Chapter 22: Summing Up

Seth's mother offered him some more cold pork and fresh-made applesauce, but he said he was not hungry. He sat staring into space and ate what he had without tasting it. He rubbed at the small swelling above his right eye, a reminder of Wainder's visit to his house. He could barely feel it now.

"Don't you worry," his mother said as she moved about her kitchen doing the familiar things that were somehow comforting in their ordinariness. "Caroline's going to be all right. Her father will see to that. Your uncle's boys will take care of that soldier's body. They'll bury him over by the creek where the ground's softer. They're dumping a lot of the mess from the store over that way. Mr. French will probably know who to notify and what should be done to mark the grave. There's graves all over the County now. It'll all be taken care of."

Seth did not know what to do or to say. He felt empty. Numbly he helped his mother carry buckets of water from the well to the big tub on the back porch. He stripped off his dirty clothes and washed himself was a bar of yellow soap and a scrub brush. The cool water in the sun-warmed tub was all that he thought about for a while. The soap stung his hands, and he examined the wounds he had gouged in his own palms and on his elbow. Then he thought about the men moving up that smoking hill toward the rifles in Early's line and wondered how they could do that.

Funny, thought Seth, how mothers know things. When he started to undress, his mother had gone into the house taking Annie, who was proudly wearing his Sixth Corps kepi. He had expected dozens of questions after his Uncle Luke had walked them home. But his mother had understood quickly and asked almost none. Once she was sure that neither of her children had been hurt, she settled into her usual, daily routine, humming to herself, working on her applesauce. Now, when he badly needed to be by himself, she had left him alone.

The boy dried himself and put on the clean clothes his mother had left on the woodpile. He went inside and sat on the edge of his bed and then lay back and stared at the shifting patterns of reflected sunlight on his ceiling. Was Wainder going to shoot him? What did that feel like? Why had his aunt called out to warn him? She didn't even like him. What did Caroline think she was doing? Suppose she had missed.

Seth tried to picture the cavalryman's face, but he could only see his staring eyes in the last long instant before Mr. French's shotgun had exploded. Did he know what was going to happen?

Again he saw the young men near Rock Creek laughing and waving as he and Jefferson rode by on their way to Fort Stevens. And then the same men, waving the same flag, were running up the hill toward the burning houses and falling, falling, getting up, falling again. Was Wainder like the men who had cried for their mothers in the night? Had it been like that for Robert down at Bull Run?