An Account for a Bullet

Father would be pardoned to return to his life as a country doctor. He was the only joy of mine the War took that it returned, but with Father's release came certain complications I had avoided. David had gone from hiding in my house because he was an enemy soldier to hiding because he was a Union deserter; either was an appointment with the gallows. In the year, none but me had seen him. Father would accept him on sight of the bullet from his leg, of that I had no doubt, but it was the world outside the house that worried me. No matter how I wanted it, I could not simply call on the minister to come by the house to marry me to a man with no name and a Yankee accent.

Though we were careful to have him spill his seed on my back or belly when we were conjugally joined, I had not bled for two months.

We knew the easiness of our way with each other was soon to end, even under best circumstances. We would have to wear all of our clothes again. He would no longer be able to take me rough against the wall of the formal parlor and I could no longer peel vegetables while he smacked from under my skirts. Freed from fear of catching with another child and having such short time with our other liberties, we came at each other day and night until we were both of us sore as postal riders. At night, I held to his chest as if my arms alone could keep him beside me.

A letter from a second cousin of mine gave me the idea I needed to not become a widow before I was a wedded wife. I got fitted for a new corset and underclothes, but planned to take only a black dress I could stand to burn when my task was through.

On the morning I was to leave, David knelt before me on the floor. I hooked my right calf over his broad back and gripped his hair in both my hands, pressing his face to my sex. I felt all tension leave him as he used his tongue to worshipfully take the seed he had just spread inside me into his mouth. If my mission failed, this would be one of our last communions. He would have to leave to go west as soon as he was provisioned. My sex still rang like a bell in my pelvis from his previous ministrations, so it was not long until he had led me to paroxysm yet again, my cries of pleasure startling birds from branches outside the window. I lowered my leg and stroked his shining face with one hand, the other still holding firm to his dark hair.

"No more, or I will miss my coach to Nashville."

"What am I to do without you, even for this week?"

"There are plenty of supplies..."

"You know that's not my meaning."

"I do." He put his forehead against my belly. I unfurled my fingers from his hair and rested them behind his ear. "Do you trust me?"

"With my very life."

"Then trust that I will not accept losing one more thing to these hungry years."

* * * *

They called it the Battle of Franklin, though the pit that yawned next to the McGavock's pretty summer house told the real tale. It was a story of a massacre inked in bodies shattered by cannon fire and writ on late November ground frozen too unyielding for anything but shallow graves improvised from Union trenches. Once, there had been wooden markers with the names of the identified dead. Two hard winters had passed since then, and the dead had less care for their names than the living had for kindling. My cousin wrote me that they needed a few women with good sense and strong constitutions to help identify the uncovered bodies so they might be boxed and shipped to their respective newly-united states or buried individually here, if their homeplaces could not be determined.

There were some troop manifests to use as a cross-reference, but most of the work to be done was to search the pockets for letters received from wives and mothers. From those, a soldier's name, regiment, home town, and last fears all could be discovered. All of the information we could glean about the soldiers was written in a single leatherbound book in the front parlor of the white-columned house.

A surprising number of the fallen Rebel soldiers had photographs of themselves in life, which made my task much easier. I tied a perfumed handkerchief across my nose and mouth and began work on the edge of the drift of gray bodies. Any one of them, their eyes sunk in to nothing and their lips pulled back grotesquely over their teeth, could have been my soldier if he had been there two Novembers gone; I was looking for the one that could have passed for him while living.

Workers dug neat lines of graves in the shadow of a young oak tree a hundred yards from the house. Between searching for letters and adding names to the master ledger, I tallied the holes: eight-hundred, and the workers slowed not.

On the second day, I found Nathan Lewis. In life, the photograph in his pocket showed a broad-chested man with thick dark hair and trimmed side whiskers. In death, he wore the same slack face as everything else that was clawed out of the Earth in that accursed place. David could be his half-brother or cousin, easily. Better still, Nathan Lewis' letters showed he was a bachelor and his brother was killed at Manassas. His only living relation was his widowed mother. I had hoped she was deep in Georgia or Virginia, so far that she would never hear of a Nathan Lewis marrying in Tennessee. My good luck in finding him was not to fully hold, though, as Widow Lewis lived but three towns up the highway from my own. I would have to trust that she was dead, blind, or persuadable, since a better match to my David was unlikely. I secreted all of Mr. Lewis' personal effects in a pocket I had sewn in my petticoat and marked his body as one of the dozens of unknowns, destined for an unmarked grave.

* * * *

It was a lovely June day, and Nathan wanted to leave off from the garden to try the new horse at carriage. My nausea and fatigue of most of the week had improved substantially, so I joined him. I directed him to a tidy white wooden house in Dixon, so that I could bring a crock of pickled beets to a widow of my acquaintance. When he moved to dismount the carriage, I asked him to stay with it, for the horse was nervous and I would only be inside a moment.

The Widow Lewis answered the door at the first fall of the brass knocker. She was a woman near as wide as tall but, unfortunate to my purpose, with hawk's eyes over her doughy cheeks. She examined me and looked to the carriage in her yard.

"Are you from the church?" She shook her head, "I am not much for social calls these days."

"No, Ma'am. My name is Ada Frazier. I am to be wed to your son."

"My sons are dead. You shame the devil with that lie."

"Your son John is dead, yes. At Manassas, Nathan told me."

"Did he tell you that before or after John Bell Hood charged him to his death in Franklin?"

"But he did not fall at Franklin."

"Then he was the only one," she squinted at my soldier in our carriage.

"He was grievously wounded, yes, but I nursed him to health. He asked me to speak to you while he stayed back apace because he was afraid you would not recognize him now. He could not bear it."

"That is not my son." She appraised my slender torso, "when you have one of your own, you will know him on sight, too. Get out of my yard." She pushed the door, but I jammed the hoop of my skirt inside before it could close. I dropped all pretense of gentility.

"If you close this door you will regret it 'til Judgement Day."

She coughed in disgust. "What is it precisely that you require, Miss Frazier?"

"To give you these pickled beets," I said, handing her the crock. She took it, bewildered, "and to give you a choice. You may be the mother of two dead sons today or one who yet lives." I touched the front of my blouse over where I was secretly starting to swell. "You may choose to be a grandmother. No other mother is going to have that choice this year."

She closed the door and said no more of it.

* * * *

May came and came and came again. Father returned to the practice of his medicine and built a new surgery in town alongside the house where he moved when we found I would have a second child in August. Nathan aided me with the baby and the crops. He did whatever else involved little conversation with neighbors and shopkeepers. His leg gave him small trouble most days, but was pained when the seasons changed. Every Sunday he drove our cart-and-pair to take our daughter to see his mother and every time came back with her little hands sticky with jam, spoiled by her grandmother's affections. My life as Mrs. Nathan Lewis was a sweet one.

Being with child made the day's heat intolerable in the summer kitchen, even when the breeze picked up through the openings between the logs. I waited for the rest of the house to fall deep into sleep to slip out to the kitchen to cook for the coming day. I was pleased with my freedom from the demands of husband and child and all other eyes. I wore only my pantalets and chemise, leaving shoes, dress, corset, and the sodden weight of my petticoats in the house with great relief.

I worked perhaps an hour before I heard someone creeping through the yard. I turned not from the work table, but listened close through the open kitchen door and tightened my hand upon the horn handle of my knife. If the interloper appraised a simple target when he saw me barefoot and stripped to my underclothes with the swell of my belly before me like an October pumpkin, he would be in for a bloody correction. The floorboards of the porch creaked, my spine a spring compressed.

Shaving soap and sweat, aromas intimately familiar, coaxed my fingers from the knife as two sun-browned hands clasped at my breasts from behind me. I sucked breath sharp through my teeth.

"Please, I can hardly bear even the touch of a dress. I am unrelenting sensitive now."

"That, my love, is the lure." My soldier flattened his palms against my swollen breasts and clenched his fingers against my flesh, drawing a ragged moan from down in my very core. He thrust his knee between my legs to brace his foot against the bottom rail of the work table, lifting all but the brushing tips of my toes from the floor. I bucked along his thigh while he kneaded and pulled at my burning breasts through the thin cotton of my chemise. My legs shook and shot stiff as spasms, the first of many that night, rolled through my sex.

His left hand drifted down to caress the swell of my stomach, tight and round as a keg around our baby. His right hand moved up to tip my chin to the ceiling and he laid his fingers firmly across my throat. He sucked at the skin above my clavicle.

"My name, Ada," his voice, even whispered against my neck, could scarce be heard above the crickets in the dark of the yard. "Call me by my name."

"David." Mine alone to know in the dark.

*****

Thank you for reading my story. It started as part of the fifth Friendly Anonymous Writing Challenge, where all of the authors agreed to use the same opening line but otherwise wrote wildly different stories. I edited and expanded this version from the one I posted previously, based on the helpful feedback I received. If you enjoyed this story, please vote and comment. I love reader feedback, because it makes me a better writer.