Published in Blue Lake Review
Hoarfrost, laid down during the night, crinkled under her boot soles, and her cheeks burned cold, near frozen. She clutched the quilt tighter around her shoulders and scurried to the barn. Her skirt hem swished through the grass, picking up ice crystals, and the rhythm of Frank’s hammer rode the breeze. She paused inside the barn door and watched him, while he pieced together the new gate. Sawdust clung to his jacket’s fringe and powdered his braids like snow on obsidian. He exhaled clouds of vapor, life from the heart of him, and she wanted to save it before it vanished. Every second she held the words unsaid was a second of grace. In a state of desperate optimism, they had tiptoed around the conversation this day might force on them, and she regretted not a minute of that contrived tranquility.
He turned toward her and smiled. His earbobs danced. When she didn’t speak, he asked, “What is it, Agnes?”
She sucked in a breath that felt like her last and released the words. “Benny’s here. He’s got a note from the Council.”
“Well.” His eyes hurled all the bottled-up fear her way. “Send him out.”
“Maybe a talk inside by the fire? He had a long, cold ride.”
Frank nodded and put down the hammer. They walked arm in arm to the cabin across the hoarfrost and brittle wild grass. She glanced back and saw their four prints in tandem, soon to be melted away.
“Is this it?” she asked.
“Probably.”
Benny stood, when they came through the door. He wore his customary pinched face that feared his own ineptitude. “Hey there, Frank.”
“What’s the word, Ben?”
“The Union Army crossed into Arkansas. We’re going.”
“When?”
“We ride in a week to join up with General Pike. They say we’ll fight ‘em at Pea Ridge.”
Frank eased down onto a chair at the kitchen table and frowned into the fireplace, flickers of gold on his cheekbones and nose. “Agnes said you have a paper for me.”
Benny pulled a crumpled page from his coat pocket and smoothed it onto the table in front of Frank. Then he straightened his spine and saluted. “You’re to be a captain, Frank. They all agreed.”
“A captain? I’m a farmer. Don’t know the first thing about soldiering.”
“None of us do. But all the men respect you. They’ll follow you.”
Frank shook his head and rubbed his eyes, and Agnes saw weariness overtake him. Then he stood and slapped Benny on the back in that way men had, so fraught with affection and conflict at the same time. “It’s a strange old world, when a bunch of Cherokees pick up arms for the white man.”
Benny squinted in thought. “We signed a treaty. We promised we’d protect our land from the Yanks.”
“The land’ll still be here, whichever side wins this thing. And so will we, scratching in Arkansas dirt. North, South, it’s hard for me to care.”
“Well, I guess I figure this is the only land we got now. ‘Sides, it was the Union government brought us here. I’m happy to help beat ‘em.”
“I’m not so sure a ragtag band of Cherokee farmers is a match for the Union Army.”
Benny shrugged. “We have to give it our best, Frank.”
“Fighting for the slaveholders. Never thought I’d be doing that. We’re not much more than slaves ourselves now.”
Benny looked aggrieved. “Lots of us had slaves in Carolina. My pa did.”
“Yeah. What’s your pa got now, Ben? A shallow grave on the Trail of Tears. It’s a white man’s war, and I want no part of it.” He resumed his seat at the table and his study of the flames.
Benny left with no words to Frank and a lukewarm farewell to Agnes.
She sat down in the chair across from Frank’s gloom and leaned onto the golden oak plank hewn by his tools. Her fingers played over the wood’s hollows and hillocks. “Is there some way out of this? Some way you don’t have to go with them?”
“Got any ideas? I’d love to hear them.” He reached over the table and warmed her hands with his own. “Pike’ll hold us to the treaty we made with him. He needs cannon fodder, and who better than us.”
“We could leave, hide somewhere, until this is over.”
“Where?”
“West,” she said without hesitation, for she had pondered the matter. “Past the Indian Territories, where the war doesn’t matter to anyone.”
His hands on hers tightened. His eyes took on a sorrowful darkness, and she knew his answer. It would be a man’s answer to duty, not a husband’s answer to love.
“Don’t do this. Say we’ll run.”
He shook his head, and sawdust drifted onto the tabletop. “I’m sorry. I can’t let our boys march off all excited with no one to keep them in line. They need leaders to see them through, maybe save a few of them.”
She snatched her hands from beneath his. “You don’t even care about this war. Why would you risk your life for it?”
“Maybe because I don’t care, I can bring a little common sense to it.”
“I need you more than those boys you worry so much about.”
“I’ll get the new gate put up and fix the fence. Matt’s old enough to be a real help with the chores. It’ll be good for him to do more.”
“That’s not the need I have of you, husband. You’re more than a laborer for hire.”
“You’ll be all right. You’ll be my fine, brave girl.”
“I’m no girl, and I don’t feel so brave.”
“I’ll be back in a week, two at most. We’ll fight this battle, and win or lose come back home.”
“Or come back in a coffin.”
He grabbed her hands again and held them, until her effort to deny his touch left her, and she let his fingers entwine with hers. “You know when I fell in love with you, Aggie?”
“You always said at my pa’s barn-raising.”
“I know that’s what I said, but it’s not true. We were on the Trail. In Tennessee. We’d all had a bad day. Ice on the ground, the soldiers driving us too hard, lots of people fell, some of the elders couldn’t get up. Remember? It was brutal cold, wind in our faces, kids crying.”
“There were a lot of bad days.”
“Your granddad fell. A soldier rode up and hit him on the back with his horsewhip. Do you remember what you did?”
A smile crept onto her frown.
“There you were, a skinny little twelve-year-old nothing of a girl. You put your hands on your hips and stood between the soldier’s horse and your granddad, and you told that soldier he should be ashamed of himself, hitting an old man.” He laughed. “I was only fifteen, but I decided I’d marry you. Had to wait a while, for you to grow up, but I loved you from that day to this day.”
“I was just a kid, too stupid to know any better. Wasn’t bravery.”
“I’ll tell you what it was. You stood up for the right of things. You’ve always done that. Agnes, I can’t run. I have to stand up for our boys. It’s the only thing I know to do.”
“You might die.”
“I know.”
“Aren’t you scared?”
“Course I am.”
After a week of cross purposes, she watched him saddle the horse and ready himself for the journey to war, and she sobbed. His disappointment in her clouded his eyes, while words of assurance aimed to give her strength, as if her tears welled up from weakness, an assumption that fired fury in her at men and their honor and their duty. Damn him. He held her close, and that embrace begged for her support, but she refused to ease his worry with a wife’s sweet smile and a wife’s surrender to his male foolhardiness. She stood in the February morning with Matt and Robbie and watched Frank ride around the bend into the woods and out of her sight. That night, alone in their bed, she regretted her coldness during what could be her last moments with him. Ten times a day their ideas clashed, but ten times a day they came together again in love. Their sour parting was bad timing.
Matt and Robbie begged her to let them help with cleaning out the horse stalls, so, instead of making a fast job of spreading the hay, she spent the afternoon watching them shriek and jump off bales and play at working. And where was Frank? Playing at a soldier. If left a widow, she could endure, but her sons would make their way to manhood without a man to guide them. What would she tell them of their father? He died a hero? That would be a lie that would come hard to her tongue, for she thought him a fool.
The sun hung low above the trees, and the air grew heavy with an approaching storm. She asked the boys to lead the plow horses into the stalls, while she put the pitchforks and rakes into the tool closet. The children’s chatter and the rising wind muted the clop of hooves until they were in the yard. She hushed Matt and Robbie and peeked out the barn door.
He wore a filthy gray coat, a soldier’s coat, but no hat, and a bloodied bandage wrapped his lower left thigh. He was white with fine blonde hair that shivered and swirled in the wind. When he dismounted, the horse whinnied and stomped, and the man had trouble controlling the animal, while avoiding too much weight on the injured leg. The horse quieted, and the man withdrew a pistol from the holster on his belt.
Agnes whispered to the boys, “Get up to the loft, quiet as you can. Stay up there ‘til I come for you. Understand? Not a word.” They nodded with serious, small faces.
They climbed the ladder, and she retrieved a pitchfork from the closet. Once the boys were in the loft, she laid the ladder on the barn floor behind some hay bales. She watched the stranger through a slit between window shutters.
He limped up the steps to the porch and searched the cabin through the window. Satisfied with the empty rooms he saw, he opened the door and entered her home, the pistol in his outstretched hand leading his way. He reemerged with Frank’s shotgun under one arm and a loaf of bread stuck into the front of his coat. When his eyes scanned the farmyard and alighted on the barn, she tightened her hands around the fork’s handle and chanted to herself, Leave, please leave, please leave.
He walked toward the barn, and she waited just inside the door, to the side. Maybe she could skewer him with the fork, before he spotted her and shot her dead, with her children alone in the loft. She called on some of that bravery Frank believed she had, but she wondered at the odds. A pitchfork against a pistol, a mother against a soldier, an Indian woman against a white man.
His shadow glided over the dirt floor, then a foot wearing a shabby boot with splitting seams. She raised the fork, its handle slick with her sweat. She dared not breathe. The pistol and his hand appeared a second before his face came around the door’s edge, and their eyes met.
He was a boy, younger than his first shave, his lip quivering, his face squinched into the same precursor to tears as her own boys’, when they fell into a burdensome predicament with no solution. They stood, pitchfork to pistol, until his tears spilled onto his cheeks, and he lowered the weapon.
“I’m sorry I took your things, ma’am.” He put the bread and shotgun on the floor. “I’ll be going. I’m sorry.”
Agnes dropped the fork. “Your leg’s hurt.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She touched his shoulder. “Come into the house. Let me see to it, before you go.”
He swiped at the tears. “You’d do that? You’d help me?
“You hungry? I’ve got some chicken stew in the pot.”
He ate with an adolescent’s frantic hunger, barely chewing the stew into chunks he could swallow. Between spoonfuls he stuffed bread into his mouth. After he ate his fill, Agnes unwrapped the bandage and scissored a slit up the side of his trouser leg. The bullet bored a path through muscle, but then exited. She cleaned it of dirt and oozing blood and pus, while the boy strangled on a stifled scream. After wrapping a clean strip of cloth around his thigh she said, “I think it’ll heal fine, long as infection doesn’t set in. Didn’t the army doctors do anything for you?”
“Weren’t any around. The sergeant wrapped my leg. My squad retreated, and I tried to follow them, but can’t walk very fast. Found the horse wandering in a field, so I got on him and rode. Didn’t really know where I was going. S’pose I’m a deserter. Are we still in Arkansas?”
She nodded. “You were at Pea Ridge?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“How was it going?”
“We were winning at first, but then it turned. It’s all over by now, I guess. We couldn’t have held on much longer.” His face took on a shy, embarrassed cast. “Are you Indian, ma’am?”
“Yes. Cherokee.”
“Thought you might be. Heard there was a Cherokee unit at the battle.”
Agnes gripped the table top. “Do you know what happened to them?”
“No, ma’am.” But his face feared a truth he’d rather conceal.
“What is it? What do you know?”
“Just a rumor. I don’t believe it.”
“Tell me.”
“Well, ma’am, was said some Indians scalped some Union soldiers.”
“Scalped!” She looked at Matt and Robbie, their eyes round and troubled. “Don’t you believe that. Your daddy wouldn’t do such a thing.” She glared at the boy. “Cherokees don’t scalp people. You don’t know anything about us, do you?”
He shook his head.
“We live like you. We speak your language, wear your clothes, don’t cause trouble, and look what it gets us. Do you take us for the civilized folks we are? No, you think we’re savages running around in feathers, scalping whites.”
The boy shrank under her attack. “I’m sorry, ma’am. It was only a rumor.”
His misery softened her toward him. “No, I’m sorry. I made you tell me.”
“Is your husband up there?”
“He and his men went last week.”
“Well, like I said, it’s over or just about.”
“Tell me true, was it bad?”
“Yeah, real bad.”
She slapped the table with a palm, stood, and walked the width of the room and back, circling the floorboards. “I told him not to go, I told him. He left us to go off and get shot at.” She turned on the boy. “Can you explain that to me? Why men do these things?”
“I don’t know, ma’am.” He looked ashamed of his failure to answer her frustration.
“I know you don’t. Forgive me. I’m just so mad at him, risking his life without a thought for me and his sons.”
“Don’t be too mad at him. I’d bet he’s sorry he didn’t listen to you.”
“How old are you?”
“Fifteen.”
“What’s a boy doing fighting a war?”
“There’s younger than me. They’re taking anyone that can shoot a gun.”
“I’ll make you a pallet on the floor by the fire. You’ll stay at least tonight. No sense in going off into a storm with your hurt leg.”
During the night the wind woke her, battering through the trees and whining around the cabin’s corners. After pulling quilts over Matt and Robbie, she checked on the boy, but he slept the exhausted deep slumber of a child, unbothered by the storm. He snored lightly, like a babe. Returning to bed, she caught a sideways glimpse of herself in the dresser mirror, a shadow figure with long, black hair. She leaned into the reflection to see what the boy saw, what they saw that threatened them, but only familiarity stared back.
In the morning he slept still, even after Matt and Robbie tumbled into the kitchen eager for more time with the soldier. Agnes stooped over him and shook his shoulder. His skin blazed through the cloth of his shirt. She tested his forehead and cheeks with the back of her hand. She shook him again, and his eyes fluttered open.
“You’ve got a fever. I need to look at the wound.”
He nodded, and she pulled the quilt back from his leg. Under the bandage, the wound had festered and swollen. A line of scarlet crawled up his thigh and maybe beyond. “It’s infected. I can give you some herb tea. Might help, but it looks bad.”
“Will I die? Don’t let me die. I want to get home.”
He fought dying with all the vigor of youth, but the infection ate into it until he had none left. She held his hand, wiped his face with a cloth, and thought about Frank. He could well be this boy, lying in a ditch or a field or on another woman’s kitchen floor. She sat with the boy through four days and nights. At the end delirium took him, and he slipped away into peace before she knew death was near. She bawled until Matt and Robbie, scared by her lapse into raw despair, wrapped her in their arms and whispered the words of comfort she had often whispered to them. She held them tight against her, until she could speak.
“I think we’ll make a cross for his grave. Will you help me do that?”
She sent them on a mission to find the right pieces of wood in Frank’s stack of lumber scraps in the barn. She wrapped the body in a sheet and hoped she had the strength to drag it from the cabin to a proper burial site. The knoll at the side of the vegetable garden plot would be a nice spot in the spring and summer.
Envisioning the grave and the cross, she slumped onto the floor beside the boy with the realization that she hadn’t asked his name. She knew nothing of him but his age, not even his birthplace. He was a nameless soldier of the South with only a date of death to mark his passing, no words to mark his passage through a short life. His gray coat hung on the back of a kitchen chair. She searched the pockets and found a small tintype of a woman, maybe his mother. She pushed it inside the sheet that shrouded him.
In ground softened by the recent rain she dug the grave until her muscles trembled, and she feared she couldn’t finish, but she did. When the hole was deep enough, she and the boys dragged the body to it and shoved it in. It landed with a thud, and she felt sorrow for the brutality of it. Matt and Robbie helped push the dirt into the grave with a mature solemnity and resolve that summoned her mother’s pride.
After nailing the boards together, she carved a tribute into his cross. Here lies a hero. 1847- March 11, 1862.
Agnes paced and fumed and stared out the window at the cross for two days. Sometimes she sobbed over Frank’s imagined death. Sometimes she cursed him for indulging in a grand adventure while boys died, and she mourned them. Sometimes she ached for his footsteps on the porch and his arms around her. When at last she heard the footsteps, her body responded with numb paralysis. She sat in the rocking chair, pulling at the bit of knitting in her hands, and watched the door swing inward. Frank’s silhouette, outlined by moonlight, filled the opening. He moved into the cabin, shut the door, and took off his hat.
She almost screamed at him to give voice to the rage that roiled in her, until she saw his face, a portrait of a grief so deep his eyes seemed sunk into his head. He stood, hat in hand, filthy with grime and blood, waiting for her to pull him out of the abyss. The knot of bitterness dissolved, and she went to him. He grabbed onto her, crying into her hair. “I made a mess of it, Aggie. I couldn’t save them. I couldn’t.”
After she cleaned him up, pulled a nightshirt over his head, and tucked him into bed, he caught her hand before she turned down the light. “Forgive me, will you?”
“For what?”
“For being an arrogant fool. I thought all they needed was me to lead them through it. But I was just a dumb farmer stumbling across a battlefield, and they followed me, like I knew what I was doing.”
“We’ll talk about it tomorrow. Get some sleep.”
“I need to say this. You were right. We should have run. Maybe some of those boys wouldn’t have died, if we had. Maybe they would have run ‘stead of believing in me.”
When she woke in the morning just after sunup, she reached for him, but his side of the bed was empty. She put on a robe against the chill of early morning and found him standing at the front window. She slipped an arm around his waist and leaned her head on his shoulder. He pointed at the cross.
“Is that a grave?”
“Yes.” She told him the story of the boy.
“Another boy dead. Fifteen, you say? Only four years older than Matt.” He gathered her into his arms. “Aggie, I can’t live in this white man’s world any longer. That they could make this war on each other and drag children in to do their killing and dying. Drag us in. They stole our land, marched us here, and then they force us to die for them. If Matt was a little older, they would have told him to die for them.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying, let’s leave. Let’s run away, west like you said, where this war means nothing. Start over, but in a place that we choose. If we stay here, we’ll always be at their mercy. Their next war, Matt will be in it. Then Robbie. Let’s find a place where we can be free of them.”
“Where would we go? The whites are in the west, too.”
“This is a big country. Mountains, forests, places where we could lose ourselves. They can’t be everywhere.”
She thought that his dream would fade as time dulled this heart sickness over lost boys, but he persisted making plans, and she let herself be caught up in his enthusiasm and his hope. When March warmed toward April she told him, “You’ve won me over to your way of thinking. Maybe it’s worth the risk. To see the boys grow up in our own place. Maybe they could be free men.”
They piled their belongings into the wagon, the table and chairs and beds and pots and clothes and the rocking chair tied at the top like a throne on a pedestal. They left the homestead in May sunshine, Matt and Robbie herding three hogs and the milk cow, Frank riding ahead, and Agnes driving the skittish plow horses unaccustomed to the heavy load in the wagon. Before they rounded the bend into the woods of scrub oak and pine, she looked back at the cabin and the barn, constructed of labor with calloused hands and a yearning in their injured hearts for a home. Behind the vegetable garden plot, now lying fallow, stood the cross with no name to tell of his death. “Goodbye,” she said to the boy. “I’m sorry I couldn’t do better by you.”