I guess.
Mercy loosed herself from Sallys loving hold, and she stood, wiping at her
eyes. They were red, and so was her nose. Her cheeks were flushed violently pink. Could I have the afternoon, Captain Sally? Just take a little time in my bunk?
The captain remained seated, and folded her hands across her lap. Take as long as you need. Ill have Paul Forks bring up your supper. And Ill tell Anne to let you be.
Thank you, Captain Sally. Mercy didnt mind her roommate much, but she could scarcely stand the thought of explaining anything to her, not right then, while the world was still strangely hued and her throat was blocked with curdled screams.
She walked slowly back into the house-turned-hospital, keeping her gaze on the ground and watching her feet as she felt her way inside. Someone said, Good morning, Nurse Mercy, but she didnt respond. She barely heard it.
Keeping one hand on the wall to guide herself, she found the first-floor ward and the stairwell that emptied there. Now, two different words bounced about in her mind: widow and up. She struggled to ignore the first one and grasp the second. She only had to make it up to her bunk in the attic.
Nurse, a man called. It sounded like, Nuss . Nurse Mercy?
One hand still on the wall, one foot lifted to scale the first step, she paused.
Nurse Mercy, did you find my watch?
For an instant she was perplexed; she regarded the speaker, and saw Private Hugh Morton, his battered but optimistic face upturned. You said youd find my watch. It didnt get all washed up, did it?
No, she breathed. It didnt.
He smiled so hard, his face swelled into a circle. He sat up on the cot and shook his head, then rubbed at one eye with the inside of his arm. You found it?
I did, yes. Here, she said, fumbling with the pocket on her apron. She pulled it out and held it for a moment, watching the sunlight from the windows give the brass a dull gleam. I found it. Its fine.
His skinny hand stretched out and she dropped the watch into the waiting palm. He turned it over and over, and asked, Nobody washed it or nothing?
Nobody washed it or nothing. Its still ticking just fine.
Thank you, Nurse Mercy!
Youre welcome, she mumbled, though shed already turned back to the stairs, scaling them one slow brick at a time as if her feet were made of lead.
Two
By the second afternoon, everyone knew that she was a widow.
Only Captain Sally knew she was a widow of a Yankee.
There was always the chance it wouldnt have mattered if everyone knew. Kentucky was a mixed-up place, blue grass and gray skies, split down the middle. Virginia was nearly the same, and she suspected shed find proof enough of that in the Washington hospital where the boys in blue were brought when theyd fallen. All along the borderlands, men fought on both sides.
Phillip had fought for Kentucky, not for the Union. He fought because his fathers farm had been attacked by Rebs and halfway burned; just about the same as how Mercys own brother fought for Virginia and not for the Confederacy because her family farm had been burned down twice in the last ten years by the Yanks.
Everyone fights for home, in the end. Or that was how she saw it. If anyone anywhere was fighting for states rights or abolition or anything like that, you didnt hear about it much anymore. Those first five or six years, it was all anyone had to talk about.
But after twenty?
Mercy had been a small child when the first shots were fired on Fort Sumter and the war had begun. And as far as shed ever known or seen since, everything else had been a great big exchange of grudges, more personal than political. But it could be that shed been looking at it too closely for the last fourteen months, working at the Robertson Hospital, where they sometimes even treated a Yankee or two, if he was caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, and especially if he was a border-stater. Likely as not, he was kin or cousin to someone lying on a cot nearby.
Likely as not, he hadnt been born when the war first broke out anyway, and his grievances were assigned to him, same as most of the other lads who moaned, and bled, and cried, and begged from their cots, hoping for food or comfort. Praying for their limbs back. Promising God their lives and their children if only they could walk again, or if only they didnt have to go back to the lines.
Everyone prayed the same damn things, never mind the uniform.
So it might notve mattered if anyone knew that Vinita May Swakhammer of Waterford, Virginia, had married Phillip Barnaby Lynch of Lexington, Kentucky, during the summer of her twentieth birthday-knowing that theyd been born on the wrong sides of a badly drawn line, and that it was bound to come between them some day.
And it had.
And now he was on the other side of an even bigger line. Shed catch up to him one day; that was as certain as amputations and medicine shortages. But in the meantime, shed miss him terribly, and take a second afternoon off her shift to mourn, if she could.