Page 7 of Always to Remember
“You wanted to go,” Thomas said gruffly. “That counts for a lot.”
“Wantin’ to go don’t count for nothing, Pa. I should have lied about my age. I should have gone—”
“He should have gone!” Thomas bellowed pointing a finger toward the far horizon and a wagon rolling off into the distance. “By God, he should have gone.”
Meg heard the bitter edge in his voice, unusual in the man who had held her on his lap when she was a child and laughed until his burly body shook. She couldn’t remember when she’d last heard him laugh, and she knew she wouldn’t hear him laugh today.
The war had cut deep wounds into the hearts of her family and the whole town of Cedar Grove. Every Sunday, Clayton Holland reopened those wounds when he stepped inside the church.
Sighing into the night, Meg buried herself beneath the quilts. After Reverend Baxter finished his meal and left, her father grabbed his bottle of corn whiskey and headed to the barn. She knew exactly how long it took him to drink himself into oblivion because he did it every night. At just the right moment she’d walked to the last stall in the barn and draped a blanket over the man who had once tucked blankets around her.
Daniel was nowhere to be found, and she was certain he’d run off to meet with his friends and talk about a war that had ended long before they were ready for it to end.
Meg wished it had never started. She longed for the days before the war, for the father who had held her on his lap, for the brothers who had teased her.
She longed for the man who had loved her.
Touching her breast, she remembered Kirk’s caress. When they became man and wife, she was seventeen, he an older and wiser nineteen. For less than a year, they shared the pleasures of marriage.
She’d loved Kirk with all her heart and soul. She’d wanted to grow old holding his hand. She’d wanted to bring his children into the world, but they had not been blessed with children. Now, alone in her bed at night, the emptiness was often a searing pain that engulfed her.
She let her hand whisper across her stomach as his had so many nights, but she dared go no farther. Her hand was not his, rough and callused from working the farm. Her hand was not his, gentle and patient with love.
“Always wear your hair down for me, Meg love,” he whispered as he fanned her ebony strands across his chest.
Then his mouth took possession of hers, and she threaded her fingers through the thick pelt covering his chest.
“Touch me, love, touch me,” he rasped. Slowly, he glided her hand along his stomach, lower, lower still until he groaned, “God, I love you, Meg.” Then he showed her, in all the ways a man could, how much he loved her.
Her tears slipped onto the pillow. She’d been afraid whenever those around her talked in quiet voices about the possibility of war. The small word conjured stark images of blood and death. Kirk consoled her, calmed her fears. Then, just as quickly as lightning flashes through the sky, people no longer mentioned the word in hushed whispers, but yelled it across the land.
It never occurred to them that he would not enlist. When the South asked her people to give their sons, Meg gave her husband. Willingly. Proudly.
And three of her brothers.
That last morning, when they gathered in town, the men had looked dashing in their hand-sewn gray uniforms. Full of confidence. Full of life. Perhaps death had come to them because they dared to laugh in its face and believe they were invincible. They were certain their presence alone would vanquish the enemy.
With pride, she had presented a large Confederate flag to the company, a flag she and the other ladies of Cedar Grove had worked day and night to complete in time for the soldiers’ departure. The men accepted the silk offering with a whoop and rebel yell that still echoed across the land.
Meg’s heart swelled with devotion as they reared their horses before galloping away to face the bitter foe.
Her heart broke with their deaths.
Rolling to her side, she studied the granite figurine that graced her bedside table. A doe protectively shielded her fawn beneath an intricately carved bush. Kirk had given her the statuette because they had seen the deer the day he asked her to become his wife.
But Clayton Holland had sculpted it.
Clay and his father had cut the words into most of the headstones in the cemetery beside the church. Sometimes they carved small statues, particularly for the children’s resting places. She had been tempted to ask Clay to carve granite markers for Kirk and her brothers, but she could not bring herself to ask anything of the town’s coward.
The Union army buried Kirk and her brothers where they’d fallen, along with so many others. As the months rolled into years, she remembered them through a misty gray fog, their features veiled by the passage of time. She could no longer remember the exact shade of Kirk’s eyes. Were they the blue of a sky at dawn or sunset?
Crudely, she’d carved Kirk’s name and her brothers’ names in wood and set the markers in the family plot. Her action constituted a vain attempt to hold onto them, a desperate need to have something by which to remember them. But her makeshift memorial didn’t stop their images from slipping away or ease her pain.
With trembling fingers, she touched the fawn. How could Clay have returned? How could he hold his head up knowing he was a coward? He owed the young men of Cedar Grove, owed them something for not standing beside them. She wanted him to suffer as much as they had before death, as much as she did now in life.
Daniel often said he wanted to pound Clay into the ground, but Meg wanted more. In time, the pain from a physical beating would recede, heal, and scar, but wounds inflicted to the heart left scars that never stopped hurting.
She wanted Clayton Holland to experience the kind of invisible pain that cut thoroughly. She wanted, needed him to face his cowardice, to have it carved into his heart so deeply that he would feel it with every breath he took for as long as he lived.
