The Yankee Widow

by Linda Lael Miller

  For the last several months, Rogan had served as a regimental quartermaster, though the post was meant to be temporary. He’d been assigned the duty after the previous job holder had fallen at Antietam the previous September, mainly because he had a strong organizational ability and an aversion to the pilfering of rations.

  It was a relatively safe occupation, his unlucky predecessor’s fate notwithstanding, but Rogan disliked jockeying bags of beans, crates of hardtack, barrels of flour and such, like some transient storekeeper. He knew the task filled a vital purpose but, at heart, he was a soldier, and he longed to return to cavalry duty.

  Growing up in an orphanage in New York City, he’d never ridden a horse, though he’d seen plenty of nags pulling carriages, street cars and peddler’s carts, pitiful plodders, the lot of them, tormented by flies, their ribs jutting under their quivering hides, their heads lowered. He’d wanted to set them all free, turn them loose to graze in some peaceful pasture, far from the noise and the whip and the long days spent pulling, pulling.

  It was later, at St. Luke’s, when he was fourteen, that Rogan finally learned to ride, as part of his academic program. His sympathy for the poor beasts he’d seen hauling their heavy loads along city streets grew into a quiet passion for horses, and this affinity rapidly blossomed into skill.

  When the war began, he’d left his two-man law practice in New York City and enlisted in the United States Army as a second lieutenant, cavalry, and thereafter advanced steadily to his present rank of captain. He had fought with all his might, somehow living through every skirmish and battle, though he’d lost several horses, and mourned them still, at times even wishing he’d died in their stead.

  Rogan took no pleasure in bloodshed, in the severing of limbs, the shattering of skulls and spines and kneecaps. He did not love war, with its incipient horrors.

  He did, however, enjoy the outdoor life. And inactivity didn’t suit him. If he wasn’t thinking, he was doing. Of course he abhorred the inevitable killing and maiming of battle, but there were parts of military service that appealed to him—secretly, he reveled in the challenges of close combat, when everything was at stake. Liked the way his mind seemed to rise above itself at those times, entering a state of concentration so keen that it was as if his brain took over the whole of his body in an instant, overriding conscious thought and guiding every motion, every maneuver of horse and rifle and sword arm.

  Tonight, however, his thoughts weren’t solely on the approaching melee, or the strange, deadly grace he’d experienced on other battlefields—and nowhere else.

  Instead he was oddly preoccupied with the young widow whose farm he’d left a few hours before.

  Mrs. Hammond. Caroline.

  When he’d first met her in Washington City, a short while back, he’d noticed that she was unusually striking, with sandy hair and hazel eyes, but these details had slipped his mind soon enough, for she’d been worried and anxious at the time, desperate to find and console her wounded husband. He was one among thousands of sick and injured soldiers billeted all over the capital. They lay suffering in army tents, on the pews and floors of churches and in private homes, as well, and though some placement records were kept, they were haphazard at best. There were simply too many casualties pouring into the city, day and night, to allow for total accuracy.

  Many of these unfortunates had to be shuffled from one place to another, as cots and floor space became available, usually courtesy of the recently expired. Those with lesser wounds or milder illnesses were either patched up and sent back to their regiments or handed a blanket and directed to a vacant lot or someone’s lawn, with hasty assurances that they would be attended to “presently.”

  All of which obviously meant that Corporal Hammond might have been just about anywhere. Hammond’s lovely wife had remained determined, despite the odds she faced. He had examined records, asked exhaustive questions of clerk after harried clerk, and finally tracked Corporal Jacob Hammond, 11th Pennsylvania, to a certain cot in a certain hospital tent.

  Subsequently, he’d led Mrs. Hammond to her husband’s bedside. She’d offered distracted thanks, and Rogan had left her there and gone back to counting bullets and beans.

  She’d lingered in his thoughts for a long time afterward. And that was a peculiar thing; he’d seen so many wives and mothers, sisters and sweethearts come and go, in the capital and on far-flung battlefields, where conditions were even worse. He’d been of whatever assistance he could, yet he couldn’t recall a single one of their names or faces.

  Then, this very evening, in the course of his duties, he’d encountered her again.

  A strange coincidence—one he might follow up on, should he successfully guide his men to victory in the fighting to come.

  He sighed. Tomorrow or the next day, or perhaps the day after that, there would be more men killed or crippled, more coffins built and stacked and, eventually, shipped home.

  Fools, Rogan reflected, as he swung down from the saddle and set about attending to his current mount, a sorrel gelding he had come to love, even though the animal, dubbed Little Willie somewhere along the way, belonged to the US Army, not to him. We’re all fools, the lot of us, Yanks and Rebs alike.

  Thoughts of Rebels inevitably led to thoughts of his best friend from military school, Bridger Winslow, the one man he truly trusted, other than Father Hennessey.

  He wondered, as he always did on the eve of battle, if he and Bridger would finally meet again, this time on horseback, in the thick of the fighting, swords drawn.

  Much as he’d like to see Bridger, he prayed it wouldn’t happen before this damnable war ended, or at least moved to neutral ground, if there was such a thing. He had no intention of raising his hand against a friend, and he was all but certain Bridger would feel the same way.

  Still he was troubled by the possibility, not because he was afraid of Winslow, but because, in all that chaos and confusion, even a moment’s hesitation on his part could easily cost other men their lives.

  After settling his horse for the night, Rogan joined his men at the campfire nearby. Coffee was brewing, and someone had set a kettle of leftover beans in the embers to warm up.

  Army food, Rogan thought, with wry disparagement. A man had to be hungry as a bear just out of hibernation to eat it.

  If he managed to get through the fighting tomorrow, let alone the rest of the war, he vowed he’d never eat another boiled bean or bite into another piece of hardtack. No, sir. He’d live on fried chicken and juicy beefsteaks to the end of his days.

  In the meantime, though, his choices were definitely limited, and it had been a long time since breakfast.

  Seated away from the fire, lest they roast themselves before the beans were ready, the other men talked in hushed voices and looked over their shoulders at regular intervals, as if they thought Johnny Reb might take a notion to creep out of the evening darkness to cut their throats or skewer them on a bayonet.

  Rogan’s companions greeted him with nods as he joined them. One or two murmured “Cap’n” in deference to his rank.

  The youngest among them, a lad named Hastings, had drawn supper duty, hastening forward to stir the beans with a wooden spoon at intervals, and backing off quickly. Hastings claimed he was nineteen years old, but Rogan gauged him closer to sixteen, probably a generous estimate.

  Alderman, a butcher from New Jersey, cooked when there was meat, which wasn’t all that often. Tonight, the older man bent over a letter he’d received months before, reading it for what must have been the hundredth time.

  As far as Rogan knew, no one had ever asked Alderman about the letter, who it was from or what it said, or why Alderman read it over and over, until it was practically transparent, almost luminous in the glow of the firelight. Oh, they wondered over all the whys and wherefores, all right, but each and every one of them held his peace. A man’s mail was his own business, his to share
or keep to himself, as he wanted.

  Another fellow, Josiah Pickering, who hailed from the state of Maine and spoke with the corresponding New England accent, brought out his mouth harp and blew a tune so slow and somber that it sounded like a lament.

  And it probably was.

  Pickering, a lobsterman by trade, with a wife and a passel of children, was stalwart in the light of day, but he tended toward homesickness when dusk fell and supper rations were doled out. Unlike Alderman, Pickering got plenty of letters; when the mail caught up with the intended recipients—always an uncertain process—his portion was always generous.

  By now, the fisherman had so many thick envelopes from home, faithfully penned by his clearly devoted wife and children, that he had to store them under the seat of the supply wagon he drove, or he’d have had no room in his rucksack for his kit. As most soldiers did, he saved every last letter, and he’d once told Rogan that he liked to grab them up in bunches because it felt like holding home itself in his hands.

  Rogan rarely received mail—an occasional missive from Father Hennessey and, now and then, from some loyal female supporter of the Union. Usually, the women were strangers to him, having secured his name through the offices of some ladies’ service organization; they used good stationery and undiluted ink, and the paper was always perfumed.

  Finally, there was his law partner, Mr. J. T. Archer, who was diligently keeping the doors of their practice open in Rogan’s absence, or so he claimed. He wrote accounts of cases won and lost, described clients, agreeable and otherwise, with a slight emphasis on the latter, and kept Rogan up-to-date on the latest public and private scandals, especially those involving judges he disliked.

  Rogan read the letters without much interest. Although he had worked with the man for nearly three years, he’d soured on him when Archer put up three hundred dollars in gold to avoid conscription.

  Rogan might have been able to overlook even that, much as it galled him, if Archer hadn’t made offhand remarks such as, “Let the micks and all those other babbling foreigners go marching off to war. It’ll get them off the streets into the bargain.”

  Remembering, too late, that Rogan was himself a “mick,” albeit an educated one, Pettigrew had reddened slightly, but he hadn’t retracted the observation.

  Rogan had refrained from breaking the smug bastard’s nose, though just barely.

  He’d suspected the letters were Pettigrew’s way of making sure Rogan came back to the law practice at war’s end.

  Rogan had worked hard to earn his degree, and harder still to establish himself as a respectable man of law, but army life had changed him in ways that went far beyond the obvious tribulations of watching other soldiers die. Of nearly meeting his own demise more times than it might be prudent to reckon up.

  It wasn’t that he enjoyed sleeping on the ground, not under these circumstances, anyway, sweltering in summer and half freezing to death in winter, or wearing the same uniform for weeks, even months, at a time. He was fed up with lice and flies and the disgusting stink of open trenches roiling with the shit and piss of whole regiments, and he doubted he’d ever sleep through a single night for the rest of whatever life remained to him, without waking up at least once.

  Rogan reined in his thoughts, accepting a mug of the sludge the army presented as coffee from Pickering, who sat at a manly distance, watching him with an expression of mild concern.

  “Something particular on your mind tonight, sir?” Pickering asked.

  Rogan liked Pickering, and he wasn’t about to burden the man with disturbing analogies or, for that matter, fatuously confide his fears and worries about the future. He wasn’t sure he wanted to return to his previous lawyerly profession and all that went with it—spending his days shut up in cluttered offices and stuffy courtrooms, pandering to people he could barely tolerate. Like Archer.

  Instead, he hedged, a skill that had served him well since childhood, when he’d often had to talk his way out of trouble. “Do you ever wish you’d lived a different life, Pickering?” he asked.

  Pickering smiled wearily, shrugged one beefy shoulder. “You know what they say about wishin’, Cap’n,” he said. “‘Wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which hand gets full faster’?”

  Rogan gave a raw chortle and shook his head. “What I meant was—”

  The words fell away. What had he meant?

  “I wouldn’t be a soldier if I could choose again,” Pickering said thoughtfully, and his smile was gone, replaced by a wistful expression, fraught with yearning. “But that’s all I’d be willing to change. I work hard, and it seems as if that old boat of mine needs patching up every time I turn around. But running my line, hauling in my traps, emptying the catch and then setting them again, well, that’s a fine way to make a living. Come nightfall, the lamps are lit, shining so bright in the windows of our little house that I can make them out from clear down at the harbor. My Sarah is there waiting for me when I come through the door, smiling sweetly as any angel in heaven, and our youngsters press in on me from every side, all of them talking at once.” Pickering paused then, drew in a long breath and released it. “The whole place smells of supper.”

  Rogan listened, taking in the lobsterman’s words, letting them weave pictures in his mind. He saw it all there, and it made him ache for Pickering, for the loved ones awaiting his safe return and, briefly, for himself, too.

  “I don’t reckon I’d want to change anything either, if I were you,” he finally said.

  After that, there was little conversation. Just thoughts about the battle that awaited them. Rogan ate along with the other men, then left to check his horse once more before washing up as best he could and dropping, fully clothed, onto his bedroll.

  Hours crawled by before Rogan slept, his mind full of the impending battle. To distract himself, he focused on the widow Hammond, hiding all those supply wagons on her modest farm, alone except for the hired man and an old woman. If things went wrong, and the Rebs took the victory, if he fell to bullet or blade, what would become of her and the others?

  * * *

  The images—of Pickering’s contented home, of Caroline Hammond on her farm—followed him into his dreams. For a little while, there was no war, no battle looming just the other side of sunrise.

  Then the nightmares came, as they always did, like swarming things with tentacles and claws, and Rogan jolted bolt upright on his bedroll, soaked in sweat, fighting for breath.

  Pickering and the others snored in their beds of grass and stone, undisturbed.

  Rogan got up, his breathing still ragged, and spent a quarter of an hour walking off the effects of the nightmare. When he’d calmed himself sufficiently, he sat down on his rumpled bedroll and gazed up at the vast sky, spangled with stars, waiting for morning.

  9

  Hammond Farm

  July 1, 1863

  Caroline

  It was around four o’clock in the afternoon when the first deafening boom shook the ground beneath her feet and caused the very air to shudder around her. She’d heard from Enoch, who’d spoken to George McPhee, a nearby farmer, that the fighting was on Seminary Ridge, north and west of town, and that the Union army was gathering in force. Another volley followed, then another.

  Caroline, weeding the vegetable patch, straightened her back and looked around, half expecting to see the earth split wide open at her feet.

  There had been intermittent gunfire throughout the day, the crack of rifle shots, the low thunder of muskets, muffled by distance and the weight of the summer’s heat, but this, she knew instinctively, was no random skirmish, as the others must have been.

  No, this was heavy artillery. Even Rachel, who had been playing nearby, chasing a ball between rows of carrots and parsnips, seemed to sense the far greater import of this onslaught of noise, for she shrieked and covered her ears.

  Enoch s
uddenly came racing over, bursting from the cornfield at a dead run, skin glistening with sweat, eyes round with fright, shouting, “Get in the house! All of you, get inside, now!” Still some distance away, Enoch hollered more frantic instructions, but Caroline couldn’t make them out, because just then another eruption of cannon fire broke the reverberating silence of the initial blasts, drowning out his words.

  Caroline stood motionless, as if frozen, unable to move, when Rachel suddenly started to scream.

  Go to her, Caroline commanded herself. Go to your child!

  Jubie shot to the side door from the bedroom of the house where she was now staying, to see where everyone was.

  Geneva, who’d been seated in the shade of the giant oak tree, leaped to her feet in alarm, dropped her mending on the grass, and headed toward the house.

  Caroline finally recovered enough to scramble toward Rachel, and when she reached her child, took her hand and together they ran inside.

  Rachel trembled as she clung to Caroline.

  “Hush, now,” Caroline whispered. “Mama’s here. You’re all right, sweetheart. I promise, you’re all right.”

  As the cannon blazed only a few miles away, Caroline prayed silently for her little girl’s protection. She felt every blast jolt up from the ground, rising through her knees and thighs to her torso, causing her heart to quake within her.

  Then the cannons had gone blessedly silent, but the pulse of their blasts could still be felt, a vast, silent echo of deadly power.

  The three women and Rachel stood still in the parlor as more volleys rolled across the fields to assail their hearing. Each new explosion became part of the those that had come before, until it seemed to Caroline that every thunderstorm in the history of the earth had ventured forth from its own time to coalesce in Adams County, Pennsylvania.

  Then came another lull.

  Enoch had finally reached the yard, and he waited in the doorway, chest heaving, fighting for enough breath to speak.