Candle in the Darkness (37 page)

“This ain’t something you can do on you own strength,” Eli finally said. “Any more than Joshua can make those walls of Jericho fall down all by his self. You either do this with God’s help or not at all. But once you make up you mind to trust Him, He gonna provide a way to get the job done. You’ll see.”

I lay awake praying for a long time that night—just as I had on so many other nights since the war began. An even greater fear than losing my own life was my fear of losing Charles. My actions could very well cause his death. Worse, if he found out I’d helped his enemies, he would surely hate me.

The hall clock struck midnight before I finally found the courage to tell God I would do His will, regardless of the cost. Then I lay awake for two more hours, trying in vain to think of a plausible excuse to apply for a travel permit. I fell asleep before I could concoct a plan. But when my grandmother’s servant frantically shook me awake early the next morning, I knew that God had provided a way.

“Missy Caroline . . . Missy Caroline, please wake up,” she begged. “You got to come help me with your grandmother.”

I struggled to wake up after a too-short night, feeling groggy and disoriented. “Why? What’s wrong?”

“Lord have mercy, Missy Caroline . . . I think your grandmother is dead.”

Aunt Anne went to the provost marshal’s office with me to apply for a permit to travel to Hilltop. She pleaded our case more convincingly than I ever could have. “My husband would never forgive me,” she said, “if I buried his mother in any other plot of ground except the family graveyard at Hilltop, beside her husband.”

“Don’t you know that your plantation is likely behind enemy lines by now?” the marshal asked.

“Yes, I know.”

“The Yankees may not allow you to come back to Richmond once you cross over.”

“I don’t care. It was mostly for my mother-in-law’s sake that we came to Richmond in the first place. My husband didn’t want her to see what the Yankees would do to Hilltop.”

In the end, the Provost Marshal reluctantly granted us permission, adding my name and Eli’s to the permit, and giving it to Aunt Anne to sign. When I read the document on the ride home, I nearly fainted with relief and gratitude that the marshal hadn’t asked me to sign my name to it:
Permission is hereby granted to Mrs. William Fletcher, Miss Caroline Fletcher, and their slave, Eli Fletcher, to
visit Hilltop Plantation upon their honor not to communicate, in writing or verbally, any fact ascertained which, if known to the enemy, might be injurious to the Confederate States of America
.

I sent Eli out to purchase a plain pine coffin. The other servants washed and dressed Grandmother and combed her feathery white hair. Eli tenderly lifted her tiny body into the casket.

“God forgive me,” I murmured as I placed Robert’s Bible beneath her folded hands.

Young Thomas threw a temper fit when he learned he had to stay behind in Richmond, so while Aunt Anne soothed him, I gathered my servants out in the kitchen and asked them to pray for Eli and me. Then, when the coffin was finally loaded onto Aunt Aunt’s farm wagon, we headed out the Mechanicsville Turnpike toward Hilltop.

The three-hour journey to the plantation took more than four hours as Confederate troops stopped us repeatedly along the way, searching the wagon, the coffin, and all of our clothes and belongings. But no one thought to search the Bible I’d placed beneath Grandmother’s stiff, folded hands. When we finally reached the last Confederate picket line, the officer in charge begged us not to go any further.

“The Yankees are not gentlemen, Miss Fletcher, they’re animals. I’d hate to tell you what they might do to a pretty young lady like you.”

“I appreciate your concern. But Eli won’t let us come to any harm.”

The officer pulled me aside, whispering, “I don’t want to disillusion you, but that boy is going to bolt for freedom as soon as you cross over to the other side. All the Negroes do. They think the Yankees will set them free.”

“Not Eli. He won’t leave us.”

The man gravely shook his head as he helped me climb back into the wagon. He obviously believed he was sending us to our deaths. “I wish you all the luck in the world, ladies. You’re going to need it.”

Eli snapped the reins and we headed down the road into no-man’s-land. When we’d traveled about a mile, Aunt Anne said, “This is our land. We’re on Hilltop’s property now.”

I thought I recognized the road to Hilltop from when I’d visited years ago, but the driveway, now deeply rutted from heavy use, was no longer shaded by an arch of pine trees; it was bordered by a row of stumps. The sultry afternoon seemed much too quiet and still. No slaves labored in the barren fields, no animals grazed its pastures. The split-rail fences that had once bordered Hilltop’s land were gone, torn down to reinforce the Confederate trenchworks. I had seen obstacles made from sharpened stakes protecting those trenches from enemy assaults, but I’d had no idea that Hilltop’s beautiful forest land had been denuded to provide those stakes. I shivered in the eerie silence. I had the feeling we were being watched.

Just as Hilltop’s barn came into sight, a dozen blue-uniformed soldiers sprang out of the bushes on both sides of road. Their guns were aimed at us.

“This plantation is my home,” Aunt Anne explained. “I’ve returned to bury my husband’s mother in the family graveyard.”

The process of being searched seemed much scarier this time, since our Confederate travel permit was now worthless. Afterward, the soldiers confiscated the wagon and drove it up to the house, ordering us to walk in its dusty wake. On the way, we saw row upon row of white tents in the distance, covering Hilltop’s wheat fields as far as we could see. Slave Row looked deserted. The once-bustling yard behind the plantation house was deserted, too. Even the flock of poultry had disappeared.

The Yankees had billeted their officers in the plantation house and wouldn’t allow us inside. A Colonel Drake eventually appeared at the back door to speak with us. He sent one of his men for Uncle William, who emerged under close guard from what had once been the weaving shed. My uncle received the news about his mother’s death as if enduring one more blow to an already bruised body. Aunt Anne clung to him, holding him up as Eli pried open the casket for a final glimpse.

“I’ll dig the grave for you, Massa Fletcher,” Eli said, “if you show me where.”

“Yes . . . thank you . . . of course,” he mumbled. “May I. . . ?” he asked, turning to the colonel.

Drake nodded. “Fetch them a shovel from the tool shed,” he told one of his men.

I stayed behind with the colonel as Aunt Anne and Uncle William trudged into the denuded woods, leading Eli to the graveyard. As soon as they were out of sight, I lifted the coffin lid, which Eli had left loose, and retrieved Robert’s Bible. The task God had given me seemed almost too easy. Still, as I handed the Bible to the colonel, I couldn’t escape the feeling that I was handing over Charles’ life.

“This is for you,” I said, placing the book in his hands. “My aunt doesn’t know about it, but it’s my real reason for coming. It’s from one of your captured officers, Lieutenant Robert Hoffman.”

“Who? Where did you get this?”

“I’ve been to see Robert in Libby Prison in Richmond. He and his fellow inmates filled these pages with their observations of the Confederate defenses as they passed through the lines. Please make sure that it gets to the proper Union authorities.”

He opened the Bible and read one of the handwritten pages, then looked up again, to stare at me. I could tell by his expression that he thought me a traitor. I certainly felt like one. I sank down onto the back step, my energy suddenly spent.

“Why are you doing this?” he asked.

It took me a moment to recall the reason. “Because . . . because I believe that slavery is wrong.”

“But you’re a slave owner.”

“My father is. I’m not.” When I thought of all the things the servants did for me each day, all the things I didn’t know how to do for myself, like plucking a chicken or kindling a fire, the distinction seemed absurd. I quickly changed the subject. “If you could please arrange it, Colonel Drake, I would like to return to Richmond before dark.”

Drake quickly sent three of Hilltop’s remaining slaves into the woods to help Eli dig. They nailed Grandmother’s casket shut and lowered it into the grave. Aunt Anne wept quietly as Uncle William read from the Scriptures in a weary voice.

“I want to stay here with you, William,” Aunt Anne said when the funeral ended.

My uncle shook his head. “The fighting is going to start soon. And you still have Thomas to think about.” They were offered no privacy as they said good-bye.

Colonel Drake and three of his men escorted us as far as no-man’s-land, then turned back without another word. We were soon approaching the Confederate lines once more. The Rebel soldiers held us for more than an hour, asking us to recall everything we had observed of the Union forces and where they were deployed. When we finally reached home late that night, I felt numb.

“If I did the right thing, why do I feel like such a traitor?” I asked Eli.

I saw compassion in his eyes as he looked at me for a long moment. “I know what this cost you today,” he said. “Me and Esther and Tessie are grateful for what you trying to do for us. But now you best stop listening to your feelings, Missy Caroline. Can’t never go by your feelings. Got to go by the word of the Lord.”

Chapter Seventeen

I had no way of knowing if the information I’d smuggled to Colonel Drake had helped the Union forces or not. I waited, along with the rest of Richmond, for the dam to break, for the thin Confederate lines to cave in and the massive Federal army to engulf us. I prayed that Robert was right, that this battle would be the one that would end the war.

Two days after we returned from Hilltop, Aunt Anne and I were eating our breakfast when the boom of cannon shattered the quiet June morning. It rattled the windows and shook our teacups in their saucers.

“That sounds very close,” Aunt Anne said.

“It is.”

The cannonading continued to rumble, swelling into a ceaseless, thundering roll. We could see the chandelier swaying and feel the ground shaking beneath us. If I could have driven out to the battlefield and pulled Charles to safety, I would have gladly done it.

The battle lasted all day. There was no escaping the sound of it or the constant shuddering reminders that somewhere close by, men were being blown to pieces. We later learned that the battle at Chickahominy Bluff had been a scant five miles away. The Union army had been close enough to count Richmond’s church steeples, until the smoke of battle obscured them from view. None of us needed to wait for the morning newspaper to know that a terrible battle raged and that the city was in great peril.

When Thomas learned that Mr. St. John and many of Richmond’s other citizens were driving out to watch the fighting, he begged to go with them, threatening to steal my little mare and ride out bareback if we didn’t let him go. To appease him, Eli carried a stepladder up to the balcony off my father’s room, and we all climbed up to the roof to peer through Daddy’s spyglass.

Confederate encampments stretched around the edges of the city, their tents covering the ground like a blanket of snow. Above the treetops to the northeast, a haze of smoke was visible on the horizon, lit from beneath with flashes of fire like summer lightning. The sulfurous smell of gunpowder hung in the air. Wagons, soldiers, and horses jammed the roads leading toward the road we had just traveled to get to Hilltop. Along with the steady rumble of artillery, the wind carried the crack and sputter of gunfire. I tried not to imagine bullets raining down on Charles in a deadly shower.

We could also see the endless line of ambulances laboring up Broad Street to Chimborazo Hospital, just east of us. I needed to go there and help—if for no other reason than to assuage my conscience. Eli had warned me not to trust my feelings, but he hadn’t been able to tell me how to deaden them. Knowing I wouldn’t be able to sleep, I spent the evening hours at the hospital, working late into the night.

Early the next day, the sounds of battle began all over again, the artillery resounding endlessly from Richmond’s hills. The carnage was unimaginable. By the end of the second day, all of Chimborazo’s three thousand beds were filled, as well as the floor space between them. The ambulance drivers continued to dump their cargo of mutilated men at the hospital, regardless of the fact that we were full, and returned to the battlefield for more. The hospital was comprised of one hundred fifty small, whitewashed buildings, spread out over a forty-acre plateau; when these facilities overflowed, the administrator ordered tents to be set up. These also quickly filled, forcing us to lay the wounded on the ground between the tents. Richmond had set up more than forty hospitals, large and small, but they still overflowed with the deluge of wounded that week.

The plague of flies that tormented all these poor, suffering souls seemed biblical in its proportions. Many soldiers survived their wounds and hasty field amputations only to be killed by one of the diseases that quickly spread in the suffocating heat. There were not enough bed sheets in all of Richmond to tear into bandages, not nearly enough drugs to deaden the pain, not enough help for the exhausted doctors who wept as still more ambulances arrived. Eli worked tirelessly beside me, lifting soldiers out of the ambulances in his brawny arms, carrying away the bodies of men who had died, making room for more. Gilbert drove Aunt Anne’s farm wagon back and forth from the battlefield all day, heaping it with wounded.