“You don’t have to stay here,” Dr. Stephens said to Liberty. “And I frankly recommend you don’t. But if you’re not going to leave, I would be much obliged if you would bring this man some water.”
Liberty backed out of the room, her wobbly knees threatening to betray her.
Amelia grabbed her by the elbow in the hallway. “You can’t.”
She licked her lips. “I can’t what?”
“You were about to bring them water, weren’t you? Don’t you care this is the enemy? It was a Yankee gun that shot this Rebel. You want to waste our ammunition? If you help this man live, he will go right back and try to kill our own men. You can’t help, Liberty. You will only make things worse.”
Memory ripped open inside her. You can’t help, Liberty. It was Aunt Helen’s voice. You can’t do anything right. Don’t try to help, you will just make things worse. Every time Libbie tried to learn something new, this was the mantra driven into her head. This was why Bella had to teach her the most basic things about keeping house. Liberty’s lips thinned as her mind spun back to the day she heard that Levi was injured. Weren’t these the same words that had held her back from going to him? You can’t help. Don’t even try. You will only make things worse. The forked tongue of deception had flickered in her ear, and she had believed the lie long enough to cause unending regret.
Liberty found her voice. “I can help. I’m going to help. This man is no longer a threat to the Union army, but he is still someone’s son, brother, or husband.”
Amelia’s eyes shimmered. “And what about your husband, Liberty? Putting away your mourning clothes is one thing, but deliberately helping the army that put him in the ground? Have you lost your mind, child?”
Libbie swayed with the force of Amelia’s anger.
Then she tasted her own. She was not a child. Even when she was young, she had had no childhood, and her prime courting years were spent in mourning.
“Aren’t you known around here for your patriotism, your sacrifice? You told me they call you the Widow of Gettysburg. How would it look for you to turn your back on everything the Union stands for?”
“I take a different view of it.” She moved to sidestep her, but Amelia blocked her path.
“Your name is Liberty. Liberty. Will you make a mockery of your very name by aiding the enemy of freedom itself? Whether you like it or not, young lady, you are at a crossroads. You must decide, today—this moment—who you are. And then act like it.”
The words buffeted Libbie’s ears. Decide who I am? It seemed too large a question to ask over the simple request for some water. But she did know who she did not want to be. A woman of guilt and regret. A woman who hid behind the lie she could not possibly do any good. Those were skins that itched and chafed, the scales she wanted to shed, as she had shed her Widow’s Weeds.
“I am going to help. There is little I can do, but I will do it.”
“They will ruin your house.”
“I am going to help.”
“They will take everything from you, Liberty. Your past, your present, your future.”
The sound of tearing fabric split the air between them as men tore her linens to shreds. They are only sheets.
“Where is the water?” the doctor growled from inside the room.
Amelia remained planted in the hallway, but Libbie pushed past her, grabbed two pails from the kitchen and ran out to the well. The breath of the battle blew in her face, choked her, as she pumped. With each splash of water into the pail, she told herself she was doing the right thing.
The pails full, she carefully carried them in through the back door, grabbed a couple of old tin dippers from the kitchen, and walked to the great hall.
She gasped. While she had been pumping the water, men had brought in hay from the barn and spread it all over the floors, every inch, until it looked like her furniture had been brought out to the barn. Several more men had been carried in from the ambulances lining up outside the house, and their groaning mingled with the distant roar of battle. Blood darkened the straw beneath broken and shattered—and missing—limbs.
“God! God! Oh God!” one cried as he clawed for a leg that was not there.
Liberty could avert her gaze but with sloshing pails in her hands, she could not stop up her ears as she navigated a path through the men back to Amelia’s room. One man called out for his mother. Another cursed her up and down when she nearly stepped on him, dribbling some precious water down the side of her bucket. One of them—whistled?
Slowly, she turned, and found Major, completely unbothered by the grotesque chorus, licking a soldier’s face and nuzzling against his chest for affection—though whether it was to receive or bestow it, Liberty could not tell. She watched in awe as the former regimental canine did his work, blind to the color of the uniforms. He gently nudged their faces, offered a paw in handshake, and even laid his huge, black, one-eyed head on a drummer boy’s chest while the boy clutched his fur and wept into his neck.
A tug on her skirt. She looked down. “Water?” he said.
She set down her pails, fished a dipper out of her apron pocket and poured some water into his mouth. He choked and sputtered. “Here,” she said, and lifted his head onto her lap. “Let’s try again.” This time, a few tablespoonfuls made it into his parched throat. He looked up at her and smiled, a beautiful smile. “Be my girl?”
“What?” Nervous laughter escaped her.
“Oh come on.” He lifted a blood-gloved hand from his arm. “Old saw-bones will take it off soon, and I’ve seen too many fellers give up their limbs only to lose their lives soon after. Always wanted a sweetheart to know I would be missed once I left this earth. Just never got around to it. Won’t you say you’ll be mine?”
“I—I’m a Yankee, you understand.”
“Don’t you worry about that. I won’t hold it against you, if you won’t hold it against me that I’m messing up your house like this. Just be my girl.”
Ridiculous request. A dying wish.
“Just pretend, just let me pretend, somebody’s going to care when I die. Such a pretty lie. I don’t believe it would be a sin if you and I both know it ain’t true, would it? If we just agree upon it?”
Liberty’s heart buckled. “I’ll be your girl.” She forced a smile through her tears.
“Nice to meet you. My name is Isaac. I never dreamed I’d have such a pretty girl as you, Miss …”
“Liberty.” She smiled again. “My name is Liberty.”
“Well if that don’t just beat all.” His eyes closed. “The very thing we’re fighting for. ‘Give me Liberty or give me death’ …” He faded, and Liberty stood.
“Nurse!” someone called. She spun on her heel to find the owner of the voice. “Water! Nurse!” Is that what I am now? Her rebellious stomach rejected the idea as she crushed the straw beneath her feet. But it did not matter what they called her. She would give them water.
When she finally arrived in Amelia’s room, Dr. Stephens instructed her to put the pails down and go fetch more. “You see only dozens of men now. There will be hundreds. Maybe more. Each will have a wound needing to be washed and dressed. And each will need to drink. Every bowl, every pail, every pan you have—fill it. It will not be too much. Go, nurse!”
“I’m not a nurse. My name is—”
“Not important. What matters is what you do. Now go! Nurse!” It was a verb, not a noun. Right now, who she was did not matter. Her actions did. This time, she would make them count.
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
July 1, 1863
I know a shortcut.”
Hettie Shriver led her daughters, Tillie, and Bella down Baltimore Street, while cannons boomed incessantly, until veering off the road to cut into Evergreen Cemetery. A placard at the entrance read, “All persons are prohibited from destroying any flower or shrubs within these grounds.” Inside, Union soldiers planted their cannon, and removed marble headstones from the graves, laying them flat on the lush green gra
ss.
“Hurry along.” An officer wiped the sweat from his brow. “You are in great danger of being shot. The Rebels will fire their shells at us here any moment.”
The women needed no other persuasion. Hettie lifted Sadie, Bella carried Mollie, and along with Tillie they fairly ran off the hill. A glance back toward the seminary showed the confusion of the battle. Troops double-timed into their positions, shells bursting in the air above them to form a great battle cloud over the ridge. Invisible waves of undulating air swept over Bella before each artillery blast could be heard.
This was no place for little girls. It was no place for women at all.
Once on Taneytown Road, they slacked their pace, put the girls down to walk on their own again, and caught their breath. Bella read in Hettie’s face the fierce mother love that would stop at nothing to protect her daughters, and knew it was the same love that had sent Tillie Pierce away from her mother, to safety. It was love that drove Moses’s mother to put him in a basket and send him down the Nile River.
Love like that was easy for Bella to understand. Away from danger, whatever the cost. Even if it meant not being his mother anymore. Yes, Bella knew. She knew the pain of separation, like a chamber of her heart being ripped away. Bella clutched at her chest, felt the erratic beating against her hand. She could live with a heart that was less than whole. She could not live with herself if she hadn’t done everything in her power to ensure her daughter would be safe from the kind of life Bella had known. Where is she now? Is she safe?
An ambulance wagon overtook them then. Hettie called out, “What news?”
“Hard fighting,” said the soldier. “General Reynolds shot through the head already this forenoon. He lies in back, we must see his body to safety. I would offer you a ride, but with a corpse in the back … it would not be pleasant for you or the children.” The wagon continued to roll by.
“Where was the general killed?” Bella called out after them.
“In a field west of Seminary Ridge. We must go.”
Liberty. The Holloway Farm was west of Seminary Ridge. The fighting could have been a mile or two distant from her, or it could have been within sight of her front porch. And she was alone. Bella’s heart flipped.
“Bella.” Hettie, several paces ahead of her on the road by now, looked over her shoulder at her. “Why ever are you just standing there? This is no time for dawdling.”
Mud sucked at Bella’s shoes, holding her there on the road as she turned her head toward the boom of cannons and rattle of musketry. The smoke over Seminary Ridge glowed orange with fire. Finally, “I must go.”
“Yes! So make haste!”
“Not with you.”
“What?” Hettie retraced her steps in the mud until she stood, chest heaving, right in front of Bella. “Where will you go?”
“Miss Holloway is alone. Over there, in that mess.” She pointed west.
Hettie huffed. “I admire your loyalty to your employer, but may I remind you, I am your employer too, and today, Wednesday, is your day to serve me. And I am ordering you to come with us. I need your help—and besides, getting yourself killed will not help Liberty Holloway.”
The words hung in the air between them. Bella looked once more at the ridge. How was she planning on getting through the lines of battle?
“Bella, didn’t you see what happened to those colored people this morning? Even if you aren’t killed outright, you could be captured by the Confederates.”
Bella closed her eyes as dread settled on her like dust on a film of sweat. Hettie was right. And with what her husband had done, or was accused of doing, down South … she shuddered. The cannons now sounded like a continuous roll of thunder. She could not go there.
Once again, choice proved to be an illusion. She had no choices. Only escape routes.
“Mommy?” Sadie called out. “Are you coming?”
“Yes.”
No. Tears pricked Bella’s eyes. LORD, she prayed, please keep my daughter safe.
Back and arms aching, Libbie placed her hand on the iron pump handle, numb by now to the pressure on her blisters. Even if she had felt pain, she would have bit her tongue before complaining. There were men dying inside her house, making straw beneath them sticky with blood, and they did not make any sound.
And there were men who did. She could hear their screams and shrieks from outside the house, a mix of horror and pain. These were the screams that slowed Libbie down, the ones that made her stop and cover her ears.
They were getting louder.
THUD. She barely heard it. Twisting around, she scanned the house and ground, saw nothing. At least nothing that would have thumped. The ground was becoming littered with injured soldiers.
Ambulances continued to deliver their patients until they overflowed the first floor, and spilled onto the second floor, as well. Miraculously, they allowed Liberty’s room to remain untouched. Amelia had retreated behind that door shortly after their argument, and there she had stayed ever since. Now, men covered the muddy dooryard, with nothing between them and the earth. Some were shielded from the glaring sun by the shade of hickory trees. Others were not so fortunate, and lay sweltering in the heat.
Squinting against the sunshine, Liberty began ferrying water to them until she heard a thud once more. This time, she saw it, too.
Her buckets fell from her hands and tipped over in the grass, soaking her feet with cool water.
Against the side of the house, where her purple phlox had stood tall just this morning, was a leg, severed from its owner. And an arm. THUD. Another leg. THUD. A foot. A hand. Her stomach revolting, Libbie looked up in time to see crimson-streaked arms dropping another load of limbs out the window.
She doubled over and wretched.
Her heart hammered on her ribs as she sank to the ground. “I can’t do this! I cannot!” Her gasped confession was drowned out by the men inside who were coming apart at their seams. She buried her face in her hands and repeated a single word in her mind: God! It was prayer, plea, accusation.
“You done cryin’ yet?” A soldier with a flattened arm propped against the side of the house grunted. “I reckon we feel the same way as you, to be honest. I keep praying I’ll just pass out from the pain, but I reckon I’m a mite stronger than I’d like to be.” His attempt at a smile pierced her heart, and shame almost swallowed her whole. These men were in excruciating pain, and fully aware of the fate about to unfold for them. The screams, the sound of saw on bone, the limbs thrown out the window, all of this was simply a preview of what came next for them.
She had no reason to complain, unless it was on behalf of these men.
But they are the enemy. The fact needled her, even though she had been so sure when she was arguing with Amelia rather than with her own heart. She scooped the remaining water from the bucket and drank it from her hand. Levi, what would you say if you were here? Should it matter what he would say? She was no longer his wife. Did she need permission from her past to do something in the present?
Elizabeth Thorn’s words came back to her then, the suggestion to talk to God every time she talked to a dead man. All right, Lord. What would You say? He answered with Scriptures she had learned as a child.
Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven.
Amelia wouldn’t like it. But her heavenly Father would.
Rising, she shook her soiled skirts, apologized to the soldier for her outburst, and ventured back into her house.
Scraping together all the courage she had, she stopped another blood-smeared doctor in the hall. “I need to talk to you.”
“There are one thousand patients here, and counting, and only two surgeons to wait upon them. Do you suppose I have time to chat?”
“It’s about your patients. The ones waiting to be—” She looked at his apron, his arms, his hands, all freckled wit
h blood. Butchered. “Operated upon. The pile of limbs outside the window—it’s in plain sight of all these poor men. Isn’t there anything we can do about that?”
“Move them.”
“Yes, that would be fine, move the limbs somewhere else.”
“No, I meant you move them. If it concerns you so much.”
Libbie sputtered. She could never do that, not after what happened to Levi. Acid juices from her stomach climbed into her mouth again.
“Or would you rather perform the amputations? One of us has to, you know. I find no pleasure in it either, but it must be done. The minié ball cannot be removed from the body like a round musket ball could. It shatters the bone, tears the tissue, utterly destroys whatever is in its path. If we don’t remove the affected section, infection will certainly kill the patient over time—and painfully, too. So move the limbs, or don’t, but do something useful, I beg of you.”
“What else can I do?” Nothing could be as offensive as touching that pile of deadened flesh.
“Feed them. Many of these men suffered through a forced march of more than twenty miles before they even arrived, sleepless, at the battle. Or bind the wounds. Have you ever bandaged before?”
She had torn yards of fabric into bandages. Rolled the strips into neat coils, two inches wide, one inch wide, and sent them on their way with the rest of the supplies from the Ladies Union Relief Society. But the unrolling and wrapping around an arm or leg to staunch the flow of blood—that was someone else’s job. A nurse’s job.
In her hesitation, men clamored for the doctor’s attention, and she could tell he was growing impatient. “I’ll show you, if you walk with me.”
In the next thirty minutes, as he cared for the patients, she absorbed three ways to wrap a bandage and how to pack lint into a wound and keep it moist. Thirty minutes. Charlotte Waverly, the Sanitary Commission worker who had nursed Levi, had told her she’d trained for a full month at a hospital in New York City before nursing any of her own patients.
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