Junius calls them ambulatory skeletons, the vacant ten thousand that wander Salisbury’s gaunt stockade. Union prisoners of war, Southern Unionists, Confederate deserters, a few ragtag Northern newspapermen like us. The sickest double at the waist in dysentery’s moist embrace; soon we’ll be dragging their corpses to the dead house and the two o’clock wagon carting them to trenches that prisoners who can still wield shovels scrape in cornfields. Forty die a day. I do not want to become like those men. Does their shit outweigh their bones?
We can’t print that, I imagine Dorcas saying as she pushes back her hair with her shimmering wrist, although she and I published everything else in that Rochester newspaper— abolition, socialism, free love, a toad in a girl’s stomach. That was before I joined Junius as a war correspondent and the Confederates caught us sneaking across the Mississippi on a hay barge and crammed us into a boxcar bound for Salisbury. He swears he’ll write a book about our trek through rebel hell: My Years in Secessia. At night, I dream of Dorcas’s thighs clasping my waist, hot and strong.
The guards who patrol the parapets with Sharps rifles spray the yard with bullets and fence what muggers steal—blankets, coats, boots, socks, drawers. In my drawers I stash the writing paper I use for the dispatches I smuggle out with the dead wagon. My Dearest Dorcas: I write in code she translates for the newspaper.
A lucky few have tents; the rest of us burrow into the ground, like maggots in craters after a shelling; in heavy rain, our dens flood. My hipbones ache when I shuffle through sleet to the watery kettles of cowpea soup, where I pinch cornbread for soldiers too weak and lousy to emerge from their earthen cocoons. The day my temperature spikes 104, Junius drags me to the hospital, where I shiver without a blanket on thin straw. My knotted fingers trace Dorcas’s name in the cold air.
When the commandant suspects I’m the troublemaker slipping dispatches north, the guards strip me, but I’ve shared the blank pages with other prisoners, for wiping. The guards toss me back in the sleety yard, where an even more ragged skeleton has appropriated my den. I don’t think twice about punching the duffer—so what if I book his passage on the dead wagon?—and squeeze between the burrow’s cold clay thighs. But the drubbing sprains my hands, thin parchment over bones, and when Junius palms me Dorcas’s letter, it slips through my useless fingers to the ground.
Junius plots: we’ll trick the guards, march out of the stockade like orderlies bearing trays of medicine vials; an East Tennessean will guide us over the mountains to the Union lines near Knoxville. He chants the ridges and rivers like a prayer. Get up, Abernathy, he urges, the Tennessean’s bringing horses; it’s our only chance. But my brittle bones balk. Worried that to the parapet an embrace might hint goodbye, I curl in my lair watching as he strides through the gate. From outside the stockade comes the ordinary scramble of hooves but no shots, and I weep, thankful, bereft.
That night I burrow into a litany of mountains: Blue Ridge, Peachbottom, Ripshin, Unaka, Roan: fog blossoming in trees, settling in comfortable coves, and rivers glinting in the sun: Watauga, Nolichucky, Doe. Dorcas stands on the far shining bank of the Doe, laden with papers, smiling amid trees whose skeletons flame silver. When she stretches out her arms to me, the brilliant white sheets float upward, swirling about her head, filling the sky.