The door swung wide open. Joe could see Jim’s wide, staring eyes taking in the room, then the place where he knelt, poised to crawl. “You fall over?”
“I walked. When I tried to sit down, I missed.”
Jim’s face broke into a wide smile, prelude to the belly laugh that tweaked a smile from Joe. Levity expanded his lungs and he added his own chuckle as he began to crawl, imagining what he must have looked like as he fell and, now, crawling around like an overgrown baby while trying to keep weight off his injured arm. The laughter felt good, unusual. It seemed like months ago when he’d last laughed.
“Got some strong branches right outside the door. I’ll break them and we’ll get started.”
Jim’s head lifted, tilted, eyes growing serious. Joe listened but heard nothing.
Jim’s frown deepened. “Someone’s coming.”
19
New streaks of blood had been added to Gerta’s skirts, Joe noted. Both she and Beth were pale and sober. Jim closed the door behind them as Riley set off back to the fields. Gerta went straight to the place where she’d lain the previous night and stretched out on top of a quilt. Beth acknowledged both of them, her own apron smeared with blood, her hem ragged, hair falling in stray tendrils around her face, staring at nothing. It was like she was seeing something else not entirely pleasant. She looked, to Joe’s eye, near to collapse.
It was the horror of the battlefield. He knew it. She had seen what he had grown used to seeing and it was as traumatizing and terrifying as he’d known it to be for all the months he’d marched and pulled the trigger at men with families and loved ones that would never see that man’s return.
He swallowed, wishing his legs were stronger, that he could bounce to his feet and touch the hair around her face. If only there was a way to protect her from it all, just as his mother and Sue had never had any protection. A hot brand of guilt seared with the knowledge that he had brought this to their doorstep. As if the direction of the entire war lay on his shoulders.
Jim scooted the stool closer to her. She sagged onto the seat like every muscle in her body had suddenly gone flaccid.
“I brought some water in,” Jim offered. He didn’t wait for an answer, but brought a tin mug to her. She took two sips and handed it back with a motion of her head toward Gerta.
The older woman rose long enough to take a deep drink. She spoke to Jim in tones so low Joe couldn’t make out the words. Gerta’s hand fluttered often to her left shoulder and massaged the spot, her face twisted with discomfort. Joe turned his attention back to Beth. Her eyes were on him. He froze, something deep inside him connecting with what he witnessed in the soberness of her eyes. Such sorrow etched in the softness of her face. Every curve translated the trauma of the day.
He braced his hand against the wall, determined to go to her, but she was there, beside him, as he gained his feet. She steadied his weight and when he glanced down, her face was inches from his. His mouth went dry as he let himself drink in the beauty of her skin, the perfection that was her nose, the eyes so clouded with the heavy load laid upon her shoulders. He could at least share it with her, bear the burden as she had born the burden of his convalescence.
Aware of the dirt and grime of the past days, the staleness of his clothes, he pulled back. “I’m afraid the air would be sweeter elsewhere.”
Her grip on his hand didn’t falter, a wan smile prelude to the argument that settled the issue. “We could all use a bath and a cake of strong lye soap.” She took a step forward, waited for him to follow suit. He appreciated the slow pace she set, could feel her own struggling limp in the unevenness of her weight against him.
To his surprise, she opened the door. The air swirled around him, tinted with a scent he recognized. He’d done enough battlefield grave duty not to identify the smell of rot. She helped lower him to the single wooden step. He braced his back against the wall, pleased with himself, but the pleasure was crushed when she sat next to him, her shoulders slumped forward, head bowed low.
He waited, hoping she would talk to him. “I’m feeling stronger. Jim said he prayed for me.”
“What about all of them? What about those who pray and don’t get better?” A shudder wracked her body. “It was horrible.”
He thought about all he’d lost. “My mother often reminded us that Sue’s death meant heaven. A better place.” And at the time it had been his mother’s talk. A comfort to him, yes, but he’d never thought of her religion as his own.
Until now. Death, he realized, stared them all in the face. Every day. Every breath. Every minute. “Sometimes I think the pain of dying must show what is truly in a person’s heart.” Hadn’t he heard that Christ had suffered before his death?
“It seems so senseless,” her voice was dead. Heavy. Her head bowed into her hands. “So . . . vile.”
“I guess it is, unless you’re ready to go.”
She had felt a deep need to talk about the horrors she had witnessed, knowing Joe would understand. Instead, the change in subject to God ground away the wall she’d held around herself since Leo’s death. She rubbed her leg, aching from the uneven pocks along the battlefield and the miles she’d walked going from one destroyed soldier to another. Some alive, some not.
How did the men endure what she’d seen? Even the survivors walked around in a daze searching for fallen comrades. She’d heard their sobs. Seen mothers and fathers being guided to the field, their faces masks of expectation and defeat. The heat, the flies, the moans and screams of those who still needed tending and had yet to be moved.
“We went along one lane where they were digging beneath those who had died to get to those who were still alive.” It had been their first stop among many. Until Beth realized Gerta’s color had faded, that there was a grayness around her lips. She had coaxed Gerta to go back to the shack, but she’d refused, agreeing only to stay at a field hospital where at least the men were laid out in neat rows and all alive if not conscious.
“I thought I could handle it after seeing the men at the house, but it was the . . .” She couldn’t find the word.
“Seeing so many at once?”
Her throat burned. “How do you do it? March and fight and . . . kill?”
He didn’t know how he had done it. He’d pulled the trigger again and again, knowing his primary goal was to stop the enemy by any method. He bowed his head. Ben had wanted so much to join the army. His brother’s goading and enthusiasm had been bolstered by Sue’s death and the talk of states’ rights. He massaged that line between his brows where an ache throbbed. “I don’t think anyone knows. You just do it.”
“It’s not right. It’s—”
A breeze ruffled the leaves of the trees and washed over him, accompanied, again, by the faint scent of sourness and rot. Joe squeezed the bridge of his nose and tried to push away the pictures that flashed through his memory. Too awful to tell or talk about, and yet she’d seen the same thing today, up close.
His father would point him to his faith, but faith in what? The answer washed over him as if his mother had whispered the single syllable in his ear. God. The Bible his mother had given him was a map to something bigger than himself. He needed to feel there was something bigger than himself and in control when he felt so confused and angry and disgusted. He realized he had to let go of it all or the dwelling on it would destroy him. Ben, the men he had called friends, all of them would have died in vain if he became nothing more than a hollow shell, disillusioned with life. No, he was disillusioned with war. He couldn’t change the hearts of others, but his own he could.
Beth shifted, and the movement brought him back to her and her obvious distress. She had it right. She and Gerta. Help those who could not help themselves. Minister to them. Offer comfort and a chance to be at peace before death claimed them, or hope for another tomorrow.
“What you’re doing is a gift to the wounded.” When she faced him, her expression was a mask of anger that chilled him. Her twisted brow, the way she hel
d herself erect, the harshness of her frown.
“I don’t see how reading a Scripture or writing a letter, or listening to a prayer is enough.”
“Not enough for them, or for you?”
Her face blanched and she presented her back, rigid and unyielding.
“Who are you to say anything? You’re a Rebel. The enemy. You’ve probably killed—”
The accusation lodged in his heart. Never had she spoken so harshly to him, and her words roused his anger. “And you are a Northerner. A lady. A woman who probably knows men and boys who have joined up with McClellan. And they are shooting at us, too.”
He wanted nothing more than to leave her to her own thoughts and rid himself of further debate. There was no winning solution. Nothing he would be able to say would soften her opinion of him and with that came the realization that they could never have a future. Jim might have thought Beth had feelings for him, but they couldn’t jump the fence of her prejudices against the South. He only wished he had seen sooner that she would hold against him the label of Southerner. “I watched my brother die. You are not the only one who stands to lose, Beth. I cannot change what happened before the war, and I’m sorry for you, but do not think for a minute that just because I am on the other side of this conflict that it erases my ability to love and be loved by others. Or to feel hurt and loss. I grieve as you do, for my brother and sister, and my mother and father. Grief does not select its target based on which side is fighting. We all suffer, whether before the war, during it, or after. It makes no difference.”
20
Beth heard Joe’s grunt to stand. She knew he was struggling to get up the step and back into the cabin. And it wasn’t because he wanted to go back inside, but because of her. She squeezed her eyes shut, the anger draining away and leaving her weak and sad. She had lashed out at him as if where he was from made any difference. His words choked every bit of her own bias out of her. She was no better than him, and he was no better than her. They were two people trying to figure out their place in a world that had gone crazy with shooting and hatred and the desire to conquer.
And she was just as bad. If witnessing the pain of the wounded and dying so troubled her, how must Joe feel having lived with it every day since becoming a soldier. What she couldn’t reconcile herself to was his desire to shoot another man. To pull the trigger because it was mandated.
But Jedidiah was somewhere doing the same thing. For all she knew, he could have been the one to shoot Joe’s brother, or Joe, for that matter.
“Beth?” Gerta’s hand was a light weight against her shoulder. Her grandmother skirted around her and settled herself on the step beside her. “Joe seemed angry when he came in. What happened?”
“He’s a Rebel, Grandmama. The enemy.”
Gerta blew a breath that swept the hair off her forehead. “The same old argument.”
“You dismiss it so easily! Well I can’t. I won’t.”
Her grandmother traced the ground with her eyes. She leaned forward to pluck a blade of grass from a sparse patch. “Is this about the unfairness of those who are dead and dying and those doing the killing, or is this about Leo and your injury?”
Her throat thickened and she pressed a hand to her lips. “Neither.”
“So this has nothing to do with God or your idea that He took away your happiness?”
Hot rage flowed upward, threatened to overflow. She staunched a sob, the burst of temper that threatened to ride out on a scream. No one understood. They were all in this together and no one except her saw the unjustness? Did the man missing an eye and a good portion of his jaw, to whom she had knelt and read Scripture at his request, deserve what he had gotten? What about the man whose screams pierced their ears all morning—because he couldn’t feel legs that the surgeon had already amputated?
“Men do what they think is right. We all do. If they fight, they realize that they also might be shot and killed, or maimed. Did you see the boy this afternoon?”
She had. A small boy, no more than fourteen, shot in the gut and crying his eyes out because he would never see his mother again.
“He told me he ran away. He thought his father wouldn’t let him join because he was afraid to lose him, and then the boy told me to tell his father he was afraid.” Gerta’s voice whispered out into the growing shadows of night. She winced, hand over her heart, pressing.
“Grandmama?” Beth had seen Gerta’s discomfort throughout the afternoon.
Her grandmother patted Beth’s leg and Beth closed her hand over Gerta’s soft one, fingers cold in spite of the heat. Gerta continued as if the conversation had never been interrupted. “Paul was his name. He told me he was named after his father.” Gerta breathed deeply and slowly and fingered the ragged hem of her skirt. “I asked him what he what he wanted me to do for him and he wanted me to pray that God would forgive him for being so mean to his father and mother.”
Men had begged her to write letters to their loved ones. She had done her best to meet their requests and make sure she knew their identity so she could tell the families where to find their bodies. Confederate or Union, it was always the same request. No one wanted to die alone. Only a few soldiers cursed foul words down on the enemy, the war, an old rival, as they drew their last.
“You can fight God’s will, or you can trust.”
“I am trusting. I’ve had no choice but to trust Him.”
“Really?” Gerta’s eyes burned into hers. “Is trust fear and hatred? Walking in darkness and shunning the light?”
Beth’s heart slammed in unadulterated rage. Of all people, Gerta should understand. Her voice shuddered. “I didn’t ask for this.”
“For what, Bethie?”
The use of her childhood nickname sucked the rage from her. This was her grandmother. “For the war to come here. For Jedidiah to leave me or . . .” She bit down hard.
“Or for Leo to die or your leg to be crushed. No one in their right mind asks for trouble, but sometimes it is measured out to us to prove what we are made of.”
“I don’t want to talk about this.”
Gerta patted her shoulder and rose. “I love you, Beth.”
The words were there on the tip of her tongue, poised to be spoken, yet she could not push them out. Instead, she pulled her knees to her chest and pillowed her head. Tears should have streamed down her face, instead she felt nothing but a cold fierceness.
Whatever had passed between the two women, Gerta returned looking the worse for it. She fussed over Joe for a few minutes, declaring his temperature almost normal and the brevity of his fever a miracle, then retreated to her corner of the cabin. Jim hovered over her for a few minutes, trying to coax the woman to eat, coming away with the same carrots and apples, untouched.
Despite his body’s need, Joe forced himself to stay upright. His eyes strayed to the front door from time to time. Jim, too, seemed anxious over Beth’s continued absence. Between the two of them, they crafted four more crutches until darkness demanded they either stop or light the lantern. Still Beth had not come inside.
Jim’s head jerked up and he lunged to his feet.
“What is it?”
Jim didn’t answer, he crossed toward the corner of the room where Gerta had reclined and knelt beside the woman.
“Miz Gerta? Miz Gerta?”
Joe watched the man rock the frail form as her name spilled from his lips. Sourness boiled in his belly as the knowledge settled over him. Jim sat back on his heels, head bowed low. He stood up and met Joe’s gaze, his face a haggard mask. “She’s gone.”
The numbness grew and twisted until Beth felt nothing at all. Heard nothing more than the distant squeak of wagons, the whinny of the occasional horse. Riley had come to them in the night with the news that the Confederates were pulling out of Sharpsburg in a long line heading west, over the Potomac. Her heart could not rejoice. He did not stay long enough to discover Gerta’s death. No one said a word about the hole Jim had dug in the side yard or the shroud
ed body of her grandmother, wrapped in the quilt that marked her wedding day. The loss was too fresh, too shocking, yet she should have known. The paleness of Gerta’s lips, the obvious discomfort she’d shown. She had not done enough to protect her.
In that same moonless night in which the enemy retreated, Jim carried Gerta’s slight form to the grave, lowered her to the ground so he could jump down into the hole, and laid her gently down at his feet. It was Joe who used his mother’s Bible to read Scripture. His voice choked with emotion. She could only stare at him as the words of Scripture spilled from his lips. Jim dared to hum a song, low and slow, that Beth did not recognize.
They formed a line and returned to the safety of the cabin. Beth went to the corner where Gerta had slept and tried to make sense of all that had happened, the suddenness. Shouldn’t God have warned her somehow? Shouldn’t the discovery of her grandmother’s death have been more than Jim’s ragged voice interrupting her solitude on the porch? The cold chill of the evening air had clutched her harder as Jim’s announcement settled around her and was immediately rejected. So she had gone to see for herself. Felt the coldness eating away the natural heat of her grandmother’s body when she’d dared to reach out and touch the frail form. And then she had pitched forward, tears demanding release she would not give.
She didn’t know how long she had stood there before realizing that Joe’s hand had been on her back, her arm. She’d wanted to be left alone, but his hand guided her into a one-armed hug that had further chipped at the wall she’d erected.
“I’m so sorry.”
Rage surged back, then ebbed again.
“At least she is in a better place.”
Words she’d heard all too often during Leo’s funeral as if a silent finger of accusation were being pointed at her.
A Heartbeat Away: Quilts of Love Series Page 12