The south was facing desperate days and food and supplies were short and people near hunger, but they weren’t defeated yet. The war had been going on so long now that they almost couldn’t imagine it ever coming to an end.
Though he’d never be able to walk again without leaning on a cane, he felt stronger and healthier than most and was almost himself again, thanks to hard physical work that had toughened his body and to the miracle that was Betsy. Even back when he was whole and sound, he’d never been so presumptuous as to expect anybody like her to come into his life.
Evan and Miranda both had colds and she’d been up half the night with Miranda who came down with croup, keeping the teakettle steaming so the child could breathe while Hetty caught a few hours of much needed sleep, but this morning both children were dosing and even Miranda was breathing easily enough while the two women wearily breakfasted on thin porridge sweetened with honey and covered with milk.
Spring was on the way now and with the coming of that season, their lives would improve with abundant milk, cream, butter and eggs and the beginning of the first fresh produce from the garden they were already beginning to plant.
Doc had been called away early to the bedside of a dying patient as he kept busy serving the needs of the community, black or white. Nobody had much energy left to protest his activities these days, though when she walked to the store with him, Betsy was observant enough to catch hatred in the eyes of some who looked his way.
Especially those who had fathers and sons who would never come home again.
Of course there had been no word from Caleb and she hadn’t expected any with the way things were now. Civilization was collapsing in the south now as battles raged on and the cities were starved into submission. Betsy knew her history well enough to know they were now in the last full year of the war but that terrible things lay ahead for the embattled confederacy. The siege of Vicksburg was still to come with all its horrors and Atlanta itself would fall and Sherman would make his terrible march to the sea.
She wished she’d paid more attention, knew more details, but back when she’d been eight or nine, she’d sat at her uncle’s ranch house in 21st century Oklahoma and watched Gone With the Wind with Mama and Aunt Lynne. She hadn’t comprehended a whole lot of what was going on, but she remembered fire and screaming and invading soldiers. And that had been in Atlanta!
Without telling Caleb how she knew, she’d cautioned him to get into that city, rescue Forrest from his hospital bed and get out again as quickly as he could. Terrible things are coming to Atlanta, she had warned like a grim old prophetess.
Hetty waved a lazy hand in her direction. “You there, Betsy girl?”
Betsy shook her head. “What?”
“You seem to be lost in a haze, like your brain had gone off to that place where you really live.”
“Actually I was thinking about Caleb,” she said, then grinned. “And you have a lot to say about being hazy when you’re about as energetic as a dead cat.”
“That’s the hard part about being a mama. Half the time you don’t get enough sleep. Especially at first.” She hesitated as though wondering if she’d said too much, then went on, “When’s your baby due?”
Betsy laughed. “And I thought I was being so secretive.”
“Hey, I’ve been working delivering babies since I used to go with my mama when I was just a little girl.”
“Is your mama still alive, Hetty?”
Hetty shrugged. “She was when I ran away, but that’s a long time ago now.”
“Down south?”
“In South Carolina.”
“Maybe after the war, you can look her up.”
Hetty’s expression brightened. “That would be nice. Had a little brother too. After the war,” she echoed Betsy as though that was an unimaginable time in the future.
“Your little Miranda will grow up not even remembering slavery and as for your grandchildren,” she thought of Susan, “they’ll only know what it is from stories they’ve heard.”
“If we win,” Hetty said the words softly as though afraid of being overheard.
“It’ll happen,” Betsy said, than remembered she wasn’t too sure of much about the future. But a few little changes couldn’t overturn the union victory, she reassured herself.
“Did Caleb know?” Hetty asked. “About the baby, I mean.”
Betsy nodded. “I told him I was pretty sure. Thought it would give him more reason to fight his way back here. He was beyond pleased.”
Hetty nodded. “He would be. Poor boy lost everybody in his life before he was thirteen.”
“But he had you and Forrest and Doc.”
“Still.” Hetty sipped at a spoonful of porridge. “A boy doesn’t get over a thing like that, but I like to think it made him stronger. He’ll make a good daddy, our Caleb.”
Daddy. Betsy thought of the remote, rather unpleasant man who had fathered her. She hadn’t had a daddy until Mama married Evan.
If it still happened. Surely if it hadn’t, all her memories would have gone away.
She finally remembered Hetty’s question. “October,” she said, “Caleb should be back with Forrest by then.”
“Long before,” Hetty agreed.
Then they heard Miranda’s choked crying, quickly joined by Evan’s sobs, and both hurried back to the children in the bedroom forgetting all about breakfast.
The one time he got careless, mostly because he was tired and hungry, he stumbled into pickets and was captured, thankfully not by the northern army!
The big private from Georgia walked him at rifle point in to meet his captain.
The captain looked at him, standing there leaning on his cane and grinned. “Coming to volunteer, son?” Middle aged with a black beard and deep-set eyes, he looked like under normal circumstances he was a man of humor. But right now, he seemed to be in a mood of grim death.
“Not this time,” Caleb said. “Went down early at Manassas, but I’m well again now, though not exactly army-ready. Headed to Atlanta to pick up a friend who’s been released from prison.”
“Which prison?” the captain barked the question.
“Elmira, at least part of the time. I’m a bit short of information.”
The captain grunted admission of the horror of that place. “Relative?”
It took Caleb only a second to realize he was referring to Forrest.
“Not by blood, but I worked for him after my folks died out on the frontier. Comanche. Major Forrest Stephens is the closest I’ve got to a father.”
The captain nodded. “You’re taking him home?”
“Hope to.”
“Where’s home?”
“Texas. Lavender over in the north central part of the state.”
“Lot of trouble in that area. Folks on both sides.”
Caleb could tell he was still suspicious, obviously wondered which side Caleb had been on at Manassas.
“Even in my own household. Forrest and me, we joined the army of Northern Virginia, but his old father, he wasn’t for either side exactly, but leaned toward the black folk.”
“That means he was with the blue,” the captain said suspiciously, “surprised he wasn’t hanged.”
“There was talk, but he’s the only doctor around and good to most folks. Reckon he was too much needed to be well rid of.”
The captain looked as though he didn’t approve of that philosophy and Caleb wasn’t about to admit that over the years of warfare, he’d become less partisan himself, caught between Doc’s opinions and those of Forrest. Still he was southern, obliged to defend his homeland.
He was questioned for a couple of hours and it was only after he’d talked at length about his army experience and he and the captain were found to have mutual acquaintances among the officers that the resistance melted.
He was invited to eat beans and biscuits with troops around one of the campfires, exchanged stories with newly minted soldiers and hardened veterans from across the sout
hern states and then slept warm on his blanket spread next to the fire.
The next morning he and his horses were on their way, skirting the camp and the one not too far away where the enemy forces lay in wait. No doubt before the day was over, the battle would ensue and before morning some of his new acquaintances would be dead.
As he rode on, he began to hear the firing of artillery behind him. He tried to think instead of Betsy and the baby they were going to have this fall and of getting Forrest safely home.
Days later he rode into the beautiful starving city of Atlanta, still in the hands of the southerners but close enough to hear the bombardment of guns as a constant nightmare, and went searching the hospitals made in what had not too long ago been luxurious mansions where the women of the confederacy nursed their wounded men back to health, or remained at their sides while they slipped into death.
Chapter Nineteen
The three of them planted the spring garden in the back yard and were soon eating lettuces and young green onions, but with only one horse left Betsy couldn’t afford to go riding off to the home in the country where she had lived with Caleb, not even to put in the spring crops.
Though she was sure she could have managed if she’d just had a way to get there. The worst of everything was that they had no way of knowing how long Caleb’s trek would take, considering the torn up countryside that lay between them and Georgia, or whether Forrest’s condition would be such as to allow for immediate travel.
Doc’s patients, paying what they could for his help, continued to keep them supplied with foodstuff from their own farms and gardens. The hens were laying and the cow giving enough milk for them and for her young calf. The heifer had been brought back from the farm and got by on grazing the fresh green grass and the hay they could occasionally find to purchase.
Evan was sprouting up, though Miranda was still petite, but even livelier than the little boy. Evan would turn three and Miranda four this summer and to the disapproval of half of Lavender were the best of friends.
If the townspeople gossiped about Doc and his household, it was behind their backs. Betsy was glad because she didn’t feel that in her condition, it would look real good for her to get furious and cuss her neighbors out.
School ending in Lavender came early considering that so many of the children lived on farms and had to help with the summer work and as was customary treats were prepared for the children on the last day when they would have special games and competitions.
Betsy went up to the school to take the vinegar pie she had baked the evening before as her family’s contribution to the big day. It was the first time she’d taken part in any social event other than occasional church suppers since arriving in this Lavender.
Back at home she and her family took part in everything from pie suppers to Saturday night dances and for the first time as she walked through the beginnings of the town she would know in the future, she realized she missed the company of her neighbors.
Of course Lavender School was quite different than the one she’d attended from the time she arrived in town with her mother until she graduated high school. The big building with its auditorium sized to fit the town’s populace wouldn’t exist for a few years and she was accustomed to the fact that neither it nor the pretty little stores downtown or the good-sized courthouse with its clock on top were anything more than dreams in someone’s mind.
Now she saw the familiar outlines of the sketchy little downtown with its box-like school, modest church and one store that served all purposes. Even these were looking shabby and rundown with most of the men gone these past years.
Still she enjoyed the afternoon, cheering the boys as they played marbles, or rolled hoops, taking a turn at jacks herself but bypassing jump rope as not befitting a woman with a baby in her tummy.
The children took to her at once, the pretty, sunny-haired lady who smiled a lot, and they didn’t seem to be bothered by the fact that she kept the ‘wrong’ kind of company.
As for the two spinster teachers, busy with their duties of greeting parents and keeping over-excited children in line, they were just grateful for the competent assistance Betsy offered.
But it wasn’t until late in the day when the children gathered out in the school yard because it was too hot inside to give their recitations and performances that she came into her own. She wasn’t sure quite how it happened, but somehow she was asked if she would recite. They couldn’t know that back home her profession was storyteller, but she couldn’t resist the opportunity after so long, to entertain.
She still didn’t look pregnant, at least not in the loose fitting cotton dresses she wore, and now she stood in front of one of the smaller groups she’d ever addressed: a couple of dozen youngsters and their moms and grandmas and grandpas.
All the faces were white, of course. Girls like Miranda wouldn’t be going to school here. She frowned at the thought, than realized Hetty would find a way to see that her daughter got an education. Hetty would always find a way.
Usually she had some advance preparation time to work on her story, but today she had to begin at the beginning and discover the story at the same time her audience did.
It was a made-up story as were all the ones she told. She left truth and reality to Betsy and if anybody ever needed a touch of the fanciful, it was these boys and girls here today. The younger ones could probably remember little of a time when they hadn’t been at war; the older had seen their families suffer the loss of loved ones either through absence or death and for the oldest of the boys, they’d most of them soon be heading into battle themselves.
She began to tell her story of a boy growing up to be a man, the support of his mama and little brothers and how he chopped wood and planted potatoes and milked cows.
And she told of girls who did the same and how they grew up to eleven, twelve and thirteen and spent one glorious day having adventures that none of those here could even imagine.
She imagined for them and before she was finished they’d gone up and down, torn with terror one minute and laughing at the antics of the hero in the next.
When she ended the story, they all were breathless for a long moment and then somebody began to clap.
By the time she went home, Betsy had made a few new friends in Lavender. Two of them, women who were close neighbors who had barely spoken to her before, walked her back.
“You gave the children such a treat,” one of them said.
“The children!” the other one said. “I had a good time myself.”
After two days of searching Caleb finally found Forrest. Even as he was admitted to the big house that had been turned into a hospital by its owners, he thrilled to hear the deep, familiar voice of the man who had half raised him. For so long now, he’d doubted he’d hear Forrest speak again.
The exhausted-looking woman who had admitted him smiled. “Major Stephens will be right glad to see you,” she said.
He didn’t linger, but stomped ahead, the sound of his cane against the tiled entrance hall announcing his progress as he followed the woman into a large room that had been emptied of furniture so that rows of cots could be placed instead.
Each cot was occupied by a wounded soldier and even at a glance Caleb recognized that most were severely injured, some most likely would not walk out of this room again.
He knew all this, had been in a makeshift hospital himself, though not such an elegant one as this, but the reality of it hit him like a body blow and he stumbled, then had to right himself to keep going.
Forrest turned from where he was talking to a soldier on the other side of his bed and saw Caleb. His mouth opened with surprise, than he grinned. “You a patient here too, Caleb?”
Caleb shook his head, almost too choked up at the sight of the other man to speak. “Naw,” he said, “Doc sent me to get you.”
“That old coot. Should’ve come himself.”
“Couldn’t leave all his sick people. But he wanted to come.”
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br /> What he recognized most about Forrest was that distinctive voice. Otherwise he was much changed, his body shrunk to the point of emaciation and even his face thinned with his cheeks hollow and his eyes sunken. He looked like a dead man sitting up.
No way was this man going to be able to ride all the way back to Texas. Then abruptly, he remembered Lavinia. In the joy of reunion, he had for a few seconds forgotten the news he had brought.
The nurse hovered protectively at Caleb’s side, obviously anxious about her patient. “Major Stephens has been through a lot,” she warned Caleb. “Maybe he should rest a little before visiting with you.”
“Nonsense,” Forrest boomed, his voice too big for his shrunken body. “What I need is to get home and see my family.”
Caleb stood in dumb silence. How could he place one more burden on this man?
“Your leg still bothering you?” Forrest asked, not being one to avoid a hard question.
Caleb nodded. “I limp a little,” he minimized his own injury, “but I get around.”
As if reminded that her visitor was not entirely sound of limb, the tired-looking nurse dragged up a chair, then went back to her work of administering to the sufferers under her care, giving a sip of water here and a touch on the forehead as if checking fever there as she went down the line. Those able to do so, murmured to her, often asking questions she obviously didn’t know how to answer. With a kind of brusque gentleness she offered soothing words as the only comfort she had available.
Forrest was not diverted. “What is it, boy? What are you afraid to tell me?”
Caleb met his gaze. He owed Doc more than this. He knew something terrible was wrong so he might as well come out and say it.
“It’s about Lavinia,” he said. “It’s about your wife.”
After the storytelling incident, Betsy began to feel a little more part of the community and even Hetty and Doc reported being met with a friendlier attitude.
Lavender Blue: A Time Travel Romance (Lavender, Texas Series) Page 13
