Widow of Gettysburg (23 page)

Something was wrong with Harrison Caldwell.

Nightmares were not so unusual. But now, even in the light of day, he saw mangled forms on the landscape even where there were none. When he saw a perfectly whole soldier, Yankee or Rebel, he imagined—against his will—an arm being blown off by a shell, or a twelve-pounder taking his legs off.

When he had covered the battlefields this morning on his horse, he had vomited. Twice. At least no one had been around, aside from the unseeing corpses, bloating and blackening in the sweltering summer sun. There were bodies—both of men and horses—everywhere.

In shallow mounds of freshly turned earth, hands and arms thrust up through the scant covering, as if begging for more earth to hide them from the glare of day. Some bodies lie flattened against the rocks as if thrown there by a giant hand. Heads, arms, and legs nestled among the branches and twigs that had also been severed from their trunks by the leaden hailstorm.

Would it never end, this human waste?
An overwhelming sense of sadness penetrated his spirit.

Harrison had seen enough of the dead. It was time to talk to the living.

When he arrived at Meade’s headquarters on Taneytown Road behind Cemetery Ridge, he found Sam Wilkeson and Charles Carleton Coffin already there, on the shady side of the widow’s home. Harrison tied his horse to the fence along with the rest.

“My boy’s been wounded.” The first words out of Sam’s mouth.

“I’m so sorry.” Harrison clapped a hand on his back. “Do you know, is it quite serious?”

“I know very little.” His eyes were red. Harrison would not be the
only correspondent having trouble reporting on this massive battle.

Before Harrison could reply, a mass of artillery roared to life all at once, the sound as if earth and sky were crashing together. The fiery thunder filled the air as suddenly and as completely as the notes of an organ would fill a church with Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus” on Christmas morning. Taking up his field glasses, Harrison counted close to one hundred fifty Confederate cannon blazing with spark and billowing smoke on Seminary Ridge. Seconds later, shells shrieked across the sky, whirling across the valley until landing on the center of the Union lines on Cemetery Ridge.

But not all of them hit their mark. Those that overshot their target exploded above, around, and through Meade’s headquarters. As many as six shells per second burst in the sky above Harrison’s head. The men scrambled to safety some distance behind the house, leaving the tethered horses to rear in terror.

For one hour that felt like ten, the inferno of the Confederate artillery raged against Cemetery Ridge, and the Union guns blazed back. Shrapnel rattled in the trees like hail. Clouds burst into view where before there had been blue, unsullied sky. Several Yankee soldiers on Taneytown Road were torn to pieces. Harrison would hear their screams again, in his dreams, he was sure.

Finally, a lull. Harrison watched in horrified awe as a mass of men, perhaps twelve thousand strong, marched forward in perfect order across the open field, a mile wide, right up to the very muzzles of the guns, until the Yankees opened fire and tore lanes through the Rebels as they came.

“They are committing suicide!” said Wilkeson.

“They are following orders.” Carleton’s voice was tempered by amazement. “No one can say they are not brave. And they will go down in a blaze of glory.”

Glory?
Harrison could barely keep himself from shouting that all was madness. Though his loyalties were firmly on the side of the North, he could not rejoice to watch this slaughter.
What was Lee thinking to
issue such a command?
This was not a fair fight. It was a squandering of human life on a monumental scale. There was no glory on this field. Only carnage.

For fifteen minutes, the Union gunned down men who, by now, were running at them like wild men, as if minié balls and bayonets could be a match for cannon and high ground. Until the last gun fell silent, the last Rebel yell and Yankee huzzah faded away, and the Union still held Cemetery Ridge.

The field smoldered with charred and grotesquely mangled forms in every conceivable position, laid out in the track of the great charge. It was scattered with caissons, canteens, muskets, cartridges, horses. Men.

“How can Lee recover from such a blow?” Harrison muttered. The words sounded distant and muffled after the earsplitting battle.

“He won’t. He must withdraw.” Carleton’s prediction. Harrison had never known him to be wrong.

Back at Meade’s headquarters, they found the one-room widow’s house perforated with shell. All sixteen horses lay dead on the ground, still tied to the fence.

Rehearsing potential opening lines to his story in his mind, Harrison walked the ridge back to Cemetery Hill. Cannons blackened with their own smoke and covered in mud rested, finally spent, among the graves. Harrison sat with the dead, then, some below the ground, some above it, and looked out over the battlefield. Just two days ago he had looked out from this vantage point and seen mostly fields of wheat, barley and rye, peach orchards and apple orchards. Now the land was war-trampled and destroyed. Green fields turned into dirt and dust, the grass ground into a layer of jelly. Mounds marked mass graves so shallow that the hair on the corpses’ heads was ruffled by the wind. Some graves had been marked with chalk on the tops of cartridge boxes. The names would be washed away in the next rainfall, perhaps in the next heavy fog, and the bodies would be lost to their families forever.

Holding his head in his hands, Harrison tried to think. His editor
would be clamoring for a story as soon as Harrison could write it. How could he tell this tale? How could he make the public, people who had never been on a battlefield, understand exactly the toll war exacted?

Unbidden, the faces of men wounded and killed at Antietam, Bull Run, and Fredericksburg passed before his eyes, a cadre of ghosts he’d learned to live with. Gettysburg would add another host to their number.

Eyes squeezed shut, Harrison clenched a thatch of hair and grasped for what was left of his decomposing sanity.

“[I HAVE] DONE WHAT
I never expected to do, or thought I could. I am becoming more used to sights of misery. We do not know until tried what we are capable of.”

          
—SARAH BROADHEAD, Gettysburg housewife and volunteer nurse, from a diary entry dated July 7, 1863.

“I OFTEN LOOK BACK
upon those days and wonder how we all were able to do what we did during those three terrible days of battle, and the weeks succeeding them. Surely we should have failed utterly, had the Lord not sustained us by His strength, and held us up by His power. To Him be all the praise.”

          
—FANNIE BUEHLER, Gettysburg housewife

 

L
ightning cracked open the sky above Seminary Ridge, and sheets of rain spilled out while thunder rolled like distant artillery. Water sluiced over hills, ridges, fields, and bodies, washing away the blood that had collected. It almost felt like baptism to Liberty, an attempt at purifying the stained. Stepping off her porch, she lifted her face to the angry sky and let the heavy drops splash her skin.

The battle was over.

In addition to the officers who had already been taken prisoner, including Lt. Holmes, almost a thousand patients had vacated Holloway Farm this afternoon, joining in a wagon train of Confederate supplies and wounded that was at least seventeen miles long. The patients who could walk hunched their shoulders against the rain and shuffled between the wagons. Those who could not were laid on the bare planks of the wagons, without straw or springs to cushion the jolting over the washboard roads.
Their agony echoed throughout the wagon train as it snaked by on its retreat to Virginia, a macabre Independence Day parade.

Her birthday.

The screen door banged closed as Dr. Stephens came out on the porch and leaned against a weathered post. The other two surgeons had left with the wagon train, leaving Dr. Stephens in charge of the remaining patients at Holloway Farm. Liberty was glad he had recovered from whatever ailment had slurred his speech and glazed his eyes. Most likely exhaustion. The man had risen at two in the morning and worked steadily until midnight the last few days. “The place feels almost empty, doesn’t it?”

“Almost.” Liberty climbed back under shelter and scanned her trampled dooryard.

“I suppose it is a great relief to you to see them go.”

Liberty measured her response. “It is a relief to see an invasion come to an end. But in truth, I wanted to say goodbye to some of those men. Three days is such a short time, but three days of crisis wraps the bonds much tighter than usual, wouldn’t you say?”

He nodded. “You say you wanted to say goodbye. Did you not?”

She looked down. “I was afraid it would sound like mockery. I’m so glad you stayed, though.”

Hinges squeaked as the door swung open again, and Bella joined them. Her apron and dress bore the marks of almost three days and nights of service, but she held her head high as she stood silently near Liberty.

“Of course.” Dr. Stephens sniffed, wiped his nose on his sleeve. “We still have five hundred who need care.”

Liberty knew. Those who overflowed the house and barn lay sinking in the mud under the eaves of the house and outbuildings, their stomachs growling and wounds crying out for relief and fresh dressings. But their medical supply had dwindled to almost nothing. The only people here who were comfortable were the ones buried in the orchard.

“I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“What about me, Thugar Plum?”

Liberty’s spine tingled as Isaac Tucker bounded up the porch steps and smiled, revealing a gap where his two front teeth should have been.

“Come on, Thugar, don’t tell me you’re not glad to thee me.” Soaking wet, he was narrow as a musket rod, and looked almost as strong.

“What on earth happened to you?” Liberty asked over the doctor’s groan.

“You’re the worst kind of coward, you know that?” Dr. Stephens growled.

“I’m injured!”

“Self-inflicted.”

Warning flared in Bella’s eyes. Liberty swiveled between the two men. “I don’t understand.”

“It’th a mythtery to me, too, but the important thing ith that the army doethn’t want me anymore. Can’t tear open a cartridge, thee? Front teeth required. And I’m plum out.” He smiled again. “Told you I wath thtaying.”

“So, you’ve been discharged?” His lisp continued to distort his speech, but Libbie’s ear quickly tuned out the hint of childishness.

He shrugged. “More or less.”

“Mr. Tucker.” Dr. Stephens towered over him. “Since you no longer require medical attention, you are ordered off this hospital grounds at once.”

Isaac laughed, and a curl of black hair dripped on his forehead. “That’s the great thing about being discharged. It means I don’t have to take orders from you or anyone else in the army anymore. Ever. You’ve got no rank on me. You can’t tell me what to do, see? The only person here I’ll listen to is this little lady right here.” He turned his gaze back to Liberty, and she fought the urge to smack that smile off his lisping mouth.

Her chest heaved. This boy was crazy.
Crazy!
The thought of his sloppy kiss made her want to run.

“Miss Liberty. A word, please.” Bella cut her voice low, guided Libbie by the elbow to the corner of the porch. “Whose farm is this? Whose
house? Whose property are we on right now?”

“Mine.”

“Then start acting like it.” Bella held Liberty’s shoulders, her brown eyes penetrating. “That boy over there is a coward and a fool, but he means to please you. Make him work for it. Lord knows there’s work enough to go around.” She flattened her lips for a moment, as if weighing her words. “Take charge. You are the mistress of this place. Step up, Miss Liberty. This is your land. Don’t you dare let them think it isn’t.” She released Liberty’s shoulders. “Do you understand me? Rise up.”