Doc blinked, almost weaving on his feet. “No grudges.” He looked down. “Captain, you’re going to lose that leg.”
“Just do it, Reb,” the captain managed through gritted teeth.
To the two privates, Doc said, “You two, find me some water, bandages, any medical supplies you can. And if you can find me another surgeon, get him here. I don’t give a goddamn whose army he’s in.”
He was working on his fifth or sixth Federal casualty before another wounded Rebel was brought to the table.
“Doc?” the young man gasped as he was laid out on his back.
For a moment, Doc blinked, struggling through his fatigued mind, lost in anatomy and surgical concerns. When he finally found the dormant part of his brain, it still took a moment to place the strained, filthy face, the chestnut hair, and green eyes.
“James? James Morton?”
James blinked, his eyes pain glazed. His uniform was covered with dried blood. “I been laying out for two days now. God, I’m thirsty.”
“We’ll get you water.”
“Am I gonna die?”
“Not if I can help it.” Promised your sister I’d look out for you.
Doc blinked again, almost in tears as he fought to shed the cobwebs in his brain. He had just exposed the sucking chest wound. Then the world turned oddly gray and soft. He felt himself reel, collapse. It hurt when he hit the floor, bringing him awake.
Hands were lifting him, helping him to one of the chairs, and then he faded off, dropping into an exhausted slumber.
He wasn’t aware that he’d failed Ann Marie, that fifteen minutes after he’d collapsed, a Federal surgeon, riding atop a wagon filled with supplies, had patched James’s pneumothorax, and done it while the young man was peacefully under the chloroform’s merciful spell.
24
May 5, 1862
Billy felt free as he and Sarah drove the wagon up the Pea Ridge grade toward Elkhorn Tavern. Spring had come. The day was warm, filled with the smell of dogwood, honeysuckle, and redbud. Wildflowers added both color and their delicate perfumes to the air.
The Federal army had finally packed up and marched back north along Telegraph Wire Road, headed, so the rumors said, for eastern Arkansas where General Van Dorn was supposedly raising hell.
Or invading Missouri.
Or both.
He, Maw, and Sarah had had their fill of Yankees and Confederates, and war, and battles. First had come the Confederates who had hauled off most everything. Then they’d been inundated with wounded and dying men. Then had come the Federals, who, fortunately, had finally evacuated the surviving Confederates from the farm and hauled off the dead for burial.
Sarah, of course, had saved the wagon—and made a dollar a day for nine days to boot, driving for the Yankees. But that she’d done so was still a burr under Billy’s butt.
“Unfitting,” Maw had insisted.
Sarah had stared back with a blue-eyed hardness Billy had never seen before. “Lots of things ain’t the same anymore, Maw.”
He was chewing on that, jaw clamped, when Sarah asked, “What’s got you riled?”
“I’m the man. I should have driven the wagon for the Yankees. Maw was right. It ain’t fittin’ for a young woman to be hauling dead men. Let alone by herself out among all them strange men. There’s no telling what they thought of you.”
But he knew, all right. In their minds they’d been pulling her clothes off, fondling her high round breasts, and slipping between her muscular thighs. That’s what men did when they saw a full-bodied woman like Sarah.
She eyed him warily. “Captain Stengel treated me with respect and courtesy. Some … well, shucks, a girl’s got to figure out how to deal with them sometime.” She raised her hands, let them fall. “All that matters is that they thought we were loyal Unionists. The ones like the Fosters, that they knew were Rebels, got cleaned out.”
“So did we,” Billy muttered.
The Federal occupation meant constant depredations. The Hancock farm was eternally crawling with blue-coated soldiers looking for eggs, silver, grain, cornmeal, or anything edible. Billy had been forced to relocate the remaining chickens, horses, and milk cow ever higher into the hills. Of course a fox got the hens first thing. The cow broke her rope and strayed off where it took Billy three days to track her down. By then, she’d stopped giving milk.
Sarah added, “Don’t know what we’d have done if you hadn’t been out in the woods hunting.”
Unlike so many who were thrown into destitution, Maw and Sarah had had full bellies. The constant supply of squirrels, rabbits, turkeys, and the occasional venison quarter beat starvation all hollow.
“Tough work having to live in the forest, setting snares and deadfalls. Barking the occasional squirrel. Had to do something to stay away from all them Federal soldiers and scavenging parties.”
“You ask me, you were just getting away from the drudgery of scrubbing gore off of the floors, burning the bloody rugs and bedding, and having to tackle any of the less-than-manly cleaning up.”
He gave her a triumphant smile.
She scowled, adding, “Never had to work so hard in all my life. Maw wouldn’t tolerate so much as a stain.”
“At least you didn’t marry one of them damn Yankees.” How would he deal with the knowledge that some strange Yankee was driving his pizzle into his only sister?
But to his immense relief Sarah—though inundated by soldiers—had resolutely ignored them.
“By all that’s holy, why do you think I’d want to marry one of them Yankees? Have my husband traipse off to get shot and bleed to death in some strange woman’s house?” She shook her head as if at the very ridiculousness of the notion. “Besides, these were all enlisted men and a couple of lieutenants. If this war’s done anything, it’s made me even more committed to marrying a man who wants the same things I do. Someone with prospects.”
She stopped short, her smooth brow furrowing as a mockingbird’s song trilled in the branches overhead. “I tell you, Billy, I just want this war over. I got a belly full
