Fight for Glory (My Wounded Soldier #1) (7 page)

“
Don’t worry none
about the farm. I’ll make sure your crops
get in.”

“Yes, your pa and
the boys have told me such. Seth is going to stay on and help me over the
winter.”

“He is?” How old
was Seth?
Nineteen?

“And Gaylin, he’s
such a wonderful young man.”

“Our Gaylin?”
I asked
,
just to make
sure.

She laughed. “Of
course
your
Gaylin. Who else? He goes out of his way
to make me smile, I declare. And every day so many flowers.”

“What?” I said
loudly, quickly doing my figures. Gaylin was nineteen. That made Seth eighteen.
That’s how it was. Course they were thinking of girls. But Mrs. Varn was a
little on the motherly side for such young bucks. But was there ever a more
pretty
lass
? None I’d seen with these eyes, and I’d
seen my share.

“Just let me know
they ever get too bothersome,” I said, rattled.

“Oh no,” she
laughed, joyful over the thought of those two it seemed, “they are both such a
delight.”

Well I’d be
darned. They were home spooning the missus with all the work we had to do? I’d
be watching them with a whole new vigilance come morning.

“Missus, let me
walk you back to the house,” I said. I was in my long johns and my pants. My
feet were bare, and my suspenders hung at my sides, but we were past propriety
it seemed.

“If I went in and
got the baby, could I come back and sit with you Tom? I…I can’t sleep in there.
I woke up, and I couldn’t breathe. I know it’s wrong. But…I don’t know what
else there is.”

“What will we
tell Ma and Pa?”

“The truth, I
reckon. Do you think they’d send me home then, Tom?’

“It’s not that,
but the threshers come early morning, Missus. We can’t have you sullied. Folks
wouldn’t understand. Tell you what. I’ll come your way. Come on now, gather
yourself.” I took my hand from her, and stood, helping her to stand. I could
feel her stronger than just a few days before. She moved more surefooted. I put
out my lamp, and led her out. The songbirds started up, and the horses banged
in their stalls.

Slowly we made
our way across the yard. We scared up a hen going broody by the porch stairs. She
scuttled away squawking. I let Missus lead me into the house. Our house opened
to a big room. The front of it was a small sitting room and then the big table
and kitchen. Off this kitchen were the rooms for sleeping.
Ma
and Pa off one side, Missus off the other.
The boys lived behind with an
outside entrance. Allie was in the attic with Johnny. That’s where Garrett and
I had slept as boys.

I followed the
missus into her room. The babe was still sleeping in the cradle. Addie pushed
the door to, and I knew it was wrong. If they found us, they wouldn’t
understand. But she took my hand, and led me to the bed. “You can have it Tom. I’ll
sit in the rocker. I don’t want to lie down. I’ll keep watch over you. I’ll
wake you first sign of light.”

“I can’t take
your bed,” I said. “I’ll stretch out on the floor.” There was a rug, not that I
needed it. But after the field, there was tiredness in me.

So I stretched
out on the floor, and she got on the bed, and she dropped the pillow on me, and
I put it under my head, hoping I didn’t get it sweaty or foul. I
laid
on my back, my hands on my hard stomach. She was above
me, on her side, her little face toward me. I knew she watched me. I couldn’t
imagine how this looked to her, but she found comfort in me, she’d said that. I
only glanced at her. That hip of hers, what a circle it made, swelling up out
of the dip from her waist. What a fix.

Tom
Tanner

Chapter
Nine

Waking on Missus’
floor had me addled for a spell. I’d woken in so many places, the gray light of
morning hanging with the smoke from many a campfire. The slow start to a day on
the trail, the sound of hacking and coughing, tin cups and pots, horses
neighing, leather creaking, fires stoked and fires stomped out.
My soldier’s life.

I looked to
her…this twister of a woman who slept so near, whose arm had fallen over the
side of the bed, and the little hand hanging so limply, so seldom at peace, I
knew. I reached for it, my own darker and twice again as big it seemed, so
rough, but hers weren’t soft, just softer than my own, and innocent…but now
she’d taken life…nothing so near to what I’d done…but she felt the stain
weighing in her, you never forgot, especially her…pure and then bam.

Delicate.
But iron. That’s how she came packaged. She would
be fine. I’d see to it, and I didn’t have much time, and another man would know
this hand in his hair, the way she’d stroked mine, another man would know her
flesh, another would capture that light in her dark eyes, that trembling in her
lips.
Another man, another time.
Not me.

So I pulled my
hand back, and looked at hers, the bones I could crush, but they’d fight back,
and maybe hold me in formation. Mayhap she was the one meant, but of course she
was if I hadn’t been marked like Cain.

It all came on me
then, in this room, on this floor. “Tom,” he’d said, always calling me to do
the hard thing. Like Ma said.
Like I was cut out for it.
“We promised each other.”

“But I couldn’t. We’d
fought that
day,
all that day with so much smoke
couldn’t see what was coming. And they’d split our ranks, the rebs. That’s how
we got separated, Garrett and me. And when he got hit, it came from the most
desperate fighting. And I barely came out of it myself, but I killed, I killed,
and he called to me, and I heard it through the cannon fire and the haze as the
hornet’s nest of gray moved off down the line, as death moved and the beast’s
tail we made wearing our blue, we lashed, we thrashed and looked to our dead
who were not silent, but calling out for mothers and sweethearts and God.

And there he
be
, the beautiful hope of our family, the eldest son, so
beloved, not just by us and our pride but by all who knew him in our county. But
this day, he was just one more who took the fury and felt its crush,
who
bent and fell and screamed against what was claiming
him.

The anguish
seeing it, Garrett’s wound in his middle, gushing up, and I put my hand on it,
felt its warmth and he screamed. “Do it,” he told me. “You promised.” And it
was night, I’d been looking for him a longtime, and the rebs were finishing
those in agony like him, and I dragged him for a broken mile, sometimes
throwing myself over him, my filthy hand over his mouth, trying to find that
blue line while those rebs were close enough to kick at me once, just to make
sure I was good as dead.

“Tom?” Addie
said.
Her voice so morning rich and kind.

I thought I was
still asleep, but I guess I yelled
cause
I was faraway
in Tennessee.
I’d been in a dream-state I reckoned.

I looked at her
then, my chest up and down, I swallowed but there was nothing but dry. And I
couldn’t breathe. Like her.
Like she said before.

So I sat up, and
held it there, waiting for it to go back down.
Like I told
her.
To fit in there so I could be.

She was seated on
the side of her bed, her little feet dangling, barely making it to the floor. All
that was missing was the
wings, that was
the truth. What
a misfit I was to be sitting so close. She had no idea. I looked like the devil
and felt like Cain.
A man without a home.
Did she
think I didn’t want her and those children? I wasn’t blind. I knew it seemed we
fit. It seemed that way.

“They’ll come
soon,” she said, meaning the threshers. I nodded. I got to my feet, my bones
cracking in that bad knee. I didn’t look directly at her. But I heard her
whispered thanks.

When I went out,
Pa was coming out across the way. He stood still. He was gut-punched, and I’d
have it now.

I nodded good
morning and went outside. I made it to the outhouse and turned the block of
wood that would hold him out. I did my business and came out again, straight
for the well and the wash bucket. I peeled off bare-chested and hauled me a
bucket. I liked a good cold one over the head to get me going. So I did that
now, and here he came, sterner than I’d seen before.

I was soaping and
sloping, and I ignored him until I was presentable. Pushing back my hair, I
went in the barn then. He followed me, grim.

I pulled my long
johns up and snapped my suspenders in place. I was combing my hair this way and
that to get the water out. Then I went for those clean socks Allie brought me
other day. “Nothing happened, Pa. Nothing will happen. There’s things you can’t
know about, and I’m glad you don’t. But that woman…it’s like she said, we got a
tie her and me, and she ain’t sleeping. She gets scared.”

I glanced as I
put my feet in the socks and then my boots. I saw his shoulders come down a
notch. “Tom…we must protect the womenfolk.”

“Yes, Pa, I
always will,” I said, pushing a couple of things from the war out of my mind
once again. How sometimes the women fought, how rough we got more than once. They
were losing everything, and we were the ones they could strike at. I slapped
that one so she’d come to her senses that day she clawed my face. I tried to
hold her, to keep her away while they took things out of her house. I’ll never
forget the sadness of that day.

“Mrs. Varn is a
daughter to us, under our roof to be held safe, so she can heal.”

“Yes, Pa.
I was doing sentry. That’s all. And I’ll likely do
it again, just so you know. If you can’t abide it, I understand, and mayhap I
need to take her home, but she cannot be alone sometimes.”

He stared hard at
me, and I saw him scrambling to protect everybody, like he was Moses, I guess. I
was opposing him, no matter how kindly my tone, so he wasn’t fooled.

“Then she must
come for Ma and me.”

“No sir. She will
not do that. She already fears she burdens you enough. She knows the workload. She
will not do that.”

“She must think
of her reputation. We have strangers on the place for two weeks. And your
brothers would not understand.”

“They understand
plenty, Pa, and they are not my first concern.”

“If you feel this
strongly Son, you know what would remedy all of this.”

I stood now, my
feet well shod. “I’m going west,” I said, like a troubadour for my own cause.

“Sometimes duty
steps in the way of our plans.”

“You would tell
me this, Pa? You would speak to me as if I’ve not been a man of duty?”

We stood and
looked harshly at each other. It was a stand-off. I saw the strength in him,
but he was a man of self-possession. And he feared losing me. Maybe it had
always been him who wanted me home. He was the one came for me that day in Springfield. I hadn’t
returned to the home place like most of the sons around here. Pa was the one
waiting under that oak in front of the factory.
My pa,
looking smaller than I remembered.
My pa, who never
left the county except to fetch me home, and him riding the train.
What
I felt walking around those palettes making my way to him. I wanted to run
toward him realizing I needed his arms.
But away, too.
He said it was Ma.
Losing Garrett, then Granma right after.
Pa feared he’d lose Ma too she was that struck with grief.

They didn’t blame
me for not bringing Garrett home, he wanted me to know. That was hard to take. Better
they washed their hands of me. Better they didn’t want to see me. But that’s
not how it was. They wanted me, they thought they did, but it was some small
piece of Garrett they were looking for. I’d always been harder to take.
Hard on them.
Always pulling the tether, always jumping the
fence-row to see what lie yonder, chasing after Jimmy, William after me. I wore
them out.
 

So all that was
there,
and I’d spoken to him in a way made me feel like
shit. “Pa,” I said, “I hear what you’re saying. I know it looks like it’s easy
to fix…this thing with Mrs. Varn and the children…but Pa…when is it my time to
just…to just….”

“I know it seems
that way, Tom. I know you been the best son a man could ask for.”

“You really feel
that way Pa?”

“You know I do. I’m
so proud of you.”

“Don’t be proud
of me, Pa. I’m not a good man, not through like you.”

“I ain’t been
called to the same plight, Tom. I ain’t been tested like you. I don’t know my
measure. But you, you’re a man who has my deepest admiration.”

“Pa…I’m no…I
ain’t bellyachin’. You gave a son, for glory sake, and kept the farm
goin’…there’s no measuring one thing against….”

“
That’s why I say to you…be
careful not to compromise this
woman, this daughter. And take a good look at what’s right here, lad. Sometimes
the manna…is under your feet.”

We’d been talking
over each other, talking fast. I did not know we had it in us to do this. We
stared at each other, but the words were out now. He nodded to me and left.

Thank the Lord. His
words had taken the plow to me. But it was morning and I could hear the wagon
load of them coming in the yard, and I knew they’d be ready to get to the
fields.

Manna.
My daily bread.
I would find
it where ever the trail took me. And until that time I would not turn down
Addie Varn. Not when she was hurting and afraid. When I could hand her off to a
man of worth, then I could turn away.

The man of worth
was not to be found in the crew of threshers that filled Ma’s table that
morning. There were a dozen of them, and they’d done woke the baby cause they
wouldn’t think of such. But that wasn’t it. Several were already married, and
the two that weren’t married were not men of property or conviction.

When she entered
the kitchen though, dressed in her gray dress, mourning proper and not wishing
to call attention to
herself
, the silence fell.
For they knew.
Everyone knew. So it was until she took the
rocker, and smiled at each. So it was they started the talk again slow, how the
statue had been ordered for the courthouse lawn in town. How Sheriff Jimmy said
it would be the first sign of cooperation and reconciliation among the blue and
gray, how veterans from each side had contributed for the bronze horse and
rider that said, ‘The Sons of Glory, Veterans
Under
One Flag.’

But I paid them
no such. I tried to keep my eyes off her, but her presence drew me, and though
she was not close enough to touch me with her sweet baby-holding, gun-firing hands,
I felt her, nonetheless. I felt this woman.