A Heartbeat Away: Quilts of Love Series (11 page)

Jim came down the steps and placed a pail of water on the floor inside the opening to the cellar, then retraced his steps.

Beth sucked air into her lungs, having no choice but to move on to the next man to keep up with her grandmother. The man moaned low in his throat and writhed from side to side, the hole in his abdomen saying more than words. Gerta shook her head. He would not last long.

They went over to the last two men, neither conscious, the earth below them drinking in their life’s blood. Gerta straightened. “They must have brought the worst ones down here.”

Beth retreated to the corner beside Joe’s cot. She pressed her back to the wall, the coolness seeping through her thin dress, welcome but chilling. Of the five men in front of her, one was dead and the other four were dying, unconscious except for the ever-diminishing moans of the gut-shot man as he bled out onto the floor.

Exhaustion weighted her head and she cradled it on her arms, blanking her mind. Within minutes she’d drifted but was jerked back to reality by the hard vibration of shelling. Gerta sat in the chair, arms folded against the cot. She had heard the last shell, too. Another one came, this one farther away.

“Oh, God, have mercy.” Gerta said, her voice soft. She made as if to stand and a new anxiey drummed fear into Beth’s veins.

“Grandmother, please rest. They can handle things for a while.”

If not persuaded by Beth’s words, Gerta’s hand to her head must have been the convincing factor. Without asking, Beth withdrew a bandage she’d never used from her apron and wiped the blood congealed on Gerta’s temple with one corner. Already it had caked in her grandmother’s hair. She crossed and dipped her apron into the water, wrung it, and returned to dab at the blood. With deft fingers she put a strip around Gerta’s head, then another. Her grandmother’s fingers rose to still her actions.

“Save the rest for another.”

Supplies were low. Even the surgeon’s assistant had admitted it.

Beth ripped the linen, pulled back her grandmother’s mussed gray hair, and tied it with the cloth strip to keep the bandage in place.

“Beth.”

She turned toward the rasping whisper. Joe’s dull gaze was on her and her hand went to his forehead. “I’m here.” She saved the most obvious question.

Joe’s hand rose, fingers splayed. An invitation.

She tucked her hand into his, reassured by the warmth and bond they’d forged. Gerta had been correct. It didn’t matter that he was a Confederate. It only mattered that he was here, now, and needed her help.

“I want to walk.”

Gunfire sounded, close, glass shattered, streams of dirt and dust snaked down the walls. She eyed the support beam, praying it would hold. Joe was shoving his way upright. She could see the weakness; the uselessness of his right arm was more
than apparent as she shouldered under it to aid his rising. He wobbled, shifted his weight onto her to the point that she felt her legs protest. And then he jerked downward again, hitting the mattress harder than he’d meant to. His moan added to the misery of the dust. Jim appeared alongside.

“He wants to walk. Then I’ll do the lifting.”

The big black man stood next to Joe, his weight twofold that of the underfed soldier. They walked a few steps before Joe gasped to be let down again. It was Gerta who handed the man a carrot and a jar of preserves, and bid him to eat.

“You’ll mend. Your body needs nourishing.”

“Why did you get up on your own? You knew you were weak.” Beth frowned at him.

“The old man. He was quiet. Too quiet. I thought he’d . . .”

“Won’t bother you none now,” Jim said as he lowered himself, cross-legged, to the dirt floor. “He left with my daughter.”

The soldier’s moans were quieter. Joe’s eyes took in the spectacle of the wounded. “What about them?”

Gerta shook her head.

Beth shared a look with Joe before he turned his head away, his jaw working.

They huddled close to Joe’s cot as he ate with slow movements. He said little, and there was little to say. Gerta cradled her head on her arms and slept. Beth’s tension eased at her grandmother’s surrender to sleep. Even a few hours would prove a great benefit to the woman. At some point during the renewed shudder of cannonading and gunfire, screams and yells, Beth found her hand again cradled in Joe’s. She couldn’t remember which one of them had initiated the touch, and it did not matter. It grounded her. Injected comfort while the world outside the cellar tumbled and rocked.

“Tell me about your home.”

Beth flinched. “Home?”

Joe’s tongue flicked across his lips, and he nodded. “Do you live with your grandmother?”

“I do now.” Her throat closed over the words.

“Why did you leave home?”

She laughed, a humorless sound. “I wanted to be a nurse.”

Joe’s smile was fleeting, incongruous. Tasting the irony of what she said in light of the reality of the situation. “And your parents didn’t want you to?”

She considered the question. “They’d just lost Jedidiah to the war. I guess they worried they might lose me, too.” She understood that fear now, in the midst of such a fierce, confusing battle, where the dying gasps of the soldier punctuated every new blast.

“That’s why she gave you the quilt. So you could see beyond the hard times.”

“Are you a preacher?”

Joe shook his head. “No. Just seems like something a mother would think of.”

It was true. The quilt was her mother’s quiet way of reminding her of this truth, and the best gift her mother could give.

“My mother sewed all kinds of things,” Joe offered, his voice resigned, heavy with tension and dread.

The question perched on her tongue to be asked, but she swallowed it back, afraid to hear that his mother had been killed. It wouldn’t be fair that he had lost both sister and mother.

“Tell me about Sue.”

This time the smile lit his eyes. “My twin. She was always in trouble.” His lips clamped together and he turned his head away. “She’d just been married.”

Another crash quaked the ground. She caught her breath and held it as she huddled over Joe’s cot. She straightened and tried to keep the words flowing. “My mother and father own a farm north of here.”

“Brothers? Sisters?”

“Two brothers. Jedidiah, I told you about. Thomas is married, much older than us because my mother lost children between his birth and Jedidiah’s.”

“That must be the worst, losing a child. My mother never quite recovered after Sue . . . It made Ben more determined to join the South and I—”

She watched his profile, his jaw working. His hand squeezed hers a little harder, an action she was sure he was not conscious of.

He stared ahead, eyes narrowed. “I followed him to keep him out of trouble.”

“You’re remembering things. That’s good.”

His brow knit. “Bits and pieces.” He released her hand and massaged his eyes, his chest shuddering as he inhaled. Shells hit in quick succession. Beth leaned toward her grandmother. Jim scooted along the ground, closer to them, as if his presence could protect them from harm. Joe’s fingers interlaced with hers and she pressed her forehead against their clasped hands, fighting tears. A scream rose in her throat.
Not again! God, not again!
Terror clawed as the dirt began tumbling down the walls, dust rising in a weak cloud that coated her mouth.

Joe’s hand cupped her cheek. The show of sympathy released her emotions, and sobs crawled up her throat. She lowered her face to her arms to muffle the sound. Joe stroked her hair, her arm, then clasped her hand again in a grip that revealed his level of distress.

The sound of the raging battle ebbed and flowed as the afternoon stretched into evening. Like prisoners they huddled, captured by the war outside and the death rattle of the dying soldier. And when quiet finally stilled the night, the breathing of the injured soldier on the floor stilled as well.

No one tried to stop Beth as she crawled from the cellar. She had to see for herself. Bullets still split the air, but the action came from the direction of Harper’s Ferry at the west end of town. She felt suffocated in the cellar. Afraid. The sudden need to see for herself rose up, growing so strong that she could no longer see the insanity of venturing out.

Smoke curled in a thick cloud to the west, against the red sunset. The same red as the triangles in the quilt. Shells screamed, farther away, almost drowned out by the moans and screams that pummeled from every direction. Men lay in the yard of her grandmother’s house now. An able-bodied assistant she’d seen earlier came from the springhouse bearing a yoke of water pails. At some point, a fire had been started, the snap of the blaze and the heat added to the misery of the men sprawled nearby. Her stomach clenched as her gaze collided with the spectacle of the surgeon’s table, a pile of amputated appendages drawing flies. Bile coated her throat and mouth, and she staggered, oblivious to the moaning and the clutching hands that reached for her as she passed. A groan rose in her throat. It was too much. Her town. The men. Rebels who had come to destroy, and yet they had been destroyed, one by one.
She rushed up the road as fast as her throbbing ankle would allow. Confederates clogged the road. Wagons, horses pulling cannons. She turned and went east, where the stain of darkness limned the horizon.

Her heart slammed pain into her chest. She stopped, a hand to her throat, seeing nothing familiar about the town, though in another way everything was familiar. Teresa’s flag was gone, and she wondered if it had survived, if Teresa and her family had left or stayed, were dead or alive.

Heat from the blazes stroked her cheeks, some fresh and just getting started, others, starved for fuel, dwindled and smoked. A choking haze laced her every inhalation. At the crest of the east end of Main Street she saw the worst and halted in abject horror. A dark shape shifted to block her view.

“Go back, ma’am. You should have left with the rest of them.”

“You’ve killed us,” she whispered, her voice ragged and hoarse. “All of them . . .”

“Get back, I tell you.”

A wagon creaked up beside her. “Elizabeth Bumgartner?”

“I’ve ordered her away,” the soldier stated flatly to the man. “If you can take her on . . .” He walked away, a stripe down his hazel trousers and linen shirt showing his rank. He was used to being obeyed.

The man on the wagon was beside her. “I thought you’d be with your parents. Come with me and I’ll take you back.”

The words were a hailstorm. She tried to collect the loose threads of her thoughts, staring again at the field in front of her, the cannons to her right and left. The milling about of soldiers, the shouts. All Rebels. Ragged, dirty Rebels. And in front of her, nearly at her feet, bodies. Blood, moans, screams.

“Come with me, Elizabeth.”

The name jolted her, and she pulled against the man’s hand, tilting her head to see his face. She knew him. He knew her. And despite the shock of what she’d seen, she recognized the face of Riley Mercer. The soft edge of a boy’s jaw now hardened by maturity. Riley had loved her once. Before Leo and the injury . . .

“Yes.” The word sounded wooden and dead, like she felt.

He said not a word as he helped her into the wagon. Erect, she could see into the bed, the tangle of limbs, heard the same low moans of pain. Blood. Her knees gave out and she sat, staring straight ahead, this view not much different.

Riley was talking. She tried to focus on his words. Closed her eyes and wished she could close her ears to the roar of the fires and the distress of injured men, screams and gunfire and . . .

“. . . school days. Never prepared us for such as this.”

“No.”

She hadn’t heard anything about Riley since returning to Sharpsburg. Why was he here and not with his wife in Mercersville, where he belonged?

“Where’s your wife?”

He stopped talking and she didn’t care how harsh the words sounded. Lina had been her best friend. Before the injury. They’d talked of Riley’s desire to court her, and his shyness.

“She’s home with the children.”

“Children.” This time the bitterness saturated her word.

He took up the reins, and the wagon lurched forward. “Where would you like to go?”

As if they were out for a Sunday picnic. She pressed her lips together. She could not blame the man. He was trying to help her. “My grandmother’s.”

They rode in silence. Two wagons rattled down the road toward them, each driver grim of face. “Gerta didn’t leave?”

Her chin shot up. “We are nursing . . .” The wagon hit a stone, and a murmur of groans and moans saturated the air. Riley glanced over his shoulder, eyes sad. When she caught his look, he grimaced.

“They commissioned me to carry their wounded. It’s all we can do.”

A caisson lay shattered in the middle of the road, and Riley was forced to wait for another wagon to clear the path before passing the wreckage.
It’s all we can do
 . . . Hadn’t she already settled that? All she could do was help. Nursing was all that was left to her.

From soldier to soldier, one bruised and bloodied man at a time, Joe moved, Jim at his side. He recognized face after face of men from his regiment. Jim helped shift men on their beds, picking up those who had fallen off the tables or cots, carrying those who had died out to the wagon parked outside the door. And always when Jim left to assist one of the surgeons or their assistants, he made sure Joe was settled and secure. “Miss Beth wouldn’t like it if I let anything happen to you.”