But I had to leave her...with those big...scared...eyes of hers come back again. She’s so pretty...so...pretty. Sayer...Sayer...if I could just see you...one last time...” His voice trailed away. Then, “I think I’ll have...some more of that...water now...if I might,” he said politely, as if they were in some situation where politeness mattered.
Jack lifted him upward and held the canteen to his lips. It was the only thing he could do for the man. If he still prayed, he might offer the Reb a prayer, but he was too weary and his emotions too raw. Even such a simple gesture as that was beyond him.
This time the Reb managed a swallow or two before he fell back against the caisson wheel. There was a breeze suddenly, carrying with it the sounds of the soft spring night. A whip-poor-will in a tall pine at the edge of the field, crickets in the grass, frogs in a ditch somewhere nearby. Not the sounds of war and dying at all.
“Graham?” the man said suddenly. “You listening to me, Graham!” He was looking directly at Jack, but Jack had no sense that he was actually seeing him. He grabbed on to the front of Jack’s uniform, his grip surprisingly strong. “Promise me! Promise you’ll help Sayer!” He made a great effort and lunged forward, his other hand clasping Jack’s shoulder. “Promise me!”
“All right,” Jack said, trying to keep him from falling on his face. “All right. Let go—”
“Give me...your word,” the man insisted. “Say it... Promise...me...”
“I promise,” Jack said to placate him, pulling the man’s fingers free from his jacket. The Reb began a quiet, but urgent mumbling.
“...teacheth my hands to war and my...fingers to...fight. Is Graham dead?” he suddenly asked as his mind shifted to another time and place. “I don’t... I can’t— Hey!” he cried, his attention taken by something only he could see. “All right, now! Get ready! Get ready! Sun’s in their...eyes.” He abruptly raised his hand as if he were about to give a signal, and Jack struggled to keep him from falling.
“Let’s go! Let’s go! Come on! We got ’em, boys. We got ’em!” the Reb said, his voice stronger now. He suddenly threw back his head and cried out. The terrible sound he made rose upward in a blood-chilling yell Jack had heard a thousand times in battle. He knew it had nothing to do with the pain. The Rebel soldier was shouting his defiance one last time, and it echoed over the battlefield and into the soft spring night.
But then the cry ended, suddenly cut short, and the still-raised hand fell onto the dirt.
* * *
Sayer Garth started as a pair of mourning doves suddenly took flight from a nearby rhododendron thicket. She couldn’t see any reason for it, no one coming along the narrow pathway leading down the mountainside to the old buffalo trace that passed for a wagon road. A cold wind blew off the mountain, and her hair swirled about her face. She pulled her shawl tighter around her and listened intently, but she couldn’t hear or see anything that might have caused the birds’ alarm. Even so, her heart pounded with fear.
“Please,” she whispered, and it occurred to her that all her prayers since Thomas Henry went off to war had come down to that one word. She felt it with every bit of strength she had whenever she thought of him, or the girls, or herself.
Please.
She took a quiet breath and waited. She was so tired of jumping at every little sound and shadow, of being hungry, of being on a mountain ridge alone.
“Thy will,” she whispered. “Thy will, not mine.”
For nearly four years she’d lived in the Garth family cabin with Thomas Henry’s two younger sisters. His mother, a kindly but frail woman, had died less than a year after he’d left. He had been gone so long! Sayer wondered if she would even recognize him when she saw him again. And how strange it was. Of late, in her mind’s eye, he always looked the way he’d looked when he was a boy. She could barely remember the dashing young soldier she had so hurriedly wed. The truth was she’d been too ill at the time to remember much of anything. She knew that he had suddenly appeared at her bedside early one bright Sunday morning and had informed her uncle, John Preston, and his wife, Cecelia, that he would be bringing a preacher that very afternoon, and ill or not, he intended to marry one Sayer Preston before he marched off to war. He wouldn’t be put off and he wouldn’t take no for an answer.
Sayer gave a quiet sigh because the truth was she didn’t really know if she remembered the incident or if she only knew about it because people who claimed to have been there had told her. She could recall the illness easily enough, the fever, the way her body had ached and sunlight had hurt her eyes and made her head pound so. She knew that she had said yes to Thomas Henry’s proposal and that she had worn a freshly starched and ironed—and far too big—nightdress borrowed from her aunt. It was much more elaborate than anything she’d ever owned. There were tucks all over the bodice and around the sleeves at the wrists. And so much lace—lace on the nightdress and the intricately tatted lace of the Spanish shawl she’d been covered in for decency. She remembered the beautiful butterfly-and-iris pattern of the shawl and the cedar-and-lavender smell of it—but not much else. She must have said the right words when the preacher asked, because their names—and the preacher’s—were written in the Garth family Bible, along with the names of two church-member witnesses. She thought that Thomas Henry’s mother had attended the ceremony, and the cook and the two hired girls had been allowed to come—which was only fitting since Sayer had spent so much of her time in their company.
But what she remembered so clearly had nothing to do with the wedding at all. What she remembered was a long-ago wagon ride from the railhead to the mountain house, and the way a boy named Thomas Henry Garth had stared at her the first day they met, stared and stared until she’d wanted to cry. She was used to living in her uncle’s house all but unnoticed—unless someone—her aunt Cecelia—decided she had done something wrong—and she hadn’t known how to withstand the scrutiny of this fair-haired boy with the gentle brown eyes. She remembered, too, the first thing he ever said to her.
I won’t bite you.
After a moment of forcing herself to return his steady gaze, she had been certain somehow that he was telling her the truth. He would never hurt her, and that belief was reinforced every summer because of the way his face always lit up when the train bringing her uncle and her aunt—and her—finally arrived at the railhead.
Thomas Henry was the one person in this world she knew she made glad, not because of anything she did or didn’t do, but simply because she existed. All through her childhood he had never missed waiting for the train, and he’d always brought a secret gift for her—some dried apples and cherries or pieces of honeycomb wrapped in brown paper, and once, when they were both nearly grown, a pencil—just in case she might like to write him a letter once in a while.
The pencil had alarmed her at first, but he had immediately understood.
“You just write to me if you feel like it,” he said. “Tell me what it’s like living in a town. I’ve never even been to a big town with a railroad through it. I won’t write back,” he hastened to reassure her. “It might cause...” He hadn’t finished the sentence, but she had known what he meant. Her aunt would never allow it. She knew that, but she had already begun arranging in her mind all the things he might like to know about the place where she lived—the ferry that crossed the river and the trains. He’d especially want to know about the trains, what kind and how many. She could count the whistles she heard in the daytime and at night and give a good estimation of that.
Remembering her forbidden enthusiasm for the plan suddenly made her smile. She had been pleased with
