Love and War: The Coltrane Saga, Book 1 (59 page)

A twig cracked nearby and Travis automatically reached for his rifle. “It’s me…” The familiar voice of John Wright cut into the silence. “Don’t shoot.”

“Shouldn’t be sneaking around on a night like tonight,” Travis grumbled as the one-eyed man sat down next to him. “Everybody’s on edge.”

“And well they should be with these mountains crawling with Confederates.”

“You don’t like to call them Rebels, do you, John?” Travis said, suddenly aware of this peculiarity.

John snorted. “What’s a ‘Rebel’? A man who rebels against something? Hell, we’re all rebelling against something, aren’t we? But what difference does it make? This time tomorrow we may be lying in a ditch rotting.”

“You sure are a grim man to have around.”

“I feel grim. You heard the news? We’re attacking Bragg at sunrise. He’s dug in along the slopes, and we’ve got him outnumbered, we think, but a lot of us will die. I keep wondering if I’m ready to go.”

“Go where?” Travis laughed, philosophically proclaiming, “Where do any of us go when it’s all over, John? I’ve been sitting here thinking about that very thing. When the last battle is over, where do we wind up? And don’t feed me that bullshit about heaven and hell because I don’t accept it.”

“I reckon I’ve had my doubts at times, too, Coltrane, but I’ll put it to you this way. If there isn’t a heaven or a hell, then what’s the point? I mean, what’s it all about? What difference does it make how we go through life if we wind up at the same place—all of us together. And if that place is no place, then a lot of men wrote a lot of lies a long, long time ago when they wrote that book called the Bible. Can you sit there and say that a man is born and he lives and he dies and then nothing happens? I don’t accept that.”

“Then you believe in God.”

“Man’s got to believe in something, or else why struggle to live? I’d hate mighty bad to think that if I get killed tomorrow when we charge that mountain it’s all over. I have to believe that it would really be the beginning, that somehow God finds me good enough to go on to heaven and be at peace through all eternity.”

Travis pulled out a cheroot and sniffed it. Damp. He threw it away. “Didn’t know you were a religious man, John. I guess I always figured you were a hell-raiser like me with no thought of tomorrow except getting through it.”

“Then you don’t know me very well. Maybe we should have taken more time to get to know each other, seeing as how I’d kind of gotten the notion that you love my little girl.”

Travis’s eyes widened as he stared at the shadowy figure. “Love your little girl…” he sputtered. “Kitty? Now wait a minute. I’ve never loved any woman. Granted she’s beautiful and I was fond of her—but love?”

John ignored his protest. “Kitty believes in God.”

“She does?”

“Yep. We used to sit by the fireside and read from the Bible. We’d talk about God and heaven and living and dying. Kitty’s got spunk, no doubt about that. And she’s got a temper that would try the patience of a parson, but she’s a fine woman.”

“Depends on how you look at it,” Travis snapped defiantly. “Don’t forget, she betrayed me.”

“Sure she did because she believed in something. I can’t blame her. That’s the way I brung her up—to believe in something and stand up for it. She didn’t ask to go with you, boy, you dragged her along, remember? I could’ve told you what she had in mind.” He chuckled. “Kitty’s a cagey one. I pity the man she marries. He’ll have his hands full.”

In more ways than one, Travis thought, a warm wave creeping down into his loins, but he didn’t dare make such a remark. “I imagine she’s married by now, anyway, to that Reb she told me about. She’s probably safe and snug back home in North Carolina waiting for him to come marching home from the war.”

“No. She didn’t marry Nathan.”

Again Travis stared incredulously through the shadows at the one-eyed man sitting beside him in the chill of the night. “How do you know? You haven’t been home. You told me so yourself.”

“Andy got a letter from his mother.”

“You told me Andy found out his mother’s house was burned and she left and went to live with relatives.”

“He found out where she was from a Reb prisoner we took that came from our neck of the woods. Andy let him go in exchange for information from home. Can’t say as I blame him. He can’t exactly go find out what’s going on for himself since everyone knows by now he took an oath to the Union, now can he?”

Travis wasn’t interested at the moment in Andy’s oath of allegiance or his inability to take a furlough and go home. He wanted to hear whatever Andy had heard about Kitty but didn’t want to appear anxious. John would laugh, say he’d been right in accusing him of being in love with his daughter. So he just sat in silence, waiting.

“What’s the name of that mountain up yonder? The one we’re going for in the morning.”

“Somebody said it was called Lookout Mountain. What difference does it make?”

“Well,” he said, not sounding at all worried, “if I die up there I’d kinda like to know where I died.”

“Ask God when you get to heaven,” Travis said sarcastically.

“Well, He’d be able to tell me. He marks the sparrow’s fall, you know.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means that God has things so organized that He knows when even a little sparrow is going to die.”

Silence. Some of the men were stirring about, digging out sow belly and hardtack. They hadn’t had much else in weeks. Food was scarce. Travis’s stomach rumbled. He thought about the hardtack in his own haversack—a six-inch square cracker, not an inch thick, and solid as a board. The damn things had been made in Boston and they had the initials “B.C.” stamped on each one. “Before Christ”, someone had remarked once, “that’s why they’re so goddamned stale. They were made before Jesus was!” They weren’t too bad, though, if they were soaked in cold water overnight and fried in grease the next morning.

He snapped back to the present and John Wright and what news he’d had of Kitty. He wanted desperately to ask but forced himself to be silent.

“I think we might just take that mountain,” John murmured. “I don’t think Bragg’s got that many Confederates up there. And we got the Army of the Potomac and the Army of the Tennessee units—and us! General Thomas’s soldiers are going to be out for blood, too, considering the way both Hooker’s and Sherman’s men been jeering ‘em for more than a month over the shellackin’ they took at Chickamauga, not lettin’ ‘em forget they had to have help to get ‘em out of there.”

“Damn it, Wright, what have you heard about Kitty?” Travis yelled, making some of the soldiers about turn and stare.

He was smiling. In the darkness, Travis couldn’t see his face, but he knew, without a doubt, he was smiling because he had done what he set out to do: proven that Travis cared about his daughter. “Andy got a letter from his mother, like I said. He’d written to her, told her he had changed over to fight for the Union and couldn’t write all those months he was a prisoner.”

“That’s right. Hell, you don’t haul a prisoner around with you and let him write letters all over the countryside telling everyone where he is.”

“Anyway, he told her that Kitty had been held a prisoner with him till she got away. She wrote him back, told him his father hadn’t come back.”

“You never told him about Orville Shaw?”

“No. You said Kitty told you that was Andy’s father your men killed. I never told him. The boy worships you, Travis, looks up to you. True, his pa was a no-good bastard that beat the boy and didn’t do right by none of his family, but he was still his pa and it might make him feel different toward you if he knowed it was you what ordered him shot. Some things is best left unsaid. Anyway, his ma wrote him about being burned out and about my place being burned, too. I’m not surprised at that. I figured they’d get around to it sooner or later, Then she went on to say that Kitty had come home, she’d heard, and the reason she heard about it was because what happened was the talk of the town and her cousin heard about it and wrote her.”

John’s voice had changed pitch, becoming strained, husky; continuing, it appeared, would be difficult. Clearing his throat and taking a deep breath, he plunged on, the words coming rapidly, as if he were anxious to have it out and all said now that he’d gotten started.

“Kitty went home and went to work in the hospital, but one night she was attacked on the street and carried off. Some men were shot and killed. One was taken with her. Somebody who saw them, riding out of town swears it was Luke Tate that had her.”

Travis’s heart was pounding with the flow of angry blood that ripped through his body. Tate! Tate had Kitty! He smacked his fist into the ground again and again, feeling the skin tearing, bleeding, and not caring. Tate had Kitty! Damn it, the son of a bitch had her, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it here in the mountains about to go into battle.

John touched his shoulder. “I know, boy, I’m hurtin’ just like you are. My girl’s been through hell and it don’t look like it’s ever gonna end. And right now, there’s nothing either one of us can do about it. Andy wrote his mother and asked her to get in touch with her cousin and find out everything she could, but that will take a while, the way letters travel so slow these days. It isn’t easy getting a letter out of the South to a Northern outfit, either. It has to go through the underground and that does take right smart time.”

“So in the meantime, we do nothing.” Travis let his breath out. He felt dizzy, not realizing he’d held it so long.

“We try to keep from gettin’ killed so when the time comes we can help Kitty—we’ll be around. But we can pray…”

“Pray?” Travis laughed. “Old man, my prayers wouldn’t get above the tree tops. And I don’t remember ever having prayed in my whole
life
.”

“You don’t have to reach above the tree tops. God will come down here to listen. He moves around quite a bit, I’m told. And there’s always a first time. And if you’re a bit rusty or can’t get started, it’ll come to you. The Lord has a way of taking care of that, too.”

“Why didn’t Andy come to me about this?”

“I don’t think he figured you’d care. We talk a lot, Andy ‘n’ me. He says you two fought a lot and at times he thought you hated each other. Toward the end, just before Kitty left, he said he wasn’t so sure but he didn’t think you wanted to talk about it.”

“And what made
you
think I did?”

“Well, I may not have but one eye, Coltrane, but I see more’n most folks think I do.”

Tate has Kitty—the knowledge burned into Travis’s brain like a thousand branding irons. The son of a bitch had Kitty. Thinking of what he must be doing to her, God, he now wished he had gone on and killed her. Death wou1d have been better than what she was probably being forced to endure! At least he had been gentle. He might have teased her, made her want him, beg for it, but he’d never brutally raped her—and if he did get a bit rough, at the time, she had enjoyed it. He’d made it good to her. However else she might have tricked him, he didn’t think she was putting on an act when he was making love to her.

“Want to get some sleep,” John asked, “or try to find some hot coffee? Though I don’t imagine there’s any to be had with no fires going.”

“No. I can’t sleep and I’m not hungry. I do have one question, though.”

John had started to get up but sat back down. “What is it, son?” The voice was gentle, compassionate, as though he knew Travis shared his anguish and concern over Kitty’s fate.

“Why aren’t you surprised she didn’t marry that Reb?”

“Nathan?” He snorted. “Those two grew up together. Kitty was so damned pretty she could have her pick of the boys, but she wasn’t interested in boys or in growing up to just get married. We used to talk about that a lot when we was out huntin’ or fishin’, and she’d tell me how she didn’t see why a woman had to grow up and get married and have babies just because she happened to be born a woman, and I agreed with her. She felt like a woman should be able to do what she wanted to do with her life, and from the time she was knee-high to a billy goat, she’d toddle after Doc Musgrave, making rounds with him. She could doctor almost as good as he could. She wanted to go away to school, be a nurse, maybe even a doctor. She didn’t hold to sewin’ and tattin’ and doin’ what she called ‘women things’. She wanted to be her own person and I agreed with her all the way.”

John paused to stick a plug of tobacco in his mouth. “Nathan came from a proud, rich family and had his own notions about what a woman was supposed to be. I knew he and Kitty would lock horns sooner or later over her thinking the way she did, but I didn’t discourage him from courtin’ her. I know my girl, and I knew when it came right down to it, she wouldn’t be pushed around—even if she did think she loved him. And it seems I was right. Andy’s momma wrote that Nathan brought her home from Richmond, but they didn’t get married. He went back to the war and she went to work in the hospital at Goldsboro, like I said.”

“And now she’s God-only-knows-where.”

“Kitty can take care of herself.” John sounded as though he believed it. “If it was any other woman, I’d say by now she was whipped, beaten—but not my girl.”

Travis nodded in silent agreement. Kitty would do her best to fight back, try to escape. She would never be beaten into submissiveness.

Not her. He looked in the direction of the dog tent he shared with Sam Bucher. Sam’s musket had been stuck in the ground with bayonet fixed, holding up the half-shelters. His friend wouldn’t be asleep, he knew. He was probably still mumbling and cursing over being ordered to fight on foot with the infantry, but this was the way it had to be. A charge up that mountain couldn’t be made easily on horseback, and besides, they’d had the misfortune of getting their mounts shot out from under them, and horses were scarce.

Get the battle over with quickly, he thought fiercely—and then what? There was no way of knowing where Tate had headed. The war was boiling all around, and he couldn’t take off to look for her anyway. And if he found her—what then? Send her back to North Carolina to treat wounded Rebs and wait for her Reb boyfriend to patch things up and get married? Hell, nothing made sense anymore. He pounded his boot into the ground.