A Place of Peace (10 page)

“No,” she said.  “If Colby wants it, he’s going to have to let me go with you.”

So, this was her little game?  Hold out supplies unless she got a ride from them?  Holcomb shook his head.

“Why?” he asked.  “Why in the world would you want to come with us?”  Except he already knew why, and the reason was lying in the backroom half asleep and drifting on a morphine cloud.

“Your decision,” she said, turning to go back inside.  “If I kept morphine hidden from the Yanks, who knows what else I might have hidden away?”

“I’ll talk to Colby,” Holcomb said, thinking that the long trip to
Nashville would be a lot easier with a wagon full of supplies.

Lilly smirked.  “Do what you have to do,” she said.  Holcomb watched her go, swearing under his breath the entire time.  She was used to getting what she wanted, and she wanted Colby.  If he and Holcomb left tomorrow, that would be the end of it, and she knew she would most likely never see them again.  But if she tagged along… who knew what might happen?  Holcomb looked around at the little general storefront with its faded red letters and peeling paint, the chipped and cracked wood that was a danger to touch with a bare hand for risk of splinters.  It was dead, like the rest of this town, and he knew there was nothing here that offered Lilly any hope of things getting any better.  They might scrape a living off a small garden, but it would end when the winter arrived, and with the war, there was no chance of her restocking her store or even opening it again.

Yes, he knew exactly why she wanted to come.  It might have had the name of Colby, but Holcomb realized there was a lot more to it than just that.  It was the chance at starting over, and like it or not, Holcomb didn’t think he could refuse her if she pushed him hard enough.

“Women,” he whispered in the horse’s ear.  “Nothing but trouble.”

The horse snorted.

Chapter twelve

T
he soldiers were arguing
over Frank’s corpse, and Melinda could hear their voices floating through the gun smoke that clung to them like wisps of fog.  The soldier near the porch was dead, and the others didn’t seem too concerned about it.  Instead, they stood over Frank’s body, while one kept pointing in Melinda’s direction.

“I’m telling you there was another shot from the field!”

“Then go check it out, private,” the other soldier said, nudging Frank with his boot.  “Will someone shut that woman up?” he motioned over to Joan, who was wailing face down on the porch.  “Someone go check on Collins.”

“Collins is dead, Corporal,” said the soldier with his gun still pointed at Joan on the porch.  “That dirt farmer gut shot him.”

“But there was another shot!” the first soldier kept insisting.  “I saw the muzzle flash.”

“Those skirmishers up the road must have sent some down here,” said the
corporal, and to Melinda, he seemed to look a bit worried, as if there were a hundred sharpshooters waiting in the darkness of the tobacco patch to pick them off one at a time.

Melinda’s eyes blurred, and she wiped the tears away.  Her gun was still loaded.  She could fire again.  This time she would not miss.

“Well,” said the corporal, he kept looking over at the field stretching out in front of him like a black shroud.  “I don’t know.  If there are more out there, why haven’t they fired yet?  Why send this poor bastard out by himself?”

The other soldier had no answer, but held his rifle slack by his side.  Melinda raised her gun and aimed at the
corporal.  He seemed to be staring right at her, and in a small moment of panic, she thought he could see her.  Maybe her gun barrel flashed in the darkness or caught a tiny reflection of light from somewhere.

“Okay,” the
corporal decided.  “Sweep the field and flush out whatever’s there.  Someone tend to Collins, though.  We can’t have him just lying there.”

“Shouldn’t we go get some of the others?  What if it’s a trick, or a trap?”  the soldier didn’t seem too eager to walk out into the darkness of the field.

“Bah!” said the corporal.  “I’ll go first.”  He pushed the other soldiers aside as he took great strides toward the field, heading directly for Melinda.  “You ladies stay here and work on your quilts.”

The others exchanged glances, then slowly began to file in behind the
corporal.  “Spread out!  Twenty feet apart.  Form a line and quit bunching up behind me!”

The others spread out like obedient children.  The four of them reached the outer edge of the first tobacco plants, and the leaves began rustling as they started in.  Melinda tried not to breathe.  She was not directly in their path anymore, and with any luck, they would just walk past her.  The
corporal entered the patch on her left and ten feet to her right another soldier came in.  Melinda clutched her rifle, tried to gather the pouch that held the powder and rounds, and began to creep forward out of the field as the soldiers went in past her.

The soldiers were loud and not careful about trampling over the plants.  She doubted they could hear her as, quiet as she could, she scrambled out of the field and raced toward the house, hoping they would not look behind them as she plunged out of the field.  They were quite a distance in, and their dark shapes had faded into the night.

She ran straight to the house, where Joan, almost catatonic on the porch, looked up at her with dead eyes.  Melinda knelt down beside her, clamping a hand over her mouth before she could say anything.

“Shhh!” she hissed.  “We don’t have much time.   We’ve got to get out of here.  Those men will be back soon.”

The faded crack of a rifle shot echoed across the field, and Melinda looked up to see a quick spark in the night.  It was coming from the treeline that rounded the back edge of the field: the same treeline Melinda had come out of earlier.  There were random shouts before another flash lit up in the distance.  A furious rustling of trees and branches could be heard, and Melinda knew some of the skirmishers had come out of the trees, surprising the four in the tobacco patch.  There were two more quick pops of a rifle, then all was quiet.

“I hope it was our boys who got them, and not the other way around,” said Melinda.  “Come on, Joan.  Now is not the time to be in mourning.”  She tried to pull the older woman, but she was too heavy, and showed no signs of movement.  Melinda pulled until tears trickled out of her eyes.  “Come on!”  She tried to hook her arms around Joan’s shoulders, but the woman’s bulk was too solid, and she was dead weight.

“Frank…” Joan whispered.  Melinda felt a fury bubbling up inside her.  “Frank is dead, and there’s nothing you can do about it,” she hissed in Joan’s ear.  “But he would want you to run.  Don’t let him see you like this!  He would tell you to get away!”

But Joan wouldn’t move.  She simply stared at Frank’s motionless body out there in the grass.  A strange whistling sound buzzed beside Melinda’s head, and at first she thought it was a large gnat that had come up to the light of the lamp, but with the crunch of wood exploding suddenly beside her ear, she fell flat on the porch.  One of the Union soldiers was limping out of the tobacco patch.  He held his smoking gun loosely in one hand, even as he clutched at his leg with the other.  It wasn’t the
corporal, it was the other one: the one who had insisted on hearing the first gunshot.  He had fired his gun at her, she realized, and even as she watched, he fell to his knees, trying to reload.

She raised her own rifle, pointing it directly at the man’s chest.  He saw the gun pointed at him and froze, dropping his own rifle in the process.  The distant shouts of the skirmishers were coming across the tobacco patch, getting closer.  The
Union soldier glanced behind him, and Melinda saw the look of fear on the boy’s face.  Sweat mingled with smears of blood on his cheeks, and he looked as if he was about to cry.  Melinda knew they would kill him when they reached him.  And why shouldn’t she?  The boy had killed Frank.  He was part of the same army that had burned down her house.  The rifle shook in her arms before she steadied it.  Why not kill this man?  After all, hadn’t he tried to kill her first?  It was self-defense, and she could hear Frank’s voice in her head telling her to defend her home.

She could still feel Blocker’s hands on her: the loathsome way he had pushed up against her as she sat in front of him on his horse.  Yes, this boy was part of all of that.  He was responsible for Joan behind her falling into such a state of shock there would be no hope for her when it was all over.

“Please, don’t shoot me,” said the soldier, reaching out to Melinda.  “Please.  I have a wife.  I have a son.  Please.”

The voices were growing closer.  Melinda stood, keeping the rifle level and rock steady.  The soldier looked behind him again, and the fear had turned to terror.  “Please,” he said again, his voice breaking and tears now running freely down his cheeks.  “My boy is one year old.  I’ve never seen him.  Please.”

Now he was begging for his life.  Melinda looked back at Joan, who was still staring blankly at her husband, her eyes dim and her mouth moving silently in some secret prayer she kept repeating over and over.

She took another step closer.  The boy was younger than she thought.  Maybe even her age.  The dark shapes were taking form out in the patch.  Another minute, and they would be out in the open, guns blazing and ending this boy’s life.

Frank’s voice in her head kept yelling at her to pull the trigger, and Joan’s quiet whimperings behind her confirmed it.  She saw the flames licking the frame of her house: the house her father had built, the barn now a collection of ashes and smoke.  She stepped up, just out of the boy’s reach.  At this range, he would be dead in an instant.  Surely it was better if she did it than if the skirmishers caught up to him.  They might decide to have some fun before they ended it.

The
soldier was quiet, as if he had decided pleading for his life would do no good.  He knelt back on his legs, his head bowed, eyes closed.  He was waiting for the inevitable, and his only concern now was how quick it would be.

“What’s your son’s name?” she asked in a quiet voice, startling the soldier.  He looked up into the black eye of the gun barrel staring him in the face.

“William,” said the soldier.  “His mother likes to call him Billy, though.”

Melinda closed her eyes for what seemed like a long moment.  She imagined little William running through the grass of the field with his father, laughing, chasing him.  Then he was taking the boy fishing, teaching him to fire a gun, and how to build a barn.  Little William was grown in a flash, and the
soldier who knelt in front of her was older now, a little bit of gray in his hair, his stomach a bit rounder from old age, standing next to his son as he exchanged vows with his sweetheart. Then the grandchildren came along, and the cycle repeated.  She opened her eyes and felt surprised that the rage that had been seething inside of her was gone. The voices of the skirmishers were clear now, and she could smell the faint bitter odor of gunpowder.

“Run,” she whispered.  She pictured Corporal Sims, tall in the saddle, telling her the same thing before he rode off to join his fellow troops.  “Get out of here and run,” she said.  “Or I will shoot you.  Go on!  Go!”

The soldier, the shock of what he was hearing settling over him and evaporating in a hurry, scrambled to his feet, taking off in a loping, half-hop, half-run, toward the road into the darkness.  She lowered the gun and watched him run.  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the first of the skirmishers pop out of the darkness, shouting at her.

She raised the rifle in the direction the
soldier had run, firing after him.  She aimed high, knowing the shot would never find a home except perhaps in the top of a tree.  The smoking rifle was lowered in her hands as the first skirmisher ran up to her.

“He got away,” she said.  “I had him, and he got away.  I tried to stop him.”

The skirmisher shook his head, spitting in the grass.  “Don’t worry about him, girl,” he said.  “We got the other three out there.”  He watched her holding the gun.  “I saw you shoot,” he said.  “Your daddy teach you that?”

“What?  Like it’s hard?”  She gave him a small smile as the others came out of the patch.  There were at least twenty of them, their faces streaked with black powder and the scent of smoke trapped deep within their clothes.

“Ran ‘em off,” said one of them.  Some of the others went over to look at Frank, expressing their deep concern at the loss of a good southern man.

“I know you,” said the first skirmisher.  “You’re Jim Jacoby’s girl.  All grown up, though.  Last time I saw you, I guess maybe you were this tall.”  He flattened his hand about three feet above the ground.

“Melinda,” she said, nodding.

“Yes.  That’s it.  Melinda.  What’s your father doing these days?  Any news of him.  I remember he volunteered for the army, didn’t he?  Ran into him up in
Gallatin.”

“He might be dead, I don’t know,” she said.  “Last I heard he was in
Mississippi, then he was captured, but now I don’t know.”

“Poor girl,” said the skirmisher.  “Bill Harris,” he held out his hand, and Melinda took it carefully, feeling the rough handshake almost wrench her arm out of her socket.  “Me and my boys here have been flushing out Yanks from these woods for the past six months.  Like flushing out rabbits, right boys?”

Melinda turned away from him and saw they had covered up Frank’s body with an old sheet they had taken off of Joan’s clothesline.  Now the white lump lay in the dark grass like a ghost.

“I’ll take care of Joan,” Melinda said.  Bill nodded.  She knew these men couldn’t do anything for her anyway.  “What about the troops up the road?”

“Scattered ‘em,” said Bill.  “Last I saw, they were headed down towards the road to Nashville.  An entire cavalry division, looks like.  Saw the fire from the next farm, though.  Bad news.”

“It was mine,” Melinda told him.  “It was the house my father built.”  She hesitated.  “If you could stay until morning, I would be appreciative.  Maybe you could help us bury Frank in the morning.  Just in case the Yanks come back.”

Bill Harris took off his hat and nodded.  “Yes, ma’am.”

***

When the morning came
, it was a gray light washing over the landscape with a dense fog.  Melinda had found enough eggs in the pantry and worked steadily most of the morning making Bill Harris and the others eggs and coffee. 

“I’m sorry there’s not so much,” she said.  “I’m afraid this is the last of their coffee, and there’s no sugar.”

“Think nothing of it, ma’am,” said Bill.  “I haven’t tasted a good cup of coffee in six months, so this is quite a treat.”  The others agreed.

After breakfast as some of the men moved off into the fog scouting the countryside for any stray Yanks, Melinda stood on the porch feeling the dampness of the fog clinging to her skin.  Joan was still in bed.  Melinda didn’t think she had slept.  Instead, she watched most of the night as Joan stared with open eyes at the ceiling, her mouth still moving in silent prayer.  Melinda  watched until the sleepiness crept up on her, and she drifted to sleep in spite of herself.