I Shall Be Near to You(22)

‘You mean just ’til we get orders,’ Henry says.

‘I’m enlisted,’ I say, and stare at Henry. ‘I ain’t going home.’

‘Rosetta—you hush for once!’ Jeremiah’s hiss almost knocks the wind out of me.

Sully says, ‘You ain’t kidding?’ and Jimmy keeps his head down, like his feet are something special to see.

‘Is that the most fool-headed plan you ever heard?’ Henry asks, looking at Sully and Jimmy.

‘Pretty much,’ Sully says.

‘Well, it ain’t my plan!’ Jeremiah yells. ‘But it’s what happened.’

‘You think you’re going to be a soldier?’ Henry turns on me.

‘Being a soldier don’t seem so tough,’ I say, straightening up. ‘I already marched with you and nobody thought a thing about it.’

‘Jeremiah—you agreed to this? It ain’t right!’ Henry says.

‘It look like I got another choice?’ Jeremiah says, throwing his hands up.

‘The other choice is you send her home!’ Henry says, like I ain’t even standing there.

‘I ain’t going. Captain Chalmers has got his wife with him,’ I say.

‘Maybe you ain’t noticed, but she’s wearing a dress!’ Henry practically shouts.

Jeremiah clears his throat, his face looking pained. ‘Ross is staying. If that don’t suit you, maybe you’d best find another tent.’

There is a long silence. The boys look at each other and then Jimmy shrugs, shaking a crick out of his back, and smiles at me and shoves his hands into his pockets. When Sully sees Jimmy’s smile, he throws the stick he’s been holding into the fire, making a spray of sparks.

‘I’ll find myself another tent,’ Sully says, and my stomach drops, thinking I am breaking the boys apart and that ain’t what I meant to do at all.

‘If that’s how you feel, I ain’t stopping you,’ Jeremiah says.

‘I sure as hell ain’t sharing a four-person tent with no newlyweds,’ Sully says low, and then he shoves himself off the crate and toward the aisle.

‘Damn it!’ Jeremiah shoves the crate that was Sully’s and then sinks down onto it without even offering me a place to sit. ‘Lord knows it’s madness,’ he mutters.

‘Madness don’t even begin to cover it.’ Henry shakes his head, looking straight ahead, past me.

I forgot to take any of them to mind, to think how Sully can’t hardly keep his mouth shut, and how Henry gets meaner every year since his Pa up and left, and how the three of them could get me sent home just as easy as Jeremiah can.


NEXT MORNING, I am up before the sun even starts creeping over the hills because I’ve got to be, because I barely slept the whole night for fretting. That and sleeping on the hard ground, Jeremiah’s back to me and the cold seeping through my blanket. Jeremiah is still breathing deep and slow next to me, but now his arm’s across my belly, his mouth curved into what almost looks like a smile, now that he is too sunk in sleep to remember to be mad. I can’t help myself, I turn to him and kiss his cheek.

‘Mmmmm,’ he says, not moving a bit.

Jimmy and Henry are two lumps under their blankets. I wriggle out from under Jeremiah’s arm and our covers, bending to keep from touching the roof of our tent. I want to stay under the scratchy wool, in the heat coming off Jeremiah, but there ain’t any other way to get my business done.

My breath comes in puffs and my teeth are chattering before I even find the tent flap in the mostly dark, trying to stay quiet so I don’t wake the boys. The ties on that flap ain’t easy to undo, but before long I am out in the morning frost, sucking in the clean air. It don’t matter it’s cold; after a night under mildewy canvas anything fresh is a blessing. Down the wide aisle between our row of tents and the next, it looks like these boys have been living here for weeks with the lanterns and crates and knapsacks left lying about. In the dim light there ain’t another soul stirring, but the snoring and coughing of men sleeping comes through the tent walls and I hope Jeremiah has the sense to pull our blankets apart when he gets up.

The camp has got one big long latrine trough dug off a ways, but that don’t stop the bitter smell of piss from reaching all the way to the tents. There is burlap strung up to make a wall shading the trough from sight, but I can’t be using that, and anyhow it is more foul than even the old school privy. Heading away from the main camp, I weave through the trees and down into the woods. The ground crunches beneath my feet until I find cover enough for my private business.

When I get back near our row of tents, there is a man still keeping farm time, dragging a wet comb through his thinning hair before getting to the day’s work. He is wearing the homespun clothes and leather skin of a farmer. He don’t say a thing, just looks and nods at me. I don’t trust my voice to ask his name, so I nod back. There’s other boys stirring now too. The wiry foul-mouthed millworker pushes out of his tent right in front of me, rubbing his hands across the stubble on his face. He says, ‘Cold as a witch’s tit, ain’t it?’

All the times the boys used words like that around me, they sucked their lips in and made like my ears might bleed, and for a second, I don’t think he’s talking to me. Then I see there ain’t no one else close.