Chapter 14
14
The doctor tried to restrain his glee at the amount of whiskey that Libby and Joseph had brought back, but as Norton worked on his leg and his hand, the physician reminded Weybridge of his nephew on Christmas, a child he had last seen in December 1860, when the boy was six. Giddy and shocked at the unexpected bounty. His own son—his firstborn—that Christmas had been an infant: far too young to appreciate the idea of gifts, much less the meaning of the holiday. The realization that Weybridge had but one Christmas with his second boy struck him now as another indication of the way this war had dragged on forever.
“I suppose you’ve killed a lot of good Southerners,” Norton was murmuring as he draped lint soaked in carbolic acid on the remnant of the leg, sponging at the pus. “But the fact you’re here now? What Mrs.Steadman brought back from your garrison? It’s a blessing, Captain. She even brought back Dover’s Powder and the blue pills. So, you’re going to save a few boys now, too. Your ledger, when you die, will not be quite so one-sided.”
His touch was gentler today than it was when they met. Weybridge was confident it was because the physician had all that whiskey in his future and was in a better mood.
“How much pus is there on the leg? I don’t see a lot on my hand.”
“Not much on either. And less than the day before yesterday. There’s inflammation, of course, but no sign of putrefaction. If you die, it won’t be of blood poisoning.”
The news was a comfort. This had been a fear.
But he definitely felt stronger. The pain had diminished, at least a little. It may have been a result of the simple fact that he had been eating and drinking and sleeping in a bed for two days. Of course, it may also have been the whiskey. He was still avoiding the opium Libby brought back because he wanted to remain clear-headed.
“I don’t think you’re going to die anytime soon,” the doctor added.
“No?”
The physician shook his head. “The ministrations of a good woman. And her servants.”
“I don’t think Joseph and Sally are her servants,” he corrected Norton, and then felt a spike of pain up his leg, as the physician pressed his thumb into a spot near the severed bone.
“Like you, Captain, they owe their lives to her,” he said, regarding the stump. He pulled back his hand and took a step away from the bed, surveying his whole patient.
Weybridge considered fencing back by remarking that it was a good thing the Union army had recaptured Harper’s Ferry, because otherwise there would have been neither medicine nor whiskey for Libby to retrieve. But he suspected that Norton might decide to probe the wound again if he did, a spiteful little stab. So, he simply nodded and said, “And I owe you a great deal, too.”
Norton dunked his hands in the wash basin and dried them on a towel.
“I’m going to stop by again tomorrow. This afternoon, I want you in a chair by the window. I want you getting some sun and some fresh air on the wounds. Joseph will help move you.”
“When do you think I might hobble there by myself?”
“Not today. We’ll see about tomorrow. Maybe I’ll ask Joseph to make you some crutches—though it’s not like the man has the time for that.”
“I know. I’m a burden.” His tone, when he heard it, sounded facetious. But he hadn’t meant it that way, and was contemplating an apology, when the physician agreed with him.
“You are. But you’re breathing, and Mrs.Steadman wants to keep it that way. And, I suppose, as a doctor I do, too.”
“Ah, but not as a Virginian,” he said, unable to resist.
“Nor as a father who has outlived two sons because of the likes of you.”
The response was gutting, and Weybridge felt a deep pang of remorse. “I’m sorry,” he told him.
“Words. Just words, Captain. No one knows what it’s like who hasn’t experienced it.”
“You’re right,” Weybridge agreed. “I’ve had to write too many parents. Too many wives. I have children of my own. Sons. Before the war, I spent my life with words, and yet, in all those letters, I never wrote anything adequate. Not once. No parent should witness his children buried or hear of their demise from a stranger with a pen.”
“Indeed. I’m not sure what’s worse: how we hear of our children’s death or the fact we know their body’s been buried far from home.” Norton gazed past him out the window. “There are just too few of us and too many of you,” he said after a moment. Then he picked up the jug of whiskey and cradled it like an infant against his chest and, without saying goodbye, turned and left.
It was glorious to sit by the window in an upholstered chair and feel the sun on his face. The last time he had sat like this was the morning of the attack that would cost him his leg and much of his hand, a memory that made him think of Eustis Marsh. He hoped the farmer was well, and Weybridge guessed that he was. No one was unkillable in this nightmare, but Marsh might have been as close as one got.
Joseph and Jubilee had carted this chair upstairs, an effort that Jubilee had made clear was a task for which she expected someday to be duly compensated: it replaced the small wooden one that had been there. It was late in the afternoon and wafting into his room from the kitchen was the aroma of frying okra and ham. It seemed Colonel Duffy had sent Libby and Joseph home from Harper’s Ferry with a little meat, too, and she was downstairs cooking supper.
Earlier in the afternoon, Libby had taken a break from the mill and suggested he dictate that new letter to his wife. She wasn’t going to attempt another journey to Harper’s Ferry anytime soon, but she said the field of battle was so fluid that an opportunity to get a letter there might present itself. And so they’d spent a few minutes together, and she’d taken down his words. He recalled now what he had said. He’d been circumspect and modest, because this woman he barely knew was his conduit. The headline was simple: he was alive. He didn’t know if the Vermont Brigade had notified her that he was merely wounded or had written her that he was dead. He minimized his injuries, saying only that he thought his leg and his hand were healing. If Emily knew of the amputation, she still could take comfort from that news. If she did not yet know, he didn’t see a reason to reveal that he had been crippled in his very first missive since, perhaps, returning in her eyes from the dead. He would let her savor the fact he was breathing, not be devastated by the reality that if he did make it home, he’d be returning a shell of his former self. Libby seemed to approve of his lies of omission.
This time he did not share the names of the people who were saving his life: Libby and Joseph and Sally. He did not tell Emily where he was. In hindsight, he was worried that his tone in the letter was passionless, a possibility that left him fretting, both because of the signal he suspected it could send to his wife, if, somehow, she ever did receive this correspondence, and because Libby might think less of him. He sounded, best case, like a stodgy schoolteacher and, worst case, like an officious martinet.
And it was the idea that he had left an unfavorable impression on Libby Steadman that had him more unsettled.
He was watching two squirrels chase each other around a red oak when he heard Jubilee—already he had come to know her footsteps well—bounding up the stairs and then into her aunt’s bedroom. With great histrionics, she collapsed onto the carpet before the chair and looked up at him, her face flushed from her exertions.
“Well, look who still hasn’t gone back to bed. My, oh my. What’s next? You gonna chop us some wood, Captain Jackal?”
“Captain? I see I’ve been promoted.”
“Don’t let it puff you up. You’re still a bluebelly. I only added ‘Captain’ because I liked how it sounded.”
“It is a nice rhythm. Captain Jackal. A pirate, perhaps. Are you a writer?”
“I’m twelve. I’m nothing.”
His mutilated left hand was tucked beneath the flap of his shirt. It had become a habit of his, he was beginning to realize. “No one’s nothing.”
“So, the schoolmarm’s now a preacher.”
He started to defend himself, to remind her he was a college professor, not a schoolmarm, but caught himself. He couldn’t believe that he’d almost taken the bait. Instead, he smiled and said, “Schoolmarm is a noble calling.”
“Tell me something.”
He waited.
“What’s it like to kill a man? Doc Norton don’t like how many Virginians you’ve probably killed.”
“I’m sure he doesn’t.”
“I don’t think he waited ’til he got home to have himself some of that whiskey we gave him.”
“Very possible.”
“Whole jug—just today! Just so he keeps his trap shut and doesn’t get us all hung.”
“Hanged,” he corrected her, a reflex, but then his mind paused. The combination of this twelve-year-old asking him what it felt like to see your bullet end a man’s life and her awareness of how his presence could get them—at least Joseph and Sally—hanged, caught him off guard. He had not expected this, and turned away from her toward the squirrels while he contemplated a response. The two animals were gone. Her inquiry felt legitimately curious to him, a question not tinged with the judgment of the physician who, clearly, blamed him for the death of many Southerners.
“That problem too tough for a schoolmarm?” she pressed when he was quiet. “What it’s like to kill a man?”
“It’s too tough for anyone,” he admitted.
“Some professor you are.”
“There are the Southerners I’ve shot and there are the Vermonters I’ve sent to their deaths by ordering a bugle call. I regret them all.”
“I bet you ‘regret’ your Vermonter deaths more.”
He decided to administer some tough love. “The men I sent into battle knew what they were fighting for. They were fighting because there are people across the South who do not see Joseph and Sally as human beings.”
“I ain’t ever owned a servant.”
“Slave. The word is slave.”
“That ain’t what this is about. My daddy never owned no one. Same with my uncle. Heck, my uncle freed his people.”
“Then what is this about?”
“You Yankees won’t leave us be. That’s why we’re fightin’.”
Downstairs, he heard the sound of plates and silverware. Jubilee had heard it, too, her eyes going back and forth between Weybridge and the door. “If anyone’s a slave, it’s my aunt. It’s me. All we do is work, work, and work some more, and what are we paid? Either nothing or Confederate money, which is also nothing. I got good reason to be right peevish.”
“You do,” he agreed. “But no one is ever going to put you in chains. Literally: in chains. No one is going to whip you or work you to death. No one can buy you or sell you as if you weren’t a human being. That’s why we won’t—to use your words, Jubilee—leave you be.”
She fiddled with the lace on her boots, clearly deciding on her response. He considered whether he was too stern. The reality was that her mother was dead. Her father was fighting. And her uncle had vanished, disappeared into the maw of the Union prison system, very likely dead, too. Moreover, in the time he had been here, he had seen no other children. Not a one. Jubilee’s company consisted of three grown-ups, two of whom were old enough to be her grandparents.
When she said nothing, he continued carefully, “When you were living with your mother, how would you spend your days?”
She crossed her arms across her chest. “Why?”
“I’m interested. I’m a father.”
“I got me one of them. It’s a mother I lack. I don’t need you to replace a good man who you bluebellies want to shoot.”
“I understand.”
“Do you, Jackal? I can tell you plain: when it was just me and my ma, I figured life could not get harder. Well, I learned when she passed: it’s a big mistake to believe life can’t get harder. It always can and it always will. Look at you! A month ago, you had two good legs and two good hands, and now you got yourself eight fingers, five toes, and one knee.”
She pointed at the ceiling—meaning, he could tell, the sky—and then continued, “I once heard a preacher talk all about how we come into this world with nothing and can’t take a slop jar with us when we go. That whole ashes to ashes sermon. Every preacher has got himself one. Well, you know what ‘godly’ men don’t talk about in that whole ashes to ashes blah-blah-blah?”
He didn’t answer; he didn’t need to. Whatever pause he’d given her during his brief lecture was behind her. Now she was a train roaring down the tracks.
“How a baby ain’t got a thing of value and an old man dyin’—or my ma dyin’—ain’t got nothing of value. For sure, they got nothing that will make a lick a difference. But, somehow, that old man and my ma at the end had so much in between. So many friends and so much family and the smell of bacon and the taste of strawberries and swimmin’ when you ain’t supposed to. No preachers ever talk about how you ain’t ever gonna smell rosewater again, at least the way it once smelled on your ma.”
She raised her eyebrows at him, challenging him to respond, daring him to try and admonish her again.
“My mama’s last words were about me, you know.”
“I did not know.”
“?’Course you didn’t. But she told the doctor to tell my aunt, ‘Do right by her.’ Do right by me. Then she passed.”
“I think your aunt has done that, don’t you?”
“She has. But—”
“Jubilee?” It was Libby’s voice from the bottom of the stairs. “Supper’s about ready. Come set the table.”
The girl rolled her eyes. “And you ask why I’m right peevish. After I eat, I get to cart a tray up here so you can eat by the window or eat in bed. My aunt will have cut your food into pieces like you’re a toddler. Then I’ll empty your slop jar ’cause you can’t hobble your way yet to the outhouse.”
“I didn’t ask for any of this. I assure you, it’s…humbling.”
“Humbling? I get that. But do crippled royalty have it so good? Kings and queens?”
“Well, which am I, Jubilee? A one-legged jackal or a one-legged king?”
“Oh, you’re a jackal.”
“Good. I don’t approve of kings. It sounds like you don’t either. So, we have that in common.”
She stood and said, “Some people are killers and some ain’t. My aunt can barely bring herself to kill the chickens, so she sure ain’t capable of killin’ a man. My Lord, look how she’s helpin’ a dog like you. But me, Captain Jackal? I could be a pirate. So, mark my words: you better do right by me. And you better do right by her.”
Then she was running down the stairs, and he heard the sound of the silver as she set the table. He thought the girl was underestimating her aunt. The woman was tough, and she was a survivor. But Jubilee was most likely right about one thing: as resilient and independent as she was, Libby Steadman certainly wasn’t a killer.