CHAPTER 34
By the time the last two letters arrived, gloom had fallen over Greensboro, even for those who longed for this rebellion to end in failure and the preservation of the Union. Deprivation touched every house and cabin. Emily recognized her brother’s hand, though only just, scratched and blotched as it was.
Vicksburg
July 8, 1863
Sister,
As you must surely know, as all God’s hell must surely know, Vicksburg is four days surrendered to the Yankee devils and I am taken captive. We shall have no need of hell hereafter, except to punish these damned Yankees. The conditions here are hell itself. No food, filthy water, filthy clothes, fleas, lice, men in filth from every sort of horrible disease and sickness. Men are dying everywhere and not from wounds. The rain and mud make the stench itself enough to kill a man.
I am in urgent need of rations and clothing. The blanket you sent is long gone to rags. I had as soon pitch it except it is now my only bed. There is no protection from this excessive heat. Men are dying from that alone. I am in an agony of discomfort. There is no remedy for my current debilitation.
Your brother,
Jeremiah
The handwriting on the second envelope was unfamiliar, the paper ragged on the edges and dirty. Emily stared at it for some minutes before she opened it. She squinted to decipher the scrawl.
Nigh onto Vicksburg
July 1863 to the best of my knowing
Dear Mrs. Slate,
Your brother Jeremiah Slate is dead. We got captured together at Vicksburg and suffered prison alongside one another and got released the other day. I’m not sure what day that was. We have lost all sense of time in there. Your brother took the fever again and he did not make it far. He was mighty weak and I am shamed to say, though I woke to see it in the night, it was one of our own cut him with his own little knife and made off with the grab or two of goods your brother still held on to. We found some wood from a nigger shack close by and laid him on it. We didn’t have no hammer or nails, but we laid a ragged blanket over him that he said one time come from you and we buried him deep enough so you shouldn’t worry.
I know it would be right of me to say I’d help you find him, but I am not yet 20 years old and have a wound in my leg, but it is not so bad I can’t walk with a stick. I am going home to find my Mama now and I am not ever going back near Vicksburg again.
Very truly,
Gilbert Adamson
Outside across the field where Emily fled, heavy clouds hung above the horizon like the smoke of a fire gone out of control. The grass was seared. Brambles tore at Emily’s skirts and ripped her hands. She sank to her knees. Her mother lay bloody in her vision, the women turned away with the baby, her mother unmoving and white except for the blood, Jeremiah wailing. And this was what had come of it all. Emily clutched her ribs as she rocked, her cries piercing the semidarkness, ripping her, gutting her. Surely she must die; she was bewildered that she was unable to. Emily rocked more slowly. Her forehead touched the ground. She felt her hands go blind.
From down the side row, a man approached. He leaned toward her. His strong hands gripped her arms and raised her to her feet. Through her tears she recognized Michael Lambert. She stumbled toward home, his arm around her waist for support.
Lambert waited on the front step until Jessie came to say that Emily was calmed. Putting on his hat, he nodded and walked away. A week later, he came again. Emily sat on the porch beside him.
“What were you doing there, Mr. Lambert? How did you find me?”
“I was out helping Asa hunt a new hound he just got from old man Everett over off the Bellefontaine Road. Just a pup. Not more than six month old. I reckon he was headed back to where he thought was home. I was up the field there and saw you go into the woods way off. So far off, I wasn’t for sure it was you. You didn’t come out and then I heard you crying.” Lambert hesitated. “Well, a little more than just crying, maybe. I thought you’d run up on a cat. I started running. Seemed like the crying got worse; then it just stopped. Felt like I was in one of those dreams where you get to running and your legs get slower and slower till you’re not going anywhere at all.” Lambert scratched his head where his dark hair was thinning at the temples. He pulled at his collar as if he needed more air. “Got real quiet then. Without the sound, I couldn’t tell where to find you. I got right scared and I was running again, keeping my eyes on the woods, listening, and I saw a speck of blue cloth. Flapped just once on a puff of air. I reckon you must of tore your dress.”
“Yes, I did.” Emily stared along the horizon. The sun was beginning to set. “Did you find the dog?” she said.
“No, ma’am. Hound turned up next day back where he came from. Asa went and got him. He’s on a tie now till he gets used to thinking of us as home. Looks to be a good dog.”
Emily stood. Lambert rose, his tall, angular body blocking the sun from her eyes.
“I was just there, Miss Emily. That’s all,” he said.
“Mr. Lambert, I want to thank you.” She faced him, her head tilted up to his height.
“Yes, ma’am. I know—”
“I don’t believe you do, Mr. Lambert. Not for bringing me home. I am thanking you for being there.”
“Well, that’s a comfort to me, ma’am. I felt kind of like I’d trespassed holy ground.”
“I appreciate that, Mr. Lambert. I’m not sure this ground is holy, but it is private.”
“I’m sorry. I regret—” he said.
“There is nothing to regret, Mr. Lambert. You brought me home. And strangely, I am surprised at the comfort in having someone witness how I really am.”
Emily went into the house and left him standing on the porch, staring at the door.
* * *
“Miss Emily, we got us a stuck calf.” Ginny was breathless. “Out of Bliss. Well, not exactly out, and there lies the problem. You got to decide, do we save the calf or the cow? May not can save either one. But you got to say.”
The fringe of Emily’s shawl caught in the chair spindles as she whirled and dropped a bowl of peas half-shelled.
“Where you going, Miss Emily?” Ginny said.
“To the barn.”
“That ain’t no place for you. Just answer me. I ain’t got time to fool with you.”
Emily jerked at the shawl as Ginny tried to free it, their frenzied hands at odds, peas crunching underfoot.
“We can’t afford to lose that cow!”
“Then we’ll save the cow,” Ginny said.
“And we have to have that calf! We have to last this war.”
“Well, now, that ain’t no answer.”
“Send Jessie to fetch Granny Sonja. She’s birthed enough babies. A cow can’t be so different.”
Emily unsnagged the shawl and kicked at the peas.
“You don’t know what you getting into,” said Ginny, her mind back to Miss Liza’s death, the screaming baby, the blood, and Emily watching. She stood full height, her eyes penetrating. She breathed deep. “Then again,” she said, “mayhap you do.”
In the filtered light of the barn, Lucian knelt in the second stall. The fetid air was dense and stank of blood and urine. Around him, the hay was soiled with blood. Bliss lay exhausted, her breath erratic. From her rear, a single leg protruded.
“Coming backward,” said Lucian. Then he saw Emily, her hand over her mouth. “This ain’t no place for you, ma’am.”
“Is it breech?” Emily managed to say.
“I don’t know about no breech,” Lucian said. “It just trying to come foot-first, one foot stuck. Bliss done give out and I can’t get this calf turned. I can kill it and get it on out real quick like, once you say and go on back to the house. Coming like that, they don’t hardly live nohow. Save us a good cow. What you want, Miss Emily?”
“Get out the way.” Granny Sonja’s voice startled them. “What she doing here?” The old woman elbowed her way past Emily, who struggled not to vomit. “If she gone stay, she got to get out the way.”
Emily stumbled over the cow’s legs and knelt at Bliss’s head. She ran her hand up the white crest, folded an ear forward, and traced the soft eyelid with her fingertip. Bliss opened her eye. The exhausted resignation in the heifer’s gaze stabilized Emily.
Granny Sonja scowled. “Look like her labor stopped,” she said. “What else you tried sides turning?”
“Thought about a horse and rope,” Samuel said. “But that other hoof still stuck and I don’t aim to tear her. She dead for shore, do she start bleeding.”
“Fetch me some soap and water. Lucian, get me some lard. And be quick.”
The midwife slathered on the grease and thrust her arms into Bliss, her elderly body weaving as she crouched on her haunches. The cow’s eyes widened and its huge head lifted. Emily concentrated on those eyes, attached herself to the life in them. She murmured, trance-like, to the animal. The old woman’s shoulder muscles tightened and the calf disappeared into the depths of its terrified mother.
Granny Sonja’s leathery hand reentered the cow. She maneuvered the offending hoof back into the birth canal, aligning it with the other, and pulled them both out. “Can’t turn it,” Granny Sonja said. “We gone take it backside first. Get that horse and hitch him up here.”
Lucian grabbed a piece of torn stable blanket, swaddled the calf’s hooves, and bound them with rope. Taking the bridle, he led the horse out slow. The calf dropped onto the hay.
“Well, now, alive and breathing,” Granny Sonja said. “Gone stand right on up. How’s Bliss?”
“I don’t know.” Emily’s voice was a hoarse whisper.
“You ain’t gone faint, now, is you?” Granny Sonja peered at Emily’s white face, while she cleaned the placenta and smoothed its bloody folds. “Where’s Ginny? Tell her to see to this woman.”
From the corner of the stall, Ginny studied Emily. She did not go to her.
“Bliss ain’t standing up,” said Benjamin, who had returned.
“Bliss done got herself cripple,” Granny Sonja said, wiping her arms on her apron. “She don’t supposed to be lying down for this. All right, Benjamin, you gone get this cow up?”
“I’ll make a sling, Granny. I can get her up. But might be days before she can stand by herself.”
Granny Sonja scrubbed at the calf with fresh hay. “Benjamin,” she said, “get this baby up to its mama’s nose. See what that do.”
Benjamin arranged the wet calf against its mother’s nose. Bliss extended her tongue to lick at the baby. She did not raise her head. With eyes closed, she continued her feeble efforts to nuzzle the calf.
The men maneuvered a canvas sling under the cow’s inert body and heaved the rope over a rafter. Knots secured, Lucian led the horse forward and the cow’s prone body rose. Simultaneously, the calf struggled to her feet, rump first. She swayed against her mother’s leg. Held upright by the sling, Bliss worked the calf with her great tongue. Within the hour, the calf was nuzzling her mother’s swollen udder.
It would take a good three days for Bliss to regain movement in her legs. According to Benjamin, that was “mighty quick like.” It would be another four before he risked letting Bliss stand without support. When the sling came off, Lucian led Bliss out of the barn. Ginny stood by the fence with Emily, watching as the calf followed, flicking its paintbrush tail, blinking against the glare of the sunlight.