Part 24 (1/2)

CHAPTER 2.

In April 1862, on the eve of a battle that would pa.s.s into American legend, a barefoot Johnny Reb handed a sealed letter to another.

”You'll give it to her, Michael, give it into the hand of my Kate,” Joseph Kerrigan of Ireland's green and fair County Sligo said.

”And why would I, Joseph Kerrigan?” Michael Feeny said. ”When you'll be able enough to give it to her yourself.”

Kerrigan, a handsome young man with eyes the color of a Donegal mist, shook his head.

”That I will not,” he said. ”Did you not hear it yourself in the night, out there among the pines?”

”Hear what?” Feeny said, his puzzled face freckled all over like a sparrow's egg.

”The banshee, Michael. She screamed my name. Over and over again, coming from her skull mouth, my name . . . my name . . .”

”Jesus, Mary, and Joseph and Saints Peter and Paul, it cannot be so, Joseph. You heard the wind in the trees, only the wind.”

”You'll give my Katherine the letter,” Kerrigan said. ”She's a strong woman and after she reads it she'll know what to do. And tell her this also, that her husband fell fighting for a n.o.ble cause and brought no disgrace to his name.”

”And it's an ancient and honorable name you bear, Joseph Kerrigan, to be sure,” Feeny said. ”You say you heard the banshee, and I will not call you a liar, but she screams for someone else, not you. Many men will die this day and the next.”

”And I will number among them,” Kerrigan said.

He shoved the folded letter into Feeny's hands.

”As you see it is sealed, Michael. Captain O'Neil used his own candle and impressed the molten wax with the signet off his finger. And why not, since I have no ring of my own and the captain's bears the crest of Irish kings?”

The two young soldiers marched together, the swaying, shambling, distance-eating tramp of the Confederate infantry.

Their regiment, the 52nd Tennessee, was part of Braxton Bragg's Second Corps of the Army of the Mississippi, and there wasn't a man who shouldered a rifle that day who didn't believe that he could take on the entire Yankee army by himself and send them running all the way across the Potomac.

”I'm charging you with a great duty, Michael,” Kerrigan said. ”Contained in that letter you bear so carelessly tells Katherine what she and our children must do to go on without me, and, if need be, where she can find help to do it.”

Michael Feeny thrust the letter back toward Kerrigan.

”No need for it,” he said. ”Give it to her from your own hand when all this is done.”

”When all this is done, I will be done as well,” Kerrigan said. ”Think you, Michael, that the banshee cries for no reason?”

”A man knows not the hour of his death, Joseph. If he could, what man would walk blindly into the path of a galloping carriage or cross a railroad track at the wrong moment?”

Feeny doffed his kepi and wiped sweat from his brow with the back of his hand.

”The banshee is a demon, but G.o.d is with us, Joseph. Ah man, you will bear whatever message you have to your Katherine upon your own lips.”

”It will not be, Michael. I have no desire to die on the field of honor, but I am confident that is my fate. But even so, I hope so very powerfully that I am wrong and you are right. Death is no boon companion whose company I seek.”

Feeny grinned, and placed the kepi at a jaunty angle back on his head.

”Remember this one?” he said.

He tilted back his head and sang.

”Oh, my name is George Campbell

and at the age of eighteen.

I fought for old Erin her rights to maintain.

And many a battle did I undergo,

Commanded by that hero called General Munroe.”

A big, grizzled soldier with corporal's stripes tapped Feeny on the shoulder and grinned.

”And didn't we English stick his honor's head on a pike at Lisburn castle?”

”Aye you did, and be d.a.m.ned to ye,” Feeny said. ”You should be marching for the Tyrant, Englishman, and not for the South.”

The big man laughed and said no more.

”Well, that's taken the song from my lips,” Feeny said. ”Let us then keep hope before us instead. Make no prediction of your own doom, Joseph. Walk bold and tall into whatever soldier's h.e.l.l is ahead for us, and come out alive on the other end. Perhaps both of us will come out together.”

”Aye, perhaps. But I cannot presume upon providence when my conviction is so strong. So I ask you to bear this letter on your body through the fight ahead. I have another copy of the same inside my own jacket, in case you should be taken away in battle along with me. Sometimes those letters are found and sent on to the families after the dead are carried from the field.”

”All this woeful talk falls far shy of prudence, Joseph Kerrigan. My sainted old grandmother told me that the things we speak go to G.o.d's ear, and He sometimes causes them to come to pa.s.s. So talk of life, not death.”

”Very well. If G.o.d is kind to both of us, we will rejoice. But if I should die and you live, then I ask you to go, as first opportunity allows, to Nashville and present it to my beloved and tell her my spirit will watch over her all her days. I don't trust the army to get the letter to her. You, I do trust.”

Feeny was ready to argue further with Kerrigan. He did not, though, instead merely laying his hand briefly on the other's shoulder. ”I give you my promise, good Joe. I expect never to be called on to fulfill it, but if fate brings ill to you and I survive, I pledge to you that your wife will receive from my own hand what you've given me. I vow it on the grave of my sainted mother.”

Kerrigan turned to his companion, s.h.i.+fting his rifle sling as he did so.

”Your mother is alive and well, Mike.”

”And so she is, hale and hearty and as fond of the gin as ever. But her grave, or the place it will be, exists somewhere, empty for now, and it is that grave on which I vowed.”

”You are an odd old crow, Mike. An odd crow, or the devil take me.”

”I am odd, and know it. But also trustworthy. You can count on me to carry that letter to Nashville if it falls to me to do it.”

”I know it will not be easy, my friend. The federals took Nashville in February. Travel in these times is no Sunday stroll.”