s bridle, and suddenly he was surrounded. As his hand sought his own revolver, he felt the cold steel of a gun barrel. against his neck. Jerking away, he kicked at the bearded man reaching for his coat.

  “Hold your fire, or I’ll shoot!” Spence shouted, reaching for his gun.

  “Grab his arm! Don’t let him get it!”

  His horse reared, nearly unseating him. As two men rolled away from flailing hooves, he pulled the trigger. His first shot missed, then the gun jammed. Unable to fire again, he clubbed an attacker with the barrel, and kicked his horse’s flank hard. As the animal lunged forward, he was pulled from the saddle and struck from behind. The world went black before his face hit the mud, and he floated in a downward spiral toward oblivion.

  “You all right, mister?”

  A distant voice penetrated the fog in Spence’s brain. For a moment, he was on the battlefield, and the ground beneath him was cold and wet. He must’ve been thrown from the ambulance wagon when a cannonball hit it. But the guns had gone silent, the only sound now that of rain pelting the earth next to his ear. The wagons had gone on, leaving him for dead.

  “He ain’t moving.”

  “Wonder where he’s from—looks like they took his coat, but he’s got butternut pants on. Put that gun away, Will—he ain’t a Yankee.”

  “He ain’t no soldier neither, Jack—he ain’t barefooted.”

  “Come on—we gotta get goin’—ain’t no way we’ll be home iff’n we don’t get goin’.”

  “Just wonder who he is, that’s all.”

  “It don’t matter, I’m tellin’ you. I got a ma and pa to worry over, Will—I ain’t got no time to be carryin’ nobody anywheres.”

  “It don’t seem right to be leavin’ ‘im like that.”

  “We gotta. We ain’t got no horse, and he can’t walk anywhere like that.”

  The voices floated off, leaving him in a fog of pain.

  His fingers dug into the mud, hanging on. He’d fallen into a hole somewhere, and when he felt better, he’d crawl out.

  It was either night out, or he’d gone blind, Spence decided, opening his eyes into the rain. He couldn’t place where he was, and he wasn’t sure how he’d gotten here, but he vaguely realized he had to get up.

  His head throbbed to the beat of his heart, and the rest of his body felt as though he’d been thrown and kicked by a mule. With an effort, he rolled to sit, trying to figure out what had happened to him. The last thing he remembered was falling. Holding his chin up with his palm, he reached up to touch the back of his head. When he drew his fingers back, they were wet with something other than rain. He knew that feeling—it was congealed blood.

  “Hey! What’re you doing sitting in the middle of the road, mister? As dark as it is, somebody’s liable to ride right over you.”

  Looking up through his wet, dripping hair, Spence saw the halo of a lantern moving toward him. Then he could make out a tall, gaunt plow horse as gray as the fog itself. A man swung down to take a closer look at him. Behind the lantern, a wide-brimmed hat and an oiled canvas coat materialized.

  “I’d say you’re in a heap of trouble, or you wouldn’t be out here like this,” the fellow said, dropping to his knees beside Spence. Holding the lantern closer, he said softly, “Well, I’ll be damned.”

  “I already am. My head feels big as a pumpkin, and I could swear something kicked it.”

  “You don’t recognize me, do you?”

  “I can barely see,”

  “Name Taylor mean anything to you? Jesse Taylor?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Army of Tennessee,” the man prompted. “It was after the battle at Franklin that you saved my leg.” When Spence didn’t respond, he asked, “You remember Danny Lane, don’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He was my wife’s brother. He was hell and be-damned to bring me in, but I knew if I did, I’d be losing m’ leg for sure. Whether you remember it or not, you cleaned out the hole and set it—it healed up real nice, Doc. I always felt sorry about holding that gun to your head, but I figured if I didn’t, you’d start sawing.”

  “Yeah, I remember. If I hadn’t set it, you were going to hell with it.”

  “That’s right. Looks like somebody bushwhacked you, Doc.”

  “They wanted my horse—that’s all I remember. I was riding home, and they surprised me, then the damned gun jammed.”

  “How long have you been out in this rain?”

  “I don’t know—long enough for it to turn dark.”

  “The bastards took your coat.”

  “It was butternuts.”

  “Hell of a thing to do to somebody that’s served with you, but there’s some like that.”

  “Too many.”

  “Well, I’m not about to leave you here like this. Come on,” Taylor said, catching Spence under his arm. “That’s it—you just come up real easy.” As the light illuminated Spence’s black hair, the man observed, “I’d say you took a real whack on that head of yours. When I get you home, I’m going to have my wife take a look at it. If it’s as bad as I think it is, she’ll have to stitch it up for you.”

  “It’ll be all right.”

  “It’s a good thing you don’t have eyes back there— that’s all I can say. If we were still fighting the war, one of those army docs would be wanting to trepine that for you.”

  “You don’t have much faith in us, do you?”

  “Just you—the rest of ‘em weren’t worth a hill of beans between ‘em.” Steadying Spence, Jesse Taylor held the lamp to his face. “You’ve got a black eye, too. Queasy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You took a hard hit, Doc. But I’m not doing you any good standing out here in the rain.” Casting a sidewise glance at the bony horse, he admitted, “I don’t know if Old Dolly’ll carry both of us, but if she won’t, I’ll be the one to walk.”

  “I’m all right.” But even as he said it, Spence knew he wasn’t. He’d be real lucky if he didn’t have a concussion the way his head hurt.

  “Here,” Taylor said, shrugging out of the canvas coat. “At least I’ve got more than a shirt on under this. You’ll catch your death soaked like that. It may be the middle of May, but this rain’s downright cold.” He thrust Spence’s arms into the sleeves and pulled it closed around him. “You may be wet, but this’ll at least help you get warm.”

  “T
hanks.”

  “They take anything but your coat and horse?”

  “Yeah.”

  “If they got your money, Laurie’s got a little put aside that we can spare. Maybe it’d be enough to get you home.”

  Spence shook his head and wished he hadn’t. “I had my money in my boots—I didn’t want anybody seeing it.”

  “Well, it’d better be hard cash instead of Confederate scrip, that’s all I can say.”

  “Yeah, I know. I’ve got fifty dollars in Union money under my foot.”

  “Whooeee—and I was offering you money,” Taylor said, grinning. “Around here, that’d make you a rich man,”

  “The hell of it is they got my bag, and my wife’s picture. I kept it in a book so I wouldn’t lose it, and it’s gone.”

  “Only hope you’ve got of seeing that again, Doc, is if they trade your clothes for money.”

  “It was in my bag—in my field kit. They stole my field kit. I had the damned thing through the whole war, and now it’s gone, too. There’s no way I can replace it or my wife’s picture.”

  “I’ll ask around tomorrow, but first I’ve got to get you home. Can you mount up by yourself, do you think?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then you take the saddle, and if Dolly’ll hold us, I’ll get up behind you. That way if you get to falling, I’ve got my arms to stop you. But we’d better get going, or Laurie’ll be worried something’s happened to me. You’d think she’d know if I made it home from the war, she can count on me being around, but I guess Danny’s death changed her some——she’s afraid to take anything for granted.”

  “He said she raised him,” Spence remembered.

  “Yeah. If you can get your foot in the stirrup, I can boost you up, Jesse said. “Dolly won’t move until you’re up there.”

  Grasping the saddle horn, Spence pulled his aching body into the saddle. He’d made it without help.

  “Your wife won’t mind having unexpected company?”

  “No. Laurie’s not exactly your ordinary woman, Doc. Little inconveniences don’t bother her. If they did, she wouldn’t have made it with the life she’s had. When her ma died, she was just shy of twelve, and Danny was only five. There was a notion afoot about splitting them up to raise ‘em, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She’d promised her ma she’d look after him, and by God, she did it. She did more than a grown woman would have—cooking, cleaning, sewing, teaching him to read like you would expect, but that was only half of it. She either raised or hunted everything they ate, and she got an egg business going, too. She’s a hard worker, and she knows what she’s doing. I think you’ll like her, Doc.”

  “I look pretty rough right now,” Spence murmured.

  “She won’t care. Danny wrote her about you, and I came home with both legs because of you. That’s enough for her. You might find her a little different from most women, though.”

  “How’s that?”

  “She likes to read—no, it’s more than that—she’s got a passion for it. First Christmas we were married, I wanted to buy her a Sunday dress, but she wanted books instead.”

  “Lydia isn’t much for books of any kind,” Spence conceded.

  “Not too many of ‘em are. I don’t mean to say Laurie lets herself go, or anything like that, Doc. She’s a pretty woman, no matter what she wears.” Realizing he’d been running on about someone Hardin had never seen, Jesse forced himself to change the subject. “Looks like Dolly’ll carry double just fine.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Riding all right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The way you’re wobbling in that saddle, I’d be surprised if that was the truth.”

  “I’m dizzy, that’s all.”

  “If you think you’re going to fall, we’ll stop.”

  “No.”

  “She’s going to ask you about Danny, you know. I’m not asking you to lie, but I’m hoping you won’t tell her anything that’ll upset her. Cholera’s a hard way to go, and I’d just as soon she doesn’t know everything about how he went. You were down in Mississippi with him when it happened, weren’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She’s got a lot worrying her right now, Doc. If nothing goes wrong this time, we’ll be having a baby before Christmas. She had a hard time of it when we lost a stillborn son right before the war. She doesn’t say much about it, but I know she’s scared it’ll happen again.”

  “What went wrong?”

  “Since you’re a doctor, maybe you can tell me. All I know is the doc we had wasn’t fit to be calling himself one. Now, nobody’s ever called me a coward, but honest to God, I couldn’t have stood what she did,”

  “None of us could. If it was up to men to have babies, the species would have died out in the first generation. It’s a lot of pain and hard work.”

  “It was more than that for Laurie, I can tell you,” Taylor declared flatly. “Doc Burton let her suffer until she was about dead herself before he decided to do anything about it. Four days, Doc—that’s how long she had those pains—and he kept telling her it’d come when it was time, when he should’ve known something was wrong. There wasn’t any way that baby could have come out—it was lying almost crosswise, and all those pains couldn’t push it out.”

  “He should have tried to turn it before things got that far.”

  “It wasn’t until she started losing a lot of blood that he did anything, and then the bastard made a botch of that, too. He got it to coming feet first, but by then she was too tired to push, and I was sure I was going to lose her. He said it was dead before it was born, and I reckon that was about the only thing he had the right of. But let me tell you, Doc—that baby was fighting to live for most of those four days. You could see it move, and she could feel it kicking. Hell, you want to know why I don’t have any faith in doctors? I could’ve got it out myself better than he did. He lost my son, and he nearly killed my wife. No, sir, I’m not about to forgive or forget that.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It wasn’t your fault—it was his. When it was over, I wanted to kill him. If Laurie had died, he wouldn’t have got out of my house alive.”

  “I don’t blame you.”

  “And the hell of it was she insisted on paying him, like it was her fault, not his. It was blood money he took, Doc. It wasn’t right.”

  “It’d be pretty hard to charge for something like that,” Spence admitted. “I don’t know that I would, anyway.”

  “Of course you wouldn’t! You’re not like the rest of ‘em, and you know what? If it’d been you there, it wouldn’t have happened. You wouldn’t have let it go on like that.”

  “I don’t know what I would have done under those circumstances. I’d have been pretty green myself. The only births I attended were during medical school, and it didn’t take many of them for me to decide I’d rather be a surgeon. I thought I’d be going out into the world doing something useful, but I don’t know that it worked out that way. Long before the war ended, I realized I was practicing butchery, not medicine.”

  “You’re too hard on yourself, Doc. Danny saw all of you work, and he said you were the best the Army of Tennessee had. He said the other surgeons working with you knew it.”

  “If success were measured like cordwood, I probably was. I maimed with the best of them. If the experience taught me anything, it was that whatever gift I had, I didn’t want it.”

  “You can’t look at it like that. All anybody, even God, has a right to ask of you is that you do. what you can. Instead of looking at those legs and arms stacked up outside the surgery tents, look at how many men went home.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Hungry?” Jesse asked, changing the subject again.

  “Right now, I could eat grass, but I know I’m not alone in that at least.”

  “It’s been pretty bad around here,” Jesse conceded, “but we’ve got beans and cornmeal, so we’re not starving yet.
”

  “I don’t mind beans,”

  “That’s good, because we’ve got a lot of them.”

  Both fell silent then, and the night was broken only by the steady sounds of rain hitting mud and Old Dolly’s hooves pulling out of it. Hunched miserably over the saddle horn, he didn’t even know where he was, only that he was still somewhere north of Charlotte, North Carolina, and at the rate he was going, he could’ve crawled home faster.

  “Where are we?”

  “Almost to Salisbury,” Taylor responded.

  “Where’s that from Charlotte?”

  “About forty—maybe a little more—miles.”

  Spence wished he hadn’t asked. On a good day that’d be another four hours. In this mud, it’d be seven or eight. “How far to Salisbury?” he asked wearily.

  “About a mile. Next road to the right goes to my front yard. If you can hang on about another five minutes, we’ve made it home.”

  “What day is it?”

  “The fourteenth for about four more hours.”

  If he could get a horse anywhere, Spence still had from two to four days of travel ahead of him. And he might as well forget about writing Liddy from Salisbury. The place probably wouldn’t even have a post office.

  “Yeah, there’s a lantern on the porch,” Jesse murmured. “Soon as we get inside, we’ll get those wet clothes off you, and Laura will clean up that head. When that’s done, we’ll eat the beans, and then you can sleep in Danny’s bed.”

  The horse sensed food and broke into a hard trot right up to the door. Jesse dismounted by leaning far enough to catch a tree branch, then easing his body to the ground. “If you can get out of the saddle, you might want to do it real fast. Otherwise, you’ll be getting down in the smokehouse. The old girl puts herself up at night.”

  “Jesse?” A woman peered out the door.

  “Yeah!” he yelled. “We’ve got company—I found Doc Hardin on the road. You’d better get out the turpentine and a good needle, because he’s needing his head sewed up!”

  She came outside at that. “What happened?”

  “Butternuts waylaid him for his horse. He’ll need dry clothes, too.”