Candle in the Darkness (34 page)

“The evacuation of Norfolk means that the mouth of the James River is now wide open to the enemy’s fleet. There is the very real possibility that Federal gunboats are going to sail up the river to bombard Richmond into surrendering. We’ve planted torpedoes and obstructions in the channel, but our last river defense at Drewry’s Bluff is only half-finished. No one knows if her guns can stop the ironclad
Monitor
. And the
Monitor
will likely come with an escort of gunboats. You must evacuate.”

I couldn’t grasp what he was saying. Thousands of displaced persons had crowded into Richmond from the surrounding countryside, seeking refuge. I had always pitied these homeless souls, alone in a strange city. Was I now to become one of them, looking for shelter in an alien city?

“But . . . where would I go? This is my home . . . I have no place to go.”

“President Davis already sent his family south to Raleigh, North Carolina, by train. I managed to purchase three of the very last tickets on a train that’s headed there tomorrow morning.”

“What about all of our servants?”

He shook his head. He was going to leave them all here to die.

“I can’t run away and leave Tessie and Eli.”

“They will be fine, Caroline. The Union army won’t hurt them. But there’s no telling what the Yankees will do to you and the other women if you stay. Besides, if the warships do get through, the state legislature plans to reduce this city to ashes rather than let it fall into enemy hands. Congress has adjourned, and most of its members are fleeing. Don’t you see? You must evacuate. Charles would never forgive me if I let anything happen to you.”

I felt too numb with fear to argue with him. I agreed to meet Sally and Mrs. St. John at the depot early tomorrow morning. Then I ran upstairs to ask Tessie to help me pack.

“You doing the right thing,” she assured me as she calmly filled a trunk with all the belongings I would need. On my own, I wouldn’t have known what to bring and what to leave behind. I couldn’t think past my panic. “Them St. Johns will take good care you—almost as good as I would,” she soothed. “Most important thing, you be safe.”

“What about you and Eli and the others? If it isn’t safe for me to stay here, how in the world can I leave all of you? They plan to burn the city down—if the Federals don’t blast it to smithereens first.”

Tessie paused to look up at me, and her beautiful face showed no trace of fear or worry. “We be safe, baby. Don’t you know Eli will be praying up a storm? Massa Jesus gonna take care us.”

“I just wish there was someplace safe where you could go, too.”

She took my hands in hers and gave them a gentle squeeze. “Honey, I wouldn’t leave here if you had a hundred train tickets. Someday, after the Yankees win, my boy, Grady, gonna come home looking for me, and I plan on being here when he do.”

It was the first time Tessie had mentioned Grady since they’d taken him away nine years ago, the first hint she’d ever given of the hope she’d nurtured all those years. I fell into her arms, grieving for her, with her.

“Oh, Tessie, if there was anything I could do to bring Grady home again, I would gladly do it. When this war is over, I promise I’ll move heaven and earth to find him for you.”

We held each other for a few more moments. Then, as if sorry she had allowed me to glimpse her hope, Tessie freed herself from my arms and resolutely resumed her packing. “I want you to go see Ruby, now,” she said. “Ask her which of your mama’s necklaces and things was special to her, so you can take them with you for keepsakes.”

I wrote a long letter to Charles by candlelight, then spent a sleepless night waiting for dawn. It was very early when Gilbert loaded my trunk onto the buggy and drove me to the depot, but even at that early hour, traffic jammed the roads. Columns of soldiers marched about while people fled Richmond in droves, scattering in all directions and by every conceivable means of transportation. Wagons and carts and even wheelbarrows were headed south across the James River bridge; flatboats floated west up the Kanawha Canal, all heaped with boxes, trunks, satchels, and all kinds of household goods. In downtown Richmond, businesses were closed and boarded, houses deserted. As we passed Capitol Square, we saw workers removing boxloads of documents from the government buildings. The fear etched on every face seemed contagious, the panic barely contained.

The scene at the depot was one of complete chaos, with people dashing to and fro, shouting and clamoring for tickets that couldn’t be purchased at any price. As I watched from the buggy seat, a feeling of great calm suddenly filled me. Why was I running away? I had been praying for God’s help and strength every day since the war began—why would He desert me now? Couldn’t He protect me here, as He would protect Eli and the others, just as easily as someplace else?

When Gilbert started to climb down from the buggy, I stopped him. “Leave my trunk, for now,” I told him. “Wait here. I’ll be right back.”

The train was already at the station, taking on coal, working up steam. Passengers hovered close, waiting for the signal to board, even though the train wasn’t scheduled to leave for another ten minutes. I found Sally and her parents on the platform, watching anxiously for me.

“Caroline, finally,” Sally said, exhaling. “We were so afraid your carriage would get stuck in that awful traffic and you’d miss the train.”

“Where’s your trunk?” Mr. St. John asked. “Did your boy check your baggage already?”

“Please don’t be angry with me,” I said, “but I’m not going with you.”

“Now, see here,” Mr. St. John said, “I feel responsible for you, seeing as your father is away. I really must insist that you go. This may be your only chance to reach safety.”

I shook my head. “I’m not afraid to stay here. This is my home. I would be much more afraid to be a refugee without a home, far away from my loved ones.”

All around us, the volume of agitated voices suddenly swelled to a roar as the bell on the locomotive began to ring. The conductor pushed through the crowd, calling ticketed passengers to board. As people began mobbing the train cars, Sally and her mother looked desperately from the train, to me, to the train again.

“Come with us, Caroline. Please,” Sally begged.

“I can’t,” I told her, shaking my head. “Good-bye. . . .” I turned and hurried away, knowing how eager the women were to leave Richmond, knowing that Mr. St. John was too lame to run after me.

Gilbert was pacing nervously beside the buggy when I returned. “You wanting this trunk now, Missy? Seems like that train’s about to leave.”

“It is, but I won’t be on it. I’m staying here.”

“Oh, Missy Caroline . . . I don’t think—”

“Take me home, Gilbert.” I mustered my bravest smile and added, “That’s an order.”

Even though I knew I had made the right decision, the suspense of waiting for the Union gunboats to arrive, waiting for the shelling to begin, was terrible. I kept my own trunk packed and made all the servants pack their things, too, so that if the city did burn to the ground we would all have a few essentials. Then we gathered in the parlor to wait.

“You thinking we might go out to Hilltop if things get bad?” Tessie asked.

“No, Hilltop won’t be any safer than Richmond—in fact, it might be worse. Enemy troops are heading right up the Peninsula in that direction. And that’s where all our men are dug in, waiting for them.”

I played the piano for everyone while we waited. Tessie and I took turns reading the Bible aloud. We knitted. Luella and Ruby did some mending. Eli prayed.

Not long after we had all eaten a little lunch, we heard the unmistakable sound of cannon booming in the distance. Unlike the night of the
Pawnee
scare, the cannonfire didn’t stop this time. Instead, the volley of explosions built and intensified, rattling the windowpanes and echoing off Richmond’s many hills. Drewry’s Bluff, the last fortress guarding the city, was a scant seven miles south of where we sat on Church Hill.

The battle raged for more than three and a half hours. I felt each blast in the pit of my stomach. But while we could tell from the thunderous sound that the fighting was very fierce, the shelling didn’t seem to be drawing any closer to the city. We continued to pray.

As evening fell, the sound of artillery fire slowed, then finally stopped. We all looked at each other. The silence was as heavy as the cannonading had been.

Esther stood. “Enough of this nonsense. Kitchen fire’s gonna go out if I don’t tend to it.”

As she strode away, chin held high, Eli began to laugh. “Seems like fear is a more powerful enemy than the Yankees.”

We learned the next day that the Union fleet had not been able to get past the eight Confederate guns at Drewry’s Bluff. For now, Richmond was safe. But more important, my own faith had won a victory over my fear.

Throughout the month of May, General McClellan’s massive army made its ponderous way up the Peninsula through torrential rain and oozing mud. We all knew that the two armies were about to clash, and city officials were determined to be better prepared to handle the thousands of casualties this time. Our latest sewing project was to stitch yards and yards of ticking material into mattress covers for the three-thousand-bed Chimborazo Hospital, on the hill just east of my home. That’s what Tessie, Ruby, and I were doing one afternoon when we heard a carriage arrive at our door.

“Sounds like we got company,” Tessie said. She started to rise, but I quickly stood instead.

“No, let me go.”

I lived in dread of the day that a messenger would arrive with news of my father, or of Charles or Jonathan, but delaying the news would never change it. I laid down my sewing and hurried to the door behind Gilbert. It wasn’t a carriage that was drawing to a stop out front, but a battered farm wagon, its wheels caked with mud. It took me a moment to recognize the tired, bedraggled-looking people climbing down from it. They were my grandmother, my aunt Anne, and my young cousin Thomas from Hilltop.

Their driver and the two Negro maidservants accompanying them were coated with mud clear to their waists from pushing the mired wagon out of ruts. I opened the front door wide and welcomed my family inside as Gilbert led the horses, the wagon, and the dripping servants around to the back door.

“Where’s George?” my grandmother demanded to know before I could utter a word of greeting.

“He . . . he’s not home, Grandmother. My father’s ships sailed last March, and we—”

“Where’s George?” she repeated. “Did any of these useless servants tell George I’m here?”

“George isn’t home, Mother Fletcher,” Aunt Anne shouted. I remembered then that my grandmother had been nearly deaf when I’d met her eight years ago. Judging by the way she peered all around with her eyes squinted and her head thrust forward, her eyesight was probably failing, too.

“What? This isn’t George’s home?” Grandmother said. “Where are we, Anne? You said we were going to George’s home.”

“This is George’s home, but George isn’t home,” Aunt Anne shouted.

“Stop repeating everything! Is this George’s home or isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Aunt Anne and I both shouted together.

“Then why doesn’t somebody tell George I’m here?”

Aunt Anne looked at me helplessly.

“George is at work,” I shouted in a moment of inspiration.

“Of course . . . at work.” Grandmother reached for my arm and let me help her to a chair in the parlor. She was alarmingly thin and frail, her skin as fragile as tissue paper. “Make me a pot of tea, Ellie,” she told Ruby, who was watching all of this, wideeyed.

“Yes, ma’am,” Ruby replied and scurried out to the kitchen. But where she was going to get tea was a mystery to me. We’d had nothing but steeped blackberry leaves to drink for months.

“You’re looking very well, Mary,” Grandmother said. It took me a startled moment to realize that she was talking to me—and that she had mistaken me for my mother.

“Um . . . Mary was my mother. I’m her daughter, Caroline.”

“Where is Caroline? At school, I suppose?”

“No,
I’m
Caroline,” I shouted.

“I haven’t seen that child in ages,” Grandmother said as she leaned back in her chair. “You’d think George would bring his only child out to Hilltop once in a while to see me, wouldn’t you? Where is George?”