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“I don’t count on anything anymore except the hope that you will return, and the silent fear that in the years since we saw each other, this war, this awful war, will have changed us both beyond all reckoning.”
-Ada
From ‘Cold Mountain’ by Charles Frazier
The Letter
August 1864
Petersburg, Virginia
Jon Snow was first aware of the sound of flies buzzing and people murmuring. They seemed eerily similar. His body ached but his leg no longer throbbed incessantly. It had been burning when the old woman had found him in the foothills where he’d stumbled away from the battle in a fog of agony and confusion.
Panic gripped him. He opened his eyes and hurriedly raised the sheet. It was still there. No one had robbed him of a limb while he was unconscious.
As the galloping of his pulse began to slow again, he observed his surroundings. He was not in a hospital tent but a house, a very grand house that was being used to treat the wounded apparently. He was surrounded by beds…and dying men.
He closed his eyes. He did not wish to see anymore just now. He could not escape the smell but he could close his eyes to it all.
After his eyes drifted shut, he dreamed.
He pictured mist hanging over the mountains on an autumn morning. He heard laughter, as lovely as any melody, and saw wisps of red hair escaping from her bonnet.
He smelled Uncle Ned’s pipe and heard the crackling of the logs in the fireplace as she sang a carol and played her mother’s piano, her hair rippling with highlights from the flames on Christmas Eve.
He smelled dew and the first spring wildflowers as she raced ahead of him, inviting him to chase her to their secret spot by the creek. Whispered promises and sweet kisses, the feel of her in his arms as they swore things to one another.
A hand shook his shoulder and the dream receded.
“You’re awake at last, I see,” an older gentleman wearing a blood-splattered apron said. He had a kind face despite the gore but his eyes looked tired. Jon opened his mouth to speak but no sound would come out. “Our patient could use some water, ma’am.”
A lady wearing an apron, though less bloody, over a black silk dress handed him a tin cup. The water was tepid but it soothed the raw desert of his throat.
“I’m Dr. Luwin. This good woman in Mrs. Hornwood and this is her home.”
“It was…it was that,” the lady said absently with her eyes cast towards the floor. “It was once a home.” Her eyes filled with tears and she begged pardon before hurrying away.
“Mrs. Hornwood’s husband and sons have died fighting for the cause,” Dr. Luwin explained.
The cause. Jon could not care less about the cause. He never had. He had only joined up because Robb and nearly every other man and boy from sixteen to sixty in their little corner of Appalachia had been joining, too.
“You have your war,” she’d said, the disdain clear in her voice that Sunday morning when word had reached Snow Mountain.
I never wanted it, he wished he’d said to her now.
Everyone had been in church when Benfred Tallhart had slunk in the back door and whispered the word to his brother who’d passed it along to Theon. Soon the hymn Jon had been singing was forgotten as some of the young men had filtered out to whoop and holler in celebration of the grand adventure that awaited them.
Reverend Chayle had labeled them all young fools as the service had quickly disbanded after that. Uncle Ned hadn’t approved either.
“What do you boys imagine you’ll be fighting for?” he’d asked him and Robb at dinner later. She had been sitting across from him, absorbed in her plate as she had been the entire meal, not looking at him once.
“The South,” Robb had answered with his easy smile.
“Last I checked, south’s just a direction,” his uncle had said.
“Summer soldiers and just as green,” Uncle Benjen had laughed.
“Why’re you so eager to die fighting so some rich man can keep his slave?”
“I ain’t fighting for that, Daddy. Wouldn’t bother me none if they was all freed. But we’re fighting Northern Aggression and…”
“Lord, the things you get in your head, boy.”
Jon had heard enough. Robb had stayed to argue but Jon had made his excuses and tromped away from his elders in anger…and in guilt. He’d hoped she would follow him. She hadn’t. She’d already tried talking sense into him earlier.
It wouldn’t have mattered. Whether you signed up right away or waited until they called you. Everyone was going. There wasn’t ever a choice really. And I couldn’t have stayed behind and let Robb go without me.
“What’s your name, soldier?” Dr. Luwin asked.
“Snow…Jon Snow,” he said disinterestedly.
“Where you from?”
“North Carolina.”
“So am I,” the doctor said with a smile. “From Raleigh. Where you hail from?”
Jon grimaced and said, “Snow Mountain.”
The doctor chuckled. “Snow Mountain? And you’re Jon Snow?”
He was humored by him sharing his last name with his little hamlet. Jon found no humor in it, the made-up name his mama had claimed was the last name of a husband everyone knew didn’t exist.
“It’s pretty country, I’ll bet. Remote though. How’d you come to…”
Jon turned his head away.
Dr. Luwin frowned at his listlessness. Jon did not care. He could go and heal men who wanted to live. Jon was done with all that. Robb had died in his arms. She hadn’t wanted either of them to go. How could he go home again without Robb? How would he ever explain it to her, to any of them?
Days passed and Jon stayed in his bed. There were bodies carried away and new corpses brought in who just didn’t know they were corpses yet.
He had to work up his courage to inspect his wound more closely, still fearing to see the maggots. They weren’t there anymore. His leg was clean, healing nicely. He wondered how it would feel to put some weight on it. He couldn’t summon the desire to try though.
He remembered the old hill woman humming, clucking at him and chomping on her pipe as he lay on the floor of her shack shivering with chills and burning with fever. She’d said she was part Cherokee and knew healing. Her place had been filled with colorful bottles and smelled funny. She had kept a croaking bullfrog as a pet. She was an oddity for certain.
The iron had been red hot when she’d removed the lead. He’d grit his teeth till he thought they’d break. She’d pinched his arm and told him to scream. He had. Then, she’d made a poultice and laughed when the maggots appeared.
“They eats up the corruption, boy. Old Maggie will save that leg yet,” she’d cackled before he’d fainted.
I suppose you did.
If he still prayed, he might have said a prayer for her in thanks for saving him. He wondered where she was or how he got here.
Night was creeping upon them and the room grew quiet except for a few random whimpers or moans. A lantern came bobbing towards his cot. The lady in black silk with sad eyes sat it down and touched his face. His whiskers itched in the sticky August heat but her hand was cool.
“Jon Snow?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You have a letter.”
He closed his eyes and told himself it was a mistake. She would not write to him here. How would she know where he was when he wasn’t even sure how he’d ended up here?
“It’s not very recent, I’m afraid,” Mrs. Hornwood said, looking it over. “I can’t make out the signature. I’m sorry. It’s dated from January.”
She’d sent it before the battle, before Robb had died. She’d mailed it not knowing where to send it, only acting on hope and faith that it would find him. Perhaps, it was all they had left.
He found Mrs. Hornwood’s eyes locked on his, awaiting permission to read. He said nothing but nodded to her, uncertain if his heart could bear it but too eager to hear from her to decline.
‘My Dear Jon,
Since you left, time has been measured out in bitter chapters. Last fall, my poor father died. Bran enlisted right beforehand and Uncle Benjen has been missing in action for two years now. Winterfell Farm is abandoned with only Arya, Rickon and I left to work it.
Every house in these mountains has been touched by tragedy and every day I feel the dread of learning who else has fallen. And no word from you. Are you alive? I pray to God you are.
This war is lost on the battlefield and is being lost twice over by those that stayed behind. I’m still waiting as I promised I would, but I find myself alone and at the end of my wits, too embarrassed to keep taking from those who can least afford to give. My last thread of courage is to put my faith in you and to believe that I will see you again.
So, I say to you now, plain as I can, if you are fighting, stop fighting. If you are marching, stop marching. Come back to me. Come back to me is my request.’
Jon’s eyes closed as silent tears of regret and anguish slid down the side of his face. He felt the letter being pressed into his hands. He grasped it tightly to his chest and heard the swish of skirts as she walked away.
“Sansa,” he murmured to the darkened room before deciding his course.
When Dr. Luwin came to check on him the next morning, he would find his bed empty.