Cold Harbor
She did not dream about him. Anna dreamed about the others, the ones who died. They came at night and lay beside her, crowding the bed, pressing their cold bodies against her. She’d wake trembling, turn her face toward the night-light that lit the lower wall. She would lie there, her eyes open, and this was when she’d think of Josh Triplett.
They had brought him in on a heavy day of fighting, the helicopter descending slow as a vulture each time it delivered a fresh supply of torn flesh and shattered bones. He was so slick with blood they used their fingers as much as their eyes to find the wounds. It was early in her tour of duty, early enough that she could still be amazed at how much blood a body held. She and the doctor found four wounds, one that mangled his arm, one in the neck, two lesser ones in his chest. They stanched the wounds, but his blood pressure still dropped.
Anna had been the one who unlaced his boots, the right one pouring blood when she pulled it off and found the fifth wound, a slashed artery above the ankle.
“This lady saved your life, soldier,” the doctor told him the next day as they stopped at his bed during their rounds. Private Triplett looked up from the cot and raised his hand and she held it. He squeezed her fingers, tears welling in his eyes. The throat wound kept him from speaking, but his mouth formed a thank you.
“I can write your family, let them know you’re okay. Do you want me to do that?” she asked.
Triplett nodded, freed his hand, and pointed to the pen in the doctor’s shirt pocket. Across the doctor’s pad he scrawled,
Mrs. Lawson Triplett
Aho Creek Road
Route 4
Boone, North Carolina
“I’ll write her tonight,” she said.
When she came back the next morning he was gone, helicoptered to the 311th station hospital, where he would begin his rehabilitation.
That was two years ago. Anna couldn’t remember what he looked like except he had gray eyes. It seemed so wrong to her that she remembered the faces of the dead more clearly than one who had lived.
Dawn filtered through the one window in her apartment, and though it was Saturday she did not try to drift back to sleep. She left the bed where she’d lain awake the last hour, the bed she’d slept in alone the last three months. She opened the dresser drawer and read the letter from Josh Triplett’s mother.
Dear Miss Bradley,
Thank you for looking after my son and thank you for letting me
know he is all right. God bless you and all others helping save
our boys.
Sincerely,
Edith Triplett
On the envelope was the address she’d memorized. She ate quickly and showered. Then came the hardest thing, deciding what to wear. She finally chose a navy blue skirt and blouse her husband had given her their one Christmas together. She already knew which roads to take, had mapped the route weeks ago.
There was one more thing to do before leaving. She found the note he’d mailed with the papers and dialed the number. The phone rang five times before Jonathon’s groggy voice answered.
“I’ve signed the papers,” she said.
“I’ll come by and get them or you can mail them back,” Jonathon said.
“I’ll mail them back.”
“Anna,” he said. “Call the VA. They’ve got doctors, psychiatrists. They might be able to help you.”
“So you think I’m crazy.”
“I didn’t say that.”
She hung up the phone.
Anna picked up her purse and the atlas. Midafternoon and I’ll be there, she guessed, glancing at the clock as she walked to the door. Whether Josh Triplett would be there she did not know. A phone call could have answered this question, but she didn’t want him to know she was coming. If they met again, it would be just like the first time — suddenly, with no time for calculated responses but instead a gesture from the heart, like that morning he’d raised his hand to hold hers.
SHE WAS OUT of Washington by six-thirty, passing through Alexandria, where she’d grown up. Few cars were on the road as she drove south into the hilly region where so many battles had been fought a century earlier. The blue and white signs raised at the highway’s edge listed them. Manassas, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Spotsylvania recalled wide, deep-green pastures she’d visited on school field trips, Saturday excursions with her parents. These outings had always been fun, the dead mere numbers on metal and stone. It was only after Korea that she found it obscene that people could picnic, play softball and football on ground where men had shed their blood.
She stopped outside of Richmond at a store across the highway from Cold Harbor, the battlefield where Grant had lost seven thousand men in eight minutes. While an attendant filled the Studebaker with gas and cleaned the windshield, Anna walked inside the cinder-block building. Paintings of gray- and blue-clad soldiers filled the wall behind the cash register, orange price tags taped to the corners. Raised sabers and tattered flags jabbed the tops of paintings, below them men gripping muskets. As she waited for her change, Anna remembered what she’d learned in high school about Cold Harbor, how the night before battle Union soldiers sat by their campfires and pinned names and hometowns on the backs of their uniforms, knowing better than their commander what the morning would bring. She wondered how many of these paintings would sell if they depicted men whose faces had been torn from their heads, men whose intestines spilled from their bodies like some pink stew. Things she’d seen and knew would have occurred in the 1860s as well, for though the weapons were more efficient now the results had always been the same.
South of Petersburg she turned west, passing through Appomattox and Roanoke and Radford, the land growing less inhabited, more stark and mountainous as she turned south again, following the New River deeper into the Appalachians. The oldest mountains in the world, the road atlas claimed. She soon passed a green sign that said WELCOME TO NORTH CAROLINA.
She stopped in Boone, refilled the Studebaker with gas, bought a Coke and plastic-wrapped sandwich for lunch. She asked the man who took her money for directions to Aho Creek Road, and the man took out a pen and scribbled on a napkin.
“That’s a far-back place where you’re headed,” the man said, handing her the napkin. “You got kin up there?”
“No,” Anna said, “friends.”
Twenty minutes later she turned onto Aho Creek Road, plumes of dust rising in her rearview mirror as she drove up the mountain, slowing to read the names on the mailboxes — Hampton, Greene, Watson — then a white clapboard church, a few dozen tombstones jutting out of the ground like snaggled teeth. A hundred yards farther was a dented mailbox brown with rust, the red flag leaning like a semaphore. Triplett. Anna turned in to a rutted driveway that did not so much end as fade into a front yard.
She glanced in the mirror, decided not to put on more lipstick, then got out, walking across the yard and up the farmhouse’s stone steps. Her hand shook as she raised it, paused, then rapped her knuckles against the wood. No sound came from inside. She knocked again, harder.