15

 

The door opened to Jenna’s second knock, the friendly face of Mrs. Maudell’s caretaker on the other side. “Morning,” the woman smiled, pulling the door open wider. “She’s expecting you—wore out from it, actually.” This was said with a laugh, as she motioned Jenna to follow her up the mahogany staircase.

The banister was scuffed, the carpet beneath their shoes faded here and there among the floral pattern. Glancing back at her, the nurse continued, “Mrs. Maudell doesn’t get many visitors these days. Your showing up this way has been good for her—gives her a chance to talk about the past with someone who’ll do more than nod and smile.”

“She’s the one helping me,” Jenna insisted, pulling a notepad from her bag. “Does Mrs. Maudell have any family left in Sylvan Spring?” she wondered, as they drew near a door that was slightly ajar near the end of the hall.

“Just some distant connections, I think,” said the nurse. “Her husband’s family, mostly. Her kin is somewhere over in Georgia last I heard.” She pushed the door the rest of the way open, revealing a spacious bedroom.

A fire crackled in the grate, heavy drapes pulled aside to shed light across the antique furnishings and rug.

Resting against the pillows in a four poster bed was Josephine Maudell, her bony frame wrapped in a quilted bed jacket. “Sit down,” she said, a frail hand patting the nearby chair. To the nurse she said, “Fetch the boxes from the wardrobe, Mollie. The two on the top shelf.” She picked excitedly at the comforter spread over her lap, gaze shifting to Jenna as she asked, “Do you take coffee, Miss Cade? I’ll have Mollie fetch some—”

“No, thank you,” she said. “I had some with breakfast.” Taking the offered chair, she hung her knapsack across the back. “I have so many questions to ask you,” she said. “All for the book, of course. I hope you won’t object to being quoted, since your ancestor was so prominent in the town’s history.”

“I won’t mind,” Josephine said, after a pause to consider. “I’m used to it, with the newspaper calling so often. If by some miracle I should live to be a hundred, they won’t have anything left to write about.” She chuckled at Jenna’s expression. Reaching to pat her fingers in a kindly gesture, she said, “Don’t worry. I’m not counting on more than a few months at best. The doctor thinks he’s smart, but I’ve read my future in the words and glances. Now it’s just a matter of the Lord’s timing.”

Jenna was saved from making a reply by the appearance of two flat storage boxes. The nurse placed them carefully in her lap and then withdrew to a wingback chair to take up her cross-stitch hoop.

“Open the top one,” Josephine said, shifting impatiently among the pillows.

Jenna did as instructed, moving aside the lid to find the contents shrouded in tissue paper. The layers folded back to reveal a jacket of gray wool, badly frayed and moth-eaten. The buttons were tarnished. A stain that might be rust or something worse spread across the left shoulder.

Lifting it gingerly from the box, she found a cotton shirt and trousers folded beneath. Both were full of holes and scarcely recognizable as any kind of historic treasures. Jenna’s heart beat as if they came from the Smithsonian collection, hands shaking as she held them up for closer examination.

“Sewed by his mother, I’ve heard,” Josephine said, touching the jacket’s edge. “Army regulation.”

“Arthur wore this. I…it’s hard to wrap my mind around.” She shook her head, searching for something more intelligent to say. All she could think of was how the patient described in the doctor’s notebook actually donned this uniform, wore it day to day through the camps and trails of a soldier’s life. Wore it into battle, too, she supposed, with an eye for the dark stain that marred the fabric.

“He must have been tall,” she noted, taking in the size of the clothes. “Muscular, too.”

Beneath the uniform, she found a stack of stationary bound together with an old ribbon. “These must be his letters,” she guessed, running a finger along the edges to count a dozen or so pages. Not as many as she hoped for, but posting mail had been a more difficult process for members of the Rebel army. Sliding the ribbon off, she unfolded the topmost sheet. “Dearest Mariah,” she began. Her lips ceased to read the tender lines that followed as she stared in disbelief. Mariah?

Slowly, she looked up to face the woman in the bed. “Your great-great grandfather,” she said. “He and the doctor…they were sweethearts?”

A slight chuckle escaped the older woman for her look of shock. “I suppose they must have been, for a time at least. He would have had many girls interested in him, a man of his looks and character. Including my great-great grandmother, who was a bit younger than him, I believe.”

Jenna glanced through the other letters, seeing all were addressed the same way. “It seems so strange,” she said. “Why would your family still have these? I mean, obviously things didn’t work out between them.”

“Perhaps she gave them back to him. In a quarrel, or some such incident. He married somebody else, you know.” Her hostess wore a troubled look, as if trying to recall something well out of reach.

Gently, Jenna suggested, “Someone in your family must have talked about it. Stories passed down, that sort of thing.”

“Oh, no one talked about those things back then,” she said, dismissing the idea with a wave of the hand. “People didn’t air their troubles for everyone to see. It was private and more respectful.”

Jenna wanted to ask more—to know why lovers who supposedly broke apart would later be buried beneath the same tree, especially when one of them had a spouse also buried in the same spot.

Her hostess seemed eager to change the subject, though, telling her, “There’s more papers in the bottom of the box. Things to do with his regiment and a few from the town.”

Digging deeper, she found a military discharge certificate that showed Arthur was sent home due to ‘chronic ill health.’ Yellowed newspaper clippings depicted events that took place long after the war, including the construction of the grist mill and later the county hospital.

There was an engraved county map that might prove helpful in tracing the background to the old homesteads. To her surprise, there were also photographs, sepia images of young people crowded in front of a whitewashed building.

“That was a one-room schoolhouse,” Josephine explained. She tapped a knobby finger against a tall, dark-haired youth in the back row. “That’s Arthur. He would’ve been seventeen or so.”

“Handsome.” Jenna smiled at the face that stared boldly into the camera. Beside him was a youth even more striking, with sharp cheekbones and a half-lidded gaze that made him seem a trifle arrogant.

They were the oldest members in a class of students ranging from teens to a boy still in short trousers. Plain, honest faces for the most part, with clothes to match. The gray-haired woman seated among the smaller children must be the teacher, the one whose headstone she helped clean the day before.

“Do you know why Arthur was buried in the old cemetery?” she asked, coming back to the question that continued to haunt her. “You said his grave’s location wasn’t known until I found it. You had told me he worked his father’s land until he died, and I got the impression their farm was close to the town, not the spring.”

Her hostess took a long sip from her water glass. “I can’t say I ever heard. His parents share a plot in the town cemetery, as does one of his daughters who died young. Perhaps it was his wife that connected him to the spring.”

“Maybe she lived there before they married,” Jenna mused, jotting the idea on her notepad. It didn’t explain everything, of course, but it was a start. If she could find more about the wife, the rest might eventually fall into place.

“Can you tell me anything about Mrs. Widlow? You said she knew Arthur before the war.” Pencil poised, Jenna waited.

“Yes, a local girl. I should have told you before. There was a picture somewhere of her...and something else, as well. I don’t know.” A foggy look had come over the woman. She closed her eyes, pressing a hand to her forehead to rub the skin in a worried motion.

This drew the nurse’s attention. Coming beside the bed, she placed a hand on Josephine’s shoulder. “Time for you to rest, Mrs. Maudell,” she said, voice soothing. “I’ll see our guest downstairs.”

“Take the letters with you,” Josephine said, “and the other papers, as well. The uniform is already promised to the festival display on Friday but not the rest.”

Carefully, Jenna packed the ragged clothing back in its box and placed it on the chair. “I’ll bring these other things back soon,” she promised, hoisting the smaller container in her arms.

The older woman seemed not to hear, face bowed against the wrinkled hand.

 



 

Back in her room, Jenna cleared away her laptop and research papers, switching the desk lamp on to illuminate the work space. As she slid the bundle of stationary free from its ribbon, bits of paper crumbled from the edges of the long-ago letters. History turning to dust in her hands, a notion that made her shake with a sense of urgency and excitement.

Carefully, she unfolded the pages to spread across the oak surface. She sank into the chair, one leg tucked beneath her, elbows propped on the desk as she leaned closer to study the artifacts with a sense of awe. One by one, she went through them, finding emotion that seemed too private for a stranger’s eyes, even those who read it a hundred and fifty years after the fact.

All were addressed to the same woman and echoed the same tone of a lover’s devotion. Love that stayed steady and even grew in strength when the rest of his thoughts seemed to turn to bitterness.

 

April 28th 1862

A camp near Corinth, Mississippi

 

Dearest Mariah,

 

We have been at Corinth only a week now, and already we have fought and lost two skirmishes. I could bruise my fingers writing to you of all I feel, knowing that hundreds of miles stretch between us. There are not words or paper enough to describe it, though, so I will not even try. Know only that you are in my heart at all times and in my thoughts as much as this stringent new army life permits.

All day, we shoulder our muskets and practice maneuvers that are mostly forgotten when we need them. In battle, all is smoke and noise. We fire blindly into the air, never sure if our aim finds its target. Commander’s shouts are lost to the boom of artillery, and every man focuses on loading and reloading his weapon, sometimes forgetting to fire in the moments between.

It is not until the smoke clears, and the cries of the wounded replace the sounds of ammunition, that we recover our ability to feel and think as we did before. Then, our senses are flooded with the notion that we are alive, still—tired, desperately thirsty, and in need of sustenance—but alive, nonetheless.

Being alive is all one can expect at times, yet I never fail to be surprised at the sound of laughter after weeks of grim silence. If I should die (and I know there is a real chance that I may), then there is little for me to regret except that I failed to make you my wife while I still had the chance. Already, I feel bound to you in my heart, as if a ring and promise had brought us together. I pray that someday it will, despite the obstacles we face.

Such obstacles seem too strong for faith even, at times, and I can’t help wondering if my will and God’s is ever the same. This is especially true at night when the darkness is close around me, and the silence rings loud as any battle yell. It is then I began to doubt Him ever so slightly, and often I don’t believe again until the first speck of light has touched the horizon.

 



 

Roll call was 5AM, breakfast at six. Corn cakes and salt pork washed down with coffee brewed from chicory, instead of the beans made rare by Union blockades. Then came drill session, hours of firing a musket, marching and forming ranks until the steps seemed automatic as a country dance. That was a soldier’s morning, not exactly the same as a farmer’s, as Arthur knew from years of rising early to break the soil in his father’s fields.

How different were the fields he looked on now.

Ground that was black and barren with the scars of battle. He’d seen men burn alive in the wildfires sparked by artillery—soldiers who were already wounded, too helpless to crawl from the foliage that blazed around them. Those who tried to rescue them bore the blisters in their hands and faces, their uniforms singed beyond repair.

“Never seen fire and brimstone on earth before,” panted one ragged soldier Arthur tried to bandage in the moments after such an outbreak. His breath came loud and harsh before it ceased altogether, his body turning slack in Arthur’s hands before he could speak a final word of comfort.

Death stalked those in camp, as well. Cases of “the shakes,” as they called it, overran the surgeon’s tent and consumed the fevered patients sometimes waiting in the rain for their medicine. Those who weren’t ill spent their days chopping wood and foraging food, since rations were hard to come by in the wilderness routes they often traveled.

Arthur was part of the group chosen to hunt game in the woods surrounding their summer campsite, a spot in rural Kentucky. They pitched their tents in sweltering heat, the sun bearing down on them with angry precision. Even this wasn’t enough to keep the sick from freezing, as men shivered beneath their wool uniforms, struggling to perform drill maneuvers on legs that threatened to collapse.

It was a miracle that he was not among them. The bronchial attacks of old should have weakened his resistance, the doctor barely pulling him back from the reaper’s grasp those weeks before he enlisted. To her gentle hands, he secretly gave the credit for this newfound immunity, though his letters to family members and the reverend back home spoke only of God’s merciful healing.

I am lucky to have the strength to do this, he reminded himself, fighting past thorns and bramble in search of something to feed the hollow stomachs of a dozen tent mates back at camp.

Birds shrieked at his presence, scaring off rabbits and larger animals his company could have boiled into a hearty stew. The wild peaches he found were a poor substitute for venison, but he tucked them inside his haversack anyway for sharing with others around the fire that night.

Biting into one, he swallowed down mouthfuls of pitted fruit, worms and all. Why should they bother him, when maggots hatched daily from the biscuit supplies, and lice crawled through his hair all night long?

He ate everything but the pit, which he tossed for the birds that were still squawking in the branches above. Two of them dove for it, black birds with plumage that glistened in the sun. They scattered as the sound of boots scuffed the ground. Arthur straightened his shoulders when a familiar gray-coated figure appeared suddenly from a side path.

Wray Camden carried himself more like a commander than a private, his stalwart build adding to the sense of authority. His skin was coated in grime, a knife sheathed in his belt. There was another tucked inside his boot, a pistol buried somewhere among the contents of the haversack that dangled at his side.

“C’mon up the trail,” he said, in a tone that would have seemed gruff to any but a friend’s ear. “I need your help with something.” Then he was gone without a glance back to see if the other man followed.

Arthur would never have considered doing otherwise, their allegiance to each other virtually unchanged since childhood games of old. Back then, it was tales of Daniel Boone and Lewis and Clark that drove them into uncharted territory, pieces of driftwood propped on their shoulders for imaginary muskets. Wray had been the leader those times as well, beating paths through the wildest parts of Crooked Wood, his steps turning wherever his instincts told them.

Now, wading after his friend through another overgrown trail, Arthur expected to find timber ready for chopping or a stream for catching fish. Instead, three bodies lay inside a dry creek bed. Their uniforms—what remained of them at least—were a deep shade of blue.

“What happened?” he asked, racking his brain for news of a skirmish before they arrived. No one had reported seeing Union troops within a hundred miles, their camps thought to be somewhere further north.

“Might have been a scouting group,” Wray said, crouching to study the nearest body. “They could’ve run into some militia members, or even some homestead owners. If anybody lives back here.”

Flies crawled over the scant remains, flesh picked apart by forest scavengers.

Wray stood and wiped his hands on a coat almost as grimy as those worn by the dead men. Disgust flickered briefly in his face, whether for the state of the bodies, or the meaning behind the uniforms was hard to tell. Wray seldom spoke of the enemy or his reasons for fighting them, even though he’d been among the first of Sylvan Spring’s citizens to lend his name to the recruitment roster.

“Let’s see what they left behind,” he said, with a nod to where a campfire’s ring had scorched the earth in past weeks.

Arthur combed the nearby weeds, finding some blankets and a knife that was broken off just above the handle. There was a haversack with tin plates and cups and a few pieces of silverware. An unfinished game of checkers was left on a cedar stump, the winning move just two spaces away.

Arthur glanced over the items, hoping to find something more useful for the men at his camp. Ignoring the previous owners proved difficult, however, his mind wandering in their direction no matter where his gaze was trained. He was used to his stench, and that of his campmates, from the limited bathing sources. A corpse was another matter. Bile rose in his throat the longer he searched the campsite. “We should bury them,” he said, after a while.

“All right,” said Wray, as if it made no difference to him either way, his pack dropping to the ground with a heavy thud.

They made a trench with a spade they carried for digging edible roots. Arthur covered the bodies with the blankets he found, Wray heaping shovelfuls of dirt over them. A funeral without ceremony or stone markers, like those on battle sites they’d left back in Corinth. Lonely graves for a lonely death.

He felt this way, even surrounded by rows of soldiers when the smoke billowed and artillery pierced the foliage they hid behind. Dying was a solitary nightmare, each man’s experience different from the rest. This much he learned, having witnessed the final breaths of more men than he could ever count or remember.

He kicked a clod of dirt, watched it crumble at the base of the mound. Beside him, Wray stuck the spade in the ground, easing down beside it as he said, “Catch your breath a minute. There’s nothing worth taking from the camp—seems they were as bad off as we are.”

Arthur had heard that Union forces fared better in supplies, with plenty of coffee beans and other luxuries off limits to the South. This group had clearly not been so lucky. Their lack of any supplies made him wonder if they had gotten lost from their troop—a common enough event with men who’d never ventured past their birth place suddenly having to navigate miles of unfamiliar countryside.

Passing him a battered canteen, Wray said, “There’s a spring back by the pine grove. Not big enough for bathing, but it’ll do for everything else.”

Arthur gulped the water down, grateful for the cool taste after their labor. He wiped a sleeve across his mouth, remarking, “It is not as fresh-tasting as the one in Crooked Wood. This wilderness does put me in mind of that place, though. It has the same towering oaks and sycamores; the rocks so big a fellow’s arms can hardly span them.”

“Remember stacking those stones for a barn’s foundation?” Wray pushed his kepi hat back, bronze-colored hair stuck to his forehead in damp locks. “We’d help roll ‘em in place then slap the mortar all around.”

“The blacksmith took the flat ones for making headstones,” Arthur recalled. “He would carve a few anytime the signs pointed to a wet winter.”

He looked at the earth they had just mounded, guilt traveling over him like a shiver. He’d played no part in their demise, yet it brought to mind times he’d felled men on the battlefield. No smoke to veil their faces as he ran full charge, pulling a saber from his belt to plunge into their flesh.

“How scared we were to pass the old cemetery,” he said, scarce believing how foolish it seemed now. “The Stroud boys would hold their breath for fear of swallowing spirits—we all did. Except you.” He glanced to his friend, a puzzled smile tugging his lips. “You would have spent the night there, if any dared you to.”

Wray shrugged, sampling the canteen. “Guess I knew that spirits could never bring as much trouble as the living,” he said. A joke, if not for the way his jaw tightened. Did he think of the stone that bore his father’s name? Planted in the northern part of the cemetery, a place often reserved for those who died in shame. In Mitchell Camden’s case, being stabbed in a drunken brawl with a man he claimed had cheated him in a livestock sale.

Cold and hard in his ways—that was how Arthur remembered his friend’s father, the years failing to soften that boyhood impression. At just thirteen, Wray had shouldered the weight of running a farm, his mother’s sole supporter in a place still untamed compared to much of Alabama. No wonder, really, that such a youth would find little to fear in made-up stories of otherworldly spirits.

“You learned everything before I did,” Arthur said. “Four months between us, yet it might have been four years.”

“Think you’ll ever catch up?” The cocky tone held a good-natured challenge.

One that Arthur met with a shake of the head. “How could I? You were first at everything. First to ride a horse and shoot a gun; first to venture past the borders of our birth town. The first to kiss a girl, even.”

“Ada Girvin.” A smile cracked the weary features. “She had sneaked a piece of hard candy from my desk. Now, every time I taste peppermint, I think of her.” Glancing sideways, he noted, “You could have stolen a kiss from Nell Darrow any day.”

The words surprised him, as did the need to deny them. “Nell is a good friend,” he said, picturing the blacksmith’s daughter as he last saw her: tanned skin and plain pinafore, carrying a handful of violets she’d picked from the woods. She had given him one of these in good-bye, lacing it through the button hole of his jacket. Later, he tucked it in his pocket, where he carried it for weeks after it had turned to dust. “She’s a sister to me in every way but blood,” he said, smiling fondly at the memory of warm brown eyes that met his across the rows of school desks. Unlike most of their friends, he saw no plainness in the girl’s features, only the shy nature of a bird afraid to show its colors.

“You’re hardly her idea of a brother,” Wray said with a smirk for the notion. “Leastways, she never heaped such praise on Henry those years we were growing up.”

This might be true, but he could take no pride in it. To hurt anyone so kind and caring as Nell seemed nothing short of sin. “There is much to connect us,” he admitted. “A similar way of thinking, perhaps. But I can make no claim to her heart. “

“Yours already belongs elsewhere,” his friend guessed.

He didn’t have to answer; they both knew the letters he received from the Darrow house were not written by Nell. It was another, more elegant hand that penned the lines of heartfelt devotion he waited so eagerly to read each time the mail was delivered to camp.

Others would tease him for the rate those letters came, another arriving sometimes before he could answer the last. He would merely smile, since none of them had met the doctor before, and could never understand the reason he wrote to her and no other female of his acquaintance. To them, she was an oddity, the first of her kind in a place where healers and quack remedies were more respected than any certificate from a clinic.

“We better head back,” Wray decided. “Might be those Yanks have someone looking for them. We’ll need to report it along with the spring I found.”

As he talked, he pulled the spade from the ground, tying it to his pack. With a glance over his shoulder, he added, “That makes one thing you beat me to—losing your heart to somebody. She must be something, this Mariah.”

“She is,” Arthur said. Climbing to his feet, he lost hold of the canteen. It bounced into the weeds, and he stooped to dig it out, where he found something unexpected beside it. A cluster of violets, the deep hue of purple he knew from fields back home.

It must have been the talk of old times, the memory of the neighbor girl that made him pluck one from the weeds where it grew. He turned it over, studying the petals as a sad smile formed on his lips. Then, he released it to the breeze, a movement that carried it below to the unmarked graves.

 



 

Arthur carried a Bible inside his haversack, the pages worn from previous generations seeking comfort in their trials. At times, he doubted any of these could have rivaled the wretched existence of a Rebel camp. The loss of food and comfort was nothing to the loss of friends, an event made frequent between the spreading of disease and the battles they fought in the woods and fields of the rural South.

When summer came, so did the storms, lightening and hail, the rain coming down in sheets to flood the tents where soldiers slept on the ground. They marched in the rain, fought in it, too, when the circumstances called for it.

Through all of this, Arthur continued to search for answers in the faded Bible. On Sunday mornings, he gathered with others from his company to hear the chaplain speak of a love powerful enough to heal the nation’s deepest wounds. Some would nod their heads; others murmured “amen.” Arthur waited quietly for a sign that such a feat was still possible in the land that grew more bloodied and broken every day.

 

Last night, we came through a town where a deserter had just been caught from the regiment camped near Bowling Green. He was flogged nearly fifty times, crying as he said that his children were starving back home. Afterward, they locked him up to face more penance when the news should reach his company’s commander.

They could have done worse by him, I know, for such a crime. Still, my heart did fill with sympathy to see one so clearly in distress for his loved ones’ well-being. The many times I have thought about the risk that would be worth it to see you again, dear love, cannot be named in the space I have left to write.

 

He didn’t dare express such feelings to any but Mariah. His parents would say it was foolhardy, a dangerous emotion in need of dampening. Only the girl who shared his intense yearning could understand, and to her was sent the bulk of the stationary he could rarely buy.

The letters mailed in return bore details that sometimes mirrored his experiences. Mariah spent her days trekking through rough terrain along the town’s outlying homesteads, a heavy satchel strung across her shoulder. She bandaged the hurt and doctored the aged, her services meeting with little or nothing in return.

She too had witnessed death in its many cruel forms, starting with that of her mother. It was this which had turned her from God while just a girl of six. Age and experience had not changed her mind on the subject, and it seemed love would not, either.

“How can you share my heart but not my faith?” Arthur pleaded on one occasion, overcome at the thought of losing her to their differences.

“Would you change for me?” had been her reply.

The look on his face had been answer enough, the doctor turning coolly away. Were she to ask him again, would he give the same reply? It bothered him that he didn’t know, his heart refusing to answer either way.

“Give us, Lord, the strength to face adversity,” the chaplain prayed, head bowed along with those of men who came to worship. Arthur glanced around, seeing eyes that were closed and hands clasped in earnest plea. Some were missing their fingers; others were plagued by the yellowed skin and rotting teeth of the dreaded scurvy.

Strapping boys wasting into scarecrows, their clothes just as badly torn. His friend Wray still had the robust frame of youth but with feet that were constantly bruised from marching sixteen miles a day without boots. Still, no supplies came, their rations down to cornmeal and canned peas as October brought the first frost to those who lost their tents in the summer storms.

Arthur covered his face, begging silently, Take from us these burdens we carry. Reach out Your hand and pull us up from the depths of hopelessness before it swallows us whole.