by Jane Singer
We bumped and wove along through the narrow aisles into high-backed worn, plush seats. As the engine rumbled, spitting ashes and coal smoke through the windows, I started shaking.
“Are you all right, Maddie?”
He really wanted to know if I was having one of the spells I’d had for a few years after I fell out of a tree when I was six years old. The fall, smack down on a river rock, left me with a mark in the shape of a half-moon on my forehead.
What were you doing, Maddie, up there so high in the tree? Maybe I was trying to fly away, Papa, away from Mama’s fevered face, her groans at night that froze me in my bed. And the way you stopped smiling, and scolded me for no good reason.
Bosh! That wasn’t it. I didn’t tell him the truth, and I never will. Fact is, I thought I heard Nancy calling to me that night, taunting me, telling me to crawl out on that tree limb, high above the forest floor.
After my fall, I healed up okay, but the spells I had were the kind that sent me to my knees when faraway sounds were as loud as thunder and made a ruckus in my brain. Because they were so worried about me, Mama and Papa never left me alone, and I couldn’t go to Mrs. Margery Middleton’s Day School like the rest of the village kids. So I was taught at home. Homebound. A barnacle-girl stuck fast to a rock, waves crashing over her with no way to break free.
Don’t get me wrong. I loved learning. We devoured books, savored them like maple-sugared porridge, clustered around our hearth reading to each other night after night. Papa’s calloused hands carefully turning the pages of Mr. Shakespeare’s sonnets. Mama reciting them by heart, looking moon-eyed at Papa, and cuddling me.
I teared up, remembering, as the train rattled along.
“I’m okay, I guess.”
I kept breathing deeply. The spells had pretty much stopped when I was about eleven. But often I felt my fired-up brain working way too hard. It was like colors, and shapes and images swarmed together. And whether I wanted to or not, by day’s end I remembered the smallest details of nearly every hour that had passed. It was overwhelming.
As I got older, I’d learned a few tricks to calm myself down. Instead of crouching low and covering my ears when things were spinning and whirling around me, I’d count . . . everything: The dots on the top of a strawberry, dust motes, fallen leaves; you get the idea. Then I’d file away all I’d seen and heard for whenever I wanted to recall it. And I sure tried like the dickens to act normal.
Just so you see what I mean, here is what I saw on the train. There were three-hundred and seventy-two brass buttons on the soldiers’ jackets as they pushed past us to their seats. Each soldier had a different smile or glower, or even teary eyes. Five had moustaches that twirled up like crescent moons; six had the kind that curved down the sides of their mouths. Ten had whiskers that crisscrossed their chins.
Sorry, I couldn’t help myself. I had to tell you. Square up, Maddie, I told myself over the gabble of the train wheels and the shouts of the soldiers. Your father doesn’t need any more to worry about now.
“I’m truly sorry I got so mad back at the cabin; Papa I’m afraid for you.”
Papa touched my cheek—the way he used to touch Mama’s; all the love he had for her seemed like it was bursting through his fingers. Then, she’d sweep us both into her arms, her fire-red hair spilling like a warm curtain over our faces.
“I’m afraid too, Maddie, but as sure as I breathe, I know I’m doing the right thing.”
As we neared Baltimore, we passed through a tunnel. It was dark as pitch as the train rattled and chuffed along the track. “Old Abe did creep straight in this way, disguised in Scotch cap, but plain as day,” a young soldier sang, smelling of spirits and crammed tight against my shoulder. “Hooray for Father Abraham!” yelled another.
“You watch what you say, brother,” a voice hissed. “Half the rats on this train might be Rebels in on the plot to get Lincoln, so shut it.”
My father turned back to the soldiers behind us. “What do you mean?” Papa asked.
“There was a plot afoot to kill the great man here in Baltimore, led by a barber and his band of weasels,” the soldier answered, pulling a tiny flask from his coat and downing the contents fast. He wore wire-rimmed spectacles that made him look like a schoolteacher. Maybe he was.
“Back in February, President Abraham Lincoln was due to be set upon as soon as he reached Baltimore,” the soldier said. “There were some who didn’t want him to make it to Washington City to be inaugurated. It seems a railroad man named Fulton hired Detective Allan Pinkerton, who operated out of Chicago, to come to Washington City to foil the plot. Pinkerton sent his best spy to infiltrate the band of conspirators.”
“Did he?” my father asked.
“Yes, he did. Posing as a Confederate, he got their confidence.”
To be able to do that, to be someone else excited me.
“To be sure, the Pinkerton men and one fine lady snuck our good President into Washington City on this very route,” another man said, catching our conversation as he walked by.
“Disguised as a six-foot-tall ailing man in a shawl Old Abe was, for the love of God,” a soldier bellowed, laughing.
“That’s right,” said the passing man. I looked him over. He was not a soldier that I could tell. He wore a dark wool suit with a purple cravat, and a gold pin studded with pearls. He had a small canvas travel bag and carried a writing pad. I couldn’t help but have a quick read of the jottings as he walked quickly past our seats. I made out a few words just by glancing down. This is what I read:
Rebel General Beauregard threatens Washington invasion. Dispatch intercepted.
When he saw me peering down at his pad, he covered it quickly and frowned. He had slicked-back blond hair and a long face.
“Who’s this dandy?” a soldier yelled. “Maybe the train has got some Reb spies on it after all.”
“I’m with the Washington Intelligencer newspaper, sir, and a loyal Union man,” the man said. “I’m here in plain sight, not disguised like some of those New York reporters that favor the enemy.”
“Bully for you!” shouted another soldier. “My old uncle down in Washington City got clapped in the Old Capitol Prison just for calling Lincoln an ape.”
“Boo hoo!” someone yelled. “Let him rot, and all the others that’s traitors!”
I thought about this. “Do they put people in jail just for speaking out against the president, Papa?”
“Apparently so, Maddie.”
“Do women do such things as spying, Papa?” I asked.
“Maybe they do, but that is hardly a woman’s work.”
A woman’s work . . . sewing, rolling pie dough, having babies, or being a governess, sleeping in a cold garret in a big house. And of course we couldn’t be soldiers.
“I’d bed a lady spy, sure,” a rattle-voiced soldier said aloud over the gabble and groan of the train.
“Quiet down, brother,” said my father to the soldier. “You’ve got a proper young lady here.” Summoner Bradford was a man to be listened to, as there was power in his quiet way.
I couldn’t sleep a bit for the singing and smells of cigars, rancid ham and coal smoke from the engine wafting through the train cars; waves of lilac perfume from a passing young woman decked out in scarlet velvet with a low, low bodice showing more than its share of milky white skin.
A soldier whistled long and low, reaching out his foot to trip her skirts up. She just sneered at his boldness and kept walking. Her high leather boots had gleaming pearl buttons. The ivory handle of a knife peeked out from one of them. Her eyes darted around the rows of soldiers. She passed a card to one of them over my head. I snuck a peek.
Mrs. Ella Stewart’s Comfort House. 12th and Pennsylvania, it read.
The soldier snickered and passed the card down the row of his comrades.
As the watch fires of the soldiers’ camps that ringed the forts surrounding Washington City came into view—more lights than I’d ever seen in my life, glowing like C
hristmas candles through a smoky fog—cheers and shouts went up from the soldiers: Huzzah! Down with the Rebs! Praise Glory! We’re coming, Mr. Lincoln!
The train engine wheezed, then lurched to a stop. “Washington City!” cried the conductor. There was bumping and jostling as men piled into the aisles. I stood up and looked back at the soldiers, the ones still sitting. One had a milk-cow’s calm liquid gaze. Another sat trembling in his seat, eying the darkness through the window. We had come for the war. Or had it come for us?
Three
We took a carriage from the B&O train depot deep into the capitol city. Even though it was late at night, the streets were crowded and noisy. I could make out wagons pulled by huge Clydesdale horses, fancy black carriages lit by candles in domes of glass, and a group of chained Negroes dragged along by a man riding a horse and cracking a whip.
“My God.” Papa said softly, clenching his fists. “If I ever doubted why I am in this war . . .”
“That there is Murder Bay,” said our driver, an old gray-haired Negro man with a battered gray cloth hat and a worn black suit with white lapels. “Folks don’t want to have no truck with that place. Yonder is the Center Market. Food so fine and meat so plump and shiny, a body could fatten itself just looking at it.”
We drove past huge houses, marbled and dormered, with rows of black, shiny carriages stopped at tall, iron gates, flooded by gas lamps. Past open fields of high grasses, soldiers’ tents, and lines of mules and cattle, their heads and manes barely visible in the darkness.
Smells, so many of them: horse manure, baking bread, rotted meat, fire smoke, coal tar, and burning wood.
The driver told us that my Aunt Salome’s house was just two city blocks from the President’s Park.
“Mr. Lincoln’s White House is there. So are the War Department, the Navy Department and the Treasury. You are in the belly of things,” he said, with a low whistle. “Yes suh, you are in the belly. And I pray you Godspeed, as I seen by that uniform that you are in Mr. Lincoln’s army.”
“Indeed I am,” my father said. “And proud to be.”
It was past midnight when we finally approached the front steps of Aunt Salome Hutton’s boardinghouse at 1240 Sixteenth Street. It was on a tree-lined, quiet block, one of a row of houses made of wood and brick with narrow stone stairs leading to the front door.
Just then I saw a man scurry away from behind the house. He was tall, and very dark-skinned; I could make out no features at all in the shadow. He had a gun, the butt of it just visible in a sliver of shine caught by a tremor of moonlight. He turned his head this way and that like a hawk spotting prey or a hunter. He ducked away into an alley.
“A runaway, I’ll wager,” the driver whispered, a look of sadness on his face.
I thought of Mr. Amos Jefferson, the blacksmith’s assistant in our village who Mama said used to be a slave. He was always on the lookout for the slave catchers, even in faraway New Hampshire. I saw whip scars down his back and arms.
Mama told me Mr. Jefferson’s family had been sold away down to a plantation in the South and that he’d never see them again. After my accident, on one of our rare trips to town, Mr. Amos Jefferson thanked Mama and Papa for warning him that some strange men were prowling around the village. After that, my parents put Mr. Jefferson up in an abandoned barn behind our cabin until the slave catchers were gone. That act did not go down so well with many of the town elders. Being kind to some Negroes was one thing, sheltering them was quite another. They liked their world just as it was: white, and unchanged, and whiter again, with everyone in their place.
I remember kneeling down and praying for Amos Jefferson right there in the ice cream parlor, between the jars of chocolate bits and the jellybeans. Then I counted the beans out loud.
“She’s passing strange, that one.” One lady said to another who was licking the last bit of butterscotch syrup from the bottom of her dish. “The child is hexed,” the other said. “And her shabby parents are Negro lovers, to boot.” No wonder I hated going to the village.
I was remembering the taste of the awful pink liquid the doctor gave me to “make me right again,” a sure cure for brain sickness he’d said, when the carriage rolled to a stop. The air in Washington City was hot and still, with no scent of the sea at all.
“I can’t breathe here, Papa,” I said, my shoulders sagging and my arms hurting as I helped my father lug our traveling trunk to the front door.
Before my father could reach up to ring the brass bell that hung from a rope, the door opened. A faded, older woman in a nightcap stood there with her hands folded across her chest and a scowl on her face.
“Devilish time to appear, Summoner,” she said, pursing her lips. Papa’s full name was Summoner Elias Bradford, but Mama had called him “Sum.”
“I’m sorry about the late hour, Salome,” my father said, lifting my trunk.
“I have a servant for that,” she snapped. Gray-streaked tendrils of hair like limp spider legs dangled to her shawl.
“Nellie, Nellie!” she yelled. “Get out from the privy and help my brother and this child.”
“I’m not a child,” I muttered.
“Yes, Missus Salome.” A large Negro woman walked past her out the door.
“Sorry, missus,” she said to my aunt as she dragged our trunk to the darkened entryway, “my innards was galled and all.”
“Lazy and sick, what good are you then?” My aunt said, putting her hand on my head.
“She’s tall, this girl.” She whisked off my cloak and glanced down at my droopy mourning dress. “I hope she brought some decent, light colored clothing.” And as an afterthought, she muttered, “Oh, the black dress, of course, Summoner, I’d forgotten about your wife’s passing. I’m sorry about, uh, Joanie.”
“Jenny!” I yelled. “Her name was Jenny! Jenny Aurelia O’Dell Bradford!”
Papa grabbed my arm. “Hush up.”
I felt so angry that his sister didn’t even know Mama’s name that I felt like racing out into the night, then and there. I glowered, my head down.
“She must have left her manners on the train, eh?” my aunt said.
I was so tired, and so overwhelmed at the thought of staying with this cold aunt of mine, that I swayed and almost fainted.
“Summoner! This child is near a swoon.” My aunt pulled me through the hall into a big kitchen with a cook stove piled with pots and skillets, all under a wide fire. Nellie was wiping sweat from her face with a red and yellow patterned kerchief. She was murmuring softly to a chicken that was nibbling cracked corn from her hand.
“That’s supper, not a pet, am I right?” Aunt Salome scolded. “Of course I am. And Nellie! Biscuits and beef in a hurry. This child is near passed out from hunger.”
“I’m not a child,” I said again, standing as straight as I could in spite of an aching in my bones.
Aunt Salome scowled at me. “Well excuse me then, Miss Sassy.”
My father shushed me again. “Madeline is fifteen, Salome,” he said.
“And still growing, I expect. Does she eat a lot?” my aunt asked, feeling my ribs.
“Ain’t got no biscuits, missus; they won’t be none ’til morning,” Nellie said. With that, she plucked a slab of beef from the serving plate, slathered it with juices, and peered hard at me. “Eat, Miss,” she said, holding out the same to my father. Her eyes were grave, a mellow golden-brown, with a broad, flared-nostril African nose. She carried herself proudly, in spite of her station.
“Thank you, ma’am,” my father said.
“All right then, suh,” Nellie answered, backing away, as though his respectful tone scorched her. “Thank you, suh.” She reached into the chicken’s cage, stroked his head once, and twisted its neck really fast. The dying chicken flopped and flapped around until it landed on my foot. I started sobbing, and heading for the door. Sure I’d seen chickens killed before, but that night, the sight of the poor bird made all my sadness burst out.
My father followed m
e, trying to wipe away my tears with his hand.
But as though my tears were just a passing rain shower and with no words of comfort at all, my aunt showed us to our room.
“I’ll leave you to your rest,” she said, handing me a handkerchief. “Put it in the laundry pile after you’ve used it. I’ve got to go pick up all the cushions in the parlor. Seems I’ve lost my wedding band, and Lord knows my departed husband paid a good sum for it.”
“It’s by the hat stand, just to the left of the big plant,” I said, blowing my nose really loudly . . . on purpose.
“What? Where is it, and how . . .?” My aunt’s mouth hung open.
“I saw a glint of gold as we were coming upstairs, ma’am. If you look, you’ll find it there.”
My father stared straight ahead. Maybe he was waiting for me to say just how many flowers there were on my aunt’s faded rose wallpaper, or have another burst of crying. I didn’t say anything more. I knew better.
“Thank you,” my aunt said stiffly. “I hope you are right. I was going to look for the ring in Nellie’s room, just off the kitchen. I thought maybe she filched it, not that she’s tried anything crafty like that before, but you know how they can be.”
“We don’t know,” my father said. “Nellie seems a fine woman. Goodnight, Salome.”
“I do declare,” my aunt muttered over and over as she bustled off.
“There are forty-six roses on each wall,” I said. “Now let’s get out of here, Papa.”
He just sighed and I silently unpacked my things; the buttercup yellow chemise Mama made me, a linsey-woolsey day dress, my favorite coveralls I wore most every day, two woolen work-shirts, a straw hat, and a handkerchief that belonged to Mama, her sweet scent; lilacs and summer rain, still on it. I held it to my face, inhaling the last of her.
“We have to let her go, Maddie.” Papa said softly as he traced his finger across a sampler Mama finished on one of her better days. On it, a little girl with brown braids stood waist high in tall summer grass, nubbins of thread making freckles on her face. She was pointing at the sky. On the bottom Mama had written My Madeline, and the year, 1857. Papa put it on the dresser and closed the trunk containing his belongings with a thud and a snap of the latch. “Jenny,” he whispered.
