I know this is right, Mother. I feel it in my heart. Chad has never been happy with Clare, but I make him happy. After we are married and the baby is born, I will let you know where we are. I hope you will come and visit.
All my love, Susan
Stunned, Clarissa felt faint. She handed back the letter. “Why on earth are you angry with me?” she asked Margaret. “Your daughter and my husband have committed adultery! Susan is pregnant by a married man who is currently still married to a woman who used to call Susan her friend!”
“Surely you knew my Susan loved Chad when you turned around and married him yourself!”
“No, I didn’t know!”
“I don’t believe you! And it serves you right to learn that Chad only married you because he needed this store! You threw yourself at him and used this store as a way to catch him, and now he will profit from it!”
A lump began to form in Clarissa’s throat and she turned away. The reality of the kind of man Chad really was hit her like a club slammed into her stomach.
Divorce! Susan said Chad was going to get a divorce! Had he already sold the store out from under her? How could she face anyone in town or at church if she was a divorced woman? What would people think of her?
Such shame! Such utter betrayal! Such deep, deep hurt she’d never known.
“Get out,” she told Margaret.
“Gladly! And I hope you’re proud of yourself, hurting my poor Susan by marrying the love of her life!”
The woman stormed out. Clarissa realized Margaret was defending Susan as a mother would, not wanting to face the sin of what her daughter had done. Still, Clarissa could hardly believe the woman could stand there and spout her daughter’s innocence in the ugly affair. And ugly it was. The realization of what Chad had done even made him seem ugly now! Behind that handsome face and those fetching green eyes lay pure evil, an evil that had cost her her trust, her pride, her means of living and maybe even her faith. Right now she felt God had abandoned her.
She managed to walk to the front door, close and lock it. She turned the Closed sign toward the street and pulled down the shade. She could not face one more customer today. How could she face anyone ever again?
Chapter Two
April 7, 1862, Tennessee
“If there’s a hell on earth, Lieutenant, this is it.”
First Lieutenant Dawson Clements nodded in agreement. He sat huddled behind a mobile cannon with Sergeant Jared Bridger listening to the hideous screams and groans of the thousands of wounded who lay sprawled among thousands more dead soldiers.
“They say Shiloh is a biblical name meaning ‘place of peace,’” Dawson told the sergeant. He shivered, pulling his rubber poncho up over his head against the cold rain. “Pretty ironic, isn’t it?”
Both men were painfully hungry, and neither had slept all night, mostly because of the haunting cries of the unattended wounded and the stench of blood that ran past them in rivulets along with the rainwater. Behind them, thousands more Union soldiers made temporary camp at Pittsburgh Landing, waiting for the arrival of relief troops.
“Grant says Buell will be here soon with a good seventy-five-hundred relief troops,” Dawson told his sergeant. “Come sunup we’ll push those Rebels clear back past that little church and get this over with.” He watched Sergeant Bridger pull his ragged wool blanket over his head and felt bad that rubber ponchos were given only to the higher officers. The fact that he and the sergeant sat here talking alone was not particularly proper army protocol, but nothing about the past twenty-four hours had been normal or proper. They were simply taking advantage of this chance to rest and gear up for what looked to be another bloody onslaught a couple of hours from now, when the sun would rise on the horror in the fields around Shiloh, and General Grant would lead a new march to take back what the Confederates had claimed earlier today.
“I’ve never seen anything like this, sir. In all our battles out west against the Apache, the Comanche, the Cheyenne—none of it can compare to this slaughter. I’ve seen men walking around still alive with their guts hanging out, bodies on the ground with no heads, an arm with no body nearby. It will be a long time before I can go to sleep without the cries of those boys ringing in my ears. I’d rather be back out west.”
Dawson rubbed his eyes. “Well, we’ve got to go where they send us, Sergeant Bridger. That’s what happens when you’re dumb enough to join the army in the first place.”
Bridger chuckled. “I do wonder sometimes why I got myself into this mess.”
Dawson shifted to relieve a sore hip caused from a horse falling on him earlier in the day. “I know why I did. It was because I had nothing else to do with my life—no home, no family, no goals—”
And because I’d left a man behind me to die. For one quick moment a flash of memory from the day he’d run away actually made him wince.
“I was thirteen when I joined,” he continued. “I was big for my age so they believed me when I said I was sixteen. I fought in the Mexican War at fourteen years old, saved a major’s life and that major’s family had money. He sent me to Philadelphia to get a decent education and then made sure I was gradually promoted to where I am now. He was killed by Indians, and I still think about him. He did a lot for me, probably the only person in my life who ever cared if I succeeded at anything.”
Bridger frowned. “Sir, why are you telling me all this?”
Dawson shrugged. “Maybe because I know I might be dead in a couple of hours. Such thoughts make a man do and say things he never would normally.”
The sergeant grinned. “Maybe so.” He reached inside his Union blue jacket and pulled out a piece of paper. “Which prompts me to give this to you.”
Curious, Dawson took the paper. “What’s this?”
“It’s my will.”
“Your will?”
The sergeant nodded. “For what it’s worth.”
“Why are you giving this to me?”
Bridger moved closer to the dwindling fire, the hot coals having a hard time keeping up with the rain. “Because earlier today you bayoneted a Graycoat who was about to shoot my head off. We were so busy fighting I never had a chance to thank you, sir, but I am grateful. I want you to know that. I have some money in a bank in St. Louis, and I’ve got no family left, so in case I’m the one who ends up with his face in the mud later today, I want somebody worthy to have my money. It’s not a whole lot, but enough for a man to get a pretty good start in life. I hope you can put it to good use.”
Dawson put the note into his own pocket without reading it.
“Don’t you want to know how much I’ve got?”
“No, because it won’t matter,” Dawson said. “You’re going to be just fine, Sergeant Bridger. You’ll end up back out west with me once this war ends.” He leaned against a wheel of the cannon cart. “Tell me, how did a man on sergeant’s pay manage to save up any money at all?”
A patient inside a nearby hospital tent let out a gut-wrenching scream that quieted both of them and sent shivers to Dawson’s very bone marrow. He closed his eyes and shook his head. “Another man has lost a limb, most likely.”
More screams came from the tent, and in the distance the continued groans and sobbing of other wounded men pierced the dark night. Dawson’s face burned from black powder that seemed to eat into his skin, and his eyes stung from it washing into them because of the rain, which the wind drove into his face