October 1781
Kemp’s Landing, Virginia
Am I dead?
Zeke couldn’t shift the weight of his eyelids. Images of the battlefield crumbled and floated in incoherent, disjointed pieces in his head. Buried? He breathed in through his nose. A gentle hand found his wrist. Not dead was good. Not buried while still alive was even better. Reassured he drifted away in a gray tunnel of slumber.
“Jedidiah Smith, Obadiah Smith. These were great men. Statues in their communities…” The misused word felt like a jagged edge as he drifted in the sleepy dream of his Uncle Eleazar pontificating on his favorite subject. It tickled him how his father’s brother polished off the glory of the Smiths every chance he got. How his uncle got from Kemp’s Landing to Yorktown puzzled him, but it would have to wait. Zeke was too tired. Once more he meandered down a peaceful path to sleep.
When he surfaced next his eyes functioned properly, but he wasn’t sure his ears were. He lay in an upstairs room of his uncle’s house in Kemp’s Landing. His four remaining friends from the regiment stood in a semi-circle around old Doc Jones. His uncle swore that somewhere deep in his ancestry Doc Jones must really be a Smith. How else could he be so good at his job?
“Will he walk again, Doc?” Moses Woodbridge the youngest of their regiment remained the most outspoken. He was always asking uncomfortable questions like that out loud.
Zeke tensed. Who were they talking about? The mist parted, and he realized it was him. Of course, he would walk again. He remembered the battle, the smell of smoke in the briny air of the York River. The rumbling of the cannon. Shouts of the men. Bayonets grating on metal. Running toward the redoubt when he stopped a ball with his leg. People recovered from balls to the leg. Unless they didn’t and bled out on the battlefield. It was already pretty clear that he was not in the latter category.
He rolled to his right side. The pain from his right knee stabbed the breath right out of his lungs. He fell back to the bed hoping the pain would clear before they knew he was awake.
“How’re ye doing, son.” Doc Jones appeared at his bedside.
Zeke squinted one eye open.
“That’s what I thought.” Doc pulled up a chair. “No doubt ye heard yer friend’s question.” He sighed while bringing his hands to rest on his thighs. “The answer is that I don’t know how well ye will walk, but ye should, after a considerable time of healing, be able to walk.”
Zeke allowed his lungs to deflate.
“How long is considerable?”
“Always cut to the chase don’t ye, son?”
“I must attend to my business, such as it is, and I have plans.”
“Plans is it?” Doc smiled. Before Zeke could dispute Doc’s assumption the old man continued. “Young woman, I’d wager. Time to get on with things now Cornwallis has surrendered?”
“Surrendered?” Zeke nearly shouted struggling once again to sit up. His compatriots nodded their agreement. “It’s over?” Hallelujah. He slumped back into the bed.
“It will take some time for the formalities.” Isaac responded in the cool tone of command. “I watched Cornwallis’s aide surrender his sword to General Washington’s aide.”
“Sent an aide, did he.” The men in the room all grunted the same assessment. Coward.
Talk stopped when Doc stood and gathered his bag. “Give it while, Zeke. Some of these things take a year or more to heal up. I’ll be back to see ye tomorrow. Eat something.”
No trouble there. Zeke’s stomach gnawed on his ribs.
Doc opened the door. Zeke’s mother led his sister, Tirzah, into the room. She carried a tray with a large bowl and biscuits large enough for two men. The smell nearly sent him hopping.
Mama’s eyes filled when she saw him.
“I’m gonna be fine, Mama.”
“Doc says it will take a good while for ye to heal.” His friends shuffled to make room. Mose took the tray from Tirzah and set it on a side table. Tirzah smiled and set her eyes on Zeke.
“I know.”
“But yer here.” Mama smoothed the hair away from his forehead.
He took her hand in his and looked directly into eyes rimmed with red. “I am going to be all right, Mama.”
“I know. Doc says it’s time for ye to eat something, so I brought stew and biscuits. Don’t eat too much this first time. It’ll make ye sick. There’s plenty more in the kitchen.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“We’ll see to him, ma’am.” Isaac motioned to Gordon and Mose.
“Be careful,” Mama exclaimed as his friends took positions on either side of him.
With a quiet signal to each other they slid him up into a sitting position. The stabbing pain eased once they let him go.
“I will be all right, Mama.”
“If yer sure.”
“I am sure.” He smiled at her.
“He’ll be just fine, Mama. If the Lord was gonna take him, He’d a done it at Yorktown,” Tirzah added as she put her arm around their mother’s shoulders.
She wiped the tears that ran freely down her cheeks. “I will check in on ye shortly.” She passed her fingers once more across his hair. Then she joined Tirzah and slipped out of the room closing the door behind her. Zeke mouthed a thank ye to his sister.
“She will settle down,” Isaac offered.
Zeke chuckled. “Ye don’t know my Mama.”
“Well she sure knows how to cook.” Mose smelled the bowl as he passed it off to Zeke.
Zeke took possession of the bowl and the spoon. “I’m sure there’s plenty more in the kitchen. Get ye some.”
“He already had some,” Isaac countered.
Mose grinned and bounced his lanky form. Zeke was struck once again at just how young the youngest member of their team really was. He couldn’t be more than one and twenty now, and he’d been with them for at least the last three years. Weariness didn’t seem to sober Mose the way it had the rest of them. A glimmer of light entered the place where Zeke had practiced the grim determination to do what was right. He was glad he’d fought for his new country.
A new country.
Only time would tell what that would mean for all of them. But that was all right. For now, he was glad the fighting was over.
Zeke thanked the Lord for his food and started in on his feast, the first he’d had in a while without the whiz and bangs of muzzle and cannon fire in the distance. His friends filled him in on the battle and how they got him home in Aggie’s wagon.
Mama’s biscuits. The first bite melted in his mouth. Oh yeah, he’d missed these.
He finished half the stew and both biscuits before he rested back against his pillows.
“Are we still on? Have ye decided a route?” He directed his question to Isaac. They were supposed to be organizing a wagon train to Kentucky. Zeke didn’t want to slow them down.
“We will wait until ye are ready.” Isaac’s calm scratched at Zeke’s anticipation. He was ready to start his new life now. The dull ache in his leg flared to a lightning strike as he shifted to a straighter position. On the other hand, he could wait a couple of days until he could at least stand properly. Zeke did not want to be carried to Kentucky in the back of wagon. He wanted to ride into the new land of opportunity ready to take on all challenges.
“I will be ready.” His full belly dragged him to sleepiness.
“Yer knee’s tore up.” Mose’s wide-eyed declaration caused him to take a longer look at the many-tailed bandage and leather splint holding his leg rigid from his calf to his thigh.
“Doc says he’s not sure the knee will bend. The ball entered just below yer knee, and he is not sure how far up the damage went.” Gordon, once a teacher, was sure to supply needed details that otherwise got left out. Zeke turned his gaze to his oldest friend.
“What else did he say?”
“Not much,” Gordon said. “The ball went clean through yer leg. The reason ye’ve been out so long is because Aggie gave ye something for the pain until we could get ye here. Ye’ve been out for three days.”
Zeke looked to Isaac. “When the field doc didn’t get to ye in what Aggie thought was a timely manner, she took matters into her own hands and got ye out of there.”
Tommy Thornton’s wife, Agatha, known to the unit as Aggie, stood behind the others as she usually did. She’d adopted them all since the beginning. Adding their clothes to her cleaning and mending piles. Cooking for them, bandaging them. When Tommy died at Guilford Courthouse, she’d stayed on to care for them, and they’d vowed to protect her until they could get her home.
“Thank ye, Aggie.” Zeke allowed himself to slip a little further down into the mattress.
Fierce brown eyes engaged his own. “I am glad ye’re feeling better.”
Isaac cleared his throat. “We have decided that we will wait to go west until ye can make the journey. It will give us all the chance to prepare.” He must have seen the grimace Zeke tried to contain as he eased his leg down the bed as he stretched out to sleep. “It’s a long way, Zeke.”
“I’ll give ye that.” But Zeke was itching to get started. His boat building business in Norfolk, torched in 1776, had yet to be rebuilt due to his service in the Continental Army and the subsequent burnings. Norfolk was a great place for a boat building business, but it was too strategically important. Zeke no longer wished to be perched on the edge of a precipice always in danger of tumbling into the water. Nor did he want his livelihood in constant threat of reduction to cinders because somebody somewhere wanted what he had. Nope. He longed for wide open spaces where a man could breathe in the grace that God gave him. That’s where he was bound, and no amount of leg healing was going to hold him back. “I am going west as soon as I can.” Once again he drifted to sleep.
Good as his word, Doc Jones came the next day and every day after that until Zeke was out of danger. By January, he could get around tolerably well with a cane. By April, Zeke had reconciled himself that his right leg just didn’t bend like it used to and it probably never would. He could live with that, just like he could live with the achy pain that accompanied him every night as he lay down to sleep.