Juliet's Moon (6 page)

She smiled through her tears. "I know."

"You know?"

"Of course. A woman always knows."

"Are you going to marry him?"

"If he ever comes to his senses, yes."

"Oh, Martha." I grabbed her hand. "You'll be my real sister then."

She dried her eyes. "He loves you, too," she said. "Don't let all his strutting and spitting out hard words frighten you. When it comes down to it, he's soft on the inside. He just doesn't know how to show it, is all."

I went to bed that night with a warm glow inside me. You would never know the cicadas were screaming outside and the girls crying inside, and those who weren't crying were whimpering and restless. It's funny what knowing you are loved can do. Too bad it didn't last long.

E
VERY FEW
minutes, Jenny Anderson tried to turn over in her bunk, could not for the ball and chain, and whimpered heartbreakingly. Martha stayed beside her, soothing her with words. Sue Mundy had gone into the Yankees' room to beg forgiveness for Jenny and ask that the contraption be taken off, at least for the night.

"I'll sign all the memo pads or pieces of paper you want," she promised. For they all wanted her signature. But this time her magic did not work. And she came out of the Yankee headquarters disheartened. She circulated from girl to girl that night, saying a few words to each one to comfort them.

I thought it was decent of her not to try to squeeze into the bunks with the girls. After all, when all was said and done, she was still a man.

Finally she made her way over to me. "Don't you come near me, you gypsy, you," I told her/him. "Shame on you, here in a room full of half-dressed women who all need baths. And you prettified up as for a ball. How do you get those Yankees to wash and clean your clothing?"

"They are thrilled by me and my exploits," Sue Mundy said. "They all can't wait to go home and tell their relatives that they met me. My name is currency, in the North as well as the South. Many of them will have dinners bought for them at inns with the promise to tell that they met me."

"I wouldn't let anybody trade on my name," I said.

"Half the soldiers fighting in this war are trading on the names of those whom they've met, and flashing souvenirs. It happens in all wars," she said.

"You. You're a spy. Else why would you be here?"

"I told you once. Yes, I spy for him."

I shrugged. "Well, your big report tonight can be that Jenny Anderson has a ball and chain tied around her ankle. Twelve pounds it weighs. And don't you dare say she deserves it or I'll hit you over the head with something. Just don't you sleep near me. Go somewhere else. You don't know the trouble you got me into with my brother."

Jenny Anderson whimpered pitifully. I could see the form of Martha putting a pillow under Jenny's ankle to try to make it more comfortable.

While Martha was doing this, the ball rolled off Jenny's bunk and slammed onto the wooden floor, making an earsplitting sound.

The Yankees must have thought Quantrill and all his raiders were attacking. They burst through the door from their private quarters in various modes of undress, some without shirts, some without boots, some in their Skivvies, but all with guns.

"What in the name of purple hell is going on here?" the head Yankee roared.

He carried a lantern. It cast shadows all over the place. I wished, like Charity McCorkle Kerr, that I had a rag doll to cling to. She, incidentally, was still in her corner, "playing the piano" for that doll.

The head Yankee looked at her and frowned. "Somebody shut that kid up or I'll shoot her," he threatened.

Martha went over to do so.

I slept fitfully that night, and in the morning when the gruel was handed out, I could not bring myself to eat it, though my stomach rumbled with hunger. Sue Mundy came over with a dish of eggs and bacon and sat down beside me.

"I'd give you some of this if only you'd be friends."

She was bargaining. I was wise enough, taught by Seth, to know that. What did she want? "Always find out what the other person wants first," Seth had taught me. "You'll place him at a disadvantage if you know."

"What is it you want from me?" I asked her.

She laughed softly. "Somebody's schooled you. You'd make a good spy. Here, take a piece of bacon and I'll tell you."

I humiliated myself by taking a piece of bacon. A "Judas kiss," Seth called it, though he wasn't much on the Bible.

"All I want to know is where Seth's house is," she said quietly. "And not for me. Or the Yankees. But for you. I think, when all this is over, you should go there for safety. The Yankees are talking of some order being written up, sending the others out of this district. I don't think you should go. Seth is here, and Seth is all you have."

"I know where it is," I said. "Seth took me there. What does it matter to you?"

"It doesn't. I was just making conversation. Look, sweetie. I'm sorry if I hurt you and got you into trouble with Seth. You're a darling girl, and I want to make it up to you. So I'm telling you this: Go to your brother's farm. You can make things up to Seth there. Prove you're no little pest of a girl."

I was about to come back with a sassy reply when the building seemed to tremble. It shook for about three minutes. "An earthquake," Amanda Selvey said.

"No, this place is falling down!" yelled Chloe Fletcher. She was not joking.

I opened my mouth. No words came out. My whole being shook. The walls trembled, and the floor bucked. Some girls were screaming. The door to the Yankees' room blew open and a guard yelled in to us. "Come on. Get out! Now!"

I
OPENED MY
mouth to say something, but no words came out. I was, for the moment, oddly fascinated with the way the bunks were sliding across the floor. By then the whole building was shuddering and there were grinding and screeching noises coming from the wood and bolts that held it together.

Plaster started falling from the ceiling, hitting some of the girls on the shoulders or heads. I saw blood where it shouldn't be, on blond curls and chestnut braids. Joists and timbers fell with terrible noises. Then came the sound of gunshots.

Gunshots? Were the Yankees attacking now, too? No, those sounds were the walls popping open.

All was confusion. Clothes caught on wood and ripped. Girls fled by me with looks of horror in their eyes. Where were they going?

I looked down to see an object sliding toward me. It was Charity McCorkle Kerr's rag doll. I looked beyond it to see her still in her same corner, playing a lullaby on her piano. I picked up the rag doll and held it close. The floor was rocking back and forth now, the windows coming loose from their frames and falling to the ground, the glass shattering all over the place, the wood splintering.

"Out!" The guards pulled Eugenia Gregg and Lucy Younger out the door and tried to come back for more, but the doorway was blocked by a piece of ceiling that had fallen in the meantime.

"The front windows!" someone yelled. "Jump out the front windows!"

"I'm not leaving without my sister Jenny," Martha Anderson announced, as if people were cajoling her to leave. Her voice no longer reminded me of a fairy tale; it was a voice of determination. She pulled Jenny off her bunk, ball and chain with her, across the floor, which already had cavernous holes in it, to the front windows, where she picked her up.

"Come on, before the roof caves in on us," Sue Mundy said. I hadn't seen her in the last several minutes, hadn't even thought of her. She was from another world already, a world I'd had to put aside. The world of my childhood. And whether she was man or woman—and who was in love with her or not—was no longer of concern. This was the here and now. Buildings falling in. Girls screaming and unable to escape. Knowing they were going to die.

This was the Yankee twenty-cent special on how to grow up fast.

"I can't," I told Sue Mundy. "What about the other girls?"

In answer came a long, drawn-out grinding noise, then dust, thick and in my eyes, wood and bricks falling all over. And then I felt myself being lifted. By a man. And then, of a sudden, flying through the air and landing hard on the street below, then rolling over and over.

Was it Seth? Had he come to rescue me? When I was small, Seth used to hold me in his arms like this and we would roll down the hill at home and I'd scream with the thrill of it.

But this wasn't a grassy hill. There were bricks underneath us, and people standing all around. And there was blood on the side of my face and my head felt as if it had cracked open. I felt like Humpty Dumpty who had fallen off the wall, never to be put together again.

And for some reason I was holding a rag doll like the one I used to own. But the man holding me was not Seth.

It was Marcellus Jerome Clark, strong as Seth and still dressed as Sue Mundy.

In the next instant he was gone, whispering, "Someone will help you." In the minute after that, somebody landed with a dull thud right next to me. I could scarce turn my head to look for the terrible jagged pain. My eyes and ears didn't work so good with the dust settling in them and the screams and shouts of the people assembled all around.

The person who had landed next to me was Martha Anderson, on top of her sister Jenny with the ball and chain. There was a long beam on top of Martha and one end of it had landed on top of me, but I didn't feel it.
Is
this what they mean when they say people are in shock?
I wondered.

"Hold on, honey, we'll help you." It was the man with the eye patch, Leonard Richardson.

"They need help more than I do." I pointed at Martha and Jenny, though it hurt to talk.

It took only a few minutes for them to remove the beam and to see that Martha had a gash in her side from landing on the chain. She was crying hysterically because she thought she had killed her sister.

"No," Richardson told her. "That's what killed her."

The twelve-pound ball had gone right through Jenny's body. There was more blood coming out of Martha than any one person had the right to have. Richardson and some others had bandages now and were attempting to stanch it. After they had bound Martha's side, she sat half up and asked for her sisters. "Where's Mary?" she asked. "Where's Fanny?"

"Being taken care of, ma'am," Richardson told her.

But when I looked him in the eye, I could see he was lying. At least one of them was dead.

"Where are you taking her?" I asked. "You must let me know. She's my brother's promised."

"Don't worry, you're going with her." He bandaged my head, which was badly gashed, and gave me laudanum and water. My left arm was fractured, too. "I'm known in town as Richardson, but my real name is Jack Andrews. I'm a spy for Quantrill." He said it quietly.

My head was muddled. I kept going in and out of consciousness. "Why does everybody have two names?" I asked. "And why does everybody spy for Quantrill?"

He gave me some kind of an answer, but I could make no sense of it. They were putting Martha on a stretcher now, and he explained that they were taking us to a special ward at the army hospital at Fort Leavenworth.

"No one will know where to find us," I said, crying at the same time.

"Remember who you're talking to. Seth will know. Now be good and brave so I can tell him."

"Seth doesn't love me anymore." Thank heaven that I was babbling, because he put it down to a fever.

"Tell that to somebody who doesn't know him. Didn't he offer five Yankees for your release? Come now, let the potion do its work. Don't fight it."

All I could see now through my tears as they carried my stretcher to the waiting ambulance were faces peering down at me and women clucking and shaking their heads and murmuring, "Why, they're just children. Since when do we Yankees go to war against children?"

"Somebody said most of them got killed when the building fell," a man was saying.

"Dear God," from another man. "There will have to be some investigation into why this building fell. Answers must be had."

They lifted my stretcher into the back of the ambulance. Every turn of it, every bump, sent me into agony. "Martha," I cried, "where is Martha?"

"You're a good girl for looking out for your brother's intended," Jack Andrews said. "We're putting her right beside you. I'm riding along. And at the hospital I'll make sure you two are together."

"Who's going to tell Seth?"

He winked at me. "It's all been taken care of," he said.

F
ORT
L
EAVENWORTH
was to the north, they said, but it could have been in heaven for all I knew right then. And I don't know how long it took us to get there. The rocking, horse-drawn ambulance could have been a sweet chariot carrying me home, I was so near unconscious from the laudanum. Next to me on her stretcher, Martha slept and moaned. I reached over and took her hand. I minded that she must be in a very bad state. Would she die? What would Seth do if she did? I knew how smitten he was with her.

With my free hand I hugged Charity McCorkle Kerr's rag doll. Somebody had said Charity was dead. I wondered how many girls had died, and I wondered how I had managed to live.

Sue Mundy, that's how. I hated being beholden to her, but I was.

What with all the rocking and the low talk of the men on horseback outside and my occasional glimpse of the stars in the sky, I fell asleep. I didn't want to do that. Somebody had to stay awake to give them what for if they took us to another prison.

I didn't wake up through all the rest of it, through them carrying us into the hospital and up to the second floor, the floor allotted for "the girls belonging to Quantrill." I slept through the doctor who examined us and fixed our wounds and the sentries who opened the gates in the first place. Sadly, there were only about four other girls besides us who made it.

When I did wake, I saw we were in total darkness, with the exception of one candle burning on a nightstand at the foot of my bed. Someone was talking in a low voice.

"The father will be here in a few minutes."