I Shall Be Near to You(35)

I find myself walking round to the other side of the parade ground, past Sergeant’s and the other Company officers’ tents, until I get to Captain’s big tent, set way off from the rest, where the stench of the latrines almost don’t reach. At his camp, there’s signs of a woman with too much time on her hands in the fresh-swept dooryard and the dripping washrags even-spaced on the line stretched between two young pines, the water leaving little dimples in the dirt below.

I’m turning to go, my feet ruining the broom’s crosshatching lines, when the tent flaps fly open and Mrs. Chalmers stoops to look through, holding a lantern up, even though it’s only getting on dusk now.

‘Oh! I thought I heard something out here! You startled me! Captain Chalmers isn’t here at the moment. Perhaps I can relay a message?’

‘I—I didn’t come to speak to Captain,’ I say.

‘You didn’t? Well, then what brings you?’ She hangs the lantern on the hook standing outside the tent.

Any made-up reason for coming flies clean out of my head. I ain’t even sure why I’ve come myself. I see how it’s got to be, but before I can turn to go, she ducks inside the tent and comes back with a basket and her arms full of flannel strips.

‘I was rolling bandages. Please. Sit.’ She points to the cleared folding table and chairs in front of the tent and sits down herself.

I look this way and that before saying, ‘Mrs. Chalmers, it ain’t prop—’

‘There isn’t a soul who pays what I do any mind,’ she says, holding a strip of oatmeal-colored flannel out to me. ‘And if anybody starts, well, there isn’t any harm in you helping me on a hospital project to aid our wounded soldiers, is there?’ She smiles at me, tucking a loose strand of auburn hair behind her ear before saying, ‘There, now that’s solved, what brings you here?’

‘I can’t—It ain’t right, you being a married woman, and me being a soldier. And Captain, I don’t want trouble with him.’

She don’t look up from the bandage she’s rolling when she says, ‘That’s the most anybody’s said to me the entire time I have been here, save my husband.’

‘I’ve got to get back before I’m missed.’ I start to push away from the table.

‘Please—’ she says, reaching to grab my arm, and then my heart just stops to see Captain Chalmers standing at the edge of her swept dooryard, watching the two of us. I pull free of Mrs. Chalmers, saluting her husband as I walk by, his eyes on me the whole time.


I COULD KICK myself for getting caught talking with Captain Chalmers’ wife. It is about the stupidest thing I’ve done in my whole life, going and ruining everything, calling attention to myself.

The boys are still playing cards, sitting there like not a thing is different, and that’s because for them nothing is.

Jeremiah turns to me before going back to his cards. That sweet look don’t make me feel better like it ought, it just makes me want to cry.

Edward says, ‘Where you coming from, Little Soldier?’

‘Nowhere,’ I say. ‘Moseying around.’

‘You hear anything new about Yorktown?’ Sully asks.

I can’t even think straight, so I stare at him until he shakes his head.

Will says, ‘At Sunday services we prayed for General McClellan, that he would know how best to storm the city.’

‘You think he could take Yorktown? With the soldiers he’s got? I bet he’ll send for more troops,’ Sully says.

Henry says, ‘McClellan don’t ever do a thing except sit and wait and everybody knows it.’

Hiram spits, ‘At least Grant f*cking wins.’

‘Yeah,’ Edward says, ‘and only thirteen thousand men killed for it at Shiloh.’

Some of the boys laugh, but Thomas is always acting the papa. ‘Ain’t right to laugh at so many soldiers getting killed because some General was too drunk and saw fit to drill instead of make entrenchments.’

Ambrose mutters something about a little drink never hurting anyone and there is a long silence before Jeremiah says, ‘Well, McClellan can’t wait forever!’

I can’t wait forever either. Any minute Captain might send Sergeant to come find me, or maybe some orderly, and they will drag me off for dallying with the Captain’s wife. But I can’t say a thing about it. All I can do is sit like McClellan, listening to the boys talk about war like it is one big adventure, saying they can’t wait to send those Rebels home like they ain’t thinking how some of the soldiers on that battlefield ain’t ever going to leave it again. They talk big but there ain’t one of them that does any real thinking or says even one thing that might be how they really feel. Not even Jeremiah. I don’t dare say a thing about the way they’re pretending to be brave, like their uniforms make them something different than just farm boys in blue coats. If I wasn’t wearing this uniform, I could talk to Mrs. Chalmers any time I please.

It’s like Miss Riggs standing me before the whole class, making me read, ‘Lesson XXXI, On Speaking the Truth: There are many ways of being guilty of a falsehood without uttering the lie direct, in words.’ There ain’t an honest thing about being in this Army, but then that ain’t what I came all this way for.



WHEN THE BOYS finally finish their poker game and we go to our tents, I’m nothing but one big prickly feeling. I can’t lie quiet, and it don’t take but a minute before Jeremiah groans and rolls away from me. ‘What is eating you?’