A Heart Divided

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Removing a wooden lantern from its iron holder near his cot, Andy stuck what was left of his candle in the lantern. They were running short on supplies as it was, the whole camp on rations, the soldiers in shoes bound with twine and clothes held together with dirt and grime. That’s why I have just one piece of paper left. Grant will starve our men and we’ll come begging to surrender, anything for a meal that consists of something more than tepid soup and stony bread. Here you go, General, the heart of the South for another sheet of parchment, what do you say? Just to pen a note back home.

He rolled the few matches he had left into a strip of cloth and shoved them beneath the thin cot where he slept. Though he trusted his men, times were hard, and he didn’t want to leave the lucifers out where someone might be tempted to filch them. Mary’s letter went beneath the cot, as well, with the remaining sheet of paper. The ink pot he capped and shoved into his haversack at the end of the bed, and with one foot he eased the plate of food under the table. He didn’t think he’d eat it, but he didn’t want it to go to waste, not when so many other regiments were starving. Maybe I’ll pack it away in the morning and keep it just in case.

Outside his tent the night was sultry and warm, the humidity this early in the year like a wet rag flung against him as he stepped out into the camp. Around him a few fires flickered in low pits, illuminating ragged soldiers hunched over the flames not so much for warmth but for light. A couple of the men glanced at Andy as he passed—they eyed the lantern he carried, envious, before turning back to their Bibles or dice or whatever else it was they used to make the war bearable.

Andy moved through the camp easily, a ghost among his own men, his gray shirt and pants bleached white in the glow from his lantern. When he reached the edge of the camp, he considered returning to his tent for his coat and rifle. His rank was spelled out on the coat in patches, and the rifle would give him some semblance of protection against the night. But he was only going to talk with the men on picket duty. They knew who he was by sight, and what use was a rifle against imagined voices and disembodied ghosts?

With quiet steps, he moved through the underbrush that ringed their encampment. The pickets were lonely men, bored with their duty, nothing else—young men jumping at shadows. Andy hadn’t the patience for that, not tonight. His mind wanted to retreat to the past, and nothing sounded better than a solitary evening spent beneath the thin blankets on his cot, reminiscing about a boy he once knew. Three years was too long. Too damn long.

As he neared the outskirts of their encampment, he halted and called out, “It’s me.” He heard the pickets shift uneasily in the darkness ahead of him. “Lieutenant Blanks.”

“Show yourself,” came the stiff reply.

Andy raised the lantern to reveal his face. For a few blinding moments he blinked in the bright light, not surprised to see it reflect off the dull metal of a bayonet pointed at his chest. Then he heard a sigh of relief and the bayonet disappeared.

“Sir,” the picket said, snapping to salute.

Andy held out the lantern to see who was on duty. Williams and Lovelace. He knew them by sight but couldn’t recall their given names. They were just two more men in a company of hundreds. Williams stood tall and lanky, his hair shaved to a thin buzz cut to fight off a particularly bad infestation of lice that plagued the enlisted men. He had small, narrow eyes that glistened darkly in the glow of Andy’s lantern, and though he held his gun at his side, his gaunt cheeks and distrustful squint still made him look dangerous.

Beside him stood Lovelace, a short, stocky man, with thick arms and a bulging stare that always unnerved Andy. The way his gaze darted nervously from Andy to the woods and back again belied his fear of whatever might be out among the trees. His salute was sloppy, and he shifted from foot to foot as if he had a touch of dysentery and wanted to slip away to relieve himself in the sink.

Both men were younger than Andy, who at twenty-five felt ancient. Three years in battle did that to a man. He felt old before his time, and in the haunted eyes of these two soldiers, he didn’t see men staring back at him but mere boys, pawns in a game that threatened to claim their souls. They should be at home, with their families, with sweethearts who pined for their return. Not here in the dark and the dirt. Not here.

Williams’ Southern accent betrayed his Kentucky roots. “Just being cautious, sir.”

“Understood.” Andy lowered the lamp and sighed. “Lieutenant Bucknell says there’s talk of a ghost.”

Williams laughed, a shaky sound Andy thought was only a cover for the picket’s superstitious fear. “Ghosts, sir?” he asked, nudging Lovelace. “I don’t—”

Suddenly Andy heard it, a faint cry in the distance that sounded ghostly in the darkness of the night.

All bravado drained from the pickets’ faces. “See?” Lovelace whispered. He shoved Williams hard, almost knocking the older man down. “You laugh and it starts up again. Do you want to die tonight? Do you want it to get us?”

“Ghosts don’t get you,” Williams replied. “Tell him, sir. Tell him that’s just—”

“It’s not a ghost,” Andy said. When Lovelace started to speak, he raised one hand to silence him. “Shh.”

The pickets fell quiet, and together the three men listened, straining to hear the cry again. It flowed like a tide, and just when Andy thought it would crest into actual words, it retreated again until it was nothing more than a windy whisper. But it was a human voice, he was sure of that much. Just another soldier left for dead, he mused, suddenly sad. War was a gentleman’s pastime, played in boardrooms and around conference tables with no regard for the reality of combat. The men who began this strife knew nothing of the horrors that befell those fighting at their command. Left for dead in the night, dying on a battlefield. Forgotten, alone. Another casualty in the game.

“It’s no ghost,” he said again, his voice softer.

Beside him Lovelace’s eyes widened in disbelief and Williams shifted from one foot to the other, watching Andy closely. “It’s a dying man,” Lovelace whispered. With sweaty hands, he grasped Andy’s wrist. “Might as well be a ghost. Who’s to say he isn’t already dead?”

“You’re spooking yourselves,” Andy admonished, frowning at the men. “You don’t need this fear. He’ll be dead by morning.”

“So we have to listen to him die?” Williams asked, his face twisted in disgust.

The voice rose again and Andy wished he could hear the words. A man’s last breath screamed into the night, and no one knows what he says. Andy could only picture too well the same fate befalling himself, a sad, lonely death. Who would tell his sister? She’d wait anxiously for his next letter but there’d be no more missives. His last words would be lost to the wind because no one heard them. No one would know…

And what of Sam? He’d send for me and think I hadn’t waited as I’d promised. How long would he wait for me? Who would tell him I’d gone?

That thought was salt on the raw wound of his heart. It cut him deep, etching compassion and sadness into his soul. Holding out a hand to Williams, he said, “Give me your rifle.”

“Mine?” he asked, incredulous. But at the stern look on his commander’s face, he handed the gun over reluctantly. He frowned as Andy strapped the rifle across his back. “What if it’s a Yank out there?”

“I don’t care.” Without asking, Andy took Lovelace’s canteen. “This is inhumane. There’s a dying man out in those woods, and you two scare each other with ghost stories while he shouts himself hoarse. A little water, is that too much to ask?”

“He’s already dying,” Lovelace pointed out. “And we can’t leave our posts.”

Andy picked up the lantern and started out into the darkness. “Then I’ll find him myself.”

“Sir, you can’t.” Williams caught Andy’s arm, stopping him. “You don’t know what’s out there. You can’t just leave the camp.”

Andy stared at the hand on his elbow until the picket let go, then leveled his gaze at the two men. In the light tossed from the lantern, his eyes flashed like gunpowder and he clenched his jaw, angry. “I’ll do as I will,” he replied. “I’m your commander. You’d do well to remember that.”

“Yes, sir,” Williams mumbled, stepping back. “I’m sorry, sir.”

“If it were you,” Andy continued as if the soldier hadn’t spoken, “you’d want someone to come for you, no? You’d want a little company at the end, just a warm hand and a smile, someone to tell you it would be all right and it was okay to let go, wouldn’t you?”

The pickets dropped their gazes before his and shuffled their feet, chastised.

Andy held up the canteen and shook it until he heard the water slosh around inside. “A little water to wet your throat, a hand in yours, someone who promises to tell your ma you died a soldier’s death. It’s what we all want, isn’t it? Yank or Reb, it’s what we all want.”

“Yeah,” Lovelace agreed. He sighed as he ducked his head.

Thinking of his own ma, Andy suspected. He remembered what he knew of the boy, and he had heard the Lovelaces were a wealthy family, full of children and no doubt proud of their oldest off to war. Thinking it might be you out there, just like it might be me. And how you’d want someone to come say goodbye, even if his coat was blue. It wouldn’t matter, not in the end.

Andy wondered if it mattered much at all anyway, the color of their coats, but this wasn’t his war. He only fought because he had to—it was the right thing to do, it was noble…and he feared that would be lost somewhere along the way, too, once the war was over. What he fought for, what all the men out here fought for, it would be mangled by time and fate and only the dead would know for sure.

Lovelace cleared his throat. “You want one of us to come with you?” he asked, his voice low, as if he thought he should ask out of obligation now but was afraid Andy might take him up on the offer.

Andy shook his head. “I’ll be fine,” he said, shouldering the rifle into a more comfortable position. “Give me a half hour. If I’m not back, tell Lieutenant Bucknell.”

Tell him I’m out chasing ghosts. See what he says to that. He smiled at the thought.

“Be careful out there, sir,” Williams cautioned as Andy stepped into the woods.

Andy nodded and held the lantern out in front of him, illuminating dense trees that glowed gray like his uniform, their limbs twisted and gnarled and bare. Above their leafy branches, gray clouds raced across the face of the moon. They reminded him of the crop back home, and he remembered sitting in the barn with Sam, laughing as they rubbed the raw cotton between wooden brushes to get the seeds out. The memory bolstered him, giving him the courage he needed to push through the spectral trees and brambly bushes that tugged at his clothes.

If that were me out there, I’d want someone by my side, he told himself, turning toward the voice. It strengthened as he approached, but it was still far off and he hoped he reached the soldier before he died. Someone to mail a letter to Mary, let her know I love her, and she’d tell Sam. Andy thought his last word would be his lover’s name, and he definitely wanted someone to know that, to tell Sammy he’d been the last thing on Andy’s mind when the final darkness closed over him and there were no more clouds in his sky.