The Perfect Hope Part 81

It seemed like hours he lay there, staring through the smoke to the blue of the sky, listening to screams, moans, shouts, and the endless, incessant, world-filling clatter of gun and cannon.

Minutes only in reality. Only minutes to breathe, to understand his friend was dead and himself alive by inches.

His hand trembled as he reached inside his uniform, carefully took out the photograph. Eliza. Lizzy. His Lizzy with hair like sunlight and a smile that opened his heart. She loved him, despite all. She waited for him, and when this h.e.l.l was over, they'd marry. He'd build her a house-not so very far from where he lay now. But the house would live with love and joy, with the laughter of their children.

When this h.e.l.l was over, he'd go back for her. He'd had one letter, and only one. Smuggled out of her house, to his mother, and pa.s.sed on to him. He'd read her despair at being locked in on the night they'd planned to elope, and her unwavering faith that they would find each other again.

He'd written her only the night before, carefully forming the words while restless in camp. He'd find a way to get the letter to her. No man could live through h.e.l.l and not believe in heaven.

He'd have his with Eliza. They'd have forever.

He heard the shouted orders to regroup, to advance again on that d.a.m.ned sunken road. He closed his eyes, pressed his lips to the image of Eliza, then slipped her carefully away again. Safe, he promised himself. Safe against his heart.

He got to his feet. Breathed, breathed. He would do his duty to his country, trust in G.o.d, and find his way back to Lizzy.

He charged again, the murderous hail of bullets flying from both sides.

He lived again as bodies, torn and rent, littered the once quiet farmland. Hours pa.s.sed like years-and somehow like minutes. Morning into afternoon. He knew by the sun he'd lived another morning. He never wavered in duty, shouldered beside others who'd vowed to serve.

He moved forward, climbing fences, through an apple orchard where windfalls scattered over the ground and bees half-drunk buzzed over them. And on the rise looked down at the men in that old road. Finally the high ground served, and they ripped through a gap. He stood near the bend of the road, looked down into horror.

So many dead. It seemed impossible; it seemed obscene. They lay stacked on each other like cordwood, and still those who survived fired, fired, determined to hold that b.l.o.o.d.y ground.

For what? For what? For what? he wondered in some grieving part of his brain, but he heard the order to fire and obeyed. He thought of George, and obeyed. Robbing another mother of her son, another woman of her love.

Taking another life that, like him, only wanted home.

And he thought of Lizzy, pressed against his heart. Lizzy who loved him, despite all. Who waited for him.

He thought of his mother weeping over his brother Joshua, dead at s.h.i.+loh.

He couldn't fire again, could not stop one more heart, drive one more mother to weeping. This was slaughter, he thought. Hundreds dead and hundreds more to die. Farmers and masons and blacksmiths and shopkeepers. Why didn't they surrender? Why would they fight and die in that depressed earth surrounded by their dead brothers?

Was this honor? Was this duty? Was this the answer? Exhausted, heart-broken, sickened at the carnage below, he lowered his weapon.

He didn't feel the first sh.e.l.l punch into him, or the second. He only felt suddenly and terribly cold, and found himself once more on the ground, looking up at the sky.

He thought clouds had rolled over the sun. Everything grayed and flattened. And all the noise, all the h.e.l.l of it dimmed into an almost peaceful quiet.

Was it over? At last, was it over?

He reached a hand inside his uniform for Lizzy, drew her photograph out. Stared, stared as blood smeared over her beautiful face.

Then he knew.

He knew.

Pain came in a sudden, shocking flood as blood streamed out of his wounds. He cried out against it, cried out again in a sorrow too deep to bear.

He would never build her a pretty stone house near the singing creek with honeysuckle growing wild and wild as he'd promised her. They would never fill that house with love, with children.

He had done his duty, and lost his life. He tried to kiss her face one last time, but the photograph fluttered out of his numb fingers.

He accepted his death, he had sworn an oath. But he had sworn one to Lizzy as well. He could not accept that he would never see her again, or touch her.

He murmured her name as the breath and the blood ran out of him.

He thought-his last thought-he heard her call to him. He thought he saw her, her face pale, wet with sweat, her eyes glazed as if with fever. She spoke his name. He spoke hers.

Joseph William Ryder, known as Billy to all who loved him, died on the bend of the road above the sunken ground that came to be known as b.l.o.o.d.y Lane.

RYDER WOKE COLD to the bone, with his throat burning dry and his heart at a gallop. Beside the bed, D.A. shoved his nose against Ryder's hand, let out a nervous whine.

"It's okay," he murmured. "I'm okay."

But in fact he didn't know what the h.e.l.l he was.

Everybody has dreams, he told himself. Good ones, bad ones, weird ones, wet ones.

So he'd dreamed about Billy Ryder. They'd just found the guy's grave. It wasn't such a stretch to dream about him, about dying at Antietam.

A soldier who dies on September 17, 1862? Odds were pretty d.a.m.n good he'd bought it on the battlefield on that bloodiest day of the war.

Billy Ryder had been on his mind, that's all.

And that was bulls.h.i.+t. Stop being an idiot, he ordered himself.

He'd felt something at that grave site, and he felt it now. Something off, something he couldn't quite get a grasp on.

Sleep hadn't helped, obviously. He glanced at the clock, saw it was still shy of five. He wasn't going to get any more sleep, and wasn't sure he wanted to risk it anyway.

The dream, vivid as life-and death-left him unsteady.

He'd stood on that battlefield. He'd walked the sunken road of b.l.o.o.d.y Lane. And though he considered himself a practical, grounded man, he'd felt the pull of the place, the power of it. He'd read books on Antietam-he lived here, after all. He'd studied it in school, taken visiting friends and relations on the tour.

But until tonight he'd never imagined it-no, he corrected, felt it so vividly.

The smells of it, the sounds. Stinging smoke, fresh blood, burned flesh, the raging storm of artillery fire that filled the world above the cries of dying men.

If he'd been a fanciful man he'd have said through the dream he'd lived in it, and died in it.

As Billy Ryder had.

Put it away, he told himself. Beside him Hope stirred a little, and the warmth of her layered over that cold he couldn't quite shake. He thought about just rolling over, onto her, clearing his mind with that slim, soft body.