SHE RECOGNIZED HIM by his feet. He came in a mass of other men. They lay supine on the wagons, their arms and legs entwined, a hideous needlework. He was near the top of the pile, but his face was obscured. She had no need to turn him over. She knew straightaway. He had broken his ankle as a child. The gnarl of the toenails. The curve of the instep. She had massaged that foot. Cleaned the dirt from it. Salved its cuts.
Broderick, the orderly, carried him out of the wagon and laid Thaddeus on the grass. A handkerchief was placed over his face. Flies were already beginning to gather.
— We’ll bury him now, nurse.
Instead she shook her head and turned to carry a soldier upstairs. Broderick lifted his cap, joined her. They shouldered another and then another. Lily arranged them in their beds, scissored through their uniforms. Asked them their names. Tended to the awful mess of flesh. They talked to her of the battle, how they had been pinched on either side by the ranks of gray. How horses had come in upon them. The fog that had opened. The thump of hooves. A casual trumpet silenced in midnote. The thud of bullets into tree trunks.
She attended their every need. Her hand dipped in and out of the washbasin.
It was much later, when all the living had been attended to, that she glanced out the window at the row of bodies still waiting in the grass. Mounds of flesh. Only the clothing would march off again. The jackets, the boots, the buttons. She stood a long while in the silence of the stairway, then set her face hard. She walked outside into the grass and knelt beside him and took the handkerchief from his face and touched his cheek and stroked his bare chin and felt her stomach wrench with the cool against her hand. She undressed him. I expect your risen spirit is listening to me now. When you get up to sit with God or the devil you can curse them both for me. This god-awful manufacture of blood and bone. This fool-soaked war that makes a loneliness of mothers. She undid the buttons on his shirt. Put her hand on his heart. He had been shot just shy of his armpit. As if his own hands had been raised in surrender but the bullet managed to sneak in anyway. A small wound. Hardly big enough to take him away.
Lily cleaned the wound with hard soap and a basin of cold water. She dressed it like she would have for the living, and then dragged his body across the grass.
NO MOON. A great darkness. The hoofclop of the horses. Jon Ehrlich descended the wagon in a narrowbrim hat and boots. She waited for him as always on the lower stairs. When she saw him approach she lit the lamp. The weather was beginning to turn, the hint of a snap in the air.
— Lily, he said, tipping his hat.
She turned to help him take the first crate from the wagon. She pushed the crate forward and steadied it against his back. He locked his knees and shouldered the burden. Bent into the familiar pose. She walked in front of him, into the basement, the light pooling, a swinging semicircle through the old glass factory. Some rats scurried in the corner, slinking past sheets of glass. Lily halted in front of the ice-room door. She turned her face away.
When he yanked on the cold metal handle and pushed open the door, he saw the boy laid out full-length on the remaining cubes. His uniform neat and washed and mended, his shoelaces tied, the harp badge on his chest. His hair washed and combed.
— Lord, said Jon Ehrlich.
He placed the block on the floor, touched his palm against the book in his jacket pocket. Lily let out the sound of an animaclass="underline" something cut, arrowed, gutted. She came towards him with her head bent savagely low. He sidestepped her. She turned. She drew her arm back and she thumped him on the chest, powerfully, a push of grief. Jon Ehrlich stepped backwards. A shot of breath moved through him. He planted his feet. Didn’t move. She punched him once more. The full force of her fist. She cried out and kept on punching until she was exhausted against him, her head against his shoulder.
Later, almost morning, they buried Thaddeus two hundred yards from the hospital. A chaplain came. There was a drunkenness to his prayers. Some men had gathered at the hospital windows to look down upon them. A faint reef of light climbed up over the east.
She knew she was going with Jon Ehrlich. He didn’t even question her when she sat up on the wagon and straightened out the folds in her dress. She looked straight ahead. She could hear the soft rip of grass in the mouths of the horses: the way it moved and crushed.
LILY ACCOMPANIED JON Ehrlich to his home north of the Grand River. She was baptized into the Protestant faith: it didn’t seem too different from what she had already chosen not to believe in. Not since Dublin had she been in any manner of church. Even then it had only been through obligation. She sat in the second pew from the front. She was given a Bible and a commemorative piece of lace. The service was short and brusque, some words in Norwegian, most in English. The preacher asked if there was anybody present who was ready to renounce evil and accept the Lord as his or her divine savior. Jon Ehrlich tapped her on the elbow. Yes, she said, and went to the front of the church. Bowed her head. Waited. One or two scattered hallelujahs rose around the church. She was taken out the back door, towards a small trout stream, where the congregation gathered. A song erupted from them. Take me from this darkened valley, wreath me in sheaves of peace. She was carried through the reeds into the shallows of the river. A heron took off in the air, flapped wildly across the water, its wingtips touching the surface, rippling it. The pastor told her to hold her nose. He put his hand at the small of her back. When she was dunked, she felt little but the chill.
She had no real idea what it meant to be Protestant, it was an absence to her, although she remembered so clearly the Quaker meetings she had seen in the house in Great Brunswick Street, with Webb at the front of the room, hands interlocked, his long rambling ideas on fate, peace, brotherhood. She had not told Jon Ehrlich of those days. She feared, if she did, he might grow silent around her. He was a good soul. He deserved no jealousy. The old life in Ireland was distant to her now: she needed it no more, she had stepped away.
After the baptism she was married immediately and was taken to the cabin by the lake. Lily Ehrlich. She descended the wagon onto the hard dust and looked around.
— I live by small means, he said.
It was a flat land. A quiet lake. Other small lakes stretching into the distance. A series of wooden storage sheds were clumped together near the road. Mosquitoes swirled in great swarms. The horses swished their impatient manes.
— I best get you inside, he said.
He had a clear, still smile. She pulled her dress tight as a bud, curtsied in front of him.
— Get you flat down.
— About time, she said.
It was the first she had laughed in quite a while.
He swung open the cabin door for her. Silver flecks of dust stuttered the sunlight. A bed in the corner made with pine pole and frapped twine. He watched while she undressed before him, then he dropped his boots, unsnapped his braces, and his clothes pooled around him on the floor.
For an older man, she thought him sprightly and enthusiastic. They lay together, panting, her face against his shoulder. She woke him when the darkness was still on the sky. He turned towards her and grinned.
— Even the Good Book says it’s no harm.
LILY WAS THIRTY-SEVEN years old when she had her first of six Ehrlich children: Adam, Benjamin, Lawrence, Nathaniel, Tomas, and their only girl, Emily, the youngest, in 1872, seven years after the end of the war.