A Heartbeat Away: Quilts of Love Series

by S. Dionne Moore

  He rested, heart slamming with the exertion and fear. More dust lifted to obscure his vision and choke him as the cannonading became a constant roar. The men writhed on the floor, calling for someone to care for them. For help he could not give. With shaking hand, he lifted the flap of the haversack. He’d been writing a letter, he remembered, to . . . A hot hand squeezed him and his head throbbed. He lay back and wept, disgusted with his weakness, his inability to move, the uselessness of his right arm, and the dark, cold fear.

  He felt the presence of her before he felt her touch and heard her voice. The constant noise of the battle had waned. Dust still filled the air, making Beth seem a hazy presence. But he welcomed it.

  “How are you doing?”

  He blinked at the brightness of the lamp she carried.

  “Sorry.”

  The light receded a bit, and he turned to face her. She sat there as if every drop of energy had drained from her body and puddled on the floor and she had no way to claim it again. Yet she was here. She had stayed to help. He wanted to help. To ease the burden hunching her shoulders.

  “Beth?”

  She raised her eyes to his, her gaze clinging, tears pooled on her lower lashes. Another shell rocked the house and she was up, running toward the steps before he could say anything. His nerves were drawn tight by the whimpers from the men around him. He was shattering and he knew it. Struggling up onto his elbow, his right arm almost numb, his shoulder protesting the movement, he sat on the edge of the bed again, willing strength into his legs and body. He smashed his fist into the mattress and eased himself to his bare feet, the cold earthen floor barely registering. His world spun. He reached out to the wall, his legs shaking with the effort. He needed to check on the others. See if he knew them. They were on his side. And the old man, too, needed someone.

  Joe’s legs quaked. He fought for equilibrium before he slid to his knees. A gasp slipped out at the impact. Pain pushed blackness into his vision and his consciousness shrank to a pinprick.

  12

  Gerta protested all the way down the cellar steps. “It’s nothing more than a scratch.”

  “You’re bleeding,” Beth said, countering the woman’s persistence, thankful that the shelling had stopped, allowing them respite.

  “And I feel fine.”

  “You’re exhausted.”

  “Everyone is.”

  “Then use this time to rest. The surgeon seems to have everything well in hand.”

  Gerta snorted, the most unladylike response Beth had ever heard from her grandmother. “I’ll rest, but there will be more. It’s not over.”

  There was nothing more to say. Her grandmother would die trying rather than curl up in a corner. And Beth had good reason to fear. Gerta’s color wasn’t good, her breathing seemed more labored than usual.

  “Where’s Emma?” Gerta asked.

  “She’s down here.” Another worry. The black woman seemed on the verge of hysteria. “I sent Jim down to be with her.”

  “Good, I didn’t like the way that fancy captain was eyeing them.”

  Beth helped her grandmother down that last step, and Gerta rushed forward and knelt at the side of one of the new arrivals who had yet to be given attention. Beth pushed back a sigh. No matter how much she harped or expressed concern, her grandmother’s heart was set on helping. She turned her head and saw Jim in the corner, lifting a limp form in his arms.

  Joe.

  “Found him like this,” Jim murmured as she came to the big man’s side. “Came to get the lantern, and there he was.”

  Beth heard something else in Jim’s voice. “Emma?” she whispered.

  “Told her to go to Killiansburg Cave. There’s a steady stream of people on the road, running for all they worth.” He turned his face away. “She took Mr. Nisewander.”

  “He didn’t put up a fight?”

  “No fight left in him. He could hardly talk. Like his mind had left him. Emma led him away like a sheep.”

  “You should have gone, too.”

  He nodded. “Should have. Probably wish I had before too long, but I couldn’t leave seein’ as Miz Gerta needs me.”

  Beth checked the bandage on Joe’s shoulder, grateful to see it remained clean. She turned, digging in the deep pocket of her apron for another roll of bandages and knelt beside Gerta, biting back a weary sigh.

  “Water?” Jim spoke the single word as a question.

  “And the surgeon,” Gerta responded. “Be my best guess he’ll want to take this leg off.”

  Beth turned her face away at the mangled mess of the limb. She’d seen so much more in the last few days than she’d ever experienced before. Gerta moved on to the man next to him. She put out a hand to help her descent and slipped in a dark puddle. Her hand came up bloody, and she rubbed it down her blood-stained apron. Beth’s eyes went over the man, trying to assess the wound, seeing nothing wrong with the man’s torso, or his arms or face. She looked at her grandmother, Gerta’s steady gaze meeting hers.

  “He’s gone.”

  “But . . . ?”

  Gerta rose, the lower part of her skirt soaked with blood, and it came to Beth in slow degrees what her grandmother didn’t bother to explain. The blood said it all. He’d been shot in the back, perhaps in his head.

  Jim came down the steps and placed a pail of water on the floor inside the opening to the cellar, then retraced his steps.

  Beth sucked air into her lungs, having no choice but to move on to the next man to keep up with her grandmother. The man moaned low in his throat and writhed from side to side, the hole in his abdomen saying more than words. Gerta shook her head. He would not last long.

  They went over to the last two men, neither conscious, the earth below them drinking in their life’s blood. Gerta straightened. “They must have brought the worst ones down here.”

  Beth retreated to the corner beside Joe’s cot. She pressed her back to the wall, the coolness seeping through her thin dress, welcome but chilling. Of the five men in front of her, one was dead and the other four were dying, unconscious except for the ever-diminishing moans of the gut-shot man as he bled out onto the floor.

  Exhaustion weighted her head and she cradled it on her arms, blanking her mind. Within minutes she’d drifted but was jerked back to reality by the hard vibration of shelling. Gerta sat in the chair, arms folded against the cot. She had heard the last shell, too. Another one came, this one farther away.

  “Oh, God, have mercy.” Gerta said, her voice soft. She made as if to stand and a new anxiey drummed fear into Beth’s veins.

  “Grandmother, please rest. They can handle things for a while.”

  If not persuaded by Beth’s words, Gerta’s hand to her head must have been the convincing factor. Without asking, Beth withdrew a bandage she’d never used from her apron and wiped the blood congealed on Gerta’s temple with one corner. Already it had caked in her grandmother’s hair. She crossed and dipped her apron into the water, wrung it, and returned to dab at the blood. With deft fingers she put a strip around Gerta’s head, then another. Her grandmother’s fingers rose to still her actions.

  “Save the rest for another.”

  Supplies were low. Even the surgeon’s assistant had admitted it.

  Beth ripped the linen, pulled back her grandmother’s mussed gray hair, and tied it with the cloth strip to keep the bandage in place.

  “Beth.”

  She turned toward the rasping whisper. Joe’s dull gaze was on her and her hand went to his forehead. “I’m here.” She saved the most obvious question.

  Joe’s hand rose, fingers splayed. An invitation.

  She tucked her hand into his, reassured by the warmth and bond they’d forged. Gerta had been correct. It didn’t matter that he was a Confederate. It only mattered that he was here, now, and needed her help.

  “I want to walk.”

  Gunfire sounded, close, glass shattered, streams of dirt and dust snaked down the walls. She eyed the support beam, praying
it would hold. Joe was shoving his way upright. She could see the weakness; the uselessness of his right arm was more than apparent as she shouldered under it to aid his rising. He wobbled, shifted his weight onto her to the point that she felt her legs protest. And then he jerked downward again, hitting the mattress harder than he’d meant to. His moan added to the misery of the dust. Jim appeared alongside.

  “He wants to walk. Then I’ll do the lifting.”

  The big black man stood next to Joe, his weight twofold that of the underfed soldier. They walked a few steps before Joe gasped to be let down again. It was Gerta who handed the man a carrot and a jar of preserves, and bid him to eat.

  “You’ll mend. Your body needs nourishing.”

  “Why did you get up on your own? You knew you were weak.” Beth frowned at him.

  “The old man. He was quiet. Too quiet. I thought he’d . . .”

  “Won’t bother you none now,” Jim said as he lowered himself, cross-legged, to the dirt floor. “He left with my daughter.”

  The soldier’s moans were quieter. Joe’s eyes took in the spectacle of the wounded. “What about them?”

  Gerta shook her head.

  Beth shared a look with Joe before he turned his head away, his jaw working.

  They huddled close to Joe’s cot as he ate with slow movements. He said little, and there was little to say. Gerta cradled her head on her arms and slept. Beth’s tension eased at her grandmother’s surrender to sleep. Even a few hours would prove a great benefit to the woman. At some point during the renewed shudder of cannonading and gunfire, screams and yells, Beth found her hand again cradled in Joe’s. She couldn’t remember which one of them had initiated the touch, and it did not matter. It grounded her. Injected comfort while the world outside the cellar tumbled and rocked.

  “Tell me about your home.”

  Beth flinched. “Home?”

  Joe’s tongue flicked across his lips, and he nodded. “Do you live with your grandmother?”

  “I do now.” Her throat closed over the words.

  “Why did you leave home?”

  She laughed, a humorless sound. “I wanted to be a nurse.”

  Joe’s smile was fleeting, incongruous. Tasting the irony of what she said in light of the reality of the situation. “And your parents didn’t want you to?”

  She considered the question. “They’d just lost Jedidiah to the war. I guess they worried they might lose me, too.” She understood that fear now, in the midst of such a fierce, confusing battle, where the dying gasps of the soldier punctuated every new blast.

  “That’s why she gave you the quilt. So you could see beyond the hard times.”

  “Are you a preacher?”

  Joe shook his head. “No. Just seems like something a mother would think of.”

  It was true. The quilt was her mother’s quiet way of reminding her of this truth, and the best gift her mother could give.

  “My mother sewed all kinds of things,” Joe offered, his voice resigned, heavy with tension and dread.

  The question perched on her tongue to be asked, but she swallowed it back, afraid to hear that his mother had been killed. It wouldn’t be fair that he had lost both sister and mother.

  “Tell me about Sue.”

  This time the smile lit his eyes. “My twin. She was always in trouble.” His lips clamped together and he turned his head away. “She’d just been married.”

  Another crash quaked the ground. She caught her breath and held it as she huddled over Joe’s cot. She straightened and tried to keep the words flowing. “My mother and father own a farm north of here.”

  “Brothers? Sisters?”

  “Two brothers. Jedidiah, I told you about. Thomas is married, much older than us because my mother lost children between his birth and Jedidiah’s.”

  “That must be the worst, losing a child. My mother never quite recovered after Sue . . . It made Ben more determined to join the South and I—”

  She watched his profile, his jaw working. His hand squeezed hers a little harder, an action she was sure he was not conscious of.

  He stared ahead, eyes narrowed. “I followed him to keep him out of trouble.”

  “You’re remembering things. That’s good.”

  His brow knit. “Bits and pieces.” He released her hand and massaged his eyes, his chest shuddering as he inhaled. Shells hit in quick succession. Beth leaned toward her grandmother. Jim scooted along the ground, closer to them, as if his presence could protect them from harm. Joe’s fingers interlaced with hers and she pressed her forehead against their clasped hands, fighting tears. A scream rose in her throat. Not again! God, not again! Terror clawed as the dirt began tumbling down the walls, dust rising in a weak cloud that coated her mouth.

  Joe’s hand cupped her cheek. The show of sympathy released her emotions, and sobs crawled up her throat. She lowered her face to her arms to muffle the sound. Joe stroked her hair, her arm, then clasped her hand again in a grip that revealed his level of distress.

  The sound of the raging battle ebbed and flowed as the afternoon stretched into evening. Like prisoners they huddled, captured by the war outside and the death rattle of the dying soldier. And when quiet finally stilled the night, the breathing of the injured soldier on the floor stilled as well.

  13

  No one tried to stop Beth as she crawled from the cellar. She had to see for herself. Bullets still split the air, but the action came from the direction of Harper’s Ferry at the west end of town. She felt suffocated in the cellar. Afraid. The sudden need to see for herself rose up, growing so strong that she could no longer see the insanity of venturing out.

  Smoke curled in a thick cloud to the west, against the red sunset. The same red as the triangles in the quilt. Shells screamed, farther away, almost drowned out by the moans and screams that pummeled from every direction. Men lay in the yard of her grandmother’s house now. An able-bodied assistant she’d seen earlier came from the springhouse bearing a yoke of water pails. At some point, a fire had been started, the snap of the blaze and the heat added to the misery of the men sprawled nearby. Her stomach clenched as her gaze collided with the spectacle of the surgeon’s table, a pile of amputated appendages drawing flies. Bile coated her throat and mouth, and she staggered, oblivious to the moaning and the clutching hands that reached for her as she passed. A groan rose in her throat. It was too much. Her town. The men. Rebels who had come to destroy, and yet they had been destroyed, one by one. She rushed up the road as fast as her throbbing ankle would allow. Confederates clogged the road. Wagons, horses pulling cannons. She turned and went east, where the stain of darkness limned the horizon.

  Her heart slammed pain into her chest. She stopped, a hand to her throat, seeing nothing familiar about the town, though in another way everything was familiar. Teresa’s flag was gone, and she wondered if it had survived, if Teresa and her family had left or stayed, were dead or alive.

  Heat from the blazes stroked her cheeks, some fresh and just getting started, others, starved for fuel, dwindled and smoked. A choking haze laced her every inhalation. At the crest of the east end of Main Street she saw the worst and halted in abject horror. A dark shape shifted to block her view.

  “Go back, ma’am. You should have left with the rest of them.”

  “You’ve killed us,” she whispered, her voice ragged and hoarse. “All of them . . .”

  “Get back, I tell you.”

  A wagon creaked up beside her. “Elizabeth Bumgartner?”

  “I’ve ordered her away,” the soldier stated flatly to the man. “If you can take her on . . .” He walked away, a stripe down his hazel trousers and linen shirt showing his rank. He was used to being obeyed.

  The man on the wagon was beside her. “I thought you’d be with your parents. Come with me and I’ll take you back.”

  The words were a hailstorm. She tried to collect the loose threads of her thoughts, staring again at the field in front of her, the cannons to her right and
left. The milling about of soldiers, the shouts. All Rebels. Ragged, dirty Rebels. And in front of her, nearly at her feet, bodies. Blood, moans, screams.

  “Come with me, Elizabeth.”

  The name jolted her, and she pulled against the man’s hand, tilting her head to see his face. She knew him. He knew her. And despite the shock of what she’d seen, she recognized the face of Riley Mercer. The soft edge of a boy’s jaw now hardened by maturity. Riley had loved her once. Before Leo and the injury . . .

  “Yes.” The word sounded wooden and dead, like she felt.

  He said not a word as he helped her into the wagon. Erect, she could see into the bed, the tangle of limbs, heard the same low moans of pain. Blood. Her knees gave out and she sat, staring straight ahead, this view not much different.

  Riley was talking. She tried to focus on his words. Closed her eyes and wished she could close her ears to the roar of the fires and the distress of injured men, screams and gunfire and . . .

  “. . . school days. Never prepared us for such as this.”

  “No.”

  She hadn’t heard anything about Riley since returning to Sharpsburg. Why was he here and not with his wife in Mercersville, where he belonged?

  “Where’s your wife?”

  He stopped talking and she didn’t care how harsh the words sounded. Lina had been her best friend. Before the injury. They’d talked of Riley’s desire to court her, and his shyness.