The Soldier's Wife. Cheryl Reavis
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wedding. Nobody ever seen anything like it in Lexington before, I can tell you that. Her wedding dress come all the way from Paris somehow or other. Must have been hard, what with the war and everything. It had all these...rosettes or some such thing. What do you reckon a rosette is— Ow!” he said, his report interrupted by his nearest comrade’s elbow. “What did you do that for, Boone!”
“I did it hoping you might start using that head of yours for something besides parking your hat!”
“Well, you said to tell him!”
The argument, peppered with insults, continued, but Jack was no longer listening. Elrissa Suzanne Barden...Vance.
Jack had never formally asked her father for her hand. She had wanted him to wait until he came home again, and he had agreed, thinking that Mr. Barden would be more apt to remember how important Jack had been to his business if he was standing right in front of him. He hadn’t really considered that Mr. Barden would say no. The man had set the precedent that his beloved Elrissa could have whatever she wanted a long time before Jack Murphy came along.
But clearly Elrissa had changed her mind. It occurred to Jack that no one in her circle likely knew anything about his marriage proposal much less that she’d accepted him. And when this greater matrimonial opportunity arose, she must have realized she could marry Farrell Vance without consequence. With any luck at all, Jack Murphy would end up like all too many of his fellow orphans and wouldn’t be coming back from the war at all. Or if he did survive, he wouldn’t likely go around telling people he’d been taken for a fool. It occurred to him, too, that it must require many months to put together a wedding that included a dress from Paris with “rosettes,” and Elrissa must have continued writing to him until she was absolutely sure the better marriage was a certainty.
“That’s that, then,” he said, realizing too late that he’d said it out loud.
“That’s right, Jack,” Ike said. “Ain’t no use worrying about it.”
“Whose turn is it to take watch?” Jack asked, ignoring Ike’s comment.
“Fred’s,” somebody volunteered. “And Jacob’s...” The sentence faded away into a different kind of silence.
“Mine, then,” Ike said after a moment. “And Boone’s.”
“Well, don’t the two of you be squabbling like a couple of old women,” Jack said despite the fact that two more of the Orphans’ Guild were dead and gone. He was glad it was Ike’s turn. Ike couldn’t tell when he was putting a foot wrong and stumbling all over something socially, but he had finely honed senses when it came to anticipating danger, probably because of the years he’d spent hiding from his violent drunkard of a father.
“No, Jack,” Ike said earnestly. “We won’t. I ain’t letting them Rebs sneak up on us.”
“That’s good to know, our situation being what it is,” Jack said. “What’s that?” he asked because of a sound in the distance he couldn’t identify.
“Sounds like singing,” Boone said.
And so it was, but Jack couldn’t make out the song. It was something wistful; he could tell that much. A farewell for a fallen comrade, he decided, as more voices joined in, perhaps for the man whose letters he still held. He felt a burning in his eyes suddenly, an ache in his throat. He stuffed the letters into his haversack. His hands were beginning to tremble again. This time he wrapped himself in his blanket to hide them and turned his back to the others. He lay down on the ground and closed his eyes, but he had little hope of sleep. His body ached with fatigue, but his thoughts swirled around and around in his head so fast he couldn’t dwell on any of them. He tried to find some sound to concentrate on—the whip-poor-will, the singing, anything—so that he could shut out everything else, but it didn’t help. The more he struggled, the more his mind raced. Eventually, though, as it had more than once, the sound he so needed turned out to be one inside his own head. After a moment, it rose out of the chaos: Father Bartholomew reading aloud to them on the cool upstairs porch on Saturday afternoons after their chores and their Saturday baths were finally done. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. It had been a favorite of the younger boys and, he thought, of Father Bartholomew. The ancient mariner. The man who could not pray.
Jack concentrated on the poem, word by word, line by line, not caring if they were out of sequence or not. After a time he began to whisper random phrases to himself. “‘The praise be given...the gentle sleep from heaven...slid into my soul….’”
But there was no chance of that happening this night.
“Jack,” Boone said, shaking him hard.
“What!” he snapped because he hadn’t been asleep.
“They’re not singing now, Jack. Maybe you better come listen.”
He sat up and struggled to his feet, wishing for the second time tonight that he associated with men who could speak in specifics. He looked toward the battlefield, keeping his fists clenched because the second episode of shaking hadn’t yet subsided. The soldiers he couldn’t see had stopped singing, just as Boone said, but what they were doing instead, Jack couldn’t tell.
“You see anything, Ike?” Jack called.
“Nothing!” Ike called from some distance away. “Whatever it is, it’s coming this way.”
“Us or them?”
“Don’t know!”
“At the ready!” Jack shouted, and they all scrambled to grab up their gear. Then they waited, muskets resting on whatever prop they could find, all of them straining to see in the darkness. Every now and then Jack could hear the whip-poor-will in the tall pine at the edge of the field.
“Jack!” Ike suddenly cried. “Did you hear that! Lee surrendered!”
“Stay down!” Jack said sharply, before the rest of his charges forgot where they were in the excitement of Ike’s announcement. He’d been at this too long to trust a voice shouting in the night. And if it was true, he had enough sense to know that the war would be over for the Rebs, not for them.
The shouting grew louder as the news came down the line. He could hear the men clearly now, again and again. “Lee surrendered!”
So.
Just like that. This morning they were at war and now they weren’t. How could it be over? he thought. And they had won. After all this time and all this killing and dying, they had won. But what exactly was the prize, he wondered, and at what cost?
Unable to contain their joy any longer, the men around him sent up a rousing cheer. He tried to feel their elation, but he was too worn down by the events of the day to feel anything.
“Where are the tin cups?” he asked abruptly, not really addressing anyone in particular.
“What tin cups, Jack?”
“Fred’s! Jacob’s! Where are they!” He needed them. Whenever an orphan fell, he sent their army-issue tin cup to Father Bartholomew. He scratched their names and when and where they died on them. He didn’t know what Father Bartholomew did with them. All he knew was that he, Jack Murphy, needed to send them.
“It’s all right, Jack,” Boone said, grasping him by the arm. “Ike took care of it. He wrapped them up good and tagged them to go to the orphanage. The hospital wagon was picking up the wounded, so he sent them back on it. Somebody will see they get there.”
“The names— Did he—”
“He scratched the names. He did all of it. You don’t have to worry.”
“Good,” Jack said. “That’s good.”
He could feel Boone staring at him. He pulled his arm free and sat down on the ground again. He had to pull himself together.
Elrissa’s marriage, he thought, wiping the sweat from his brow with a shaking hand. Her betrayal had laid him lower than he