The Face of Heaven (27 page)

They began to cross even as shells crashed into the water and balls
sent up splashes all around them. Before their very eyes, soldiers in front of and behind them were killed and toppled into the canal.

Shocked and angry, Lyndel’s eyes lit as if by a white phosphorus match. She stopped in the middle of the bridge and stared defiantly up at the gray troops she could see crouched behind a stone wall on the heights.

“What are you doing?” demanded Morganne. “Keep moving!”

“Let us see what sort of men war has turned these Southerners into!” Lyndel snapped. “Let us find out if they will stoop to firing on unarmed women!”

She and Morganne stood still for a full minute while the battle shattered the sky above them. Gradually the splashes from bullets became less and less until they ceased.

“Are the Confederates firing on us?” asked Morganne, looking upward anxiously.

Lyndel shielded her eyes with her hand and peered through a haze of black powder smoke and sunlight. “No. I thank God.”

They finished crossing the canal. Hiram rushed up to them from a spot where a number of war correspondents were hugging the ground.

“What are you two doing here? Have you lost your minds? Burnside will be sending up a fifth assault any minute.”

A bullet plucked his derby from his head and the three of them crouched low.

“You told us the wounded needed help,” Morganne reminded him.

“Yes, yes, but to come here when the air is thick with lead—”

Lyndel seized Hiram’s hand. “Tell me what’s happening with Nathaniel and his men.”

“They haven’t been engaged. Except for the 24th Michigan, who put up a stiff fight, the Iron Brigade hasn’t been used at all.”

“I thank God. But why have they been spared?”

“Ask Burnside. And while you’re at it, ask him why he didn’t send troops upstream and downstream and come at the Rebels from the sides and back as well as the front. All he’s doing is slaughtering our young men.”

“Where are the wounded being assembled?”

Hiram pointed, his hatless red hair blowing about in a sudden breeze. “See the field hospital over there by the water? Then the stretcher bearers get them across the canal into Fredericksburg or all the way across the Rappahannock back to Stafford Heights.”

“Do you think you’ll see Nathaniel and Levi?”

“I don’t know.”

“If you do, please tell Nathaniel how much I love him. And tell them both—and Joshua—that I’m praying for them.”

Hiram nodded. “All right.”

“Lyndel.” Morganne’s pale blue eyes were locked onto her friend. “They need us.”

“Then let’s go to them.”

Morganne kissed Hiram quickly on the cheek. “I’ll be fine.”

“I’m going back across the canal to send a telegram. Then I’ll join you and try to help out.” Hiram held her hand a moment. “I don’t believe a Rebel sniper would target you intentionally. But there are ricochets. And cannon fire is just as indiscriminate. You shouldn’t be here.”

She smiled and touched her lips gently to his. “Yes. I should.”

The two nurses crouched and ran to where surgeons were working on the most severe injuries. They began to clean and dress the wounds of those who were to be carried back across the canal into Fredericksburg.

Soon their hands and faces were streaked with blood. At one point, as Morganne rose to get water from the canal, a bullet passed through the hem of her dress, tugging so sharply she thought she had been snagged by a thorn. An hour later, as another attack was being launched against Marye’s Heights and the stone wall, a ball laid open Lyndel’s cheek and knocked her to the ground. Blood trickled down her face and smeared her neck.

“You must get back into Fredericksburg,” a surgeon commanded when she came for bandages. “We can’t care for you. There are too many who have been shot.”

“I’m not here for your help,” she replied. “Only to get supplies for the wounded.”

“You can’t work like that.”

“Yes, I can. The blood will clot soon enough.”

“Miss Keim. I could order you.”

She stared at the doctor. “You could, sir. But I can’t hear you very well. The musket fire is deafening.”

The assaults ended with the quick coming of the December night. Morganne found Union coats full of bullet holes that had been thrown to one side and the two women wore them as they nursed in the cold dark until three or four in the morning. There were no more attacks the next day, December 14th, but the cries of the wounded that had pained Lyndel all night continued into the morning. Splashing icy water on her face she went back to cleaning and binding wounds and examining tourniquets she had fastened earlier.

Early in the afternoon she and Morganne watched in silence while a Rebel sergeant crisscrossed the ground in front of the stone wall, canteens dangling from his body, eventually giving hundreds of injured Union soldiers water. No Northern soldier targeted him. Both armies faced each other, guns leveled, a few hundred yards separating them, as his gray form moved from one blue-uniformed soldier to another. It went on for hours as he handed out blankets and coats as well. Then Burnside asked for a truce so that he could bring the wounded down from Marye’s Heights. Lee granted the truce and the nurses joined the stretcher bearers as they climbed the slopes to reach the thousands of Union casualties. The two nurses treated as many as they could before the men were carried off the ridge.

Lyndel briefly came near a Rebel sergeant who was standing by the wall watching her. She knew who he must be from all the canteens still slung from his body. Approaching him she extended her hand. Surprised, he took it and held it a few seconds and then removed his hat.

“May I have the pleasure of your name, sir?” she asked.

“Kirkland, ma’am. Richard Kirkland. From Flat Rock in South Carolina. Kershaw County.”

“Sergeant Kirkland, I am Miss Lyndel Keim from Elizabethtown, Lancaster County, in Pennsylvania. God bless you for what you have
done today. The water you brought to the wounded saved scores of lives.”

He looked away. “I had to do it.”

“But they are your enemy.”

His eyes returned to her. “We’re in a fight all right. But I don’t think of them as such.”

“Nor do I think of you as such. Thank you again, Richard Kirkland. I will remember you. I will pray for you. You are a man close to God’s heart.”

He smiled. “I am grateful for your words, Miss.”

Lyndel returned to bandaging the wounded and stanching blood flow with tourniquets. Soon Hiram was working alongside Morganne, his good Philadelphia suit and shirt stained with blood and dirt. Lyndel asked about the 19th Indiana. They were stationed on the army’s left flank, he told her. No, he hadn’t seen Nathaniel or Levi but the regiment had never seen action. If Burnside decided to renew the assaults that would probably change.

They worked into the night. Lyndel found the constant activity prevented the winter cold from getting into her bones. A sudden display of the aurora borealis sent white whirls and silver streaks across the sky. She often paused to look up at them as they twisted and turned and shone onto the battlefield.

“I’d say it’s likely most of those Southern boys have never seen them,” Hiram told her and Morganne. “Even this is pretty far south for a display. They’ll probably think it’s a sign from heaven to honor their victory.”

Lyndel wiped loose hair from her eyes as she stared at the loops and spirals of white against black. “We call them Northern Lights in Pennsylvania. They could just as easily be taken as a sign by the Union not to despair, that in the end Northern forces will overcome.” She glanced at Hiram. “Do you think this fight is over?”

“I do. We may be in for another string of defeats just like it was before Antietam.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Burnside will be sent packing for the high number of casualties
here. I expect Hooker is next in line and I have no more confidence in him than I do in Burnside.”

“I thought we might have turned the corner at Antietam Creek.”

Hiram bent to wipe his hands on the grass. “With victories at Perryville, Kentucky, and out west in Corinth, Mississippi, I thought so too. But I’m afraid this is looking like the familiar pattern reasserting itself.”

Morganne had her hands on her hips. “You might be wrong, Hiram.”

“Wrong?” He straightened. “Well, in the vagaries and vicissitudes of war and life things sometimes come full circle. One day it might be us dug in on the heights and entrenched behind the stone wall. Then we’ll see if Robert E. Lee fares any better than we did today.”

The next morning Union troops began withdrawing across the canal and the Rappahannock. In the marching and the turmoil Lyndel glimpsed the black hats of the Iron Brigade but couldn’t spot Nathaniel or her brother. She and Morganne remained at Marye’s Heights and Fredericksburg for several more weeks, caring for the wounded men before they were sent on to hospitals in Washington and elsewhere. Hiram disappeared to file his story for his paper and then returned.

The days were cold and harsh. Two letters came from Nathaniel that she devoured, sitting in the kitchen of an abandoned house in Fredericksburg. When she picked up a pencil in her gloved hands to write a short reply she found she couldn’t focus on the characters of the alphabet; they kept blurring or shifting positions.

Getting up to make herself a cup of tea and set things to rights she felt dizzy, and she steadied herself on the back of the chair. She took a careful step, and then as she made ready for another, the dizziness enveloped her completely and she collapsed, knocking over the heavy wooden chair that had been her support.

Morganne, washing up in the next room, came running and found Lyndel unconscious on the floor. She flew down the street for one of the surgeons, who quickly saw Lyndel had developed pneumonia in
one of her lungs and that it was likely to spread to her second lung in her weakened condition.

“She’s worn herself thin,” the physician scolded. “You both have. Not enough sleep. Few proper meals.”

“The wounded always come first for us, Doctor,” replied Morganne. “You can’t budge us on that.”

“Miss Keim will need to go somewhere clean and quiet in order to recuperate, and soon, or we will lose her.”

“Hiram Wright can get her to Washington by wagon and rail. We have a residence there. The Palmer family will take her in.”

“Are you certain of that? She will require care if she is to recover.”

Morganne’s eyes were dark. “I’m sure the Palmers will take her in. Just as I am sure she will get the care she needs.”

The doctor folded up his stethoscope. “Whatever arrangements you can make, do them now. If she is to survive, Miss Keim must be transported to Washington immediately.”

17

N
athaniel pulled open the wooden door of the small log cabin the men in the brigade had built for their winter camp in Virginia. Levi had removed a section of the roof for the daylight hours and sun poured into the normally dark enclosure. He looked up at Nathaniel from a Bible he was reading as he sat on an overturned cracker box. Joshua was on the edge of his cot with a newspaper spread over his knees.

“Any mail?” Joshua asked without glancing up from the paper.

“Not for us,” Nathaniel replied. “At least, not from home. Miss David sends me a note saying Lyndel rallies some days but does poorly on others.”

Levi’s face was in a shadow. “We ought to pray together for her.”

“
Ja
.”

Joshua, with his eyes still on the newspaper said, “When Fighting Joe Hooker took over command of the army from Burnside he said he’d take care of his men. And he has. The whole brigade is loaded down with parcels from home he’s ordered through the lines at the pace of a lightning bolt. Ham got a bunch of summer preserves from Indiana just yesterday and not one jar was broken.”

Levi answered, “Hooker didn’t reckon on the intractability of the Pennsylvania Amish. When they sent those goodbye letters in October they meant them. Lyndel told me they even stopped sending packages of medicine and bandages.”

Nathaniel sat on his bed. “That’s true. She still mails them letters
but who knows if anyone reads them? Before she took ill she sent them a note saying everyone was alive, that none of us had been injured at Fredericksburg.”