Leaves crunched under my feet, along with the occasional snapping twig. The swish, swish of cloth against twigs and branches and dead briers easily announced my course of travel. Filtered by towering trunks of trees I could see the sunset coloring the sky before me. Light purple, lilac, a tiny hint of blue then fuchsia and pink closer to the horizon.
I stepped over a fallen log carefully. The thick skirts I wore, even without the hoop, proved challenging when trying to evade some obstacles and I was keeping my eye on the sloshing liquid in the tin cup I carried. It was hot and I had already burned myself once that day. Beyond the log I stepped around the remainder of a stump and looked up to the only other figure standing in the wood with me. My older brother was stone still, his dark hair slicked back under the stained, gray forage cap. His butternut colored jean wool frock coat and trousers turned a muddy brown by the red of the sun. He was looking at something, his own cup of coffee almost forgotten in his hand.
I stepped up quietly beside him, pulled my tin cup to my lips and let the steaming vapors wash over my frozen cheeks. It was only September but it was already cold, and the night promised to be colder. I didn't mind. I loved this time of year. When the heat of the summer began to shift, a bite visited the wind like a long unseen cousin.
I watched the sun for a moment then shifted my gaze to my brother's whiskered, but no longer whimsical face. Beneath his gaze lay the remainder of an artillery piece. It was small, the sort that could be used by men only, moved and aimed by muscle alone. There were no horse bones nearby, nor any hasty graves indicating that they had been buried. Only the piece remained.
What had once been gleaming black was now starting to fade and green with time. One wheel was flush against the ground and nearly grown over by vines and wild strawberries. It was fall but I could still see the drying tendrils. The rocky ground tilted the barrel so that it leaned heavily and I could see that it teetered dangerously, held in place only by the joists still connecting it to the other wheel that had been wedged between a rock and a hard place, forced at a slant, frozen in time, attentive but wounded.
In a way my brother was precisely that as well. He had been wounded in the war of course, many times. And each wound brought him more sorrows, more pains, and strangely, in the way of all wars, more responsibility.
When the war ended he had returned to our home. Mother had expected that he would marry, perhaps the red headed girl that he had been writing to when he first left for the fighting, but he had refused to see anyone. He worked in the wood shop or in the fields, he built himself a small shack on a parcel of land that he bought from father.
I visited him there often, whether or not I was invited, so close in age were he and I. When a year had passed and he received a letter from some of his fellow soldiers describing what remained of the old battlefields he determined that he had to return. It took some convincing to assure him that I was going as well.
There was concern for his safety and for mine. A soldier of the former confederacy might not be welcome near the place where Union died, even if as many or more Rebels died in precisely the same spot.
In this moment however our concern seemed fruitless. My brother remembered the hillside for its strategic value. He remembered fighting desperately to gain and then hold the position near where this dilapidated gun had fallen. He remembered hundreds of thousands of men crossing this ground over and over from both sides. And yet a year later it was deserted. Silent.
"Out there..." He said quietly, then lifted his arm to point beyond where the thick tree line ended. There was a small cabin nestled against large boulders, a wisp of smoke rising from it's mud and wood chimney. "That cabin wasn't here then. It was a pasture for sheep there. But the rancher must have moved them long before we arrived."
A vague look that might have been amusement crossed his features, ending with a barely perceptible wince. "The men kept slipping on the dung."
I smiled slightly, knowing a blush had colored my cheeks, sipping cautiously from my cup to cover my reaction.
My brother took a deep breath and swallowed...and the dampness about his eyes could have only been the cold, or something else. He finally seemed to notice the brew in his hand and he sipped from his cup before he pointed to his left. What I had taken for logs or stones suddenly sprang into being as other dead carcasses of weapons. Only bits and pieces but enough for me to envision what might have once been a battery, lined up, defending its fellow troops.
"All along that line," He said. "Shelling one right after the other...keeping the field clear for the boys. It was bad enough getting the guns to this spot...we knew the enemy couldn't get them up there."
Far off, near where the sun was sliding out of sight were the beginnings of foothills. I could not imagine the distance, nor that the gun before me could possibly reach it. Or that there were enough men in the world to fill that field. The noise, the crush of so many boys...men desperately fighting for their lives...or their country...to defend themselves or their families.
Tears sprang to my own eyes as I stared at this empty place, hating it now. It seemed to have forgotten. The rocks and the dirt and the sun seemed not to care at all about the sacrifices made under their vigil.
I knew the questions that so many had asked as the war continued on. Was it worth it? Was it all just a waste? Could we truly win our independence? Was it about the slaves the way the northerners said? Would they be free when the Confederacy became a nation? Where the fighting men, black and white, throwing their lives away for nothing?
And when the papers came and we saw the pictures of all the generals in their shiny uniforms, and saw that the war we had waged had been lost...how many more of those questions came? We saw the pictures of cities burning, left wasted in the path of Sherman and his armies. Heard the rumors of other atrocities acted on civilians, or on our men in prison camps.
But nothing in a paper or in the quivering voice of a mother or wife affected me as much as this vast, empty, cold place.
"I'm glad it's here." I said, my voice shaking with anger, sadness and something else. Something determined. "It should always be here. Protected. So that no one will forget. So that no one sees this place as just another...parcel of land to be bought or sold with money."
Tears ran down my cheeks, burning hot channels through the cold numbness.
"Because it was once purchased with blood and it belongs to those men that paid for it with their lives. That should never be forgotten."
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