He turned to Bebe and took her hand. “I’ve asked your father for your hand in marriage.”
“Yes, I know. I was eavesdropping.”
“Did I do something wrong that your father didn’t answer my question?”
“No, he always takes a long time to pray. That’s just Papa’s way.”
“Then if he agrees, will you marry me? Please say yes, sweet Beatrice.”
“Are . . . are you sure you want
me
? Your family is so wealthy and . . . and I don’t know anything about your way of life—”
“My life will be empty and pointless without you. Please say yes . . . please!” He dropped to his knee like a prince in a fairy tale, leaving Bebe breathless.
Could she really live the life of a wealthy, genteel woman? She owned only one good dress. The rest were work clothes that were stained and tattered. She needed to confess her ignorance and tell him who she really was. But as Bebe gazed into Horatio’s eager, expectant face, she realized that if she could transform herself into a boy during the war and learn to do a man’s work, why not transform herself into the woman he thought she was? Anything was better than saying good-bye to him and never seeing him again and living her life without him. If the river of life was going to carry her into marriage and motherhood next, why not choose her own vessel and chart her own course?
“I don’t care what my father’s answer is, Horatio. My answer is yes! Yes, I will marry you!”
“Oh, Beatrice . . .”
Happiness filled his eyes as he gazed at her. He was speechless for the first time since she’d met him. Then he scrambled to his feet and pulled her into his arms to hold her tightly.
By the time Grandma Bebe and I arrived home from the reunion of the Grand Army of the Republic that Decoration Day, I had a better understanding of what she’d meant when she said that I was here because of my uncle Franklin. But at the same time, I was left with the unsettling feeling that life resembled a game of chance more than a river, and that we were all at the mercy of a heavenly game master. I existed because of the random firing of a minie ball that just happened to strike Great-Uncle Franklin’s leg at the same moment that another one struck Grandfather Horatio in the foot.
The minie balls might explain why I was here on earth, but why was I
here
, in this jail cell, some fifty years later?
I rose from the rusty cot to stretch and yawn. My night’s sleep had been anything but restful. I paced from one end of the cell to the other for a few minutes, then lay down again. I couldn’t help worrying about Grandma Bebe. I loved her so much—and her heart was going to break in two when she found out what I had done.
I heard footsteps in the hallway outside my cell. It was lunchtime, so I figured someone must be bringing me a meal. I sat up, then groaned aloud when I saw Tommy O’Reilly stop outside my cell door. He balanced a tray on one of his brawny hands and fumbled with a ring of keys with the other hand as he tried to unlock the door.
“You can take back the food,” I told Tommy. “I’m not hungry.” It wasn’t true. I was starved. But I thought I should maintain an aggrieved attitude for a while longer.
“Nonsense,” Tommy said. That’s what he’d said last night, too, when I’d tried to explain what I was doing driving a carful of bootleg hooch.
Tommy finally managed to unlock the cell door. He took a step inside, glancing around for a place to set down the tray before deciding on the floor. It was the only place he could put it other than the bed, and since I was sitting with my legs crossed and my arms folded in a posture of defiance, I didn’t blame him for not venturing any closer. Lunch consisted of a cup of coffee, a slice of buttered bread, a bowl of soup—it smelled like vegetable beef— and a dish of pudding. Tapioca. My favorite. It was going to be hard to resist.
“Don’t you want to call someone to come down and bail you out, Harriet?”
I heaved a bored sigh. “As I explained to you last night, Tommy
,
there is no one I can call. Besides, the liquor wasn’t mine. I don’t understand why you don’t believe me.”
He looked down, and I had the wild thought that he was staring at his shins, which had received their fair share of kicks from me over the years. The kicks had all been well deserved, I might add, but they had done nothing to endear me to Tommy O’Reilly. He probably thought it would serve me right if I spent the rest of my life in jail.
“Well,” he finally replied, “the evidence against you says otherwise, Harriet.” His voice was soft and a little sorrowful, I thought. “As an officer of the law, I’m obliged to make assumptions based on the evidence, which in your case was a load of bootleg liquor. It’ll be up to a judge to determine your guilt or innocence.”
“Oh, I’m quite sure the judge will find me innocent, once the facts are known.”
“Maybe so, but why sit here starving in the meantime? In fact, why sit here at all?” he asked with a shrug. “You’re entitled to a phone call, you know.”
I looked at him in amazement. From all outward appearances, Tommy looked . . . well . . . sympathetic! It must be a trick. He probably thought he could wheedle a confession out of me if he smiled his wide Irish grin and pretended to be nice. Tommy had grown into a fine-looking man, filling out every inch of his policeman’s uniform. He’d been blessed with classic Irish good looks: dark, straight hair that fell into his brilliant blue eyes, and shoulders that were broad and strong enough to rescue innumerable damsels in distress. Any other woman might have swooned when he grinned at her the way he was grinning at me, but Tommy O’Reilly and I had a long, checkered history. My heart fluttered only a little.
“I’m sure there must be someone who’s getting worried about you by now,” he continued. “Someone who’s wondering why you didn’t come home last night.”
I shrugged. My personal life was none of Tommy’s business.
“I really hate to see you like this, Harriet.”
I sighed again and lay down on the bunk, crossing my ankles and folding my hands behind my head. “Don’t you have work to do, Tommy? Aren’t there laws in this town that need to be upheld?”
He stared at me for a long moment before walking away, locking the cell door behind him.
My thoughts drifted back to my grandmother. She was going to be so disappointed in me after all her work for the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, wielding hatchets and closing down saloons. She had been gloriously triumphant when the Prohibition Amendment had passed a few months ago and might have celebrated with a glass of champagne if she hadn’t taken The Pledge years earlier.
I knew full well why she had become involved in the Temperance Union. I groaned and pulled the pillow over my head, wishing I could hide in jail forever.
On her wedding night, Grandma Bebe nearly died of fright. One moment she was sleeping peacefully beside Horatio Garner, nestled in the warm, safe curve of his body, and the next moment a piercing cry startled the life right out of her. She leaped out of bed, terrified, ready to run, and saw that the anguished cries were coming from her new husband. She grabbed his shoulders and shook him.
“Horatio! Horatio, wake up!” His eyes shot open. He stared at her as if at a stranger. “Horatio, it’s me . . . your . . . your wife . . .” When Bebe’s heart slowed again and she was able to catch her breath, she sat down beside him on the bed and gathered him into her arms.
“Oh, Horatio . . . what is it? What’s wrong?”
“I’m so sorry. I should have warned you . . . but sometimes . . . sometimes I have nightmares. They are always about the war. I dream about all the things I’ve seen . . . I thought they might go away in time, but . . . but they haven’t.”
Bebe rocked him in her arms and felt a tremor course through his body, shaking the bed. She wondered if it would help to light a lamp in the unfamiliar hotel room, but he was clinging to her like a drowning man in a flood.
“When my brothers and I used to have bad dreams,” she told him, “my mother always made us talk about them. It seemed like the nightmares lost their power once we spoke them out loud. Maybe if you told me—”
“No, Beatrice,” he said with a shudder. “You don’t want me to describe the things I dream about.”
“Yes I do. I think it will help. Please?” He didn’t reply. She squirmed out of his embrace and stood to light a lamp, then coaxed Horatio to sit propped against the pillows. She sat cross-legged on the bed facing him, waiting.
“It isn’t really a dream,” he finally said, “because I’m remembering things that really happened. It’s like . . . like I’m reliving the war all over again. Tonight I was back in Virginia, fighting outside of Richmond.” He shivered, hugging himself as if to ward off a chill. Bebe longed to take him in her arms again but was afraid he would stop talking if she did.
“We had fought a hard battle two days earlier . . . and lost nearly two thousand men. Now the Rebels were entrenched behind earthworks at the top of a rise. We all knew there was going to be another slaughter when we tried to take that hill, so the night before the battle, some of the men sewed tags in their clothes with their names and addresses printed on them. That way people would know whose body was whose after the Rebs shot us all to pieces.
“And that’s just what happened the next morning. It was a slaughter. The generals kept sending our men up that stupid hill . . . charging forward in nice, neat rows . . . and the Rebels kept mowing us down like a field of wheat. As fast as one row of men would fall, we’d send up the next batch. Our commanding officers were asking us to commit suicide!”
His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed a knot of emotion. His voice didn’t sound like his own, and Bebe realized that it was the first time she’d ever heard him speak plainly, without all of his flowery words and inflections.
“I was so scared as I waited for my turn,” he continued, “that I could hardly stand up for shaking. It seemed like a terrible waste to me, and I didn’t want to go. But people were determined to shoot me either way. If I sat down and refused to obey orders or ran off like a coward, the Yanks would put me up before a firing squad. And if I charged up that hill like they were telling me to do, I would face Johnny Reb’s firing squad. No matter which course I chose, I was a dead man. So you know what I did? I got out a nickel and flipped it in the air. Heads, I would die by a Yankee bullet, tails by a Rebel one.”
“It must have come up tails,” Bebe said quietly.
“It did. So I started reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Everyone was reciting it. A lot of us were vomiting our guts out, too. I was all set to die, like I’d been ordered to do. But just before my turn came, they stopped the slaughter. Someone finally saw the senselessness of it, I guess. I heard later on that when General Grant ordered another attack, his officers refused. I don’t know if that’s true.
“But even though the shooting stopped, our wounded men were lying out on that hill, pinned down. You could hear them begging for help, moaning and weeping and dying—all day and all that night. I tell you I cried like a baby for those men. Some of them were my friends. Except for the grace of God, it might have been me.”
He swallowed again and drew a ragged breath. “They say that seven thousand men died that day in less than an hour.
Seven thousand
, Bebe! And I watched it all happen. It’s something I’ll never forget. And now . . . well, my body may have survived, but my nerves were shot all to pieces that day. Sometimes . . . sometimes I think I would have been better off if I had—”
“Don’t say it, Horatio! Please!” Bebe scrambled forward to hold him in her arms again, gripping him tightly as if trying to squeeze her own strength into him. “Don’t you ever dare to say such a terrible thing.” The tremor that ran through his body was like the rumbling Bebe felt when riding the train.
“You know how much longer we had to keep on killing each other after that battle near Cold Harbor? Ten more months! I felt like a condemned man on death row all that time, following those generals around Virginia as they sacrificed us like so many sheep just to win some little piece of worthless land or a burned-down town. I was one of the walking dead, waiting for my turn to go down into the grave.”
Bebe looked into his eyes and brushed his damp hair from his forehead. “But you didn’t die, and it wasn’t a useless sacrifice. You kept our country united and you won freedom for millions of slaves.”
“Well, why couldn’t they have settled those issues like gentlemen? Isn’t that what governments are for? War is a horrible way to decide an argument, Bebe. You saw the aftermath of it when you visited the army hospital.” He released her and fought free of the covers to climb out of bed.
“Where are you going, Horatio? Can I get you something?”
“Stay in bed, dear one. I’ll get it myself.” He crossed the room to retrieve his small traveling case and set it on top of the dresser to open it. Strapped inside were four glass decanters of golden liquid and two sturdy glasses.
“What is that?” she asked.
“A little something to calm my nerves.” His hand shook as he poured a generous amount into one of the glasses and carried it over to her, sitting beside her on the bed. The smell of it made Bebe’s eyes water. “Would you like some?” he asked.
“Is it liquor?”
“It’s the only thing that helps chase away the ghosts.”
She pushed the glass away. “No, thank you. My parents never allowed alcohol in our home. Reverend Webster always preached against strong drink.”
Horatio drained half of the liquid in one gulp. “Well . . . I would hate to wake you up again with another nightmare, beloved Beatrice. This was not at all how I envisioned our first night together, and I am so very sorry for frightening you the way I did. You must know that I would never do anything to hurt you.” He drained the second half and pulled her into his arms. “Do you think you can ever forgive me for the way this night has turned out?”
“Of course. There’s nothing to forgive. You can’t help having nightmares.”
He stroked her hair. “You’re the best thing that has ever happened to me, do you know that? Who would have thought that fighting the war and getting wounded would lead to meeting you?” He kissed her, and she didn’t like the taste of the liquor on his lips. When he pulled away again, he looked at her for a long moment, then rose and crossed the room to the dresser. She thought he was going to put the glass away, but instead he poured another drink. It seemed like a lot.