Freedom Stone

by Jeffrey Kluger

  And then, Lillie saw one more thing. It was a bullet, another bullet caught in mid-flight, this one heading straight toward her papa, frozen in place just inches from his chest. Cal, who had tumbled in the mud beside Lillie, saw it too, and he hobbled upright and helped her to her feet. Lillie’s knees trembled badly as she rose and she feared they wouldn’t bear her weight. Her hands shook too and she feared she couldn’t use them. But she held her body steady and reached slowly out toward the bullet. Then, with thumb and forefinger, she plucked it from the air and dropped it in her dress pocket.

  Instantly, the world exploded around them all in a storm of shell blasts, gunshots, snapping trees and the anguished cries of ten thousand men. Papa looked her square in the face with bright, living eyes.

  “Quashee!” he said.

  Then he grabbed Lillie and Cal, pulled them to the ground and threw his body on top of theirs.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  THE SOUND OF the battle was a terrible thing—far worse than the sight and smell of it, if only because Lillie could at least close her eyes or pinch her nose and shut those things out. But there was no shutting out the furious roar of the shells and guns. It was a sound that wasn’t just heard but felt—shaking the bones inside her and the ground below her and even the air above her, which seemed to hammer down with the force of a solid thing every time a cannon boomed or a shell burst.

  Yet while Lillie felt the noise, she felt no fear. What she felt instead was safe—safer here on a battlefield where men were losing their lives than she had felt in even the deepest part of the quietest night in all the months since Papa had been dead. Because Papa was dead no more. Bett was wrong! It was possible to spare his life, and Lillie had done so! Even now, she could feel the bullet that had been meant for her papa harmlessly pressing against her hip as she lay flattened on the ground. It was a bother, perhaps, like a pebble in her shoe, but no more than that. Far more powerful than the bullet were the arms of her papa, holding her and Cal tight and shielding them from the explosions raining down everywhere. Lillie lay half buried in a smoldering shell hole, and yet all she felt flowing through her was a sense of protection and peace.

  Finally—perhaps minutes later, perhaps hours—the explosions began to slow. There were longer and longer gaps between shellings, gaps that were filled with the ongoing rattle of gunfire. Then the guns stopped too and all there was to hear was the screaming of the wounded men. That, Lillie suspected, was a battlefield sound that never stopped. Slowly, Papa’s weight began to lift, and he sat up and looked in wonder at the two children pressed into the muck beneath him. He recognized Cal’s face well, since he had known the boy since he was very small, but for a moment he ignored him. Instead, he looked only at Lillie, reaching down with one arm and scooping her up as easily as he had when she was a baby. He grabbed her in a fierce embrace.

  “Quashee,” he said. “Quashee, Quashee, Quashee.”

  “Papa,” she said through her sobs.

  “Quashee, I don’t understand. It can’t be you. It can’t be either of you.”

  “It is, Papa. It’s us. We’re here.”

  “It ain’t possible.”

  “It is possible, Papa.”

  “But how? How did you get here? Why did you come here?”

  “Papa . . . ,” Lillie said, pulling back and looking him in the face.

  Before she could say more, there was a sound of sloshing footsteps at the lip of the mud hole and the voice of an angry man barking down at them. “What’s all this?” the voice demanded. “Who is this girl? Who are these children? Soldier, explain this!”

  Papa, Lillie and Cal turned toward the sound. Standing above them was a broad, beefy white man, not quite as tall as Lillie’s papa but more muscled. He had a thick mustache and long, muddy hair. Even through the filth that covered his uniform, Lillie could see three stripes on his sleeve.

  “Sergeant,” Papa stammered, “Sergeant, it’s . . . they’re ...” He began to stand, helping Lillie up as he did; both of them found only poor purchase on the slick soil.

  Beside them, Cal struggled upright and faced the sergeant square. “Drummer boy, sir,” he said. “I’m a slave from near Charleston what got sent down here to help.”

  “There ain’t no slave drummer boys!” the sergeant said.

  “There is from Charleston, sir,” Cal said. “Not enough white folks sent their boys; someone had to do the job.”

  “Who’s the girl?”

  “Runaway, sir,” Cal said. Papa snapped his head toward Lillie, who looked down at the ground. “I got orders to carry her back to where she escaped from and collect the reward.”

  “What company are you with, boy? Who’s your commander?” the sergeant asked with narrowing eyes.

  Lillie froze, Papa stared—and Cal, for a moment, said nothing. Then he shrugged. “Don’t rightly know, sir,” he said. “Been with all of ’em, it seems. I just go where they sends me.”

  The sergeant nodded in disdain. “Well, if you’re a drummer boy, you ain’t a very smart one. Got no wits at all windin’ up here, ’specially with that foot o’ yours. Now, get off my battlefield and take that runaway with you.”

  “Yes, sir,” Cal said.

  “And you,” the sergeant said, wheeling to Papa, “quit tendin’ to children when you got wounded men to look after!”

  “Yes, sir,” Papa said.

  The sergeant turned and plodded off, and Papa looked back to Lillie and Cal. “What’s he sayin’?” he asked Lillie. “You can’t be no runaway. He can’t be no slave chaser.”

  “No, sir,” Cal said, “I ain’t.”

  “No, Papa,” Lillie said. “We come to see you. We come to save Plato.”

  “Plato? What are you talkin’ about?” Papa demanded. “What happened to Plato? What happened to your mama?”

  “They’s all right,” Lillie said. “They’s all right now. But they won’t be soon. The Master’s gonna sell off Plato. Then he’s gonna sell me off. They won’t let us go free ’cause they say you’re a thief. You was dead, so you couldn’t tell ’em otherwise, but now you can!”

  “Quashee, you ain’t makin’ sense,” Papa said. “Look at me—I ain’t dead.”

  “But you was!”

  “And I ain’t no thief.”

  “But they say you is!”

  “Boy,” Papa said, turning to Cal, “what kind o’ story is this child tellin’?”

  “It ain’t no story,” Cal said. “She’s talkin’ truth.”

  “It’s Bett, Papa,” Lillie said. “Bett sent us here to help.”

  Lillie then told Papa everything there was to tell—all the things she and Bett had just explained to Cal, and all the other things Papa could not know about: the slave appraiser and the shelling of Charleston and the hard times at Greenfog. She told of her trip to Bluffton and her visit to the one-legged Henry and her charmed run through the darkness to see his family at Orchard Hill. Finally, she told Papa of his own death, of the terrible sorrow it had caused and of how she had now prevented it. She pulled the bullet from her pocket and offered it to him, but he did not want to touch it, and Lillie tucked it back away. Papa said nothing at all as she told her story. He had no cause to believe such nonsense. But he was Ibo and Bett was Ibo and he’d always believed she had powerful ways. And the fact was, the children were here, and there was no other way that could be so. Finally he spoke, and to Lillie’s surprise, he sounded cross.

  “That old woman don’t have no business workin’ charms on a child,” he said.

  “But I asked her to,” Lillie protested. “And now you’re alive! You can come home.”

  Papa waved that off. “If I’m s’posed to get took by a bullet, I’ll get took by a bullet,” he said. “If I ain’t, I ain’t.”

  Lillie nodded mutely at the words. They were exactly like the ones Bett had spoken. She wanted to argue with him just as she’d wanted to argue with her, but she saw the same look of certainty on Papa’s face that she’d seen on B
ett’s.

  “What about Plato?” she asked instead. “What’s s’posed to happen to him?”

  “He’s alive, child,” Papa said. “Sometimes there ain’t nothin’ more’n that.”

  “What if he gets sold away from Mama and me?”

  “And what if you and Cal get yourselves killed comin’ here to try to fix things? What would your mama do then?”

  “She’s gonna lose us both to the slave trader anyway.”

  “Least you’ll be alive.”

  “But Plato could be free!” Lillie protested. “Mama could be free! We could all be free! Don’t that matter?”

  Papa looked at Lillie, and now the certainty in his eyes wavered. The child had done a foolish thing playing with charms and stepping into a war. But that didn’t mean she was a foolish girl. She knew her papa, and she knew his wishes, and she knew he wouldn’t have gone to war himself if freedom for his family hadn’t mattered more to him than anything else. Lillie knew the weight the very word carried with him—and the effect that simply saying it would have on him. Like any clever daughter, she knew the mind of her father.

  “Little Ibo,” Papa said with a look that was part love and part surrender, “you are a stubborn child. Tell me what you’re plannin’ to do.”

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  PAPA HELPED LILLIE and Cal out of the shell hole and led them deeper into the battlefield to a patch of clear ground protected by a stand of thick trees. Many of the Confederate soldiers who had survived the battle were drifting in the same direction. As Lillie approached the spot, she could see a large tent with smoke and steam rising up around it.

  “Cook tent,” Papa said. “You children should have somethin’ in your bellies.”

  Lillie followed, not interested in food after all she had seen this morning and not understanding how the soldiers themselves could have any appetite either. Yet the soldiers seemed to be hungry indeed and came streaming across the battlefield so fast that a few of them almost knocked her down. Suddenly, Lillie stopped in her tracks. Approaching the tent from barely twenty yards away was Henry—but this Henry had both his legs. He had yet to be wounded, yet to be sent home, yet to learn anything of the lonely life he’d be living in the furniture barn in Bluffton.

  “What is it, Quashee?” Papa asked.

  “It’s Henry!” she said, pointing.

  Papa looked in the direction she indicated. “Leave him be,” he said. “If what you say is true, he don’t need to know it yet.”

  Lillie nodded and simply watched in wonder as Henry trotted past and melted into the crowd.

  “Now, don’t stand about,” Papa ordered. “Quiet times like this don’t last no longer than it takes the Yankees to rest up and reload.”

  As Lillie and Cal waited, Papa gathered three tin plates with a strip of salt pork and a torn piece of bread on each. He unclipped a tin cup from his belt, dipped it into a barrel of water and filled it. The water looked brown and grimy in the barrel, but less so in the cup, and Lillie took it from Papa gratefully and drank it down. He refilled it and passed it to Cal, who did the same. A few soldiers looked at them curiously and Papa mumbled some words about a drummer boy and a runaway and that seemed to appease them. He then led the children to a spot next to a toppled wagon where they’d have a little privacy, and they sat.

  “So they’re sayin’ I’m a thief,” Papa said, not seeming troubled by the slander. “What do they say I took?”

  “Coins,” Lillie said, chewing on a small bit of the hard bread, which felt grittier than the water did. “A whole bag of ’em. Yankee gold.” She tossed off the last two words with a small laugh, as if the idea were too foolish to say out loud.

  “Like these?” Papa asked, reaching into his coat pocket. He withdrew a drawstring bag, opened it up and spilled a shiny pile of golden money into his hand. Both children’s eyes widened. Here in the past, where Papa was alive, the money was still in his possession. Back in the present—where Lillie and Cal lived and where Bett waited in her cabin for their return—Papa was already dead and the Master had the coins. The thought made Lillie dizzy. But she was dizzier still at the idea that what she’d been told about Papa and the gold seemed to be true.

  “Papa!” Lillie said.

  “Then they wasn’t lyin’!” Cal whispered.

  “Not about the fact that I got these coins, no,” Papa said. “Five hundred dollars, the way I count it up—and I’ve counted it up a lot.”

  “Five hundred dollars,” Lillie repeated in a wondering whisper. “Papa, where’d you get it?”

  Lillie asked her question before she gave it much thought, and as soon as she did, she regretted it. It wasn’t so much what she said as the way she said it. Her voice carried a whisper of doubt—a doubt that said she might actually think her papa could have stolen the money. She was ashamed of that tone and turned away.

  “It’s all right, Quashee,” he said. “If my papa had turned up with five hundred dollars in gold, I’d have wondered if he stole it too. But I didn’t steal it.”

  “How’d you get it, then?” she asked.

  “I can’t tell.”

  “Who did it belong to?”

  “I can’t tell that, either.”

  “Was it a man named Appleton?”

  Papa looked at her in surprise and tried to hide it, but Lillie saw through him—and Papa saw that she had. “Where did you hear that name?” he asked.

  “Henry,” she answered. “He said the soldiers go to the Appleton land for supplies all the time. Said you went there to fetch water one day and come back with a bag full o’ gold.”

  Papa thought that over. “I don’t know nothin’ ’bout what Henry thinks.”

  “Papa!” Lillie cried, so loudly that a soldier nearby turned. “Papa!” she repeated, lowering her voice to a fierce whisper. “I got to know! It’s what I come here for! It’s the only way to save Plato!”

  Papa fell silent now and looked down. He seemed deep in thought and far away. When he looked up again, Lillie could see that his eyes were red.

  “You know, your mama couldn’t get by without you children,” he said softly.

  “I know,” Lillie answered.

  “And Plato can’t get by without you and Mama. You reckon they really plan to sell him off?”

  “Bett says it’ll happen today or tomorrow.”

  “You reckon she’s right that they’ll sell you too?”

  “She ain’t been wrong yet,” Lillie answered.

  “And she reckons she was right sendin’ you here where men is dyin’ instead o’ keepin’ you home where you oughta be?”

  “I know it don’t seem safe,” Lillie said, “but we ain’t s’posed to get killed—on account of the charm.”

  “What kind o’ charm can promise you that?” Papa demanded.

  “The same kind what got us here.”

  Papa fell silent once more, then nodded to himself as if he had just made a decision. “All right, then,” he said. “You both need to listen to me hard. I can’t leave this battlefield. Times between shootin’ like this is when deserters usually run, and the Army’s got riflemen posted to see that they don’t. A man lights out—’specially a slave man—he gets shot just like a Yankee. But you two can go—in fact you got to go. The fightin’ what’s comin’ is worse’n what’s happened already. You’ll be killed sure if you stay here, and the Appleton farm is as safe a place as any. You go there, you talk to that farmer, and you see if he can’t tell you what you need to know.”

  “But why can’t you tell us?” Lillie pleaded.

  “Because I gave my promise I wouldn’t,” Papa said. “Besides, who’s gonna believe a slave child carryin’ a tale that her papa did no wrong? You gonna have to have a white man’s word on the matter, or it won’t amount to nothin’.”

  Lillie nodded. She hadn’t thought of that, but of course it was true.

  “Boy,” Papa said, turning to Cal, “can you move on that bad foot?”

  “I’ll
keep up,” Cal said.

  “You good at navigatin’ the woods?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about you?” Papa asked Lillie. She knew nothing about navigating but lied and nodded. Papa saw the fib and turned back to Cal.

  “You gonna have to get yourself and my girl where you’re goin’,” he said. “And you gonna have to be ready to use some o’ that storytellin’ I saw you workin’ on the sergeant. You don’t think you can do all that, you best say so now.”

  “I can do it.”

  Papa nodded, then reached down and ran his hand over the ground, smoothing out a patch of mud. With a shard of wood pulled from the toppled wagon, he drew a map from the battlefield to the Appleton farm. Cal and Lillie studied it carefully and listened closely while Papa told them about the landmarks they’d see along the way and the wrong turns they needed to avoid. The children traced the map with their fingers while Papa looked around to make sure no one was watching.

  “You got it in your heads?” he asked at last. The children nodded, and with a sweep of his hand, he wiped the map clean.

  Papa then walked Cal and Lillie as far as he could before he came in range of the riflemen hunting for deserters. Then he stopped and took Lillie by the shoulders.

  “Tell your mama and Plato I love them,” he said.

  “They know that,” Lillie answered, choking back tears.

  “And I miss them.”

  “They miss you too.”

  “They got me, child. They got me in you. Your mama’s a beautiful woman, and I know you was always disappointed that you favor me, not her. But you’re a beautiful girl—the most beautiful one I ever seen. And you’re the piece o’ me what’s gonna live no matter what.”