Felecia Roundtree sat on the edge of her bed in the only white dress she had left since the war had begun. She’d always preferred white because it was simple and easy to care for. She should have been wearing black, but she wasn’t seen often enough to worry about it. Besides, this dress had turned mostly pale gray by then anyway, and the hem was beginning to fray. She’d been meaning to buy fabric to sew a new dress, but it wasn’t on the top of her chore list.
It was already after six on a warm, moist Saturday morning in late August and she hadn’t even finished dressing yet.
Felecia was thirty-seven years old but looked more like twenty-seven. Her hair was long and strawberry blond and parted dead center; thick waves fell into points below her shoulders. Each morning, she haphazardly pulled it back and pinned it into a chignon, exposing a face so delicate and pointed and looked so much like a handsome fox, old friends sometimes called her Foxy.
Before she started her day, she crossed her legs and hesitated. She rested her chin in the palm of her hand and sighed. Then she pursed her lips and gazed through the open window of her second-floor bedroom, beyond the small, quirky cemetery that covered the entire front of her property. This was one of those mornings she still had trouble believing she had a graveyard in front of her house.
She reached for a book on the cherry nightstand alongside the bed, a small black bible with faint traces of what had once been gold lettering embossed on the frayed cover. She didn’t open it. She just placed her right palm on top and said a small prayer for her two young sons who were off fighting somewhere in Virginia.
Last she’d heard, they were in Spotsylvania, but she’d never been south of where she lived and new nothing of the places people told her about. But Felecia knew how to pray. And she did this almost every morning, praying the war would end soon and that her blessed boys would return alive and well.
She’d lost their father, Joshua, a year earlier in a small battle outside Atlanta. At least that’s what she’d been told, though it wasn’t one of the largely publicized battles that would ever be in the American history books, and she’d never seen the body.
But that didn’t matter, because she saw Joshua at least once every single day. At least she thought she did: she’d been alone for so long, she wasn’t sure about anything anymore. She never mentioned aloud seeing Joshua to anyone; it was her own little secret. Sometimes in the early morning, while pulling her hair back or putting on her shoes, she’d notice him standing in the bedroom doorway in his dark uniform. His hat would be pulled down below his eyebrows; he would be leaning against the frame with arms folded and feet crossed at the ankle. There was always a sly grin on his face as though he knew some dark secret she didn’t.
She jerked and blinked the first time it happened. Her heart started to beat so rapidly, she had to grab hold of the bed post to keep from falling down. But the old sparkle in his steel blue eyes calmed her nerves immediately and made her feel whole again. His handsome half-smile slowed her racing heart. And though he never spoke to her, not even a single word, there were times when she thought she heard the faint whistle of an old song she couldn’t quite place.
She hadn’t seen Joshua that morning. She could never predict when he might pop in. But Rusty, a colossal black and red mongrel who wasn’t as mean as he looked, began to bark out in the front yard and Felecia dropped the bible and put on her shoes fast. She reached under the bed for the shotgun. This wasn’t instinct; she was alone. She’d learned to be prepared thanks to the war. Rusty’s bark that morning wasn’t a playful bark like when he was standing at the back door and wanted to go out. This sound was dark and wrecked; a bark-growl combination he only used when strangers approached.
Where she lived, she took nothing for granted. Her property was called Locust Point, not far from Finns Point, just north of Salem, New Jersey. Locust Point was on the Delaware River adjacent to Fort Delaware about ten miles south of Wilmington, Delaware. Fort Delaware, on Pea Patch Island, had been completed in 1859.
That’s where they kept Confederate prisoners of war. The majority of them had been taken from Gettysburg. And sometimes, though not often, they escaped and swam to New Jersey. She’d seen what some of those desperate, starving men would do to survive. She’d lost her only sister the last time one escaped and the experience had instilled a fear in her that would never go away. The scoundrel had raped, stabbed, and then robbed the last ten dollars the poor soul had in the house. Though Felecia had always been the gentle one in the family, she’d learned hard and fast during wartime that a woman’s best friend was her shotgun.
While old Rusty continued to bark, Felecia ran through the upstairs hall, down the sweeping curved staircase and out the front door. She stopped short at the edge of the stone portico and stood beneath a small gold sign that read “Monkey Jungle.” There was something happening beyond the green lawn with the small white grave markers. Down near the black iron front gates. Three gray figures came into view.
From what she could see, there were three men in tattered clothing; the one in the middle had his arms wrapped around the two on either side for support. She cocked the shotgun, pressed her index finger to the trigger and shouted, “Get away; nothing here for you. I shoot to kill.” In spite of her shaking hands, she wasn’t joking. |
