Chapter 5
5
Libby stood alone in the doorway after dark. She smelled the man before she saw him. She smelled the room, malodorous and bog-like. He was a dark mass on the floor, his breathing a wheeze she might have mistaken for a snore were it not so labored and sad.
She knelt before the soldier and brought the light close to his face. When he looked at her, his eyes were those of a wounded horse asking to be shot.
She heard Joseph’s shoes on the hardwood floor behind her. The two of them had come because today Sally had heard a man calling from this bedroom window. The house had gone empty that summer when it was clear to Maude Bingham that neither of her grandsons was ever coming back, and she should wait out the end of the war further from the fighting with her daughter in Richmond. She no longer wanted to manage the place all alone.
But she’d told Libby and Sally before leaving to take whatever vegetables they wanted that were left to ripen in the kitchen garden. (Those were long gone: Jubal Early’s army had taken everything within hours, except for some of the wildflowers, which neither the quartermasters nor any of the soldiers knew how to use.) This afternoon, Sally had walked the two miles to the property to harvest beebalm for the simples she crafted to combat nausea and sore throats, and to infuse the tea that Joseph liked. And though the stranger’s voice was hoarse and small, she’d heard his cries for help. Had the beebalm been even twenty yards further away, she doubted she would have noticed the fellow calling out. But even at a distance, Sally could see the man’s left hand was wounded and the fellow was badly injured. She thought, based on the uniform shirt, he was a Yankee. She’d come straight home, and the three adults had decided, after some debate in which even Jubilee expressed her opinion, that Libby and Joseph would return to the Bingham place after dark. They all had their reasons, but two were paramount for Libby. There was the practical: he might have a weapon or ammunition. And there was the moral: when her husband had been wounded, she would have wanted someone, even a Northern woman, to provide him kindness and succor. You just can’t leave a person to die.
And so here she was. Here they were.
She placed the lantern on the floor.
His sleeves indeed were blue. “You a Yankee?” she asked.
The wounded man nodded, then murmured, “Water. Please.”
She could see from his face that either he’d been crying or he was sweating. For his sake, she hoped it was the former. It was chilly tonight, and if he were perspiring, it was probably a fever, and one more reason he was likely to die.
She had filled the wineskin with water before coming here, and now she uncorked it. Holding his head, her fingers lost in his hair, she dribbled a slow stream into his mouth. He coughed some of it back, but nodded in gratitude and, she supposed, because he wanted more. So, she gave him a few more drops and then lay his skull back on the mattress. She ran the lantern over his body to see where he had been wounded, fighting not to look away from his mutilated left hand, the bandages having unraveled and sitting beside the mattress now like a dead animal. She paused the light where his right leg had been amputated. Though he was still wearing his uniform shirt, his pants were folded on the floor a few feet away, where they’d likely been since he’d been brought here, and he was wearing only drawers.
“It’s bad,” Joseph whispered into her ear. “We’ll need the doctor.”
She studied the soldier’s shirt. A patch with two bars on the shoulder. He was a captain. Like her brother and like her husband.
Disgusted, she shook her head. The Northerners had left behind a captain to die, an indignity that infuriated her.
“The man’s an officer and they deserted him,” she told Joseph.
“Crime would be just as awful before God if the man was a private,” Joseph observed.
“Left him to die with no food or water.” The Yankees’ ignominy knew no bounds in her mind. This was a disgrace.
“They left some,” the dying man croaked softly, correcting her.
“How long have you been here?”
He shook his head. He had no idea.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Jonathan Weybridge. Eleventh Vermont Volunteers. Company C…” His voice trailed off.
“I’m Libby Steadman, and this is Joseph. Did they leave you a gun?”
His eyes grew a little wide, but he said nothing.
“I can’t decide if he thinks you wanna shoot him or he wants you to shoot him,” Joseph told her.
She stood and walked slowly around the room with the lantern. There was the empty plate. The empty canteen. His pants. There was the corner of the room that, for a time, he had been using in lieu of a slop jar.
“A gun?” she asked him again.
Once more, he shook his head. She glanced at Joseph, perturbed. She hadn’t realized how badly she wanted another weapon.
“Well, he’ll die if we leave him here,” she said to Joseph. She would not behave with the dishonor of the Northerners who had abandoned him. “So, we have to bring him back.”
“I agree. But he’ll probably die at your home, too—but, at least, he won’t die alone. And maybe Doc Norton—”
“Doc Norton won’t help him.”
“We can ask.”
They could, but she wasn’t sure what good would come from any plea for his help. Jeremiah Norton was closer to Leveritt Covington’s age than hers. He had lost two boys in the war and loathed Abe Lincoln more than Satan—his words. He detested the Union soldiers, and was disgusted by the way they had turned parts of the Valley to ash. She had heard that since his second son’s death at Spotsylvania in May, he’d been drinking more than any man should—though where he found the whiskey these days was a mystery to her.
“I’m guessing no one else knows he’s here,” she told Joseph. “Which is good. He should be easy enough to hide at our house. On our property.”
“No, it won’t be easy,” Joseph corrected her. “He needs medicine we don’t have. And we don’t seem to go very long these days without one of Mosby’s men or an army quartermaster comin’ by.”
She nodded. Harboring a Yankee? If someone found out, they’d hang Joseph and Sally for sure. Who could say what they would do to her and even Jubilee.
And, of course, there was the dead man Joseph had killed buried on their property, the corpse’s existence a reminder that the Northerners did not have a monopoly on roughness and barbarity. Still, they could not compound the Yankees’ crime and go home without this wounded man. She wouldn’t leave him here.
“We live up the road,” she told this Jonathan Weybridge from Vermont. “We’re going to bring you to my husband’s and my house. We have a wagon and a horse. It’s going to hurt when we carry you down the stairs. It’s going to be uncomfortable in the back of the wagon. Do you understand?”
He nodded.
It’s going to be uncomfortable. No. It was going to be excruciating. She thought of all the bags of flour she had lifted the last few years. None of it had prepared her for this.
Libby stared into the sky a few minutes later, the moon so bright it hid the stars that dared try and speckle its halo. Her husband and her brother, if they were still breathing, were seeing the same moon wherever they were.
When Sally had told Joseph and her about the soldier in the window, Libby had figured his wounds must be bad. But she hadn’t expected he would be this close to death. She’d been caught off guard by the smells and the sights and the sheer weakness of the man. For the amount of pain he had endured and was still experiencing. Now, it all felt beyond her capacity.
She looked into the wagon where they were going to lay this Union captain, wishing she had brought more comforters or pillows. She had thought two of each would be sufficient. She leaned against the side wall, her arms across her chest, disappointed in herself. Thank God, at least it was a four-wheel wagon and not a two-wheel gig. A gig would likely have jostled him to death.
Her eyes fell on the road, and she noticed the trails the wheels had left in the dirt. Tomorrow morning, would anyone notice them and care? Would someone tonight?
She had come out here to assess how they would get the man into the back, and all she had resolved was that she would soon be naught but frustration and anger and regret.
Joseph was motioning to her from the front door, holding the lantern. He had the captain ready to bring down the stairs.
“We won’t be able to carry him, but the staircase is wide. He’s willin’ to try and put weight on his good leg.”
“Only leg,” she corrected him, a reflex born of gloom.
“He’ll wrap an arm around each of our shoulders. I’ll take the right, since he’s got no leg there.”
She agreed and they walked back inside, and she was aware with each step that she had two feet. She became mindful of this reality whenever she saw a soldier who had lost a leg—and she had seen a lot the last three years.
“I reckon the hardest part will be gettin’ him up,” Joseph murmured. “He’s sittin’ now, but even that was a mighty struggle. He ain’t eaten much lately, but he’s still a big man.”
“We’ll have to navigate the stairs in the dark,” she said. “We’ll need both of our hands.”
Joseph put the lantern down in the front hallway near the base of the stairway. “It’ll help some.”
Then they climbed to the second floor and paused before the bedroom. She could see Weybridge sitting upright, his shape silhouetted by the moon. She knelt beside him.
“Do you have a haversack?” she inquired. She hadn’t seen one, but she needed to be sure.
“Gone,” he whispered.
“Is there anything here you want us to bring?”
“My pants.”
“What about a boot? For your left foot?”
“It…”
“Yes?”
“It had a hole in it,” he said, his voice still small, but there was the tiniest hint of levity in the tone, as if he found something about this idea funny.
“So, it’s gone, too?” she pressed.
“Apparently.”
She looked at Joseph and then at the captain. And then, with all the strength she had built at the gristmill since Peter had left for the war—she still couldn’t believe they’d expected he’d be gone but months—she slid underneath his left arm, and when Joseph said, “ready,” she used as much of her legs as she could, but also her back because, it seemed, that was how the body was built, and the man said nothing but she heard the pain in his breathing as she and Joseph got him onto his feet.
No. Onto his foot.
On her twentieth birthday, when she and Peter had been married barely a month, they had gone swimming in a secluded stretch of the Opequon he called the teacups.
“Teacups?” she had asked, after he had broached the idea.
“Giant ones. Smooth as the inside of bowls,” he’d said. “But each has a handle made of rock that juts out toward the riverbank.”
Over millennia too many to count, the current had crafted two, almost identical, stone basins the size of stagecoaches there, and the water swirled into them and it was cool and clean. The two of them were alone, and they dunked one another—he could just touch the bottom of one of the bowls and keep his nose above the surface, she could not—and then warmed themselves on the sun-baked slab of rock between the hollows. He put his shirt beneath her and they made love, and then, as if they were children, they slid back into the water.
For her birthday, he gave her a small gold pin with a garnet, and he gave it to her when they were walking back to the house through the woods. It had been in his pants pocket all the time.
He had cut his foot on one of the rocks around the teacups that day, but it was only the next morning that he had understood he was going to walk with a limp for a week or two while it healed.
Now, as Libby looked upon the man prostrate in the wagon bed, his chest heaving from the agony and exertion of getting down the stairs and into the cart, she recalled how Peter coped, running the gristmill with a limp. Managing the property with a limp. Because he was on his feet so much, it had taken an extra long time to heal.
But it had healed.
When he had marched off to war, when he had marched across Virginia and Maryland and Pennsylvania, he had been fine.
She climbed onto the bench at the front of the wagon and rested her feet on the toe board.
Joseph sat beside her and took the reins. He wiped the sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his shirt. He was too old for this, she decided. She was, too. Oh, she was barely a third his age, and if she viewed her life solely by the number of days she had walked this earth, she was still young. But the war had aged her. It had aged everyone. And saving this Union soldier from Vermont? She wouldn’t be surprised if she had gray in her hair before she turned twenty-five.