by Julianne Lee
“Stop talking crazy, woman. The Yankees won’t come within a hundred miles of here. They’d have to march through Kentucky to do that, and Kentucky is neutral.”
“Lean forward.” Lucas obliged, and Shelby took a cup from the table to douse his head before lathering his hair. Then she said, “Tell me, Lucas, what is the route of the Ohio River?”
He leaned back again, his head held forward for her to scrub. “It starts in Ohio, I think. Goes along the border between Kentucky and Ohio, then Indiana, and on south to the Mississippi somewhere around Paducah. If I recall correctly.”
“And from there...?”
“The Mississippi runs south past...” His voice faltered as he realized what she was getting at. “Past Memphis. Tennessee. You think they’re going to float down the Ohio River and bypass Kentucky?”
“I know that’s what they’re going to do.”
“How do you know that?”
“Isn’t it what you would do?”
He grunted, but didn’t reply, his usual reaction when she was right. But then he lifted his chin and said triumphantly, a thin trickle of lather making its way down the side of his face, “They’d have to march eastward across Tennessee to get here. With the entire Tennessee Army in Nashville, they wouldn’t even try that.”
“They’ll cut across at Paducah. One swift little violation of Kentucky’s neutrality, and by the time anyone knows about it, they’re across, down the Cumberland River, and at the gates of Fort Donelson. Wham, bam, thank you...I mean, just as slick as you please, they’ll have Middle Tennessee.”
Lucas fell silent again, thinking hard. Shelby pressed his back again, so he’d lean forward to let her pour water to rinse his hair. She also fell silent, to let him think about what she’d said.
When he leaned back, he ran his fingers through his hair to get it off his face. It had grown quite shaggy since last spring, and Shelby suspected it hadn’t been cut since his enlistment. He took a look at her over the side of the tub and said softly, “Have you recovered from the baby yet?”
Apparently he wasn’t thinking too hard about what she’d said. It took a moment for her to realize what he meant, and she replied, “No. I’m afraid I’m still a few weeks away from that.” The bleeding wasn’t bad; no more than a heavy period. But she knew it would be unhealthy for her to have sex for another month or so. That was one of the few issues on which modern medicine agreed with nineteenth century midwifery. But she couldn’t bear to tell Lucas there would be no fun and games during his furlough, so she let her cloth slide deeper into the water, down his belly. There were other ways to keep occupied during this time.
His eyes shut and lips parted, and he let his head lie on the tub lip once more, his knees pressed to either side. His hips moved to meet her, and she found him excited by her touch. But as her hand closed over him, he groaned unhappily and lifted his head. His hand found hers and raised it to his chest. “No,” he said, “Don’t.”
“Why?” She wanted to touch him; it had been so many months since he’d left, and she missed the contact. Drinking him with her eyes, she found herself fascinated by the curve of his collar bone where the wetness of his skin shone in the candle light. His pulse throbbed at the side of his long neck. His lovely, lovely heartbeat.
“It’s a sin.”
A frown crossed her face. “Why? I thought we’d decided—”
He shook his head. “Spilling seed is a sin any way you look at it.”
Now she understood. She laid her hand on his knee and stroked the inside of his thigh where the sprinkling of black hairs lay, wet against his skin. “I see. You’re saying that all this time when you were away from me you never relieved yourself of frustration? Or did you find a likely woman to catch the seed so it wouldn’t fall, and thereby avoid sinning?”
Ears reddening, he said, “It’s a shameful act, and I couldn’t let you be party to it. How I address the question of...frustration, as you say, doesn’t mean I think it fitting for you to help me accomplish it.” Now the blush was creeping down his neck and across his chest. This was more frank talk than she’d heard from anyone in this century, and the effort it took for him to say these things made it plain he was unlikely to be moved in this. Like the day they’d met, when she’d told him she was from the future and he looked at her as if she deserved to be locked in an attic, she realized Lucas was a product of his time and she couldn’t change him.
She withdrew her hand from his thigh, and wrung out the cloth into the tub. “All right. If you’re sure you want it that way.” The next few weeks were going to be a study in frustration for both of them. “If it would make you uncomfortable.”
“It would mortify me.”
She kissed a finger tip, then laid it against his lower lip. “Then we’ll wait.” Till when, she had no idea.
Lucas might have seen disappointment in her, for he reached up behind her neck and drew her in for a kiss. He was warm now, and he kissed her deeply, like a husband. She drew away just far enough to say, “You like to torture yourself?”
He chuckled. “I like to kiss my wife, even if it leads me to perdition.” He kissed her again.
Whether Lucas ever defiled himself, or toughed it out instead, Shelby never knew. There was no sign of either the entire time he was home. They slept together chastely, warm in each other’s arms, and Shelby began to feel whole again. The scent of his skin that had been missing all these months now filled her head. The return of it, waking up to him, knowing him in her sleep before rising to consciousness, was as if her life had been torn in half but was now restored. She and Lucas spent their days caring for the baby and the horses as if there weren’t a war closing in on them. Lucas cut wood, made repairs on the house and outbuildings, shot some rabbits and squirrels for the stew pot, and in the evenings lent to the reading his masculine voice they’d all missed so much. For a length of days, Shelby could almost feel things had gone back to normal.
But the more normal life appeared on the surface, the more obvious it was that on the inside Lucas was no longer the innocent young man who had signed up to fight less than a year ago. Wearing his old civilian clothes emphasized the change. There was now a hardness to him. He’d seen battle at Manassas, and though he never talked of it Shelby knew he thought about it often. She could see it in his eyes as he ate his supper, and in the way he carried himself and handled the horses. He’d stopped fidgeting. No longer did he fiddle with things in his fingers, nor shuffle his feet when standing, as if impatient to be going somewhere. When he was still, he was still, and when he was not he moved economically. Some, especially those living in the Brosnahan house that year, would see it as maturity. The Army and battle had made a man out of young Lucas. But Shelby saw it as a loss. His sense of safety was destroyed. The tiniest sound was enough to awaken him at night, and even during the day he was unusually attentive to strange noises. He no longer left clothing lying around when he undressed. Every sock, every pair of drawers, every handkerchief, was accounted for. Always. Nothing was casual for him any more, and Shelby mourned the part of him that had gone forever.
Lucas’s six week furlough lasted only two weeks. In mid-February several gray-clad riders galloped into the yard. Shelby heard them from the kitchen, and came to look, wiping her hands on a towel. She didn’t recognize the men on horseback, who were in uniform. Lucas had been chopping wood, and shouldered his ax as he rounded the corner of the house to meet them.
The one in the lead, nearly hysterical with excitement, shouted when he spotted Lucas, “Yankees is coming, Lieutenant, sir! All leave has been cancelled! The Army is retreating south. We got the telegraph in Gallatin this morning.” Shelby hurried over to hear what had happened.
“Where are the Yankees?” Lucas asked.
“Word’s come from Fort Donelson. The sneaky bastards boated down the Ohio River, and they cut across at Paducah. Came sashaying up the Cumberland River, took Fort Donelson, and now they’re a-headed for Nashville.”
; Lucas uttered an Anglo-Saxon vulgarism Shelby hadn’t heard since leaving the twenty-first century, then glanced sideways at her for forgiveness though he didn’t care to blush. He said to her, “Tell Clyde to get as many horses on leads as he can. The best ones.”
“All of them.”
“As many as he can, however many that might be.” He would take all of them, if possible. With relief, Shelby understood he would probably take her advice about the money as well.
“Right.” Shelby hurried to comply, and as she went heard Ruth invite the soldiers inside to eat and rest while Lucas made ready to leave. Lucas ate as well, and Ruth put up a sack of food for him to take along. In uniform and tying his pack in the foyer, the other soldiers waiting for him outside with the horses, Lucas then turned to Shelby and kissed her goodbye. He peered into her face. “You don’t seem nearly so upset as you were last time I left.”
“Your life wasn’t in danger last time you left. Those Yankees find you here, you having fought them at Manassas, who knows what they’d do to you? They’d arrest you for sure. Maybe send you away, maybe shoot you on the spot just because they can. I’d rather see you free and gone than here and dead.”
His only reply to that was a nod and a kiss. Then he was out the door, and she watched him mount and ride off with the animals that had been his pride for all his life. The ones she’d thought the Yankees would get, but now they wouldn’t. Or they hadn’t. She wasn’t sure which any more. A floating sense of fluidity of events, of time and space, made her wonder just how much could be changed by one person. How far-reaching was her presence in this time? Just how much influence could one person have over history?
She returned to Matthew, and thoughts tumbled one over another, none of them coming clear or making sense.
Chapter 15
It was a matter of only days before there came trainloads of Yankee soldiers moving along the tracks from Nashville to Gallatin. Shelby stood at the front door and peeked through the window each time a locomotive came chugging down the tracks, to watch the trains packed with men in dark blue uniforms, the cars sometimes so full the soldiers had to ride on top. Often she had to remind herself this wasn’t a movie. Those were real men, in real Union blue, sent by Washington to quell a rebellion. They were armed to the teeth with rifles, and pistols, knives and steel swords sharpened for use against their enemies. This is a real invasion, folks, this is not a drill.
The men passing by sometimes shouted foul language at the house, especially if they saw her watching like a woodland creature from the foliage, but they never needed to see anyone to hurl abuse at the locals. More often, they only rode in silence and stared out at the pastures and thickets and various buildings of the Brosnahan farm.
The first patrol that came on horseback to the house sent Shelby’s heart to her throat, where it lodged so solidly she could hardly speak. Bringing wood in for the kitchen fire, she spotted them coming up the tracks. The dogs started up barking.
“Damn.” Quickly, she ducked into the kitchen, deposited her armload of firewood on the floor, and hurried down through the tunnel to the house. “Ruth! Ruth, Martha!” She called out as she ascended to the foyer. “Get Matthew. Hurry. It’s Yankees.”
Ruth came into the foyer with the baby, eyes wide and her countenance ghostly. “Soldiers? Oh, Lord.”
Martha descended the stairs, and stopped halfway down to peer at them, silent. As Shelby took Matthew, she said, “Both of you, let me do the talking. That way they only get one story. Don’t agree with me, don’t disagree with me, don’t say anything.”
Martha said, “I wouldn’t care to speak to Federals in any case.”
“Good.” Don’t piss them off, either. But Shelby kept shut on that account and hoped Martha would be uncharacteristically mellow today.
Ruth clasped her hands together and hurried to the window in the front door. “Oh, Lord. God save us.”
Shelby held Matthew as closely as she could, and draped her shawl over the arm that held him. She looked out the window and watched as the men in blue approached the porch. They dismounted, one of their number taking the horses to hold them, and the other four mounted the steps. The one in the lead had stripes on his sleeve: a sergeant. He saw her peeking out from behind the curtain, and bent his head to peer at her. He didn’t bother knocking.
“We’re here to search the house.”
“Got a warrant?” It was hopeless, but she said it anyway because she’d been raised in an era of civil rights. She figured she’d probably regret her big mouth.
The Sergeant, a hefty blond fellow with a wide, well-fed face, replied, “Martial law. I don’t need a warrant.” He sounded like a cop, and a giddy thought crossed Shelby’s mind that blue uniforms might do that to a man.
She stepped back before reaching for the knob, for fear he might shove the door open and knock her down. He and his men crowded into the foyer, and the women moved well back out of their way.
The Sergeant directed his men into the various rooms and up the stairs. Without any further conversation, they set to work pulling things from drawers and trunks, pulling boxes from the closets and rifling through them, overturning rugs, pulling paintings from the walls to examine backing and frame. Firewood in each room was dumped on the floor, and ashes poked through. Papers and letters were read through, and Shelby thanked God she’d stuffed Lucas’s letters deep inside the wall upstairs. Maybe these men didn’t know this household had three men in the Confederate Army, and the longer they didn’t know it, the better. Dad Brosnahan uttered no sound when he was ordered out of his cot for the bedding to be searched, and he only struggled to his feet and stepped aside.
But when one of the soldiers pulled out a Bowie knife and began cutting open the cushions on the sofa, Ruth couldn’t hold her tongue. “No! Leave that alone, you heathen!”
The Sergeant slammed her up against the wall with a resounding thud, and she stood there with her eyes wide. Horrified. “Am I going to have trouble with you? ’Cause I’d just as soon arrest you as to talk to you, secesh bitch. I’ll tie you to that horse out there, and you can walk with me back to Gallatin.”
No words came from her mouth. It gaped open, but nothing more came out of it. She clasped her hands against her chest, and stared at the floor in front of her.
“We have nothing to hide, Office...uh, Sergeant.” Shelby tucked her shawl a little more firmly around Matthew, and stepped forward. “You see, we had a very bad harvest last fall, and this winter we lost all our horses when the Army took them. They didn’t even pay for them; I assure you we’ve seen not dime one for our animals.” And they wouldn’t, unless Lucas returned, but that was beside the point. “The hogs are all gone.” Also true, for they’d slaughtered all of them after the fall of Fort Donelson. The meat was mostly sold off for gold and that buried in a stall out in the stable, and the remaining meat was salted away and hidden in a tree cache in the forest. “We have a goat for milk out in the stable, some dried apples in the cellar, and some beans and cornmeal, but that’s all.”
“Where’s your guns?”
The barking outside was turning hysterical. Apparently some of the men had gone to the stable, where the dogs lived.
“We have no guns, sir.”
Matthew wriggled inside his blanket and reached out with his grasping, baby hands. Shelby tugged her shawl a little more.
“What do you hunt with? You got dogs.”
“I am not a skilled hunter. Neither was my husband, though he kept dogs for the purpose. We had but one hunting musket, and it’s gone now.”
“Where’s your husband?” His eye was on the baby.
She would have liked to have claimed her husband was dead, but the Sergeant might know that was a lie. Then they would surely tear up the property in search of a nonexistent musket. So she lied in answer to a question the Sergeant hadn’t asked and couldn’t disprove. “We sold the musket. With the war on, and ammunition so hard to come by, we thought it would do us more good as cas
h.” There was a pause, punctuated by the distant barking, then she added, “I don’t like guns.”
The barking outside kept on and on and on.
“Where’s your cash?”
“Spent. As I said, it was a poor harvest last fall.”
There was a shot. Shelby jumped. The barking stopped. The report echoed from the stable and other buildings. Shelby turned, heartsick and speechless. Ruth laid her hands over her face and started to sob. Martha was dead silent, expressionless. There was another shot, and they all knew both dogs were gone.
The Sergeant said, “Well, poor hunter that your husband is, I’m sure he won’t miss those dogs.”
Shelby only stared at the floor, her lips pressed together. After a long moment, she said quietly, “We’d be obliged if you would leave us with enough food to see us through till the greens and apples come in.”
“Right. You’ll be feeding our men when they come for provisions. Can’t do that very well if there’s no food. There’ll be regular patrols up and down these tracks.”
Shelby had one wild moment of wondering what poison might be found on the premises, then set that thought aside and nodded. “Yes, sir. We’ll set places when they come.”
Two men came through the side door and one said, “Nothing in the other buildings but some sacks of grain, a few saddles, and a young idiot fellow lying in the straw out in the barn.”
“You sure he’s an idiot?”
Shelby had to struggle to keep her voice steady. “Clyde barely knows his own name. He couldn’t hurt a fly. I assure you, all the men that are left around here are idiots and weaklings.”