Widow of Gettysburg (46 page)

“I understand that. But don’t you see the face of your attacker when you look at me? Lt. Holmes said I was the very likeness of him. I need to know if—do you look at me and see tragedy?”

Tears glossed Bella’s eyes. “No, child.” She placed a hand on Liberty’s cheek. “You are my triumph.” She sliced a piece of cake and handed it to Liberty. “Happy birthday, Liberty. You’ve got a lot to celebrate. And so do I.”

Liberty thanked her and bit into the cake, savoring the sweetness as it melted on her tongue. A comfortable silence filled several moments as they ate. Then, “Did you see Abraham? Is he all right?”

Bella swallowed her bite, nodding. “He’ll do fine. Not very seriously injured, and definitely not ready to come home.”

“Did he say anything about being paid?”

“He did. Turns out they offered the colored troops some money, but less than they’re giving the white soldiers by almost half. So they refused to take it.”

“He’s still going to fight? For free?”

“Yes. They’d rather fight for free, as volunteers, than accept half-pay and be seen as hired mercenaries. They mean to hold out until they are paid on equal terms with the white soldiers.”

“Will you be able to hold out, without his income?”

“I mean to try. And what will you do?”

The wind fretted loose tendrils of Liberty’s hair as she looked around. The house would never be an inn now, and the wheat field she meant to sell was now trampled into oblivion. The dead slept beneath the apple trees. “I don’t know. But I know I can’t stay here.”

Whispers followed Liberty wherever she went. “There goes the Widow of Gettysburg,” they said as she swished by in her mourning clothes. She did not care. She mourned no longer for Levi, but for the loss of Silas, wherever he was, and for Gettysburg itself, the town that hemorrhaged innocence. The men who fought and died here, and those who were wounded, or imprisoned. For every man who was lost to death, disease, or injury, Liberty imagined a group of women who mourned—sisters, wife, mother, daughters—until her mind’s eye formed an endless parade of darkly veiled forms on the horizon.

Liberty did not care that Camp Letterman had not asked for her help, had certainly not demanded it of her. She arranged for Major to stay with Bella, pitched a small tent and camped outside the nurses’ quarters anyway. There was nothing for her at home.

This place was nothing like Holloway Farm had been in its hospital days. Skirted by woods on the northeast and southwest, the camp was laid out on a gentle slope, supported by a good spring with all the clean water they could ask for. Five hundred tents were laid out in six long avenues, their great fluttering pairs of white wings brooding peacefully over the eight to ten men inside each tent. When Liberty arrived, there were sixteen hundred patients, half of them Confederate.

A mind-numbing monotony filled Liberty’s days, for which she was grateful. The day she arrived, a line of stretchers a mile and a half long made its slow procession into the camp, and she set about her work at once. She washed agonized faces, combed out matted hair, bandaged slight wounds, and tipped drinks of raspberry vinegar and lemon syrup into parched mouths. She wrote letters to Rebel mothers and Union wives.

Hunger gnawed at her vitals until the new camp kitchen was erected and filled with monstrous stoves and huge caldrons with which to cook thousands of meals. Nurses darted in and out of the Sanitary
Commission and the Christian Commission tents just west of the graveyard and embalmers tent, and then to the general cookhouse, each one eager for the greatest amount of luxuries for her patients.

After the grisly work at the field hospital, Liberty’s duties at Camp Letterman felt more like methodical housekeeping. Beef tea was passed three times a day, stimulants three times, and extra diet three times—making nine visits which each woman nurse made a day to each of the two hundred men under her charge. This was done besides washing the faces and combing the hair of those who were still unable to perform these services for themselves, preparing the extra drinks ordered by the surgeons, and seeing that the bedding and clothing of every man was kept clean by the men nurses.

Liberty’s feet swelled in her shoes, and when she removed them, found the skin rubbed off her toes. She felt immune to the pain of physical exertion, but when women came looking for their loved ones, her heart was cut to the quick.

There was no time for leisure at Camp Letterman, and no room for selfish regrets. From waking till sleeping, Liberty’s day was spent in the service of others, from both North and South. If she was lucky, her slumber would be dreamless.

As long as Camp Letterman remained open, she would not go back to Holloway Farm.

Against her will, a lump formed in Liberty’s throat as soon as she spotted them. Two bedraggled women and two small children poked their heads in every tent on their way down the lane, looking lost and forlorn. By the time they got to Liberty, their errand was no secret.

“Hello.” The younger of the two women spoke first. “My name is Carrie Daws. This is my mother-in-law, Betty, and my daughter Virginia
and son Samuel. We received a letter from a Liberty Holloway that my husband was here.”

“Jeremiah Daws?” A Virginia man.

“Yes!”

“But how did you get through the picket lines?”

Betty and Carrie exchanged a glance. “We took the Oath of Allegiance to the Union.” Carrie twisted her hands together. “It was the only way. My father-in-law turned back, but I would have said anything to be able to see Jeremiah again.”

Liberty nodded. Thank God Jeremiah was not dead yet. There had been too many near misses, each one heartrending. “I’m Liberty. I’m so pleased to see you.”

“Is he—” Betty covered her trembling mouth with her hand.

“Alive. Follow me, I’ll take you to him.”

Inside the northwest tent of Ward M, Jeremiah lay on his cot, insensible due to the merciful morphine. He had never recovered from the amputation of his arms. Beneath his bandages, gangrene crawled ever farther. Liberty was glad his dressings had just been changed.

“Daddy?” Virginia laid a small hand on his sallow face.

“Does he know we’re here?”

The pleading in Carrie’s eyes sliced through Liberty’s heart. She shook her head. “The morphine keeps him comfortable, but he’s not aware of his surroundings.” She read the sorrow in their faces, and guessed at how much they had endured to arrive here. The travel must have been torturous, and very likely, at least some friends and family would shun them for taking the oath to the North, when their own land was ravaged by the Yankees. And now Jeremiah was so far gone he couldn’t enjoy their comfort.

Dr. Stephens ducked into the tent and seemed to surmise the situation in a single glance. “You are Jeremiah’s family?”

Four heads bobbed.

Dr. Stephens rubbed a hand over his face. “He’s not long for this world, I’m afraid. I can let the morphine wear off so he can recognize
you before he goes, if you like. You may get a conversation with him, albeit brief.”

After a heartbeat’s hesitation, Carrie nodded, and at a gesture from the doctor, she, Betty, and the children sat on the wooden floor of the tent next to his cot, waiting, while the doctor continued his rounds with the other nine patients in the tent.

Liberty left them there, and stepped back out into the sunshine, but did not feel its warmth as her black crepe absorbed it.
How long will it be before Carrie and Betty dye their own clothes black?
she wondered.

The rest of the afternoon passed as usual, and Liberty made her rounds bringing beef tea, milk toast, and reading materials from the Christian Commission to the two hundred patients in her ward. No sight or smell could bother her now.

But when the telltale wails arose from a tent in Ward M, her heart could not help but bleed with tears in empathy.

The sojourners’ mourning filled Liberty’s tent that night, and Liberty slept under the stars. Fresh grief like theirs needed a place to unfurl in relative privacy.

The crisp autumn wind cooled Amelia Sanger’s warm face as she hustled into the Union Refreshment Saloon. The cannon they called Fort Brown had fired minutes ago, signaling another crowd of troops would be arriving shortly. She adored the thirty patients at the hospital—they all called her Mamamelia—but when time allowed, as it did today, she was eager to help slice the beef or bread, or better yet, serve the food onto the plates of the grateful soldiers.

Of course, sometimes, they weren’t soldiers at all, but prisoners on their way to camp, or just released from it, or refugees from the South. All of them had their fill of food and drink here, all of them
were welcome to use the washing center for a shave and a haircut, and as many as possible were given paper, envelopes, and stamps to write home. It was work Amelia believed in. Now if she could only convince her tired feet to keep up with her spirit.

“Good afternoon, Mamamelia!” Amelia’s friend and fellow volunteer Phoebe Bilbow smiled as she tucked her grey hair back into her snood. “Would you like to work the line today?”

“How did you know?” Amelia laughed. She had made sure that everyone knew she loved interacting with the soldiers more than anything else. She probably whined more than most when she was stuck washing dishes in the back.

Tying an apron on over her black bombazine dress, she took her post behind the tray of slightly pink, succulent beef, and inhaled the divine aroma. After a diet of hardtack and desiccated vegetables, fresh beef was always a big hit with the men.

Here they come.
Amelia watched in eager anticipation as the men rushed the line. Oh, these men looked hungry. One after another, she placed a slice of juicy beef on their trays as they went by, and each one thanked her in his own way.

“Fresh beef!”

“Thank you!”

“Oh, I’ve dreamed about this day.”

“Amelia.”

With a slice of beef suspended in the air, Amelia looked up in surprise.

“Amelia Sanger.”

Her metal tongs clattered into the pan of beef as she covered her mouth with her hands. “Silas Ford.” The man Liberty had clothed in Levi’s shirt, who had sat in Levi’s vacant chair. The man Liberty fell in love with, though she never admitted it to anyone.

“Hey, you’re holding up the line, Johnny.”

Silas looked back over his shoulder. “Nope. I’m a Billy now, remember?” He turned back to Amelia and grinned. “Took the Oath of Allegiance. They let me go.”

She hadn’t even known he’d been taken prisoner. Suddenly, Liberty’s silence began to fall into place.
The poor girl.
Amelia fumbled to fish the tongs out of the pan juices. “Please, find a seat. I will join you as soon as everyone has been served.”

For the rest of the line, Amelia’s mind was back at Holloway Farm, reliving the darkness of those battle days, and tasting again a hint of bitterness that Liberty had replaced Levi in her heart. She sighed and reminded herself of all that God had taught her in the last two and a half months. Not the least of which was that Liberty was quite capable of making her own decisions, and should not be held hostage to grief.