She stepped back, adding, “You can come round after dark. Sarah and me, we’ll leave the bucket on the porch when it’s safe. If you sneak in and don’t see that bucket? You skedaddle right back up the creek.”
Billy rocked his jaw, nodded, and led Clyde into his stall before pitching out hay. Sarah had just about finished with Swat, unbuckling his bridle and lead rope. “We got time though, don’t we? I mean, Billy don’t have to go tonight?”
“Morning will be good,” Maw agreed. “But just in case, we’ll leave a pack by the back door. Should any soldiers show up, Sarah, you and I will occupy them while Billy sneaks out the back and through the pines. But by dawn tomorrow, I want the stock and what grain we’ve got left off this property and hidden.”
Billy nodded. But it seemed that the world was turned on its head. It didn’t seem right that the women were at less risk than he was.
12
February 18, 1862
Doc kept hearing the complaints from his fellow Southerners that Island No. 10, sitting as it did in the middle of the Mississippi River, was the coldest place on earth. He had arrived but three days past, accompanied by four other young men—boys, if the truth be known—dedicated to enlisting in Neely’s Fourth Tennessee Infantry.
They had traveled north from Memphis after he had seen to the closing of Benjamin’s surgery, and the dispersion of its assets for Mrs. Morton. And yes, Isaac Kirtland had made good on his offer. Felicia had been paid handsomely in newly printed Confederate dollars, all of which had been deposited in Isaac’s bank.
The first thing Doc had done was to look up young James Morton to give him his mother’s and sister’s regards, love, and best wishes. Both the chestnut-haired Morton, and the strapping redheaded Nathanial Nelson served as privates in the Shelby Grays.
James had greeted Doc with a wild hug, his green eyes alight, and so reminiscent of Ann Marie’s. Compared to so many, at least the young man looked healthy.
“I tell you,” James insisted, rubbing the sleeves of his new gray uniform, “polar bears ought to live in Kentucky.”
Doc was attending to his instruments, having just finished extracting a pistol ball from a private’s arm after an accidental discharge. They’d given him a tent to serve as his surgery, along with two “assistant surgeons.”
Doc raised an eyebrow as the oldest, Augustus Clyde, recently of Tyler, Texas, replied, “Naw, James, they’d freeze this far north. Even a polar bear’d have sense enough to head south … at least as far as Hernando.”
The town to which he referred was in Mississippi just south of the Tennessee line.
Clyde was a thick-set and muscular man, just turned twenty-two. A mat of rich black hair crowned his head and contrasted with his almost brilliant blue eyes. His father was a Methodist minister back in Texas, and while Clyde had apprenticed with a surgeon in Tyler, he had no formal medical training. He did, however, have a quick mind, and rarely needed to be told twice.
James tucked his hands into his sleeves, puffing out breath as he watched the slushy rain fall from the gray sky. Beyond the surgery, the Fourth Tennessee camped in cramped quarters within the Island No. 10 fortifications. Lines of muddy tents sagged wetly, while before them, men clustered around sputtering fires that spewed redolent blue smoke into the air. When the wind changed, not only was the smoke so thick it would choke a man and leave his eyes weeping, but the smell of urine and feces from back in the trees would, as the troops unkindly said, “Gag a maggot.”
Half of the regiment was down with diarrhea, and, though Doc had mentioned it to Colonel Neely, a proper latrine had to be a priority. Sanitation was simply appalling.
As miserable as conditions were for the soldiers, Doc’s heart went out to the battalions of slaves who labored building the defenses. Ragged, cold, and shivering, they dug out the dirt, piled it to create ramparts, and hauled timbers to build gun emplacements.
If they had any brightness in their lives, it was that as valuable “property” they were at least fed and provided shelter. As if, in the grand balance of things, that in any way tempered their endless labor and misery. But at least the effort was made on their behalf. Unlike each time a soldier died of dysentery or pneumonia, when a slave died, it was money out of the Confederacy’s war budget to reimburse the distant owner.
Doc had never been comfortable with slavery, given his raising and time in Boston. If the Confederacy is to fall, he thought, it will be through divine justice coming home to roost.
“You have no idea what cold is.” Doc turned his thoughts back to the conversation. “I lived in Boston for three years. My father used to tell me about winter out in the western mountains, how it got down to twenty and thirty below zero. He said the trees would pop as they froze. But something about Boston, the damp cold, the wind blowing across that half-frozen harbor … It slices through a man like a saber.”
“Don’t suppose I need to give that a try if it’s worse than this,” James said as he wrapped his arms tightly about his chest. In the cold, the freckles dusting the bridge of his nose stood out. “So, you’re really going to be my brother-in-law?”
“Your sister, having taken leave of her good senses, has agreed. We will set the date as soon as my enlistment is up.” Doc glanced at the young man. “Don’t know where I’ll find a best man.”
James grinned, looking around. “Well, you sure won’t find one among any of these lazy bastards, if I’m any judge of men.”
Doc shot him a wink and buckled his surgical chest closed.
