He nodded. “Once. When I was a much younger man.”
“Was it as bad as Joseph’s?”
Fogarty shifted his weight on the chair. “Hard to say, each injury has so many circumstances around it. For instance, the one I saw as a young man was different than Joseph’s.”
Rebekah swirled her cup. “What happened?”
Fogarty’s eyes glistened as he remembered back to yesteryear. “I got hired on a riverboat during the Great War.”
“People named their boats, did they not?”
He nodded. “You are correct. That they did.”
“Did yours have a name?”
“Yes, it did.” His voice had dropped to a whisper. “The Sultana.”
A sense of foreboding fell upon the table when he said the name.
Rebekah squirmed in her seat with the sudden curtain of uneasiness that befell them. Where have I heard that name before?
“What happened?” Rebekah’s voice was equally quiet.
Fogarty drew in a breath and chased it with a sip of steaming coffee. “It was my job to load horses onto the riverboat. The war between the north and south was freshly over, and tensions were at an all-time high. Nobody said it, but everyone aboard wondered why we were alive when so many others had perished. We were all waiting for something to happen, for our date with death to arrive, as it had for so many of our friends.”
He shook his head. “The day the accident happened a young Union soldier, who was being shipped home after being shot in the arm by a minie ball and nursed back to health at a Confederate field hospital, came out to help me. I never even got his name. The rest of the passengers were mostly Union soldiers. The majority were from Andersonville.”
“What is Andersonville?”
Fogarty seemed to have forgotten his audience for a moment. “The most horrific of all southern prisoner of war camps.”
“They take prisoners in war?” Rebekah was intrigued. Amish were pacifists, that was part of their separation from the Englischers. No war. No fighting. Only peace. “What does that mean?”
Fogarty stopped talking. “This must be too much for you to hear. Please forgive me and my fool tongue.”
Rebekah chewed her bottom lip. “No, pray continue.”
“Well, we, aboard the Sultana, were those poor former prisoners’ ride home, up the mighty Mississippi River.”
“Where were you?” Rebekah leaned forward in her seat. “Where were you going?”
Fogarty smiled. “We were bound for St. Louis, Missouri from Vicksburg, Mississippi. Must have been close to 2,500 poor souls aboard, myself included, aching to see home having been lucky enough to have survived the war.”
He stared off into the distance for a moment. “The problem was the ship usually only carried around eighty to a hundred people at a time. Not to mention, the weather was unseasonably terrible. High water, filled with war debris and trees, swirled all around…” His voice trailed off a moment, as though he was seeing it all over again. “And it was cold for April. Very cold.”
Rebekah shivered against an imaginary cold, brought on by Fogarty’s story. He rubbed his arms absently as though feeling the chill again himself.
“Perhaps that all added to the sense of foreboding that hung over everyone on board.” He sat in silence a moment before continuing. “We were in a terrible rush to get loaded and on up the river. It seemed that everyone felt something terrible was going to happen and the sooner we got out of there, the better. Rumors about a faulty boiler added to the unease. Cannot rightly explain why, it was just a sense of sorts.”
Rebekah held her breath. Fogarty certainly was a tantalizing storyteller.
“Well, as we were getting loaded up, one of the boy’s arm bandages came loose. It spooked the horse he was loading something terrible. As we tried to get her on board, she reared up and caught his forehead with her front hoof. Knocked him out cold and there was so much blood. Unfortunately, everyone on board was used to blood by now so nobody paid it much mind.” He shook his head as the memories appeared to come faster and faster into his mind and out of his mouth. “Poor kid. He was not much older than a pup and still wet behind the ears. Then, someone noticed he was horse kicked.”
He shook his head again. “Everyone was in such a hurry to get loaded, up the river, and out of Johnny Reb’s territory, that they did not much want a dead or dying man on board. They figured he would just slow matters down and complicate things further than they already were. And heaven forbid if we got overtaken by a band of renegade Confederates.”
Rebekah opened her mouth, but Fogarty beat her to her question, answering her question before she had a chance to ask it. “Renegades were those boys who did not honor Lee’s surrender at Appomattox and kept right on waging war.”
Rebekah’s head spun as Fogarty tried to catch his breath.
It must be so heavy carrying around such memories. And to see how horrible humanity can be to each other…Rebekah’s heart ached in her chest.
“Well,” Fogarty said, “if some of those boys came aboard, they would likely jump to conclusions about what happened to the boy and the war may kick up again, right aboard the overcrowded Sultana. Not to mention, we were rather an easy target.”
Rebekah tried to follow along, but nothing made much sense, including the words and places he spoke of. The only thing she understood was that an injured man, in danger of dying, was being talked about as if he was less than human, as if his very life was somehow an inconvenience, and his current predicament somehow made him even more so. It made her stomach sour.
Fogarty shrugged. “So, to make things easier, Cap’n Cass Mason and the boys opted to throw him overboard.”
“Easier?” Her eyes widened and she let out the breath that she had been holding. Her breath carried the word quietly. “Surely not.”
“War is hell, Rebekah.” Fogarty took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “But I for one have never been a fan of hell and have tried time and again to stand up to it when I could, even when I found myself standing alone. Which, more often than not, I was.”
Something deep inside Rebekah cheered, though she was not sure why.
“I could not let him get tossed overboard, you see, and even though I did not even know him, he was a still-breathing war survivor, for God’s sake.” He stopped short. “Please forgive my tongue, Mrs. Graber. I wholly apologize.”
Rebekah shook her head. “I am sure it was for God’s own sake that you were there to help the young man. Even if war is…” Color heat her cheeks for even thinking the word. “Even if war is a horrible, eternal lake of fire.”
Fogarty straightened his back. “I wish I could be as eloquent a speaker as you, my dear.”
