I Shall Be Near to You(86)

I am Ever his,

Rosetta



I don’t know if any of those words are right but there ain’t a thing to make the news better, except news I ain’t ready to share.

I fold that paper up and address the cover. I look at Jeremiah’s letter and wonder what words he might have set down, if he said a thing about me, if he told his Ma and Pa anything of me going home to them.

Maybe come morning, I will put my farm clothes on, Jeremiah’s old clothes, and desert the whole Union Army, walk away from this place, just like I walked away from home. This time I could keep heading West until Nebraska. Even now, I can cover near to twenty miles a day if I walk hard, maybe more if I find farmers willing to take me along in their wagons. Maybe I could make it there before the worst of the Winter weather and get myself settled in time for Spring planting, in time for the baby coming on. I can see it now, raising that baby up inside me and Jeremiah’s dream.

That lonesome wildness whirls about me again, to think of living without Jeremiah, with no kin or family beside me, my whole life stretching out before me. I could do it if it meant living as I have a mind to, being just the way I am with no one to answer for it. But there is not just me and Jeremiah now and I can’t go on living as Ross Stone. That path is gone.


ALL I SEE is blood. Lint soiled with blood. Flannel strips smeared with blood. Bed linens drenched in blood.

I gasp, my eyes flying open.

‘It’s only me,’ Will says, from where he is sitting on his blankets next to the fire, poking at the cinders with a stick.

‘You still got that Bible with you?’ I ask.

‘I do,’ he says.

‘Can you read Ruth to me?’

‘Course,’ he says, bringing his blankets closer to the fire, turning those onionskin pages slow and careful. And then there is his voice, saying words I ain’t heard since home with Papa reading.

Tears start and I wonder what I have done, asking Will to read this, but I don’t stop him. The words wash over me, his voice saying, ‘And Naomi said unto her two daughters in law, Go, return each to her mother’s house: the Lord deal kindly with you, as ye have dealt with the dead.’

I try to think on the words, but I can’t. Home and Mama and Betsy sewing for my wedding get all mixed up with Jeremiah and his hands shaking as he took mine on our wedding day, and our wedding night and how I got the shivers.

But those words cut through my thoughts. ‘And Ruth said, Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee. For whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge. Thy people shall be my people, and thy God, my God. Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried.’

And then I can’t stop the tears from running and I try not to make any noise, but Will stops reading.

‘You’ve got to hear the rest,’ he says.

I don’t know how he can say what I’ve got to hear. I think how Mama wanted these words read to me before my wedding. I can’t tell if it is wrong of me to leave this place or wrong of me to stay.

Will reads, ‘… thou hast left thy father and thy mother, and the land of thy nativity, and art come unto a people which thou knewest not heretofore.’

And the tears keep falling.





CHAPTER

35


The sun is well up when Will drags me out of my blankets, saying, ‘Sergeant asked for volunteers to guard the hospital. I put us forward.’

‘I ain’t good for any of it,’ I moan.

‘We have to find Sully,’ he says, like he knows just what will get me moving.

It is late morning by the time we walk up to a farmhouse, a red H flag flying out in front. It was a good farm before all this, that much is plain. But now there ain’t a thing of farm about it except the house and its wide porch and the whitewashed barn and its weathered gray plank fences with crescent moons chewed into them. Men are all around, spilling out of the house, the open barn doors. Complaining, coughing, crying, sprawling, filling any shade, lying under tents put up quick. The boys outside ain’t the worst ones but they don’t look good. Wounds need tending. Letters need writing. Prayers need saying. The smells of fever sweat and old meat hang over the whole farm. I cover my nose. Boys lie in crooked rows, faces streaked with dirt and gunpowder and blood, lined with pain, eyes wide with fear or closed tight against it. Men too hurt to be hungry. Men too sick to get to the outhouse in time. Black smells. Black thoughts.

I search for a face I know and catch myself looking for one I ain’t ever seeing on Earth again, except maybe in the echo of some other face. I have to stop myself or there ain’t hope for me being useful.

Will is up the stone steps to the house. He walks through the door left open to catch any breeze and I make myself go after him. He turns from the dark hall and its stairs, all of it stained with blood that ain’t ever scrubbing out, and pokes his head into the parlor, moving closer to sounds I don’t want to hear ever again. I’m scared of seeing more hurts I can’t fix. This ain’t the right place for me, but Will is here. I’ve got no one else to follow.

He steps into that parlor, says something. A voice answers. His footsteps move away into another room. Inside it ain’t a proper house no more. The rooms and all the furniture are being used for the wounded. Taking up every bit of floor are boys and men, weeping and moaning worse than the boys outside. In here, surrounded by yellow walls, it is close and hot even with the doors and windows flung open, whatever drapes there were pulled down for bedding or maybe bandages.