“I will.”
Philip had shifted, forgetting the letters. James using the sleight of scuffing his boot on the walk, looked down. Glanced sideways. “I see you have a female admirer. Three letters?”
Flushing, Doc knotted his muscles, stuffing the letters behind his back as if he were a child caught stealing hard rock candy. “An acquaintance. Nothing more.”
A flicker of annoyed smile played at his father’s lips and then died. “I can’t put the past back the way it was before. As you’ve no doubt discovered by now, she wasn’t worth your time.”
“But she was worth yours? Married man that you were, and are?” Doc demanded hotly, the sour rage starting to burn in his gut.
“She would have been a millstone around your neck, son. She’d have tied you down, killed your dreams, and left you a broken man when she ran off with whatever feller made her a better offer.”
“You don’t know that!”
“Sure I do. Reckon she wouldn’t have let me into her bed otherwise.”
“Sometimes I wonder why Maw never slipped in with an ax in the middle of the night to put you out of our misery.”
“She might have. It certainly wasn’t beyond her, Philip. But she had something I never did.” He shot Doc a knowing look. “Belief in family and kin.”
Doc swallowed hard, struggling for words.
“Good day, sir.” Paw touched his high forehead in a salute, turned, and walked back into the saloon where the celebratory strains of “The Bonnie Blue Flag” were belting forth in a harmony of tenors and a bass.
16
March 10, 1862
Blood. So much blood. The worst cases, the horribly wounded and dying, had been carried inside the house. Others, most no less critical, had been laid on the porch or lay bleeding in the yard.
The sights, smells, and sounds of torn, blood-soaked, and dying men overwhelmed Sarah’s senses. Raised on a farm as she was, she was more than capable of cutting a shoat’s throat, gutting and butchering it. She had long been accustomed to the feel of hot red blood on her skin, the sight of entrails as they spilled from an animal’s body behind her knife.
When she killed, the act had always been quick, clean, and merciful. Suffering and filth of this magnitude—let alone that it was endured by human beings—had her sick in soul and body. Senses reeling.
The first units of the fleeing Confederate Army had appeared around noon the day before, announced only by the clanking of metal and the soft clatter of hooves on the cold ground.
She and Maw—having almost grown used to the distant sound of battle—had walked out, staring in awe at the first columns of weary horsemen, many swaying in the saddle from exhaustion, their horses plodding and stumbling. Some lame.
The wagons hadn’t been far behind, turning off the Huntsville Road and climbing the lane to the Hancock farmyard. She and Maw had walked out, unsure of the meaning, only to stare in horror at the wounded men groaning, gasping, and crying in the wagon beds.
“Ma’am,” a bleary-eyed teamster in the first wagon greeted, his hands blood-blackened as they held the ribbons. “We need your help. These wounded can’t go no farther. We’ll have a surgeon here soon to take over. But I gots to get back to the field hospital. We got more to evacuate.”
“But I…” Maw had gaped, her eyes wide as she stared at the grisly, writhing men in the ambulance.
Three more were pulling up, the seats crowded with dirty men, their clothing bloodstained. The whites of their eyes were a stark contrast to their blackened faces, but something in their stare was hollow and lost.
They seemed to fix on Sarah alone—as though she were an apparition from a heavenly realm. The look unnerved her more than the sudden appearance of so many strangers with their cargoes of torn and dying men.
“Thank you, ma’am.” He turned. “Let’s get these boys out. Move now! Take the worst inside.”
“But what’s happened?” Maw had pleaded, stepping forward as the men on the wagon boxes climbed down and began pulling litters from where they’d been lashed to the sides.
“Army of the West is withdrawing,” one of the other men told her. “Orders were for us to start moving the wounded down Huntsville Road. That’s all I know.”
Sarah stared at the column of men and horses now choking the narrow road. They might have been souls of the damned marching into hell. It was the way they walked, exhausted, desolate, loose-jointed and without hope as they shuffled, head down, shoulders slumped, guns dangling.
And then perdition unfolded before her as she hurried into the house ahead of the first of the casualties. Unable to think, she stepped aside as the teamsters laid the first poor man on the rug in the main room. To her horror, she realized his arm was missing; a blood-soaked bandage began weeping blood onto Paw’s Persian carpet.
Just as quickly, another was borne in, and another, each being laid next to his fellow, like cordwood on the floor.
As each of the bleeding wretches was laid out, he gasped or cried out in pain. Some trembled, others had tears streaking their powder-blackened faces. A few, jaws clamped, bore the pain in stoic agony.
“But what do we do with them?” Sarah had cried plaintively.
“Someone will be along,” another of the teamsters told her.
“When?”
“That’s up to the officers, ma’am.”
And then he was out the door with his companion and litter to get another one.
Sarah had watched the ambulances as they jostled and backed in a clumsy turn around the yard; then they headed down the lane to the mass of troops thronging southward on the road.
There they sat, shouting impotently that they needed to get back. That more men needed rescuing. As if God himself could part that river of men, horses, and guns. Even as she watched, the walking wounded, some limping, others with blood-soaked arms or head wounds, began to be loaded into the ambulances by their comrades. When the teamster
