Widow of Gettysburg (27 page)

“He had a son in battle.”

“And lucky for the
Times
, he died there. Apparently had to amputate his own leg with a penknife first!” Boris picked up the
Times
with a flourish and began reading: “‘How can I write the history of a battle when my eyes are immovably fastened upon a central figure of transcendently absorbing interest—the dead body of my oldest born son, caused by a shell in a position where the battery he commanded should never been sent, and abandoned to die in a building where surgeons dared not to stay?’” Boris peered over the top of the paper. “Beat that.”

“Beat it!” Harrison was out of his chair now, pacing in the cramped, smoky office. “He lost his son! I can’t ‘beat’ that. I’m not writing about the dead. I’ve had enough dead to last me a lifetime.”

“Then what in the Sam Hill will you write about? What you gave me tonight won’t sell papers.”

“But it’s a story that needs to be told. Not all the glory should go to the dead. So much is required of the living, and so much of that from civilians, women and children!”

Boris leaned back in his chair and threw his feet up on the desktop with a clunk, cigar smoke swirling around his head. “I’ll make you a deal. You write me a Gettysburg battle story that sells papers, and I’ll print
your little story about the sacrificing civilians.”

“And then I’m off battles all together. Until I’m ready again. I need a change of pace.”

And scenery.
Harrison crossed to the window and looked past the classical façade of Girard’s National Bank across the street, until his gaze rested on the spire of Independence Hall, just two blocks beyond it. Birthplace of the Declaration of Independence and home of the famous Liberty Bell.

“Funny, isn’t it?” Harrison mused aloud. “Both North and South point to our revolutionary founding fathers to justify their points of view. But it was Northern abolitionists who made the State House bell their icon, renaming it the Liberty Bell for its inscription.” Growing up in Philadelphia, Harrison knew it well: PROCLAIM LIBERTY THROUGHOUT ALL THE LAND UNTO ALL THE INHABITANTS THEREOF. LEVITICUS XXV X.

Boris heaved a sigh. “States rights. Slavery. Either way, it’s all about liberty. But enough about that.” He waved a hand, swirling the smoke above his head. “What kind of story did you have in mind next? After your Gettysburg articles, that is.”

The Liberty Bell Harrison pictured in his mind dissolved as he thought of Liberty Holloway. And Bella.

He was on to something. If he could just connect the pieces of the puzzle… “Fanny Kemble’s journal.”

“A book review?” Boris scoffed. “Too late, already done.”

“No, to follow up what happened next. What happened to the slaves she mentions in the journal? Where are they now?”

Boris chewed on the end of his cigar for a moment. “Do you have a lead?”

“I believe I do. Right here in Pennsylvania.”

“If you can deliver a story like that, Caldwell, you’ll make us both rich.”

Not to mention famous.

In his dream, Silas Ford was whole again, riding a horse bareback through the wooded hills of Tennessee, his father on his own horse beside him. Sunshine spilled through towering hemlocks, splashing his skin with warmth, infusing him with joy. Then his father’s horse veered off the trail. Silas chased after him, but found only darkness. A jackal latched on to his right leg and—

“Johnny. Can you hear me? Johnny.”

Silas awoke with a start and sat up on the barn floor, half-expecting to see a wild animal on his leg.

But there was no leg at all. Only pain. He reached past the stump of his right thigh and waved his hand through the air where his leg should have been. Silas grimaced, felt his face pull tight over his teeth as pain bit the leg that wasn’t there, tore at it, chewed on it, stabbed it with a red hot poker. He squeezed his eyes shut, felt the warmth of a hand on his back.

“Do you need morphia?”

He could barely breathe, let alone answer Liberty. He felt her presence, hovering over him, watching his mute agony, his shoulders hunched over his butchered leg. He wanted no audience.

“Breathe, Johnny.”

He had not realized he held his breath. He concentrated on breathing in, breathing out. In. Out.

The invisible jackal clamped down his absent calf again, and Silas gripped the end of his stump, sending fiery darts shooting up the short distance to his hip. It was like having a nail driven into his palm and only being able to hold his wrist instead.
Useless!
Panic bloomed in his veins, swelled in his chest.

“Where is the pain? At the bottom of the stump, or is it higher? Please, tell me if you can, Johnny, we must know if there is some infection further up.”

“Don’t touch me.” He gasped out the words, tasting their bitterness as they left his mouth.

“I’m trying to help.”

He didn’t look at her. He wished she would not look at him. The muscles in his jaw bunched as he clenched his teeth against the pain.

The pain is in the air near my stump.
If he told her the truth, she would think he was crazy. He almost believed it himself.

The pain seeped away now, until he could stand to open his eyes.

Liberty was still there, striped with sunlight that fell through the barn planks. “I came to see if you’d like soft bread and beef tea, compliments of the Christian Commission. But you seem like you need the doctor.” A warm breeze played with the curls that had escaped her snood, and carried with it the smell of fresh bread and chloride of lime. Someone was disinfecting the property.

“I’m not hungry.”

“You must eat.” She sat on her heels next to him on the straw-covered floor.

“I have no appetite.”
For anything.
Silas turned his head away and stared at a row of abbreviated men, asleep.

“Please, Johnny.”

Why wouldn’t she leave?

“Tell me what you want me to do. I’ll help you however I can. May I see your—bandages?”

“I don’t want your help. You’ve done enough.” He glanced at her face and saw that the words he’d flung at her had hit their mark, embedded themselves like shrapnel in her heart.

Her face hardened as she looked down at the rejected offering in her hands. But still, she would not leave.

Pain sharpened his tongue and he thrust again. “You told me that you’ve always felt so guilty for not seeing your husband after you heard he’d been injured.”

She raised glittering blue eyes to his. Nodded.

“But who asked you to come?”

“The nurse wrote to me and—”

“Exactly. It was the nurse. Not your husband. He didn’t want to see you. He didn’t want
you
to see
him.
Did you ever consider that you were doing him a favor by staying away?”

“How do you know that? Why would you say such a thing?” Lines deepened in her forehead. Her chin trembled.

His heart galloped in his chest as he twisted his weapon in her heart. “Because I don’t want to see you. Do me a favor, Liberty, and stay away.” Truly, it was for the best.

His words grew blades, dug into her, slicing away the illusion that he would be grateful for her help, for life itself, and that they could get past this nightmare together. The joy that had surged when she realized he would survive the operation drained away now, with the idea that perhaps he had not wanted to. Or perhaps, it was just her that he no longer wanted.

Tears threatening to spill down her cheeks, Liberty studied his face. His jaw was set, but his eyes glistened, and the end of his nose was pink with emotion. He could not mean what he said, truly, could he?

“I found your letter, Johnny. It was in your clothes.”

He looked up at her, and she read a dozen questions in his eyes. “Then you know,” he said. “You know everything.”

“I do.” Her lips flattened as she watched him, waiting for more of a reaction.

None came. Until, “Then why are you still calling me Johnny?”

That was all he had to say?
She cleared her throat. “I know it isn’t your given name, but it’s what you asked me to call you. It seems to fit somehow.”

He laughed through his nose, a single short puff of air. “I thought you’d be upset, considering where your loyalties lie.”

Liberty had been loyal to Levi for long enough. “Do you remember what you said to me when we first met? There’s so much more to life than death.”

“Yes. Like convalescence.” He looked at his stump, and she winced.

“Please don’t be angry.” Her voice hitched. She had not considered, in her rush to save his life, that he might not forgive her for the loss of his leg.

Johnny sighed, rubbed a hand over his face. “Forgive me for not hopping around on one leg, full of joy at my current situation.”

“Miss Liberty.” Bella stood in the barn door.

“Coming!” She turned back to Johnny. “I need to go. Should I bring back some morphia?”

“Don’t come back.” Bitterness sizzled between them. “Send it with someone else. I want another nurse.”

Anger knotted her face. “
Who
, Johnny? Who? Whether you like it or not, I’m all you’ve got right now, besides Bella cooking and two doctors tending more than five hundred patients. If you want a nurse at all, you’re going to have to get used to the fact that it’s got to be me.”

“I don’t want you.”

“I thought you did.”

He looked away.

Liberty left without another word, Johnny’s silent response still pulsing in her ears.

The ride into Gettysburg was perfectly desolate, like a scene out of Dante’s
Inferno.
Liberty was grateful for Bella’s presence beside her on the buckboard wagon. They made the journey in silence, save for the whinny of Dr. O’Leary’s horse.

Fields once green were trampled brown and turned to marsh by the recent rains. On either side of the miry road, dead horses bloated to twice their size. Bodies began to rise from their shallow graves, uncovered by wind and rain. Fences gone, cows, pigs, sheep, goats, and chickens
alike freely roamed the countryside, routing in the mounds of freshly turned earth.

The debris of battle mingled among the dead: broken gun carriages, muskets, bayonets, swords, canteens, cartridge boxes, like a strange and terrible crop. Not a single vulture circled overhead, but blankets of green flies had descended like a plague.

The odor in the countryside was nothing compared to the stink of the town. Without freely sweeping wind to clear it, the air in Gettysburg pulsed with stench. Liberty and Bella covered their noses as they rode toward the Sanitary Commission headquarters at the Fahnestock Brothers Store in The Diamond. People walked about with bottles of pennyroyal or peppermint oil beneath their noses, and kept their windows closed despite the sweltering July heat. White picket fences were perforated with balls, wooden shutters were riddled with bullet holes, brick homes spotted with the blue of lead.

Women on hands and knees scrubbed the pavement in front of their doors while others threw chloride of lime in the streets. Liberty lost track of how many yellow flags were thrust out of windows of private homes and public buildings, signaling they had been turned into hospitals. The white cornettes of visiting Sisters of Charity flapped like angels wings about their heads as they carried supplies through the streets. Regimental bands played lively tunes outside buildings crammed with wounded to drown out the cries from within.

It didn’t work.

Embalming parlors, never before seen in Gettysburg, sprouted suddenly along the main roads. One sign advertised full-service rates: $15 for embalming, $5 for a coffin, $24 for express shipment to home state. A preserved corpse stood upright in a coffin outside one parlor as proof of what the embalmer could accomplish.
Ghastly.

The Sanitary Commission headquarters was an oasis of supplies for a town in grave need. Liberty recognized many of the citizens waiting in line, and imagined they were just as hungry and desperate as she was. After waiting their turn, Liberty and Bella told a Commission
agent their names and location of their hospital. A round-faced young woman, blonde hair misbehaving in its disheveled bun, sat on a barrel next to the brick wall of the store, and watched. A worn carpet bag slouched at her feet, half-hidden by her green and tan gingham work dress.