The Rebel found Arlis’ eyes with his own, dulled and gray from blood loss. “Kill me, Yank!” he said, “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.”
Arlis was utterly sick of killing, having just charged with the rest of the Sixth Wisconsin on an unfinished railroad cut outside Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. He looked at the Rebel, who lay wounded and bleeding beneath a bramble next to the cut. The Reb’s right leg was stuck beneath him, the foot pinned under his backside, and it was this image more than the gruesome wounds in the man’s gullet which alarmed Arlis, the position obviously uncomfortable even under the best of circumstances.
“Matthew: Five, seven,” Arlis said, acknowledging the man’s words. He knelt down and lifted the Rebel’s right hip slightly, pulling the trapped foot from beneath him, straightening the man’s leg into a position of comfort…
By the time Arlis Jenkins had gone to war, he’d become all too familiar with death. At the age of ten he’d already lost a sister to disease and a brother to a storm… and while he struggled with his own agony and that of his surviving sister, Rachel, he watched helplessly as his parents wallowed in their despair, forever changed, forever distant, forever lost. Now, nearly ten years later, as death and destruction rages all around him, he’s lost the only girl he’s ever loved and Rachel too, while his mother sits in a rocker at a hospital for the insane in Milwaukee, choosing to starve herself to death rather than allow God to force her to bury her last remaining child.
“Black Iron Mercy” is a 99,000 word historical novel about hardship, love, loss, war, coping, and the strength of spirit. A lifetime of passion and ten months of research went into the manuscript before a word was put to paper. Although Arlis is fictional, many of the principals were real people, and when a writer takes liberties with the lives of real people then that writer has a dire responsibility to get it right.
Eric Schlehlein, Author 