“What time is it, do you reckon?” Ben said. They were crouched in a cornfield a little behind the sunken road where all the fighting was. They had fired over the heads of the men in the road until they ran out of cartridges and then had begun working their way backwards between the rows of shredded corn, taking rifles away from dead and wounded men and firing them. It seemed like they had been doing it for hours, but there was so much smoke Ben couldn’t even see the sun. He wondered if maybe they had been here all day and the sun had gone down.
“It ain’t noon yet,” Malachi said. He had his hand under a soldier whose left shoulder had been shot off and who was lying face down in the broken corn stalks. He had yellow hair. His arm was lying on the ground beside him, still holding on to his Springfield. There was a scrap of cloth pinned to his sleeve with a stick. Ben put down his rifle and unpinned the cloth. It was a handkerchief.
Malachi turned him over and rummaged in his pockets. It was Toby.
“Come on,” Malachi said. “Looks like he ran out of minnies, too before they got him.” He thrust Ben’s rifle at him and yanked him backwards. “Listen. They’re bringing the guns up,” Malachi said, and Ben could feel the rough dirt shake under his feet.
“I have to…” Ben said and started forward again.
Malachi stood up and grabbed him by the back of his shirt. “What in tarnation do you think you’re doin’? ”
He showed the handkerchief to Malachi. “I gotta pin this back on Toby, How will they know who he is? How will his kin know what happened to him? ”
“They’ll have a right good idea, but they won’t find out from that,” he said, and jerked his finger at the handkerchief Ben looked at it. It was covered with soot from the powder so badly he couldn’t even make the letters out, “Now come on! What the hell you doin now? ”
“I know him,” Ben said, scrabbling in his pockets. “I know where he’s from. Do you got some paper? ”
A bullet kit Toby’s arm and gouged out another red hole, “Come on,” Malachi shouted, “or that gal back home’s gonna be findin’ out about you.” He took hold of Ben’s coat and yanked him back through the corn till they couldn’t see Toby anymore.
After a while the shooting let up a little and Malachi said, “Me, I stick my pertinents in my boots. ”
“They can shoot you in the foot, too,” Ben said.
“They can,” Malachi said, “but most likely you won’t get kilt straight off and you kin tell ’em who you are before you die. ”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “We had no business reading that. ”
She was asleep. I took the galleys back from her and put in the proofreader’s marks till I began to feel sleepy myself, and then went and looked out the window a while at the Rappahannock. Union troops had camped on the far side of the river, no more than half a mile from here, their campfires hidden by the fog along the river, waiting for the battle to start. Everyone who had written about the Civil War, generals, platoon historians, journalists, said the waiting was the worst part. Once you were in the battle, they said, it wasn’t so bad. You did what you had to do without even thinking about it, but beforehand, waiting for the fog to lift and the signal to be given, was almost unbearable.
“It’s so cold,” Annie said. She sat up and tugged at the blankets with both hands, trying to pull them free of the foot of the bed.
“I’ll get a blanket,” I said, and then realized she was still asleep. She yanked hard on the coverlet and it came free.
“Get Hill up here,” she said, wrapping the flounced muslin around her shoulders and holding it together with one hand at her neck, as if it were a cape. “I want him to see this.” Her cheeks were flushed almost red. I wondered if she would be feverish if I touched her.
She let go of the coverlet and leaned forward as if looking at something. The coverlet slipped off her shoulders. “Bring me a lantern,” she said, and fumbled with the satin edge of the blanket.
I wondered if I should try to wake her up. She was breathing fast and shallowly, and her cheeks were as red as fire. She clutched the edge of the blanket in a desperate pantomime of something.
I moved forward to take the blanket away from her before she tore it, and as I did she looked directly at me with the unseeing gaze of the sleeping, and let go of it.
“Annie?” I said softly, and she sighed and lay down. The coverlet was bunched behind her neck, and her head was at an awkward angle, and I gently eased the coverlet out from under and pulled the blanket up over her shoulders.
“I had a dream,” Annie said. She was looking at me and this time she saw me. Her cheeks were still flushed, though not as red as they had been.
“I know,’ I said. I hung the coverlet over the end of the bed and sat down beside her. “Do you want to tell me about it?”
She sat up, tucking the pillow up against the headboard and pulling the muslin coverlet up over her bent knees. “I was standing on the porch of my house at night, looking down at the lawn. It was winter, I think, because it was cold, but there wasn’t any snow, and the house was different. It was on a steep hill, and the lawn was a long way below me, at the bottom of the hill. I was looking down at the lawn, but I couldn’t see it because it was too dark, but I could hear the sound of someone crying. It was a long way off, so I couldn’t really be sure what I heard, and I kept squinting down at the lawn, trying to make out what was down there.
“I turned on the porch light, and that just made it worse. I couldn’t see anything. So I turned it off again and stood there in the dark and just then somebody crashed into me and it was a Union soldier. He had a message for me, and I knew it would be good news, but I was afraid if I turned on the porch light to read it by, I wouldn’t be able to see what was on the lawn.
“Then I saw a light in the sky, a long way off, and I thought. Oh, good, somebody on their side has turned a porch light on, but it wasn’t like that, it bobbed and danced, and I thought, Somebody is bringing me a lantern to read the message by, and then the whole sky lit up with red and green, and I could see the bodies on the lawn.”
“Were they Union soldiers?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, “only they weren’t wearing blue uniforms. Some of them were wearing long underwear, red and white, and some of them were naked, and I thought how cold they must be lying there without any clothes on. Do you know where we are?”
Oh, yes, I thought, I know where we are. I hadn’t taken her anywhere near the battlefield all day, but she had been there anyway. And why had I thought the battles Lee had won would haunt him any less than the ones he had lost?
“They weren’t wearing uniforms because the Confederates came down from Marye’s Heights in the middle of the night and stole them off the dead bodies. After the battle of Fredericksburg.”
She leaned back against the pillows as if I had said something comforting. “Tell me about the battle.”
“After Antietam, Lee retreated back into Virginia. It took forever for the Union army to make up its mind to follow him, and when they did it was at the worst possible place. In December, the Union army crossed the Rappahannock at Fredericksburg and tried to march across the plain southwest of town, but the Confederate army held Marye’s Heights above the plain. They proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that you can’t attack a defended ridge from an open plain.”