I Have Seen Him in the Watchfires

by Cathy Gohlke

  “Flowers?” I repeated. “Before I go?”The words stood fuzzy in my brain.

  “Ones that will come up every year, whether you’re here or not.”

  I thought, Where else would I be? but didn’t say it. “Flowers,” I said again, wondering what kind Ma would like.

  “You’ve got to pick up, Robert, to go on.”

  I wanted to say, I can’t, and what do you know about it anyway? You’ve got your ma! And she’s a real mother! But I didn’t say that, either. And what I couldn’t bring myself to think clearly was that I wouldn’t wish her back, not the way she was.

  “As hard as it is, your life goes on,” Wooster started.

  “I don’t want to hear this, Wooster—not now. I don’t want to think about it.”

  “But you’ve got to think about it. There’s a house full of hungry people back there, most of them children. They’re looking to you for food, Robert, for answers.”

  “Answers? I’m fresh out of answers. Come back some other day—some other lifetime,” I said. When there’s not so much death, I thought. I stood and stomped away, sure I could outwalk him. But that was wrong, too.

  “Do you remember what you told me Chap. Goforth said, about serving where you’re called, about answering God’s call on your life?” Wooster panted but kept up with me.

  I wanted to stick my fingers in my ears, to shout at the top of my lungs, not listen to any of this. Wooster grabbed my arm.

  “What do you want from me?” I shouted.

  “It’s not me that wants it, Robert!” he shouted back. “Why did you come here? Why did you fight your way all through the South, risk your life and mine to get here?”

  “I did it to find Ma! Well, I sure found her! And look what happened!”

  “Yes! Look what happened.” He wouldn’t let go of my arm. “You helped them get from South Carolina to North Carolina. They would have starved, the women would have been left alone—to the hands of deserters or foragers or Sherman’s bummers—if you hadn’t been there.”

  “They were doing fine before I showed up!”

  “You saved those kids, found Stargazer, brought Ruby’s mother back to her burial ground! For the sake of all that’s holy, Robert, you found Ruby—Jeremiah’s mother! Do you think Gen. Sherman would have provided a safe escort to two colored women, a passel of slave children, Emily, and your addled mother if you hadn’t been there—if he didn’t believe all you told him?”

  “How did you know—”

  “Emily told me. Ruby told me. Ruby told me you promised to get her to Jeremiah. Emily and those kids are counting on you to take care of them. You know they can’t stay here. There’s nothing for them! Emily won’t complain, but there’s not enough money to pay the taxes. They’ll be turned out before next winter.”

  “Alex has money in England.”

  Wooster snorted. “From everything you told me about him, from what I know from Emily, he’s probably already spent it. Even if he hasn’t, he can’t get it through the blockades, and after the war, who knows what will get through? Do you think he’ll pay to raise slave children as his own? Do you think he’ll provide for Emily once he learns she’s freed all the slaves—didn’t get a penny for them?” He shook my arm. “Think, Robert. Think!”

  “I don’t want to think!” I shoved him away. “I can’t take responsibility for them. Look what happened to Ma when I tried to help her. She’s dead, Wooster. She’s dead! I killed her!” And then the dam broke—the dam I’d been holding back three weeks.

  “You didn’t kill her, Robert. You kept her from killing innocent people—me, Emily, Ruby, Noah—the children. She couldn’t help herself, and she couldn’t stop. You know that.”

  I did know that, but I needed to punish someone. I needed to punish myself for failing—failing Ma and Pa, failing to pull our family back together, failing to get Ma home. “I couldn’t stop her.” I swore. “I couldn’t change her.” I swiped at my eyes. “She could have lived a hundred more years, and I couldn’t change her.”

  “That’s the truth you have to remember. It wasn’t your job to change her. It was your job to love her, and you did that. Now you need to forgive her, to let her go.”

  “I did forgive her! I knew she couldn’t help it!”

  “Knowing she couldn’t help what she was is not the same as forgiving her. You know that. You know that because you know that not being able to help her is not the same as not loving her.”

  His words spun in my head. I didn’t want to listen. I didn’t want to heed. My temples throbbed. “I don’t know how to go on, Wooster. I don’t know how.”

  “One day at a time. One minute at a time. The strength doesn’t come from you. You know that, Robert.” I looked at him, wondering how he knew, if he really knew. “Emily told me you learned that, too. I’m glad, Robert.”

  Why would Emily tell him anything so personal about me? I hadn’t even said it to her in that many words, and yet she knew—enough to tell Wooster. They were alike in many ways, and I was surprised I hadn’t paid better heed. “You aren’t courting Emily, are you?” It was the first time the idea had swept through my mind.

  Wooster started, then snorted. He chuckled. The chuckle spread till he laughed out loud. “That’s you! That’s a lot more like you, Robert Glover! That’s the grumbling, bumbling friend I ran South with!” He laughed till he clutched his sides. He laughed till tears stood in his eyes, but he hadn’t answered my question.

  “So what is it? Are you? Are you courting her?”

  He stopped laughing—almost. “No, you fool. But if you don’t wake up and do it yourself, I’m bound to!” I felt my dander rise, but he punched me in the chest. “Somebody’s bound to—and soon. Just make sure it’s you.”

  “I mean to.”

  “Then do it. You remember what you told Chap. Goforth about Katie Frances? Well, you’re every bit as slow and stupid as he was.”

  “It’s not the same! Katie Frances loved Andrew. She wanted to marry him, but he didn’t see it. He was afraid of what the war would do to him—to her.”

  Wooster stared hard at me, like he was trying to read my thoughts, trying to figure who I was. “And you’re not?” He started to walk away, then turned back. “Emily has eyes for you and only you. You’re a fool not to see it, and a bigger fool not to ask her to marry you.” I stared after him, wondering if he could be telling the truth.

  “But I’m eighteen. I don’t have anything. I can’t ask her. And there’s a war on!”

  “The war is nearly over. Gen. Sherman’s already in North Carolina. Petersburg and Richmond are nearly broken through. We both know the South can’t hold. It can’t be news to the generals! When this war’s done there won’t be many men with a penny to rub between their fingers. That won’t keep life from going on.”

  He started to walk away again, but turned back. “If you can’t offer Emily anything now, court her. Promise her you’ll make something of yourself—then go out and do it.” Wooster raked his fingers through his hair, frustrated. “Because if you don’t, you fool—I will.” And he stomped off. He stomped off and left me standing in the road.

  I couldn’t take all that in, not yet.

  I walked back toward Ashland, stopped in the circular drive. I saw the Big House’s black ruin with its chimney monuments, saw the cemetery plot on the hillside—Ma’s newly dug grave, and the lane to the run-down slave cabins beyond, broken and empty. I turned again and saw Wooster, my friend, clomping unevenly out the lane and down the road toward Mitchell House, toward Emily and Ruby, toward Noah and Mamee and the six small slave children in need of a home. I thought of Henry’s brown eyes, imagined him growing up, learning to read, working at Laurelea with me and the Henrys.

  I shook my head. I didn’t feel equal to taking responsibility for Henry, for any of them. I didn’t know how I could offer them protection or a home, or offer Emily a life when I owned nothing. But I didn’t for a minute think that would stop Wooster from doing all of that.


  Everything in front of me promised long years and hard work. Maybe I could make a different home, a different family. Maybe Emily would agree to be part of that. I shook my head. That seemed too good to be true, but I wondered.

  Everything behind me, even the grieving, promised the laying down of struggle, an uneasy peace made of giving up. It seemed safer, an easier path, not so frightening. The going forward seemed too big, too hard, too uncertain.

  Wooster had turned onto the road. I saw him between patches of new leaves as he thumped out of sight, determined, strong. He’d lain near death three months before. What made him so strong, so sure now? The love of his mother, the people in his church, his faith? The belief that his life could be different, new, that it could go on? What?

  I remembered him back at the field hospital, when Andrew talked about war-maimed men and how they’d have nothing to offer a woman, no life worth claiming. Even then Wooster knew that was a lie, knew he was stronger than that.

  But I knew, for my own part, that war maimed in ways a body couldn’t see.

  The old, easier path pulled hard at me. It would be so easy to give up, to quit fighting. Was that the decision Ma’d made? Did she have a choice—ever? Or did something broken inside keep her from having choices? I’d begged her to hold on. I knew she’d tried sometimes. She’d waged her inner war, long as I could remember. She’d run from one life to another, back and forth. But for some reason she couldn’t hold on. She couldn’t.

  But I could. I could choose life and all that meant, or I could sit in my darkness.

  “I can’t do this alone, Lord.”

  I will never leave you nor forsake you. That Scripture promise came as clear in my mind as it had on that South Carolina road.

  “But how can I do this?”

  And I remembered: I can do all things through Christ, who strengthens me.

  Christ in me. I sighed. Ma understood, I think—even if it was only for a few minutes, only at the end. I wondered what Ma had prayed for, what she’d thought in those last moments—before she thought Jed Slocum had returned, and after—when she thought I was her enemy.

  I wished time could turn back, wished things could have been different for her, for Pa, for all of us. I guessed that is what everyone living through this war wished. I knew Andrew had wished it for him and Katie Frances. I prayed they’d made it, would make it through the war.

  But what about after? Wooster was right—most of us wouldn’t have a penny to rub between our fingers. Most of us lost loved ones, farms, everything that matters in this life. It would be hard to find our way, hard to find my way.

  Trust in the Lord with all thine heart and lean not on thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him and he will direct your paths.

  I breathed that Scripture in, let it take hold, let it settle. It was all right. I’d long known that you never reach a thing without setting your feet straight and walking toward it. I could do that. I could trust Him.

  I breathed again. The air was new. That surprised me. I hadn’t noticed when winter passed, when spring came on. The violets were blooming. It was time to plant. That surprised me too.

  I looked again for Wooster but couldn’t see him. He was beyond the line of trees and probably most of the way to Mitchell House.

  I started down the lane. Maybe I could catch him, talk to him. Maybe I’d thank him, or just shake his hand.

  It would be good, would be right to see Wooster and the Widow Gibbons off to Salem. They’d done so much for us all, in so many ways.

  I picked up my pace. I thought of Emily standing in the morning sunshine, standing in the doorway of Mitchell House, waving good-bye to our friends, then waiting … waiting, maybe, for me to come home. I pondered that till the thought stole my breath. I smiled … all over… and began to run.

  Epilogue

  The Salem newspaper reported rumors that Richmond and Petersburg were being evacuated that first week in April. Gen. Sherman, it was believed, was in Goldsboro, North Carolina. No one was certain which way he’d head next. A “terrible battle” had been waged at Dinwiddie, the roads strewn with the dead and dying. Dinwiddie was not far from the field hospital where Wooster and I’d left Chap. Goforth and Katie Frances.

  Wooster rode from Salem the next week to tell us that Gen. Robert E. Lee had surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Gen. Grant outside a small Virginia village called Appomat-tox Court House the morning of April 9. Gen. Stoneman crossed the shallow fords into Forsyth County, North Carolina on the 10th. Union troops, under Col. Palmer, occupied Salem that same day.

  We heard later that when President Lincoln celebrated the war’s end at a White House reception he ordered the band to play “Dixie,” saying it was one of the best tunes he’d ever heard. I thought well of him for it.

  Folks wondered if the president really intended reconstruction “with malice toward none, with charity for all” like he’d talked about in his second inaugural speech.

  But I think most, North and South, were relieved to lay down their guns. We all wanted to go home—those that fought on the battlefield with courage and rifles, and those that fought from home with courage and prayer.

  We were sure there’d be lean times, and we worried for those we loved, but it seemed things might eventually straighten out. And then Wooster rode from Salem again, this time bearing news that President Lincoln had been shot in a theater house in Washington City on Good Friday, shot in the head, and killed. The world turned over on itself. Even the South knew it had lost its best hope for mercy. Nothing felt safe. Little felt sacred. And all of us who’d grieved through the war, grieved again.

  Emily and I decided to wait two months to start our journey north—partly because the roads and railroads were a shambles and would surely be filled with starving soldiers making their way home, and partly because there were too many of us to travel together, too heavy a burden for Stargazer to pull. Wooster helped us find a second horse, Gus, old though he was, to team alongside Stargazer. Still, I feared the trip north would be too much with all of us. Noah changed that.

  The day we learned that the war had ended, Noah disappeared for two days. Later we learned that he’d walked all the way to Salem, courted Rebecca, and gave her the first love poem he’d ever written. She couldn’t read it. Noah promised to teach her—over a lifetime together. In less than a month they married. They took the twin girls, Mildred and Martha, thinking they might be a sweet and civilizing influence on Sam and Hez. Last I heard, all four children fight like roosters and play like whelp pups.

  Mamee moved near Salem, where Rebecca and Widow Gibbons found her a job cooking for the tavern. Old George, white haired and stooped though he was, made a pretty sight toting field flowers in his stained leather apron to the tavern’s back kitchen door.

  Wooster and his cornflower eyes took to courting a Moravian girl who baked the best sugar cake in Salem and who didn’t seem to notice or mind Wooster’s false leg. Plying his leather trade, Wooster made Jubal and Henry each a round ball before we left and taught them some new game he’d learned in the army, called baseball.

  The journey home to Laurelea was a long grind through a beaten backroads Virginia. The land lay wasted, houses and farms and even some whole towns in ashes. We passed hundreds of soldiers still trying to get home—mostly on foot. We saw desperate families led by penniless mothers or by youngsters no more than twelve, begging for food, searching for a place to lie down, to rest, if only for the night. Freed slaves, in groups of eight and ten and twelve with no place to go and no hope, roamed the roads, searching for somewhere, anywhere to call home.

  We carried little food and took to hiding it under the children’s legs in the wagon. It shamed me that we hoarded. There must have been a million times I wished for Jesus to come right down and do His miracle with the loaves and fishes, feeding the five thousand all over again. But I didn’t see Him, and I wondered that I didn’t have the courage or the faith to be His hands, His f
eet—but how could I do it without enough to feed our own?

  Gen. Will Sherman’s name and the signed passes he’d provided afforded us more movement and protection than I’d ever thought. Nobody would mess with those carrying the signature of “Uncle Billy.”

  Emily and Ruby kept a firm hand on the children, though Henry vowed he wasn’t a toddle baby and didn’t need “watching.” He stuck by me like tar, day and night. I liked that well enough. I took to telling him about William Henry and the antics we used to pull, till Ruby got fed up and fussed, “Don’t you be filling that child’s head with your nonsense, Robert Glover. He has plenty of his own!”

  But when I told Henry about Jeremiah, Ruby drank in every word, like every stunt Jeremiah had pulled was the funniest thing and pure gold. I can’t say as I blamed her. She’d waited Jeremiah’s lifetime to know him. We determined to contact William Still just as soon as we reached Laurelea. He’d have the latest news from Jeremiah. I was sure of it.

  Emily and I talked about opening a school at Laurelea for Henry, Jubal, and Lizzie, for Jacob when he got older, and maybe for other freed children. I felt sure Mr. Heath would take to that idea, and that Mr. Garrett up in Wilmington might be persuaded to help with funds. The meeting house Mr. Heath had built for the colored church at Laurelea would be just the place. Our plans grew bigger every day, stretching our hope.

  On those rare times Henry slept, Emily sat close to me, and I told her details about my life at Laurelea, about Mr. Heath and the Henrys, and especially about William Henry. I told her what his friendship had meant to me, how it walked with me still. By the time we reached the Maryland line I think she knew him pretty well, though she’d never laid eyes on him and never could this side of heaven.

  The thing that worried me was Pa—how he’d take Ma’s death and what it might do to him. I believed he’d made it through the war. I had to believe that, couldn’t let my mind wander down any other path.

  When we reached the Susquehanna River I breathed deeply of the summer morning. By the time we crossed the river and finally reached North East, the sun had stretched across the sky. It was all I could do not to push our team beyond their limits. When we crossed the narrow bridge over the Laurel Run, the setting sun had washed everything in rose and gold. I thought my heart might burst.