A Place of Peace Read Free Page B

running around in this fool of a war.  Tell him to come home and tend to his farm.  He needs to be planting seeds, not his fellow soldiers.”
    Melinda smiled a little at the older man’s cranky tone.  “I’ll tell him,” she promised.  “As soon as I can find out where I can send a letter.”
    “Good girl.”  Frank stood and put his hat back on his head.  “Enjoy that bread, and if you need anything, just holler up the road and me or Joan will help you anyway we can.”
    “Thank you, Mr. Johnson,” Melinda waved goodbye as his wagon rumbled off down the road.
    As he left, she thought about that boy.  His name had been Luke.  Funny, she had never thought to ask him his name when he was here all those times, but now the face had a name to go with it, and he couldn’t have been more than eighteen.
    She dumped the rest of her coffee over the porch rail into the flowers and went inside.  The morning chill for her just got a lot colder.

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
    chapter three
     
     
    Colby kept clutching the letter as the wagon jostled him past the point of any kind of sleep.  He knew it was night, but the covering on the wagon made it impossible to see the stars.  So instead, he lay on his back and stared at the darkly white canopy and pretended he could see stars, like the ones on his farm.
    His leg hurt, but he was glad because if he felt the pain, it meant it was still attached to his body.  However, what they did on the operating table was probably a lot more painful that if they had just taken the saw and cut the whole thing off. 
    He winced at the memory and winced again as a rough bounce knocked his leg against the side of the wagon.  Colby was supposed to be discharged and sent home, but he didn’t think that’s where he was headed.  Around him, big burlap sacks stuffed with paper created a crude pillow for him, but each bounce sent a new cascade of letters spilling out into the floor of the wagon.
    He had managed to catch a ride home on one of the mail carts heading north to Nashville.  From there, Colby figured he could arrange for other transportation.  It was a long trip, and he couldn’t sleep.
    So he held the letter of his departed tent mate from the field hospital.  He had probably read it a hundred times, but what made the last few readings so different was that he now had a face to put with the name Melinda.
    Before Colby had grabbed the whiskey and drank a rapid series of toasts to his dead tent mate, he had noticed a glint of silver in the dead man’s pocket that must have been pulled out when Colby pulled the letter.  It was a chain, and as Colby went back and pulled on it, a locket swung out.  Inside was a small portrait of a girl, probably sixteen or seventeen, with sharp red hair and ridiculously round eyes that seemed to stare out past the edge of the portrait and into Colby’s soul.  He lay there in the tent, bleeding, drinking and looking at the portrait of the man’s daughter who now had a name: Melinda Jacoby.
    He held the letter until the paper crumbled beneath his fingers.  Poor girl, he thought as he stared at her face.  Two hundred miles away and not the faintest idea of what fate had in store for your father.  Who would tell her the news?  Would she have to read it in the papers or perhaps an official message from a dispatch would tell her?  He looked at her again.  Her eyes, innocent, not having ever seen the horror of war.  She hadn’t seen fifty-nine men cut to ribbons on a hillside like Colby had.  The most traumatic thing she had probably ever seen was her cat killing a mouse.
    He would tell her.  He would find her and tell her.  For some reason, Colby felt he had an invisible bond with her father in his last minutes on earth, and he seemed to tell him to break the news to her.  Tell her how I am gone and deliver my last letter to her.
    And Colby said he would even as he drained the last of the whiskey and the orderlies carted him off to