Widow of Gettysburg (Heroines Behind the Lines)

by Jocelyn Green

  He had failed.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

  Liberty’s pulse pounded in her ears as she pulled away from Silas, her hands still warm from the heat of his body.

  “You’re sorry?”

  Cicadas whirred in her ears, echoing the thrumming of her heart.

  Whether he was sorry for kissing her, or sorry for pushing her away, she could only guess.

  “I lost my head.” Silas leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “You said—”

  “I said you are loved.” His face was flushed, his lips swollen. “You are. Lots of people care about you. Look how much good you’ve done here.”

  Hurt compressed into anger, and she smacked him clean across his face. “Then I better get back to the ones who care.”

  Liberty jumped to her feet and did not help him do the same. “I have work to do. Don’t waste my time again.” She hiked up the ruffled hem of her skirt, trotted down the steps and did not look back. Salty tears streamed down her face, tasting of humiliation.

  Liberty pressed her fingers to her lips as she hurried toward the summer kitchen. Her mouth still burned from the heat of his kiss. She may have been married once, but she had never felt the fire of passion like that before—from a man, or from herself. She felt like her body would have melted into his like wax under a seal.

  And he was sorry. Well, so am I. She was sorry she cared about a Southerner so much, sorry she’d deceived herself into believing Silas Ford was trustworthy—and sorry she now knew what it meant to be truly kissed. Most of all, she was sorry that longing awakened inside her. He’s like a brother to me, she once told Bella. She’d never say that again.

  Myrtle Henderson stepped into her path. “What happened?” She swiveled to look past Liberty toward the porch. “What did you do to Silas Ford? He’s just sitting there, holding his cheek.”

  Liberty brushed past her, the sunbaked ruts in the earth punching against the soles of her feet.

  “But what did you do to Silas Ford?” Myrtle cried out again, her voice sharper this time.

  Liberty had no answer.

  And she told me to stay away from him? Bewildered, anger boiled in Myrtle until it burst out of her in a shout. “Liberty Holloway, you stay away from Silas Ford!”

  Liberty whipped around to face her, fire flashing in her eyes. “What did you say?”

  A lump bobbed in Myrtle’s throat. She knew what it felt like to never have anyone defend her. She would stand up for Silas. She had to. “I’m not the only one who hurt him, you know.”

  Liberty stared at her, and Myrtle’s skin crawled with the familiar sensation of being thought an idiot. Liberty pressed a hand to her forehead and sighed, her shoulders slumping. Finally, she looked up, eyes rimmed in red. “Myrtle, please go boil the water. You know as well as anyone that if we drink it untreated, we’ll grow sick from the contamination from all the corpses near the water source. You have a very important job. A lot of lives depend on you. All right?”

  Myrtle watched her walk away, her head held high while her skirt dragged in the dirt like anyone else’s. Liberty was not so different from Myrtle.

  An idea formed in her mind, and anger crystallized into resolve. She would follow orders. She would boil water. For the patients.

  After all, a lot of lives depend on me.

  Including Liberty’s.

  Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

  Monday, July 27, 1863

  Bella Jamison’s house felt like a tomb: hot, dark, and laced with stink. Her windows were closed to keep out the rancid odors lingering in the town, and her shutters were closed to block the sun. But nothing could keep out the blistering heat.

  Back aching, and face damp with sweat, Bella stood over her ironing table and pressed the wrinkles out of a dress. She was lucky, she knew, that her one-week absence had cost her no more than a fierce reprimand from her employer. Truth was, Mrs. Shriver was desperate for help, and would not fire Bella just to make a point. When Mrs. Shriver had returned home, she found it had been used by Rebel sharpshooters. Two ten-inch holes had been punched through the attic walls for their guns. Blood had congealed on the floorboards, and not a crumb of food had been left in the kitchen or garden. Anything valuable—clothing, linens, tools, curtains, money, silver, liquor—was either gone or destroyed. Both the home and the saloon had been used as hospital.

  The patients were gone now, either en route to prisons or evacuated to Camp Letterman, a general hospital erected by the Union army a mile north of town. The wounded had been culled from all private homes by now, and the women scrubbed away at the residue of war.

  A sharp knock jerked Bella’s attention to the door. Setting her iron back on the stovetop, she opened the door, and the gust of hot air, poisoned with the aftermath of battle, nearly knocked her back.

  “Mr. Caldwell!” She covered her nose and mouth with her hand, but stepped aside for him to enter. She shut the door quickly behind him.

  His red-orange hair splayed up from his head, evidence he’d been raking his hand through it again. Hat in his hands, the reporter swept a glance over her home.

  “You have been spared much, I see.”

  “My garden suffered the worst. The same is true for most of my neighbors, but many of them still have not come home.” Some of them never would. The image of several colored folks being marched out of Gettysburg on July 1 was seared on her memory. Thank God at least Aunt Hester had escaped. She’d hid in the belfry of one of the churches for three nights and two days before coming out again.

  Bella smoothed her apron over her dress. “What can I do for you?”

  “Please, sit down.”

  Her hackles raised. “I can stand just fine.”

  Harrison reached into his knapsack and tossed a book on the kitchen table, the cover of which was soiled, the corners bent and frayed. “Read much?”

  She narrowed her eyes at him, then edged closer to the table, read the title of the book. Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839. By Frances Ann Kemble.

  Her heart leapt into her throat. Wood scraped on wood as Harrison slid the chair out from the table and gently guided Bella into it.

  “I know who you are, Mrs. Jamison.” He sat across from her and leaned forward over the red-and-white checked tablecloth.

  “You do not know me.”

  “I know where you came from, which means I know how far you’ve come to get to where you are today.”

  She shook her head. He knew nothing.

  “You can’t deny it. It’s right here.” He thumped the cover of the book with his finger. “Your mother’s abuse at the hands of Roswell King Junior. The way you tried to stop him, but became his special pet instead. Your plea to Fanny to teach you to read and write and speak like her, your twin sister’s disinterest in anything but her own babies.”

  “That proves nothing. You don’t know that’s me.”

  “Your name is in the book, Bella. It was your twin, Daphne, I met at the Weeping Time.”

  Her breath seized. Was she well? Where did she go? her heart cried out. But, “There is more than one Bella in the world, you know.”

  He craned his neck to look past her to the front room. Light sparked in his brown eyes. “Shall we sit somewhere more comfortable?”

  He walked directly to the couch and lifted off an old quilt, skimming every patch with his fingertip. Until stopping on the red and cream pinstripe flannel. He looked up at her then, the devil’s gleam in his eyes. “I thought so.”

  Heat crawled up Bella’s neck. “You thought what, Mr. Caldwell?” He could not know. He could not know anything.

  “‘Nearly all the women beg for flannel, and my bolt of red and cream pinstripe is almost gone.’ Page one hundred twelve, Journal of a Residence.”

  “Pinstripe flannel is not so very unique.” Bella’s chest thrust in and out with breath. She pulled at the collar of her dress.

  “
But red and cream pinstripe of the same shade, aged exactly the same over the last twenty years?”

  Perspiration filmed her face, and she dabbed it with the edge of her apron.

  “I have seen this fabric one other place. Holloway Farm. Did you know Liberty cut up an old quilt to fashion a pad for the crutch of a Rebel patient? His name is Silas Ford, I believe.”

  She stared at Harrison’s freckle-sprayed face and tried to read it the way he was certainly trying to read hers. He wanted her to admit Liberty was her daughter. But what proof could he have, real proof? Perhaps he was even guessing about the piece of flannel. He was a reporter. He hounded up stories for a living.

  Bella swallowed hard. “Coincidence.” She would not betray her daughter, no matter how her heart was breaking.

  Harrison dropped the quilt back on the couch. “I spoke with Lt. Holmes. Pierce Butler Holmes?”

  “He was crazy with chloroform, you know.”

  Harrison crossed back to the kitchen and slacked a hip against the sideboard, hands in his pockets. “No. I mean I found him, at West’s Building Hospital in Baltimore, last week. He’s recovering nicely, by the way.”

  “Stop.”

  “I asked him about you. Turns out he wasn’t just mad with drug, after all.”

  “Stop talking.”

  “He remembers you, Bella, because you were about the same age, growing up in very different worlds, but inextricably linked by the physician—his father—who cared for all the Butler slaves. Including your mother, after confinements and the beatings she endured from King’s wife. Including you, after your own row with Roswell King Jr., himself.”

  At the mere mention of the memory, the tangled mass of scar tissue ached on Bella’s back. “Leave,” she gasped.

  He held up his hands. “He told me you were with child, about to give birth, when you ‘and your increase’ were sold to a man in Virginia named Gideon Holloway. The year was 1843. Liberty Holloway turned twenty this month, didn’t she? It’s quite a story, to hear him tell it. A story that even I could not make up. And if you’re wondering, yes, he went on the record with that. Even better—Pierce Butler himself was there visiting Holmes too, along with his daughter Frances. Butler confirmed the sale.”

  His words hung in the stifling air, more putrid than the rot that had blown in with him.

  “The rest of the story gets a little fuzzy. Gideon died and left Liberty to his sister. Why?”

  She glared at him, muscles in her jaw bunching. Gideon loved that girl, wanted her to be raised white for her own sake, even though she was not his daughter. He said he loved Bella too, but she never trusted that. Bella would share none of this with a reporter.

  Fear churned and solidified into anger. Bella gritted her teeth. “Don’t you have a battle somewhere to cover?”

  “We’ll get to that. But this is the story I want, Bella. Do you realize what a fantastic tale this is? It could be even better. Why don’t you tell Liberty who you are? Don’t you think she’d be overjoyed to discover she isn’t an orphan after all? Come now, write your own happy ending.”

  “Oh, I’ll tell you how this ends. It ends here. It ends now.”

  “Surely not yet!”

  Bella walked over to him. “Surely I have some say on this. Surely you don’t get to tell me what to do just for the sake of a story.” Her voice grew quiet. “I sure would like to be you, Mr. Caldwell, running around all over the map to write stories about the bad things that happen to other people.”

  He opened his mouth to speak, but she raised a hand to stop him. “This is my turn now. I will have my say.”

  Bella was nearly suffocating. With the windows shut against the toxic fumes in the street, the heat of summer baked the inside of Bella’s house, even with the shutters closed. She unfastened the top two buttons of her collar and paced slowly, to create her own breeze in the dark, steamy room.

  “All my life I been bowing to white folks, from yes massa to yes ma’am. Not this time. Now hear me. You covered the battle of Gettysburg, and then you left. The armies left. The surgeons left. And the rest of us stayed, to put life back together again while you’re off watching some other big drama unfold. Just don’t forget, Mr. Caldwell, that just because you turn in your article doesn’t mean the story ends there. See what I mean?”

  His flushed face glowed with sweat as he listened. Good.

  “Every battle has its aftermath that goes largely unnoticed except by the folks living in it. Right? Well, now you come here saying you know my story, and that gives you the right to share it for me. It’s not your story to share. It’s not even just mine. It’s Liberty’s story, too, and you’ve got no business waltzing in, stirring things up to make a buck for yourself, and then waltzing out again. You want to put a period at the end of our story and move on. It doesn’t work that way. Yesterday’s news is always somebody’s life today. Does it matter to you at all that I don’t want her to know where she came from? Did it ever occur to you she might rather believe a lie than the truth? Just leave it a question mark and move on.”

  “But—”

  In two long strides, Bella stood in front of the man and silenced him with a tug down on her collar. Mr. Caldwell’s eyes widened at the sight of the scar at the base of her neck.

  “You should see the scar I gave the man who gave this to me.”

  His eyes darted back up to hers.

  “I fought to protect my mother. Don’t you think I wouldn’t fight for my daughter’s safety, too. There is no story here, Mr. Caldwell. Just a question mark. Now. Move along.”

  She released her collar and stood tall.

  Harrison rolled the brim of his hat in his hands. “I will. But first, there’s something else. About your husband. There’s been a battle.”

  “You’re lying. The 54th doesn’t fight. They dig ditches. Build breastworks. They don’t fight.”

  “I assure you, they did. They led the assault on Fort Wagner, South Carolina, on July 19. It was, however … unsuccessful.”

  “I haven’t heard anything about this.”

  “News travels slow from South Carolina. Surrounded by Confederate lines, you know, so it had to travel by ship, not telegraph. We only just learned of it at the Inquirer’s office ourselves. It will be all over tomorrow’s papers. Of the six hundred men, nearly three hundred were killed, missing, or wounded. They fought most nobly, according to witnesses.” He retrieved a paper from his knapsack. “Abraham Jamison is on the casualty list. I’m sorry.”

  Bella eyed the paper as if it were a rattlesnake, ready to strike. She backed away. “You could have typed that page up yourself. If this is some game to get me away from here …”

  “No game. Your husband has been injured. But it may only be slight. The list doesn’t specify. If you want to go to him, I can arrange the passage. I would be willing to accompany you myself.”

  “If I let you print your story, you mean?”

  He shook his head. “I’m not that low, ma’am. No strings attached.”

  The broken bodies of Gettysburg rolled through her mind, but with Abraham’s face on every one of them.

  “South Carolina?” The birthplace of the Confederacy, and major port for the slave trade. Just north of Georgia.

  “Beaufort, yes. You need not fear, Mrs. Jamison. The area has been controlled by Union troops for more than a year now. You need not fear.”

  The anger that had fueled her a moment ago fled, taking her strength with it. Her eyes focused on the curtains hanging limply in front of windows shuttered against battle’s stench. She had not been able to keep war from her home after all.

  Tasting her heartbeat, she turned back to Mr. Caldwell. “When do we go?”

  “We can leave Gettysburg tomorrow.”

  It did not feel soon enough.

  Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

  Monday, July 27, 1863

  Harrison Caldwell stepped around a pile of old muskets blocking the sidewalk and almost tripped on a four-year-old bo
y sitting on the other side, pounding with a toy hammer at some percussion caps on the ground. Down the street, another boy launched a used-up shell and called out to his friend, “Hey, you Reb! Don’t you hear that grapeshot scream?”

  In his mind’s eye, Harrison saw all three boys in uniform, perfectly whole until they were ripped apart on the altar of war, the blue-grey smoke of gunpowder consuming their ravaged bodies. He shuddered. The nightmares were bad enough, but these vivid daydreams rattled him to his core.

  Loud voices and laughter splashed the night air as it spilled out of the Confectionary and Eating Saloon on West York Street. Though he had not eaten all day, Harrison did not go in. He was in no mood for a crowd.

  Instead, he crossed the street and made a beeline for the Grocery and Provision Store. The wooden sign that swayed, squeaking on its iron rod, was no larger than a foolscap page, yet riddled with six bullet holes. Harrison purchased two boxes of Necco wafers—licorice, of course, and chocolate, which he hoped Bella would enjoy on tomorrow’s train ride.

  But when he stepped back into the night, and before he could open his package, his nose pinched and his mouth clamped shut against the smell of decay and chloride of lime.

  Harrison wasn’t all that hungry anyway. But he sure was thirsty.

  He checked his pocket watch. Eight o’clock. Still an hour before the sale of beer and liquor would be stopped for the night, thanks to the Union Provost Marshall. With swollen feet and a heavy heart, Harrison Caldwell followed a stream of men into the Eagle Hotel and claimed a stool at the polished cherrywood bar. Oil lamp sconces with soot-rimmed chimneys belied a staff too busy pouring to bother cleaning. Bottles of liquor lined the wall behind the bar in a sparkling glass rainbow of clear, brown, and green.