The Soldier's Wife. Cheryl Reavis
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of one of the windowsills. Apparently Sayer Garth liked the little touches.
Rorie was still trying to get her breath. Her bonnet had fallen off her head and was hanging down her back, but she still had a good grip on the basket.
“Did you hear what I said?” he asked.
“Yes, Jeremiah, I reckon I did. And I’ll remember it. Another ride like that one and I’ll be simple-headed, too.”
She untied her bonnet and put it on top of whatever she had in the basket, then stood for a moment, listening.
“You hear anything?” she asked, turning her head side to side.
“Nothing but the wind in the trees,” he said.
“Well, I reckon I got to go see.”
“I’ll go,” he said.
“No, you won’t. How many times a day do you want to come that close to getting yourself shot?”
“Used to be a pretty regular thing,” he said. “Of course, ‘wanting’ didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Well, now it does. Sayer might be in there with a musket sighted on the door. She’s got those girls with her, and you’ll scare her so bad she’ll shoot first and then worry about what you was wanting.”
She began walking toward the cabin, and he came with her. “Used to be she had a dog,” she said. “Good old dog. Wouldn’t let nobody come up on the cabin unless Sayer called him off. Something happened to him.”
“Thomas Henry’s uncle, you mean?”
She flashed him a look of what could have been appreciation for his powers of deduction or one that indicated she didn’t find him quite as “simple-headed” as she’d first thought.
“You hear that?” Rorie said suddenly. “I hear crying.” She moved forward quickly. “Sayer! It’s me! I’m coming in!” She stepped up on the porch. “You stay out here,” she said over her shoulder.
He watched as she disappeared inside. He could hear the crying clearly now, but he couldn’t be certain if there was one person in distress or two.
He kept looking around for anything that might be amiss outside the cabin. He’d heard enough now about Thomas Henry’s uncle to think that the dead Reb had been right to worry about his wife’s safety.
The horse began to prance nervously, something Jack took as a sign that this situation might not be safe for ex-soldiers. The crying coming from inside the cabin seemed to be tapering off, in any event. He pulled the horse’s reins forward and dropped them on the ground, because he had learned from an ex-cavalryman riding the stage to Jefferson that it would stay put as if it were tethered. Jack’s not knowing about the animal’s war training had seemed to satisfy the man’s mind regarding Jack himself and the all-too-obvious U.S. brand on the horse’s left shoulder. A man who hadn’t been a Union cavalryman and who had bought a warhorse cheap wasn’t going to know the fine points. The imaginary tethering and the fact that it would come whenever he whistled—unless it thought it was in the middle of another charge—thus far had proved at least somewhat useful.
“She ain’t in here and she ain’t in the privy,” Rorie called after a moment. “The girls don’t know where she got to. That path yonder leads down to the spring. You walk down that way, Jeremiah. See if you can see her. I’ll tend to these young-uns. They’re still fevering and they’re both scared might near to death. I’m going to leave the back door open. You holler if you find anything—you can holler, can’t you?”
She didn’t wait for him to say whether he could or not. “Watch out for snakes! We got some big rattlers and copperheads around here!” she yelled as she went back inside.
Jack stood for a moment. He had thought Mary was accomplished at having the last word, but Rorie Conley was a true artist.
He began walking through the tall and probably snake-filled grass to the path that led...somewhere. He kept looking for livestock. He would have expected chickens, at the very least, but what he took for a henhouse and a chicken lot were clearly unoccupied as was the pigpen and the barn. He could see a smokehouse and tobacco barn, and there was a planted field on a slope some distance away—hay that needed cutting and drying. There was another field lying fallow with the rotting stubble of a corn crop beyond that one.
But what was most apparent was that Sayer Garth had no animals to feed of any kind. Uncle Halbert didn’t seem to favor one species over the other. Chickens, cows or child’s pet, they were all the same to him.
The path grew very steep suddenly, and it was difficult to keep his balance because there was nothing but tall grass to grab on to along the way. It occurred to him that if the path led to anything of importance, the grass needed to be scythed. If he was going to run into any snakes, this would be a good place for it. The path needed to be terraced and braced with thick planks, something he supposed Thomas Henry might have done if he’d lived.
Once again he could hear water flowing, not the rushing of a stream in a rocky bed like the one they had crossed at the bottom of the hollow on the way here, but a steady, quiet sound of water hitting water.
The path made a sharp bend, and as he came around it, he saw a woman lying on the ground next to an overturned bucket a few yards ahead.
“Rorie!” he yelled, moving as quickly as he could down to where the woman on the ground lay, still trying not to lose his balance. He could immediately see a gash in her forehead that ran into her hair.
He couldn’t hear Rorie coming, and he yelled again. “Rorie!”
“Oh, no, what is it!” she cried from somewhere behind him.
“I found her!”
He knelt down by the woman.
“Is she—?” Rorie called. She came down the path as far as she could make it without falling.
“No,” he said. “No, she’s breathing. Looks like she might have hit her head on one of these rocks. I don’t think she’s been out here too long. The place is still bleeding a little.”
“Get her up from there, Jeremiah. Don’t let her lie on the hard ground like that. Oh, no, I hope she ain’t snakebit. I’m going to get the other bed ready. You carry her in,” she said, and she was running—hobbling—away again.
He grabbed the bucket Sayer Garth must have intended to carry back to the house and filled it in the small pool that collected the water running in a steady stream from a split in the rocks. She was very pale—and thin—unnaturally so. Hers was the kind of thinness he’d seen far more times than he’d ever want to count. It was the kind that came from starving.
He took off his neckerchief and wet it, then began wiping the dried blood from her face. She stirred after a moment and caught his hand. Her eyes opened.
“Thomas Henry... Oh, Tommy,” she whispered as her eyes closed again.
He picked her up as carefully as he could and began the long climb back up to the cabin, going down on his knees once when his feet slipped. He didn’t drop her, but the jarring made her rouse again. She reached up her hand and grabbed on to his shirtfront, gripping it tightly, not because she was afraid of falling, he thought, but because she still believed he was Thomas Henry. He could smell her soft woman smell—soap and rosewater—and he realized suddenly that she was crying.
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