1st 5 Pages September Workshop - Guthrie

Name: Melissa Guthrie
Genre: Young Adult Historical Fiction
Title: The Shadow of Death

Chapter 1
Falmouth, Virginia
June 21, 1863

Ira Wonsettler was dead.

One moment prior, he was sitting upright in bed, face devoid of color. A tattered blanket, stained with the blood of a multitude of other soldiers lay across his lap. in his right hand he held a revolver.

“Confederate,” Ira said.

Jacob Clemmons leaned his good ear towards Ira. One hand rested on the bed to keep his balance, in the place that Ira’s left leg should have lay. The right one was gone as well.

The voices of a thousand souls seemed to speak all the around them, their voices muddled together.

“War,” the voices said, and “fight. Kill.” Above all, kill. Jacob’s heart beat faster and his mouth went dry. His hands twitched. This was the thick of battle; this was black powder burning his eyes and the ragged voice of the captain screaming orders.


“I said you musta’ stole it from some Reb,” Ira said. He turned the revolver over in his hand and admired the ivory grips.

“Burial detail,” Jacob said. He stood, walked to the end of the tent, and paced back.

The man Jacob had taken the gun from was older than he, his face grizzled with a poor excuse for a beard, with fire red hair. By the time Jacob crossed the field with a spade over his shoulder to separate the Union dead from the Confederates and give his men a decent burial, the man’s fingers were bloated to twice their normal size.

Virginia was hotter than Jacob’s home, back in Ohio. It was special sort of hell reserved for the southerners- the secessionists- that thrived there.

Jacob hadn’t pried the gun from the man’s hands. No, he chopped it loose. He separated the man’s index finger from his hand with a single thrust of his shovel. The bones crunched, satisfying, loud, among the moans of the not yet dead. Those men festered like sores on the earth.

Ashes to ashes and dust to dust, said the Reverend.

Only a demon would pick over the dead like this, but that thought didn’t stop Jacob.

He was a demon dressed in blue, same as the man in gray he stood over, on the blood soaked land near a town called Chancellorsville. Jacob took the man’s shiny gun. He would take all he could from an enemy that wanted him dead.

The voices outside the tent grew louder. They buzzed like a swarm of angry bees. Jacob slapped himself in the head. The headache there, it didn’t go away. He walked more. He settled his breath. He thought of a beautiful girl in a green dress. His fiancé, Anna.

Run. Escape. Stay. Fight. Kill.

“What’d you want it for?” Jacob asked. He stopped at the end of Ira’s bed and looked down upon his best friend. What was left of him. It would be two days before Ira would be sent home. Two full days left to burn in hell. Jacob ground his teeth together.

“My mama,” Ira said. “It’s for my mama.”

Then he placed the gun between his lips and pulled the trigger. His head jerked backwards. Blood spattered the tent walls and the world ripped in half.

Hornets swarmed the tent. Jacob hit his knees. He screamed until the world went black, until hell rose up claimed them both.




Hewitt Town, Ohio
July 4th, 1863

Henry Clemmons opened his eyes to the ceiling spinning, in a bed that didn’t belong to him.

“Ah,” a voice said. Calm. Gentle. “You’re awake.”

On the other side of a doorway, Gabriel Hewitt stood beside a workbench, dressed in the same dark pants Henry saw him in the night before. His feet were bare, stained black. His dark hair, the color of ink, was brown with sawdust. A cigarette burned between the first fingers of his right hand, the scent of tobacco heavy in the air.

“Did you sleep at all?” Henry asked. He found his drawers tossed over a trunk at the end of the bed and pulled them on. He looked back to find Gabriel watching, a smirk on his lips.

Gabriel’s eyes were his most notable feature. Never before had Henry met a person, male or female, with eyes like his. They were the color of sky after a snowstorm. Fire burned in Gabriel’s eyes, sometimes bright as dawn and sometimes smoldering like embers, but always burning.

“The Welk baby died last night,” Gabriel said. He straightened and took a drink from the tin mug that seemed permanently affixed to the middle finger of his right hand. Dark circles ringed his eyes. He wiped sweat from his brow with the back of his arm and looked around the shop, as if he were surprised to see slants of daylight in the dark corners of the workshop.

Henry nodded. There were papers stacked on a desk across the room, stabbed through with a nail sticking up out of a chunk of wood. The desk was a veritable rat’s nest of orders, invoices, and ledger books, the making of a bustling business Gabriel ran, alone, since his uncle’s death. Henry once tried to make sense of the books on a cold February afternoon. He gave up after an hour.

“Pull yourself together and eat something for breakfast. The Widow up the way sent biscuits and I found some berries,” Gabriel said. Henry cleared his parched throat, as if just the thought of the widow’s dry, crumbling biscuits was enough to make swallowing a chore. Gabriel brought the old woman meat and provisions from town and she repaid his efforts with baked goods best suited as doorstops. “There’s goat’s milk as well, if you are so inclined. Should you add the milk to the biscuit, perhaps it will be more palatable.”

“You really want me to eat, don’t you?” Henry asked.

“Can’t have you wasting away.”

“What’s the catch?”

“The Welk baby died last night,” Gabriel said, again, “and we have to go get measurements.”

“We?” Henry asked. He looked around the shop, at the stacks of wood leaned against the wall, projects half finished. In the corner there were some long forgotten cupboards and cradles, partially hidden by cloth. A coffin leaned against the wall closest to the door, a simple cross carved into the lid with a brass nailed beneath it. All that was left was the engraving of the person’s name onto the plaque. Gabriel had finished the coffin at close to midnight the night before, just as Henry arrived.

A small lump formed in Henry’s throat. His palms went sweaty. We implied that they would go together to tend to the body of a recently deceased. Henry was no stranger to death- it lurked in the shadows of his mother’s home and on the worn quilt of the bed in the downstairs bedroom. In the dark recesses of Henry’s mind, Death was a specter that rose up from the mist to pull others down in the cold and worm filled earth. Death was sudden and unexpected even to people who knew they were on death’s doorstep. It made hands cold and joints stiff even during the heat of summer. Death fundamentally changed a human being from the moment it first stole across their eyes.