The Last Full Measure by Ann Rinaldi Read Free Book Online

delicious aroma, and I wandered, fidgeting. David went about securing windows and doors, closing the shutters.
    A courier came galloping up and down the street, shouting something.
    David opened the front door. I heard him exchange brief words with the man. He came back in, crestfallen. "Our General Reynolds was killed this morning," he told us.
    Mama turned from the kitchen table where she was kneading bread. "Oh, not John!" she wailed. "I always felt as if I knew him! Your father wrote of him frequently in his letters home. They became such good friends at Antietam and Chancellorsville! Everyone respected Reynolds so!"
    "I'm sorry, Mama," David said. "I know Reynolds arrived here early this morning and led his infantry right into battle. The courier said he turned in his saddle to look for more troops and just fell right to the ground, from a bullet in the back of his neck."
    Mama wiped a tear from the corner of her eye with the back of a flour-covered hand, nodded, and went right back to kneading her bread. "That other loaf must be done. Take it out of the oven, Josie."
    "I only wish I'd had the honor of meeting him," she said.
    "Tacy, go help your mother," David told me.
    I did so, losing myself in the mess of butter and flour and other ingredients, near jumping out of my skin as every shell that crashed seemed closer to us, as the realization that the sound of wagon wheels outside were not civilians on a jaunt but ambulances bringing wounded to town.
    David told us that, offhandedly. "Wounded coming," he said, the way one would announce that it had started to rain. Then he went out to the barn.
    Taking advantage of his absence, I ran to the window, my hands covered in flour. I had to see. But the first wounded I saw was not in an ambulance. It was a man on a beautiful black horse, the kind a prince rides in a fairy tale. But this was no prince. It was Mr. Emil Watts, who ran one of the grocery stores in town. And he had, lying across his horse, a soldier with blood pouring out of one leg of his trouser, right down the side of the beautiful black horse.
    Mr. Watts stopped in front of the house of Mrs. Broadhead, who sometimes helped in his store.
    I opened the window to hear.
    "Emily," he shouted. "Emily, come out here. You've got to help with this man!"
    She came out, Mrs. Broadhead did. She stood there, hands on hips. "What do you want me to do, Emil? I'm not a doctor!"
    "I want you to be a human being, is what I want!" he said. "I want you to take him in and help me mend him."
    Together they carried the man inside.
    And then scores of wounded came, some dragging themselves, some being led by comrades, supported by comrades, piled into ambulances, and holding on to horses.
    They had gaping wounds, gashes, bloodied clothes, partial limbs. Some had hideous faces, some could not see. Blood flowed from parts of their bodies they did not even know they had.
    Some cried for their mamas. Others just whimpered, while some did not seem to know where they were or who they were or, worse yet, why they were.
    Girls and women lined the streets, handing them cups of water.
    I heard the regimental band playing patriotic tunes. They played "Dixie," of all things. And "The Star-Spangled Banner."
    David must have come in from out back. Before I knew what was happening, he was jerking me away, shaking me, and closing the window and shutters.
    "I told you to stay away from the windows, didn't I?"
    "The men are bleeding, David," I told him.
    "Everyone's bleeding," he said.
    So I went back to my stupid bread making.
Who is all this bread for, anyway?
I wanted to ask. But I dared not.
    Around noon we heard a shell hit a roof. I knew immediately what roof it was. And I knew I was not mistaken.
    It was the roof of Christ Lutheran Church.
    And what was on the roof but the belfry.
    We all just stared at each other for a second, because the others knew it, too. I had a lump of dough in my hand. I'd been just about to knead it, and now I squeezed it