Candle in the Darkness (62 page)
“I don’t want your thanks,” Josiah said. “I didn’t do it for your sake, or for Jonathan’s.”
“May I ask why, then?”
“I did it for Missy Caroline.”
Charles’ stomach clenched at her name. He bent and began picking up fallen bricks, moving them uselessly from the ruined floor and tossing them aside.
“Before we was free,” Josiah said, “when things was against Tessie and me, Missy Caroline always make sure we can be together. When my son was born, she ask her daddy to give him to her for her slave. Then she set him free . . . she give my son his freedom.”
Charles looked up at Josiah as he suddenly realized something. “You could have been free the day I was wounded. The Yankees were right there. You would have been free if you had just kept walking. But you carried me to the field hospital.”
“When I went to war with Massa Jonathan, my pa made me promise I would look out for you, make sure nothing bad happens to you, because Missy can’t live without you. That gal loves you. So I kept my promise.”
“I’m grateful.”
“Then why you breaking her heart, leaving her like you done?”
Charles felt a sudden rush of anger at this man for poking at a wound that hadn’t healed. “That’s really none of your business.”
“If I give up my freedom to save your life, it’s my business. I’ll tell you something else. I almost left you there to die, not because I want to run to the Yankees, but because there was so much hatred in my heart. I hate Missy Caroline all my life because I hate her father. George Fletcher use my Tessie. He make her pregnant with his son, Grady, then sell that boy to the auction. Sell me, too, so he could have Tessie all to himself, even though he already have a wife.”
Charles saw the fury on Josiah’s face, the clenched muscles in his arms and fists. He knew the other man’s pain was at least as deep as his own.
“My pa say I can’t punish Missy Caroline for the sins of her father,” Josiah said. “He say I have to forgive. But when I seen you laying there I knew I could get even. Let all you white folks see what it feels like to lose someone you love for once.” He paused, shaking his head. “But I can’t do it. What Missy done during the war she done for us, out of love, so we could be free. That’s why she was fighting—to help people be free. Why were you fighting?” Charles answered automatically, angrily. “I was fighting because states should have the right—” “That’s all I hear you white boys saying—‘states’ rights, states’ rights.’ But you name me one other right you wanting besides the right to keep me your slave?”
Charles couldn’t reply. The South had lost, his city was in ruins. What difference did it make, anymore, why he had fought?
“You were fighting to have your own way,” Josiah said. “To keep us your slaves. Missy did the unselfish thing, like the Bible say to do, not for herself. If anyone gonna say they sorry for what they done during the war it should be you, not Missy Caroline.”
Charles looked away, unable to face Josiah. But everywhere he looked, in every direction, he saw nothing but rubble.
“God use that war to show you white boys what it’s like to be a slave,” Josiah continued. “For four years, you sleeping on the ground instead of in your fine houses. You eating food that no one would feed a dog. You wearing rags and going barefoot and marching all day beneath a hot sun until you so weary you want to die. You ain’t allowed to see your family or the woman you love. Your life ain’t even your own anymore, with someone telling you what to do and when to get up and when you can go to bed. How you like it, Massa Charles? How you like trading places with me?”
“Get out of here,” Charles said in a shaking voice.
“This is what Missy Caroline done for me. I’m a free man. I got a wife and a son. That’s more than you got. You got no family, no money, no future . . . you just like a slave. Except no one took all those things from you—you threw them away. We changed places, Massa Charles. You want to know whose side God’s on? Look at what you got left and tell me if you think God believes in states’ rights. Missy Caroline done right. You the one who’s wrong. You ought to be asking her to forgive you.”
“Get out of here and leave me alone!” Charles shouted. He didn’t think he could bear to hear her name one more time.
“No sir, I ain’t leaving yet. I come here to give you this.” He removed the burlap bag that was slung over his shoulder and pulled out a ragged stack of paper, tied together with string. “Tessie say for you to read this. Missy Caroline don’t know I’m giving it to you.”
Charles stared at the bundle of paper Josiah had shoved into his shaking hands. It looked like ragged sheets of wallpaper from Caroline’s foyer. It was covered with her beautiful handwriting. He recognized it from all the letters she had faithfully written to him, and he felt a pain greater than any of his other wounds.
“Tessie say Missy still loves you. You didn’t lose everything. She still loves you. You sent her away because you won’t try to understand the reason why she helped us or forgive her for it. Now her Yankee friend Robert’s coming around, offering her his love. Says he’ll give her a new start in a new town. She don’t love him, but she awful lonely. This your last chance . . . you gonna throw it away?”
“I listened to you because you saved my life,” Charles said in a trembling voice. “I owed you that much. But what goes on between Caroline and me is none of your business.” The anger and rage that gnawed at him swelled from a dull ache to an agonizing pain. All he could do was lash out. “The Yankees are here and you have your freedom, Josiah. Go flaunt it someplace else.”
“I won my freedom long before the Yankees came,” Josiah said quietly. “I was free the moment I picked you up and decided to forgive Missy Caroline and her daddy. You can start living as a free man, too, once you forgive. Maybe then God will start giving back all the things you threw away.”
Josiah turned then, and walked away. When he was gone, Charles sank down onto the charred beam and buried his face in his hands. Pain and anger filled every inch of him, until he thought it would consume him. But even in the blind heat of his rage, he knew two things: that Josiah had spoken the truth and that the reason he so deeply resented facing that truth was because the man who had spoken it was a Negro.
Against his will, Charles remembered his first few encounters with Caroline, how her outspokenness had angered him. He knew, now, that it was because she had shone a beam of light on the darkness that was inside him, exposing the racism that he’d never wanted to admit was there. He’d seen a little Negro boy as a thief, not a hungry child. He’d seen a Negro carriage driver as a convenience, not a man.
But hadn’t that also been what had drawn him to Caroline from the very beginning—the deep compassion she had for all people? The light that had shone so brightly from her?
Charles looked down at her handwriting on the ragged pile of paper on his lap. Then the words slowly slid into focus. He began to read:
As I write this by candlelight, Union troops have my beloved city of Richmond under siege. The hall clock tells me that it is well past midnight, but I am unable to sleep. I no longer know what tomorrow will bring, nor do I know when my arrest will come—but I’m now quite certain that it will come . . . I’m not sure anyone will ever understand why I’ve acted the way I have. I can only pray that they will try . . .
Twenty little Negro children sat in a circle at Caroline’s feet in her drawing room, listening in wide-eyed wonder as she read Longfellow’s poem,
The Song of Hiawatha,
to them. When she first began teaching these young students, it had brought back memories of Hilltop and of her afternoons beneath the pear tree with the little slave children gathered around her. Caroline enjoyed teaching her adult students very much, but these little ones had become as dear to her as her very own children.
She finished the poem and looked up at them. One small boy raised his hand. “Yes, Jesse? What is it?”
“Someone here to see you.” He pointed behind her. Caroline turned around.
Charles stood in the doorway.
Her heart felt as though it was being squeezed so tightly she wasn’t sure she could bear the pain. His eyes—so wide and expressive, so deeply blue—gazed down at her with a softness she thought she’d never see in them again.
“I can come back at a better time,” he said.
“No . . . give me a minute.” Her voice shook as she quietly told her class to take out their slates and practice writing their names. The slates had been a present from Robert. He had used his army connections to help stock her school with supplies.
“Please work quietly until I come back,” she said.
Charles followed her through the drawing room doors into the backyard. The June day was warm and very humid, a foretaste of the summer that fast approached.
“You’re a wonderful teacher,” he said. “I was watching you.”
Caroline couldn’t answer, couldn’t speak past the knot of emotion in her throat. She didn’t know why Charles had come, but she knew now that she would have to tell Robert that she could never marry him. It wouldn’t be fair to spend her life with one man when she still loved another so deeply. Even after all this time, all the sorrow and pain.
“I came to give this back to you,” he said. He took his battered army haversack off his shoulder and pulled out a ragged pile of papers—her papers, the story she had written on torn sheets of wallpaper.
“How did you get that?”
“Josiah gave it to me.”
He looked away from her, gazing into the distance at things she couldn’t see. Caroline was afraid to hope that he had come back into her life to stay. She silently prayed the only words that mattered anymore—
Thy will be done
—trusting in God’s love, knowing that His will was the very best thing for her life.
“After reading this,” Charles said, “I realized how different we are. Those differences should have been obvious from the first day we met. Even now, I look at that roomful of Negro children in there, and I know I don’t see them the way you do.”
He paused, then turned to face her again. “I wish I could see them your way. I’ve lost everything but my blindness, it seems— I’ve lost the war, my father, most of my friends, my wealth. The mill is gone and I have no money to rebuild it, no future. But Josiah said I hadn’t lost you. He said you still love me. And I don’t think it would hurt to see you as much as it does unless I still loved you, too.
“Listen now,” he said softly. “Am I too late, Caroline? Could you ever forgive me and start all over again?”
She moved into his arms as if she and Charles had never argued or parted. He clung to her, holding her tightly in return. “I love you, Charles,” she told him.
Behind Caroline was her schoolroom full of bright, eager students. God had given them to her as a gift, to show her that the sacrifices she’d made did have meaning. His purposes for her life would be partly fulfilled in them, and in those children’s futures. And now He was giving her still another gift, giving Charles back to her.
“Thank you, Lord,” she whispered as she held him in her arms. “Thank you.”
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