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attention.”
    Joe. A Confederate. He was no better than the three men vaulting the Pipers’ fence, disappearing among the apple trees.
    Gerta mounted the steps before her, the familiar warmth and the smell of bread and sauerkraut meeting her upon entering the house. She glanced beyond the kitchen into the narrow parlor where Joe lay, restless, whimpers coming from his throat. She didn’t want to go to him. Every ounce of desire to nurse was sapped from her. She collapsed into a chair, and cupped her head in her hands, and pressed her fingers against her temples where a dull ache had begun to form.
    “They’re shooting at each other, Beth, and there’s nothing you or I can do to stop it. One side will win, the other will lose, but thousands upon thousands of women and men and children will forever have their lives changed because, North or South, they lost someone they loved.”
    “I know that.”
    “I don’t doubt that you do, but I think it’s easy to forget. To take sides because we don’t like what we’re seeing. These men are trained to do what they’re doing. They don’t have to like it—it’s expected of them.” Gerta touched the back of Beth’s hand. Beth lifted her face and accepted the touch, closing her eyes against the burn of tears.
    “I don’t know if . . .”
    “It’s going to be worse, if I don’t miss my guess. The Confederates hold the town. People are leaving. Things will be destroyed, lives, homes . . .” Gerta’s expression pinchedinto the saddest expression Beth had ever witnessed on her face. What she saw there, in the face of the grandmother she so loved, tugged at a level where Beth rarely let her emotions go. It hurt too much to see the agony. Her anger churned into the need to run.
    “I can’t bear to watch this . . . carnage.”
    “It’s not the watching you’re being asked to do, it’s the helping. The healing. That’s what a nurse is all about.”
    Beth stole a glance at Joe. Beyond the gray uniform he wore when he arrived, he was a man. No more and no less. She must not lose sight of that fact.
    In her school days, there’d been a boy much like the Confederates. He’d been unconcerned with others, taunting, spending more time hating others than he did learning. Being much older, Beth had kept her distance from him. Jedidiah had fallen prey to the boy’s pranks, until his friend had rescued her brother. Not with his fists, for gentle Leo never fought anyone, but with his words. A boy wise beyond his seven years. Within the week, Leo would be dead in a fire and everyone would forget him. Except her. Her injury was the memory she held of him.
    “If you want to leave, you can take the wagon. I fear that if the horse stays the Rebs will come for her.”
    “Wouldn’t they have taken her by now?”
    Gerta shrugged. “Perhaps not. I have been feeding them, you know.”
    “If our boys fight through, we could be in trouble for having helped the Rebs.”
    Her grandmother rose from the table. It took a full thirty seconds for her to straighten completely, yet she never once glanced in Beth’s direction. “When did your faith stop and the worry take over, Bethie?”

6
    B
en’s laugh rang deep and loud in the close confines. Joe stared, trying to understand the reason for his brother’s good humor. He scratched his chest, miserable, hungry, and ducked out of the corncrib that provided precarious shelter to stretch his legs. He wandered among the campfires lighting the night like a band of fireflies blazing their color all at once
.
    “We’ll be moving soon,” said one of the men, hovering near the fire, hands outstretched to catch the warmth in the cold night
.
    Joe couldn’t hear his companions’ reply, but he heard their raucous laughter when a soldier stood up and blazed a trail to the edge of camp. Effects of eating green corn, or bad rations. He’d seen the reaction a million times. His own stomach gurgled with the need for food, but he resisted