For the next few weeks all I saw of the great beast of war was the tail. The hind end of all the battles fought up at the front lines. And those battles were so terrible and so plenty that in a war that had nothing but terrible battles, the road from Washington, D.C., to Richmond that cut through the Shenandoah Valley came to be called the Bloodiest Hundred Miles in America.
Just after dawn, the boys marched off to face the enemy, stepping high and acting brave even if they’d just aired their paunches, heaving up that morning’s coffee and hardtack. The lucky eventually came back, stunned faces black with gunpowder, the smell of cordite and fear heavy on them.
The less lucky were carried back in tall, rickety ambulances to join the poor souls waiting for the sawbones to turn them into cripples or corpses since there wasn’t but one treatment in those days: amputate.
The ones who came up flat out of luck didn’t return at all. On the banks of Opequon Creek or Tom’s Brook or up on Fisher Hill, those mothers’ darlings were laid to take their eternal rest, never to rise again.
Every battlefield had a Dying Tree, the highest, prettiest tree around where friends of the mortally wounded dragged them so that the dying boys might take their leave of this world amidst a bit of beauty. I was haunted by the sight of those doomed faces, watching out of their hollow eyes as we left them behind. Too tired to struggle anymore, they had a kind of glow on them like they were already halfway into the next world and didn’t bear us any grudge for abandoning them.
In spite of our terrible losses, we ripped through the Breadbasket of the South, burning fields heavy with a harvest the starving Rebs needed to survive. We gathered up their livestock, scattered what horses and mules we didn’t need, and freed the slaves to wander where they would. What the General had done to Old Mister, he was doing now to every farmer and plantation owner who had the misfortune to be in his path. Every day, the sun rose on a vision of the Shenandoah Valley’s fresh green heaven ahead and the smoking, charred black inferno we left behind. We were shutting down the South’s pantry. No food. No fight. It was a new way of doing war and it was an awful one.
The fear of returning to slavery, and believing that I could help Mr. Lincoln keep that from happening, made me into the best cook’s helper Solomon ever had. I skinned peels off sweet potatoes so thin you could of read through them. Water was always fresh and plenty and at Solomon’s side even before he hollered for it. Pots were scrubbed until any fine lady’s dainties could of been sudsed out in them.
As soon as we started running into new units with their rearguard of contrabands, I spent every second when I wasn’t scrubbing or fetching, asking if anyone had seen my sister or my mother. I explained that my sister was a quiet, sweet-faced girl, frail and fine-boned, and that my mother was a mighty woman, sturdy and tall as me, both of them marked with rows of scars pretty as strings of pearls resting above their hearts.
Lord, the answers I got.
I heard tales of every bump and pockmark ever to blight a female body. And I won’t go into detail on the ones who peeled off shoes or hiked up shirts and lowered britches to display their own disgusting assortment of warts and bunions. And scars. Lord, the libraries of scars I was shown. I saw backs had been lashed until it looked like garter snakes were writhing across them. And ankles and wrists with thick bracelets of scars from iron manacles. Though those marks told the story of how much worse than me others had suffered, no one had seen Mama or Clemmie. Then one day, I met up with a fellow said he’d followed Grant from Shiloh to Vicksburg. I showed him the pearl scars on my collarbone and asked if he’d ever seen the like.
“’Deed, I have,” he answered even before I could describe Mama and Clemmie. Figured I either had a confabulator on my hands or one of them’d go on and describe every skin peculiarity he’d ever come across. Which he did. Though he wasn’t particularly old, the man didn’t have a tooth in his head. Watching his baby mouth open and close, gummy balls of spit stretching between his lips, gave me the creeping willies to where I could hardly look his way.
So I wasn’t paying much mind when he raised his hand up high and asked, “These gals you’s hunting? The old one tall? Strong? Skin near coal black? No titties to speak of?”
I started to walk away for all in the world this jasper was doing was throwing off on me by guessing how my mother would look based on my appearance.
“The other one?” he called after me. “Little frail thing?”
I stopped.
“She ’bout yay high?” he asked.
I checked and could see Clemmie fitting right in beneath the palm he raised up to his shoulder. Not a height anyone would of guessed from looking at me.
“Pretty gal?” he asked.
Also not what a body’d reckon from looking at me. I nodded.
“Both of them all bumped up here.” He drew his fingers across the space between his collarbone and the place where his chest swelled.
He had every speck of my attention now. “Yes,” I said, barely breathing. “You know where they are?”
“’Deed I do.” He nodded slow, pleased with himself that he had something I wanted.
“Where? Where are they?”
“You want to know where that pretty li’l gal and the big ’un are at?”
“That’s what I’m asking you.”
He paused and inspected his nails. “How much’s it worth to you?” he asked.
I saw the way things were going and, not caring for his approach, I clamped my hand around his throat, put the Green River to his neck, leaned in and growled in his ear, “Enough to stick this knife in your throat and lick your blood off the blade when it comes out.” Hard cases like him sometimes required a persuading detail or two.
He pursed his lips even farther into his mouth like he was pulling the strings of a reticule tight. He was pretty sure I wasn’t going to put him under, but didn’t care to place a bet on how bad I’d hurt him. “Last time I saw that pair,” he said. “I was throwing dirt on their naked bodies for they had already had the clothes stole off them.”
My hand dropped. “You’re lying.”
“Why’d I do that? I was lyin’, I’d tell you I knowed where they are. Make you pay to find out. Naw, they dead.”
That toothless hole went on opening and closing right in front of me, but the words came from far off as he went on, “I was on buryin’ detail. They was scrubwomen. Heard they took sick with breakbone fever. Bad way to go. Might could be the worst. Way they seize up there at the end. Trying to scream but can’t pry they jaws open.”
I felt my hands rising up to stop the man’s words from hitting my ears. I forced my hands down but couldn’t stop my feet from carrying me away from the sight of that gummy mouth. Still his words followed me. “Though lockjaw, now, lockjaw’ll take you down hard. Wouldn’t want no…”
I ran and didn’t stop until my legs gave out on me.