I Shall Be Near to You(79)

I keep firing. I can’t quit working my rifle. Not even when an artillery horse gets to screaming and galloping across the field, dragging its harness and traces, but then I see I’m wrong and it is tangles of innards. Not even when a line of our men moves forward and every one of them gets cut down by those Reb artillerymen laying canister right in front of them. Not even when the shrapnel flies up into the lines behind them, tearing them to pieces, a whole arm flying up like a bird taking flight only to come flopping right back down.

I fire until my hands burn, the barrel of that rifle is so hot, and then make my way toward the fence, stumbling over the wounded and dead lying there, and maybe it is a marvel I ain’t been shot yet myself. Some of the bodies still have cartridge boxes and using what is there for the taking, I don’t know how many times I shoot. But then jeering starts up from those firing Rebels and our troops are falling back.

The panic hits me that I don’t know where anyone is or even where we came through that corn.

I yell, ‘Jeremiah! Jeremiah!’ and scramble back looking at each boy, only none of them are him. It don’t make any sense how that cornfield got so far away but I can’t even find it now and then I am tripping over the stalks, the cornfield stripped down to nothing. Jeremiah ain’t anywhere. All the worst thoughts spill into my head, but maybe it is just he has already quit the field.

A row of boys lie in the stubble, laid out by canister, their bodies twisted and torn. And then a lightning bolt goes through me. There, sprawled on the ground, is a lanky body, his kepi gone and that shock of hair I would know anywhere.





CHAPTER

27


ANTIETAM: SEPTEMBER 17, 1862

‘Rosetta,’ is all he says when I kneel by him.

‘I am here,’ I say, ‘and you are okay.’

His hand scrabbles across the dirt and I grab it in mine.

‘You are going to be okay,’ I hear myself tell him. ‘You have to be.’

The way I say it must catch his attention because his eyes find mine and they are so blue, bluer than any bluebell.

And then I say the one thing left to be telling, ‘There’s a baby coming and you have to be here. You have to see it.’

His look is raw then, and his breathing goes wrong.

‘Home,’ he says. ‘Home.’

I tell him hush and he don’t say a thing more. I press my ear to his chest, listening for him, for his heart, for his breath but the thundering coming from every direction is too loud. I don’t worry about the blurs of soldiers running past, there is only him, his face, his coat ripped open, his shirt stained with seeping blood, his knapsack and rifle gone. I grab him under the arms and drag him backward, keeping myself bent low, watching his feet bump over the ground. It should be hard, he should be heavy, but he ain’t. The firing boxes us in, and men too, but I don’t care for a thing but getting Jeremiah out of the battle, to where we can’t be seen, to a hospital. I stumble over a body or a hole in the ground or the bent and flattened cornstalks, I don’t even know what because there is Jeremiah’s head bouncing against my knees as we fall.

I get myself right up and out from under him. We are near trees, not in the field we came through, some other place. I shove my arms back under his and now he is like lead and so still but he is just hurt and he is still bleeding, there’s lots of blood seeping from his belly and I’ve got to get us safe. The ground around us shudders as shells land. It is so loud, the whole world going to pieces and hell swallowing us up and hauling us down. I look for the safest thing and drag us behind a rotting log. There is some grass there and dead leaves to make a bed for him. We are clinging to the edge of the woods and maybe the trees will hide us.

I lean into Jeremiah. I try to hear him breathing, to feel it and I can’t but he is all right, this ain’t nothing but Doc Cuck could fix. I pray harder than I’ve ever prayed in my life for it to be safe to try for the hospital or for a stretcher bearer to come find us, but we are too far from our lines and too close to the Rebs for that.

I lie like that a long time, by that log in the dead leaves, Jeremiah’s head pulled against my chest. His dark hair slicked back like on our wedding day, but with sweat this time. I pet his hair like he is a small animal. I rock him. When the fighting swirls back around us, I hug him tight and pray until it swirls away again. And then I say all the nicest things to Jeremiah. I tell him about the size of my love for him and about our farm and everything we promised each other, the woods and cows we’ll have and the fields growing. I tell him about the baby growing inside me, how my pants don’t fit right no more. I trace the muscle in his neck that flutters and tremors. It is a long time before I see that his eyes are open wide, their bright blue turned to dull ice. There are drops on his shirt, and it is not raining so I know they are from me.

I work myself up to sitting when the field goes almost quiet, his head in my lap. The trees crowd out the sky or the sky has gone dark, I don’t know which. The ground is quaggy with leaves, mud, manure, blood. Sometimes other men move past us, hobbling farther into the woods. We are there so long, the cannonading has stopped. The rifles have stopped except for way off in the distance. Only the screaming is like before. It has turned to a field of the wounded and the dead and ain’t none of them quiet. The wounded shriek and cry, and the dead hiss and pop. Except for Jeremiah. He is quiet because I said so, because I said hush.