Eliza

Chambersburg, Pennsylvania

1863

It is late in the afternoon of an overcast day in June. The earlier drizzle has lifted, and I am darning stockings by the window in the ebbing light. My son George is playing outside with his hoop. I have a stringy old hen simmering on the range in the hope of it becoming tender by dinner‑time. We did not keep a servant full-time, then: none of us knew what the end of the war would bring. And I was used to managing; when you have been at the frontier forts, a town in Pennsylvania seems the last word in convenience. I considered myself fortunate not to have to face wash-day alone.

 June of 1863: consider. Those names we cannot now forget are simply places, like a thousand others – Gettysburg, Chickamauga, Petersburg, Appomattox: as innocent and light upon the tongue as Utica or Zion. They have not yet acquired the tragic weight of Antietam, Fredericksburg, Shiloh, Chancellorsville.

 General Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia has crossed the Potomac and invaded Pennsylvania, a bold move in this bloody game which is being decided on fields checkered with shattered bodies in butternut and blue. His men are in need of food and shoes; and a decisive victory, before they surpass the limits of their endurance. I have not thought it necessary to move from our home in panic, as some of my neighbors have done. I am familiar with the military – Lord knows I should be, after all these years. I know half of the commanders on both sides by their first names — we’ve laughed and danced together from South Carolina to California. An army holds no terror for me; only sorrow and heartache for the men who make up this crawling tide, who must soon be cast up to leave their bones behind forever in some unfamiliar patch of ground.

 So I am sitting by the window, then, wondering how close the fighting will come.

My late husband George’s portrait stares down from the mantel. He supervises our meals nowadays, that same picture. I had it done from the daguerrotype chiefly so that our son would have something to remember his father by; he never would have sat still long enough otherwise.

 We hang it in the dining‑room nowadays because it’s so very formal, George in his full‑dress uniform, dark and splendid. Of course, back then in Chambersburg the dining‑room was the same room as the parlour; which was also the library and the music‑room. The necessary‑house was outside. The only other rooms were the kitchen, which was oddly‑shaped, being an afterthought to the original structure; the attic, where George slept; and my bedroom, not much larger, with a small braided rag rug to save my feet from the bare floorboards right beside the bed.

Anyhow, the portrait does resemble George, in some ways, at least. It captures a little of his swagger in the pose, a touch of his flamboyance; certainly his lively intelligence. The eyes are quite direct, and perfectly fearless. Handsome, too. And I have said that George was generous; I must have. That’s harder to see here, but it was perhaps his finest part. It comes across very clearly in his letters.

And in his actions, too.

Sometimes, since, I have wished that I had not had it made: the portrait, I mean. Perhaps that sounds strange. It is a mighty fine piece in its gold frame, I know; but I have noticed, how a particular likeness of a person can override all of your other memories of them – turn the living, changing image into a stiff eikon, as it were – once they are no longer there before your eyes. George looks so stern here, while actually he was the liveliest soul you could imagine: energetic was too pale a word! Hasty‑tempered – but hastier still to throw back his head and laugh. If you didn’t know him, you never would tell from that picture, no sir. It is his face all right, but some vital spark is missing.

I have no likeness of Lewis to so insinuate itself into his place inside my head, for which now I am heartily grateful, although it was a regret to me at first, not realizing then how easily beguiled we are into this substitution of artifice for the thing itself. I would likely have stared myself silly over it, had I had one, so it’s entirely for the best. I prefer just closing my eyes and calling him to mind.

 We are in the little frame house outside of town, my husband George’s boyhood home and my son George’s also. I am darning up his stockings – again; how that boy would wear out his clothes! – and he is amusing himself outside. His voice and the thwack of his stick against the hoop come drifting inside through the window. The oil paint is fresh on the picture – you can smell the varnish.

 It is quiet – did I say that? Two days earlier the neighbors were quite agitated with the excitement of a troop of Confederate cavalry passing through. I cannot say I shared their agitation. I had my son shovel the dung from the dusty road for use in the garden this winter: waste not, want not, I told him. I have always been a pragmatical sort of person. I am raising a slip of yellow rose which I transported back from our quarters in California at the beginning of the war. When it is grown I intend to plant it on George’s grave.

Well, then. Without so much as a drum‑roll, it begins. Or rather, continues: for everything was set in motion years before; but this part is the crucial one. All the knots are tied here.

There are details I have not shared with a living soul. They cut too close to the quick; I never could bear to talk about them.

But it’s time.

 Back to George’s stockings, then, for the third time, and my eyes are growing strained over my needle when George bursts in, full of importance, as boys will.

 ‘Mama! Mama! There’s a Reb coming through our gate!’ he cries.

 I look up from my work. I am a little surprised, I suppose, but no more than that.

 ‘Mama, he’s only got one arm!’

 Well, little surprises the mother of an eight‑year‑old. I put the mending down and get up to greet our visitor. It does not seriously occur to me that it might be someone with whom I am already acquainted. I am expecting a request for provisions, or the use of my house; whatever.

‘Can I help you, sir?’ I ask.

 George is quite correct: the officer is of medium height, gaunt, bearded, his face shielded by the rim of his black felt hat. It is quite a splendid hat. I blink. I really must stop sewing in bad light.

 He bows. ‘Mrs. Hamilton...’ His voice is hoarse, though at the time I hardly ascribe this to emotion.

 I am polite but cool; more puzzled than anything. I think, No; it can’t be Lewis. He would never call me that; and he doesn’t like to wear a beard; and he has both of his arms, still, surely?

 ‘Have we met? Do I know you, sir?’ I ask.

 He steps forward, taking off his hat and holding it to his chest, gold lace twined halfway up his arm like snakes. His empty sleeve is pinned up. His hair is thinning. Dear God, it is Lewis.

 He clears his throat. ‘Eliza – ’ he says. ‘It’s me: Lew. Lew Armstrong.’

 I realize that my hand is covering my mouth. I am mortified for reacting so.

‘I beg pardon for startling you, Eliza,’ he says, and I see his mouth inside those unfamiliar whiskers, the same shape it was when I kissed it, once, for goodbye, before the war.

 ‘No, no,’ I cry. ‘I should have known you anywhere – it’s – dear Lord, Lewis, my dear! Come in!’ My fingers are somehow glued to the doorframe. I pry them away. My stays are too tight, even though I wear them loose.

 George pipes up, ‘Mama, he’s a Reb!’

 ‘Thank you, George,’ I say, ‘I am aware of that.’

 ‘But Mama! He – ’ 

 ‘George,’ I say firmly, ‘the polite term is an officer of the Confederate army. I will thank you to be mindful of your manners toward a guest. I will talk to you later.’

 Poor George hangs his head and shuffles. ‘Yes, Mama,’ he mumbles.

 Lewis watches him trudge off into the yard and out to the lane, where his hoop lies in the dirt. ‘George,’ he calls out, ‘do you see my horse there, hitched to the fence? Would you be so kind as to loosen his bridle for me, and give him his head so he can graze that tuft of grass?’

 George waves assent. ‘Yes, sir!’ he cries. His pace regains its self-importance: he fairly skips to do so.

 ‘I wasn’t offended, Eliza,’ Lewis continues gently. ‘Lord, how could I be? He’s the living image of his father – who never beat around the bush either, I recall!’

 I let out a deep breath. I want to take him by the hand, but it is already occupied with holding on to his hat. Awkwardly, but it serves I suppose, I reach to take the hat from him with my left hand and clasp his right hand with mine. It seems to emphasize that I have two and he does not. My throat is dry. I succeed in drawing him into the parlour. I am glad that I lit the fire earlier, before I sat down to my mending; often I do not, not this late in the year, but this afternoon had begun to feel particularly dreary. The room feels cozy, like George’s and my quarters used to in the old days in the Southwest when we were on station together and Lewis would drop by for a chat, or some music, or to compare our sketchbooks. Of course, he wore a different uniform then.

 ‘Lewis, my dear, how are you?’ I ask. I want to ask him about his arm, but how do I do so? Is it rude, to call someone’s crippling to their attention? Surely one cannot pretend not to have noticed! I set his hat down on top of the piano. ‘I heard you were made Brigadier. What has happened to you? How are you coming along?’ I ask.

 I feel his eyes on me as I move about the room; poke the fire; pull two of our threadbare chairs up to it. ‘I am fine, Eliza,’ he replies, ‘tolerably fine, I thank you.’

 I invite him to sit and take some refreshment. God knows my mouth is dry. How little I have to offer him! ‘Would you care for some sassafras tea,’ I say, ‘or a glass of brandy? Or lemonade, perhaps? I – I think I have a lemon in the house... ’ My voice trails away. Three years of bloody war, my husband killed and our dearest friend maimed, and I am fretting over lemonade.

 He looks down at the chair before sitting in it. ‘I don’t believe I’m lousy, at present,’ he says, flushing.

 ‘I wouldn’t care if you were!’ I tell him. I mean it, too. ‘Now, what will you have?’

 He gives a little head‑shake, as if realizing he has been holding his breath and deciding to let it out. ‘I – thank you, Eliza, I believe I’ll take a little brandy, since you are so kind; no more than a finger, I pray you.’

 I get up, glad of the activity; go to George’s decanter in the sideboard. ‘George was saving this for special occasions,’ I say, speaking my thoughts out loud for once. ‘He’d like for you to have it now, I’m sure.’

 He takes the glass from me. Why am I so formal? How very familiar we used to be, before. ‘That was such a kind letter you wrote,’ I say. ‘It was – a very great comfort to me’ – I pause a second – ‘Lew, my dear.’

 There: that is better.

 It had a canvas cover, stitched, because he had to send it under a flag of truce, through enemy lines. I didn’t think I should ever see him, to thank him for it; nor, I am sure, did he when he wrote it.

       In the Field,

       July 7th 1862

My dearest Eliza,

 I am so stunned with grief that I hardly know what to write you. I knew from the day we put on uniforms for the first time that such a tragedy might befall; but in the face of this loss I can find no comfort.

 George was the truest friend that ever drew breath, and the kindest man; I rejoice to have known him; and count myself among the blessed on God’s earth to have been honored with his regard.

 Words fail me - I do not know what I can say to you. I wish to God I could have fallen in his stead, if that might have preserved him for you and your son. No loss in this war, nor any I can imagine, could strike me more cruelly.

 I know that his unwavering devotion to you must be a comfort even in his loss. A better man never lived. I set at naught everything I own save my honor - dear God, to be honest, I do not value that as I once did, and certainly not above my love for him - oh Eliza, there is nothing, nothing at all on Earth or in heaven worth the loss of such a man. To write of his death turns this pen in my hand to the deadliest of all weapons, despair - but, Eliza, you must remember that he loved you above all – with every breath he drew – his heart was yours entirely. But he stepped firmly into harm’s way because he could do no other, being the soul he was. This was his essence. God made him so, to be the man we rejoiced in. He gave up all, because of it. How could we wish him otherwise ?

 I do not know if this is of any comfort at all to you. My own tears flow faster as I consider the man he was. How I wish we were not now thus divided, more bitterly today than at any time until now. I should have liked to have shouldered his coffin, at least.

 May God keep you at all times in His sight, as you are in the undying remembrance of one who would still call himself

  your devoted friend, Lewis Armstrong.

 ‘He thought so very much of you,’ I tell him. I am still agitated at the sight of him. Perhaps he is also, to be here, after everything that has happened since we all said our goodbyes. There were tears that day too, I am not ashamed to admit it.

 His thoughts have taken the same direction: ‘Who would have thought it, all those years ago?’ he asks. He raises his glass to George’s portrait. ‘Here, old friend!’ He drinks the brandy down in a single swallow and sets the empty glass down. It makes a sharp sound in the quiet room. ‘Who could have imagined it? Dear God...!’ He pauses. ‘Eliza, I hope I do not intrude. Our division was passing by so close. We are encamped just over the next hill. I had to know how you are – you and George – how you are managing.’ How familiar, how inexpressibly dear are his kind, earnest tones. He had a way of speaking with all of his attention focused on you, as if nothing else in the world mattered, whether you were a child, a homesick private, some poor old woman in the street, or his commanding officer: it was all the same to Lewis. He heard you out.

His men adored him; they always did. You couldn’t help it.

 I reply with some platitude. Then I bite my lip, and add: ‘I am so very glad to see you!’ I am fidgety with the desire to know more. I want to know everything about his life in the interval since we have seen each other. I want to embrace him. I am dying to hear tell about his arm. My heart goes out to him. How do I ask, without sounding unduly inquisitive? ‘Lewis, you didn’t tell me that you had been wounded when you wrote,’ I say. ‘What happened? How do you get on?’

 He shrugs.

 ‘Your arm,’ I remind him. Not that he must need any reminding. He nods. I raise an eyebrow, gesture toward his empty sleeve. ‘Tell me about your arm, my dear?’

 He looks down at it, as if he had forgotten its existence; or absence, rather: ‘They took it off at Sharpsburg,’ he tells me, flushing slightly. That would be eight months ago now. In the North we called it Antietam. By either name it was a slaughter.

 I ask him how he manages.

 Tolerably, he guesses, he says. Fortunately it was not his right arm.

 ‘Fortunately!’ I cry bitterly. ‘Almighty God, what has this war done to our terms of reference, when a man claims good fortune at the loss of a limb?’

 He looks away. ‘There’s many worse off than I, you know,’ he says to the fire. ‘So very many fine boys and men. I’ve lost so many, Eliza, from my own brigade. Still more from disease! I swear, Eliza – I’m sure I don’t know what for. For ideals, they say. That’s a lot of blood, for an idea. A lot of arms and legs and sorrowing mothers and wives... And I do try to write to as many of them as I can, even if it’s only a few lines. Oh God, so many! Hundreds, Eliza, this year, in my brigade alone. And say what? What can I say to them? And now multiply that out...! Well. Wiser men than I see fit to conduct it. God grant they are wiser, anyway. And only He knows how it will all end.’ He looks up. ‘I hope I haven’t done the wrong thing, visiting you. Feelings here must run pretty high, too.’

 ‘Lewis,’ I cry, ‘Lew Armstrong, how dare you even think that? How could I ever not rejoice to see you, in any uniform at all, on God’s earth?’ I mean it.

 He lets out another long breath.

 ‘But you are gone quite grey, my dear,’ I say, lightly.

 ‘You haven’t changed,’ he replies.

 He is too kind, I murmur; but this... and I reach out to pass my hand across his short chestnut hair whose color I remember so well, now streaked with silver. ‘Forgive me, for not knowing you right away – ’

 He seizes my hand and presses his lips swiftly into the palm before releasing it. Startled, we both look at each other. ‘Eliza, oh, ’Liza, forgive me!’ he cries. ‘I had no right to such familiarity. I don’t know what I was thinking of! It has been so very long – I mean ... ’ He gets up from the chair abruptly, walks over to the window, his sword clattering. ‘It has been altogether so long since I encountered any tenderness at all... I do beg your pardon... I shouldn’t... ’

 ‘My dear,’ I say. I would not mind a great deal more familiarity than that; but I do not say so: not yet.

 He swallows. I see his Adam’s apple move up and down inside his high gold-trimmed collar. ‘You still have a piano, I see, Eliza. You don’t know how many times I have minded your playing... ’

 Glad of a distraction in this awkward moment, I sit down at the battered instrument and pick out a Schubert impromptu with a yearning melody line I have always loved; then a dance melody we used to step out to; and one of George’s favorite sentimental ballads.

 ‘You always had such a gift for playing without music, Eliza,’ he says, and picks up singing in the middle of the verse. He manages a few lines in the pleasant baritone I recall so acutely, then falls silent. Turning away, he buries his face in his single hand, which does not suffice to cover it. His shoulders jerk. The sound of his sobbing is like cloth ripping.

  I get up from the bench and go to him: ‘Lewis. Lew, my dear.’ He sits down heavily in the chair where I was darning. I take him in my arms and cradle his head to my breast, resting my cheek against the top of his head. I see his shirt, inside the stiff collar of his General’s tunic: it is grimy. He always liked clean linen. As his sobs abate, I murmur to him as I would to my child: ‘There, now. There. Oh, my dear. It’s all right. Cry all you want!’ My comforting only serves to release a fresh cascade. I do not hush him: I have neither the right nor the desire to. If this is the welcome he needs, it is the one he shall have.

 George bursts in, shouting, ‘Mama! Mama, what’s wrong? I thought I heard you crying! Oh! Mama!’

 ‘Nothing’s wrong, George,’ I tell him.

  Lewis withdraws himself from my embrace, struggling for composure. He pulls out a large handkerchief, wipes his face and blows his nose. ‘It’s all right, George,’ he says unsteadily. ‘No harm is come to your mama. It was I who... we were talking over old times, and I was overcome thinking of your father.’

 ‘How do you know my father?’ demands George.

 ‘George,’ I say, ‘don’t you remember General Armstrong? Lewis Armstrong?’

 ‘But he’s a Reb!’ cries George. ‘A secesh! A traitor!’

 ‘He wears the uniform of his country, George, honorably, just like your father did,’ I tell him.

 Lewis extends his hand. ‘I am deeply honored, George. I don’t suppose you would recall the last time we met, sir.’

 George looks at me.

‘General Armstrong stood godfather at your christening, George,’ I remind him. ‘Don’t you remember how he taught you how to ride, in California, when you were five? He and Papa used to take you out in the little boat – and shooting after rabbits. He used to clean your fish for you.’

 George stares at Lewis in frank disbelief. ‘That was you?’

 Lewis nods.

 ‘But – you’re old! I remember him! He wasn’t old!’

 My mouth falls open. What can have got into George? I have never seen him be so rude. Lewis puts his hand up as I begin to splutter, anticipating my reproach and forestalling it: ‘You’re right,’ he answers simply. ‘I used not to be so old. Neither did you!’

 ‘I’ve still got all my hair, though,’ says George in a crushing tone.

 ‘Wait till you’re my age,’ replies Lewis pleasantly; very pleasantly, considering.

 ‘How old are you?’

 ‘Oh, very old. Middle-aged.’

 ‘My papa was forty-two,’ says George.

 ‘I know,’ Lewis replies.

 ‘How do you know?’

 ‘Because I loved him. He was my best friend in all the world. That’s why he asked me to be your godfather.’

 Intelligence dawns upon George’s face, followed by indignation. This man really is one and the same person with our friend and his godfather, the man he remembers. He heard me say it, but until now he did not believe it: his universe could not hold such a contradiction. ‘My godfather, a Confederate General? Mama – this is Papa’s friend Lew you always had me to pray for?’

 I nod.

 ‘But Mama – why didn’t you tell me he was a Reb? What if he fired at Papa, Mama?’

 ‘Because you were too young to understand, my dear, or else you would surely speak more considerately in front of a guest. It doesn’t make any difference to the Lord, I believe. General Armstrong is just as much in need of His protection as Papa was.’

 George turns to Lewis, wide‑eyed. ‘Did you kill my papa?’

 ‘I did not, George,’ says Lewis, steadily this time. ‘I loved your papa more dearly than any man alive. He was like my own brother. Did you ever read in your bible, about David and Jonathan, whose souls were knit? Like that.’

 George considers for a moment. ‘You wrote that letter. The one Mama keeps taking out and crying over.’

 Lewis’s eyes meet mine, still over-bright. ‘Your father was the finest man I ever knew, George. You may be very proud to be his son, sir.’

 ‘Yes, sir.’ George’s brow is wrinkled. ‘Mama, I don’t understand. How can he be the enemy?’

 Lewis turns to me: ‘May I?’

 I nod.

 ‘Sir,’ says Lewis to George, as if he were talking to a fellow officer, ‘would you do me the honor of taking a walk down the lane with me? I should be much obliged, if we could talk man to man. I... I should like to have the opportunity to explain to you more fully, as you deserve. It is a vexed situation to try to explain...’

 George looks at me for permission. ‘Yes, George, you may go,’ I tell him.

 ‘Lead the way, sir,’ Lewis says, and stands aside for George. George reaches up to take his hand. ‘You sure have a lot of lace on your sleeve!’ he says, admiringly.

 Lewis laughs: ‘I guess so,’ he says. ‘The men call it chicken guts, you know!’ I hear them laughing all the way down the lane.

  While they are gone I put up a quick batter for dumplings in the stew. The work calms my mind. It is easier, to think of breaking an egg and mixing in flour, than to reflect too much. I set the table with the best cloth, and put the half of the rhubarb custard pie left over from yesterday to warm through at the back of the oven. It is not the first time I have not allowed myself to follow a train of thought.

 It is a while before they return. Lewis’s face holds a peculiar tender smile. George is lit up and sputtering like a firework. He does miss his father so, I think. He receives so little attention from grown men, nowadays. There aren’t too many left at home: all our old friends are serving.

On one side or the other.

‘Mama,’ George begins. ‘He didn’t do anything to hurt Papa. He wouldn’t have harmed a hair on Papa’s head, he said so! He said he would have cut his own arm off first! He’s not really a bad man at all, Mama. He’s going to show me where they really did cut off his arm. Not right now, because it’s hard getting into his coat and all with the buttons, but one day. I thought it was blown right off in a battle, but he said the doctor had to cut it off to save his life. It was all smashed up. He said he would be a liar if he said it didn’t hurt. He has an orderly to help with his dressing and stuff, Mama. Like to tie his cravat, and things. It was a minnie ball that did it. They call them that because a Frenchman invented them. I always thought it was a silly kind of a name. He let me look at his sword and take a good long stare through his field glasses, like Papa used to. He’s heartbroken over Papa, just like us. And, mama, he knows Bobby Lee!’

 I flush. ‘George, you have been interrogating our guest!’

 George is too caught up in the flow to stop. ‘Mama, he said he doesn’t believe in slavery either. He called it rep‑ rep‑ reprehensible and indefensible. So I asked him in that case, what was he doing defending it, and he said, as far as he was concerned he was defending his home state, which isn’t the same thing at all. And Mama, I asked him to stay to dinner, and he said he would!’ he concludes triumphantly.

 How can I chide him? He has found out everything I was too delicate to ask.

 Lewis bows again. ‘If it don’t put you out, Eliza, I have a little while yet before I must return to my duty – I should dearly like to share your table one more time. And I find George’s company – and yours – so very delightful.’

 George tugs at my hand. ‘Do say yes, Mama, please say yes! He says I’m ’spicacious and I can ask him lots more questions about Papa and the old days and he promises not to go crying again.’

 ‘George,’ I say, horrified.

 ‘It’s quite all right, Eliza, I do assure you,’ says Lewis. ‘I do most sincerely appreciate his... his concern for my dignity.’ He is biting his lip. I think he is trying to spare George’s feelings from being found amusing. I hope so.

 ‘Of course you must stay,’ I say. ‘I was counting on you to, my dear!’

 While I am serving the food, George asks Lewis to play cat’s-cradle. He has recollected it was Lewis who taught him, when he was five.

 ‘Sorry, George,’ says Lewis. ‘The spirit is willing, but the old fingers come up a few short! How about tic-tac-toe?’

 George turns deep red.

 ‘No offence, George,’ says Lewis cheerfully: ‘I forget myself, sometimes!’

 At the table I apologize for the meager spread. His face is more tired still by lamplight. George sits by him and quite naturally butters his sweet potatoes and cuts his stewed chicken meat for him. I have barely begun to think about all the everyday things a man with only one hand cannot do for himself any more – using a knife and fork together, so many moments we take our skill for granted… I think about them now.

Lewis begins to eat as if he were very hungry indeed – almost keeping pace with George! – but soon slows and does not finish. I find I have very little appetite. George’s questions keep the conversation going with artless fluency, for which I am grateful, as I learn a great deal myself. When I speak Lewis fixes his eyes on my face, and the smile he has for George turns to something quite else, a sadness, a habit of private longing which all his self‑discipline cannot hide. We do, between the three of us, succeed in finishing the rest of the rhubarb pie. It was always my favorite, up until then. I cannot look at one now.

 After the meal I send George away to my neighbor’s house for a little while, telling him he has had more than his fair share of General Armstrong, and now it is my turn.

 ‘How much longer do you have, my dear?’ I ask.

 ‘Not long,’ he replies, taking his watch from his pocket, slightly clumsily. I am reminded again of how very many things I use both my hands at once for, and of how he always liked to do for himself, and my heart aches for him. ‘I am to report back to General Lee’s headquarters by nine o’clock.’ He returns the watch to his pocket. His nails are clean and trimmed, I notice. Who does that for him? I think, I would: gladly.

 By nine o’clock! Not long, indeed. He seems to intend returning unescorted also – for purposes of discretion, I imagine, but not having George’s forthrightness I do not ask him – and it is almost eight already. I take a deep breath. ‘It does not seem like too much time,’ I say.

 ‘Eliza,’ he declares, as if beginning a set-piece speech, ‘I... I do not know what may come to pass; but... if I can be of any service to you and the boy – now or in the future, God willing – I should count it a favor if you would call on me, for – for dear George’s sake. And I should like to direct that – ’ (he passes his hand over his head) ‘ – should I not survive, I... whatever my estate might yield shall be for his education. And to provide for you, naturally, should you need... ’

 I do not trust myself to look directly at him. ‘Lewis!’ My voice surprises me by its passion. I do not think of myself as a passionate person. ‘Please God that day never comes! I have prayed for you, Lewis, every day – every day for the last two years, since the day we parted – I have asked God to keep His hand stretched over you and bring you safely through every danger... my dear... ’

 ‘Don’t!’ he says with more force than I am used to hear from him. ‘Eliza, don’t say it; it wouldn’t do any good, not now... I don’t think I can bear to hear a kind word from you just now.’

 ‘Surely now must be the time, if ever,’ I say.

 He is staring fiercely past my left shoulder. His eyes are bright. He takes refuge in a particular formal dignity. ‘I thank you most – most kindly for your prayers, Eliza.’

There is so little time left – I must give him George’s letter, then. The dice are tumbling end over end as they fall, now: though I do not know it. ‘George wrote to you,’ I tell him. ‘He sent it to me, with his last letter home.’

 Lewis watches as I go to a drawer of my bureau and take out two letters: the one so long, the other a single folded sheet, sealed. I give them both to him to read. ‘I was a good, dutiful wife to George all these years, Lewis,’ I say quietly. ‘I loved him dearly. You know that. I never for a second betrayed his trust in me.’

 ‘I know that, Eliza,’ he answers, a little above a whisper. 

 I put my hand over his with the unread letters in it. ‘And what about you, all that time?’

 He cannot look at me. ‘Have I ever behaved toward you in a way that was not strictly honorable, Eliza?’

 ‘No. No; never, my dear. But he knew you too well not to see it anyway.’ And I take the longer of the two letters, George’s letter to me, and open it, and hand it back to him. I search his face while he is reading. He goes white, then red, then white again.

He is trying to hold it still to finish reading it, but his hand is trembling too much. He steadies the edges of the pages against his chest. All the little ways he has learned to manage: it flays me to see him have to do this.

I have received two love letters in my life.

This is one of them:

Lizzie my dearest,

 Should your gaze fall on these lines it will mean that I am no more. How to comfort you, my dear wife, when my own grief at the very idea of our being lost to each other is too great for words?

 I have written to you in the past, I hope, in gratitude for all the glorious gifts you have brought to me in our lives together. I know that I can rest my trust in you to bring up George to be an honorable man, as I have strived to be; to know his duty and keep his word. I am grateful to God, for His bounty to me in the form of our abiding love and respect. And if time allowed now I should wax eloquent again on the subject.

 Now, my dearest, do not take amiss the next thing I am going to say. Because if I had all the time in the world, I should find another day and another way to say it. But I have left it unsaid too long, and now it is but a short while before I expect to begin a perilous engagement; and I have a strong feeling that I shall not survive it.

 I want you to know, my darling wife, that when this dire and bloody conflict is past, if the kind Lord should spare him to you, you must not fear my displeasure if you should find yourself eventually in the arms of our old friend Lew A.

 You know what I mean to say, I hope, as you have always been so sensible of my meaning. I have known from our early days together of his complete devotion to you and also of your tender regard for him - an affection whose sisterly nature I have never found a moment’s reason to doubt, my dear, but a deep and steady regard nonetheless. And I have often wondered, had he but met you before I, whether I should have had the opportunity to have enjoyed - as I have done - all these years of blissful union with you — for which, as I say, I thank the Lord, and you also.

 For I believe He made us three kindred souls, Lizzie, and I beg you now do not hesitate out of delicacy on my behalf to turn to each other for solace. For I know that I will be kindly remembered wherever each of you might be – and doubly so, together. And God knows you will have waited long and honorably enough.

 And know that I love you – both – and at the Day of Judgement, if things fall out so, why - we will just have to cross that bridge when we come to it, my dear.

 Do not be offended that I write you thus. I am thinking only of your happiness and wellbeing; and, selfishly, I think my spirit might like to hear itself spoken of as often and affectionately as I would hope the two of you might speak of me.

 You are dearer to me than anything in the world, Lizzie. You have made me happier than I ever thought to be. I have prayed with all my heart that I shall continue in this blissful state. But if the good Lord sees fit to call my number, why, then I shall have had my turn at absolute happiness; and I do not grudge the same chance of bliss to any man worthy of you – although there cannot be many of those. I hope and pray that I have been.

 Farewell, Eliza. Mourn me; but do not extinguish your flame when I am gone. Kiss George for me. Kiss Lew for me.

 Your loving husband,

   George Hamilton.

 It was written with more care than his usual style, a formality he must have thought appropriate to so final a farewell. Slowly Lewis raises his eyes from George’s cramped script. They are glittering. He puts that letter down and takes the other one from me.

 ‘Shall I open it?’ I ask

 He shakes his head and, steadying the single folded sheet against his chest once more, breaks the seal with his thumb. I guess its content, from George’s letter to me, though he does not show me just now. (I read it later, tucked inside Lewis’s Bible, at the story of David and Jonathan, whose souls were knit: Lewis had underlined that part.)

George’s hand here is bold, dashing, the way it was when he wrote directly without thinking too hard first.

Lew -

 Brother, friend - time presses - we move at dawn and I have the strongest of premonitions tonight. Why? Who knows! We have both seen such phantoms realized.

 The saddest day of my life was the day we parted to fight on opposite sides. Side by side we could have been invincible, don’t you think?

 Dammit Lew - damn the war - why! why! Why did you have to pick the other side! What a goddam waste, Lew. Salvage something - marry Lizzie – it’s the least you can do. Besides, it’s a brother’s duty, the Good Book says, and duty is one area you’ve never shrunk from. And I know George will be in the very best of hands: none better. I always said that.

 God don’t take sides, I think

 Good-bye, old friend. We have shook hands for the last time this side of Paradise: adieu. - G.

 I watch Lewis reading.

The laughter-lines by his eyes, deepened by the Mexican sun, have been clawed into harsh crows’-feet. I try to imagine him ordering men to stand up and be killed. I never had any trouble picturing George doing so; but then, George was a born fighter. He loved a good scrap. The only way Lewis can do it, I think, is to get out in front and let them follow him; because they love him. Because he has earned their trust. Because they are his brigade. I am right, as it turns out; but that part is yet to come.

 I can almost hear his heart thudding. A single tear trembles on the edge of his eyelid and makes a fiery streak all the way down to his beard.

He folds the letter; thrusts it into an inside pocket at his breast.

‘My God, George – ’ he says. ‘How unselfish can a man be?’ His voice shakes. ‘A man would have to love his wife very dearly, to write to her so….’

‘Yes,’ I say.

‘Well, so he did,’ he says, ‘God knows he always did – love you.’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘ — and you,’ I add.

 The shadow of his nose wavers oddly across his cheek in the firelight. ‘Eliza, if I don’t leave I shall be late in reporting to the General.’

 ‘You are not moving your division further tonight, though?’ I ask.

 ‘Not as far as I know,’ he answers, not taking his eyes from mine.

 ‘Ask him if he can spare you until the morning,’ I say.

 You cannot unring a bell, once you have struck it. It might appear, viewed as a strictly mathematical portion of my life, that twelve hours are neither here nor there. Less than that, actually. No more than an interlude.

 But that would be wrong. I take full responsibility for everything that happened, which turned the rest of my life into prelude and postlude to that event. And it was my actions as much as anyone’s which changed it all. My conscience is clear. I would do the same thing in a heartbeat tomorrow, knowing everything that was to follow. The price was not too high.

So I speak up. I ask him to come back – and stay till morning.

There is no-one else on earth to whom I should have made that invitation; but he has sought me out and found me here in the middle of it all, and tomorrow he will leave again.

His eyes widen; his nostrils flare. He stares at me. A log falls to ashes in the hearth. ‘I can’t promise... ’ he says.

 ‘I know. But will you ask?’

 ‘I will ask. Oh Eliza! My dearest – I – if this is good-bye, now, and I can’t return tonight – I shall never forget your graciousness in asking me.’

 And he snatches up his hat and hurries away, not trusting himself even to an embrace, striding down the path into the shadows. His horse nickers in greeting. I remember how he used to mount in a single fluid movement; it is with a considerable effort, now. His light grey coat seems to drift like a ghost even after I tell myself logically that he must be long out of sight.

* * *

 As I did not witness his subsequent interview that night with General Lee, I am forced to imagine how it must have passed. An indulgence, but it pleases me to do so. Lewis told me of it; sometimes I think I can almost hear their voices.

  I see the commander-in-chief at his desk, papers and maps spread before him; rosters, lists of officer casualties, regimental returns, requisitions, matters of supply: artillery and quartermaster and commissary reports. It is a little before nine as Lewis is announced.

 Lee looks up from his papers. He is evidently weary, but his expression is mild. Lewis salutes in the doorway, a courtesy returned by his commanding officer. ‘Sir – ’

 ‘Yes, General?’

 ‘Can you spare a moment of your time for a personal request, sir?’

 ‘I should hope so, sir, I should most certainly hope so.’ General Lee sits back in his chair and takes off his spectacles. He rubs his eyes.

 He was one of the most courteous men alive, of course. His reputation was deserved. I think he would have been most particularly kind to Lewis; he knew his quality. He wrote me so himself, afterwards.

 It was also, in the end, his fault: the worst mistake of judgment he ever made; but that’s another matter. It has not yet happened, this June night, in this green Pennsylvania valley behind the Blue Ridge, and his gamble may still pay off.

  He sets aside his various preoccupations, to give Lewis his full attention. ‘I believe I have informed General Longstreet, sir, that I do not need to trouble any of his corps for their time just at the moment. Did you not receive the message, General?’

 ‘I did, sir, just now. Thank you. I am most obliged, sir.’

 ‘Well then, General, what can I do for you besides authorizing you to turn in to your tent and retire to bed, sir?’

 Lewis bows a little. ‘Sir, General Longstreet has already retired, General Pickett is nowhere to be found, and there is no-one else to ask besides you, sir – I should like to ask your permission... that is – under the present circumstances, I – should like to know whether you... ah... anticipate any need for my services before daybreak?’

 Lee regards him quizzically. ‘And what circumstances might those be, General? Do you know something about our situation that I do not, sir?’

 ‘No, sir. Not at all. It is a purely private matter, sir.’

 General Lee frowns. There have been incidents lately of ‘affairs of honor’ among his officers. ‘Reassure me, sir, that you have no quarrel with a brother officer requiring you to go do something foolhardy?’

 Lewis’s face clears. ‘Absolutely not, sir. Nothing of that nature at all, sir.’

 ‘I do wish I had heard from General Stuart. I should be happier in my mind, knowing whether those people are moving up in our rear. Will I know where to find you, General, should I need you?’

 ‘I will leave my direction with Captain Orr, sir, should my request be acceptable to you. I shall not be far away, sir; the other side of the town, at a civilian residence.’

 Lee consults his map. ‘Chambersburg? Ah, yes. Just so.’ Little escapes his notice, or his memory. There is intelligence and affection in his steady gaze. ‘I do not recall your asking for any favor of this sort in the past, General Armstrong.’

 ‘No, sir.’

 ‘Well that being the case, I do not see how I can reasonably refuse.’

 Lewis salutes. ‘Thank you, sir.’ The realization of everything Lee’s yes might mean bursts in him with a schoolboy wildness he struggles to master. Beneath his tunic his heart has taken a violent lurch, begun to thud like an entire battery of brass Napoleons. His mouth is dry.

 General Lee is hiding a smile. ‘General Armstrong... ’

 ‘Sir?’

 ‘Would you be so obliging as to convey my kindest respects to Mrs. Hamilton, if you have not already done so? I am quite sure that if she could spare her husband – what a fine officer he was, sir! – for the Union cause, I can dispense with your services for a few hours. I remember well how close you were before the war. You must have a great deal of news to catch up.’

 Lewis flushes. His voice is stiff: ‘I hope I have not been indiscreet, sir.’

 Lee waves his hand. ‘No, General, you have not. It is I who have been forward in taking the liberty of surmising the direction of your errand, sir. It came to my mind just now that George Hamilton used to speak of this town when we served under General Scott in Mexico. We were engineers together, you know. You have made no secret of your regard for him, as I recall.’

 ‘I am proud to call myself his friend, sir.’

 ‘So you might well be, sir. A gallant officer. Well now, General. I believe I have no further need for your services tonight. That is, unless something unforeseen might occur before morning. Kindly report to General Longstreet at first light, sir. I shall be consulting with my corps commanders very early in the morning. And of course, leave your direction with the Captain outside, as you have offered to do; for which I do thank you.’

 Lewis’s color is still high. ‘You are very kind, sir.’

 ‘Not at all, General. Kindly do not take a chill, sir, while you are out-of-doors tonight. You have not been altogether strong, sir, since you returned to us — I cannot spare you indefinitely with a pleurisy.’

 ‘I am obliged, sir.’

 General Lee replaces his spectacles. The two men salute each other gravely. Lee speaks once more, with a tender, sad expression. ‘Carpe Diem, General.’

 ‘I beg your pardon, sir?’

 ‘A Latin tag from my schooldays, General, no more than that. I said Carpe Diem, sir.’

 Lewis flushes more deeply. ‘Thank you, sir.’

 General Lee returns to his paperwork. He is writing home to his wife, after composing yet another letter to his commissariat complaining of inadequate supplies. He is of the old school, and does not like to bring hardship to the civilian population by sending troops out to forage, even here in Pennsylvania. He has also written again to President Davis to apprise him of the latest position of his troops and his hopes for their success in forcing the Federals to lay down their arms and recognize the Confederacy; and adding as an aside, not for the first time, that many in his Army have no shoes, and are reduced to robbing the dead for clothing, while it is rumored that wealthy states such as North Carolina are stockpiling warehouses of uniforms for their own regiments.

 Lewis closes the door quietly behind him.

 And returns to me.

Eliza

Chambersburg

1863

I have tried, looking back on all those years, to recall one defining occasion when I first knew it: that Lewis’s regard for me might be considered more particular – more singular in its nature – than the general kindness I had so come to take for granted. But knowing what you know colors everything. You can’t help it. When you go back over events, it’s so hard to see things as they appeared then, without the gloss of interpretation. It’s impossible to say when I really knew: I certainly overlooked plenty of clues, at the beginning.

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know George. Our people knew each other through a relative of his in Cincinnati. He came to my father in his full-dress uniform to ask for my hand. George always liked to do things in style. Two years later, when my father considered us both old enough to know what we were doing, I traveled out from Ohio to marry him. I had been in love with him since my childhood. He was the most dashing thing I had ever seen. They all were: such laughing and optimistic young men, so splendid, so determined to hide their tenderness under all those shiny buttons. How heartbreakingly beautiful young men are!

 I have mentioned how afraid I was of intruding into that tribe of brotherhood, whose mutual devotion had been the subject of many of George’s letters to me from the Point; but I should not have worried. They welcomed me unreservedly. I became the object of blushing gallantry and touching confidences. Several dozen of them fancied themselves in love with me, as they would have with any young woman who happened to be the first to enter that charmed circle; but soon they passed that stage, to our mutual relief, replacing adoration with a peculiar tender brotherliness.

 When Harry Arnett married Kitty the following year, a match I knew of long before she did, our circle widened automatically to include her. We expected confidently that it must soon expand again whenever our friend Lewis should enter into the blessed state of matrimony and set up housekeeping with one or another of the many young ladies who looked with favor upon his speedwell blue eyes and handsome mustache.

He did not have George’s dash; rather, a thoughtful air about him, a complete lack of pretension: not the first man you would notice in a room full of people, but the one you would soon find yourself drawn towards. I know I soon became very fond of him. After all, we both adored George.

  Kitty and I introduced him to our entire acquaintance. He was always perfectly polite and considerate with them, with those beautiful manners of his: but, one after another, they declared that all their wiles were useless in the matter, and they would give up on him and turn to the pursuit of easier game.

 One of them, a particularly spirited and rather wilful Colonel’s daughter, unused evidently to being thwarted of anything she had taken a fancy to, pressed him for an explanation. She did not take kindly, she said (to Kitty, who naturally told me the next day) – she did not appreciate, no sir not at all, such an expenditure of flirtatious exertions on her part with so little result. Lieutenant Armstrong, she said, had the gall to apologize to her, if he had seemed in any way to encourage her interest, which was not his intent; and assured her, furthermore, that it was in no way due to any lack of charm in her person, nor of assiduity in her efforts to be agreeable.

 Well, what, then? She insisted on being told. He smiled and said nothing. Might she take it then, sir, that his attentions were engaged elsewhere?

 Still he said nothing. Well, then, he was a sad flirt to draw her on so, if he was in love with someone else, she cried.

 He was sorry, he repeated, if he had given her any idea of the kind. And she saw something closed and inflexible in his eyes, so she told Kitty; something that had nothing to do with flirting, and was not to be trifled with – something direct and private, something achingly sad: thus far, it said, but no further: my heart is out-of-bounds, and there is nothing more to be said.

 She was determined to have one of them, though; and since George was mine, she had to wait until poor Kitty died in childbirth a few years later, when she saw her chance and swiftly married Harry Arnett. Not that he was any prize, if you knew him as well as I did. Harry became a senator, though, so I suppose she got what she wanted.

 What was I saying? I was telling all this for a reason. Oh, yes: the attachment between Lewis and myself before the war, and its precise nature. As I have said, I could not select a particular occasion and say, Then I knew.

It was not really a moment at all, but a gradual unfolding that looked different viewed backwards than it did at the time: as I said, every new light cast fresh shadows across the terrain of the past.

But I have told what I can; and so we are here. I am telling all this now because I want it to be perfectly clear who it is that I am waiting for, this June night in Chambersburg, in the middle of this unthinkable conflict and at the center of all the rest of it; this slight, desperately tired man, lifelong soldier, career officer, who now commands a brigade of Confederate soldiers under Generals Pickett and Longstreet – the enemy, that is. My late husband’s dearest friend on earth; and my own, also.

This grey-coated, crippled Lewis Armstrong, Brigadier-General, CSA.

There will always be more to tell — but this should be a beginning, at least; enough to understand. I hope I can find the words.

* * *

 Night has fallen. I have been waiting for his return this past hour in an agony of restlessness. I have re-read the letters from George to me before his death and from Lewis after it until I was staring right through the ink at eternity. I have put my son firmly to bed upstairs. I have looked long and hard into the mirror. The woman who stares back looks compassionately at me: still beautiful; hauntingly sad.

 I wonder if I will ever see him alive again. I wonder if his knock will sound at the door at any moment. I wonder if he is virgin – can he be, still? If not, he has been the soul of discretion, always. I do not believe him to be that kind of man; not then, not now.

I wonder what he will think and do, what he may think I meant. I wonder about his arm, whether he will believe the sight of it troubles me.

Going to the window for the twentieth time, I see him approaching. He has come on foot – because of my reputation, I realize: he did not want to leave his horse tethered here, betraying his presence, all these hours that are to come.

 I open the door and wait for him in the rectangle of yellow lamplight. His step quickens; his limp is more pronounced when he is tired, I see.

 His name is on my lips, and mine on his, and then he is in my arms, my face pressed against the buttons of his uniform coat, and he is kissing my hair and calling me darling. He is forty-three years old; he is trembling.

 I take his face in my hands and look into his dear eyes. They are as kind as ever; but my God, how sad and deep-set they are now. I want him to kiss my mouth, and to my sharp joy he does so. His mouth quivers, tender at first, a child’s kiss if it were not for the silky sweep of his beard and moustache – then he closes his eyes and with a small sound kisses me harder, very much harder, almost bruisingly. This kiss engenders a dozen more, our mouths hungry as if for sustenance: top lip, bottom lip, the corners, cheekbones, the space under the nose; and I am filled with a slow sweetness as if I am a hollow tree running with wild honey, and he is still trembling.

 We both know what must ensue, now that we have dared this much. But, dear Lord, how to come to that place of sanctuary across our old, familiar divide of self-imposed denial and composure? I take his hand in both of mine and lead him indoors. I cannot entirely believe that this is Lewis, whom I have kissed only once in all the years until now, and his reality is here before me and he has lost an arm and he is shaking. I want this to be easy for him. Staring at his beard, I ache for its brush upon my breasts. Is he thinking this also? He is gazing at me and his face is haunted, longing, marked with grief and responsibility.

 I do not know how to proceed. His splendid uniform catches the light. Uniforms mean to impress, to quicken the heartbeat, to claim authority. They set out to beguile us into perceiving a cloak of glamour and magic over unspeakable, unthinkable things: and they do so most effectively. Men wearing the same uniform killed my husband, I think, but somehow that is not relevant now. It is simply Lewis.

  A rent in the empty sleeve has been neatly mended. He always did look a little untidy at the best of times, as if his uniform were the wrong size, or he somehow the wrong shape; George was the tidy one. Other hands have made a neater job of tying his cravat than he ever did. I do not want to overwhelm him by being too forward, too soon. I have had a long time to think about this day, if ever it should come. He, I think, has never believed it could.

 I wonder if he has ever rested his head upon a woman’s bosom. Surely he must have. How little I know of his life! I wish for the ease of our former friendly intercourse, in the South-West and the West, so natural and familiar. But in his going and coming something has been decided: a line has been crossed and there is no going back.

 He knows this as well as I. Neither of us knows how to proceed.

 I raise my hand to caress his hair. It is thinner, now, than it used to be. In my heart I know he is mine, and I rejoice fiercely; but my voice is steady as I say, ‘You’ll spend the night here?’

 ‘I have leave to do so,’ he replies, carefully. Perhaps he cannot quite believe it either. Then he smiles. ‘General Lee sends his respects. He told me Carpe Diem! ’

 ‘Very sensible advice, I’d say.’ I smile back, but my throat aches.

 ‘I don’t think this was what he had in mind,’ he says.

 ‘No; probably not,’ I say. ‘But I did.’

 His eyes search mine. What is he looking for? Not permission, surely. Are my feelings written as plainly on my face as his are upon his? Unconcealed, its aspect is almost too bright: if I were wood I should burn up in the blaze of his look, like the trick schoolboys have with a magnifying glass and the sun’s rays. I imagine a wisp of smoke curling up from me before the conflagration. I take a deep breath before I say the next thing, because it is irrevocable: ‘I want to hear everything, everything you’ve done, everything that’s happened to you; but just now, Lewis, I can think of nothing beyond holding you in my arms all night, my dear, to make up for all this time we have lost...’

 There. I’ve said it. Something has shifted: I can no longer read his face.

 His mouth twists. ‘I only have but the one to hold you with, Eliza.’

 ‘Oh, my dear,’ I hear myself saying, ‘My dearest, my darling – ’ and we cling to each other as if for rescue. I have never before heard the sounds which come from my throat now, as with the back of my head cradled in his trembling hand, we kiss, and kiss, and kiss again.

 Our mouths and hands know what to do in spite of us. Their knowledge is our passport. In the midst of this war over rights, we claim our private right to each other. We have paid our dues.

 Only our clothes are in the way, and that is easily overcome.

I unbuckle his saber and he sets it down on the table where we ate an hour before. ‘Tonight you don’t belong to the Army of Northern Virginia,’ I say. ‘You’re on leave. It’s official: orders of General Lee. Tonight you’re mine.’

 ‘I always was,’ he replies, since he has nothing to conceal any more, and my heart knocks like a summons-server.

 His eyes are on my face as I begin to unbutton his uniform coat. I think it must have above a score of gold buttons, if you were to count them all. I am aware how acutely conscious he is of his mutilated body underneath. He drapes it over my chair: its long skirts brush the floor. I see his left shirt sleeve has been cut off and neatly oversewn. It would flap about and get in the way, otherwise, I suppose. I struggle with the smaller buttons of his waistcoat, my fingers made more clumsy by my anxiety on his behalf, and he forces a smile: ‘You must promise to help me back into all of this, Eliza, seeing as I have left my orderly behind at camp...!’

 So that he shall not be the first one of us to be revealed as God and man made him, I leave him in britches and shirtsleeves and begin to unfasten my own garments. I am wearing a grey-green costume with green velvet facings.

 (I still have it. It became very worn by the end of the war, worn and stained, and the moths have got at it sadly since. I take it out and finger it sometimes, reflecting on the woman who wore it then. We have both been preserved long beyond our usefulness, in a way: my fleshly God-given form and this, its outer covering. I do not, however, smell quite so strongly of camphor!)

 Stepping from my costume, I stand before him in my chemise. My limbs are fully visible. Now, at last, he looks down from my face. ‘Oh — oh, honey!’ he whispers.

  I take his hand in mine; kiss the palm and fingers, and lay it – his one hand, dear sweet God, his precious hand – on my heart. I feel my nipples stand out through the thin cambric under his stare.

 ‘I’m not such a pretty sight as you are,’ he says softly, and I know he is afraid: though whether he fears my horror or pity more I cannot tell. I search for words to set his apprehension at rest.

 ‘Lewis,’ I tell him, ‘in my eyes you are complete just as you are. You always were: nothing has changed.’

 He gives a bitter, disbelieving little laugh, and slips out of his waistcoat, which falls to the floor. Standing there in his white shirt, with webbing suspender-straps over the shoulders, he loosens his cravat and starts to unfasten the buttons. They are small. His fingers fumble, one hand trying to do the work of two. I think of his sister in Richmond – was it she that sewed up the left sleeves on all of his shirts? He has stepped backwards out of my reach, so as to do this without my help. His suspender-straps slip from his shoulders, to hang down on each side, just as George’s used to. With a quick writhing movement and a shrug he is free of his shirt.

His eyes defy me to flinch. His quivering lips beg me not to. He sees me looking at his mouth; closes it firmly.

 His left arm ends in a stump a few inches below the shoulder. It is altogether more painful a sight than I had anticipated. Not what is there – a scar is a scar – but what is not: the lost symmetry, the shocking absence of the limb which by Nature and right ought to be there. I bite the inside of my lip, and swallow to push down the whimper which rises in my throat. I think I am going to be sick.

  I should know better. I am no stranger to the sight of limbless men, not after all this time as an Army wife; not two years into this war.

 But this is not a stranger, not an acquaintance. This is Lewis, whom I cherish. He is watching my face. I return his gaze steadily, willing my expression to remain composed. I think, I never saw him whole. Never.

 I look longer. Oh, but he is beautiful; he is! There are dark whorls of silky hair round each of his nipples, which are pink like wild strawberries, and a glossy line between them running down his belly and disappearing under his waistband. My eyes travel down it to the gold-striped dark serge of his uniform britches, where the firelight outlines the evidence of our kisses. Our bodies have their own agenda, I reflect, unrestrained by this halting dance our thoughts and fears demand of us.

 I look once more at his damaged arm, at the red puckering of scar where his sweet flesh once continued whole to the elbow, wrist and fingers. God, I think, remembering when he used to dance with me, so long ago, when I was a bride.

He is holding his breath. Sensing the direction of my gaze, he lifts his chin, stands a little straighter, this man entrusted with command, with impossible responsibilities, among them leading fragile bodies into murderous withering fire. I know that he is vulnerable to me in this moment even as he is not to the most hideous, but impersonal, wounding.

 I also know that it is this sensibility, coupled with great courage, which makes him the commander he is. ‘Let me see the scar,’ I say softly. ‘You needn’t hide it from me, Lew. There’s nothing to hide between us.’ And I take a step toward him, cup the short stub of his arm in my hands. He has been holding it stiff to his side. I raise it gently, and he lifts it as if the rest of his arm were still attached there to do his will. Setting my lips directly on the seamed flesh, I tell him: ‘Lewis, I care for you entirely. There is no part of you I do not cherish. I can’t find ugliness when I look at you.’

 He is silent. His throat works as he swallows once, twice; something splashes on my wrist from his turned-aside face. We have passed this test. The painful moment flowers into tenderness.

 Eighteen years’ worth of pent-up kisses; how can we possibly kiss enough, for that? I say his name with his mouth on mine. And then he lets himself say what he has choked back unsaid, an untold number of times: ‘oh – oh – Eliza; oh, Eliza – oh honey – ’ – the last restraints give way – ‘oh, Christ, how I love you! I love you so!’ He can’t say it enough, now that the dam has broken and a thousand repetitions wouldn’t begin to pay for all the other times when he thought it, and turned away, and said nothing. ‘Oh, sweetheart!’ – and this time, at last, it is not a dream – ‘I love you – oh, God help me, I love you so! I always did — always…’

 ‘I know,’ I tell him, ‘I know.’ His lips leave their imprint on my cheek, the hollow under my jaw, the length of my neck, my collar-bone, my shoulders. We are intoxicated with this sudden license. I ruffle his hair, the wrong way, up instead of down. His hand cups my breast, takes its weight: his thumb outlines my nipple with a tender deliberation. Stooping, he puts his lips to my breast through my chemise.

 I am overcome: my knees tremble and will not hold me. Nothing in my life has prepared me for the force of what I am feeling. I kneel on the bare floorboards and bury my face in the silken hairs on his belly. My arms encircle his waist. He sways and grips my shoulder to steady himself. We each try to get our breath back. ‘May I take down your hair, Eliza?’ he asks. ‘You don’t know how many times I have thought of it tumbling over my hands – well – my hand, now, I guess – I know I shouldn’t have, I had no right to even think it – only – oh! honey – ’

 ‘Of course,’ I say, and one by one he draws the pins from my hair and sets them on the arm of the chair beside him. As the heavy coils fall loose upon his fingers he whispers my name. I tremble in anticipation of the moment – soon, surely – when we shall be one.

 ‘Come, Eliza, are you cold?’ he murmurs, raising me and enfolding me as best he can to his bosom with his half embrace. A lock of hair falls across my eyes. He pushes it gently aside with his nose. His beard brushes my cheek. I hold him tightly to me, so that his wanting presses against me through the woollen stuff of his britches and the fine cotton of my drawers. Once before, in California, I have held and felt him thus. A sadness comes over me: how many times in these eighteen years has it been so for him, with no hope of consummation?

 ‘I’m not cold, Lewis,’ I say. ‘I’m trembling for this.’

 ‘So am I,’ he confesses.

 We walk through the doorway to my bedroom beyond, holding hands. He sits on the bed. The ropes creak under the mattress. I have set a lamp burning low upon the dresser. Kneeling in my underclothes, I draw his boots off.

 ‘Should I turn out the light?’ I ask, thinking still of his diffidence about his wound.

 ‘No,’ he says. ‘Don’t: Eliza, I cannot count the times I have thought I could not endure to go on, and closed my eyes and pretended that the pillow under my head was your sweet breast. I should so like to open them and still find it so!’

 His fine black boots are dusty from the walk down the lane, the soles worn through. They smell of blacking and horses. His right stocking has holes in it. His left foot wears a stained bandage. In the lamplight the old, dried blood is the warm brown of wallflowers. ‘It’s healing up nicely – ’ he says in answer to my raised eyebrows, ‘it was clean.’

 In all this time that we have known one another, I reflect, how odd, how very strange it is in our society, that a man’s feet should remain almost as hidden as his male parts. When have I seen him barefoot? This makes me consider how odd also are the thoughts which pass through one’s head at times like the present.

  As if from a previous lifetime, an occasion from our early days together flashes into my head next: I had kicked off my dancing slippers and rested my poor feet up on the chaise. Leaning back, my eyes closed, I felt tender fingers chafing them back to life. ‘George?’ I murmured. I think it was not long after we were married. It must have been before Lewis stopped touching me, ever, when he could avoid it.

 ‘Well actually, my dear, it’s Lewis, as it happens,’ he said softly, and my eyes flew open. ‘George has gone to fetch you an ice, don’t you know, and I – I thought he would want me to fill his part for him until his return.’ Yes: that time, when it was my feet in his hands. But what about his?

 The sadness that has been hovering descends now. California. We walked along a beach together while George slept off his lunch. I had forgotten. How could I forget that? Oh, how could I possibly have forgotten? For now I remember with a dull pain in my chest, pulling off his right stocking, that this foot is not whole either: he was frostbitten, out in the Plains, the winter we heard by letter that he was missing and feared killed. George refused to believe it: but still he wanted the comfort of my body every night, his only recourse when assaulted by grief too great to bear - which was the very last thing I wanted; but I acquiesced, thinking, Lewis. Lewis. I shall never see him again. Oh, Lewis, my dear; my dearest.

 Only an eternity later did that other letter arrive, from him this time – it was very short – to say that he was safe after all. I cried then.

 And he is here now, and I have been losing him by pieces. I rub his foot and say, ‘Oh, what if you’d died out there in the snow, Lewis — !’

 He falls strangely silent, as memories pass before his unfocussed eyes, answering at length, though not the answer I expect, ‘I guess there’ve been times I wished I had —’ and then he looks past me to the frayed edge of the rag rug where it is unravelling, like the people we have pretended to be all this time, adding, ‘I’m surely glad I didn’t, now... but I did, at the time.’ This last is in a soft voice, almost to himself. ‘I prayed, Eliza. For God to do something. To harden my heart - to make it stop insisting on you, on you or no-one. Or if not that, then at least to take away the - the heat of my nature. Wanting you so. And when He did neither one, then I did - I did wish He’d let me die out there.’

 And I remember his silence the next time we saw each other, as if there was nothing left to say any more – the way he hardly said a word, on his arrival in California, from the steamer dock all the way back to the garrison. Hardly a word. George was at the reins, so it was I who bore the brunt of it. I don’t want to think about that day, not now. I don’t want to remember our joyous anticipation, and then the pain in his face that he couldn’t hide, on seeing us, pain and joy inseparable as the twin edges of a sword, sharper than I can bear. ‘Oh my darling, I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I’m so sorry.’

 He shrugs. ‘Couldn’t be helped. And He knew what He was doing after all, I guess -’

 ‘I think so,’ I whisper, and deliberately I pull untied the ribbon at my bodice, and begin to open the buttons down the front, starting at the top. They wink in the light, little discs of mother-of-pearl, come all the way from the bottom of the Mississippi to here and now where they seem suddenly such frail things to stand between my body and his gaze. One button after another, slowly. With each one a pulse throbs in a place I have no name for.

He puts out his hand, as if to lift my chemise open – I hold my breath – but then hesitates and withdraws it: brings it to his face instead, his knuckles against his mouth.

 ‘What?’ I ask. ‘What is it?’

 He looks a little like someone might who is staring over a cliff, contemplating stepping off it. He is pale. ‘I’m afraid,’ he says quietly. No bravado, no pretending: the truth.

 I don’t know anything about charges and artillery fire; I’ve never been in battle. I know him for a brave soldier, brevetted for gallantry under fire. I’ve seen him dash toward a panicked horse, ducking the murderous hooves. But sometimes courage is as quiet as this.

 ‘What can I do?’ I whisper.

 ‘I don’t know,’ he says, ‘only — I used to want to make love to you, Eliza, I mean, I still do — but back then I was crazy for it, oh God, it was all I could think of — and now half the time I – I just wish I could be held...’

 — and I stop, and hold him; just that.

 For a long time – it seems like minutes on end – neither of us speaks, or even moves. We sway a little. I hold his head nestled to my shoulder. My fingers twist in the soft feathers of his hair. There is no desire in this embrace, nor the need for any. There is compassion instead – caritas, agapé. A settling. The love which yearns for physical expression is anchored in this stillness. 

 ‘There’s something I’m not sure you understand yet, Lew,’ I say into this new freedom, making a mental apology to George for what I am about to admit, a kind of betrayal because it’s about when he was alive, when we were married.

 ‘What’s that, my sweetheart?’

 ‘That I felt it, too. I knew, and I wished — god help me, I wished…. ’

 ‘Oh,’ he says. ‘Oh no. God, no.’

 ‘Yes. Oh, yes,’ I say, and watch this new knowledge kindle in his eyes. I have never thrown a match into a barn full of hay, but I imagine if I ever did that it would look something like that.

 ‘I didn’t know — I had no idea,’ he whispers. He has stepped back; we are no longer touching. This is almost too much for him to hear. ‘I thought — you and George – the two of you — ’

 ‘We were. I don’t mean it was an unhappy marriage: it wasn’t. But sometimes I tried so hard not to pretend it was you,’ I say. ‘That’s why I kissed you, in California, when we said goodbye. Because I used to close my eyes and make-believe it was. And just once I wanted it to be, for real. You in my arms.’

 ‘I thought you were being kind,’ he says. ‘When you said goodbye, when you kissed me — I thought you knew, and you were sorry for me — ’

 I shake my head.

 ‘Then — you’re not being kind now either,’ he says, in an exemplar of understatement.

 I shake my head again. ‘More than that,’ I say.

 ‘Oh, Eliza!’ he says. ‘Oh, dear sweet god: my love, my love — come here?’

  I do; as I step within his reach he lifts my opened chemise one shoulder at a time, so that it slips over my arms to the floor.

 Now it’s my turn to hold my breath under his gaze. What is he thinking?

 I can’t possibly be pretty enough, I know that, not for eighteen years of dreams. My breasts have given suck: they are full, blue-veined, not the hard high crab-apple bosom of the girl he fell in love with. He’ll be disappointed, I am telling myself, and I must not mind, it’s only to be expected — until I see his face, all the harsh lines softened from it, and I realize it doesn’t matter; that to him I am entirely beautiful. The most beautiful woman in the world. Always.

 I kneel and unfasten his britches carefully, the fabric strained taut, my face so close that as he is released my cheek brushes against him. I repeat the motion deliberately, just to hear his sharp intake of breath once more; drop a kiss there.

 I am thirty-eight years old. I have never done this in my life. I have never wanted to. I steady him as he steps from his clothing; then I rise. He puts his hand out to me as I do so.

 Now as the Lord made us we stand face to face.

 ‘Eliza,’ he says.

 The ghost of George stands between us for a moment, alive in my imagination because I have known no other naked man with whom to compare the one before me now. George was square, compact, muscular: a bantam rooster, full of fire and vigor. I believe the term virile might fairly be used. By now we would have been finished.

 Lewis is altogether different: an unknown quantity, a phrase which pops strangely into my head from the days when I pored over my algebra; although I know him, in some ways, better than I know myself. I have surprised myself, today.

  His shadow on the wall is quite a sight. George preferred to wear his shirt at such times. What different things men are shy of!

 I wonder more than ever how it must be to be a man: to have your desires be so – well, so evident. I suspect most women have wondered the same thing. I imagine it makes a lot of difference, what kind of greeting your ardor may expect to receive. Do you stop touching someone, or even standing near them, when you know it’s hopeless? Does that help? What could he have done differently, all those years?

 I draw him beside me down on to the bed and in so doing it seems that we have leave to fulfill all the caresses we have begun. As he suckles my breast I cry out and clasp his head tight to me, his cropped hair like the pelt of an animal between my fingers, the skull hard beneath.

 At last. Oh, thank you, God. (George did not care for this activity. I think it seemed unmanly to him; in all truth he liked my hips better, my thighs and the sway of my bottom. He did not want to be so nakedly needful of a woman’s comfort, I suppose. I have always longed for it. I asked him once or twice, but he would rather squeeze or bite me through my nightgown; I presumed since it pleased him to do so, he thought it must please me likewise.) How can Lewis know what I want, right away, without my asking him? Is it because it is also what he wants? Was that moment in Texas when this so nearly happened born of his desperation as much as mine?

Or —— did I dream it?

  I am beside myself with his tender attentions. I do not think he can be virgin. I do not care. I know he has wished that every time was this time, every embrace mine. I do not need to know more than that.

 George used to solicit my caresses. He was impatient for them. He couldn’t wait until I wanted to touch him: so I never found out how different it is, not to have my hand placed but to reach out because it is what I want to do, gaining in confidence from a tentative touch to the frankest delight. I recall George’s grip on my wrist and my shock at what met my hand on our wedding night: how hot, how terrifying, how alien it seemed; how impossible, that it could belong to the cheery and debonair young man I thought I knew; or that this was what was meant by the sacrament of marriage. ‘We’re married now,’ he was saying, ‘Lizzie, we’re married now,’ almost pleading I realize now, pleading for it to be all right with me, what he was about to do, what he wanted me to do. Oh George, I think, why couldn’t you have waited? It needn’t have been long: just enough time for affection and curiosity to conquer my fear of the unknown. Oh, George. Dear George. If you could only have been a little more patient.

Patient… George? How foolish, to have looked for that in him. He was the best husband he knew how to be; he was not a patient man.

George was sanguine, brave, loyal, passionate: George went at the world like a bull at a gate, always. You knew this about him and you loved him for it; we both did.

George was dead, now, though.

And he has told Lewis to kiss me for him; and me not to extinguish my flame.

So whatever this is that we do now, it is no betrayal.

No; George saw it coming, as inevitable as the wind, if ever we met after he was no more.

So he is present now, too: George, who loved us both so dearly. And he has blessed this. He didn’t know how to be patient – but in generosity there was no-one to touch him, ever.

‘Oh god, Eliza..!’ says Lewis. ‘Wait!’

I have been caressing him, without thinking what unbearable state of urgency my touch must summon him to. He is desperate to enter me, his groans tell me so; but unlike George he presumes nothing. I realize he is waiting for my invitation. It crosses my mind to wonder how he will manage without his arm, and whether he has made love to a woman since he lost it.

 He smells of lye soap, arnica, woodsmoke, the peppery musk of sweat. I want to cry out, to keep all harm from him, to hold him so tightly that he can never, never be hurt again – and I know that I cannot. But I can have him now, here in this little piece cut out of time: all of him, for now.

 I invite him, then: ‘There’s no need to wait, Lewis,’ I say. ‘Don’t you think you’ve waited long enough?’

 He looks at me to be sure that is what I mean: ‘’Liza?’ he asks.

 I want better words than these, I want to be quite clear what I am asking for. ‘Now, please, oh please, now – ’ I repeat, ‘darling, now... take me for your own – now, oh please, oh yes my darling, yes —’

 – and he does, with a hoarse cry, as he enters into that sanctuary where we both long for him to be. Oh my sweet Lord. Oh Lewis. After all this time, and then just like that, from one moment to the next, it is happening. Such a simple thing, really, come to think about it. Not so very difficult. So we are one flesh, I think: how ironical, that it should be a Rebel, a Confederate, gasping upon my breast for the sake of this union.

He is lying on me, half his weight or more on his right elbow, the rest on me. It is awkward, without his other arm; I don’t think he had any idea, how strange it would be to attempt it thus. So he has not been with a mistress since he was wounded, then. He is clumsy, and he knows it: I see it in his eyes, that he doesn’t want to be, knows he cannot help it now. ‘My love,’ he gasps as soon as he can get his breath to say anything at all. ‘Oh, God, honey!’ – and he pauses, kisses me, stares at me. I move under him, wanting him deeper. ‘Oh my darling,’ he whispers, shifting some, ‘is my weight too much for you? Can you breathe, my darling?’ and I tell him, ‘Lew, you are not at all heavy, my love,’ – although he is; but I would happily be crushed so every night for the rest of my life; and, reassured, he loses himself once more in my arms, crying out my name over and over. Yes, Lewis: now, at last, it is who you have always longed for it to be. It is Eliza, really and truly Eliza: the only one you ever wanted, the one you couldn’t have. The one you prayed to God to make you stop wanting, before you went out of your mind in frustration and despair.

 I am breathless too, though not from the weight of him. I am watching his face, his beloved familiar face, taking on expressions I have never seen before; not these: how could I?

 I couldn’t even meet George’s gaze fully dressed, I remember, sitting there in the railroad car, the first day of our honeymoon: all I could think of as I stared out of the window in mortification was my torn flesh, and the startling nature of its rupture. Please let him wait, I prayed then, as the carriage wheels sang: God, let him wait, please let him wait. Just another day or two, I added, not wanting to seem dissatisfied with the husband Providence had bestowed on me; let him be patient, let him just wait till I’m not so sore...

 But he didn’t.

 Of course, I didn’t ask him to; there is that to be considered.

 I became used to it later, of course. On occasion I quite relished his exertions. George performed everything with a cheerful dispatch, an energetic efficiency, his marital duties being no exception. I used to feel a fond but detached affection at such times; I took pleasure in his evident enjoyment and welcomed him as my husband to his rights in my body – which he claimed in a territorial, rather impersonal, though essentially kindly, way I surely did not grudge him. What do I mean by kindly? He was considerate of my feelings: if I had a sick headache he would by no means insist upon my receiving him. Sometimes I wondered how he felt about it at all. It was a need, quite clearly, just as it is for Lewis; a need men have, that only this will assuage. It wasn’t something we spoke of at other times: he would simply approach me upon our retiring, with the single hoarse utterance, ‘Lizzie..?’ letting his state of desire ask the rest for him. I questioned, on occasion, whether his need was for me, or whether someone else would have done just as well.

 Oh, George; I know now why I thought that — for I realize he never said my name after that, not once he had got what he wanted. That’s why I felt somehow excluded. George never said anything, anything at all. He closed his eyes, screwed them tight shut and launched himself at me as if I had not breasts, but breastworks; not a womb, but a fortress to be stormed, proving himself in the process. Sometimes I found it painful. If he wore an expression beyond that urgent grimace, it was one of apology. He was ashamed of needing me, I think: ashamed of his heat, of expecting me to take him in, knowing himself impatient, unsubtle – of not knowing how to be any different than he was.

 Lewis is calling out my name, it’s tumbling from his lips, calling me darling, oh honey, my love, oh my sweet love.

Eliza, oh Eliza, E – li – za —!

 His movements are as tender as he can make them. I want to cry.

 I know that this cannot be prolonged. I hardly think his time can be more than a moment away. I call him my darling, my sweet, sweet love, hearing tones in my own voice I have not heard since I gave birth: not those of a respectable gently-raised lady, but wrenched from me beyond my volition. And I know my selfless thoughts of offering him the comfort of my arms were utter self-delusion; for I want this connection with his body as urgently as he does, like a wild thing in heat.

 I also know that I have held myself back from this in all the years with George – perhaps because we began so differently, with my shrinking from him as he breached my virginity in that bull-at-a-gate way of his, thinking I am sure that he should get it over with for both our sakes; and again after our baby died, when I would require myself to submit to him and not let him see how much of a violation it seemed. There is accepting, and there is taking. They are not equal. George took me; I accepted him. How condescending, how ungenerous I have been.

 All this takes far longer in the telling than in the moment. I become aware that Lewis is trembling again, so violently that my bed rattles against the wall. George used to make it pound, as if drilling at the double-quick. Lewis is using every shred of self-control he possesses to keep from doing so. When I realize this is so my throat aches. It does not seem a sacrifice, to refuse this longed-for tenderness; once again I search for the right words: No, darling, no; it’s all right – you don’t have to be so careful! Lewis, let go. Let go. I won’t break.

 I won’t, of course – break, I mean – but he does. It all happens so quickly. It seems for a few moments that he would plumb my depths all the way to my heart, if he could, and lose himself entirely. How painfully thin he is! The corrugation of his ribs feels like a washboard under my fingers. I pull him to me as if I have no shame. Perhaps I do not, not any longer. I don’t care to hear the Lord’s name taken in vain, either, I never have; but as Lewis cries out piercingly to his God all I can think is that I have never heard anyone in church sound half so much as if they meant it; and that if prayers are answered then this must surely be one. O! O, hold me! he gasps: which I already am, and his bony body leaps in my arms like a landed fish. I can’t make out anything after that, it is fractured and inarticulate, not the tender words of love I heard that afternoon in New Orleans but hoarse and ragged: you would think him wounded. His good arm gives way under him and he crumples on top of me.

I say his name.

 He opens his eyes, blinking, lost, like one who has been recalled unwillingly from a hard-won place of shelter to the recollection of all earthly grief. We are still one. His breaths choke in his throat, issue in clots of sound which fall over one another and strangle into sobs; for the second time today he cries in my arms like a forsaken child.

 Sometimes when dreams come true they are not at all what we thought they would be. Sometimes they are too much for us altogether.

How could he be anything but overcome, in this moment?

What else could I have wanted or imagined, but this?

 I comfort him: ‘Hush – sh – sh. It’s all right, my dearest. It’s all right.’ Only we both know that it isn’t; that out there, waiting, is a kind of hell on earth; that he has seen more than anyone should ever be asked to look upon - they all have; required himself to do what no-one should have to do – and to keep the horror of it all hidden within, and above all, not break down, no matter what, not like this. They may have this luxury; their commander may not. His tears fall on my bare skin this time, splashing on my breasts, hot then cold, and as I stare up at the ceiling my own sight blurs. The shadows thrown by the lamp grow indistinct at the edges, and shift. I know in this moment what he means to me, and am jolted into sharing his tears. I think of them, all the men for whom he is responsible, and before whom he can never allow himself this. He weeps also for them, I think; and because at last, at last, and only now at the price of George’s loss, he lies fulfilled where he never thought to come. And I? Oh, because of all of that; and because now I have more to lose than ever I had before. So I rock him in my arms like a little child, as if by doing so I could keep the nightmare from him, and I don’t let go.

 I had thought he would sleep, then. God knows he was tired. I thought I had given him what he wanted most in the world. I had a lot to learn. I will tell it, in a little while, as best I can.

 First I want to make it quite clear who he was. That’s essential. If I fail, there’s no point in telling any more: he is the only reason for telling any of it. Otherwise why should it matter, what happened then? That I asked him to come back; that he said my name over and over; that he wept?

  How to describe the indescribable? How can I capture for you the essence of a human spirit, a certain one, that one and no other? Where do I start, even?

He had a quality of humility, a kind of luminous inwardness, which expressed itself as an instinctive sympathy for every living thing he encountered. I think of his affectionate sketches of the fellows in his brigade, the hardships and pleasures of their lives distilled into single moments: ‘Dinner is served, bivouac-style,’ ‘Pvt Mullarkey startles a hare,’ ‘Wash Day,’ ‘Corp. Billy Hobbes, homesick on his 19th birthday,’ ‘A Game of Horseshoes,’ ‘Reveille, South Mountain.’ I think of the pillow under my arm that morning in Texas. Perhaps another way to say it is that he had a willingness to meet every situation or piece of God’s creation on its own terms. Yes: that willingness.

 We cannot spare such people. We must have better uses for them: there are precious few of them as it is, without putting them in the front rank to stop bullets.

  I do not mean to disparage George by comparison; merely to say that he was an entirely different kind of a man. In that consisted the magnetic attraction between them. I do not believe George could have told you why he cherished Lewis as he did; he lacked the introspection to do so. And it was this very spontaneity and decisiveness of George’s which Lewis responded to with affectionate admiration, knowing it could never be his.

 You know, the sound of a bugle always puts me in mind of George: immediate, clear, single-minded. George always seemed quite sure of himself. Lewis, I’d say, was more in the nature of a violin, with its complex tones and searching voice. To Lewis such certainty came as a rare epiphany, a gift from God as a reward for all of his self-examination. He had it in battle; and now, with me also.

 Well; reduced to simplest terms, if you will: George commanded. Lewis led.

 And now, at this moment, he lies spent upon my breast, and his seed smells like new bread, mown grass, rainwater; like in New Orleans so long ago. A lifetime ago.

 But Time does not stay, not even for us. Later in my life I will learn to be glad of that.

 I am still holding him: he lies quiescent, begins to whisper – ‘Oh, Eliza. Oh, honey. The night of your wedding...! Oh, God, I got drunk, blind drunk, to keep from thinking about George doing this with you... only it didn’t work, it was all I could think of, kissing you, kissing you everywhere, that and – and how it would be to see your legs parted, a vee, like a skein of geese — oh, Eliza, I’d never been with a woman, I couldn’t imagine what it would be like, only wishing it was me lifting up your nightgown —’ His beard brushes my skin as he speaks. I kiss the top of his head, where his hair grows fine and wispy, now.

 ‘Oh, darling,’ I say. I never called George that. I just called him George.

 Lewis can’t stop: ‘Staring into the glass, and all I could see was you. Your face. Right there in the glass. So I drank straight from the bottle, then, till I passed out. ’Course I woke up, eventually, couldn’t run away from it for ever, you know; only the first thing I thought was she’s his now. And I could hardly get falling-over drunk all the other nights, I just had to learn to live with it.’ He buries his face in me. ‘Oh, dear god —!’ Even muffled, the pain in his voice hurts me. I don’t mean a sweet, sentimental kind of a pain. I mean a hollow misery, that sick feeling you get when struck on a bruise. ‘Oh, George!’ he says then. ‘Oh, George!’

 ‘But it wasn’t like that,’ I want him to know. ‘It wasn’t like this. It wasn’t like this at all.’

 ‘Like what?’

 ‘Like this. Oh, my dear.’ I can’t explain, not with George’s memory between us. I feel disloyal saying even this.

 He takes a deep breath; tells me that my breasts are like twin roes which feed among the lilies. Kissing and suckling them until I am in a fever, he murmurs, ‘That time. In Texas. Oh, God, Eliza! I didn’t know what to do with myself, seeing you like that!’ His voice shakes with emotion at the memory. ‘I was ashamed of myself – but I couldn’t help it, I couldn’t help wanting to— ! You don’t know — you don’t know the half of it… ’

 ‘Oh, darling,’ I whisper, ‘oh, please – please... ’ I don’t want him to stop, ever. I could just close my eyes and die right now with his lips on me, by far the sweetest thing I ever imagined, what I have been starving for and called myself names for wanting; what I have seen in his eyes for eighteen years. I beg for more, for him not to stop. ‘Do you mind?’ I ask.

‘Do you need to ask?’ he replies.

 I am the hill of myrrh and the running fountain. My breasts flower under his fingers. When he puts his mouth to them now I can’t breathe.

 A kind of panic seizes me: I am losing control of myself. Now I am whimpering for him to wait, to stop. His hand has been drawing a streak of flame up the inside of my thigh: it waits, rests lightly there. If he lifts it up I will shake all to pieces. ‘Do you really want for me to stop?’ he asks, gently.

 I don’t know. I don’t know.

 ‘What’s wrong, honey? Is this too much for you? You look – scared? Is that it, Eliza?’

 I nod.

 ‘Of what, honey?’

That I’ll scream; wet the bed; soil myself. That I’ll let go and drown. ‘I don’t know,’ I whisper. ‘I — I —’

 ‘Tell me, sweetheart. It’s all right.’

 He has already shown me what to do, by doing it himself: it’s what terrifies me more than anything. How do I step off the edge of the cliff into the unknown? Become vulnerable? Lose control? It reminds me of childbirth, of being overwhelmed by the sensation that my body is running away with me and I can’t stop it. ‘I’m losing myself!’ I wail. ‘Oh, God, Lewis — what do you want from me?’

 I search for clues in his face. There is consternation, disbelief; a fathomless tenderness. Now I am the helpless one, and he the comforter. ‘You’re safe,’ he says. I want to believe him. ‘I swear. This is for you. Oh, trust me, honey; won’t you trust me?’

 Yes, I say. And I do.

 Is this what love is, then: not conquest but surrender? He is inviting me to dissolve. I am no longer inside my own head. The world has contracted down to where his tongue curls round my nipple, and I am willing to let it, no matter what happens to me if I do. ‘Baby,’ I hear myself whisper, ‘my baby.’

 It hurts. No; it almost hurts. Someone in the bed is sobbing: it isn’t Lewis.

Oh, help me: I am bursting into blooms of fire, burning chrysanthemums. The Fourth of July is about to go off somewhere between my legs; his fingertips find the place and I fall apart.

 I didn’t know; I didn’t know.

 I am crying: inside me a sea anemone opens and closes. I am tidal, a rockpool filled with the sea, glistening and slippery as wrack. I am barefoot on a beach in California, my arm in his, seized with an inexplicable desire to run into the breaking surf and drown, let the water rush over my head, if only I can cling to him: and now I have.

 I think there’s plenty that still don’t know, just as I never did: that a woman’s passions can be aroused just like a man’s, called up and then resolved in this sweet fulfillment. And that there is no shame in it. It’s even in the bible, in the Song of Songs – but those self-righteous moralizing folk who know no better think all such talk is sinful: they’ve done a fine job of concealing it from us. We don’t speak of it, don’t read about it — it’s hidden away like some wicked secret. The good Lord saw fit to create our bodies not unlike musical instruments, exquisite ones; but He left it up to us to figure that out. If we are fortunate, someone will sound the melody locked inside us. Or if virtue and ignorance keep us in silence, we’ll never even guess it was there for the playing.

I don’t mean the kindly warmth a wife feels when her husband needs her, comes to her; that I knew already, after all those years with George. I thought that was it; that I knew everything there was to know about men and women and the ways of desire.

How can you imagine something you don’t know is there?

 I was blessed: I had the gift of Lewis.

 My limbs feel slow and sweet as molasses.

 He stares at me, oh how he stares, saying nothing, the love-light in his face beautiful as the moon and the Milky Way, the night we parted. Their names are his gift to me, the constellations and all the brightest individual stars, hanging in the sooty velvet heavens; I see him pointing, naming, smiling with the pleasure of having something to share with me. Brighter than that.

 I want to know how: how he can know me better than I know myself.

 ‘Well – I don’t know. Because I love you, I guess?’ he answers, with a little half-smile that cracks my heart: as if that explained everything.

 ‘But how?’

 In his dreams, he says; and now, when it was really me, well, by my breathing, he says, the sounds I made; by my face: ‘’Liza, surely you — you and George — ? In all that time – you must have...!’

 ‘No; never,’ I say, ‘not like that. Not what you did. I didn’t know…’

‘Oh, my love,’ he says; and when he kisses me I cannot tell if it is his tears or mine that are trickling down and tasting of salt. Perhaps both.

 I consider asking him where he has learned these tendernesses; learned how to read someone by their breathing; what it is that will bring a woman to that place that is like drowning; but it doesn’t really matter. Tonight it was all for me – and in a sense I know that it always has been, even when the face on the pillow belonged to someone else.

 He reads my mind. ‘I only ever wanted it to be you,’ he says. ‘I — there have been — I’m not going to pretend there weren’t — but oh! Eliza, the dreams were all of you!’

 And I kiss him, and find that still we are not done: not at all, not by a long way.

It is a grace, I learn tonight, a gift from God, to be incarnate.

I will not give up that bed, as long as I live: I have it still.

 Gazing at his features in the lamplight, I have the strangest sensation of seeing right through him, as if his flesh were become crystal to reveal his immortal soul; which burns, not flashing momentarily as I have glimpsed it all these years, but steadily: a clear pure light in plain sight. I cannot describe it any better than that. Not because he has been my lover, no; nothing so carnal as that. No — because at last there is no constraint between us; because I know now, and he knows that I know, and he no longer has to hide all he feels; not any of it. And because he has come to me naked, and I to him: and we have dared to love one another.

 A person might wonder whether it occurred to us that it need not be the man who lies uppermost, if there is a strain upon his stamina so. I would ask the same question, I daresay. It was my suggestion; but that might be supposed, after all my talk of being a pragmatical sort of person.

 I am dazed, remade into something molten, as if my very shape has changed; even when cool – yes, now, even, I cannot help but bear the impress of the mold: his mouth, the give of his fingertips, the curve of his palm; his thin body in my arms, his narrow hips under me, his tongue, his sweet flesh. The silken skin of his shoulders. His face nestled between my breasts. His face.

 I tell him I could drown in his gaze. ‘No,’ he says, ‘you dwell there, Eliza.’ He is inside me when he says so. My hair falls like the amber water of a mountain freshet over his chest and shoulders: I know because he tells me that, too. This time seems as long as the first was short, perhaps because we keep stopping to kiss and stare. I don’t think about George, this time.

In a lull, my head on his uninjured shoulder, his arm around me, I run my fingertips through the silken dark hairs between his nipples. He shivers with delight, draws his breath through his teeth; kisses the top of my head. I think back to that long-ago afternoon in New Orleans, when I sat beside him in his fever and he was undone. And of the echo, ever since, that I couldn’t stop hearing, like the whisper in a shell – I was the shell.

‘Lewis,’ I say, ‘do you know what I kept hearing, all these years, in my mind?’

‘No,’ he murmurs, ‘tell me… ’

‘You,’ I say, ‘what you said that day you – oh, sweetheart, you are going to hate this, but you can’t have forgotten — the day you were ill, that time in the post in New Orleans, and I came to see you, and you — had one of those dreams…’

He winces. ‘Not that day!’

I kiss his chest. ‘But you don’t know,’ I said, ‘you don’t know what I thought… ’

‘No,’ he said, ‘but I wished the ground would’ve swallowed me up, I swear to God, when I woke and you were there and I came to myself, and knew – what had happened – I just wanted to die right there.’

‘Mm,’ I say, ‘yes, I knew that.’

He sighs, smiling at his long-ago self, so mortified. Only now that he has spilled in my arms at last does this memory not crucify him altogether, I think.

‘Listen to me,’ I tell him.

‘I’m listening,’ he whispers, his lips on my hair.

‘Do you know what you said, as you spilled?’ I ask him.

‘God, no,’ he says.

‘You said oh, sweetheart,’ I tell him. ‘You said Oh – oh – I love you so —!’

‘Did I,’ he murmurs.

A sob rises in my throat at the memory. ‘I thought it was the sweetest thing I ever heard,’ I tell him. ‘I used to look at you, and hear you say it… ’

‘Christ,’ he says, his voice trembling.

‘I used to make-believe… ’ I say, ‘when I wished for such tenderness… that you were saying it to me — ’

He shakes his head. ‘You know I was,’ he says.

‘I know it now,’ I say.

‘You knew it for a long time,’ he says, ‘didn’t you.’

Now it’s my turn to sigh. Will he be mortified all over again, to think all his poor efforts to conceal his feelings proved so inadequate? Those many many times that cost him so much, to bite it back and say nothing, look away, pretend he felt nothing when he was hollow with longing. I need him to tell me it’s all right – for me to say it, for him to hear it. ‘If you could choose the answer you wanted,’ I ask him, ‘what would it be?’

‘The truth, of course,’ he says.

‘Then yes,’ I tell him, ‘yes, of course I knew.’

He lets out a long breath.

‘Did you really think I couldn’t?’ I ask him.

‘No,’ he says softly, ‘no: not as sensible a woman as you are, Eliza; no. You had to. I knew that. But god! I tried so hard — ’ his voice breaks here. He continues, anyway: ‘so very, very hard, ’Liza, not to let on… all I felt for you — not to wound George with it, ever — not to give him a moment’s cause for concern... ’

‘What must it have it cost you…’ I whisper. I almost cannot bear to know: but I must. If I do not ask him now, when may I do so?

He does not answer for a long time. I let the question hang between us. ‘My soul,’ he says at last, helplessly, ‘it cost my soul, Eliza, I swear to God.’

I knew – but for him to say it was like tearing the scab from a wound. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I murmur.

He goes on, after a moment: ‘But I didn’t know what else to do — I didn’t have a choice, about it… I told you, I used to pray, not to feel for you as I did — to be satisfied just with the sweetness of your friendship — ’

I tremble before I say the next thing: but there is someone who deserves to have it said. ‘I wasn’t the only one that knew,’ I say. ‘For a long time, I think.’

‘God,’ he cries-out. He does not deny it.

How can he, when George gave him my picture to take with him? And wrote me that beautiful, extraordinary letter?

George: George. The man in the center of all of it, the man who loved both of us with every fiber in him, and so accepted this intolerably awkward situation without a word of reproach, or even revelation, for seventeen years?

Lewis recalls that it is by George’s invitation that he is in my arms at this moment. I know he is thinking that, because he whispers his friend’s name several times.

Oh, I would have asked him to come to me tonight anyway; I would not have needed my late husband’s sanction, to take Lewis to my bosom. But to have it was so very precious a thing. We might have felt guilty, I am sure we would, if George had gone to his grave as silent as he was in life about this extraordinary circle of passion we lived but never spoke-of. We surely would have wondered what he thought, how long he had known – whether he minded, whether it brought him suffering to know of it.

Apparently it had not. Not the way he spoke of it.

He called us three kindred spirits; and said he knew we had waited long and honorably.

George even took care to let me know how much he appreciated the gift of our marriage, all these years, because he had met me first.

Gracious: oh dear lord, how very gracious he was, in life and in the final hours of it especially.

Most of us, when we are forced to take leave of a thing we hold dearly, grasp it all the tighter.

George opened his hand.

And stepped aside, as gracefully as if our lives were one long dance and the music had stopped. Just as he did on our wedding-night.

Did he know even then?

I consider it freshly. How close they were; how transparent Lewis was, to those that loved him. It was more than possible, then, that George read his friend’s face from the very beginning. And it was George who told me what Lewis had said to him, that night, so lightly, so long ago: that he was fortunate to have met me first.

And told me Lewis never said anything he didn’t mean.

George — George. Husband; friend. That Lewis and I may lie here in all honor this night is his gift to us, from all those years he looked, loved us both, said nothing.

How threadbare it was, our poor little sail we put up against the winds of destruction and jealousy.

How long it held. Even beyond death.

Because of George’s determination never to rebuke his friend; never to ask him what he thought he was doing; never to ask me what I thought, what I knew — just to let it be.

And I had not given him credit for being a patient man.

I make a mental apology to him now, seeing this freshly.

His trust in us, so complete.

Lewis is thinking the same thing. ‘You know,’ he says, ‘he gave me your picture. When we left – didn’t make a fuss, didn’t say anything – didn’t make it awkward, didn’t call me on it — he just stuck it in my bag. He sighs. ‘ — said it all… ’

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘he told me he had.’

Lewis’s one arm tightens around me.

I think about love. People presume that to love most deeply, one must do so singlemindedly.

Is it possible to love more than one person singlemindedly, in different ways?

George seems to have been living proof that it was.

‘I couldn’t help it,’ says Lewis again. ‘I would have, if I could, god only knew — but I couldn’t… ’

‘I know,’ I tell him. My hand strays to caress the part of him that ached the most beside his heart, all that time.

He groans. ‘God, I never thought,’ he whispers, ‘never — never — ever —!’

‘Know it now,’ I tell him: ‘know it, Lewis.’

We turn to one another once more in a kindling of feeling, and take from one another’s arms the gift that George bestowed.

* * *

 He gets up once in the night; goes outside to relieve himself. The patter of his water is strangely comforting: such an ordinary thing. He is human, just as I am. I want to lie in bed every night for the rest of my life and quietly turn over when I hear it, knowing he has just stepped outside for a moment, that he will come back to my arms with the cold cobwebs of dew in his hair. I want to take him for granted. God, is that so much to ask for?

 It is not yet four in the morning. We are quiet, astonished, grateful; sated, not with each other but, at last, with making love. Beside me, he drifts in and out of sleep. His dear face is so very weary. A little smile hovers on his lips, as befits a man who has got his heart’s desire. Once or twice a slight snore escapes him. I watch the rise and fall of his chest; pull the coverlet over his bare shoulders. I taste him still on my lips – Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for thy love is sweeter than wine... feel the trickle of his seed down the slope of my thigh. I think: if this is all I ever have, it is already more than I ever expected.

 Somewhere across the rainy dark fields I hear a rooster crow, even though it is still night. He stirs, comes to consciousness.

 ‘...I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes, and by the hinds of the field, that ye stir not up, nor awake my love, till he please.’

 His face still seems lit from within. He turns to me: ‘You will marry me, won’t you, Eliza?’ he asks.

 I heave a great sigh. ‘After the war,’ I say.

 ‘No, now. Today,’ he says.

 ‘I can’t, Lewis,’ I reply.

  Some unbearably painful thought moves across his face. ‘Forgive me,’ he says, in answer to my rejection. ‘I — I beg your pardon. I had forgotten... it was quite wrong of me to presume – I forget, that I am no longer whole – you would not – I have no right, to ask you to marry a cripple..!’

 How a moment’s silence can be misunderstood. ‘Dear god, Lewis, it’s not your arm!’

 ‘What is it, then, Eliza?’ he asks.

 I think my heart is going to turn inside out and wither on the spot. ‘I can’t,’ I tell him again.

 God forgive me, since I may not ever forgive myself, thus do I refuse him. I am not sure why, now. It seems impossible, at the time: an alliance with the Other Side; what my family will say. What George’s family will say. But he is not the enemy; I have loved him for ever. For half my life. Does that not count for anything?

 Not enough. Not now.

 ‘Sh – sh – sh!’ he says, brushing my trickling tears away onto his fingertip and tasting them. ‘I didn’t mean to make it any harder for you. Only – I don’t know when I may get leave – or how we will be together, when my division moves from here. This is enemy country, you know. What if there is a child, Eliza? What then?’

 I swear I have not given it a moment’s thought until he spoke. What passed between us was not, to my mind, connected with procreation. He is right, of course.

 ‘Then I’ll call it after you,’ I say. ‘Lewis. Or Louise.’

 ‘What about you? How would it appear for you, my darling, with no husband? Oh, marry me, Eliza, please, oh honey, please! You can’t refuse – if I’d thought you’d refuse I never would have...! Oh, for God’s sake! It’s not just that!’

 I do not answer him. On the ceiling, patches of discolored plaster form a kind of map. I try to fit the countries of the world, or the States, into the shapes. It is a game I have often played. I do not know why I am doing so now. Perhaps I am paralyzed by the impossibility of it all.

 He asks me once more. ‘I’ll go wake up the chaplain,’ he says. ‘He won’t mind. Not too much, anyway. Eliza, won’t you say yes?’

 I shake my head. The tears roll faster now, too many to wipe away with one fingertip. ‘Where would George and I live? How could we see you? It’s not practical, Lewis. People don’t simply up and change their allegiance just like that! Lew, I can’t change horses in midstream and start supporting the Confederacy!’ He has said it himself, a moment ago: this is enemy country. But I live here! We are enemies, then: we must be. I am a widow, my son fatherless, for the sake of the Union. Love alone cannot outweigh the crushing freight of that fact. I hate the cause he fights for. I can’t espouse it, I can’t.

 ‘I’m not asking you to marry the Confederacy, Eliza – just me! The Confederacy can – well, I don’t care, anyhow. It doesn’t have to matter. Oh God, don’t let it matter, ’Liza, please... I will ask General Lee for the time... it’ll take but an hour or two – we can arrange it, I swear to god. You can get packed up and I can arrange some kind of transport for you and George. You could stay with my sister in Richmond; she’d be overjoyed to have you. Or you could even stay right here – I’d find my way back to you, I swear to god I would, somehow! It’s got to be over soon, one way or the other!’

 I make no reply, only stare at him in misery. He kisses my forehead. ‘Very well, Eliza. We’ll speak of this again another time. We’ll find some way to manage it. It’ll all come right in the end. Don’t cry, my darling. Oh, don’t cry, my love! Not on my account!’ His voice breaks. ‘As long as you will, won’t you? Be my wife? When this is over: you will?’

‘Of course,’ I say, ‘you know I will.’

And so we leave the insoluble matter of our allegiances, and simply hold each other once more. ‘I shall never forget a moment of this, Eliza,’ he murmurs.

 Soon; oh, God in heaven, too, too soon – it is time for him to leave. I help him dress. His drawers are worn quite through in places. I can’t say I had noticed, last night.

 ‘Leave them with me,’ I say, ‘I’ll mend them. Wash them. Bring them to you.’

 ‘There’s no time,’ he says. ‘Besides, my other pair are worse.’

 ‘It’ll take me an hour,’ I say. ‘You go ahead. I won’t wash them – just darn up these holes for you. It’ll be like old times.’

  I used to mend his clothes sometimes, on station. Each time I had to reassure him that it was no trouble, that it was the least I could do. I couldn’t tell him then that I was moved, in the tenderest way, to think of my stitches next to him. I tell him now.

 ‘You really thought that?’ he asks.

 I nod. He smiles, shakes his head ruefully: ‘Me too,’ he confesses.

 All those years rise up into one enormous lump in my throat, for the poignant tiny things people cling to. What will I cling to, one day?

 He leaves the drawers with me; pulls on his britches. I hope they are not too scratchy. I button his shirt, tie his cravat. It is still dark. I am a different person, buckling on his sword, from the woman who unfastened it last night. I have left her far, far behind. I shall never be her again.

 ‘Farewell, Eliza,’ he says.

 ‘God go with you,’ I reply.

 ‘I’ll write,’ he calls, striding down the lane. I watch him out of sight, shivering in my wrapper.

 Sitting by the lamp, I mend his drawers. One knee is out – it is torn, as if he has fallen. Oh, does he fall much, without his arm to save him? I patch it with a piece cut from George’s, and use another to reinforce the seat where the seam is split. Then I make them up into a parcel, with a cake of fine soap rolled up inside, George’s silver field flask filled with brandy, and a small sack of coffee – all I have left – and wrap everything in brown paper. I write his name on the front, tie it up with string, and put on my clothes and my woollen cloak, to bring it to the camp.

 The sky is turning feathery grey, like a pigeon’s wing. I smell the smoke from their fires before I reach the inner pickets at the crest of the hill. There is a murmur of voices, some complaining; the clatter of mess-cans. The Army of Northern Virginia is stirring.

 As the valley opens up before me I behold the strangest sight: hundreds of tents sprung up like pale mushrooms over-night. I have seen this many times, and it never fails to make me catch my breath. The troops are starting to pack up already. I see that many men have slept on the ground, with nothing but a blanket. Their muskets stand stacked against each other in pyramids, like rows of iron corn sheaves. Tethered horses fidget, snort, snicker. Here and there colors hang limp from their standards. Some of them are torn, blackened; defended, I know, at the most terrible cost. I wonder which is his, which are the regiments of his brigade: I realize I would not know them if I saw them. I walk straight down the churned-up lane toward the soldiers on duty. They have been watching my approach in the half-light. One of them goes to point his weapon at me, but his companion knocks it up and greets me courteously.

 ‘I’m looking for Brigadier-General Armstrong,’ I say. ‘I have a package for him.’

 ‘He’s gone already, ma’am,’ the soldier replies. His clothes are appallingly shabby. I think his britches, once sky-blue, must have been removed from a Union soldier, likely a dead one. He is barefoot. ‘Rode out mebbe fifteen minutes back, ma’am – they all did, for their orders.’

 ‘Are you in his brigade?’ I ask.

 ‘No, ma’am,’ he says.

 ‘Where can I leave this for him, then?’ I show him the parcel.

 ‘Why, over there, I guess –’ He motions, then raises his voice: ‘Hey, yew! Frum ole Strongarm’s brigade, aincha?’ A burly, filthy soldier comes up. ‘Take this lady to the Gin’ral’s tent, will ya?’

 ‘Which Gin’ral? Got more Gin’rals here’n yew could shake a stick at!’

 ‘Yours. Ole Strongarm. Thess why I axt yew. She done ax fer him by name, even bein’s how she’s a Yankee.’ His voice is such a drawl I can barely make it out. Georgia? I think; or maybe even Mississippi, or Louisiana?

 I am escorted over the trampled pasture to a tent down the valley a way. It is unguarded; the flaps are open. I go inside. It contains a camp bed made up with red blankets, not slept in, and a battered writing-desk opened on top of a camp-stool. Inside the desk are a daguerrotype of a woman with grey hair and a kind face, much lined – his sister? – and two sketches of me, tacked inside the lid with carpet-tacks. One is a portrait; it must be from memory, since I never sat for it, with an expression I do not recognize, for I do not wear it when looking in the glass – quizzical, the lips parted as if I am about to speak: I realize I have not seen it, but I know exactly how it feels from the inside when I must appear thus. The other sketch is a study of my face asleep in a tangled spill of hair, one hand thrown up across the pillow. It includes a quick detail of the bed-post: my carved Spanish bed from Fort Belknap.

 I close my eyes for a moment.

 A lieutenant hurries up, now. ‘Can I help you, ma’am?’ His voice has a sharp edge.

 I think: I’m glad you do your job. Guard him well. I say: ‘I’d like to leave this for the General.’

 ‘I’ll see he gets it, ma’am,’ he says with a little bow, and takes the package from me.

 ‘Tell him -’ I begin, and stop.

 ‘Yes, ma’am?’

 It’s a little late for reticence. ‘Give him my love,’ I say.

 ‘Who shall I say...?’

 ‘He’ll know,’ I reply, with some dignity.

 He looks from me to the sketch in Lewis’s desk. Then he bows, more deeply this time. When he straightens his cheeks are pink.

 ‘Thank you,’ I say, and turning, I pick my way back between the rows of troops in the grey light before dawn. On my way out I pass a little boy curled up on the ground beside his drum, sleeping through all the hubbub, his untouched breakfast of cracker-crumbs in bacon-grease congealing in his mess-tin by his cheek. He has a dirty face. He looks barely older than George. As I walk I am struck by the ragged informality of this Army, compared with the Union camps I have visited while George was alive. Some men gallantly remove their caps to me. A few make less gallant gestures. The morning bugle-calls follow me down the other side of the hill and back, past the edge of town. Dawn draws a streak of primrose-yellow across the silver sky as I walk slowly home.

 I don’t know why I am telling all of this detail now. I suspect it is to put off making the statement which must follow. Might as well get it over with, then ——

I never saw him again.

Eliza

Chambersburg

1863 – 4

So Lewis walked off that morning in the somber twilight, back to his duty.

I received the most obliging letter from General Lee the following afternoon, delivered into my hands personally by his adjutant, mounted on a spirited black horse. Lewis was already miles away with his brigade.

My dear Mrs. Hamilton,

I take the liberty of writing these few lines to commend matrimony to you in the person of Brigadier General Lewis Armstrong.

Madam you must naturally follow your own best counsel in the matter – but as I consider these cruel and sanguinary times I am compelled to note that those who do not seize their comfort wherever they may find it are in danger of doing without entirely: should you scruple as to the propriety of a connection with an officer of the Confederate States Army, your late husband having distinguished himself in the service of the Union Army, why madam we must all cut our coats according to how we may find our cloth; and I guarantee you will not discover a finer man anywhere, in or out of uniform.

He tells me only that he has proposed to you: I am not qualified to say, You should or should not accept — but I do know his quality; & of that, at least, I am wholly convinced.

I hope I shall be able to spare him to you shortly, at least for long enough to perform the ceremony, although it will very probably be necessary for you to travel. Kindly let me have your reply so that I may make the appropriate arrangements.

I remain, dear Madam, your most Obdt. servant, R. E. Lee.

What a truly kind man he was. He was fond of Lewis, of course. They had known each other many years, off and on; since Mexico. And, of course, they were fellow Virginians: which counted for a great deal. More than one might imagine.

I wrote to accept. It did not take me long to see where my happiness lay: General Lee was quite right. But it was too late by then. General Lee had had another idea, not such a happy one. At his direction Lewis had led his brigade across a mile of open field under General Pickett’s command, charging the Federal lines at Gettysburg. I have already said they adored him. I have it on excellent authority. They would have followed him anywhere. They did, as a matter of fact: half of them as far as it is possible to follow anyone in this world, and further – all the way into the next.

It was sultry, that day. They had been fighting for three days: we heard the cannon, right across the Blue Ridge. The bombardment was so heavy they even heard it in Pittsburgh, a hundred forty miles away. I didn’t know what to do – whether to go looking for him, or wait to hear. Whatever I might hear. I didn’t want to get in the way. Oh God, might I have found him, if I had gone?

I didn’t go. And afterwards it was too late. People really do wring their hands; I didn’t know that. I had thought it was a convention of sentimental fiction; but it isn’t. I even found myself wringing my feet, once or twice, on awakening from dreams of his safe return.

‘By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth... I sleep, but my heart waketh: it is the voice of my beloved that knocketh, saying, Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled: for my head is filled with dew... I opened to my beloved, but my beloved had withdrawn himself, and was gone: my soul failed when he spake: I sought him, but could not find him; I called him, but he gave me no answer.’

Half their shattered army came back through our town: but none of the ambulances had him in it.

‘The watchmen that go about the city... to whom I said, Saw ye him whom my soul loveth?’

I heard scraps, tried to find out more – there was chaos, despair; it was hopeless. No-one had seen him since the advance failed. If anyone knew for certain, I didn’t find them. Or they wouldn’t tell me. I begged for word of him, but the remnants of his brigade had come another way; no-one knew anything.

Finally his loss was confirmed, in a second letter from General Lee:

My dear Mrs. Hamilton,

I cannot adequately express my sorrow in having to inform you that Brigadier General Lewis Armstrong lost his life at the engagement recently fought at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania on July 3rd.

He conducted himself with honor and the greatest gallantry – I should say, heroism, leading an assault upon the Union position.

I take full responsibility for the failure of this attack, which was prosecuted with all possible valor. I had thought my men invincible, and asked them to perform the impossible.

I have received written confirmation of his demise privately from the surgeon commanding the Union field hospital there, to which he was taken. I have no details of his wounds as yet.

It pains me more particularly to send you this news in view of the happier nature of our recent correspondence, your kind answer to which I have to hand.

I believe his remains are to be returned by the kind offices of the Union command to his family in Richmond, where we shall also forward his effects still in our possession.

He was the best kind of commanding officer and the best kind of man. I had not a more conscientious commander in this Army. He was greatly loved. The loss to his country is most grievous indeed. I may make brigade commanders, but I can find no more of his quality.

Do kindly forgive me for not writing to you at greater length just now. I have unfortunately far too many such letters to compose. I did most particularly wish to apprise you of this myself; this sad task being the very least service which may be offered in your affliction by

your most respectful and obedient servant,

R. E. Lee

But by then it wasn’t news: Lewis’s Bible had reached me a week earlier, along with a pair of letters that left little room for doubt – or hope.

My Dear Mis

I rit You with al Rispec as One who Mornes owr Dear Genral with al my Hart He wus the Best Comandr we evr had Me and the Boys in his Briggad wer ntirly Divotd to him as He wus to us We wornt jest Canon Foddr to him He wad offin Stop his Hors jest to ax how we wus Doin Wen he wuz Kernel He skecht pitchers and giv them to wun of Us Boys to sent Home also he alwas trid to Fed us rit wich wus Hord at timz Mennyz the tim I sen him giv his owen Canten to wun of us on a Hot March Also wen al of us Hed Disentry he dint tak hisself off to Hosipital lik sum uther Orfisrs he jest Sufird droppen out with Grippes rite alongsid us Beggin yor Pardin Mis but yew doant Now wut a Diffrins this Maks Also he wornt wun for Swaring at us Most of al he wus Kind He wuz not a Stikler for Dril lik Sum Comandrs He sed he cud Count on us wen it Rely matird wich we felt the Sam abbout him Speshly in a tite Spot Sum sed thas why he nevir got mad Major Genral frum Briggader wel we wuz Heppy to kep him Not thet he wuz Soft on us no Sir wen it cum to Farenes he cud get rele Strickd We likd thet See he New Whut to punnish and wut to Ovrluk Efter he lost his Arm we wuz thet plezd to see him agin we eevin Fort over who wud Do for him and al Evvrybody wunnit to holt his Hors I ges I am sayin wel miss him not thet thers to meny of us Left to mis him or ennybody els now Now we did here thet he wus Engaijd to be Marid Yew no thers allus Rumers in a Army camp we wus all Rele plesd fer him We wud hev follod him Enyware It wornt his Folt wut Hepend He wus rite ther in Front of us Speke of a tite Spot I Got a Ball rite thru the Leg but thank God no bone Brokin so I got back Saf wich he dint Now I her Captin Jessup is Sending You his Bibl so I mak so Bolld as to Ax him to Enclos this Wich I rite yew whil watin fer Ambewluns wich I hop gits heer afor the Yankees duz We ar hartbrokin The mud is maken Ritreet reel Hord Hits a Scrambul This wor Has gon on to Long Rispecfly

Aron Stebins Privit 5th Va Genl Picketts Div Genl Armstrongs Bgd. P.S. Im the feller wut brung Yew to His Tent thet mornin I stil sees yore Face wen yew herd yew Missd him wich is Why I rite yew now thinkin yew wud Lik to heer Lik I sed I gess weull Mis him too now orl rite.

The package arrived wrapped in brown paper, tied hastily with cord. It included his Bible, and Captain Jessop’s covering letter. I recognized the paper. On the inside was his name, as I had written it that morning. I knew before I opened it, because the writing on the outside was some other hand. That was the moment when I knew for sure: seeing the packet come for me, and the writing on it not Lewis’s.

Gettysburg, in the field

4th July 1863

Dear Mrs. Hamilton,

Immediately before the advance of Genl. Pickett’s division yesterday, Genl. Armstrong gave me these and asked that I should send them to you in the event of his death. I promised him I should do it, though I never hoped to carry-out so sad a task. I enclose along with them his Bible, which he wanted you to have also.

I should have been directly behind him in the advance, with our brigade, but for an incapacitating wound to the foot sustained the previous day, to which I owe my life.

We all loved him. I do not know, what we shall do now.

I cannot say more right now. Our forces are to withdraw and there is much confusion. I wish I could tell you that he is among the missing and possibly wounded; but several of our fellows saw him fall mortally hurt; he could not have survived.

Respectfully,

Hannibal Jessop, Capt. 5th Va. Regt. C.S.A.

P.S. I hope I do not cause offence, in telling you that his happiness in the last few days over your renewed acquaintance was transparent: all of us on his staff remarked upon it. I am only sorry it was to be so short.

No, I was not offended – far from it. My heart wept and sang at the same time, to think his joy so piercing that everyone noticed it. But then, he never could hide it too well, when he was most moved. You could see through him like water, when you loved him.

‘Go forth, O... Zion, and behold King Solomon with his crown... in the day of his espousals, and in the day of the gladness of his heart.’ God knows he deserved to be so very happy. A week doesn’t seem like too much happiness to ask for, out of a lifetime, does it? A week of knowing himself altogether beloved and wanted; of looking forward to a future together, of which he had never allowed himself to dream.

With George’s blessing.

Not long afterwards, quite unexpectedly, I received a letter from a Union officer:

Dear Mrs. Hamilton,

I write to you at the request of Brigadier General Armstrong, of the Confederate States Army. I was close beside him when he received his mortal wound. He fell most gallantly I should tell you, at the head of his brigade, having reached our line by storming it upon foot across open ground for considerable distance under extremely heavy fire. He was standing to exhort them further on, his hat pierced upon the point of his sword for his men to see, when he received a musket ball through the lung, on the left side. I was closely engaged with troops of his brigade a few yards away, since under his example they had attained the entire distance and were storming our line.

After we had driven off the attack, I went to him at once by reason of his rank.

He was conscious and coherent. Seeing my uniform, he knew that the assault had failed. He asked after his boys. I thought he must mean his sons, and offered to write his family for him. No, sir, he replied, I have no family – I am unmarried, sir. I meant my boys out there, in the field. I shall never forget how simply he spoke. His love for them was so very clear. I had to tell him they had suffered desperate casualties, but that those who had gained our lines were safe. Our boys helped them over the wall: it was an extraordinary thing to see, we could hardly believe any of them had made it through all our fire. My boys, he said again, god love them, they wouldn’t run away, not my boys. A short while later, as he was failing, he asked me to write to you. He was most emphatic, that I should do so. I gave him my word that I would, and this seemed to ease him a little. He did not appear to struggle so, after I told him I should do as he wished. I hope this letter is not unwelcome to you, but I promised him I should write it.

I believe he died of his wound during transport to the field hospital some time after that. I regret I did not have the honor of being with him at the time. I do not know if he could have been saved, but I should doubt it extremely: he had lost a great deal of blood and was already very weak and sinking when I spoke to him.

I wish I could tell you more but there is no more to tell. All of us were impressed with his courage and dignity. I do not believe he was in too much pain.

I would like to say that I had the honor of serving briefly under your late husband General Hamilton. His complete dedication and fearlessness were an inspiration to me. General Armstrong mentioned the great friendship you shared, before the war.

Assuring you, madam, of my respectful attention at all times, I remain your humble servant

Jno. Snelgrove, Captain, 69th Pennsylvania.

No more to tell, he says, this Captain Jno. Snelgrove, of the 69th Pennsylvania. He seems like a decent young man – brave, too. I sometimes imagine those moments he describes so coolly: the assault, the long line of grey advancing inexorably on the Union line, ignoring the terrible gaps in their ranks, just closing up to fill them and coming on; the desperate fighting where they attained the Union guns. These few lines will have to be enough. They are not, of course. But I could not bring myself to write it, so he has done the task for me. Tactful, how he put in that bit about George, I thought.

* * *

Our son was born the following spring.

I did not cry: not for a long time. Not that I didn’t want to; tears would have been a release. They did not come.

My body grew heavy. I felt nothing. Not grief: nothing. I simply didn’t care about anything. Not George; not myself; not the future. Whenever my thoughts began to wander, the knowledge of his loss would pursue them like a ferret down a rabbit-warren, from which there could be no escape. Moving through the days mechanically, I did the laundry, tended the garden, ignored my neighbors’ stares. They may have felt I owed them an explanation. I didn’t think so. I never could think it wrong.

At nights I would sit and rock his unborn child.

When my time came George ran for the midwife. He might just as well have walked: it was by far the most protracted and difficult of all my labors. My body was unwilling to relinquish his flesh and blood. The babe was footling breech, and required all the midwife’s skill to survive the perilous passage.

At last I was delivered. She cut the cord and wrapped him, still bloody and squalling. Automatically, I reached for him to put him to my breast: the action of mothers the world over. It is impossible to hear that cry, and not do so. Every mother will know what I mean.

He gasped and hiccupped, his body quivering and rigid, rooting for my swollen nipple. After a few seconds’ panic he found it. With all his tiny might, he began desperately to suck. His miniature hands flexed and closed. The nails were long, the color of lilacs. His eyelids fluttered and his breathing calmed to a rapid, regular rhythm as he suckled. Slowly, he opened his dark blue eyes and gazed at me.

I wept, then. I put back my head in that bed, on those pillows, and howled like an animal.

It was not him. Never again would it be him. If I have told the rest half well enough, perhaps it will be clear.

I wept each time, for the first few weeks. I could not help it. Poor little Lewis had quite a salty start in life. Oh, well. It doesn’t seem to have done him too much harm.

* * *

At the end of that year his sister replied to a short letter I had sent her.

I did not mention having seen him; I couldn’t bear to rip it all open again, as I should have had to if I told anyone. I had merely sent her my condolences, and asked if he was buried there…

Richmond, Virginia, December 1863

Dear Mrs. Hamilton –

How I should like to call you Eliza; may I do so? Your kind letter reached me recently after some delay, which is hardly to be wondered at. You ask about my dear brother’s resting-place. I understand you and your late husband were quite attached to him, before the present conflict. He wrote home of you so often. I feel that I know you. How I should like to meet you one day, after the war, which I pray will not long continue. You must visit us, and I will take you to where he lies.

Meanwhile I will describe it for you, my dear Eliza, as you have requested. It is a tranquil spot. Our family has a section of an ancient graveyard where our forefathers lie, including our parents, may God rest their souls; and I had him placed there not far from them, and not far also from our ancestor who served with distinction in the Revolutionary War. His headstone is of white marble and reads Lewis Anderson Armstrong, Brigadier General, C.S.A. – and his dates, you know, just a little over forty-three years apart; and the words, A True Son Of His Native Land.

I have planted two flowering chestnut trees there to shade him in the hot Richmond summers.

As he may have mentioned to you, I have no other immediate family still living, although there are quite a number of more distant connections to carry on the Armstrong name. My husband died quite early on in the war, of illness I believe: he was a Federal prisoner at the time. My brother’s loss was therefore a great sorrow to me, since we were always very close. I used to rescue him when he got into scrapes, as a child.

He had a kind, affectionate nature as I am sure you recollect. I am glad to think that another womanly soul was fond of him besides myself. I understand he was also much endeared to his men – you would not credit the many letters I have received from officers and enlisted men of both sides who had served with him at one time or another.

You must know that he thought the world of you and your husband.

Tell me, did you see him at all after the hostilities commenced? You did not mention it in your letter, but I feel sure somehow –

I do hope I have told you everything you wished to know. Do, my dear Eliza, do me the favor of visiting once this dreadful time is over. I should so like to be able to talk about Lewis with someone who cared for him.

Affectionately,

Susannah Armstrong Caton.

I didn’t go; I couldn’t bear to.

I should have, but —

* * *

I have a little pill-box, with a couple of his hairs. I lifted them from the pillow that morning, after he left. They are still dark, with that beautiful chestnut lustre – while mine are gone quite white. I keep them wrapped in a scrap of pale silk, so as not to lose them; and in another twist I keep the other little tuft, the one tied with crimson thread. I always meant to set it in a brooch, but I never did. Too private, perhaps.

I have a few more mementoes, besides.

His Bible, that he sent me: the one I read each morning.

I keep my place in it with that little red feather. It came tucked in there just like that. I wrote in the front, under his hand:

Lewis Armstrong, he had written, large and round: Received from Mama upon my Tenth Birthday, 1830.

I added, Died July 3rd 1863.

Father of Lewis Armstrong Hamilton, Born March 2nd 1864.

I hoped he would not mind their sharing his name with George’s. I did not think so. We shared everything else. It might have been easier to take his, and give out that we had been married: but if I had not the courage to do so while he was alive, I scorned to buy it with a lie later.

Sometimes when there is nothing else to keep hold of, the truth must suffice.

Speaking of George, I keep the rest of his letters to me in a separate bundle along with his earlier ones from Mexico. As an account of the early campaigns of the war, they make fascinating reading. One quickly receives the liveliest sense of his vigor and impatience, his ability to sum up a man or a piece of terrain and act accordingly; his inability to suffer fools gladly. There is little doubt in my mind that, had he survived, he would swiftly have progressed to the highest level of command – even perhaps, with his military abilities, thereby shortening the course of the war. I sometimes wonder; but who can know?

There are few notes of private passion to be found among the many pages: after all, we had been married for some time, and it was George’s great gift to take for granted as no more than his due the bounties Providence bestowed on him. Quite naturally, he reposed the utmost confidence in my support and understanding. That went without saying – it is the underlying premise of the entire correspondence.

Until his last letter, which I have already shared. I still wonder what governed this change of tone, opening the floodgates of his love for me and telling me so directly all he had left me to guess-at, in all the years of our marriage. How often do husbands and wives not express all they feel! I think of his bright face, his laughing eyes; I wonder whether it came as a revelation to him in the face of his impending presentiment of death, that he had never told me in so many words — how very much he loved me.

Well, he left little doubt, at the end, with his last thoughts upon the subject. George always knew how to make it count, when it really mattered.

* * *

There are two more letters.

I have saved them till the last.

The tearstains are not mine. They are tears, though: I licked them once, to be sure. His emotion was so close to the surface, in his frailty, in the extraordinary intensity of those few days.

I do not think him any less of a man, for that.

June 27^th 1863

My love -

my dearest, only, darling, beloved Eliza -

On my return to our encampment this morning we received orders to strike Camp and continue our march at once. It came as a blow I confess, as I had made sure of seeing you again at least for an hour before we should be miles apart, with the fighting front between us.

What can I say, my own darling, my wife - for so I hold you, in spirit, which counts for more than mere factual details; and so I believe you to be, in the eyes of God - what is there possibly to be said, beyond what we have already said and done?

How I regret the unkind turns that Fate has taken with our lives, when with a different throw of the dice we might have met in our youth and loved all our lives long; or George might have been spared to you, in all honor and glory, and I should have continued an affectionate spectator.

But I cannot regret the miracle of this little space of time in which we have belonged wholly to each other. I believe God gave you to me in His grace. And if it shall please Him, we will know that grace again.

If it does not - then I shall thank Him unceasingly for His gift of you, until He summons me; and then, for the rest of eternity.

Oh, my love, I have spent a good part of my life longing for you from afar. If you let my Bible fall open, it will likely be at the Song of Songs; for I used to read that part often and call your loveliness to mind.

I do not believe this to be sacrilegious. If we had ever regarded or used each other shamefully, I do not think we should have been granted that which we received.

How easily we might have missed each other altogether! Even as I crossed the threshold of your house yesterday afternoon, it could by no means have been assured that I would spend the night with my head pressed to your sweet bosom. I did not know what I should say or do there, beyond paying my most devoted respects to you and George. The rest was your gift entirely. I did not expect anything of the kind, you must believe me: only to see how you did.

How beautiful you are become, Eliza. The cares of the past years have set your eyes more deeply, like precious stones. How I do thank you, my own love – and how sweetly those words write themselves, that I have so longed to say to you! - oh, how I do thank you for your courage in offering me everything my heart has ever desired, and more.

One day, by God’s grace, I shall come home to you and this will be but the first page of our lives together. If it should not turn out so, why, we have written the verses of the Song of Songs together upon each others’ hearts, I believe, which is more than God grants to most folk in a lifetime.

General Lee says he intends to write you to put in a kind word for my suit. We are to move again shortly. I must put away my writing-desk and send this in haste. Oh, my love. My love. You are for ever in the thoughts, prayers and heart of your devoted

Lewis A.

P.S. I almost forgot to thank you also, sweetheart, for the mended drawers and the other things! – which I recd. with pleasure, surprise and no little emotion. You are a darling. Now if I cd. only send you my other pair, along with this - they are all to ribbons now. Oh, how I love you Eliza. I love you so!

That wasn’t the letter that broke my heart, though.

The next one was – the last one.

It’s harder to read, because it’s such a scrawl. He wrote it there in the field, at the edge of the woods, after receiving his orders: on his knee, with his one hand, without his writing-desk, with no clip to steady the paper. They were already under heavy fire from Union artillery. That’s why it’s in pencil.

Nowadays they look back and say it was the mistake of all mistakes, that charge, the one which cost the South the war. Every professional soldier in the field at the time knew it simply could not be done. I read General Longstreet’s memoirs, and Alexander the artillerist; how Longstreet couldn’t bring himself to speak the order to begin the charge, only nodded. And how, knowing it to be impossible, they attempted it anyway; because Marse Robert had asked it of them. For the South. For Virginia.

Not that the details matter, not now; it cost me Lewis, that’s all I know.

But even that is not the heartbreak I mean.

3rd July a.m.

My darling -

Forgive me. I find myself this morning no longer sure if I ever should have come to you: never, never for my sake – that is not in question – but for yours, sweetheart.

The fighting has been very heavy & we are preparing for an advance which I believe has little chance of success; nonetheless, I must lead my brigade in it & shall do so to the utmost of my ability.

I face death cheerfully for my own part; but oh, my darling, I fear now I cannot help but be the instrument of breaking your heart once more.

What have we done? What have I done?

Eliza, I had rather die than cause you pain. I think today it may be both.

I wish I could be sure, that I had not wronged you. I take comfort in your strength and courage, wh. I have loved in you all these years & wh. I know will not fail you now.

Oh my love. My love. My love. How hard it is for me to leave you. Are you well, my love? I think it is harder for you, to be left behind.

Forgive me.

Lewis.

Could he have thought that at the end, ‘during transport to the field hospital’ ? That he had done anything which needed to be forgiven?

Oh, God. Dear God.

Was he alone?

Lewis, Lewis, I would give anything, anything at all, if only I could have held you then, my love; held you as you bled inside and out, the bright petals of your life spilling scarlet until my breast and lap were soaked, salt-sweet, reeking, sticky — and you suffocating —

Oh, my darling, I could have lifted you at least, propped you up against me to breathe more easily as your lungs filled and you choked and gagged. I would have stroked your dear face; kissed the blood and spittle from your mouth.

‘The Lord is my shepherd,’ I would have told you, watching your cheeks turn to clay; ‘I shall not want: He maketh me to walk in green pastures, He leadeth me by the still waters – ’ as you did for me in Texas; oh, sweetheart, sweetheart —

Did you call out for your mother? I would have comforted you, my love; said, ‘Mother’s here, little one; hush; Mama’s got you safe... ’ and rocked you as you gasped for breath, a child in a nightmare.

I would even have let you go, darling, I swear I would not have insisted upon your life when you could struggle no longer: my love, my love, I would have closed your glazing unfocused eyes; washed you, laid you out, dressed you in fresh clothes, Lewis – oh, I wanted at least to dig your grave myself, with these hands, Lewis —

— but I can do none of these things, not one: nothing.

I cannot even tell you there is nothing to forgive.

Oh, could you really have thought that, at the end?

Could you?

That is the only part of it all – any of it – which I regret.

Oh, Lewis!

I think he would tell me I am still beautiful, if he were here, though. The eyes more deeply set, certainly, but I have been strong, and I have been brave: he was right about that, at least. Not the fierce blaze of gallantry that wins a brevet, but the dogged, steady, unglamorous kind: doing what needs to be done, day in, day out; refusing to be tempted into the Slough of Despond, choosing to wear the grief as a crown and not a hobble, remembering always that you can only mourn that which you have been blessed to receive in the first place. And that there are no guarantees of anything, ever, except that which is, right now.

I think that deserves to be called courage.

Eliza

Philadelphia,

1885

I did not tell his sister about our child – not for twenty years.

I am ashamed to say it; but it’s true.

I thought of her often all those years, not knowing she had any living connection with him: in my own pain, I chose to ignore hers, though it didn’t feel like a choice at the time. It used to take all of my strength and courage to get out of bed each morning and face the day without him, in the full knowledge that I should never, never see him again as long as I lived; never hold him; never look up from the piano bench upon feeling his touch on my shoulder; never stand, fingers linked, looking down upon our sleeping child together. I shut myself off from anything that could remind me of him, or else the urge to join him would have been too strong to withstand.

They were hard years, years of struggle and sacrifice. George had not left us well-provided-for, chiefly because he had always been so very quick and generous to help a friend in need — which was not, I am sorry to say, reciprocated. It was all I could do to make ends meet, to send the boys to school clothed and fed, put food on the table; and sometimes, the hardest times, not to jump off the bridge into the creek and escape from my despair, leaving them to fend for themselves.

Little by little I pulled myself together and did what needed to be done. I wish I could have done it with a greater helping of joy, but I prayed for the strength to meet each new day.

George went into the Bank, where he proved very successful, and Lewis grew to manhood so like his father it took my breath away, sometimes: caring, conscientious – a sensitive son, a kind one. He was the kind of child that keeps you company; the kind you tell things to. I tried to be a good mother to him – he seemed to understand how hard it was for me, all those years; like his father, he never asked for more than I had to give.

From his earliest years he wanted to heal things. I scraped together what I could and wrote begging letters to officers’ widows’ funds, asking for help in sending him to medical school.

It was the least I could do.

I was so very proud of him — still am.

Well, I came to my senses at last and realized Susannah Caton had every right to know, if anyone did.

Too much time had gone by for me to be able to put it in a letter, though; so I sent our son to her.

A gracious woman — like her brother.

Richmond, Virginia

May 1885

My dearest Eliza,

I have wondered all these years why you did not visit. I had thought that perhaps with the passing years the affection you held for my brother had naturally taken its place, shall we say, amongst the turned pages of your life. And I should not have blamed you. Twenty years is a long time, is it not?

You know why I write, of course.

It was so very, very kind of you to send your son to visit me, dear Eliza. His son, I should say, also.

I understand your natural reticence all this time in making the connection known. This has been a time of mending for our entire nation, and many scars are not yet healed. I now understand what my brother finally was to you, and what his loss must have meant to you all those years ago. My heart goes out to you.

Forgive my candor, my dear, but I see no shame at this time, no – not in any of it. When I walked through the door & saw him I almost collapsed, he so resembled his father. And I must tell you, dear sister, that I had more than an inkling who his mother was before he introduced himself.

May God bless you and keep you as He has done thus far, and repay you for sending my brother’s child to me, dear Eliza. He tells me he intends to become a physician. I see much of Lewis in him.

I am sending you one or two little mementoes of Lewis’s with this letter, thinking you might like to have them. At my death I intend to will the rest of his effects to my nephew, your son.

In sisterly affection

Susannah Armstrong Caton.

It seemed the right thing to do, sending Lewis’s son to see her. Well, at least she died in the knowledge of it. I wish now that I had been more trusting and considerate.

How the time does go by.

Lewis Armstrong Hamilton

Philadelphia,

1885

What he remembers from his childhood is the glass case of things at the turn of the staircase. They mesmerize him. He never makes a journey up or down the stairs without brushing the glass with his finger, like a talisman. After a thousand times, he believes, Mama will open it with the key and let him touch the things inside.

 There is a shell, from a beach in California somewhere. It is pale yellow, with a round top and a long, slender tail. The inside is creamy. When he puts it to his ear he hears the sea. It roars and moans. Mama has a way of weaving that kind of magic.

 Then there are the General’s medals, George’s father’s. They feel cold and hard. When he smells them the sharp odor of metal polish blends with the old scent of rotting silk from the ribbons. Each one has a story: the campaign, the significance, the names. They epitomize masculinity for him: something shiny, martial, with an aura of danger and heroism which he struggles with as he grows, not turning out to be that kind of a man himself.

 A fan made of ostrich feathers. He always holds it so that it doesn’t quite touch his cheek, and closes his eyes, and feels the tingle of its closeness. His mother had it before her marriage, it had traveled with her. Some of the feathers are bent.

 A child’s moccasin, from one of the tribes that wandered the Staked Plains, in Texas. It pre-dates glass beads: the decoration is of colored porcupine quills. It is worn and soft. He always wonders what became of its original owner, who had walked in it till the deerskin was greasy and thin. His mother doesn’t tell too many stories about Texas: something comes over her, a distance, when she says the word. Sometimes, dreamily, she pronounces it Tejas, Tay-has, the Spanish way. He quickly changes the subject, watching for her face to unfold again.

 His happiest moments are being allowed to lift the lid and finger the things, first with his eyes closed and then turning them over and over, staring at all of the details, memorizing them. There are other objects in there – a lump of rock with large purple crystals thrusting from it, an embroidered needle-case with a tarnished silver thimble inside; a scrimshaw whale’s tooth engraved with a ship. He follows the little figures on it into their adventure until the step he sits on became the bench of the longboat and the deadly harpoon is right beside his hand and the spume is flying, the monster spouting ...

He loves the sea. They spend every August in Beaufort, North Carolina, where his mother has a friend from her schooldays. There is very little money, so this yearly respite is precious to them. Arriving there across the bright-green salt marshes winds him up to a peak of anticipation for the joys to come. He sleeps upstairs on the outside porch, listening to the slap of the water in the harbor, smelling fish and hearing the gulls, wild and plaintive: their piercing cries are the last sound he hears before he falls asleep and the first when he wakes. From earliest childhood, something in him responds deeply to that savage, forlorn music of the tidal reaches: he is drawn to the ambivalent places, the seashore of the soul. He dreams all night of pirates and shipwrecks, smugglers and daring rescues with himself at the oars, pulling against the storm. Between his bed and the sitting-room inside are windows that open onto the porch, so as he lies there those long, light summer evenings he can hear the murmur of adult conversation. It is like being in two worlds at once. He thinks it is Heaven.

In Beaufort no-one knows he is illegitimate.

It’s not easy, being the offspring of the sole consummation of an illicit love affair. Children with legal fathers, even dead ones, have a head start, in the area of righteousness if nothing else. When you’re born out of wedlock, he finds, the more questions you ask, the greater the mystery: Why? How? – and all of it tinged with heartache, of something not quite right about you, no matter what your mother tells you.

He can see that in many ways his mother’s and brother’s lives would have been easier had he not come along. His brother fights anyone who calls him a bastard, not so much for his sake but because it reflects on George himself and, most of all, their mother. He is a reminder of something George would rather forget. George is ashamed of him, hence all the grazed knuckles and black eyes.

He loves to walk beside his mother in silence, beachcombing. Sometimes they take a boat to the Outer Bank and cross to the whipping, windswept ocean side. The long Atlantic combers come rolling in with a steady roar. They need no words to feel close. Broken shells, driftwood oddly scoured, leathery egg-cases and, most highly prized, a piece of colored beach glass, green or amber or cobalt blue – he puts his treasure in his mother’s hand, and her fingers close around it, and she gives him a secret smile and slips it into her pocket, and the wind wraps her long skirt around her legs, and she strides out and on they go. Useless things. Beautiful things. She teaches him that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

 As he grows, he finds that looking for his father reminds him of beachcombing. Wandering, watching, sorting through all the extraneous material in pursuit of the treasure, the piece that will make all the rest make sense, complete the picture: never knowing what among the flotsam and jetsam washed up out of the ocean of the past might fetch up at his feet here in the present. And, like on the Banks, what’s found is chance, serendipitous, disordered — it requires insight, to chart its origins and meaning.

 He skips flat stones across the water of the inner Sound over and over, playing ducks and drakes; learning how luck comes into it and skill also, whether the angle of incidence will deflect the projectile for another jump or cause it to enter the denser element and sink.

As he grows older he thinks how human lives glance off one another like that, never knowing when we will fly or drown, whether we will have ten hops or only one, like George Hamilton; like Lewis Armstrong. Who just hit that moment, that motion coming towards him that was Eliza in all her loveliness, and flew, straight as an arrow, not touching again until the wave rose up to meet him all those years later and he went under. Love and death in the same week, he unwilling or unable to run away from either.

 Now George – his brother – is no more inclined to look at things that way – allegorically, poetically – than he is to lend someone money without collateral and interest. George is a pragmatist; he prides himself on it. His mother Eliza is not a fanciful person either; which means that must be his father in him right there, he thinks, looking at the sea and seeing the continuum of time and fate, picking up a stone and endowing it with the significance of a human life before hurling it on its journey. Even his hands are his father’s. Eliza’s are square, capable, no-nonsense. His fingers are long and thin, wiry; if you liked them you’d call them sensitive, if you didn’t they might put you in mind of a spider.

 Lewis Armstrong’s hands.

One night as a child he kept waking up every twenty minutes to puke. His mother sat up, dozing beside him and waking each time at his first gasp, turning to make sure he had a fresh rag to vomit onto. He was too weak to sit up and do it in a bucket, so that is what she did. She said someone did that for her, once. Years later she tells him it was his father. In Texas, she says.

He puts his father together out of snippets of information like that, a jigsaw-puzzle of a man: an aura of gentleness, an overriding sense of loss.

He has always wanted to be a healer. His brother George prefers the precise world of finance. George looks at a human body and sees a collection of isolated parts – some admirable, some disgusting though necessary – tripes, excretory organs – some arousing, in the right proportions on the right person. Lewis Hamilton sees a unity, an alliance of systems and limbs beautiful beyond architecture, beyond understanding. Beauty in the shiny clouded membranes, the filmy omentum, the branching arteries, the businesslike coils of the gut so neatly arranged, the eyes’ pearly sclera, the glistening kidneys, the nestling pancreas, the fingers strung with the precision and responsiveness of fiddles; the lines of bone and ligament. He loves it all, his very bowels twist in compassion for its heroic fragility. He has a holy respect for its perfection, its powers of self-regulation – its peculiarities. He reveres its processes: its mysterious, sometimes revolting, always miraculous exudates.

His hands have always known what to do. Going to medical school is like having the One True Religion revealed to him. So there is never any question what he will become.

Three years into his training, out of the blue, he receives a request from his mother to take the train down to Richmond, Virginia. She encloses money for the fare – he ekes out his student days on a tiny budget – and the address of a woman he has never met: his aunt. I think it’s time, says his mother’s letter. She wastes no words on explanations.

He has always known of his aunt’s existence; but this is the first time that he knows of since he can remember that his mother has reached out to make contact. He, it seems, is to be the emissary.

He is curious, of course; he feels that thrill of anticipation, as before opening a door leading somewhere thrilling and unknown. And it is, in a way: here at last is his key to the past.

He finds himself on the steps of a white-pillared portico in a part of town that has seen better days, doubtless before the war, and pulls at the bell. He has a bunch of gardenias in his hand – someone was selling them outside the station. He’s spent the cab money on them, and walked the tree-lined streets until he found the house.

 A colored woman opens the door, old enough to have been a slave. She looks him up and down. She looks like a dark old cypress log that has been pulled out of a swamp, stiff, crinkled, pickled in the bitter waters.

 ‘Good day, ma’am. Is Mrs. Caton at home?’ he asks.

 She turns on her heel without a word and goes inside. He hears her announce him: ‘Miz Caton, there be a Yankee axin’ fo’ you. No ma’am, I didn’t catch his name. Mmm-hm. Yes, ma’am.’

 His heart beats faster. The woman returns, and shows him inside to a small parlor. It is furnished in green and white, with pieces that were once been elegant and now are frankly shabby. He feels at home: he has grown up with the same faded furnishings. Unsure what else to do with them, he puts the gardenias down on a chipped marquetry side table in the shape of a half-circle that stands against the wall.

His aunt walks in on two canes. He smiles at her shyly, aware he has the advantage of her: he knows she is his aunt.

She doesn’t.

She takes one look at him and grips the handles of her canes as if they would save her life.

 ‘Who are you, young man?’ she says; and, before he can answer, she continues, ‘no; no; don’t tell me. You’re my brother Lewis’s child, aren’t you!’

 ‘Yes, ma’am,’ he replies, stunned and delighted all at once. It’s that obvious, then? ‘Do I look so very like him?’

 ‘Just about the spitting image, that’s all,’ she says, and sits down stiffly, painfully, across from him. Her eyes are blue-grey sea pebbles fixed on him. ‘And so then I know who your mother is,’ she goes on. ‘It has to be. He wouldn’t have – it could only be – your mother is named Eliza, am I right?’

He nods.

 ‘It had to be. It couldn’t have been anyone else.’ She draws a deep breath and closes her eyes: ‘Lord be praised! Oh, sweet Jesus, thank you, thank you, thank you for giving him that! Oh dear lord, I thank you, I do most sincerely thank you!’

He offers her his handkerchief. She dabs at her mouth and looks at him narrowly. ‘Your name?’

 ‘Lewis Armstrong Hamilton, ma’am.’

 ‘Alleluia!’ she says, and bursts into tears. He goes over and kneels beside her. Her gray hair curls in tight sausages under her black widow’s cap; her old-woman’s hump heaves between her narrow shoulders. He hesitates for a moment, then puts his arms around her. ‘Bless you, child,’ she says, blowing her nose in between, ‘that’s what your father would have done.’

He feels the oddest familiarity with her, despite their never having met, mingled in the fact of their mutual flesh and the somewhat unsettling coincidence that his student cadaver, this past year in anatomy class, has been that of an old woman not dissimilar to her. It lends a peculiar intimacy to their embrace: he can’t help knowing secrets of her body she can’t even guess at herself, her stringiness, the yawning cavity of her ribcage, her adipose tissue like gold bullion on deposit in the hidden vaults of a bank. It gives him a special respect for her, for the mere fact of her survival, knowing the forces against which she’s held out all this time so that he can kneel here beside her now in admiration. His aunt, his flesh and blood. It is a benediction beyond words, to own it.

 She makes him stay while the colored woman prepares tea. ‘That’s Maisie,’ she says, as if this statement alone constitutes an explanation. ‘Maisie, now look, child, who do you think this is?’

 Maisie doesn’t seem to mind being called ‘child’, even though she can’t have seen a day less than six decades, maybe seven. Once again he is the object of intense and pointed scrutiny. ‘Ah would have to say he look powerful like my honeychild Marse Lewis, ma’am,’ pronounces Maisie.

 ‘Indeed he does,’ says his aunt gleefully, ‘indeed he does. And for very good reason.’

 Maisie must have guessed; but she gives the old woman the pleasure of saying it anyway: ‘Whyever so, Miz Caton?’

 ‘Because he’s Lewis’s son, that’s why. Just think of it! All these years – Lewis, why did your mother never write back to me and tell me about you? I could have died, and not known...!’

 Maisie stands in silence in the doorway, wringing her hands in her apron. Opal tears roll down the wrinkles in her mahogany cheeks.

 ‘I don’t know, ma’am,’ he says. ‘It hasn’t been easy for her. But she wrote me last week, and suggested it was time. I’m twenty-one. Perhaps she wants to make some kind of peace with it all. With herself, I mean, not just you.’

 ‘Bring him tea, Maisie,’ she says, ‘and mind you put something stronger in mine!’ Then she bends forward to take his hand. Hers is cold, wrinkled, like an ancient turtle’s neck. Heavy rings weight it. They look imitation, the kind people have copied when the originals have been sold. ‘I want you to know something,’ she tells him. ‘He worshipped the ground your mother walked on. Just worshipped it. He just did.’

 ‘That’s what I heard,’ he tells her.

 ‘She’s not bitter, then, your mother?’

 ‘Oh, no, ma’am. Not at all. Quite the opposite.’

 She squeezes his hand. ‘I am so very grateful to hear that. He would have died before he hurt a hair of her head.’ She pronounced it in two syllables, hay-ed. ‘Now, child, tell me all about yourself. How strange it is to watch your mouth open and hear a Yankee voice come out! I know nothing about you, I realize, nothing at all besides who fathered you. What do you do, Mr. Lewis Armstrong Hamilton? What kind of a person are you?’

He tells her, as best he can, while she nods with approval and sips her tea noisily. When she learns he is studying medicine, she comes close to tears again. ‘He would have made such a fine physician. Your father. He had such gentle hands,’ she says. ‘Anything that was hurt, he’d find it like he had a magnet inside of him and fix it up the best he could. He set a bird’s wing once, a green heron we found down by the river bank. We figured one of the boys had got it with a sling-shot, the poor thing. It pecked him so – Lord! I thought he was like to lose an eye. He stuck with it till it quieted down and then he splinted it up and fed it fish till it was mended. My Lord. That was a long time ago. Got to be fifty years, more even.’ She sighs. ‘I always thought how much happier he’d have been, tending to folks, not fixing to fight ’em.’

 ‘I rescued a gull once,’ he tells her in excitement at the congruence of his father’s life with his own. ‘In Beaufort. A baby. It was lost.’

 ‘Of course you did,’ she says, patting his knee. ‘You couldn’t help it. No more could he. Just made that way, the both of ye. He liked the drawing best, you know, at West Point. That and the French. All those sketches and maps and diagrams. He just took to that. He always hated the artillery.’ She gets up slowly from the chair, her lips white with effort. He gives her his arm. She goes to a bureau in a corner of the room and opens a drawer. A battered portfolio lies flat inside: the initials on the front catch his eye – his initials, L.A.A. ‘Take it out,’ she says. ‘Go ahead. Look at it.’

 Birds. All kinds of birds. Flycatchers and honeybuzzards and banana quits and gaily colored buntings; avocets and stilts; those little speckled birds that run along the beach; gaudy birds, drab birds, blue-crowned and pileated and spotted and streaked. Hummingbirds, oystercatchers, jays. Each labeled with a date, carefully sketched in ink, usually colored. Sometimes a detail of a feather or the formation of the claw off to one side, or a wing extended to see the full flight plumage. A couple of bats, too, their hideous faces rendered with pathos and charm. Then quick sketches of soldiers in action, mule trains, artillery pieces with puffs of smoke lightened with white chalk; thorny hillsides and impregnable-looking mountain fortresses. 1846, 47: the Mexican War.

 And among the military scenes, domestic ones: washing on a line, the bellying curves of linen catching the light. An ink sketch of a hunchbacked woman making tortillas. Landscapes in wash, all violet and blue-tones with the foreground buff and ochre and sepia. Brilliant tropical flowers.

 And his mother’s face.

 A dozen studies of her, more, a score perhaps, usually from the side or from a distance, as if the artist wished not to be observed at his work. Mama with a child on her lap. Mama picking up her skirts to tiptoe in shallow water, with her husband beside her, George’s father, his pants rolled up to his knees. A baby laughing, its fingers clutching the fringe of a blanket. The same baby with closed eyes on a bed of flowers. A study of a man’s hands – they look just like his brother’s, square; powerful. Mama, her eyes half-closed, nursing a child: the swell of her breast a single chalk highlight rising out of the dark folds of her clothing, the child’s face nestling into it like a flower, lips little parted petals on her skin.

 ‘My god,’ he says.

 ‘Gifted,’ she says. ‘Just gifted. He just was. I’m not saying that to brag. I brought him up, you know.’

 ‘Mama told me,’ he says.

 ‘She did? Well, bless her heart. What else did she tell you?’

 ‘That he gave her his Bible. I mean, he asked for it to be sent, if... He got it from your mother, for his tenth birthday.’

 ‘So that’s what happened to that! I wondered – it didn’t come back with the rest of his things, and I knew he never would have lost it, not the Bible our Mamma gave him. So your mother has it. Eliza. How fitting. I’m glad.’ She sighs. ‘Our Mamma died right after that, you know. She never was strong, I’m afraid, it damaged her heart, bearing children. After him she couldn’t have any more. The doctor told her for sure it’d kill her.’ She looks up at him, then. ‘I think she blamed him a little bit, our mother…. It was hard for her, she used to fight so to get her breath, and her nails would turn blue... so I had to make it up to him. Be extra kind. He did take it to heart so, and it really wasn’t his fault!’

 ‘Of course not!’ he exclaims.

‘Yes, but you know how children are,’ she says sadly, as if she sees her brother’s young bewildered face. ‘How easy it is for them to feel responsible.’

 ‘Did he?’ Suddenly this nebulous, semi-mythical splendid adult figure of his father has become a ten-year-old boy, with a boy’s tender heart and desperate love for his mother. He almost can’t bear to hear the answer.

 ‘I think so. I really do. He turned into a very responsible young man, you know. Very kind.’

 ‘Was it worth it?’ he asks her suddenly. He isn’t sure what he means, but she guesses and her answer fits.

 ‘Hankering after your mother all that time? I don’t know. At the time I surely didn’t think so. I so wanted for him to settle down with some nice girl, you know... I guess it was, so. It was what he wanted. You never could turn him aside, once he’d set his heart on something. Never.’

 ‘But — ’

 ‘We’ll never know, child. It was just the way he was made. Once he made his mind up that was it.’

 ‘Did you keep slaves?’ he asks her. He knows he is being blunt, but he does not know how else to ask.

 ‘Of course,’ she replies, with the same directness and apparently without shame. ‘Everyone did. We had three house servants. One of them was not much older than Lewis. She played with him, tended to him when Mamma was sick. Maisie. Yes, Maisie. The others were our cook and the driver. They were a married couple, don’t you know. Well, when our father died, he had promised them their freedom, in his will, you know, and he was as good as his word, they were manumitted, that was the word they used then, set free under his will. Oh, back before 1840 or so, that would have been. He died a few years after Mamma. Right when I was to be married. It fairly broke his heart, that’s all. So then they were free people. They stayed on anyway, doing the same work, just like before, only then we had to pay them a wage. Maisie came with me when I married Mr. Caton. She was a servant, I guess, but we treated her like family. Well Mr. Lincoln emancipated Maisie, but she didn’t plan on going anywhere, so you see she’s still here.’

 ‘She seems fond of you.’

 ‘Well, child, we’ve seen a lot of years go by. A lot of grief and commotion. I’ve lost three children of my own, dear Lord, three, all under the age of six, not to mention I’ve lost count how many pregnancies that didn’t... and a husband, in the War, Mr. Caton died up in prison in Illinois… and then both parents, you know, you expect that, but we were so young, so young; and then my brother of course. So – we’re all the other’s got, Maisie and I.’

‘You’ve got me now,’ he says. He knows he wants to belong to her, this fiercely loyal old ironclad of a woman.

 ‘Well, so I do. So I do.’

 They talk a little longer; he can see that the shock of his turning up out of the blue like a ghost is beginning to take its toll. He prescribes some more tea, fortified if she likes, and a rest. She protests that he isn’t a doctor yet, but indulgently, as if she is privately thrilled to be told what to do. He kisses her good-bye. She smells of tea-rose.

 ‘Now mind you come back,’ she says. ‘I intend to write to your mama and thank her. But we’ve just scratched the surface today. Barely gotten acquainted.’

 ‘Yes, ma’am,’ he says.

 ‘And anybody calls you a damn-yankee to your face on the street here, why, you just let them know you’re a Tidewater Armstrong, with the blood of heroes in you, a son of Virginia.’

 ‘Yes, ma’am,’ he says again.

 ‘Next time you come we’ll go visit his grave,’ she says. ‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Why don’t you come back tomorrow? Do you have a place to stay?’

 ‘Too many questions!’ he protests. ‘I’ll come back soon. Maybe not tomorrow; but soon, I promise. And I would like to go with you.’

 ‘I thought so. Now off you go. Have Maisie show you out. My Lord. All these years, and up you pop like a jack-in-the-box – Lewis’s son! He found her, just like he was hoping. Oh, he wanted to see her so bad! And he did, he did – oh, Lord, at last, he got the thing he wanted most in all the world, bless him. Oh, thank you, dear Jesus!’

 That strikes him as overly direct, not to say crass, even coming from an old woman. He knows he was begotten that night; but to reduce it to that – ! He is shocked. ‘Do you mean the act of engendering me?’ he asks, frowning. As he speaks his prim tone reminds him unpleasantly of his brother George’s, the one George assumes when referring to the whole business.

 She is stung. ‘Of course not! Don’t be ridiculous! Oh, I’m sure that meant a great deal to him, don’t think it didn’t. But that’s not what I meant. Don’t you see, he never had the chance till then to do what he really ached to do, all those years — just to tell her he loved her. Just that. All this time, and I thought he never even got to do that!’

 ‘Oh,’ he says, feeling slightly ashamed of himself.

 ‘I reckon he did do that, all right.’

 ‘I reckon he probably did,’ he says, and made a mental note to ask his mother the next time he sees her: Mama, was that the first time he told you he loved you?

He is leaving when she calls him back.

 ‘He had her picture in his pocket when he died,’ she says. ‘I knew it was her. It was — stained. You could only see her eyes. But I knew who it was.’

 ‘Oh,’ he says.

 ‘They looked kind. Your mother’s eyes. Looking out over — that stain.’ Her chin quivers – her chins, to be accurate. ‘They sent his body back, you know,’ she explains. ‘The Yankee commanders. They knew him, knew who he was, from before the War. He would have done the same by them, I’m sure, if the tables had been turned. Even – even the contents of his pockets. In a separate package. His watch. That picture of your mother.’

 ‘Have you still got it?’ he asks. He doesn’t say so, but something in him wants badly to touch his father’s blood, old and dried as it must be, but still his. He shivers with the horror and the pathos of it, the evidence, fresh and black in her hand twenty-two years ago, of that slow horrible seeping that soaked his uniform, clotted in his pocket; ebbed away, bearing Lewis Armstrong’s life with it.

 ‘Oh, no,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t keep it. Not when it meant so much to him. I put it right back in his pocket, where it belonged. He still has it.’

He lets that present tense echo in the room awhile before he speaks again. A week-old body, maybe two weeks, in July. ‘Did they – was he embalmed?’

 ‘No,’ she says. ‘But I opened the coffin anyway, to do that. To put it back.’

 ‘Oh,’ he says again. What else could he possibly say?

 ‘He was my brother,’ she says. ‘I could do that much for him.’ She stares out of the window at the end of the hall. A magnolia tree – magnolia grandiflora – lifts its waxen blooms like chalices, a hundred Holy Grails. The edges of the petals are turning brown. Some have already fallen, made a spill of cream on the lawn. ‘Anyhow, I don’t believe in all of that,’ she goes on, ‘new-fangled embalming rubbish. It don’t seem right, somehow. I think the good Lord intended for us to return to the clay He raised us out of, not lie there all primped-up like a whore in bed or some danged old mummy waiting for the last trumpet. There’s a lot to be said for corruption.’

 ‘You’re the most wonderful old woman I’ve ever met,’ he says, in genuine admiration.

 She smiles. ‘That’s the kin calling to you. I’m a blunt old widow, that’s all. But I’m your aunt. Telling you things you want to hear.’

 ‘Oh, yes,’ he says. She reminds him a great deal of his mother: they have the same out-spokenness. He can see why Lewis Armstrong loved them both. It’s a rare quality – shocking, at first, until you realize you’re invited to say what’s on your mind, too. Then it’s like a long, long drink of water after a party, when you realize you’re sick of sugary social froth – and the bitter aftertaste it leaves you with.

 ‘You come back now,’ she says.

 ‘I will,’ he promises. He means it, can’t wait for the next time.

He walks through the tree-lined streets to the churchyard in search of Lewis Armstrong’s grave. He cannot quite believe he is coming here after all this time. He feels as if he has found out things about his father this afternoon that he has been longing to know all his life. He tries again to picture him as he must have been – it seems a little easier, now.

The paint on the iron gate is a little rusty, but the grass is kept scythed.

He finds the stone in a corner, shaded by a pair of chestnut-trees. It is spring: they are in bloom. Their candles nod and dip in the breeze, a spread of creamy spires like a lace tablecloth gracing the leaves. The grass is clipped short, even around the edge of the headstone where other graves are overgrown.

He swallows.

‘My father,’ he murmurs — ‘Lewis… ’ He wants to trace the name with his fingertips. There is no-one here: why shouldn’t he? He kneels and does so. The letters are in a simple italic. The headstone is not as painfully new-looking as some: after all, it’s been over twenty years, and marble does not stay as crisp as slate. He prefers it slightly weathered, he thinks; he likes the cheerful yellow-gold lichen-splotches that star it here and there; they remind him of the colors in his father’s sketchbooks. They fit.

And there below his name are the dates that bracket Lewis Armstrong’s life. Forty-three: he was forty-three.

I am already almost half that, he thinks.

He has read as many accounts of that last desperate, heroic charge as he could get his hands on, though he has kept the books out of his mother’s sight. I should go there too, he thinks: the battlefield. It is not so very far from where he grew up, god knows; but his mother will not even go that way, takes the long way round to avoid it. She hates all the monuments she hears they’ve been building, she says; though the truth of it is that he has seen her wince even at its name. So he has not yet been there. One day soon, he promises himself, he will. Now that this is all coming-together at last.

But for now this private place is the end of a journey.

The stone is turning grey, like his father’s uniform. He tries to imagine the thoughtful face, the creased brow, the pinned-up sleeve.

He thinks: My father was a hero.

Well, they both were — both the men his mother loved were the best of their generation – like Guinevere, loving both Arthur and Lancelot. Except that in the stories, the king and the knight fought over Arthur’s queen – whereas, as far as he knows, Lewis Armstrong and George Hamilton loved one another unswervingly: till their last breath.

Lewis Anderson Armstrong, he traces again.

He is glad he has his father’s last name, too. He is proud to bear it. It was one thing to read it in the books, another to be kneeling here.

He thinks about that daguerrotype of his mother. He still has it, his aunt said. He is close to it, then: it is just beneath him.

A True Son Of His Native Land, are the only other words besides his father’s name and rank.

And so he was, till the end.

True, he murmurs: true — his father was true. A simple word: a profound one.

And then he has to hurry, to catch his train.

All the way home on the train he hears his aunt’s voice. ‘Hay-ed’ for head. ‘Ah’ for I. The time she takes, forming her sentences, while he hung on every word. The way people spoke in Beaufort, his childhood heaven, only more so.

 Did Lewis Armstrong speak like that, in those soft, thoughtful syllables? What about on the parade-ground: surely he must have raised his voice, then?

 What did his father say, the first time he told Eliza that he loved her?

 How did it sound, to her? He hears his aunt speak his mother’s name: Eliza. Ee-lah-za. He says it over to himself, all the way home.

 His mother has a habit of sitting in a room with no lamps lit as the afternoon turns to evening and the corners fill with shadows, until eventually she is concealed by semi-darkness. Sometimes she sings and plays the piano with a faraway look in her eyes. All through his childhood, when she did that he’d steal away, knowing not to climb in her lap, knowing the only thing was to leave her alone till she was played out.

 All those melancholy ballads: Barbara Allen, Lorena, The Ash Grove, Shenandoah, The Raggle-Taggle Gypsies: images of death and desolation, betrayal, yearning and abandonment. ‘O what care I for my goose-feather bed?’ she’d sing, ‘with the sheet turned down so bravely-O; For tonight I shall sleep in a cold open field, Along with the raggle-taggle gypsies-O!’ — and he’d steal a sideways look at his mother’s face, and believe that she cared no more than that for her own snug bed with the hand-pieced comforter turned down so bravely-O, the bed into whose warmth he counted on creeping when assailed by worries and night monsters; and that one morning he might climb in to find it cold, to find her gone, stolen away to the place in her faraway eyes, a country impossible for him to attain, where the wind would blow your top-knot off. As if there were a hollow place inside her and all that music and those keening winds couldn’t fill it, they just echoed over the top, like when you blow across an empty bottle: their small house would throb with it, reverberate with it; ache with it.

He can never fathom what it is that ties her to them, or whether it will be strong enough, whatever it is, to keep her. He knows that her reality also embraces, every moment, that other place to which he holds no invitation. As he also knows, looking at her face, that whoever her audience is, for whom this outpouring of music and emotion is intended, it isn’t any of them.

 When he was little, and his mother’s loneliness jangled out of the yellowing keys, he’d seek comfort upstairs in her wardrobe. There was a particular alpaca jacket she had, heavy and stiff, that smelled of her; when he put it on it felt like her arms around him. Later, when she seemed to have returned from wherever it was she’d been, he’d bring her something: a dandelion or a broken shard of blue-and-white pottery out of the garden. If she accepted his gift, it was a sign she was back. If she stared at it distractedly, looking through it as if it weren’t there; or in perplexity, as if it had found its way into her hand by magic and had some hidden significance she could devise if she only pondered it long enough, then he’d slip away again and try later.

She is in one of those moods when he returns from visiting his aunt in Richmond. He lights a lamp and comes to sit by her. She plays Bist du bei Mir twice on the piano, all the way through. Her voice cracks on the high notes, but she sings it anyway. Then they sit in silence. He is bursting with the story of his visit, but he isn’t going to speak first. The clock ticks. It is a grandfather clock, from Cincinnati. He hears its dry familiar voice, the unhurried sweep of its brass pendulum.

 ‘Well, did you see her?’ she asks at last.

 ‘I did,’ he says.

 ‘And – ?’

 ‘She said he look just like him.’

 ‘I could have told you that,’ she says.

He digests this. ‘I guess I didn’t believe you,’ he says. ‘I so wanted to. Look like him. I thought you always told me that to please me.’

 ‘No,’ she says. ‘I wish you didn’t, sometimes, not so like. But there you are. Sometimes, when I just catch a glimpse of you, through the door, say – ’

 ‘Mama,’ he interrupts her.

 ‘What, honey?’

 ‘She said he worshipped the ground you walked on.’

She nods and smiles. When he was younger he’d have sold all of China and Araby for one of those smiles.

 ‘He really did, then?’ he asks. She’s told him before, but he wants to hear it again now he has another piece of the puzzle to try to make fit.

 ‘He really did.’ And she gets up, and leaves the room, and comes back with a letter she has never before shown him.

My love — it begins, my dearest, only, darling, beloved Eliza...

 As he reads it his hand shakes. The words come right up off the page and get stuck in his throat and choke him. Somehow he’s always imagined that it had just happened. Out of a very human loneliness, or sheer physical need, or for old times’ sake, perhaps. Not like this, not this incandescence, this poetry, this humility.

He gives it back to her, then, and walks over to the mantelpiece. His father’s face looks at him out of the mirror, asking to be understood: and pardoned.

 ‘Don’t ever make me regret I showed you that,’ she says behind him.

He turns and kisses the top of his mother’s silver head; then he kneels and puts his chestnut-brown one in her lap and she strokes his hair.

 ‘I wish I knew I’d see him again,’ she says. ‘Do you think there’s a chance?’

 ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘What if you did? What about – you know – George? General Hamilton?’

 ‘I guess they have a way of working those things out up there,’ she says. ‘I sure hope so, anyway.’

 ‘I think this is our afterlife,’ he tells her. ‘I don’t believe in anything after this. I think we just live on in the people we knew. The ones who loved us.’

 ‘Hmmm,’ she answers. They are swathed in a kind of stillness. Time is something going on outside the windows. ‘I reckon he’ll live on a little while, then. A little while.’

He tells her more about Mrs. Caton, about the sketchbooks and Maisie and how she didn’t need to be told who his mother was.

 ‘I suppose she wouldn’t,’ says his mother slowly. ‘She would have known, if anyone would.’

 ‘Did you?’ he asks.

 ‘Did I what?’

 ‘Know. All that time. All those years. That he loved you. I can’t believe he never told you…’

 ‘Yes,’ she says. She is smiling again. ‘I did know. Of course I did. And no, he never, ever told me. Not out loud; not in so many words. I was married, you see. He couldn’t.’

He had to know: ‘And did you? Love him? All that time?’

 The clock ticks. ‘Yes,’ she says. A long moment passes. ‘You needn’t tell George. But yes, I did. God forgive me, I did. You couldn’t help it. Not when you knew him. Yes, I did.’

* * *

There is another encounter, that takes him by surprise some years later. Traveling with his wife and small daughter, he gives a talk on recent advances in medicine at a church group in a small town in Northern Virginia. After the talk a couple of elderly ladies hobble up to him shyly, one on each arm of the minister, asking for an introduction.

He smiles, bows. The Misses McAllister, he is told.

Begging his pardon, they ask, but on the program it says his name is Dr. Lewis Armstrong Hamilton (he always has it printed in full, thus). They wonder, could he be any relative of the Lewis Armstrong they had nursed following his evacuation from the battlefield of Antietam creek – Sharpsburg – in September of ’62? They don’t mean to be impertinent, they say, but there’s a resemblance…

Yes, he says, bending (they seem a little deaf). Why do they ask?

The taller of the pair takes his arm earnestly: he sees a love-light creep into her face. Her sister takes out a lace-edged handkerchief and dabs her eyes. They had charge of him, they tell him. He always said they saved his life, they add, blushing.

Tell me more, he says, his heart thumping.

After losing his arm, they explain, he was sent out to them for nursing because of the desperate conditions in the Army hospitals. Being good Christians, they had offered their home and their care to any wounded soldier in need of it, of either uniform; though they were particularly touched, to be charged with the care of a true hero of Virginia.

When he arrived, they say, he was raving with fever and the wound was hopelessly mortifying despite the amputation of the shattered limb just above the elbow. His life was despaired of. A second amputation, several inches higher, was performed. (Twice, he thinks: dear God!)

Despite their best efforts, however, the sepsis returned. There was a threat of erysipelas also. They took it in turns to poultice the suppurating wound with scalding gauze. His shrieks distressed them shockingly. Opiates, tincture of laudanum, ether, chloroform, were nowhere to be had at that time, with the Union blockade and so many thousands of fresh casualties from that bloody piece of butchery. They asked the harried doctor what else they could possibly do for him.

Why, spirits, they were told, strong liquor, was called for. Confederate chloroform, that’s what they called whisky, in the South, back in those desperate days.

But theirs was a temperance household! the dear ladies replied.

Well, then, he would just have to suffer, and groan. But they were fond of him. So they took their savings and sent out for brandy, all the way to the next town, so that their purchase should not be known locally; and made sure that at the next dressing he was very well, shall we say, dosed beforehand.

He gave orders for battle, they say, in his fever, and spoke encouragingly to his men: Come on, boys, it’s not far now, come along, that’s the spirit; but most of all, they said, he cried out for Eliza, whoever that might be: his sweetheart, perhaps? He had not mentioned a wife, when he came to himself again.

My mother, Lewis Hamilton tells them gently, all those years later. He was my father. No: they were not husband and wife. They saw each other only once, after the war began. I was the result, he tells them.

They put their hands over their mouths, both of them: the tears flow freely, now.

He loved her so, they say, choking as they speak. Night and day, delirious, close to death: Eliza! Eliza! Eliza, my love! – until his voice was hoarse and cracking, and still, even in no more than a whisper: Eliza! Oh, ’Liza! Come along boys, you can do it – follow me! That’s the spirit ! – Oh, God, Eliza... Close up the ranks, now, close up, hurry along there, put your best foot forward, we’re needed badly, boys – let’s not let ’em down, eh? Come on, Virginians! Rally to me! Smartly now, that’s the ticket... oh! Oh, Eliza... oh, my darling — oh please... oh please, dear God — I love you so ——— !

He tells his wife afterwards, and their little daughter.

Tears come to his eyes also, as he recounts their story.

She is only four, and she does not understand it all: but her father’s emotion makes a deep impression on her. The next day, before leaving town, he brings his family to the Misses McAllisters’ home to be introduced.

They pat the top of Louise’s glossy head, cluck over her name, find her a bag of huge mint humbugs and a much-treasured old-fashioned dolly with faded crinoline skirts and a china face; wave the little family off with hankies, standing under the rose-arbor at their gate.

God is good, they say to one another: and He moves in mysterious ways, dear heavens, yes… did you ever see His workings so plainly as this?

No: never.

Maisie

Richmond

1885

If she could pick one moment of her life to live over again, she thinks, it would be that one: that moment right before he opened his mouth, when her eyes saw what they saw and didn’t pay no never-mind to her brain telling them it couldn’t be, no way, nohow, because of him being dead these twenty year and more.

When she recognizes him. Right there.

As soon as she sees him, she just knows. It hits her like a cleaver, right between the eyes. She doesn’t say nothing to Mizz Suzy, though. Lets her get the surprise, same as she just did. Gives her that moment – his own kith. Standing there as large as life, his daddy all over again, that little hesitating, that heart just shining through anyway.

She thinks of other times, a whole heap: nigh on a mountain of them, like one of them Blue Ridge that stretches on near all the way to the Promised Land, blue and blue and blue, on forever – puts her in mind of those eyes of his.

They took a trip up in those mountains once, the entire family, Mizz Suzy and Marse Caleb and the babbies – and him. He’d got him some furlough, a nice long time, before he went off on some posting on the other side of the country. That was when the babbies were alive – those poor sweet chilluns. She never had any of her own; wishes she had. They were like her own, those two.

They’re angels now, she thinks, no question about that.

They all stayed in a lodge up there. He gave her a picture he was just done painting, because she admired it so. She had brought them a critter she’d found lying in the dirt, for the chilluns to see – they loved such stuff; so did he. Some kind of a big old moth, it was. All green, like — like she didn’t know what: like the color of the fuzz inside a lima-bean pod, all silvery. These fingers of hers have shucked a good few hunnerd thousand of those.

‘That’s a lunar moth,’ he said.

She thought at first he was saying loonie, like crazed in the head. She always loved hearing him explain things to the chilluns – like he used to for her, before they both got too old and he thought it was beneath her dignity to hear things explained. ‘Lunar,’ he said, ‘like the moon. A moon-moth.’ He wrote it right there on the picture for her: Lunar Moth, Monteagle Mountain, Tennessee.

He taught her her letters. Wasn’t supposed to, but he did. It was way back when he was growing, a corn-stalk shooting-up only twice as handsome and ten times as sweet — he’d come on home from school with all that book-learning, and share it with her. Like she shared things with him.

What did a little pickaninny child have to share? Plenty, with a friend that appreciated such things: chinquapins, a clump of early jonquils; the place in the hedge where the fattest, shiniest blackberries grew; the bluebird’s nest in the back of the spring-house; the hummingbird-bush. The April morning when spider-webs were stretched all across the grass, grey with dew, early, real early, before anyone but the two of them was out of bed to trample them – that kind of thing, is what she had to share with him, back then: and he liked it fine. Just fine.

They were friends, is what they were, she thinks. He’d taken it hard, losing his mother the way he did. Seemed like he had one of them restless, lonesome souls always looking for someone or something to care for. So they cared for one another, back then, before they grew old enough to know better.

Till he came back from that boarding-school, and looked at her different. He tried not to, but he couldn’t help it – no more than the rest of them. Lord! She was a sight, then. It was awkward at first, till they could find a minute to talk.

‘You’ve growed up, ha’n’t you, Marse Lewis,’ she said. She made sure to smile so he would know it was all right with her that he had.

She was purty, back then: tender as a new squash swelling behind its crumpled blossom on the vine. She could just about feel the great lump in his throat.

‘So’ve you,’ he told her.

‘Don’t make no niver-min’,’ she tried to assure him. ‘I reckon we still friends, ain’t we?’

‘Always,’ he said. Oh, he said it so firm – so certain, she thinks: always. And they always were. ‘But Maisie – I never gave this any thought before — I mean, you just lived with us, and such — oh, Maisie, don’t it bother you, bein’ a servant?’

She would have been less shocked if he’d slapped her. What kind of question was that to ask a person? When did colored folk speak their minds to white folk, on that subject? Really speak their minds? ’Less they was already free, of course… To answer a question like that would rock the boat, for sure. There they all were with a whole society built on top of folks not saying what they were really thinking. Rock the boat: lordy, she thinks, somebody fall out and git theyselves drowned, if colored folks started-in doing that: saying what they thought.

But she had never lied to him, never. And she wasn’t fixing to start now, not if she could help it. ‘What you think?’ she asked him.

He said nothing – nothing at all. His mouth went all aquiver, like a plucked banjo-string, only no sound came out.

‘Look,’ she remembers saying, ‘don’t you worry yourself none ’bout thet. Iss allus bin thet way. Thet’s jes how ’tis. You wuz borned to be who you is, an I wuz borned to be who I is. Thet’s it.’

She couldn’t make it right, because it wasn’t – not even for him: not at all. But she cared so much for him that she tried, that day. After all, it wasn’t his fault.

She thought he was going to cry.

‘I don’t want to own anyone,’ he said. ‘Ever. I’m not going to live here when — when I leave school. I’m going to get away. So I don’t have to.’

‘Well you don’t, honey,’ she told him. ‘’Cuz I b’long to Mizz Suzy, you know thet. Not to you. And cain’t nobody make you, ef’n you don’t want to.’

They talked about folks owning one another, off and on, after that. Not a lot, but now and then. But that was the first time, so it sticks in her memory. Not like taffy; more like something you got on your shoe. Not his fault, though.

She’d thought he was going to ask her something quite different, in all truth. She was all ready to hear that, instead of what he did say. And she would have said yes, without a second’s hesitation. But he didn’t. Not then; not ever.

No, it was she who asked him, a year or two later. It was right before he went away all the way up North, to that West Point place, the military one.

He had gone outside, after dinner: she had come looking for him, down the garden. ‘I seen the way you bin lookin’ at me,’ she told him. ‘Like you hands is itchin. Like you jes don’t know whut to do wit’ yo’self.’

 ‘Sometimes I don’t,’ he said. She had never seen him go so red before, not even when he’d been out in the sun too long. This red was like someone spilling a wine-stain in his cheeks. It hurt to see it, she was so fond of him.

‘Let me take keer of you, then,’ she said, bold as brass and straight-out. ‘I allus has, Marse Lewis, honey, I don’t allow this be no diff’rent, ef’n you don’t let it.’

 ‘But it is,’ he said. He shook his head, stumbled for words. ‘Maisie —! Ah, god, Maisie… you’re too kind — much too kind. More than I deserve. You’re a – a true friend. But it wouldn’t be right. I couldn’t, Maisie.’

 She thought he meant because she was colored. A darkie. She felt about as big as a ant. He must have seen by the look on her face: ‘Oh my god,’ he said, flushing deeper still, ‘Maisie, you’re beautiful. I — I —’ He was floundering like a fish in the mud.

She will never forget what he found to say next, to get them both out of that hard place. ‘Disrespectful,’ he said. ‘It would be disrespectful to you, Maisie. Because of everything else. Because you’re not in a position to refuse.’

 ‘’Scuse me, honey,’ she said, ‘in case your mem’ry is poor, it wuz me as axed you.’

What got into her then she will never know. Perhaps she wanted him to see exactly what he was turning-down.

She pulled ahold of her frock and peeled it off over her head.

She’d been working in the kitchen, putting up preserves, so she hadn’t bothered with no foolish underclothing that day, not such a hot day as it was and planning on working over that hot stove nigh-on all of it. For waiting on table, company coming, going to market, she’d wear Mizz Suzy’s old things, her shimmy and drawers and such, but loose – it was a good thing the mistress was a sight bigger ’n she was, because she never could have laced them like she did.

But that day she hadn’t a stitch on under her calico frock. Which she had just shucked off. There was no droop to her shape back then, either. Like two plums on a shelf right under his nose, blue-black, a bloom on them even; yes, just like plums in moonlight. Her legs were long, they went on for ever except for where they stopped, which they did eventually: and that was pretty too.

‘Oh, god,’ he said, and his knees crumpled.

She shouldn’t have done it, of course, it wasn’t fair and she knew it. Not to a decent young man like he was. He just knelt there and stared and stared: she’d seen sheets not that white.

Lord, how she wanted him to touch. Every inch of her begged for it. But it was like there was a sheet of glass between them – as if she was one of those stuffed birds arranged so natural on a twig under a dome of crystal, good for nothing except looking-at – and dusting, of course. Lord, how she wished he’d have dusted her even, just that, with those long bony fingers of his. But my, how he stared.

They were outside, down the end of the magnolia-walk, where they’d always shared their secrets and hidden from trouble. Well, now she’d brought trouble here.

Of all the men who ever came panting after her, she thinks, that look of his was the hungriest. She didn’t think he’d ever seen a girl naked before.

Then he just fell on his side in the grass and lay there twitching.

She turned her frock back the right way out and put it back on and knelt down alongside him and held him. ‘I shouldn’t a done thet,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, Marse Lewis, honey. I’m sorry.’

 ‘That’s all right,’ he said. That hot night, the katydids shrilling fit to bust, and he was atremble. ‘That’s all right.’

 ‘I won’t do thet no more,’ she said, ‘Less’n you come to me an tell me thet’s whut you want. I swear.’

‘Thank you,’ he said.

For what? For nothing, she wanted to say. For shaming him. For acting like she had no sense. If she hadn’t done that, she was thinking, if she’d ha’ been patient, maybe they could even have got there. But it was too late for that now.

The katydids were loud in the silence. She waited till he was done trembling, the way you put your hand on a nervous critter and just let it quiet itself.

 ‘There’s somethin’ I got to say fust,’ she told him, ‘afore I shut my mouth up ’bout this an niver say no mo’ to you ’bout it.’

 ‘Fire away, then,’ he said, like he used to when they were chilluns. It raised a little smile, just like he meant for it to; made things more comfortable between them again, after what she had just done to shake them up.

‘Fust you promise me — you swear — thet if you gwine go with a who’, ef’n you even tempted, you stop right thar afore you git a disease an you git on down here to me instead,’ she said. Lord, she was bold, she thinks. She really spoke her mind, that day. ‘I be here fo’ you, Marse Lewis. Don’t you niver go to no who’, go ketchin’ you some ole disease. Niver, you hear me?’

 ‘Thank you,’ he said again. Eighteen years old and the manners of a judge. She would have said politician, the manners of a politician, but you know when they come around being polite that they ain’t gonna give you the time o’ day unless there’s something they gonna get back. They’re polite on the outside and mean as a possum on the inside. You could see right through him, though, Marse Lewis – clear out to the other side: there wasn’t no difference, inside or out. Natural as water. What you saw was what you got, with him.

Too straightforward for his own good, by a long ways.

He was sitting up again, grass in his hair. They had just scythed the walk. His hands were dropped in his lap, casual-like: she pretended not to notice. It was her fault, after all, what she had just done to him. Oh, but she was fine, back then, she thinks, proud still: steaming and dark and about as needful as a cup of coffee first thing in the morning, when you are trembling for it. Not a hair on her body except that fuzz between her legs that stood all in a bush and drew his eyes like it had a life of its own, just a couple of minutes back.

‘That was – a mighty kind thing for you to say,’ he said, muffled, like his voice was wrapped in cotton.

She wishes he would have come to her, all those years. Of course, later she got stout and stiff, he probably wouldn’t have wanted to like he did that night; but back then, hoo-ee, she was like ripe fruit for the picking, just waiting to fall from the twig into his outstretched hand.

But he never stretched it out.

He wanted to give her respect, instead.

She would rather just have had him, she thinks.

Still, they were always friends – the kind that can have hard words and awkward times, even, and still stay friends.

He came looking for her, after the Emancipation Proclamation.

Dear Lord, how Mr. Lincoln set the cat among the pigeons with that. The Confederacy was a big old ant’s nest, and he took a big old stick and stirred it up. Gave them all something to think about. Ole Abe didn’t have the right to do it, said all the newspapers, interfering like that. She read them before she lit the fire with them in the grate: his gift to her. She liked to know what was going-on; reckoned he wouldn’t have minded. It never occurred to them to ask themselves what right they had, she thought, to think they could go owning folks in the first place. Ostriches, they were, folks that thought like that, with their heads stuck down so tight in the sand. Rights — ? Yassir. Freedom — ? Yassir. But ideas were ideas, and folks were folks, good ones and bad ones, all mixed together like beans and stones, can’t nobody pick out all the grit, she thinks. Not even him, with those careful fingers.

Nothing seemed to have changed, in Richmond. Mr. Lincoln could proclaim whatever he damn well pleased, and wouldn’t nobody pay him any mind round thereabouts.

She’d been putting-up dried-peach chutney. The vinegar smell hung around the kitchen, stinging, almost enough to make your eyes water. It was when he was home getting-better from his arm.

Oh, dear lord. The first time she saw him without it, she thought he looked just like a scrawny plucked chicken somebody had started on dismembering and then got busy and didn’t finish the job. She helped him take a bath, dry himself. The bile just rose up in the back of her throat at the sight of him, like the sight was a kick in the belly, that sweet pretty limb gone forever. She toweled him, got him dressed again, ran to her room biting her knuckles so as not to bust out howling.

So he’d come looking for her, down in the kitchen, that day she was making chutney. He’d been home a little while, by then. Christmas and New Year’s had come and gone. Mr. Lincoln had done what he did. He had dressed himself, best he could; wasn’t in his old blue robe. Dressed meant closer to leaving again, and she knew it. So did Mizz Suzy.

‘This war,’ he said. ‘It ain’t about that, Maisie.’ He hadn’t got the strength back in his voice, yet, though; it had a tremor still.

‘Ain’t it?’ she said.

That was all the answer she could find for him. Plenty of time since to wish she’d have spoke different, she thinks. But he had meant well, he wanted her to understand something; and she didn’t have the heart to give him a lie back in his face.

He said nothing. What could he have said? It was as if they had both just picked at a scab.

She put down her spoon. They were confusing times for everyone, sure enough. ‘Marse Lewis,’ she said, ‘I kin see how fer you it ain’t.’

‘Thank you for that,’ he said. He had to clear his throat first, to get the words out.

She used to like that chutney. That’s why she was making it, him being home and all. Lost her taste for it that day, though. Being a servant right there, she thinks, sweet and sour and spicy and kept in a jar. Every time she’d go to take a helping, it reminded her of the look on his face. She wonders if she is the only person to act foolish like that, to choke up on a memory and not want to eat that thing ever again.

The last words he ever spoke to her were about that. Slavery, not chutney. ‘I wish things were different,’ he said.

‘Me too,’ she said, both of them knowing they were indeed wishing for them to be different, only not in the same ways. Oh, they both were praying for the war to be over. And she knew there was plenty of Yankees no more fond of Negroes than the folks round Richmond – less so, if you believed what they said in the papers: they were afraid of all those freed hands a-going north and taking away their livelihood in the factories, the mills, the dockyards. Still and all, though, once they had chosen to pick a fight about it, she would just as soon they didn’t lose it.

Of course, she thinks, nobody knew how bad it would be those first few years after the war, all that ruination and hardscrabble. They thought it would be the end of the struggle, not the beginning. How simple some folks can be, she sighs to herself sometimes, looking-back over it all. Lord, who is she to judge?

So he rode off that morning; she’d fixed-up his uniform real nice, polished up the buttons, stitched that lace just so, pinned up that sleeve like it was a medal. She and Mizz Suzy sat down with all his shirts in a pile and cut off the arms on the left side and sewed them up nice so they wouldn’t flap and get in his way. Mizz Suzy went to cut the first one; but as soon as she started to close the blades to shear it she made a small sound in her throat and put the scissors down again. Maisie picked them up, finished the job so they could get busy with their needles, like they needed to. She’d had more practice doing things that hurt, and not showing it. So his shirts were all done and folded and packed. His orderly stopped by and shone those old boots of his within an inch of their lives, and still she got out of bed an hour early to shine them some more, all on her own, where no-one could see her doing such a useless thing: nor her face, neither.

And he rode off to join his brigade, both of them wishing things were different, only they weren’t; so they made the best of them anyway.

And here was his boy, with his clear wide eyes: Marse Lewis come back to life.

Lordy, oh lordy. She thought she had seen everything: but now, she thinks, how wrong can a person be?

Mizz Suzy still went over to tend his grave, regular as clockwork. She could be crawling on the ground and she wouldn’t miss it. Plants morning-glories close by it with her own hands, every year: blue ones, to climb up the wall so you see them behind the stone when you’re walking that way. Then she has Maisie cut whatever they have in the garden, same as they’d put in his room when he was expected home on leave – a little posy of lilac or a few jonquils: never nothing store-bought, not for him.

* * *

The boy is leaving; she takes him aside in the hall, when Mizz Suzy’s still a ways back in the parlor, tells him where to find it.

He looks at her, at the expression in her eyes. She sees all his easy Yankee assumptions crumble. Startled, he blurts out what he is thinking: god, he says, Maisie – you loved him, didn’t you!

‘What you think?’ she answers him, just like she did his father all those years ago.

* * *

She comes back in her own time, too, what little she has of it, so as not to have to share him with Mizz Suzy; sits there in the shade. Talks to her friend, the way she did when they were chilluns together. Sometimes she’ll bring the blue shell of a robin’s egg or a pretty striped snail-shell, same as she used to, to share with him. She keeps it nice, pulls up them old weeds. Ain’t no weeds getting a look-in there so long as Maisie’s alive, no sir, not a one. Not a single one.

Susannah

Richmond, Virginia

1901

The hands that fold the paper are painfully swollen: her arthritis prevents her from doing much, these days, but this is one letter Susannah Caton has spent half a lifetime intending to write, and she will not fail in it now.

The doctor has told her it’s time, if she wishes to get her affairs in order. She never could abide a mealy-mouthed doctor, and she is heartily glad of this one’s candor; she made sure to thank him for it, with a sincerity that brought tears to his eyes. He is fond of his spirited old patient.

She has dismissed her lawyer, an old friend not much less wheezing and arthritic than herself – and even more gouty, she observes wryly. Let him do the legal mumbo-jumbo, draw it all up and seal it, make it tickety-boo, as her brother would have said with that little half-smile that lives in her memory as if she had last seen it this morning over the breakfast-table, as he read some item of interest out to her over his coddled egg, with Maisie at their elbows pouring more hot coffee. When they could get coffee, that was, of course…

That would have been back when the diamond on her knuckle was the self-same beauty Caleb gave her, way back when he came courting and secured their father’s permission to marry her (though if he had withheld it, she would have married him just the same, but no need to mention that to Father... ) It was paste now, had yellowed through the years as if in reproach to her for selling it. I had to eat, she told it firmly; no sense in freezing and starving with that pigeon’s egg on my hand, now was there! – nor Maisie neither; what would have become of her? I was responsible, with nothing to be responsible on, except for that. So it was missed but not regretted, if that distinction made any sense.

It does to her: plenty of sense. She is a person with no shortage of that particular commodity. She and Eliza have plenty in common.

 She has written, read over once, and is satisfied: it will do. It will have to. She takes in her hands one more time the faded stack of letters, that have meant more than anything to her these past thirty years and more, and taps them gently straight, smoothes them, re-ties the once-red ribbon around them.

She puts her own on the top, and sets them in a small wooden box. They are the most precious things she owns, these and his sketchbooks that she has already given-up. This little pile here is all she has of value, to leave to anyone – the house is mortgaged, she had to help that boy through medical school – and Maisie will need the rest, to get by.

But this – this is priceless. These are him, as he was. Straight from the heart.

She has done well, to have kept these from the chaos of Time and war and destruction. She is prouder of this than of anything: that she has preserved these. Her pride twinkles in her pale blue eyes as she congratulates herself on a job well done.

It was the least she could do, after all.

Richmond, Virginia 1901

To be sent after my demise – S.A.C.

Eliza my dear,

I once promised my brother that I should not share with another living soul the confidences which he reposed in me. He wrote me for over twenty years, Eliza: occasionally, when his heart was too full to be contained, of you.

The vow was made a long time ago, and I have never considered breaking it during my lifetime. I think, however, that you have a right to see the enclosed. Whether they will bring you pain, I do not know. But I think you should be aware, if you are not already, of the depth of his devotion to you: and what he gave up, for it. I say this because you bore him a child, Eliza; in the end you, too, made sacrifices.

How I wish he could have lived, to have enjoyed even for the shortest time such a fulfillment of all his dreams, so long put aside for your sake.

I do not mean this as a rebuke, my dear. It was his choice. Nor did I mention, when I wrote you that first time, that I knew more than you had told me. I should add, I did not know then whether he had succeeded in finding you; therefore, I could not know, until your son came to me, what you finally were to each other. I still considered myself under my vow to him — the confidence was not mine to break.

Now that I am almost gone, however, there can be no-one left in this world except for you who cares that he even existed. What a strange thought that is!

As I said then Eliza, he wrote to me at least once a month for over twenty years. I have saved as many of his precious letters as I was able. Some were lost at the time Richmond was burned and taken, but what I could carry away safely I did. Whenever I read them I hear his gentle voice. He always wrote so directly, from the heart, keeping nothing back. I believe, Eliza, you have a right to these, now. I know you will pardon those passages which bare his soul without thought to appearance or discretion. He was only human. You were everything to him.

I trust you will treasure them, as I have. After all, they and the sketchbooks, his sword – and your son! – are all that remain of him.

I trust we shall meet in the Lord, sister, as we have not done here.

Susannah Armstrong Caton.

* * *

…and with this she sends on all his letters.

His Eliza ought to know; she ought to know all of it, all he felt, all he endured for her sake and never told her.

These are the last gift Susannah has left to share: now there is nothing left but memories. They will suffice to fill her; there is no need for her hands to grasp anything beyond the grave. Everything she cared for has long preceded her there.

Eliza

Philadelphia

1901

The first time I read all his letters to Suzy, I didn’t talk to anybody for a week.

I just stayed in my room and wept over them, reliving all those times. I thought I knew how he felt, but to read it in his own words still crucified me. The years fell away and we were all there again, just as he wrote.

Most of it I knew, of course, though to see it through his eyes was like seeing something backwards in a mirror, or upside-down… and he had such a gift for capturing the little details that bring things to life. I could hear his voice, over and over, in every line, each word — it was like being there at his elbow.

Our lives together.

I thought about this last extraordinary exchange of gifts, between myself and his sister — his son, his soul.

And then, of course, there were the things I didn’t know; although I had guessed, I guessed even before the night he finally came to me and was so very tender and so skilled. Although that confirmed it; he even said so, that night, wanting no secrets from me.

But I didn’t know any more than that; I thought I never would.

All those years we spent together, the three of us, I had wondered if anyone ever held him close – if anyone loved him, in all that time. I truly didn’t know, as I mentioned earlier; he was so private. Never in all the years we lived on the same post did a single breath of scandal follow him – except for that foolishness of Kitty’s.

I always felt sure there must be more, that he didn’t say.

I read those letters especially with trembling fingers, his name on my lips. I wanted him to have known some comfort – I really did. It was too unbearable to think otherwise.

Two lovers, in all that time, that he mentioned — only two, dear god.

First, Mexico — I read that one letter from Mexico, and sat back in the chair and closed my eyes and pictured it…

Lewis, so vulnerable in his young-manhood.

This widow, Inez whoever-she-was, latching onto that to increase her consequence and perhaps fill some emptiness of her own… if I gave it the kindest interpretation.

Though I knew I could never know what it was really like.

Still, now that I had known Lewis as a lover, I couldn’t help wondering… as I wondered all over again who were the women in his sketches, preparing food, bending over laundry, carrying water-jugs on their heads? Did they have names? Had he spoken to them, smiled at them, asked if he might paint their pictures as they went about their everyday tasks?

It would not have been like him to sketch a stranger without permission, even a peasant: so he must have.

Was it Inez that taught him how to love a woman?

No; he already knew that, before she met him: he had taught himself that. But perhaps she showed him how to make love to one.

Perhaps.

Idle speculations, but when they are all you have, as I said, you can’t help wondering…

…and then that Indian girl.

Oh my dear Lewis. Ten years, ten long years, ten full years after Mexico! And not a word of anyone else, in-between.

No wonder it happened: how could anyone blame him, so far from home and in an alien culture, without our beliefs and our morality? After all we had been through in Texas; after I had born my son, and then we had been posted so far away, left him there in Kansas Territory and then Fort Laramie without us: how lonely he must have been — he was.

It explained much, of course, that he never told us. He might well have been reticent, when he spoke of that time among the Sioux. I had no idea how completely shaken he was by it; but I always knew there was something that troubled him, about the whole episode…

George wouldn’t have understood; perhaps it was just as well Lewis didn’t confide in us, then.

I try to imagine her. He didn’t even mention her name.

Was she comely? Did she smell? Was he desperate?

I wonder…

Well, no-one will ever know, now; he took those secrets to the grave with him.

He could always be trusted with a confidence.

Eliza

Philadelphia,

1913

  I was re‑reading the Holy Book this morning. After all, a little Bible study before rising is entirely suitable for a respectable widow – a General’s widow, no less – in her declining years.

 ‘A bundle of myrrh is my beloved unto me... ’

 The last time anyone lay all night betwixt my breasts was a good while ago now, of course. Fifty years or so. Half a century.

 ‘As a piece of a pomegranate are thy temples within thy locks...’ Well, that’s stretching the truth a little. Actually his forehead was high, painfully furrowed, jutting under cropped, receding hair. The responsibility haunted him, I could tell. He never became used to ordering men to their deaths.

 I do not consider this to be a weakness.

 And the frankincense and myrrh business – common in the Holy Land, I daresay.

 He smelt of arnica and lye soap and sweat. His belly wasn’t too much like a heap of wheat set about with lilies either.

But his mouth was most sweet; he was altogether lovely; comely as Jerusalem; and he was mine, for a little while.

Terrible as an army with banners… double canister, at ten paces – that’s terrible, all right.

Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is as strong as death; many waters cannot quench it.

Oh, whoever that wrote that part, King Solomon or whoever it was, they knew what they were talking about. I take my hat off to them for those lines. Wish I could find words like that, to tell all I want to. I have tried. I know I have barely told the half of it – less than that, even.

What was it all about, what they both died for?

I still wonder.

I don’t believe women prize honor the way men do. I still cannot decide if it was absolutely, tragically ineluctable – or a piece of damnfoolery which could have been avoided if men like Lewis and George had not been so willing to sacrifice their lives for it; and if women such as myself could have prevented them from doing so. Duty – slavery – rights – I don’t know. We put one set of meanings on things at the time, and another in hindsight… And, dear God, what an empty exercise that is: and how men take it to their hearts!

I am so very tired of other people passing judgment on what they do not understand, and never will. What is decency, anyway? It’s not about maintaining respectability at all costs: that much I know. That would be a wretched betrayal of the word. Decency… something you are, the way you live, they way you meet another’s eyes when you speak.

The way they did.

George with that straightforwardness you couldn’t help liking; Lewis with his soul in his face and not knowing it.

I think it is time for me to join them both in eternity.

Oh, but I’m old. I’m hardly the lovely, passionate creature Lewis has been waiting for all this time. He will be forty-three forever.

I shuffle, and sometimes – I don’t tell my son George – I wet the bed. Just a little. My granddaughter Louise helps me with the sheets, so no-one will know. It’s our secret. Dignity is a precious commodity at my age.

 I still sleep in the same bed. My son George says it’s a disgrace. He wants to buy me a new bed, too. Mama, he says, it’s not worthy of you. Besides, nobody sleeps in one of those old rope‑strung beds any more. Well I do, I tell him. It’s been restrung, and I don’t weigh too much these days. Besides which, I want to add, I made love in this bed once, under this same shabby coverlet he so despises, and it’s had to last me the whole rest of my life – but since it’s not his Papa I am referring to, I keep quiet on that score and tell him I am too old to change my ways. Which is quite true.

Louise has Lewis’s eyes — an intense blue, expressive, with the love‑light in them I can hardly bear to remember. But in a way the almost unbearable remembering is all that makes any of it bearable, all the rest of my life: the labors of raising two sons alone, of keeping my head up in the face of gossip and censure, the endless rows of preserved tomatoes and beans, clothes on the washing‑line, mending, beds, excrement, bills on account; visiting the one grave every week and the other never. But I must say the grave I should like to end my days in is the unvisited one, the grave in Virginia. Susannah wrote me of it: I can see it as though I had been there a thousand times, shaded over with chestnuts now grown to their full height, their roots nourished by his sweet flesh. A good choice, I think: his hair was chestnut, in certain lights. By lamplight.

 I could have afforded to go. George has been very successful in his line of business. It wasn’t the money, nor even the journey. I have been to Paris and Florence, after all. I could have traveled first‑class and stayed in the finest hotel in Richmond, as many times as I would have liked. And I regret not having spoken with Susannah Caton before she died. But I feared that I could not bear for us to part a second time; I imagined that I should simply lie down there upon the quiet turf in all weathers until I, too, dissolved into the ground.

In a chest I have George’s sword and dress uniform put away, still handsome with its bright gilt buttons; and beside my bed is Lewis’s bible. And, of course, I have my sons with their fathers’ names and their fathers’ ways at every turn, mingled so strangely with my own: George all dash and brilliance, ambitious, with a tendency (if I am honest) to bully those who are less clear‑sighted and quick to action than he. And Lewis, so very hard-working and dedicated – too much for his own good I sometimes think; one of these days he will catch pneumonia hurrying to some house where he is needed in the middle of a storm with his patent oilskin cape and battered black holdall. I wish he would buy himself an automobile.

 Good boys, both of them. I am proud of how they have turned out.

 I see how it must appear: as if I love Lewis more than George. I must say I have always believed it perfectly invidious for a mother to favor one of her children over another. They are both fine, decent individuals by any standards. George has supported me these many years in the greatest comfort a mother could possibly desire – more than I am at ease with, if I am to be honest, for I have always lived modestly – and a more obliging, dutiful son is not to be found anywhere, I will wager any amount on that.

Regrettably, though, it is his misfortune not to have inherited his father’s most shining quality, a perfect amiability, a particular sunniness of nature, which went so far to render charming the more forceful aspects of his character. But then, my George’s childhood had quite a different flavor from his father’s. Not that any excuses need to be made for him: not at all. I do not think I am being partial in saying this. Avoidance of the truth is a thing I despise, however noble the excuse. Lewis has the gentleness that George lacks – an extraordinary sweetness of disposition; it makes him more easily loveable. People find George admirable. They adore Lewis.

 Oh, very well then. So do I.

 I do try so very hard not to let it show.

Good boys: good men. I wish their fathers could see them.

Sometimes I feel a sense of peace about it all; and others, I still can hardly bear it.

What do I mean? Oh, all of it. George’s magnanimity; that letter of Lewis’s from Minnesota, when we were so far away and he was so desperately lonely. He wrote something that still just makes the bottom drop out of my stomach every time I see it, in his slanting hand, not quite so smooth as usual:

… I shall always be an outsider, always a friend never the beloved, indispensable to no-one; I thought it would suffice but it don’t.

Didn’t he know? How precious he was, to so many people?

Did he really not know?

How could we have taken him so for granted?

Well, in the end, he knew: I comfort myself with that thought. He knew just how much we thought of him, George and I.

Everything: both of us.

I stare into the fire with his letters in my lap and see their eager faces; or hear the rumble of cannon in distant summer thunder — or I read Lewis’s favorite passages in his Bible early in the morning before rising from my bed, in the grey light before sunrise when the ghosts of a hundred thousand men strike camp across a dozen states… and then I know I am just waiting out my days until the Lord decides to conclude the book on it all and write ‘Finis’.

He seems to be taking His own good time.

I must say I would have no objection to His hurrying up a little.

— Finis —

Note:

 Those readers knowledgeable about the Civil War will see that I have borrowed elements of this narrative from the lives of Brigadier General Lewis A. Armistead, of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, and his close friend Major General Winfield S. Hancock, of the Union Army of the Potomac.

 The differences, however, are significant and substantial. They are not intended to be the same people. Armistead actually did not graduate from West Point; he was ‘found’ (sent down) for breaking a plate over Jubal Early’s head. He was also a widower. It is the case, however, that after Armistead’s heroic death at Gettysburg, his Bible was sent at his request to Mrs. Hancock.

 Hancock, nicknamed the Superb, survived the war, to run for President.

 It has occurred to me to imagine for a while, however, taking inspiration from some parts of this most appealing story and cast of characters, what might have happened if some not dissimilar Union General had been standing a few feet to the left a year before at the battle for Malvern Hill, directly in the path of exploding shrapnel from a Confederate battery; and to invent a very particular significance for the gift of the Bible.

 In thus taking historical leave, I have also altered other names and places, while retaining some well-known ones.

A.A.J. 1994 - 2001