“Do you ever?”
“Sometimes. I wrote home a lot in the beginning. Told my mother things I probably shouldn’t have. I meant to set her mind at ease, but the time between letters was hard for her and then...” His voice trailed off and he shrugged.
“No,” she said. “Don’t do that. You were going to say the letters stopped, weren’t you?”
“Yes. They stopped.”
Laurel thought about that. “You were captured.” He was silent for so long, she didn’t think he intended to respond. She made herself wait, let him decide what he was willing to tell her rather than pepper him with questions.
“Yes,” he said finally. “Captured in December ’62 at Fredericksburg, Virginia. I was an advance scout by that time, serving in the Army of the Potomac under General Burnside. Maybe if you were a Reb, you’d call me a spy, but I never thought of myself that way. I’d already made the river crossing that the men would make later, and if I’d made it back to the camp, I would have advised against an assault on the city. I didn’t, though, and they came across without the intelligence I had gathered.
“I learned that they sacked the city later because by then I was being held by Lee’s army, well back of the front. General Lee kicked their collective ass—” He caught himself. “Sorry.”
“I’ve heard the word before,” she told him, “and heard it said with much less good reason. Go on.”
“The victory didn’t make the boys in gray any less peeved at me. I’d been hoping they’d rough me up some and send me back to Burnside, but they roughed me up a lot and sent me to Libby Prison.” Call understood from Laurel’s sharp intake of breath that she’d heard of it. For good reason, he supposed. The Richmond prison was notorious for the crowded conditions and poor care the officers received.
“Were you one of those who escaped?” she asked.
So she knew about that. It was the other reason people remembered Libby. “I was. We dug for weeks. The ground was rock hard. We started in late December and by midnight on February ninth we were ready to go, one man at a time, worming his way through the tunnel. Hell of a thing, that tunnel. We made it without attracting notice, but when over a hundred men vacate the prison, well, even the Libby guards understood something was going on. I heard later that fifty-nine men made it to Union lines. A couple of fellas drowned. The rest of us were recaptured. Later that month, we were moved south.”
Laurel slowly shook her head as she brought her hand to her mouth and spoke from behind it. “Oh, no. Please tell me you did not end up in Andersonville.”
Rather than lie, Call remained silent.
Laurel lowered her hand, as she understood what he was saying when he said nothing. Libby’s deplorable conditions were exceeded by only one other place, the Camp Sumter Prison Camp, known better as Andersonville Prison. “I never heard about escapes from Andersonville,” she said quietly.
“Because there weren’t any, at least not that I ever heard. Guards in towers shot if you got too close to the line. The dead line, we called it. I knew men who skirted it as if it were a game to see if they could provoke the guards to shoot. They usually did, and their aim was true.For some it wasn’t a game, just a way to end a life when they believed suicide was a sin they’d carry forever.”
“You were there until the end of the war, then.”
Call drew in a breath and let it out slowly. He nodded. “Made my way back mostly on my own. Traveling with others made even two or three of us seem threatening. And we looked like hell, emaciated, wearing filthy rags, lice-ridden. You’d have barred the door if you saw us coming. Folks did until we figured out that alone was better. After that, people were mostly kind. They shared food if they had any, sometimes liquor. One woman took fresh-washed clothes off her line and gave them to me. A barber stepped out of his shop as I was walking by and handed me a comb to pick nits out of my beard and hair.” Call’s faint smile was rueful. “He didn’t invite me inside, though.”
Laurel mirrored Call’s sheepish smile. “I suppose even a kindhearted barber has his limits.”
“For good reason. I caught a look at myself in his window front and didn’t know the man looking back at me. The generosity of people still suffering from their own losses was humbling. I wouldn’t have made it home without their help. I know it and I’m grateful.”
“So am I,” said Laurel. She stood and held out her hand to him.
Call did not take it immediately. He stared at it and then at her.
Laurel smiled. “Go on. Take it. Have you noticed the boys stopped playing? That means they’re heading to bed now. I figure we should do the same.”
22
Call waited at the foot of the stairs while Laurel extinguished the lamps burning in the parlor and her office. She merely turned back the one in the dining room, leaving it to flicker at the window to mark the entrance to the station house, and carried another with her. She didn’t take his hand again as she climbed the stairs to the second floor, but she did look over her shoulder once to make certain he was following. He was. Oddly, his mouth was dry and his eyes were damp. Damn, if he wasn’t in love with this woman.
It wasn’t precisely an epiphany. He’d known his feelings were moving in that direction for a while, but tonight the current of emotion carried him right to where he was now. He rarely spoke about Libby, and only once about Andersonville, and yet he’d told her about both. Laurel Beth Morrison was someone to him, someone important, someone who could bear knowing about the wounds he carried and was as grateful as he that he had survived them.
So am I, she said and offered him her hand. He’d almost told her then. It’s why he hesitated. By accepting her hand and the invitation inherent in the gesture, he was agreeing to her terms. She was the one who did not want to attach meaning to making love and he made a conscious decision to honor that. It was only as he reached the landing that he wondered if he’d been wrong.
Laurel passed three closed rooms before she stoppedat a door at the end of the hall. She set her hand on the knob and looked at Call. “This is my room,” she said for want of something to say. She held the lamp away from her, hoping he wouldn’t notice that she was embarrassed by her unnecessary comment. If he thought she was nervous, if he doubted her sincerity, he would walk away. She was sure of that, and it was the last thing she wanted.
Laurel opened the door, let it swing wide, and led the way into her bedroom. She set the lamp on the bedside table between a short stack of Beadle’s Dime Novels and a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles. She turned to face him, arms at her sides, and was mindful of not shifting her weight or curling and uncurling her fingers.
“Maybe you should close the door,” she said.
Call had stopped just over the threshold. He pulled on the doorknob so it swung toward him and then tapped it closed with the heel of his boot. He walked to the room’s only window and looked out. Laurel’s room faced the barn and the corral. The bunkhouse was off to the left at a hard angle. The chicken coop and smokehouse weren’t visible. He released the tabs that held the curtains closed and waited until they fell in place before he closed the short distance separating him from Laurel.
