Chapter 8: A Letter from Emma

(Spring 1865, Fort Columbus, Governors Island)

Three weeks we’d been in that stone box, and the hurt was still fresh, like a blade twisted and left in the wound. I carried Samuel’s pouch everywhere—Pa’s watch, the creased photograph, the dried sprig of lavender that had lost its scent but not its weight. Some nights I woke shouting his name into the dark, and Tiny never said a word, just shifted closer so I’d know I wasn’t alone.

One morning the guard came with a letter.

Not prison scrip or new rules—real mail, thin and travel-worn, addressed in a woman’s careful hand.

“Kane.”

My heart near stopped when I saw the return mark: Danville, Virginia.

Emma.

I took it back to the cell and sat on the edge of my cot. My fingers shook so hard I near tore the envelope. Tiny studied the wall, giving me what little privacy iron and stone allowed.

The paper inside was soft from handling, the ink faint in places, as if she’d written it by candle stub.

My dearest Virgil,

If this reaches you, thank the Lord and every angel who carried it north.

I write with a trembling hand and a heart that has not known a single peaceful night since the day you rode away.

Danville is no longer the town we knew. When Mr. Davis and his government fled here from Richmond, the streets filled with soldiers, wagons, and sorrow. The hospitals overflowed—every church, every warehouse, every spare room. I have been nursing since February, and I fear the things I have seen will live behind my eyes forever.

Men lie two and three to a cot, some no older than Samuel was when you left. I hold their hands while the surgeons take arms and legs. There is never enough ether, never enough bandages, only the sound of the bone saw and boys calling for mothers they will never see again. I have learned to pray without ceasing, because it is the only thing left to give them.

I keep your letters under my pillow and read them until the words blur. I keep the memory of your kiss the night before you left like a coal in my chest that refuses to die. Some days that coal is the only warmth I own.

They say the war is ending. I do not know what that will mean for us, only that I will wait as long as there is breath in me. If you come home missing an arm or a leg, I will still be here. If you come home missing everything but your name, I will still be here. And if you do not come home at all, I will carry you in my heart until we meet in a better place.

I love you, Virgil Kane, with every stubborn beat it still manages to give.

Come back to me when you can. I am saving every tomorrow for you.

Yours alone,

Emma

There was a single pressed violet folded in the crease, brittle as ash.

I read it three times before the words stopped swimming. Then I pulled out the pencil stub I’d traded a week’s tobacco for, thinking I’d write her back. But what could I say? That Samuel lay dead in Carolina dirt and I’d helped kill our cause with my own hands? That I was locked in a Yankee prison with no notion when I’d see daylight again? She’d sent me hope. I couldn’t send her despair in return.

I’d write when I had something worth saying.

So I folded her letter small, pressed it inside the pouch with Samuel’s things, and sat there a long while with my face in my hands.

Tiny finally spoke, soft as he ever got.

“She still yours, Virgil?”

“She is,” I said, and the truth of it cracked something open inside me—something that had been clenched tight since George told me Samuel was gone.

Emma was alive.

Emma was waiting.

For the first time since the peach orchard, since the night I thought I’d lost both my brothers in one war, a thin thread of light found its way through the dark.

I still had something to walk home for.

That night I slept without dreaming of Gatling guns or peach petals soaked in blood.

I dreamed of violet in a girl’s dark hair and a woman’s voice calling my name across four hundred miles of ruined country.

It was enough.