The Deserter by Jane Langton Page B

look in a fair way to need a chair.” He swung one out from behind the counter and Ida politely sat down. “Well, there’s all these people’s houses you could look into, but my advice is, try the churches or maybe the courthouse first. Big places like that, they got a lot more.”
    â€œThank you,” said Ida, smiling at him and rising from the chair. And so, following his pointing hand, she had begun with the courthouse.
    Now, walking south as she had been told to do, she looked left and right, curious about a village that only ten days ago must have been very much like her own. The town of Gettysburg was now a desperate resource in a time of crisis, a refuge for thousands of battle-wounded men. It was clear to Ida that all its citizens had dropped whatever they had been doing last June. Now in this terrible month of July they were helping out however they could with the wreckage left behind by a war that had moved on someplace else.
    She hurried on in the direction of the Taneytown Road, passing a flower bed that was now a butcher’s refuse dump of sawed-off arms and legs, and a tannery that was shut up tight and a newspaper office from which no cheerful clatter of presses rattled out into the road. Only at an open shed belonging to J. H. GARLACH , CARPENTER , was normal business going on, if the making of coffins could be called normal.
    Next door to Mr. Garlach, a wheelwright was hard at work mending the smashed wheel of a gun carriage. Down the road from his shop Ida could hear the clanging ring of a hammer, and soon she was walking past the dark cavern of a smithy, where the blacksmith was pounding a glowing iron tire on his forge.
    She walked on, looking for the fork in the road, then stood aside for a girl in a floury apron who was running into town with a basket of new-made bread. Ida couldn’t help exclaiming, “Oh, how good it smells!”
    â€œIt’s my brick oven,” said the girl proudly. She stopped running, eager to talk. “I’ve been baking all day for a week, all the loaves I can pack in my oven at once. There were twenty-five barrels of flour in the shed when I started that first day. Now there’s only five, so Father cut the rest of the field today with his new reaping machine.”
    â€œOh my,” said Ida, wanting to praise her. “A reaping machine! Think of that!”

IDA ON THE
BATTLEFIELD
    A crude sign was nailed to a tree:
    15REBS
BURIED HERE
    But the worst thing were the dead horses. Ida was surprised by the length of their swollen carcasses stretched out like that on the ground. The smell was very bad. She took out a handkerchief—it was of her own making—and held it over her nose. A little way off, a boy was robbing an animal of its saddle. He seemed undaunted by the overpowering stench, but he was having a hard time with the girth because it had been strained to the breaking point by the bloating of the horse’s belly.
    Ida tramped on over the deeply rutted road, imagining the traffic that had come this way last week, the trains of ambulances going and coming, the ammunition wagons, the horse-drawn artillery and the marching men. She had to pick her way carefully among the ruts and ridges to avoid the litter of battle—a dead mule, a caisson on a smashed limber, rags of clothing, blankets sopping from the recent rain, rotting pieces of salt pork and spongy masses of hardtack.
    Her boots sank in where the mud was soft. But they were old and comfortable and her burdens were light, both the baby inside her and the valise in her hand. Ida strode along briskly, leaning a little backward. On the journey from Philadelphia her good dress had lost its crispness, but it swayed easily as she walked. Under the bulging skirt her money belt was comfortable, riding high under her bosom, keeping her banknotes safe.
    She began passing clusters of men in uniform, mostly in their shirtsleeves because the day had been warm. Some of