Afterward, I went in search of some container to haul away the litter of amputated limbs, the presence of which, I judged, could only work on the fears of the wounded. That chore accomplished, I looked for water to clean off the blood. Finding the ewers empty, I gathered as many as I could carry and, picking my way through the ruined men, made my way to the well house.
Even in candlelight, even after twenty years, even with her back turned, I recognized her. She was bending to fill pitchers from the well bucket, and there was something in the curve of her back, the sway at the waist, and the way she came slowly erect. As I had stood outside on the steps, gathering my courage to enter this place, it had fallen into my mind that Grace might be the slave the private had mentioned. I wanted it to be so. I dreaded it be so. At the moment I recognized her, longing and dread collided with a force that made me clumsy, so that a ewer slipped in my hand and I fumbled to keep hold of it. She, of course, could not have entertained the possibility of seeing me. So that when she turned, all she saw was yet another in the roll of the wounded, a coatless soldier without token of rank, whose blood-spattered visage spoke of some grievous hurt.
“Let me take those, soldier,” she said, reaching for the ewers. That silvery voice, so distinctive. “You are kind to try to help, but you shouldn’t be walking about with your wound untended.”
“I’m not wounded, Miss Grace. I was helping the surgeon with an amputation.”
Her head, tied just as I remembered in an elaborate rigolette, went up like an animal, scenting. She raised the lantern that held her candle and looked at me, hard. “Do I know you, sir?”
“You probably wouldn’t remember me—” Even as I said the words I realized how ridiculously they rang. How would she not remember the foolish youth who had been the source of her agony?
“My name is March…I was here in forty-one…”
“Mr. March! The teacher!”
I could not tell, in the dark, if she intended irony by addressing me so, or whether the warmth in her voice was genuine. “Forgive me, I did not expect to see you a soldier.”
“I am serving as a chaplain.”
She raised her chin in a slight nod, as if that fit her memory of me, and held out her hand. I took it, noting as I did so that it was chapped and calloused.
Something must have shown in my face, for when she drew back her hand, she looked down at it self-consciously. “So many things have changed here, Mr. March. Some of them you see for yourself. Others are less evident. Perhaps we will have time to speak of it, if you would care to, but now the wounded men are thirsty…”
“Of course,” I said. “We both have much to do.” I let her go and went to my own duty, which was to bring comfort where I could. I was sitting in the oval entrance hall sometime toward dawn, my back propped against the stairwell, when exhaustion finally claimed me. I had taken the hand of a gravely injured man, and I held it still when I awoke. But it was cold by then, and rigid.
Grace was standing over me, pouring from a jorum of coffee. I closed the eyes of the dead man and stood stiffly, every fiber of my body complaining. As I steadied myself on the stair rail, I noted that the wood was rough under my hand. Grace ran a finger over the ruined banister. “My doing, I fear: I brought Mr. Clement’s horse in here, during the fighting,” she said. “He chewed the banister, as you see, and then of course the army found him anyway, and took him as contraband…”
She looked away then, and I wondered if she was aware that her own status was not unlike that of the horse: she, too, might be considered contraband of war. I accepted the tin mug she held out to me, drank the scalding contents, and passed it back to her so that she could serve another man. In the gray light—for it had rained hard all through the night, adding to the misery of the many men without a shelter even as cheerless as this house—I studied Grace’s features. She had aged in twenty years, certainly; there were fine lines etched around her eyes and mouth, and hard times had robbed her skin of its bloom. But she was handsome, still, and I could see the eyes of the men following her as she moved from one to another.
There was much to do that morning. We buried those we had recovered from the toll of the battle’s dead, laying them side by side in a shallow grave, each man with his name and unit inscribed on a scrap of paper placed in a bottle and tucked under his blouse, if indeed he still wore one. Before noon, the ambulances arrived on the Maryland side to fetch the wounded to Washington, so I lent my hand as stretcher bearer to move the men down to the boats, over the protests of my aching muscles. It was a labor of many hours, made miserable by the incessant rain and mud. I had no boots, so the viscous stuff tugged at my bare feet with a thirsty suck, and soon the skin was rubbed red raw. Across the river, as the day wore on, the hungry mules pulled in their traces, wrenching the wagons back and forth. The moans told the effect on those lying within. When the train finally set out, we had left with us only the walking wounded and those so gravely injured that McKillop had deemed they wouldn’t last the journey to Washington.
By daylight, some things were evident that darkness had concealed. It was clear that the ruined state of the house was not a matter of a few weeks at war. The signs of long decay were everywhere. The tobacco fields were overrun by tare and thistleweed; the plants, which should have been harvested for drying, stood blackened by frost. The pollarded fruit trees that had hedged the kitchen garden were sprouting unpruned; the long-stretching bean rows, once trim as a parade line, were leggy scraggles, while many beds stood unsown. I realized that the ruined gristmill I had passed in the darkness was the selfsame structure that as a going concern had so vexed Mr. Clement. Some calamity, clearly, had overtaken this place. I longed to learn more. But I was pressed hard all that day and into evening, and when I glimpsed Grace, she, too, was about myriad duties so that we had no chance to speak. The next day, our colonel came to make an assessment of our condition, and told us that we were left with no more than 350 effectives in a unit that had numbered more than 600.
McKillop proved himself a good judge of the men’s condition, as most of those he had marked for death were indeed gone within those two days. In the afternoons I helped to bury them with what ceremony conditions allowed.
I was coming from the corner of the field we had staked out for a burial ground when I saw Grace, walking on the terrace with a frail old man on her arm. I say walking, but in fact the progress the pair made was achieved in an odd gait for which there is no name. Augustus Clement—I cannot say I recognized him, but rather knew that it must be he—no longer had the posture of a man. His head was cocked forward and to one side, like a rooster’s, his ear almost set down upon his collarbone. Grace held his left arm in a firm grip and supported him further with a hand around his waist. His right arm seemed fixed to his side from shoulder to elbow, but the lower arm flapped wildly, his fingers fanning the air. He progressed by raising one knee almost waist high, swaying there for a long moment, then placing the toe tentatively onto the ground before letting the heel follow it, deliberate as a dancer.
Because they could make no very rapid progress, I soon came abreast of them and offered a greeting. Mr. Clement could not raise his head, but turned his body sidelong, his cloudy eyes groping to see who it was that spoke to him. There was a blankness to his expression, for it seemed that the muscles of his face were as palsied as the rest of him. Grace leaned down to his ear and spoke soothingly. A strange sound, a kind of donkey bray, issued from his slack lips. A bubble of saliva formed itself into a thread and dribbled down his chin. The flapping of his hand became more violent. Grace drew forth a handkin and wiped his face. “Mr. Clement is very agitated because of all the confusion here,” she said. “Forgive me, Mr. March, but I believe I had best return him to his room.”
“Can I help you? He seems so very frail.”
“I would be obliged,” she said, and so I took my place on the other side of the trembling body, and together we brought him within. She had made up a bed for him in the breakfast room, for it was long since he could negotiate the stairs. When we got there, after our tortuous progress, and Grace eased him down upon his couch, he gave a ragged sigh of relief. I held the basin as Grace bathed his face, and by the time she