Distant Flame

Winter, 1862-1863

Winter, 1862-1863 O EYOND THEHOUSE THERE was an apple orchard and past that a fallow cotton field. Fingers of apple limbs climbed the cold sky toward a cluster of stratocumulus clouds. The day, which had been reasonably warm, though edged with an irritated wind, was turning bitter as the sun fell apart toward Atlanta sixty miles west. Charlie stood and watched the twin chimneys of the small house begin to cough out smoke, thinking of his father and brother, considering the many chambered vaults of heaven and wondering how the dead found their families. Was love deathless, after all? What if you found your father, and he had lost reason or recognition? After the Battle of Fredericksburg in December, more sorrow spread through Branton, even though General Lee had won. The town, never wholly absorbed into the idea of secession, turned sullen and shadowed. Charlie did not try to shame himself with guilt. All he considered, as the weather turned sharp, then bone-achingingly cold, was Sarah Pierce. Now, however, Jack was often ill, and Charlie had the iron taste of fear and wondered what dark corners the light of reason might illuminate , and which ones it could never reach. Lincoln's emancipation order was like a burned house, a place without shape but somehow familiar , and Charlie had tired of hearing local firebrands saying this was somehow the best thing for the Confederates—a flame to the tinder. B 206 PHILIP LEE WILLIAMS Now the sun began to shade toward blood. Sometimes countryhens laid eggs with red yolks, but this was unlike that, more like the first shudders of conspiracy or unexpected death. When they had moved into the house many weeks before, it was hot and stuffy, and rain sprayed through wall cracks; they damped down the puddles with old towels, and Martha, who feared storms, would sit rocking on the floor. Now, the wind howled beneath it, and the single fraying rug in the front parlor waffled with a sharp breeze, lifting as if spirits were mad to enter. Betsy kept flames in the fireplaces on both sides of the shotgun hallway, but the warmth extended only a few feet. Women from the Baptist Church brought charities, and Charlie turned quietly away or went for a walk when they came. Betsy, formal in breeding and Southern in manners, accepted clothing and food for her children. Mr. Thomas McCombs , seventy and mild in politics and manners, paid for alaundrywoman to wash and iron, picking up on Monday and returning on Tuesday morning. The laundress was a silent old woman named Harriet Kilmarlin, whose eyes were as hard as her hands. Death had wormed his way through the Branton Rifles, with wounds and disease rife. David Magruder, a young banker elected captain in the Rifles, died from pneumonia near Malvern Hill. Louis Vaught, a poor man seeking glory as a private soldier, took a ball in the face at Marye's Heights. Hunter Baldwin, a lawyer and city councilman, died from gangrene, which grew like an autumn garden on a slightly wounded foot after Sharpsburg. Though the Confederacy had reclaimed Galveston, it was shaken, and the town debated the war fiercely. Charlie, fifteen, thought of the battlefield. Yethe could not abandon Jack, and his love for Sarah bound him with steel bands to the town and its manifold sorrows. "Charlie! Supper's ready!" cried Martha. She was growing taller now, blond like Tom and sturdy, defiant. "Coming," he said. The skywas lowering now, and he looked upon it, feeling like an Old Testament prophet, seeing auguries in the bloody streaks, messages from a God who had abandoned him long before. When he was well, Jack worked alongside Charlie on the house, nailing and sawing, planing boards to replace the sagging front porch. Charlie scraped the buckled whitewash from the window frames and smoothed white lead paint, supplied by the church, around the sunstruck windows. Together, they levered up the spent shingles and re- A Distant Flame 207 placed them, laughing as they made sly comments about fat wealthy men moving down the streets in their precious hacks. "That rail wouldn't hold a flea on a crutch," said Jack, laughing one day. Charlie stepped back and looked at his handiwork, a lean strip beside the sharply ascending steps at the back of the house. "You are to a carpenter as a goat is to a stallion...