The Gettysburg Zone Part 9

Robin was heading out to meet Mike when she heard the furious hoofbeats pounding up to the porch. Traci ran from the kitchen to see Angus leap from the massive black horse. There was foam coming from the horse's mouth. George took the reins and started back to the barn but Angus stopped him. "The rebs are in town! They're battlin' it out on the Chambersburg Pike! The whole town's afire! Folks are headin' for their cellars!"
It had been so peaceful that they'd almost forgot the gruesome facts. The Battle of Gettysburg would last three days and take thousands of lives. Jennie Wade would die on the last day as would thousands of men marching in Pickett's charge. Angus was busy hurrying to open the door to the cool, dark cellar. Karen and Paul dressed with lightning speed and ran to join their friends and host in the cellar, armed with only two hurricane lamps, extra candles and a Bible that Angus would read from. By the afternoon, the Confederates had forced the Union defenders back through town. By dark they all emerged from the cellar, tired and hungry. Angus assured everyone that the boys in blue would surely drive the reb menace from Pennsylvania in short order.
"It's not over, Angus." Karen said tiredly.
"We held 'em. Surely they'll retreat."
She turned to face him. "Angus, trust me. The confederates are not whipped like you might think. We need to be in the cellar by daybreak. It'll be very close."
He eyed her suspiciously. "And just what kind of witch might ye be?"
Her eyes widened. "Angus, I try very hard to be a woman of faith, not witchcraft! I just know that it's not over."
"A spy then?"
She was beginning to get angry. "I am not a spy, but I don't like what's happening to my part of the country anymore than you do yours. Just trust me and my faith or intuition...whatever you choose to call it! It is not over and we need to take cover!"
The second day of the battle was worse. They listened to the the volleys of gunfire and cannon shot as the battle was waged all around them. This time it was Karen who read the various passages and Psalms meant to calm fears and strengthen faith. Just the sound of her voice reciting some of what they all knew she truly believed had a calming effect. She closed the Bible and closed her eyes and spoke clearly from memory. Psalm 20:

The Lord hear thee in the day of trouble, the name of the God of Jacob
defend thee; Send the help from the sanctuary and strengthen thee out of
Zion. Remember all thy offerings, and accept thy burnt sacrifice; Selah.
Grant thee according to thine own heart, and fulfill all thy counsel. We
will rejoice in thy salvation, and in the name of our God we will set
up our banners: The Lord fulfill all thy petitions. Now know I that the
Lord saveth all his anointed; he will hear him from his holy heaven
with the saving strength of his right hand. Some trust in chariots and
some in horses: but will remember the name of the Lord our God. They
are brought down and fallen: but we are risen and stand upright. Save,
Lord, let the king hear us when we call. Amen

The main portions of both armies were nearly a mile apart on two parallel ridges. The little town of Gettysburg was caught in the middle. Union forces were on Cemetery Ridge as they faced off against the Confederate forces on Seminary Ridge to the west. To the south, James Longstreet ad-vanced on the Union left and broke through D.E. Sickles' advance lines at the Peach Orchard. The Wheatfield and Plum Run were overflowing with the dead and wounded. The Confederates would head for the rocky area called the "Devils Den". Confederate sharpshooters would kill with deadly accuracy from those outcroppings. The base of Little Round Top was devastated. The observance by General G. K. Warren saved Little Round Top for the Union. He noticed that the hill was a desireable strategic location, one that the Confederates had overlooked and left unmanned.
On the evening of the second day the men were busy moving the dead, while the girls cooked, fed and ministered to the wounded. Karen's back ached from dipping water for the men in both blue and gray. She was witnessing history as were they all. But all she could see at that particular point was the horrible waste of human life. Her countrymen were dying all around her. Sherman and his men would rape and burn their way through Georgia next year. Women would live in fear in Vicksburg and New Orleans. Children would starve on the streets of Richmond...and for what? The south would surrender. The slaves would be free. Thousands of southern women would be widowed and their children left without fathers for nothing!
She wasn't even aware of the fact that she'd been unconciously avoiding the Union soldiers. It was a jumble of bodies that the women cautiously worked their way around. But when she looked down to see who was clutching her skirt, she nearly broke down in tears. The hand that held on for dear life came from a tattered blue uniform and it's owner couldn't have been more than fourteen. His leg was badly mangled from grapeshot schrapnel. She tore off a piece of her skirt and poured a dipper of water over it to clean his face. He looked up at her with pain glazed blue eyes. He spoke with an Irish brogue. He'd joined the famous Irish Brigade with his older brother shortly after they'd arrived in America. The Irish Brigade had been a crazy quilt of regimants from New York and Massachuttes. She wasn't sure where this child was from, but the sight of him in such pain at such a young age tugged violently at her heartstrings. Suddenly it didn't seem to matter what color he wore. She just wanted to make his existance...how ever long he had left...more comfortable.
"You're a sainted woman, you are," he said as she cradled his head to allow him to drink.
She didn't feel sainted. For the last few hours, she didn't even feel American! But she smiled at him and finished washing the gunpowder stains from the boy's face, "I'm not sainted, sugar. I'm doing my part."
The boy's eyes widened. "You be a reb?!?"
She dipped more water for him. "I'm a southern woman, yes. But I'm here to help you."
" I can't find my brother. I saw him fall at the Wheatfield but he got up. He had to get up. Where's me drum?"
She took off his hat and stroked his hair. "I'll look for your drum in the morning. I can't see too well with just the torchlight. What's your name?"
He coughed and she could hear a rattle in his young chest. "Andrew O'Neill. My brother is...Timothy. Can you find him, ma'am?"
She swallowed hard as she watched the boy's eyes flutter. She tucked her feet up under her and let him rest his head in her lap. "I'll do my best, sir."
He smiled weakly. "Ain't no sir. I'm a boy."
She kissed his cheek and blinked away tears. "You look like a pretty big man to me, Mr. O'Neill, and every bit a hero. Why I'll bet Abe Lincoln himself will give you medal," she whispered as he closed his eyes. In ten minutes the boy in her lap was dead and Karen was in near hysterics.
At midnight Mike, George and Chris sent the women to bed. They would keep the vigil for the rest of the night. Ordinarily Paul would have stayed outside, too. But Angus didn't like the vacant look in Karen's eyes. Paul carried her upstairs and returned to the kitchen to heat water for her bath. He felt like it would help her sleep, even though she'd only rest for a few short hours. When he came back upstairs she was sitting cross legged on the bed. She didn't say a word as he helped her undress. Her extremities felt leaden even to him. He'd watched the boy die in his wife's arms. Knowing Karen's sensitivies, he knew that the boy's death had torn her up inside. But she didn't talk about it. She didn't talk at all. Just bathed, got into bed and shook even in her sleep.
At the first sound of gunfire on July third, more distant than the day before, everyone was up and getting dressed. Before she left the room for the safety of the cellar for the last time, she took a long pull from the scotch bottle that Angus had left in her room when they'd first arrived. She was so numb and cold from the night before that she didn't even feel the burn as it hit her empty stomach. In school she couldn't imagine the magnitude of the final engagement: Pickett's Charge! But she was living through it and she felt the most incredible sense of loss and waste. Fifteen thousand men had started the march across the Emmitsburg Road from a spot on what would become Confederate Avenue. In fifty minutes, ten thousand of those men and boys would lay dead and/or having been cut down by Union forces at the High Water Mark as they crossed the open field vulnerable. In another part of town, more than a hundred bullets would pock mark the home of Jennie Wade's sister. One would go through the door and kill the girl that Karen would always remember. Suddenly the words to a song of another time came to mind. Karen started out softly with the words that everyone would soon join in on, much to Angus's amazement. "Mama, just killed a man. Put a gun against his head. Pulled my trigger now he's dead..." Angus would be first man ever to hear "Bohemian Rhapsody." When the song ended, Karen's voice faltered only slightly as she recited the 23rd Psalm.


Gettysburg would not magically recover from those three fateful days in July. There had been roughly fifty one thousand casualties in a battle area roughly twenty five square miles Makeshift hospitals and prisoner camps sprouted up everywhere in a town of twenty four hundred residents! Manpower was in short supply to bury the seven thousand battle dead. More would die from their wounds and infection. Stacks of limbs cut from the wounded laid in fetid heaps outside of makeshift hospitals. Consequentially the entire town was enveloped in the sickenly sweet stench of death. Some mass graves and trenches were dug hastily that would later be dug up so the bodies could be reinterred by the families of the dead, be they North or South. Some bodies wouldn't be discovered until the nineteenth century by an unseuspecting farmer merely trying to plow his fields. But during the summer of 1863, the greatest smell came from the decaying flesh of the five thousand dead horses that just couldn't be buried for lack of manpower. They seemed to be everywhere! Some were literally torn to pieces. Some had a leg or two blown apart. The flies were thicker than pepper on sweet corn. People took to wearing kerchiefs over their noses and mouths in a desperate effort to keep the smell out of their noses. It helped a little but there was no way to escape it completely. And it wouldn't get better for a few more months.
Karen still found herself in charge of the cow and the chickens. She also helped Robin with the cooking and cleaning. But she drew the line at helping Traci in the garden. She couldn't stand the smell or the memories of the bodies that had crowded around the farmhouse. The anemia had to be coming back. She felt lightheaded and sick a lot of the time. And she still couldn't look at herself in the mirror without thinking back on how she'd felt during the battle. She had for an instant that lasted far too long become a true Virginian and forgot all about being an American! She looked at Union blue with the same distaste as a woman in Richmond! And a boy died in her lap wearing that Union blue, a boy who, in another time, could've been her little brother! There was no way to rationalize her past feelings. And she was terrified that they would grow in intensity and turn her into something that she knew in her heart that she wasn't! It made her sick and weak but she couldn't bring herself to talk about it.
Paul cut a wide path around his wife's mood swings. He knew how devastated she had been by the young drummer boy's death and he wanted to help. But she wouldn't let him in. She didn't sleep well and her appetite was diminishing...for both food and sex. The only way he could even hold her was by sneaking his arms around her after she fell asleep. She didn't want to be touched and that was it. She sometimes talked in her sleep. Usually it would be in a fit of tossing and turning when she would keep repeating the words that he'd memorized. She wanted to go home. But which home? Obviously they all would've preferred Gettysburg 1994. But none of them knew how to bend time. So maybe she wanted to go home to Richmond. Robin had confided in him that Karen had relatives in Metarie, Louisiana and was actually about an eighth Cajun. Maybe she had her heart set on New Orleans? He didn't know. But once the war was over he'd take her anywhere she wanted to go. If he could only get her to talk!
Angus was a wee bit amused by Paul Jefferson's naivete when it came to women. And to think that he had always blamed Jefferson for leading the lass astray. It was apparent that it was Mrs. Jefferson who ran things and obviously always had. The mister worshipped the very ground the missuss walked on. But one look from her would send him retreating to the barn, the forge or wherever. And poor young Jefferson had no idea of what was wrong!
In the barely dawn hours on that mid-September morn, Angus saw Paul halfheartedly eat his breakfast. Karen was still upstairs. They never came downstairs at the same time anymore. He sloshed some scotch into the lad's morning coffee and handed it to him. Paul drank it straight down.
"Lad, ye not be happy with the lass. Ye need to fix it."
Paul looked up with the sad eyes of a blood hound! "I can't fix it, Angus! The war has changed her." Paul was surprised at how defeated he sounded. He watched Karen come into the kitchen so he poured her a cup of coffee. She took one look at the proffered cup, brought her brows together in a look of disapproval and left the room in a flurry of gingham. He took Angus's scotch and poured a double shot into the coffee he'd poured for her. After drinkking it he slammed the cup on the table. "You see? How in the hell can I fix that?"
"Are ye blind or stupid, lad? Maybe a little of both?"
"She doesn't love me, Angus!"
Angus laughed loud and hard. "The war didn't change her, lad. You did. She loves you more than ever but she doesn't know how to tell you. Maybe she can't handle it herself!" He was surprised to see that young Jefferson still didn't understand. "Has she refused ye the marriage bed?"
"Hell yeah! Damn!"
"And it be because of a woman's time?" Angus pressed.
"No! She just doesn't want me!"
Angus put a fatherly hand on the lad's shoulder. "You changed her, lad. You put a child inside of her. Now go to her before she makes her-self believe that 'tis you that doesn't love her. She's sick. The child makes her that way. 'Tis many a time that I saw her grab a piece of furniture to keep from faintin'. That's your baby, Paul. Maybe your son. Maybe a bonny lassie like her mother Don't look the other way until it is too late...like I did!"
Paul ran from the kitchen. He found her at the pump. She was drinking water from her hand. "Hey! If your're thirsty, I'll go get you a glass," he offered.
She didn't look up. "I'm not thirsty. I was rinsing my mouth. I hate the taste of baking soda," she said, refering to the concoction they were forced to use in the place of modern toothpaste. What she didn't tell him was that she'd been violently ill when she left the kitchen. "I'm fine."
"Yeah. You're better than that. You're gorgeous!"
At that she did look up. She frowned at him. "What do you want?"
He laughed as she started for the barn and he fell into step with her. "What?!? You don't know how to be gracious when handed a compliment?" he asked. She stopped and turned a little too fast. He caught her elbow. As soon as his next words left his mouth she jerked away. "Dizzy blonde?"
Her eyes flashed her anger like a caution light. "Ooh! Sometimes you can really piss me off, Paul!"
"Honey, wait!" he pleaded. When she didn't stop, he opted for the nineteenth century husband, lord and master type. "Mrs. Karen Lee Hampton Jefferson, stop right where you are!"
She turned to give him a puzzled look. Who in the hell did he think he was to give her orders? It might be the nineteenth century chronolocically, but she was a twentienth century woman through and through! So why did she stop? She wasn't sure. But she did and faced him with a steady gaze. "Yes?"
"I know about the baby. It's not the war, or the battle or the hardships. You're pregnant and you're scared and it's okay. I'd be scared, too, if I was in your shoes. Hell, I am scared...for you! But I can't help you if you don't let me in."
She sat down in the cool dew covered grass and he sat down beside her. "How'd you figure it out?" she asked after a long silence.
"I didn't. I'm sorry. Angus did."
She laid back and stared at the red tinted clouds. "I thought that it was my old anemia coming back because I didn't have my vitamins. But I started getting sick and throwing up. The smell of coffee...I get sick thinking about it! And then I started thinking about my grandmother's crawfish etouffe...really craving it and well..."
"So you're Cajun."
"A little. But I could always take or leave the food. Now I want spicy and it's drivin' me nuts!" She took a deep breath. "No hospitals. No painkillers except opiates. And we know that's not good for a baby!"
Paul gathered her into his arms and stroked her hair. "Hey! You said that you had enough faith for both of us, remember?"
"That was before I saw a boy die! He could'vve been my brother, Paul!"
"Lady, I watched you with that boy. You made him feel like a hero. He went to war a boy, but he died a man because of you!"
She pulled away. "You don't understand. I'm...changing! I think George is, too. We're becoming the people we represent! I get angry when anyone calls Confederates traitors! George snapped in that barn...not over what was being done to me....but what that uniform did to his people! He lashed out in anger, not out of self defense. He felt what I feel and human nature takes over as in all of us. He is black. I was raised southern. We know our history. We know what our ancestors did and what was done to them."
Paul weighed her words and the conviction with which she said them. Yes, they were all a bit different. He himself didn't hate the South, but he had changed his opinion on war. The weaponry may change, and the battlegrounds may get farther away from him. But the game of war was basically the same: one idiot on each side decides that he is right and everyone else is wrong. And whether it's stones, spears, swords, bullets or nuclear bombs, innocent people will die."We might change history for the better. What if the child you carry grows up to be the one who cures cancer or ends all wars?"
She felt sick again. "Or becomes another John Wilkes Boothe and decides it's time for the south to rise again?" He thought about that for a second. Then he smiled and kissed her wedding ring. He got to his feet and held out his hand to her. She got up and walked with him to the barn. It had only taken one word from him to calm her and convince her to put it in God's hands. The word was faith.



In the fall of 1994 the Hamptons were in short supply of faith. Unfortunately they had an abundance of Jane Does, psychics, cranks and kidnappers in name only. The Jane Does were thankfully never Karen. The cranks were sexual deviates who had claimed to have seen Karen in everything from Hustler, to strip joints to porno movies on pay per view cable! Marjorie was furious to find her husband in front of the T.V. one night checking out a title that someone had mentioned. She cancelled the cable the next day. It didn't bother her that he watched it. It bothered her that he would even remotely believe that Karen would be in it! And, even if she had been, did he really want to watch his daughter doing something like that?!?!
The phone was tapped so the would be kidnappers were always dispatched quickly. The psychics were the hardest to deal with for Marjorie. She knew she'd felt her daughter's presence on Wright Avenue but she had never told a soul! Some told herthey sensed great violence and sorrow. Some said there was happiness and impending joy. All were vague but none ever said that Karen was dead.
Richard had seen far too many dead bodies. He was thankful that none were his daughter, of course. But the whole thing needed to end. They needed closure. What had happened to Karen? How could anyone drop below the radar of the likes of the F.B.I.? Granted, she didn't have a credit card, but her picture was in every police department in the United States! Somebody had to see her when she bought a coke or got gas at a service station!
If Jefferson had her locked up in some basement with the rest of his cronies, how did they get groceries or beer? Was his family providng for him? The police said the Jeffersons were a dysfunctional family at best, but they weren't the weirdos in "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre". Her college fund was was untouched. Her ATM card was still on her dresser. She probably didn't have more than twenty dollars in her pocket when she left the house on June 24th. It was October 19th and that twenty dollars had to be long gone. Was she doing something to get cash? He shuddered to think of his beautiful daughter selling drugs or her body to survive. Marjorie refused to believe that it could be possible. But Richard didn't think it could be any other way.
People were supportive and non-judgemental for the most part. But it was very hard not to notice that empty seat next to her mother. Karen never missed church unless she was deathly ill. She helped out in Sunday School, she decorated the church for holidays and holy days. She served coffee and donuts after the service and helped with all of the fellowship suppers. She was as much a fixture as the minister and his wife. She was likeable and respectful. It just didn't seem possible that she could just walk away and never look back. But apparently she had done just that. Richard pulled out his "Prodigal Son" sermon and reworded it some to get people's attention. He was recycling a lot of sermons lately. He just couldn't seem to write anything inspiring. His heart was too heavy and his faith was growing weaker with every day she was gone. He hoped that God would forgive him for not being another Job or having that mustard seed tucked away in his pocket. And when he had to be carried away from the pulpit a couple of Sundays because he was crying too hard to be understood, Marjorie decided that they needed a vacation. They weren't about to leave town but they needed a rest.