When Johnny Came Marching Home Read Online Free PDF Page B

from me. I don't want it to take you too."
    I turned back to her, but had difficulty meeting her eyes. "Tell me about the cruelty you saw in Johnny," I said.
    She shook her head, but I couldn't tell if it was about Johnny, or because I had avoided what she had said to me. I suspected it was the latter. She turned and now it was she who stared out into the dark night. "He came into the store quite often, especially over the last few months. It was the way he looked at people, Jubal, almost as if he had contempt for everyone he met, people he had known all his life. And it was also the things he said. We spoke about Abel right after he came home, and I asked him if he was with my brother when he died. He said he wasn't, but he knew what had happened. He said Abel died because he was a fool." She turned back to me, her eyes filled with tears. "Is that true, Jubal?"
    Rage built inside me. I had been with Abel, had seen him draw his final breath. I knew why he had died. But I could tell Rebecca none of it, not now . . . perhaps never.
    "No, it's not true," I said. "It was a stupid thing for him to say . . . stupid and cruel. Did he ever say that to your father?"
    "No, not that I ever heard." Her jaw had tightened when I mentioned her father.
    "Did he speak to your mother?"
    Again, her jaw tightened. "Yes, he did. He came home two weeks before she drowned, and she went to him to ask him about Abel's grave. She was deeply, deeply wounded that her son's body was buried so far away. So she went to him looking for some comfort. But Johnny had nothing to offer except more pain, and my mother told me that he seemed to take great pleasure in the terrible things he told her, in the suffering it caused her." She lowered her eyes. "Two weeks later she was dead."
    "What exactly did he say?"
    "He said the boys who died at the Wilderness were all thrown into a pit together, Rebels and Union alike, and then covered over. It was a lie. I wrote to the army and they told me exactly where Abel is buried. They assured me it is a solitary, marked grave that our family can visit. But my mother was already dead by the time that letter arrived."
    My rage was still boiling, yet I could think of no way to comfort her. "I'm sorry," I said. It was all I could manage.

Chapter Four
    Jerusalem's Landing, Vermont, 1855
    Edgar Billingsley plucked his banjo and Cory Jimmo sawed away at his country fiddle in a rousing rendition of "Oh! Susanna." They were seated on the bandstand on our small town green where more than three hundred townspeople had gathered, some slapping their thighs or stomping their feet to the music, others forming lines at tables tended by women from the Baptist church, each one laden with home-cooked food.
    My house was opposite the green and my father had set up picnic tables on the wide front porch so people could sit in the shade and eat their Fourth of July lunches. It was something he did every year, always winking at me and telling me it was "good politics."
    Abel and Johnny and I wandered through the crowd, our pockets stuffed with fireworks, mostly miniature explosives called "salutes," that we would drop behind young girls as we passed by and then laugh raucously as they squealed with mostly false fear. We were sixteen and full of ourselves and even the stern looks we got from some of the older women had little effect on us. All that mattered was getting the attention of the girls we were trying to impress.
    "The three of you are being very annoying." The soft yet stern voice had come from behind us, and when I turned I found Abel's sister Rebecca staring at us. "If you're not careful you're going to hurt someone with those dumb salutes," she added.
    Rebecca was fourteen and something miraculous had begun to happen to her. The skinny, awkward little sister who had tagged along after us for years had experienced a physical transformation. Almost overnight, or so it seemed, breasts had begun to appear, hips suddenly became more rounded,