He said it was our war. I didn’t believe him. Oh, I wanted to. I wanted to believe him – believing him was like opening a cage door and having every thing that ever dragged you down flying out. But it wasn’t our war. It was Lincoln’s. And, in my mind, it was pointless. Whatever happened to communication and argument without flinging beautiful men - our beautiful men - out onto the battlefield?
          War is not glorious.
          I’d read enough to know, and to see the entire North rile themselves up for it, as if they were doing some kind of good deed only sickened me. But what really sickened me was the blue material sprawled across my knees, and the needle going in and out. Up and down. And the pretty brass buttons I’d never imagined using on a war uniform for my husband. My husband. I wasn’t proud, like so many others. If I were a great Southern lady, I would be proud. I would right my chin and give him those looks he so loved. Because down South they were fighting for something real to them. It wasn’t that I didn’t admire him. War was a bloody business, terrifying men to the point of madness who seemed perfectly strong and capable before. I knew he wasn’t exactly fearless. To be fearless would make him foolish. And Oscar was anything but foolish. I glimpsed the fear cutting into his eyes when war was declared. As we stood in the streets with cheering men around us, he did not cheer. He dropped his head, his beard brushing against his coat, for a moment, to let the solemnity of the affair sink in. I looked at him in that sea of mirthful men, and truly believed he was the best of them all.
            When he’d come home and met my eye in a way I’d never seen before, I knew he’d just enlisted. I didn’t cry. Crying didn’t come naturally to me.
           “Well,” I’d murmured, and my hand was already reaching for my sewing basket. He stood in the center of the parlor and watched as I’d slipped the end of the thread through my mouth and poked it through the eye of the needle. Behind the bureau, I’d been keeping yards of beautiful navy blue material, and I took those out then.
           The moment he’d walked in the front door with an unusual heaviness in his booted feet, a numbing sensation spread up through my toes, until it perched on my knees, and as I took out the sewing scissors, it engulfed me entirely until I felt as if my heart was thudding dully behind an insurmountable brick wall.
           “When do you leave?” I asked, but the memory of what he said next was fleeting.
And now here I am, sewing. In and out. Up and down. The needle pricks my finger, but I don’t feel it. When I look down, a pathetic little blood mark mars the sleeve. I look at the blood and I look at the uniform, and know the two go together. And know they both will have something to do with Oscar very soon.
          “You’ve been sewing for a while.” Oscar enters the room, in his long johns, “It’s late.”
         “Yes, it is.” I remarked, and looked up. In a few days, Oscar would not be here to prod me to bed from my monotonous chores. And I hated that fact, so I continued sewing, knowing I must make myself used to this aspect of life.
        “Lillian, please,” Oscar was taking my hand from the sewing and gripping at it like a lifeline, “I want to spend as much time as I can possible with you.” He didn’t follow up with “before I leave”, so I turned my white face towards him and managed to smile – for him.
         I let him lead me to bed.
         Sitting in a circle of chatting women was something I should enjoy, but I didn’t today. The women discussed their bulging hearts full of pride and their belief in the righteousness of this way; the importance. They sewed their husband’s uniforms with zeal, zipping in and out between seams with earnest fingers. My numb finger’s barely acknowledged the work I was doing, and sometimes they fumbled clumsily for a clammy hold on the cold metal of the needle. I’d forgotten my thimble, so I just let the needle prick me. Over and over again.
        “Lillian, I have an extra thimble.” Martha reached across the space between us with a shining thimble, ready to aid my pain.
        “Thankyou,” I took the thimble.
       “You’re not very talkative today. Are you frightened? Because we are all scared too, it just doesn’t seem like it.”
         I let my eyes meet hers and then they flitted down to my sewing once more. The room bristled with silence, waiting for my answer.
        “I don’t…I don’t feel anything.”
        “I understand.” Allie, the most expressive, most proud, most loud about the whole affair, reached forward and placed her smooth hand on mine, “It’s almost a numbing sensation of fear, pride, and excitement.”
          That was not at all what I had meant.
          The night before Oscar was designated to leave, my mind continued to skip ahead to the glorious send off the next morning, the streets swarming with cheering people, and exhilarated men in their new shiny boots and home-made uniforms. And I felt nothing for it – not even a hint of pride or grief at seeing him leave. It terrified me, so that as I sat finishing up his uniform and running my hands over the shiny bright buttons I wondered if I deserved Oscar.
            We made love that night, but it was so different, filled with hot urgency, and the blue dark closed in, leaving me suffocated and numb, all the way to the tips of my toes. When first light faded in from behind the lace curtains of our bedroom, a warm buttery haze filled the bedroom. It should’ve thawed the numbness in my stomach, like a block of ice had been dropped down my throat and now crowded my stomach, refusing to melt. I hadn’t slept – Oscar had. I’d just stared, not really thinking about anything. And suddenly it was morning and I had been thinking I’d been staring into the dark for years, not hours.        I whipped back the bulky covers and let my feet settle to the chilled floorboards. I would pack him some food for the day…but it was only for a day. It wouldn’t last months, and what if he needed it to last months? My hands involuntarily did the work, while my mind remained back in the bedroom staring in the face of darkening shards of no feeling. I decided to go through an inventory of all the things he would do, need, and think of. Drills, training, fighting, shooting, marching, food, warmth, drink, morale, me, home, life. None of these things stirred any feeling in the depths of my stomach, like I wanted them too.
          Cheers began to rise from the outside, and they engulfed my mind, till I wanted to walk out onto the front porch and scream at them all. My knuckles tightened around the water pump as I filled his canteen, arm pumping up and down. Up and down. The frigid water ran over the rim of the canteen and dribbled over my hands, like a fresh wave of tears.
          “The canteen’s full.” Oscar was suddenly behind me, a hand on my pumping arm.
          “Oh.” I murmured, and took the canteen away, twisting the cap on.
            “I’ll be back, Lillian. We still have decades ahead of us. This war will be over within months.” His arms were around me, and his mouth on my temple.
           “Yes.” I managed to say. A woman should feel something when her husband whispers poignant promises on her skin, but I didn’t. I wasn’t even frightened when I didn’t feel anything. He was garbed in his crisp uniform I’d made. It seemed a little tight across his shoulders, like I didn’t know my own husband’s shoulders. I surmised I’d probably drawn it in a little tighter when my hands kept working and my mind forgot what I was doing.
          “It’s a little tight-here,” He pointed at the shoulders, “But I think since we’re going to be living on less food, maybe I’ll shrink a little.” He smiled. I went back inside with him and had him eat a large breakfast. He didn’t speak much, just focused on his food, and I didn’t speak much either.
         “Will you be lonely?” He rose from his chair once he was finished.
         “Yes,” It seemed the appropriate thing to say.
        “Spend time with the other women. I’ll write letters as much as I can. At times like this I wish you had a child to keep you company. But the other half of me would hate the idea of leaving a son and daughter behind for war.”
I handed him his pack of food, and listened to the cheering outside as new soldiers marched down the streets.
        “Will you come out and watch me leave?” He asked, nodding towards the front door.
        “Yes.”
         The rest of the morning seemed to play out before my eyes but never reach me really. My eyes rested on his broad shoulders under the tightened material as he marched away down the street among a hundred others. I didn’t cry. Crying didn’t come naturally to me. And of course, I couldn’t feel anything. Many of the women around me were crying, wiping their tears off their chins, while their children stood solemnly.
         He disappeared from my view, and I went home.
         I didn’t do much of anything for the next several hours. I had chores, but I didn’t want to do them. I was invited to help with the war aid that afternoon, but I didn’t want to go.
         Sometimes I paced. It was while I was pacing, and I was feeling something for the first time. Desire. Desire for feeling. Desire to feel the grief, to feel the loneliness. My foot hit something and it skidded across the floor. A shiny brass button rolled under the bureau. I got down on my hands and knees, and saw it sparkling back at me, smiling and glittering in the dark.
           It all exploded, all of it. My cheek went to the cold wood, and soundless sobs racked my body, again and again. And then I was shrieking his name, suddenly realizing he was slipping away moment by moment. Grasping for the button, I only managed to kick it back farther, until it slipped down the crack at the back of the wall. I’d put the bureau there to cover the crack.
     ` I never listened to the silliness of omens, but this caused shivers to rivet down my spinal cord, erratically locking up my gasping throat. The button slipping down the crack played over and over in my mind, until I wanted to crack my head open and get the vision out myself. I flung myself out the back door and squinted at the late afternoon light. Yes,  Oscar was long gone.
        “Oscar!” I screamed towards the south west.

         I slept hard, not even dreaming, and when I woke up, I felt.
         I peeled out several sheets of paper from the desk, dipped my pen in ink and proceeded to write. I wrote about everything. Everything that had happened between the time he’d told me that he’d enlisted and now. To have my lack of emotion now on paper seemed to free my shoulders from that tense place of nothing. Grief crashed down on me and the house echoed with vacancy. Pride for his bravery, for his sacrifice, however misplaced, rose in my throat and eyes – in the form of tears that often never happened. And through it all respect for him as my husband seemed to engulf me till I had a headache. I sent the letter off immediately.
         Oscar was killed in the Battle of Fredericksburg December 14th, 1862, under the instructions of General Burnside, charging up an open field while being shot at by Robert E. Lee’s army on the other side. Under General Caldwell, he made it within 40 yards of the wall which covered Lee’s men. He joined the 1,283 others that night under the frigid black. I was told his body didn’t rot. It was too cold. That was supposed to comfort me, I suppose.
         What did comfort me, I learned many years later, when his son was six years old. Men who had witnessed the Battle of Fredericksburg exclaimed the Aurora Borealis had made a dazzling appearance the very night Oscar died. I wondered if he had seen it as he died. I wondered if he had thought of me and his young son as he lay in the horrible field.
I never felt that numbness again – not when Oscar died. And I was grateful I felt consuming grief. Because, I’d rather feel agony than nothing at all.