SO THERE I was, alone in the ravine, like I was at the bottom of the world, with all the quiet in the world above me. Quiet is nice, I thought. I looked up for the stars, but there was only smoke, and that made me pull myself out of my reverie and decide what to do next.
I could go back to the cave. Or I could go back to the house.
I decided on the house, because I’d promised Mama that Robert and I would guard it against looters. I went up the side of the ravine and got my bearings and started home, wondering what I would do if the house was already looted. I walked home, making up lies along the way. Without Jewel I felt like I was missing my right arm. I wondered what she thought, taking Robert home. Horses think, I knew that. There were plenty of instances when I had proof that Jewel was thinking.
The house, when I got to it, was dark, no candles in the windows, no lanterns anywhere. It was downright creepy going in that front door, into the center hall. Of course I knew everything so well I could have walked through the place blindfolded, but that wasn’t the point. The point was nobody was home! And this was my home! And right now it was full of ghosts, and I wanted my family to be here like they’d been before that fool Grant and his army attacked us.
I pulled myself together. “You can allow yourself only two minutes of self-pity,” Pa had said. “Then you must get on with it.”
Pa. He was ailing. Ma had had a letter from him just this past week, telling her he was on his way home. No, he hadn’t lost any arms or legs. He was all of a piece, but he had what they were calling camp fever, and they were sending him on home to recuperate.
Pa with camp fever! He’d never been sick a day in his life. Oh, my whole world was falling apart.
I found my way down the hall and out back to the kitchen, where I groped around for a lantern. Beside it Clothilda always kept some of Landon’s matches. I managed to strike one and light the lantern. It sent a warm glow through the place. Now all I needed was one of Pa’s Colt Navy revolvers.
Into Pa’s study and to his gun case. There he kept his guns, not many, an old hunting rifle, a few Colt Navy handguns. As I thought it would be, the glass-enclosed case was locked.
Where was the key? Likely Mama had it hidden away somewhere. If I wanted a handgun, I’d have to break the glass. Well, if Robert and I were guarding the house, as I’d promised we were going to do, we’d have to break the glass, wouldn’t we?
I turned to Pa’s desk, found a paperweight, and hit the glass with it. The sound of splintering glass is never pleasant, but in the dark, empty house it sounded sickening. I reached my left hand in for the Colt Navy, secured it, and on pulling it out, cut my hand, right above the thumb.
“Peabrain,” I called myself. I set the revolver down on Pa’s desk and grabbed the hem of my dress to douse the blood, but it wouldn’t be doused.
I picked up the revolver again, went back into the kitchen, took up a small towel, and wrapped my hand in it. There. I’d learned something helping Landon in Pa’s surgery, hadn’t I?
Then I went into the front parlor, just off the main hall, and sat in a chair, the revolver in my lap, holding my throbbing hand and watching the shadows on the walls from the pine-knot torches people carried as they passed the house. And I promptly fell into a disturbed sleep.
IN BACK of my mind I heard Mama’s grandfather clock at the foot of the stairway in the hall chime out the hour. Twelve midnight. I was jerked awake. Where was I? Then I remembered and fell asleep again.
The next time I was jerked awake some people were standing over me. “Claire Louise, where’s Robert?” from Landon.
“And what did you do to your hand?” from Mama.
It took me only a moment to adjust my mind to what was going on around me. I looked down at my hand. Blood had soaked through the towel and part of my skirt was red.
“Come along with me,” Landon was saying.
“I’ll get a clean skirt and petticoat,” I heard Mama say.
“Where are we going?” I asked shakily.
“To Pa’s surgery. To stitch up that hand.”
“How do you know it needs to be stitched up?”
“Do you prefer to bleed to death?” He sounded annoyed.
In back of the house we went through the door to Pa’s surgery.
But first we had to go through the waiting room.
It was then that I saw the bird.
There were about six or eight people waiting in all variations of distress, from broken bones to cut faces.
Also three Yankee soldiers holding rifles were standing around another Yankee soldier who was holding a perch attached to a wooden pole.
On the perch was a bald eagle. I stopped and stared at them. So did Landon for a minute. “Is this Old Abe?” he asked them.
“Yeah, Doc. He got skinned in the leg. We need him fixed. People told us to go and find the Yankee doctor. Be that you?”
“Yes,” Landon answered evenly.
“Will you fix him up for us, Doc?”
“If you will set down your guns and let me attend to this bleeding girl first,” Landon answered. “I won’t be long. Give your names and regiment to my mother here.”
“Company C/8th Regiment, Wisconsin Volunteers,” one of them recited. Mama took it down and handed me my clothing, a clean skirt and petticoat and pantalets.
Landon took my arm and led me into the surgery.
“Doctor, Doctor, Doctor,” they appealed, as we passed through.
“Be with you in a minute,” Landon said. “My sister here has cut her hand, badly.”
Landon closed the door and gestured that I should sit.
“How’d you get the cut?”
“Breaking into Pa’s gun case for a revolver.”
He unwrapped the towel and gestured I should come to the sink, where he poured something over the cut that stung so bad it made me cry. “I’m sorry,” he said. Why was it that I didn’t believe him?
“You telling me that you’ve been bleeding like this for the whole night?”
“No. Just for a couple of hours.”
“You’ve been here only a couple of hours then. I’m going to sprinkle some laudanum on this so it doesn’t hurt when I stitch it up. That’s an ugly cut you’ve got there.”
He sprinkled it on. Then he got his needle and started to stitch. I wanted to cry out in pain, but I wouldn’t let myself. I couldn’t control my legs though. They were giving way under me. Not so much from pain as from the sight of him stitching.
I suppose I would have slumped to the floor just as he finished his stitching if he hadn’t picked me up like I was a rag doll and put me on the table. I was sitting there and he stood directly in front of me. “What did you do before you cut the hand?” he said.
He was wrapping it now, gently.
“I don’t remember.”
“You don’t lie very well.”
“Is this the way you treat your patients?”
There was silence between us. He gave it time to move across the heavens, like clouds across the sky. He was still wrapping the hand. “What happened to Robert?” he asked again, concentrating on the bandage and not looking at me.
“I don’t know.”
“I’ve got no time for lies. I was going to turn Robert over to the authorities, yes. It was the right thing for me to do. No one in the Confederacy will ever know now who lost that order of Lee’s and a few people will always be under suspicion. A few lives ruined. Do you think that’s right?”
I didn’t answer.
He sighed. It was deep and sad. “When I put Rosie in the barn, I saw that Jewel was gone. You did a big thing tonight, giving Robert your horse. I know you think you did the right thing, but it was wrong. It was none of your affair, and it was wrong.”
Tears were coming down my face.
“Do you really think he’s going to go home? Where he can be found? He’ll likely go West, where all the fugitives from this war will go. Claire Louise, I’m going to ask you one more time. Not with the intention of having him run down. But for us. To save what we have. Had. What happened to Robert?”
I felt like a fox in a leg trap. Did he have to make his voice so kind? So gentle? I shook my head. Tears were really coming down my face now.
“You haven’t anything to say to me then. All right.” He handed me my clean clothes. “Change in here. I don’t want you going through the waiting room and all those patients seeing you covered with blood.”
He helped me down from the table and went to one corner of the surgery and drew a curtain across it. “Here. For your modesty. If you think you’re going to faint, call me. Remember, I’m a doctor.”
I went into the corner. He had a grip on the curtain. He was about to close it when he stopped. “Oh,” he said, “one more thing. If you don’t tell me what I want to know tonight, then I don’t want you ever to tell me. Someday when we’re both old and sitting around drinking a mint julep and our grandchildren are picking blackberries down by the stream, you can tell me. And I can’t see any reason why we have to be friends between now and then, either.”
He closed the curtain with a dramatic movement and went to call in the three Yankee soldiers with the bald eagle.
I felt like I’d been slapped. I was stung so by the words. I commenced to cry again and I struggled to change. I felt weak. The back of my neck was in a cold sweat, as was my scalp. And my stomach felt queasy. But I’d faint dead on the floor before I’d call Landon in to help me, doctor or no doctor.
I listened to the exchange of words between him and the Yankees. One soldier was bragging how, when the 8th Wisconsin went into battle, Old Abe would fly over the fighting and screech at the enemy. “So many times those Rebs tried to shoot him and they’d miss,” he told Landon. “Is he bad, Doc? Will you be able to fix his leg?”
“Sure will,” Landon assured them.
I rolled my bloody clothes in a ball.
“You finished back there, Claire Louise?” Landon called out.
“Yes.”
“Then you’d better skedaddle. I’ve got a heap of patients to see yet.”
I stepped out from behind the curtain. “How’s the hand?” he asked without looking at me. “Any more bleeding?”
“No, but it hurts precious bad.”
He went to a cabinet and got some powders and put them in some paper and handed them to me. “Help you to sleep tonight,” he said. “Take only one at a time. I suggest you go over to the hospital in a day or so and have Dr. Balfour take a look at it. I’ll be gone tomorrow.”
What was he telling me? I paused only a moment. “Can I pet the bird?” I asked.
The eagle blinked at me.
The soldiers nodded their head, yes, saying he liked women.
“No,” Landon said. “This isn’t a game we’re playing. You’d best leave.”
The soldiers looked embarrassed. He’d told them I was his sister, hadn’t he? I’d heard it when I was behind the curtain. They knew he was a Southerner and were likely thinking, “I thought Southern families were close and loving.”
I left, and as I did I heard him refusing to take money for fixing Old Abe. From the window in the center hall of the house I watched the Yankee soldiers, guns at the ready, walking down to the waterfront. Old Abe was secure on his perch.