Cheryl Reavis (25 page)

From Avery?
she wondered. Had they come to some kind of “understanding” through an exchange of letters that would account for Beata’s lack of discretion where her feelings for him were concerned?

No, she decided immediately. Avery had been too concerned about Leah’s engagement to Kader to have pledged himself to Beata. And besides that, he would never pledge himself to anybody. She took a small breath and tried not to think about what condition he and the others might be in now.

In a moment, Lise brought out the herb book. Beata was busy in kitchen when they came down the steps. She eyed them closely—apparently to make certain the book was all
that was taken—but she said nothing, and neither did Caroline.

“You’ll come back, won’t you, Aunt Caroline?” Lise said as they walked out on the porch. “Even if Papa and Uncle William and Uncle Avery don’t?”

“I’ll come back,” she said, hugging her tightly for a moment and then Mary Louise. “Be good girls for Beata.”

“We will—except sometimes I go and get Papa’s fiddle,” Lise said. “Beata says leave it alone, but sometimes when Mary Louise and I hold it and we try really hard, we can just about almost hear him play it. Is it all right if we just hold it, Aunt Caroline?”

“I don’t think your papa would mind,” she whispered to them. She stood for a moment, looking into their upturned faces, then she slipped from their grasp and hurried away, the book clutched tightly in her arms.

S
he kept thinking about what William had written after Sharpsburg.

I don’t have to worry no more about what hell is like, for I have seen it with my own two eyes…

She had thought that, intellectually at least, she was prepared to go into the Richmond hospitals. She had seen death before, but she had never seen it on such a scale as this. She had no point of reference, and the reality of these men’s suffering was far beyond anything her uninitiated mind could ever have conceived. The sight and the smells of such mutilation was nearly unbearable, and the cries of fear and pain went on and on in every crowded barracks she entered.

She could hear them in her sleep at night.

Mama! Mama
…!

But she kept looking.

I am ready for the storm. No one is going to give me the white feather, William,
she promised as she waited for Johann to accompany her into yet another hospital ward. Three days of searching Chimborazo’s one hundred and fifty buildings from dawn to dark had yielded nothing. She had located men from the North Carolina regiments, some of whom belonged to the Fifth, but none of them had been able to give her any information.

But she kept on looking—when she was already exhausted from the harrowing five-day train trip to get to Richmond. Johann had found her lodging of sorts with a middle-aged German clergyman and his huge family, but the house was terribly crowded and she didn’t understand any of their rapid German enough to communicate. A constant object of curiosity for the children, she slept in her clothes in a curtained alcove in the wide upstairs hallway—or tried to. The street noise that never abated and the strangeness of the house and her profound worry kept her awake every night until just before time to get up again. She couldn’t eat and her head ached all the time.

On the fourth morning, Johann came to the house early and was waiting for her to come downstairs.

“I want you to stay here today,” he said.

“No, Johann—”

“Caroline, you are exhausted. I will continue the search. You must rest—sleep. You look terrible.”

“I’ll sleep later, Johann. When I know. I can’t stop now. I can’t…”

They both looked around as the clergyman came into the room. He nodded to her, but he spoke in German to Johann, giving him a folded piece of paper from his coat pocket. Johann read it quickly.

“It’s from another colleague here in the city, Caroline. He says he has located an F. Graeber on the rolls at Winder.”

“Winder?”

“It’s another of the military hospitals—”

“Then we must go. Now.”

“Caroline, don’t get your hopes up,” Johann warned her.

“Oh, please, Johann. Don’t worry yourself about that. It’s been a
long
time since I’ve been burdened by
hope.
“

Camp Winder was not nearly as large as Chimborazo— but it was no less intimidating. They found the ward the note had indicated, but the Invalid Corps attendant, a young
man with his left arm missing, stopped them from entering.

“I’m looking for Frederich Graeber,” Caroline said, too upset to let Johann do the talking. “He’s a North Carolina soldier—the Fifth Regiment. He’s German. We got a message this morning saying he’s here—in this ward.”

“No,” he said without looking up. “No Graeber. No Germans.”

“But—”

“I’m telling you. There is no Graeber in this ward.”

“Was he here?”

The man ignored the question.

“I want to look,” she said, her voice trembling in spite of all she could do.

“It ain’t no use looking—”

“Please!”

The man glanced at Johann, then shrugged his permission and stepped aside. But he was right. She and Johann peered into every face. None of the men here was Frederich.

“But he was on the roll for this ward,” Caroline said to the attendant. “Could he have been moved to some other one?”

“There is only one place a man goes from here,” the man answered.

She had already pursed her mouth to ask him where, but then she realized that he meant the cemetery that was clearly visible through the windows behind her. Several burials were going on even now. She stood there, struggling not to cry.

“Has he got any relatives here in the city or close by?” he asked after a moment. “Sometimes a man’s family will come and take him out.”

She shook her head. “I am his only relative here.”

“Then I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said, finally meeting her eyes. He had the same stunned look that Jacob Goodman always wore, and she wondered if all the men who had endured
an amputation did as well. She tried not to think of what might have happened to Frederich and William.

“We will leave you the address of the place where Frau Graeber can be reached should you encounter her husband—Frederich Graeber,” Johann said pointedly, looking at the man hard enough to quell the objection he clearly was about to make. The man reluctantly took the slip of paper Johann gave him.

“I don’t think you ought to get your hopes up, ma’am.”

The opinion of the hour, Caroline thought. “We will have to look in the other wards,” she said.

“I’m trying to tell you as kindly as I can that it’s likely a waste of time—”

“Then why was his name on the roll?”

He didn’t answer her. She looked at him until his eyes slid away, and she let Johann lead her outside and make her sit down on a bench by the barracks entrance. There was no shade, and the sun bore down on her. She felt light-headed, and worse, defeated.

“We have to look in the other wards,” she said again.

“You sit for a moment. I’m going to look over here.”

He meant the cemetery, and for once, Caroline made no effort to participate. Her sleepless nights and her fatigue and the overwhelming July heat had suddenly caught up with her, and she sat and watched him move up and down the rows of rough-cut wooden markers, until finally he stopped. She realized immediately that he had found a name he knew.

She didn’t wait for him to call her. She got up from the bench and walked rapidly to where he stood, clearly startling him with her sudden presence.

“Caroline—”

“Who is it?” she asked, trying to see around him. “Johann, who—?”

He stepped aside so she could see.

The breath left her in a soft “oh” sound.

“I’m so sorry, Caroline,” he said as she dropped to her knees. He bent to help her, but she made no effort to stand.

“No,” she whispered. “Oh, no, Johann—”

She reached out to the wooden marker, letting her fingers touch the name:

Pvt. William T. Holt

5th North Carolina Regiment

Company “K”

Pennsylvania Campaign

She hardly remembered the walk back to the clergyman’s house. She was aware on some level that the sun was still hot and glaring and that the streets were crowded and she was jostled again and again as Johann moved her along. She didn’t object when he insisted that she come with him. She didn’t object to anything except William’s death.

Little brother,
she kept thinking.
Little brother
—

He’s just a boy!

Oh, William, how can I bear to never see your face again?

She let herself be delivered into the capable hands of the clergyman’s wife, oblivious to the German words that the woman and Johann exchanged. She drank the glass of amber liquid that was offered her, and she lay down on the little alcove bed as she was bidden to do. She even slept for a time, waking in the early dawn, not knowing where she was.

But then it all came rushing back to her, and she lay there, the tears quietly spilling down her cheeks until the sun came up.

Had Frederich been with William when he—when they both were wounded? Had William suffered? She needed to know these things and that was yet another reason she had to find Frederich.

The house was very quiet when she finally arose. She tried to maintain the quietness as she came downstairs to the kitchen, her sadness weighing so heavily upon her that she felt years older than she had just yesterday morning. Her hands shook. She was glad that there was no one about. She helped herself to a piece of corn bread that sat on the back of the kitchen stove and filled a tin cup with water from the bucket on the small table by the back door. She ate her meager fare because she needed it and not because she was hungry. She had to return to Winder today. There were still the other wards to search and the rest of the cemetery.

After a time she became aware of the murmur of voices-two people speaking in German somewhere. Johann? she wondered as she listened. She needed to talk to him and she got up to go find him.

The voices came from a room down the hallway and on the opposite side. She knocked quietly on the door, and there was a long moment before she was bidden to enter. When she opened the door, she saw the clergyman’s plump wife—then her husband. The woman immediately stood up, and Caroline couldn’t begin to follow whatever she was saying.

“Excuse me—I don’t understand—”

“Bitte,”
the woman insisted, taking Caroline into the hall. She grabbed Caroline’s bonnet from the hall tree, then her own, then her husband’s wide-brimmed straw “preacher’s" hat.

Caroline put the bonnet on, because there seemed no way to do otherwise, and she let herself be rushed out the door, the clergyman taking one arm and his wife the other.

“Beeilin Sie sich!”
the woman urged her as they hurried along the street.

“Oh, what’s wrong?” Caroline said more to herself than to them.

They both answered her in a jumble of incomprehensible German.

Their destination was a small house on a back street several blocks away—too far away to be rushing so in this heat. She could only guess that something had gone wrong with the lodging arrangements and she was being relocated elsewhere—in which case she should have brought her valise— or something had gone wrong with Johann. What if he was ill or injured? she thought. He was so absentminded and the opportunity abounded at every turn to be run over by some kind of military wagon.

But he was not ill or injured. He stood waiting on the shaded front porch, and he came immediately down the steps to meet her.

“Caroline,” he said. “I have found him, I
have found
him. He is here in this house—”

“Frederich?” she dared to ask.

“Yes, of course—didn’t I say that? The family here—the mother is German and she has taken him in—arrangements were made—”

“Johann, I want to see him! Does he know I’m here?”

“I don’t know—she says he isn’t awake much of the time. You must prepare yourself, Caroline. I believe he is very badly hurt—”

“Johann—”

The clergyman’s wife said something in German, and Johann put his hand on Caroline’s shoulder.

“She says that you must forgive them for their haste in getting you here, Caroline,” he said quietly, looking directly into her eyes to see if she truly understood.

She took a long, shaky breath, then nodded.

Before it was too late—as it had been with William.

He released her then, and she followed him up the steps and into the cool, dark hallway of the house. A young girl waited just inside, her hair in long braids that had been pinned on top of her head.

“My mother is done washing him,” she said. “She says you can come up now.”

“I will wait here,” Johann said.

Caroline looked back at him once as she mounted the stairs. She meant to say thank-you, to tell him how much she appreciated his efforts, but she couldn’t manage it. Her knees were trembling, her heart pounding.

He is very badly hurt…

The lady of the house waited at the top of the stairs with her arms full of bed linens.

“Your man knows you are coming,” she said to Caroline in heavily accented English, and she caught the young girl’s sleeve when she would have continued down the hall. “That door at the end—he is there.”

“Thank you,” Caroline said. “Thank you for all you’ve done.”

“Nein,”
the woman said. “You don’t thank me for my charity when there is none. I am a poor widow. I must make money however I can. I was paid for his care.”

“Paid?”

“Go now,” she said. “While he is awake. He is very tired. It is hard for him to wait for you—”

Caroline hesitated a moment, then walked quickly on. She took a deep breath before she pushed open the door the woman had indicated. The room was located on the corner and very small, but it had two windows, both of which had been opened to give cross ventilation. A maple tree shaded one of the windows, leaving a patch of mottled sunlight on the floor, the leaves rustling in a random breeze and scattering the sunlight from time to time.

There was nothing in the room but a rocking chair and a small table with an oil lamp, and a waist-high four-poster bed. She walked quietly forward, moving so she could see Frederich’s face. His eyes were closed. He wore no night-shirt, and he was covered with a freshly ironed sheet, one heavily bandaged arm and leg exposed. And he had so many small wounds, scraped and nicked places on his face and hands and arms as if he had been dragged for a long distance.
She could smell the wood ash scent of the strong soap he’d been bathed in, see that his hair was wet and neatly combed.

She stood by the bed, watching him closely, not knowing if she should disturb him. After a moment, she took off her bonnet and hung it by the ribbons on the back of the rocking chair. When she turned back to the bed, he was waiting.

“Frederich…” she whispered, leaning toward him, but he held up his uninjured hand.

His eyes searched hers for a moment, eyes that were fever-bright and full of pain. He licked his lips and attempted to speak. She leaned closer, intently aware of the monumental effort he was making.

He closed his eyes briefly, then tried again. “You are…not a widow…yet,” he whispered.

“Don’t!” she said, reaching out to touch him. He visibly winced, expecting her to cause him more pain. “I’m sorry,” she said quickly, drawing her hand back. “Frederich—”

“What will you do…for me?” he asked.

She didn’t understand, and she stared at him without answering.