Freedom Stone (28 page)

“It doesn't matter. More and more runaways now. And there'll be more still as the war grows worse. You musta come down here to find your papa.”

“Yes, sir,” Lillie said. “To prove he ain't no thief.”

“Who said he's a thief?”

“Everyone,” Lillie answered. “They say he stole money from you. Yankee gold—five hundred dollars of it!”

Appleton nodded. “Your father does have my gold. And five hundred dollars is the right amount.” He paused and Lillie held her breath, waiting for the man's next words like she'd never waited for anything in her life. “But he didn't steal a penny of it,” Appleton said at last.

A burst of joy and relief exploded inside Lillie, and tears flooded her eyes. She wiped them with her sleeve, not daring to soil the lace napkin in front of her. But Appleton picked it up and handed it to her.

“Dry,” he said, and Lillie dried her eyes. “Blow,” he said, and she blew her nose.

“I have family too,” Mr. Appleton now said, “but only a little bit. One of my sons died when he was a baby. My wife died of typhus in the first year of the war. My other son died at Antietam in the second year. All I got left is my brother, Lucas—and you met Lucas.”

He inclined his head to the stairway that led to the second floor, indicating that Lucas was safely tucked away. “Lucas and me grew up here, but he was working in the North when the war broke out, and he enlisted in the Union Army. He wasn't much cut out for fighting. The shelling drove him near mad, but he fought all the same. Coupla months ago he was sent down here for the fight at Vicksburg. ...” Appleton now trailed off, as if he didn't want to admit what he had to admit. Lillie spoke for him.

“And he run away,” she said.

Appleton nodded. “Deserted. Fighting so close to home was too much for him. He nearly got away clean, but when he wasn't but half a mile from here, he got caught by a shell. You seen his limp.”

Lillie nodded.

“Same day he got here, your papa came to fetch water. He saw Lucas bleeding, close to death. He surely woulda died, but your papa had his nurse's kit with him and stayed to fix him up.”

“Papa fixed a Yankee?”

“He did,” Appleton said simply. “The Army of the North woulda shot Lucas if they'd caught him deserting. Army of the South woulda shot your papa if they'd caught him helping the North. But your papa stayed all the same, knowin' they might come lookin' for him.” He patted Lillie's hand. “Lucas earned a lot of money—Yankee gold—workin' in New York. Don't you think your papa deserved five hundred dollars of it?”

Lillie beamed and nodded.

“So did I,” Appleton said. “So did Lucas. So I don't reckon it really matters if people think he stole it, long as you know he come by it the right way.”

“But it does matter!” Lillie said. “The Army made the Master promise that my family could go free if Papa went to war, but now he says the money should be his and we got to stay slaves.”

Appleton's voice went cold. “Your Master said that?”

“Yes, sir,” Lillie answered.

“How'd he find out about the money at all?”

Lillie stopped. She suddenly realized she had no answer for that. She didn't want to lie to Appleton, but she couldn't tell about the charm that had brought them straight to the battlefield today. She couldn't tell him that Papa was already dead, but that here in the past he wasn't dead, or that the bag of coins was in the possession of the Master of Greenfog, but that here in the past it was in the possession of her papa.

“A white soldier saw the money and wrote a letter home sayin' her papa was a thief and word got sent to our plantation,” Cal jumped in. “I reckon the letter got there before the mail roads got cut.”

Lillie glanced at Cal, but Cal didn't look back. All at once Appleton rose and pushed back his chair. His face looked angry and the chair gave out a loud scrape against the smooth floor. Lillie was terribly afraid that he'd spotted Cal's lie and that now they were both in worse danger than ever. Appleton turned and strode into another room. He came back carrying a piece of paper, an inkwell and a pen. He sat back down in his chair.

“I'm writin' a letter to anyone who needs to see it saying it was me who got hurt. I fell off the roof and woulda died of my injury, but your papa stayed to mend me,” he said sternly. “Any person takin' his money is takin' my money—and I'll pull the law in if I have to.”

Appleton scribbled out the letter quickly, and Lillie marveled at the speed of his hand and the way the curly script fell from his pen. He read it through, nodded in satisfaction at what he'd written, and folded the paper up. He slid it inside a creamy white envelope.

“Now, you can't take this to your plantation yourself,” Appleton said. “You both're runaways and it'll go hard on you if you show your face there again.” He held the letter just out of reach. Lillie ached to snatch it from him and tell him that they weren't runaways at all, but again, she dared not. And again, Cal jumped in.

“No, sir, we can't never go back there,” he said. “But if you was to give us a stamp for that letter, we could go somewhere near home to where the roads is still open and try to find a place to mail it. Then the rest of the family could get freed and meet us somewheres.”

Appleton smiled. “You're a bright boy,” he said. He walked back to the other room again and the children could hear a drawer opening and closing. Then he returned holding a stamp and stuck it to the envelope. He asked Lillie for the Master's full name and the plantation's proper name and wrote them out on the envelope as well.

Then he handed Lillie the letter. She smiled broadly and nodded in thanks she couldn't even express, but Appleton's expression remained serious. “You think you can carry that letter without losin' it?” he asked her.

“Yes, sir.”

“Can you make sure she keeps track of it?” he asked Cal.

“Yes, sir.”

Lillie slid the letter into her dress pocket. Appleton then rose, and Lillie and Cal did the same.

“Now, go,” he said. “Get away from this terrible place and go back where there ain't no shootin'.”

Mr. Appleton walked them to the front door and, while they were standing there, did something no other white person had ever done before: He reached out his hand to shake Lillie's. Lillie paused, then held out her hand and let it be swallowed up by the man's big, callused grip. He turned to Cal and did the same. At that instant there was a great double-clap of shellfire, and Lillie and Cal both jumped.

“It's thunder, children,” Appleton said. “Just thunder. You'd best move on before the rain starts.”

The rain never did start during the long slog Lillie and Cal made back to the battlefield. The clouds gathered as if they were set to burst, and the wind whistled as if it were set to blow. But the clouds, for the moment, held back their rain—something Lillie counted as lucky lest the letter in her pocket get ruined before anyone could read it.

Lillie and Cal said little to one another as they struggled back along the country roads, retracing their steps—forked road, plank bridge, dry goods store, left turn—and eventually plunging back into the smoke storm of the battlefield. They fought through long stretches of ooze where the mud was nearly knee-deep, found a patch of purchase here and there, and then waded back into the mire.

Finally, they saw the cook tent where Papa had fed them and, further on, the shell hole where they'd found him. Lillie picked up her speed, and Cal struggled to keep pace with her.

“Papa, Papa!” she cried, not seeing him but reckoning he must be somewhere nearby. “Papa!”

She strained to hear him calling back to her but got no reply, and she guessed that was not a worry since there was no telling exactly where he would be by now. It was only when she and Cal came within steps of the shell hole that they had a clear line of sight inside it. And it was only then that she saw two other slave nurses struggling up the slick, muddy sides of the pit, dragging a lifeless soldier between them. The man had a long, lean build and a bristle of beard and dustings of gray in his hair.

“Papa!” Lillie wailed, releasing a ragged cry from the very bottom of herself. “Papa!” she shouted again. She ran flat-out and leapt into the hole and fell atop the form of her papa. She grabbed him tight and screamed at the men.

“Leave him be, leave him be!” she cried.

“He's dead, child,” one of the nurses said.

“Leave him be!” Lillie repeated.

“He's dead,” the nurse said again. “Bullet got him two hours ago—long after the fightin' stopped. Musta' been one o' those guns what got dropped near a fire and just went off. No matter what, he's dead.”

Lillie, holding her papa and sobbing against his muddy, bloody shirt, heard none of what the man was saying. She did not notice the rain at last beginning to fall, nor Cal trying to pull her free; nor did she notice that the bullet she'd carried all day in her pocket was no longer there. An instant later, she and Cal spun back into the void.

Chapter Thirty

LILLIE AND CAL reappeared in Bett's cabin just the way they'd been in their last moments on the battlefield—with Lillie lying down as if she were clutching her papa and Cal holding tight to her. Papa himself was still in Mississippi.

“Papa, Papa,” Lillie was saying between her sobs.

“Lillie, Lillie, let go,” Cal was saying to her.

Both of them then felt Bett's warm, strong arms around them, and heard her murmuring to them.

“Hush, children, hush,” she was saying.

They opened their eyes, blinking in the daylight of the warm, dry cabin at Greenfog.

“Hush, children,” Bett repeated. “You ain't where you was. You're home now.”

Bett helped Cal and Lillie up, seated them in the hard, wooden chairs at her eating table, and listened as Lillie tried to tell her story. Again and again, her sobs interrupted her tale, and again and again Bett would try to quiet her. The old woman seemed to know what the young girl was going to tell her and didn't want her upsetting herself with the effort. Cal stayed mostly quiet and stared ahead.

Bett helped Lillie and Cal clean themselves off and when they seemed more composed, she fed them warm bread, fresh milk and cold, just-picked apples. The children, to their own surprise, wolfed them down. They'd eaten nothing in the time they'd been away but the bit of salt pork and hard bread Papa had fed them, and now that they were out of danger, they were hungrier than they knew.

Even as Lillie ate, she found that Papa was the only thing on her mind, and when his face floated before her, her tears would flow again. In all the months he had been dead, she had often wished she could see him just one more time, talk to him just one more time.

But now that she'd gotten that chance, she wished she hadn't. She felt as if she were learning all over again that Papa was gone—and understanding all over again that he would never be back, even though she'd begun to make her peace with that months ago. She resolved at that moment that while she would tell Mama everything that had happened today—and carry Papa's message that he loved her and missed her—she would say nothing to Plato until he was older. The boy did not need the sorrow Lillie was feeling.

The letter from the farmer was still in her pocket and had escaped the rain that had begun falling in Mississippi. Lillie took it out carefully and pulled the precious paper from its neat little envelope. The man's flowery script was hard to read, but Lillie was able to make out most of it. He wrote about the care Papa had provided him—leaving out any mention of Lucas, as he'd said he would. He told of the money he'd given Papa, and he went on to address the Master in a manner Lillie had never heard any other person use with him.

“You will take heed that the five hundred dollars in Union gold in your slave man's possession is my property, which I gave freely to him,” he wrote. “Upon his discharge from the Army, that sum belongs to him. Upon his death, that sum belongs to his family, who shall be freed according to the terms of Army conscription. You will take further heed that I will view any interference with those terms as a theft of private wealth, and I will proceed accordingly.” The letter was signed “William T. Appleton.” Lillie reflected that until this moment, she did not know the man's full name, and now that she knew it, she liked it fine. It was strong and simple and it suited him well.

Lillie was thrilled by the words. The Master was now required to return the money to Mama and the family and set them free, but first he had to see the letter, and that would not be easy. Lillie could not simply hand it to the Master, who would not believe it was real and would surely have her flogged both for fibbing and for knowing how to read at all. Bett, however, had an answer. She took the letter from Lillie and, later that day, gave it to a kitchen maid, who gave it to a parlor maid, who waited until the Master was away from his library and placed it atop the stack of plantation correspondence he read and answered each afternoon.

“What is the meaning of this?” the Master boomed as soon as he returned to his desk and read the letter. The Missus ran in to see what the disturbance was, and the two of them stayed behind closed doors for the better part of the hour—the Master pacing and shouting, and the Missus offering soothing words. He called the parlor maid in and questioned her closely about how the letter got there, and she coolly revealed nothing.

“I cleans around the letters, sir,” she said. “I never touch them. Besides, I couldn't read them to tell one from the other nohow.”