The Face of Heaven (37 page)

“I’m riding out on Libby in a few minutes. We will be gone for a few days.”

“I will pray.”

“You wonder what it is I do on these excursions—”

“You don’t have to explain yourself.”

“I’m not sure why I was chosen. There are only a handful of us. The
others are all cavalry officers. We ride hard and fast and get in as close as we can to Lee’s army. Often we elude the pickets and are on the edges of the camps. We look for unit standards, estimate brigade size, watch for movement north or west. There was a time when we thought Lee might march on the Mississippi to try to lift the siege at Vicksburg. But he has no intention of leaving Virginia except to come after us.”

“Is he coming now?”

“There are reliable reports that have just started arriving from our agents and Virginians loyal to the Union that the Army of Northern Virginia began to march yesterday, on the 3rd. They say Lee is going up through the Shenandoah Valley to make it more difficult for us to track him. I and the other officers have to find out if the reports are true.”

He grew quiet. Lyndel raised her head. “You have something else to tell me. What is it?”

“None of it has been corroborated.”

“Yet it worries you.”

“Some say Lee is headed for Pennsylvania as well as Baltimore and Washington. He may go through Lancaster County to get at Harrisburg and Philadelphia.”

“Our home.”

“Lee is a gentleman. He will not allow his soldiers to lay waste to villages and farms.”

“But war is no gentleman.”

Nathaniel didn’t respond.

“Can he do it?” she asked. “Does he have the men?”

Nathaniel’s eyes were the green of a deep forest. “We are pretty sure he has over seventy thousand troops.”

“Oh, Nathaniel—”

“I must go.” He kissed her on the forehead. “I hope to be back by Monday.”

He walked to where Libby was tethered, stepped up into the saddle, and rode off through the throng of soldiers and wagons and tents. Levi and Joshua saw him go and approached Lyndel, who watched as her husband disappeared among the trees.

“Ginger,” Levi asked, “what’s going on?”

“Nathaniel’s just doing what he always does.”

“Which is what?”

“I’m sure he’s told you.”

“No,” replied Joshua, “he doesn’t tell us anything about his rides.”

“Why are you asking me? If he wanted the platoon or company to know he’d have said something.”

Levi folded his arms over his chest. “He went out of here like a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders. Grow him a beard and dress him in black and gain him another half foot in height and he’d win the Abe Lincoln look-alike contest sure.”

“Rumor in camp has him scouting for Hooker,” Joshua prodded. “You think that’s so?”

“I can’t say.”

“It’s Lee, isn’t it?” Her brother was staring at her, hoping to catch a flicker in her face that would tell him the truth. “He’s on the move. We don’t see any Rebel pickets posted on the riverfront today.”

Lyndel dropped her eyes to avoid his. “Even if General Lee were on the march, Nathaniel wouldn’t talk about it. He would be afraid of causing a panic.”

“A panic? That would be a cause for celebration in this camp! Ever since South Mountain and Antietam, the brigade’s been shoved to one side or left in reserve. We want to fight, Lyndy. All we do is sit around here eating salt pork and potatoes and hardtack. Why, those of us who were new recruits to the 19th Indiana last year never even fought at Brawner’s or South Mountain. So we want to look Lee straight in the face like we did at Antietam Creek. We want to knock the Army of Northern Virginia so far south they’ll have to change their name.”

“Strange words to come from the mouth of an Amish boy and a bishop’s son.”

She looked up as she said these words. His eyes burned black.

“When I say I will plow a straight furrow I plow a straight furrow.” Levi bit out his words. “When it’s time for haying I cut the whole field. When it’s harvest I work all day and all night if necessary to bring the crop into the barn. So our father taught me. When I say I will fight slavery I mean to fight it until the fight is finished. When I say I will die to
keep this nation free if necessary I will die to enable men and women to live in liberty within our borders. All men. All God’s children.”

He stalked away and Joshua followed.

Long Sol had asked Morganne to lead the men in a sing that night. It was meant to get their minds off gambling, profanity, and whiskey as well as the illicit trade with the Rebels on the far bank of the Rappahannock. It was also an opportunity to celebrate with the 24th Michigan, who had finally got their hands on their black hats a week before, after waiting more than half a year. At the same time the 19th Indiana had received both a new Stars and Stripes and a new regimental flag.

Morganne had wanted Lyndel to join her but Lyndel, feeling out of sorts after quarreling with her brother, chose to remain at the Fitzhugh House. Standing at her bedroom window she could see the flames of the bonfire and Morganne standing slender and dark in front of the wall of light with her guitar. The men’s voices, some two thousand of them, easily made their way into the mansion. They had just finished singing “The Girl I Left Behind Me” and now were shouting for Morganne to play a song Lyndel knew had become popular in both the North and the South. Her friend’s voice, clear as starlight, reached her before the soldiers joined in like a storm.

By the end, the men’s usually thunderous voices had softened. Lyndel didn’t like “All Quiet Along the Potomac Tonight,” for it sang of death. Whenever she heard the words they renewed her fear that Nathaniel would come riding in from his reconnaissance one night and be shot by mistake by a Union picket just as Stonewall Jackson had been shot by his own men. She was grateful that Morganne immediately launched into a more cheerful tune, “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again.” For an instant she was certain she saw Levi get to his feet, clapping his hands to the beat of the song. Soon hundreds joined Levi and blocked him, if it was him, from her sight.

Lyndel knelt by her bed. It was her place to go her brother and ask
forgiveness. She had snapped at him the way their father would have snapped at him. No, she didn’t want him to enjoy the fighting or look forward to the battles. But without soldiers like him, the war couldn’t be won and slavery nailed into its coffin.

And he was more than the ordinary soldier who fought and slept and wanted to go home. He had been reading the Bible to the men in his platoon daily and answering the questions about God and life after death they put to him. Men from other platoons and companies had begun to join in. Even Rebel prisoners that had not been sent north yet. Their father wouldn’t be proud to see his son in a uniform but he would be proud to see what he was doing with a Bible in his hands.

“He is a good teacher, ma’am,” said one of the prisoners to her. “A powerful good teacher. He’d be welcome back home once this spat is over.”

Lyndel was applying a new bandage to the wound on his shoulder. “Really? And what does God think of our ‘spat,’ as you call it, Corporal Erwin?”

“Not being privy to the Lord’s thoughts, I can’t say. There are good Christian folk praying for victory on both sides of the Mason–Dixon line. A lot of them are going to be disappointed. But no one is disappointed with a good message from God’s Book. No one loses there, North or South.”

Another Reb prisoner asked, “I hear the man with the Bible is your brother—is that so?”

Lyndel was bathing a bullet hole in his foot. “That’s true, Sergeant Thornton.”

“Is he a chaplain?”

“No. Infantry. Like you.”

“I would say he has a calling to preach the gospel. I know because I’ve had such a call myself.”

“You’re in a strange place for a Baptist church.”

He grinned. “How’d you guess I was Baptist?”

“Your hair grows a certain way.” She smiled up at him. “Just a shot in the dark, Sergeant.”

“If the Lord spares me, I’ll have my church and my pulpit and my
flock one day. It will be a glorious undertaking. The one thing that transcends all this folly and carnage is the Spirit of the Lord. That’s why I can see that what’s in my heart is in your brother’s heart also.”

“If it’s folly, why are you fighting?”

“I expect because the South is my home—and y’all have invaded it. But I reckon you’re doing what you think is right too. The Lord’ll sort it all out. I hope your brother makes it through and honors the call God has blessed him with.”

She dried his foot with a clean towel. “Thank you, Sergeant Thornton.”

Lyndel’s knees began to ache. She tried to pray but the Bible verse kept coming into her head about cleaning the debris from her own eye before she could see clearly enough to clear the debris from her brother’s. When she tried to ignore it another verse popped into her head:
Therefore if thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath ought against thee; leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift.