Most days of the winter bivouac, he came alone to this narrow water, barely a stream, just a rivulet, brush and vines to one side, rushes to the other. Two broken-down rowboats rotted in a bend. The water glimmered toward Cedar Mountain. The reflection, the shimmer, put him in mind of the clear dappling ribbons tracing through the flat fields of his childhood. That the shapes of the streams were so similar, even to the gentle bends and wide-mouthed opening that tightened to a false horizon, confounded him. The little boats were ruined versions of the one he’d drifted in with his girlish wife, tangling limbs to lay still and not be seen through the green shoots of the fields. Those moments, in all he’d traversed these three years of the War, away from her, came back to him.
They’d made no children in those short years before battle commenced. It seemed a trick of fate when she got with child just as War broke out. He was sick to go, sick to stay, but the babe, safe in the mountains now, was a more urgent reason the War must be won. There should be a child, if things were well. He read letters from the first months again and again, but his Seventh West Virginia Volunteer Cavalry Regiment had been pulled into the Third Brigade, Second Infantry. Cavalry sharpshooters ranged farther than their infantry counterparts and moved on verbal order. Letters seldom found them, and he mailed his own missives into a void, one camp to another. He’d seen children and their stunned families streaming out of battered Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg: weak, coughing children, black and white, with rheumy eyes.
