Sharpsburg, Maryland. September 1862.
The shelling had stopped three days before, but the cornfield still smoldered. Maggie Hollis could smell it from the barn—burnt stalks and something sweeter underneath, something she wouldn’t name.
She was on her knees beside the cow, a bucket between her shoes, when the pail went over. The cow—Bluebell, but she hadn’t answered to that name since the batteries rolled past—kicked with her hind leg and the milk splashed across the straw.
From the corner stall, a boy in a butternut jacket laughed. It turned into a cough. Blood speckled his lips.
“You mind your own breathing,” Maggie said. She righted the bucket.
The boy was maybe seventeen. His leg was wrapped in a piece of Ada’s blue Sunday dress. They’d torn it that first night because there was nothing else.
Ada came through the barn door with an apron full of rags. “Mama, the creek water’s gone brown again. I can’t get the stains out.”
“Boil it twice,” Maggie said. “Use the lye.”
“There ain’t any lye left.”
Maggie wiped her hands on her skirt. “Then use the ashes from the hearth.”
Ada stood there, her fingers picking at the hem of the apron. She didn’t say what they both knew: the ashes were gone too, the soap, the flour, the salt, the two chickens. The only things left were the cow, a rooster with one leg, and seventeen men who couldn’t stand.
The wounded had come in waves. First the Union boys, carried on doors torn from the church. Then the Confederates, left behind when their line fell back across Antietam Creek. By the time the last rider disappeared over the hill, the Hollis farm had seventeen men in the barn and the wheat field. Three died the first night. Maggie and Ada had buried them in a shallow trench under the oak.
Caleb, twelve, had been sent to Sharpsburg for bandages. He came back with two rolls and a piece of bread, cost twelve cents. He said the town was a hospital now—every pew, every porch, every wagon. The smell, he said, was like the time the larder went bad in August.
Maggie stood up. The cow’s teats swung, empty. Bluebell was giving less every day.
“Go fetch me the deed box,” Maggie said.
Ada blinked. “The one under the floorboard?”
“Go.”
Ada went.
Maggie walked out of the barn. The sun was low over the western hills. The wheat field was flattened, and in the middle of it, a man in a blue coat was trying to sit up. He fell back.
She crossed the yard. The one-legged rooster hopped out of her way, clucking.
The man in the wheat field was a Union lieutenant, older than the others, with a wound in his shoulder. He’d been lucid the day before. Now his eyes were glassy.
“Water,” he said.
She knelt. “You’ll get some. But I need you to tell me something first.”
He swallowed.
“Those three Alabama boys,” Maggie said. “The ones we buried. Do you know their names?”
The lieutenant moved his head. “No, ma’am.”
“Somebody does.”
“He had a letter,” the lieutenant said. “The one with the red hair. In his coat.”
Maggie went back to the barn. The boy in the butternut jacket was asleep. She searched the coats hanging on a nail. She found a folded paper, damp and torn. It was a letter from a woman in Mobile. The name at the bottom was Sarah, and the boy’s name was Henry. Henry Cleary.
She read it twice. The third time, the words blurred.
That evening, Deacon Tolliver came up the lane. He wore a clean shirt, which was more than anyone on the farm had. He stood at the fence with his hat in his hands.
“We need to talk about the burials,” he said.
Maggie kept scrubbing a bandage in a bucket. “They’re buried.”
“The Confederate ones. They can’t stay on your land.”
“They’re in my family plot,” Maggie said.
The deacon’s jaw tightened. “That plot is hallowed ground. For your people.”
“They are my people now,” Maggie said. She didn’t raise her voice.
Tolliver looked toward the wheat field, where three fresh mounds of dirt lay under the oak. “The committee has decided. We’re digging a common trench by the creek. All the rebels go there. It’s the Christian thing, to keep them from desecrating your—”
“The committee can dig all the trenches it wants,” Maggie said. “On committee land.”
“This is a matter of decency. You can’t have Confederate dead next to your husband’s grave.”
Maggie set the bandage over the fence rail. “My husband’s grave has been there eleven years. He’d have something to say about a man telling his wife who can lie next to him.”
Tolliver put his hat back on. “I’ll come back with the constable.”
“You do that,” Maggie said.
He didn’t come back with the constable. Not that day.
The next morning, Maggie took the deed box out from under the floorboard. It was a tin box, rusted at the corners. Inside were the deed to the farm, her husband’s will, and a small leather pouch with three gold coins. She hadn’t touched the coins in eleven years.
She took one coin.
Ada watched from the door. “That’s for emergencies, Mama.”
“This is an emergency,” Maggie said.
She walked to Sharpsburg. The road was rutted with wagon wheels and shell craters. She passed the Dunker Church, its white walls pocked with bullet holes. A woman outside was selling bread for fifteen cents a loaf. Maggie did not stop.
In town, she found the stonecutter. His name was Mr. Eakins. His shop was half-collapsed, but he was there with a chisel.
“Three stones,” Maggie said. “Small ones. Just names.”
He quoted her four dollars and sixty cents.
She put the gold coin on the counter. It was worth five dollars.
“Keep the change,” she said. “Carve them today.”
He looked at the coin. “Today.”
She walked home with the receipt in her apron pocket.
That night, the cornfield stopped smoldering. The wind came up from the south, warm and wet. Maggie stood at the fence and watched the last of the smoke drift toward the creek.
The Union lieutenant died before morning. She sat beside him until his breathing stopped. Then she covered his face with the blanket.
The next day, the stones arrived. Mr. Eakins came in a cart with the three limestone markers. Ada and Nell helped him set them in the family plot, next to the fresh mounds.
Deacon Tolliver showed up as the last stone was being set. He stood at the fence. His clean shirt was wilted now.
Maggie stayed by the graves. She took the family Bible from the house—Ada had brought it out—and opened it to the back page, where births and deaths were recorded.
She wrote three names. Henry Cleary. James Otey. The third was just “W. Simmons, Alabama” because that was all they’d found in his coat.
Maggie had no pen. She borrowed one from Mr. Eakins. She paid him nothing extra for it. He didn’t ask.
Tolliver spoke from the fence. “You can’t do that. The county—”
Maggie turned the Bible around so he could see the page.
From the barn, the one-legged rooster crowed.
Tolliver read the names. Then he looked at the stones. Then he walked down the lane.
The next morning, Maggie climbed into the loft. She found a half-empty bottle of whiskey and a jar of honey. She’d saved them for the wounded. Now the wounded were either gone or on their feet.
Ada came up the ladder. “Mama? The cow gave a full pail this morning.”
Maggie set the bottle down. “Good.”
Ada worked a splinter in the ladder rail with her thumbnail. “Are you sorry about the gold coin?”
Maggie shook her head. “I’ll write to the families tonight. That boy Henry—his mother’s name was Sarah. She ought to know where he’s lying.”
“What about the other two?”
“I’ll write what I can. The postmaster said three cents a letter.”
Ada bobbed her head. “I’ll help.”
They sat in the loft until the sun came through the cracks. Below, in the barn, the one-legged rooster scratched at the straw. The cow lowed. And somewhere up the road, a wagon rattled toward Sharpsburg.
That evening, Maggie wrote the three letters at the kitchen table. The kitchen clock had stopped at 9:17 on the morning of the battle. She had not wound it since. The ink was thin, and the paper had been cut from the pages at the back of the Bible—blank ones, no scripture. She’d made an envelope from a piece of wallpaper that had peeled off the parlor wall.
She folded each letter. In the first, she put a lock of hair. In the second, a button from a coat. In the third, nothing, because there was nothing left of W. Simmons but his name.
The next morning, she walked to Sharpsburg again. The postmaster, a man named Goshen, took the letters one by one. He weighed them. “Nine cents,” he said.
Maggie counted out nine pennies from the tin box. She’d taken the money from the bread jar—Caleb’s twelve-cent bread had been the last purchase, and the jar still held eleven cents.
She pushed the pennies across the counter.
Goshen looked at her. “You want them to go out today?”
“Today,” Maggie said.
He stamped each envelope. The sound was like a heel on a floorboard.
She walked out into the street. The air smelled like rain and like nothing burning. She had the receipt for the stones in her apron pocket. She had eleven cents left in the tin box. She had a cow that was giving milk again.
At the edge of town, she passed Deacon Tolliver. He was standing outside the dry goods store with a piece of paper in his hand. He didn’t speak. He just watched her pass.
Maggie didn’t speak either. She kept walking. The road home was long, and the wheat field was planted with three stones and three names.
Behind her, the mail wagon rolled out of the post office yard and turned south toward Sharpsburg. The driver snapped the reins. The bag on the back was thin, but it carried three letters.
Maggie did not turn around. She put her hand in her apron pocket and touched the receipt, the one that said four dollars and sixty cents had been paid in full.
