Weathering the Storms Box Set

Chapter 1

“It was a dark and stormy night, October 27, 1863,” our Civil War reenactor instructor said, peering out at us over his wire-rimmed glasses. “If it wasn’t then, it sure is now.” He had a big smile. Everything about him was big, his shoulders and chest, the reddish bushy beard that covered most of his face, and his boots. Guy must have had size fourteen feet, at least. “The sky was angry, its noise as loud as artillery fire.”

Right on cue—BOOM!—a clap of thunder rattled the casement windows set in concrete block all around us. I jumped. Loud noises weren’t really my thing.

We were down in the basement of a beautiful antebellum home that was now a museum. Upstairs, according to the website I’d scoured, the furnishings were antiques, the walls covered in original brocade paper, the windows with silky drapes. Where we were stuck, everything was musty, gray, and dank.

“The Battle of Browns Ferry had one purpose,” our leader continued. “Food. After the Confederate victory in Chickamauga left thousands of union soldiers trapped and starving in Chattanooga, General William S. Rosecrans telegraphed Lincoln with dire news, stating our hold here could not be assured.”

I couldn’t remember the instructor’s name. I wanted to say Philip?

“There were very few nighttime battles during The Civil War,” he read from a hardcover text book eerily similar to one I’d used in high school more than a decade prior, “but this was one of the more significant.”

“Come do a reenactment with me,” my brother-in-law, Rip, had said. “It’ll be fun,” he’d told me. So far, it felt a lot like studying for a final. When I checked my phone for the football scores, Rip nudged me.

“What?”

“Pay attention, Goose.”

“I’m listening,” I said.

Truthfully, I wasn’t. Yeah. I could be immature sometimes. I’d giggled when Rip and I first drove under the sign that read Welcome to Cocke County.

“It’s pronounced like the soda, you freak,” he’d told me. “Not the body part.”

I kind of thought we’d put on the uniforms, run around like kids, and yell “Bang! Bang! Bang!” I pictured it being like a production of Hamilton, only with different costumes, setting, plot, and music I would make up in my head. I had no idea so much effort was put into these things to make them accurate. We were learning about The Battle of Wauhatchie, which took place in Tennessee and Georgia. About thirty of us had gathered on the grand southern estate to relive those two days in history.

According to that website I’d read over and over ahead of time, our lodgings had everything, from stunning architecture, to famous historic visitors, to secret tunnels, to ghosts. What it didn’t have on the level we were stuck in, were enough bathrooms. There were only three, which meant I’d have to fight ten or fifteen other guys at shower time in the morning, unless being accurate to the era meant we were going to go into battle stinky. At almost thirty, I was too old for that frat house crap.

“Jesus!”

“What?” Rip whispered.

“The lightning.” The entire room had turned blue for half-a-second, accenting a bunch of backpacks and several dozen sleeping bags.

I wished more than ever I was in one of the comfy rooms upstairs, with air conditioning, a soft mattress, and drapes to shut, so I wouldn’t have to see Mother Nature’s light show. We weren’t allowed to sleep up there, though. All sorts of rules applied that it was likely assumed we, as Neanderthals, would be incapable of following. The house’s management had little faith in us. Checking out some of the stains on some of the undershirts not quite covering some of the bellies around me, I could see their point. At any rate, we were stuck in an annex at basement level, with bathroom amenities that looked as if they’d come from another period in history as well. I was guessing the 1970s.

“You afraid of thunder?” Rip asked me.

“No.”

Kind of.

The old home’s exterior was white, with beautiful columns and terraces outside the upper and lower rooms. The wrought iron railings were sculptural and ornate. They’d captured my eye the moment Rip and I had driven up the long, winding driveway. I kept drawing them in the notebook I was supposed to be using for actual notes. I liked to draw.

“Pay attention,” Rip said to me again.

I focused in once more on our speaker.

“Thirty-five of us will work to reopen a route to Chattanooga from Browns Ferry on the Tennessee River,” Paul said. Or was it Peter? I checked my notebook to see if I had written his name down. “And five of you will be the starving soldiers.”

“What do they do?” I asked Patrick. According to my scrawling, his name was Patrick.

“Just lie around, um, starving,” he answered.

“Pretend starving, or are you telling us we don’t get to eat? Is the food authentic? What did they eat in 1863?”

“Well, it’s called the ‘Cracker Line’ operation, Mr. Tucker.”

“Call me Goose,” I said.

“Okay, Goose. My point is, there will be crackers, for one thing.” Patrick smiled. “Also, coffee, and tea…”

“Yum.”

“Is this your first time with us, Goose?”

“Yeah. That obvious, huh?”

“It’s fine. I like questions. I also like to keep things as authentic as possible. Just think, if going twenty-four hours without eating is hard, imagine what those soldiers must have felt like day after day. If you can come away from all of this with a sense of understanding and appreciation for the plight of these frightened, hungry, devoted, patriotic men, well, I’ll have done my job. Is there anything else you’d like to know?”

Damn. Suddenly, I felt pressured. “Um…Nope. Proceed.” I turned to Rip. “I should have packed more snacks. I wonder if there’s a convenience store nearby.”

“Why didn’t you ask?”

“After Pat said all that about appreciating the soldiers? I’d have come off as a pretty big jerk, don’t you think?”

“You said it.”

“We can have beer, right?”

“Shh!”

“Currently,” Patrick explained, “following previous battles not as successful as we might have liked, the confederates have occupied positions that require us Federals to bring in supplies from the Stevenson railroad. We must travel via wagon, up the Sequatchie Valley, and then south, over Walden Ridge, to the north bank of the river opposite Chattanooga to get rations where they are needed. The sixty-mile route is treacherous and winding. After rainy weather, this trek was taking our men over a week, and our animals were breaking down.”

“There’s not a test after, is there?” I muttered.

“Shut it!” Rip scolded.

When Patrick mentioned a man named “Baldy Smith” I chuckled. Rip sneered. I had a feeling he was already regretting his decision to include me, as much as I was regretting saying yes.

Rip and my sister had done so much for me. I owed them. This was step one in paying them back, except I was every bit as frustrating as a Civil War reenactment partner as I was as a depressed and isolating relative.

“Baldy Smith,” Patrick said again, “has devised a way to open a shorter route via Kelly’s and Browns ferries.” Patrick pulled out a brittle, yellowed map we all had to gather closer to see. The guy really knew his stuff. “To do this, we must first drive the Confederates from Raccoon Mountain. With the approval of Major General Ulysses S. Grant, Hooker’s force at Bridgeport will secretly move across here.” He traced the route with a small wooden pointer. “One group will lead the advance along the line of the railroad south of the river toward Wauhatchie.” The pointer showed that proposed journey as well. “Ours will cross northwest of Whiteside to join them. At Chattanooga, we will all drift downstream, past the enemy, to Browns Ferry, where we will secure the heights overlooking the site. We will have to fight off a small counterattack, but victory shall be ours.”

I was late in joining the rousing Hoorah!

“Hoorah!” Better late than never, I figured.

“Another brigade will then cross at Browns’ Ford’s north bank,” Patrick told us, “and a pontoon bridge will be erected. On the morning of October 30, forty thousand rations and tons of forage will have arrived because of our efforts.”

“The Cracker line is open. Full rations, boys!”

Once again, everyone else seemed rehearsed. The exclamation came in force, with me as an echo. “…rations, boys!”

“We’ll all meet back up here at eleven,” Patrick said, “in full garb, to prepare to start the reenactment. In the meantime, feel free to roam the grounds.” The torrential rain pouring down challenged the notion.

“Or not. Maybe take the opportunity to relax and get to know one another before we start.” Patrick fixed his glasses. They were always crooked. “There was downtime during war. The bond some of these men formed with one another is something else I hope we can replicate in the short time we have. Our mission will be grueling,” he continued, “but once again, keep in mind it’s nothing compared to what these actual young men went through in real life. You’ll all be leaving here alive.”

Another loud crack of thunder had me airborne. “f**k!”

As our compatriots dispersed, Rip was giving me stink eye. “You’re not taking this serious,” he said.

“Seriously…”

“What?”

“I believe, seriously is the word you want. I’m not taking this seriously. You know History. I know English.”

“Jerk.” Rip walked away.

“What? You’re really mad?”

He headed for the door in the rear of the basement and went out into the storm.

“I’m angry. Angry is an emotion. Mad is an affliction.”

Okay, so I wasn’t the only grammar cop in the room.

“You coming?” Rip held the door for me. It was pouring, but an awning overhead kept him dry. As lighting lit up the entire black Tennessee sky twice in a matter of seconds, I wondered if the overhang would do anything to protect us from that.

“I guess.” I went out. “I’ll behave. Don’t be angry.”

Rip and I had known one another since entering junior high as Richard and Max. “Richard” to “Rip” wasn’t much of a stretch. I don’t even recall how it came to be. My last name, Tucker, prompted another classmate to call me “Tuck,” then “Tuck, Tuck, Goose,” and eventually, just “Goose,” which might as well have been on my driver’s license by the time I’d turned twenty. No one in my life, not family nor classmates, army buddies, nor lovers, called me anything else.

Rip was family now. He and my sister would celebrate five years as husband and wife in December. Another friend of his had dropped out on the reenactment weekend late on Thursday. That was when Rip started begging me to come.

“Playing pretend doesn’t really sound like my idea of fun,” I’d said, lying on the couch trying to concentrate on Gran Turismo on my PlayStation.

“You stare at that game twenty-four seven. It’s exactly your thing,” he’d argued.

“Yeah, but this is three fingers and a thumb. I’d have to put on pants and move my legs. It’s a whole thing.”

I’d been accused of being anti-social, a hermit. That was nonsense. I left the house daily. I worked, as a cleaner at a big box store. I went in once everyone else was gone for the day and went home before any other human beings showed up to open the place. I liked the quiet at night and didn’t even mind the occasional rodent or insect. No field mouse or gray rat had ever been as mean or hurtful to me as some people I knew. No roach or wasp had been as dangerous.

Twenty-foot ceilings, a maze of shelving and displays, minimal lighting, pitch blackness outside the windows, and me with a power scrubber equaled good times.

Rip had once called the empty store spooky, when he’d come to pick me up at daybreak. “You can’t see a damned thing hardly anywhere in this place. Someone could be hiding in any corner, alcove, or right out in the open, for that matter, because you’re trapped in a dead-end alley of women’s underwear or garden supplies. I’d be checking behind every rack of clothing, in between these shelves.” He’d pulled out a toaster oven to peer behind it. “Someone could even be up there on top of one, ready to pounce.”

He thought he was scaring me. He wasn’t. I wasn’t afraid of what I couldn’t see. I’d spent too long fearing what was right out in the open. Even thunder didn’t bother me at work. If a storm came up while I was there, I just jacked up the volume on my iPod.

Rip didn’t get me anymore, but it wasn’t his fault. I kept a lot hidden. I made believe I was okay, but then exhibited signs that I wasn’t by not showing up to Thanksgiving, summer barbecues, or birthday parties thrown in my honor.

I’d shown up for this because I loved Rip, which was why I also tried to put on a brave face out under the awning, despite the storm. The lightning wasn’t really my issue. It was the thunder I didn’t like. “I can go back in, if you really are angry.”

“I’m not angry. I just thought you might enjoy yourself and might even learn something, Goose. The hope was fresh air would improve your mood.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Is it the war part?” Rip asked.

“No. Maybe. I don’t know.”

“Just tell me, if it is.”

“It’s more the people thing, right now,” I said. “I’ll get over it.”

Truthfully, I was a part-time hermit. Once home from work, other than an early morning trip to the grocery store once a week, I was a devoted homebody. That was fine with me. The only thing I missed was occasional s*x.

“Most of the people here you want to avoid are men.” Rip might have sensed that, because he offered one last bit of incentive. “Some of them could be into dudes. Patrick said bond. If you impress the right one, maybe you’ll get some.”

My fingers and thumb had been taking care of that part of my life, too, lately, with a little help from the Internet. “You think I’m that shallow?” I asked.

“Yup.”

Rip was one hundred percent correct. I’d gone all the way from New York to Tennessee for d**k. When I looked back to scour the room, out of the thirty-some men I saw, I was willing to hook up with about eight, maybe ten if I got drunk. That wasn’t a bad average.

“Hello. You going to shut the door?” Rip asked from the other side.

“Oh.” I chuckled. “I hadn’t realized I was holding it open.”

Rip lit a cigar and passed one to me. The next loud crack from the sky made me drop it to the wet pavement.

“Oops.”

Rip shook his head. “I get three of these a year. I only brought four with me. You’re not getting another one.”

“Maybe it’ll light.” I picked it up, stuck it in my mouth—“Eww!”—spit out some grit, and then struck a match from the book in my pocket. No matter how hard I sucked and puffed, the limp, damp thing wouldn’t ignite. “It’s junior prom with Barry Mitchell all over again,” I said.

“At least you were making an effort back then.” Rip scowled.

“Yeah, I’m a fuckup. Who’d want me?” I kept trying to light the stogie.

“It fell into two inches of water. Things a goner, Bro-ford. You’re not, though. One failed relationship shouldn’t make you feel hopeless. You learn. You change. Back in high school, you were the s**t, man. Always positive, funny, outgoing…what happened to that guy?”

I shrugged, then opened my mouth and let the cigar fall back to the flooded pavement. “I should probably quit smoking anyway.” I had the same three cigar per year habit as him. “Speaking of things I should and shouldn’t be doing, standing in water during a thunderstorm doesn’t sound like a great idea.”

“You’re shorter than me. You’ll be fine.”

“‘You’re shorter than I.’ Wait. I think that’s right. Yeah.”

“Kiss I’s ass.”

One thing was certain, Rip could still crack me up.

The storm calmed, and so did I. There was enough secondhand smoke to satiate my tobacco urgings and a little conversation and goofing around that made the adventure fun again, at least for a few minutes. Rip decided to try to take a nap once we went inside. I teased him about getting old.

“It’s going to be a long night,” he shot back. “These after dark battles aren’t for sissies.”

I wasn’t much of a sleeper, at least not at night. “I’m pretty sure I can handle it,” I said, with no idea whether or not that was true. “Now that it’s quiet, I think I’ll walk the grounds, like…Pablo suggested.”

“Patrick.”

“That’s what I said. Good night, Rip.”

“Have fun.” He rolled over.

The air outside was waging its own battle, between icky humidity and crisp, fall splendor. When the breeze came at me from one direction, it felt like July. When it turned, I was reminded we were near the end of October, which had me missing home. New York in October was my idea of heaven. If I ever got there, I wanted it to be October twelve months out of the year. Things like that were possible in heaven, I assumed.

I wandered around the yard with my medium-size sketchpad, comparable to a notebook a kid would use in school. I did a lot of drawing when not playing video games and had several pads in different sizes, everything from one that fit in my pocket, to one as big as a canvas for an oil painting, about one and a half by two feet.

I walked a few minutes, taking in the night, watching the spray of water from the wet grass fly off my shoe like a mist of glitter in the glow that came when the clouds began to part. A low-hanging oak leaf illuminated by moonlight that shone on its wetness from the rain caught my eye. The way it shimmered in the slight breeze, the way it danced, I wished I could capture its joy with just a pencil. I found a blank page, but when all was said and done, I hadn’t even come close.

With a flip to another, I decided to draw something not living, something stationary and stoic. The house was beautiful, for sure, but it didn’t have a soul. Some would argue neither did the leaf. I thought everything alive had something special to show. Maybe the problem wasn’t the subject, but rather the artist. Sometimes, I wondered if my soul was dead.

I sketched the columns, the wrought iron, the black shutters, and the clay roof. I penciled in the arches over the windows and their muntins, and then the door, four panel black with a half-moon lite on top.

The door.

One minute I was drawing it. The next I was trying the handle.

Click.

It was unlocked. I wondered if that meant we were allowed inside.

“I think it does,” I said to a moth at the porchlight.

I never talked to myself—ever. I talked to everything else, though, spiders, plants, clouds, animals, gnats, family pictures, moths…

“We were told we couldn’t sleep here. No one said we couldn’t look around. There are probably all sorts of things to draw in there. I say we enter. Well, I enter, Mrs. Moth, not you.”

When I opened the door, the moth went inside, too.

“s**t. Well, I guess you had other ideas. I admire your boldness.” I decided to call her Charlotte, after the spider in my favorite book as a child. “Enjoy yourself, Charlotte.”

The thing that caught my senses right off was the smell. Wood. I smelled a lot of wood. I touched one piece, a roll top desk, certainly an antique. The couch reminded me of the one on Mama’s Family, the Vicki Lawrence sitcom I loved to watch in reruns. I wanted to call it a davenport, even though that might not have been right. I pulled my phone out to check.

“Davenport…” Nope. A davenport was more modern. I was still learning.

This sofa had shiny, golden brown wood all around the back and down the front of the arms. Its fabric was bluish gray and surprisingly soft to the touch.

“I guess the couch didn’t want to take sides—not quite Union blue, not quite Confederate gray.”

Charlotte’s laugh was barely audible, but I was sure she found me funny.

There was a bookcase on the wall behind the sofa with a ton of books I knew and had read. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein…

“Damn,” I muttered. There were some good ones in there. I wondered if they were original to the time, or if someone had beaten them up to look it.

Little Women, Sense and Sensibility, Great Expectations, Wuthering Heights…

“Had they all been written by the 1800s?” I asked.

Charlotte didn’t know, and there was no one else in the room.

“Maybe the whole place isn’t accurate to the time.” I pulled down Bram Stoker’s Dracula and began to flip through the pages. “That Patrick dude might know.” Halloween wasn’t far off. A good monster story might be just the thing for an unsettled October night when I was about to play dress up. Another book caught my eye, though.

“The Diary of Jefferson Eaves. Who’s Jefferson Eaves? Why am I asking a moth?” She flitted around the wall sconce as if it was helping her warm up. “You just keep doing what you’re doing, Charlotte. Be you, boo. I’m gonna read.”

I grew up in the north, in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, where winters are brutal, but summer brings abundance and joy. My family owns a farm there, amongst rolling green hills and far off mountains I dreamt of climbing when I was grown. I wanted, then, to touch the sky. I wanted to touch it in the morning, aglow in orange, and then at night when it was pink, to sense the difference upon my fingertips. I wanted to touch it in the dark of night, to know if its velvety blackness felt the same as it looked, and also to know if the stars that glittered were warm or cool.

Those boyhood wishes seem unattainable now. As I enter manhood in my eighteenth year, 1861, and find myself going into battle, I’ll be forced to leave my mountains, the ones I knew and wanted to get to know better. Have I put that wish off too long? Will it never happen now? Will I ever come home to Massachusetts, or will I die in an unfamiliar land farther south to be buried in dirt I’ve never touched with bare feet, never tasted, while rolling in it with my kin or the man who touched my heart and body in a way the books I’ve read only describe happening between a man and a woman?

“Well, this is taking a turn,” I said to the moth at the light.

The couch was more comfortable than it looked. I kicked off my Nikes and curled my socked feet up under me. Then, because my mama raised me right, I decided to keep my feet on the floor.

“Okay, Jefferson. Then what happened?” I continued reading.

It was the summer of 1858 when I first felt myself falling in love with Thomas. His flaxen hair, the opposite of mine, that fell into his eyes, those sapphire orbs of sparkling wonder, his precious nose, and luscious mouth, the beauty of him transfixed me of mind and tempted me of body.

“You go, Jeff!”

Boyish games and picking buttercups dotting the greens, like little rays of sunshine yellow, became something altogether different that summer, when the chicory that touched bare flesh as we tumbled over the knoll wrapped together was not the only stiff probe I felt at my back. I could dream of Thomas forever, now, as we’re separated and forced apart before we even came to be together. This war, I know what is right and what must be defended, but I damn it, too, and wish I didn’t have to go. If I return to him, to Thomas, will he be bearded and round at the belly, or will his youthful firmness and smooth face remain? Will I have changed? War, they say, can affect a man as nothing else can. Who will I be? What will the world be? My small part of it, a mere speck in what is out there beyond my imagination, let alone my access, what will I leave when I’m gone?

My Thomas, he claims to not share the desires I feel for him in tender places behind my ribcage and at my groin. Is it fear, is it God, is it nature, or is it denial? The body, it tells us what we feel. It is only the mind that tries to argue. If I take my dying breath on the battlefields of Georgia, will I have ever tasted a man on my mouth? Will I never have felt one against my nakedness or inside me?

Civil war erotica! Jefferson Eaves was getting me hard.

I will go to Thomas tonight, before my departure, and will myself to break his, to test whose will is stronger. I will conquer those fears and press his lips to mine and then put mine to his manhood, hot, erect, ripe, and musky.

“Damn, yo!”

I will inhale that glorious stench I have only afore devoured on my own fingers, from my own places kept hidden, except in the privacy of intimate moments when all inhibitions are lost to sensual urges untamed and untamable, under darkness, under the covers on my bed.

Thomas, Thomas, Thomas! If I am finally gifted with a taste of the secretions of your milky s****l climax, will it satisfy me for any duration, or simply make me mad to experience more of it again and again? The answer is worth the conundrum which may follow, as my mind is now fixated on those two things only; life in its glory, a part of which is the carnal urge to be sticky with that which comes from inside of you during a sweaty, breathless encounter in my bed; and death, that which might come as exhausting, but only as pleasurable once it has taken over the fear and pain that might precede it.

What tale will these pages tell? One of days, of weeks, of months, or of years? One of living, filled with conquests of the romantic and ribald kind, or will they be only of suffering, horror, and eventually an unsatisfying ending, where my writing just ceases, because my hand has been stilled in fatal permanence or by deformity?

That answer will unfold another night. I am about to sneak from my window into the fields under cover of night, not for war, but for love and desire. Thomas’s house is far enough away my legs will be weak by the time I arrive. The hours we have together are few now, not quite enough to make up two days. Shall I march into battle on legs even weaker, barely able to hold me up after the coming together of Thomas and me? That is the hope. That is the hope.

“Mine, too,” I said. “Mine, too.”

The next page included a crudely drawn map. Five lines created a house in each corner, rudimentary representations, with two square frames and triangles for roofs. The path between them was a curvy line that reminded me of the wavy, uneven pattern I created whenever I mowed the lawn. It used to drive my ex mad.

“Jesus. Can’t you do anything right?” he would grouse.

I tried to imagine what filled all the white space on Jefferson Eave’s hand drawn map. It was summer, he’d said. Was it grass with wavy lines? Cornfields? Wheat? What would Massachusetts farmers have been growing in the 1860s?

I Googled my question and found an agriculture report. Because of the terrain, wet fields, and an abundance of rocks, many local farmers gave up on trying to cultivate food beyond their own family’s needs and opted to use their land for feed and pasturing of cattle and sheep, the site stated. Those who did keep growing produce planted tomatoes, onions, and potatoes. Tobacco, hops, beeswax, and lumber were some nonperishable items exported regularly from the area, I learned.

I wondered how Jefferson’s family would survive with him gone off to war. Farming—life in general—must have been really tough back then. I wondered if there had been any siblings left behind to help, or if Jefferson might have had some brothers who would have also been called into battle.

There was only one way to find out. I was going to have to keep reading.

“Did you get old Thomas to bend you over and let you shove your nineteenth century c**k up his—”

“What are you doing in here?”

I shot up off the couch and stood at attention, as if the pharmacist who was leading our reenactment was an actual general.

“Just looking around,” I said.

“It’s a fascinating place. I’ve been here dozens of times and never tire of it. Anyway, I wanted to let you know, I’ve made up the roster, random draw, and you’ll be fighting on the front lines.”

“Ah. Good to know. No starving to death, I might just take a bullet.”

“It’s a roll of the dice.”

“Isn’t that true of life in general?”

“No,” Patrick said. “It’s literally a roll of the dice, like in Dungeons and Dragons. I roll to see who lives and who dies.”

“Wow. The power.” I smiled. Patrick didn’t.

“I’ll know your fate before the skirmish commences,” he said.

“Do we get to know, or is it all left a mystery?”

“As it happens, soldier. As it happens.”

“Ah. See you on the battlefield, then.” I had the urge to start singing Pat Benatar.

“Midnight.”

“I’ll be there.”

“Be careful in here,” Patrick ordered, the smile I’d been waiting for tempering his tone.

“Yes, sir.” I saluted.

“I know it’s tempting, but they get a bit of an attitude when they come in on Monday and my guys have pawed their antiquities.”

“I’ll behave.”

“You look like a man who can be trusted.” His eyes shone behind the lenses that helped him see my trustworthiness. “Look, but don’t touch.”

Good thing I’d stealthily hidden the diary behind a pillow.

The moment Patrick was gone, I was back on the couch with Jefferson, flipping to the next page to see if he was able to consummate his love for Thomas.

The fields were thick with dew and my manhood was thick with arousal, using just my imagination.

“Hello!”

The chirping crickets would be as melodious to our encounter as the finest composition by any musical master. I don’t even mind if those stars that twinkle and the creatures about watch as it happens. It would be my joy for the whole world to know that Thomas and I are one together for always, in the most intense and intimate way.

Writing by moonlight and walking concurrently is difficult, so alas my recollection will next be at the end, when it’s done. When I awaken in Thomas’s arms with his essence still salty on my taste buds, twitching where he once brought pleasurable pain and ecstasy beyond what I was able to conjure in my young, uninformed mind, I will record from memory with flowery words and exclamations.

“Damn. I was hoping for a play-by-play.” I turned the page. The afterglow, post-orgasm recount would have to do.

What a fool. What a simple, childish fool.

“Uh-oh, Charlotte.”

Thomas rejected my love. He ridiculed my emotions and was sickened by my amorous advances, sickened and violent, pummeling me, stomping on my body and my soul.

“f**k you, Thomas.” I touched my chest and recalled the pain, the bruises on the outside and the invisible scars no one knew were there. I never spoke about either, and never would. “f**k you.”

I want to believe he’s afraid. I want to believe he would come around in time. I don’t have time. We don’t. This might have been my one chance. The way my heart aches right now, I almost wish it would simply stop. Upon every star that sees my tears, every one, I ask for the confederacy to take my life. I don’t want to live with this emptiness and rejection inside me. “I don’t want to live!” I screech it at the sky, like a howling beast, in the hope that God will just take me now.

“Aww, poor young Jefferson. Screw Thomas.” I stood up and tossed the diary. “There are other fish in the sea.” I had to wonder how one went about meeting them in a century without Grindr or Craigslist, not even Match.com. Or gay bars. “Maybe someone in your regiment will be interested in your body and your sweet, poetic soul.” I snatched up the book. The book was Jefferson, not Thomas. I brought it to my heart. “I’m still hoping I might. I’m an okay guy. Sure, I find myself occasionally whispering to moths and smutty journals. Some people might look down on that. Not you, I bet.”

I heard a noise then, a door opening, maybe. The creak of a hinge. I looked around for Patrick, or maybe Rip.

“Hello?”

Even Charlotte was still where she’d lighted, beside the torch-style wall light glowing against paper that felt like fabric.

The lights flickered. All of them, and I jumped.

“Not funny, Jeff.” I knew it wasn’t him. “Stupid storm.” It had quieted for a bit but seemed to be coming around again.

“There you are.”

This time, I jumped higher than Simone Biles. “Jesus, Rip. You scared the crap out of me.”

“What, you thought I was a ghost or something?”

“Maybe.” I stuck the diary down the back of my shorts. “Actually, I thought you were sleeping.”

“I got worried about you.” Rip looked down at his shoes.

“You don’t have to do that. Really.” I looked at his shoes, too. They were ugly—slip-on black walking shoes with white socks and cargo shorts. I couldn’t take him anywhere.

“Patrick said you might be in here.”

“Ah.”

“You should sleep,” Rip said. “We’re going to be awake over twenty-four hours straight.”

“Unless I’m killed.”

“Always looking on the bright side, Goose.”

“That’s me.”

I gave in, though, and we headed back to the basement together. There wasn’t enough brightness down there to read, so I pulled my sleeping bag up over my head and used the little flashlight on my phone, like I used to do with a blanket and my favorite books when I was a kid, and later porn as a teenager.

I have heard much about this war we will be fighting, none of it from anyone who has actually been a part of it. It is my first time on the rails as I make my way south, and I am still sore from the savage beating Thomas inflicted upon me. Which hurts more, I try to decide, my body or my heart?

Always the heart, I thought.

The countryside, visible through my window, might be more beautiful were my destination one of pleasure. My conscription made my mother cry. My father was proud. I am, too, proud and willing to fight for my country and the freedom of all men and women. I never understood why the color of one’s skin made them anything less than anyone else. We do not apply such ignorance to the flowers in summer. They come in all colors. The black rooster is no less than the white one. The brown eggs one hen lays are not tossed out for only the white. The white cow and the black one give the same milk. I am truly baffled why this does not apply to all living things.

Sometimes, after writing, Jefferson would cross most of the paragraph out. I found his logic simple and sweet, also intelligent, not only ahead of his time, but also, quite sadly, relevant in the present.

My comparisons are as stupid as the entire debate. Human beings are not flowers, nor chickens, nor eggs, nor cows. This is all the more reason none should be enslaved or treated as if they are less than even these things. I get angrier and angrier at the people who feel, with every fiber of their supposed God-loving soul, fellow humans should be lessened based on flesh. With every bit of mine, I feel the injustice. We are all free or none of us are free. I will fight for that with everything I have.

On the next page, more than a day later, apparently, Jefferson had arrived at his destination.

It is warmer here. A sweat pops out the moment I step off the train. I was greeted by a dozen rowdy men, welcomed into a comradery I didn’t expect. These soldiers are happy and cheerful today. War has not tainted them yet, as I expected it would have. When I mentioned this to one named William, he explained the down time, the waiting.

“We play. We act foolish. Sometimes, there is little else to do and potentially there will be no time for such foolishness again in our lives.”

The idea we will die seems to permeate everyone’s thoughts. William challenges this, when I say it aloud.

“Not we will, but rather we might, or he might, or he. Mourning will likely come, let’s not invite it or allow it to visit until necessary, small Jefferson.”

I like William. He is a burly man, well fed and cherubic. He could almost be Santa Claus, were he wearing red and not shades of blue. Will I have another Christmas? Will my family enjoy theirs if I am not there?

We play baseball, a crudely made version, and sing. He continues to call me “Small Jefferson,” because I am littler than almost everyone.

“Run, Small Jefferson!” he cheers when I hit the ball.

“Coming right to you, Small Jefferson!” he warns when the thwack of the bat sends a hit my way.

I later find out there is another Jefferson, a man six inches taller than I, if not more.

“Why isn’t he Big Jefferson?” I ask William.

“Because he was the only Jefferson, until you came along.” William’s embrace knocks the wind out of me. Like everything else he does, I quickly discover, he hugs with all that he has.

I have always liked singing. The men tell me I am good at it. One soldier, Wade, his brown eyes take in my voice with such adoration, dare I say, that I want to keep singing only for him. “Amazing Grace” is the tune.

I began to quietly hum the moment I read the title of the hymn. I couldn’t help it. The lyrics, those past the first two provided for me in the title and the two after that, were fuzzy. If I’d been alone down in that basement, I’d have sung them full out, though, all twelve notes it took for six words. I liked to sing, too. Though it had lost some of its fun, once I’d been told I was tone deaf.

“You were great!” He’d said that first, and the wind had been knocked out of me, just like when William hugged Jefferson, except mine was only from surprise.

It had been my first time onstage since high school, my first venture out into the world since coming home from the desert. I was having a blast as part of the ensemble in Little Shop of Horrors at the local community theatre.

Then, the punchline came. There was always a punchline, if not an actual punch. “I mean, as long as other people were singing to drown you out.”

My look had expressed my hurt, garnering an apology—sort of.

“You know I’m just kidding. Stop being so sensitive.”

My sister and Rip sang my praises, though. If not for them, I might not have gone on after opening night.

I wondered if Small Jefferson fell in love with William, or maybe Wade.

We had a few days of play, of singing and baseball, crude jokes and cigarettes, but then, word came down it was time to fight.

Several pages had been ripped out after the one on which that sentence had been written, in Jefferson’s perfect and precise cursive. The next page still attached explained why, in writing that had changed some, to become a bit sloppier and far less chipper in tone.

I will not describe war anymore. It is sad, bloody, repulsive to every sense, and why would I want to relive it after? Why would I wish to be reminded of it ever again in my life, of watching someone I cared for slowly dying in my arms, of men in agony, whose only relief would be the end of breath?

I have been at this for years, now.

I gasped.

“What?” Rip was still awake.

“Nothing.”

There were a lot of pages gone. That explained that, too.

Were there happy moments in those pages I burned? Yes. Did the unhappy ones go up in flames with my written words? No. Still, it was something that seemed appropriate, as I turned from age eighteen to nineteen to twenty, here in another strange place, farther and farther from home.

“He’s twenty now,” I whispered. “My God.”

I’d been deployed for years myself, so why was it so surprising young Jefferson—Small Jefferson—had been at war so long, too?

“So many pages.”

I had no answer. Still, I was shocked, somehow. I probably would have ripped the recollections of war from my diary as well, those that recounted the worst days I was where I was.

I’m in Tennessee now. The lilting accent of those who were born and grew up here is sweet to my northern ear. They are my enemy, I am told. Yet there are soldiers who join us who speak the same or similarly from other southern states. Not everyone here is on the same side. Not every northerner is for The Union. Not every southerner is against America. Borders and boundaries do not make up a mind or create values. They shouldn’t. Yesterday, I met a former slave who goes by the name of Calvin. He is jovial and kind, despite what he has been through in his short time on Earth. Two years younger than I, he seems far more adult. His beautiful face smiles for me when I sing or tell the one joke I know, one he has likely heard a dozen times.

“What is the difference between a boy running after a girl and running after a carriage?”

“I don’t know, Jefferson. What’s the difference?” He knew.

“One chases the miss and the other missed the chaise.”

I didn’t get it. The only chaise I knew was a chair, a lounge chair. What did that have to do with a baby carriage?

I sneezed.

“Bless you,” someone said.

“Thanks.”

Siri helped explain the riddle, by informing me a chaise was a horse drawn vehicle, often one built for two, with a folding top.

Duh. Maybe I did need sleep. The whole thing was in the setup. The joke was cute, and Jefferson making Calvin smile made me smile, too.

Tonight, when no one was watching, Calvin held my hand.

Aww. Yay. My heart went pitter-pat for Jefferson.

I have grown to adore him more and more with each passing day, each passing hour. No words were needed between us to know something was building, something like love. He whispers we shall kiss someday. I’m impatient and ask why not now?

“Soon,” is what he tells me. “Soon.”

We find an acorn while walking a day later, a rarity the squirrels have not stowed away for a winter ahead.

“For you.” Calvin snatched it up and handed it to me. He dropped to one knee and presented it, like a young man to the one he wishes to be with for life. I smiled at the sweetness of it. My heart beat quicker.

When I went to take the nut, Calvin pulled it away.

“This is worth more than any jewel,” he tells me. “From this, life can be born. Let’s plant it in the earth, so that it may grow, like my love for you, until this tiny acorn reaches the sky in another form from what it is now.”

We did as Calvin wished. The ground was cool, but we hoped something would sprout, to live on long after we are gone.

“A man and a man cannot produce their offspring as a man and woman can. This tree will be our child. We will come back to see him grow, as we live in every other way as any man and his wife can.”

It was the sweetest damned thing I’d ever read. The tree would be their child. I turned the page eagerly to see what happened next. It sounded like Calvin was about to propose. Had he? Did they kiss? Did they make love?

Back home, things would be brown by now. Autumn starts stripping the green from us early, if I remember right. I haven’t been back there now for two Thanksgivings and two Christmases. Everything is still as green as summertime here, even though we are in October.

“A weather report?” I ask in my head. Still, I keep reading.

Food has been scarce. Our hope is to remedy that over the next night and dawn by reopening a route to Chattanooga from Browns Ferry on the Tennessee River.

I gasped again. “They’re doing what we’re doing.”

“What now?” Rip asked, turning over to face me with a grunt.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Stop talking to yourself. People will think you’re crazy.”

The battle cry has gone out. Here we begin. How will it end, for me, and for me and Calvin? I guess time will tell.

I turned the page. There was nothing there. I turned another, and another, and another. They were all blank. Every one.

“No.”

But one was marked now; I could see it in the light from my phone, marked from the tear that fell from my eye.