Widow of Gettysburg (13 page)

D
id you hear that?” Hettie Shriver flung open the door of her Baltimore Street home to Bella. The large two-story brick house was flanked by a garden and had a ten-pin alley and saloon built on the back of the house, ready for business but waiting until Hettie’s husband, George, returned. “Home by Christmas my foot,” Bella often heard Hettie mutter. She hadn’t seen George once since he had joined Cole’s Cavalry in Frederick, Maryland, in August 1861.

“Hear what, ma’am?” Bella swiveled, a basket of freshly pressed laundry hugging her hip. During breakfast, a long line of Union cavalry and more wagons had passed by her home, going north on South Washington Street. But the brick sidewalks here on Baltimore Street were fairly empty now, and washed clean from the recent rain. Birds twittered from their perches in young trees lining the dirt road, the blue sky glimmered with gold-rimmed clouds. Romeo swished his tail contentedly
as he stood at the hitching post, harnessed to Bella’s wagon.

“There.” Hettie raised her hand to silence her daughters, though neither had made a sound yet. Mollie, a girl of just eight summers, and Sadie, two years younger, both clung to Hettie’s work apron, their solemn blue eyes peering around at Bella vacantly.

Then she heard it. A bugle from the northeast, sounding the call for battle. Nodding but once, Bella locked eyes with Hettie for a heartbeat until the
pop pop
of small-arms fire carried faintly on the summer breeze.

Quickly, Bella stepped inside the butter-cream parlor and Hettie locked the door behind her.

“Mama?” Sadie tugged Hettie’s skirt. “Is it Daddy?”

Color drained from Hettie’s face. “No, darling.”

“Then who is it? Are they good men or bad men?”

Both
, thought Bella, as Hettie ushered the girls up to their playroom and told them everything would be fine.

The shots were so faint in the distance, maybe Hettie was right. Maybe, if a battle was to be had indeed, it would move farther away, not closer. Bella smoothed her apron over her green checked skirt and went into the kitchen to start baking for Hettie and her girls. She hitched her thoughts to the task as she would a horse to its post, concentrating on the dusting of flour on her fingertips, the scraping of the wooden spoon against the sides of the bowl, the spicy scent of the cinnamon and raisins waiting to be mixed in. It was something her mother had taught her long ago. When your thoughts run away, focus on what your hands are doing instead, shut out everything else. It was good advice—slaves’ hands were rarely idle. Bella’s mouth tilted up.
My hands are rarely idle now.
At least the driver’s whip would not reach her here.

If only her memories would stay as far away.

Footsteps flew down the staircase over the kitchen, jerking Bella’s attention to the doorway until Hettie filled its frame. Truly, the lines around her eyes and mouth spoke of a woman much older than the woman’s twenty-six years.

“Bella, come quickly.” It was a breath, spoken all at once, the kind
that leaves no room for questioning. In one fluid movement, Bella dropped her spoon on the work table, wiped her hands on her apron, flicked her gaze to the window.

“No don’t! Come away from the window at once.” It was a whisper now, and frantic.

Hettie grabbed her arm then—something she had never done before—and pulled Bella forcefully out of the kitchen, down the servant’s stairs and into the cellar.

“Stay here, at all costs, and don’t make a sound.” Hettie stood silhouetted in the doorway to the stairs, the light spilling over her shoulders from behind, the shadows hiding her face. “I will keep them away from you, I promise.” She left. A latch clicked from the other side.

Bella was trapped. Again.

Fear shuddered through her, oozed out of her pores, until her collar plastered her neck, and her petticoats stuck to her thighs. Pulse pounding in her ears, she slid closer to the single shaft of light slanting into the cellar. The window was small, but not too small for her to spot the source of Hettie’s alarm.

A dozen colored folks, men, women, and children, shuffled in a line down the street, Confederates with bayonets hemming them in behind and before.

“Goodbye!” one of the women shouted. “Goodbye! I’m going back to slavery!” No one corrected her. No one could deny she was right.

Bella squinted through the dirty glass. These were her friends, her neighbors, the only other colored people who had stayed in town. Aunt Hester was among them.

Bella wheeled away from the window and pressed her back against the cold bricks and chipping mortar. The tea and bread she’d had for breakfast threatened to reappear, uninvited. Were they searching the houses? Had they just missed her? Would they search a white woman’s home looking for colored people—or Yankees? She wasn’t safe. She wasn’t safe here, and she wouldn’t be safe at home. No matter where she turned, there was no way out. She had felt this way before.

The bricks of the Shrivers’ foundation chafed the scars on her back through her dress. Crumbling to her knees, Bella pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes, tried desperately to fasten her thoughts once more to anything else—the musty smell filling her nostrils, the dampness clinging to her skin—to rein in the memories. But they ran away with her, unbridled, to the rice swamp of St. Simons Island.

Bella had tried to run away, then, and the other slaves had called her crazy. “What for you run?” her gnarled grandmother had said to her. “T’ain’t no use. What use you run away? De swamp all round, you get in dar an starve to def, or de snakes eat you up. No, massa’s negroes don’t neber run away.” She had been right. It was an island, after all.

But Bella had run anyway, to the swamps where snakes slithered, hissing in the shadows, and her stomach fairly roared for food. Until she came back half-dead from starvation and was tied up by her wrists to a tree branch, her feet dangling above the floor so as to not afford a purchase for resistance. Driver Bran turned her shirt up over her head, exposing the flesh of her back.

Sweat itched across Bella’s scalp and trickled down her face. She licked the salt from her lips as she remembered the leather thong scoring her body, filleting it open. In an attempt to heal itself, her flesh pulled tight as it breached the gullies carved out by the whip. The scars on her back burned with the memory of their birth.

She had run more than once, though she knew there was no way off the island. So many times, and with the same result, that she had been deemed insane.

Maybe she was.

She would run again.

Bella Jamison would not go back.

The line of captives had been snaking east. She would go southwest, to the Holloway Farm. She waited in the shadows of the cellar, ready to pounce as soon as Hettie opened the door. Bella was taken aback by the force coursing through her veins: the primal instinct to be free.

BOOM!

Cannon fire shook the earth, and the world shifted. This was not distant popping of musketry or a faint strain of bugle on the breeze. It was close enough to rattle the house. The children screamed from somewhere upstairs. A door slammed, and Bella watched as three pairs of feet ran past the cellar window. The Shrivers were running away? They would leave her here? Alone?

BOOM!

Before Bella had time to gather a plan about her, four pairs of feet came running back from the other direction. The door slammed again. Footsteps on the stairs. The latch clicked, the door opened and morning light streamed in again.

“We’re leaving,” Hettie said.

Bella, at her side, “So am I.”

“Where?”

“To the Holloway Farm. I can hide there.”

“On the other side of Seminary Ridge? You can’t go there, that’s where the fighting is. It’s covered in smoke. Come with us.”

“Where will you go?”

“My father’s farm—Jacob Weikert. We’ll be safe. He’ll take us all in, I know he will. We’re taking our neighbor’s youngest girl, Tillie Pierce, to keep her out of harm’s way, too. She is fifteen, and can help us with the girls …” She trailed off.

They reached the top of the stairs and found Sadie and Mollie clinging to Tillie, whose face was just as ashen.

“Ready to go see Grandpa?” Hettie’s voice lilted in an effort, Bella guessed, to convince her girls this would be a pleasant outing.

BOOM!

The girls were not convinced.

“Where does your father live?” Bella prodded as Hettie locked the house behind her, and immediately covered her mouth. The air tasted of saltpeter from the gunpowder.

“Three miles south, away from the fighting. Safest place we could
be. On Taneytown Road, on the eastern slope of Sugarloaf Hill, next to the Round Top. We go by foot—it’s faster.”

If her hands would only stop shaking, Liberty would busy them with quilting, or mending, or sewing new curtains for the guest rooms. Anything that would require the concentration of small, even stitching that had always calmed her nerves.

But how could she be still when the whole earth shuddered, when cannons roared, when the drummer boys beat out their call to battle on her very chest? The day had begun like any other. Liberty had taken Major out for a walk along the west bank of Willoughby Run. But she had let her mind wander, and her feet followed. The smell of freshly mown grass and purple clover clung to the breeze teasing tendrils of hair from her bun. Before she knew it, she and Major had crossed Hagerstown Road, about a mile north of her home.

Then everything changed.

Half a mile to her left, the crest of Herr Ridge squirmed with men just rising from the other side.
What are they doing?
Liberty whipped her head to the right and found her answer, which nearly knocked her off her feet. For there on McPherson’s Heights was the Union cavalry, facing their enemy, their backs to the Lutheran Seminary.

Before the first shot fired, Liberty grabbed the scruff of Major’s neck and turned him around to run home.

He knew. He could not hear, but he could feel the ground shake, the atmosphere change, smell the sulfuric belch of the field guns. It was enough. He kept pace with Liberty—though he could easily have outrun her—as she flew back home, and he would not leave Liberty’s side as she now sat in the great hall, blood rushing in her ears.

You’re crying wolf along with the rest of them.
Her own words came back to her.

Don’t you remember? In the end, the wolf actually came.

He was right, after all. In the end, the wolf had come.

Was this the end?

Amelia wrung her hands and paced the length of the room, her bombazine rustling in the gaps between the cannon fire. Liberty sat in a red velvet armchair and wished she could put words together to pray, but her brain was so rattled even that was difficult.
Then pray the psalms.
It was something Bella had taught her to do when her grief was raw. So she picked up a Bible with shaking hands and read Psalm 27, punctuated by shot and shell screaming through the air. It sounded closer than the mere mile that separated them from battle.

“The LORD is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? the Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?”

A small porcelain figurine toppled off the whatnot and shattered on the floor.

“Though an host should encamp against me, my heart shall not fear: though war should rise against me, in this will I be confident.”

Major whined and brushed his head against Libbie’s ankle.

“One thing have I desired of the LORD, that will I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the LORD, and to enquire in his temple. For in the time of trouble he shall hide me in his pavilion: in the secret of his tabernacle shall he hide me; he shall set me up upon a rock.”

Blue-grey smoke blew in through the open windows, and Libbie rushed to slam them closed, to shut out the war outside her door. The war was not supposed to be fought here. It was supposed to take place somewhere else—somewhere far away. Not in fields of wheat, apple orchards, villages, and farms. Not where widows and orphans were defenseless. Not here.

She returned to her chair and continued reading. “Hear, O LORD, when I cry with my voice: have mercy also upon me, and answer me.
Hide not thy face far from me; put not thy servant away in anger: thou hast been my help; leave me not, neither forsake me, O God of my salva—”

The front door burst open and Major, misjudging the distance again, sailed into the intruder, wagging his tail, before stumbling back a little. The man staggered back a few steps, recovering his balance, but did not stoop to return Major’s greeting. “You must not be afraid, but a very great many men are going to be brought here to this house. I’m Dr. Philip Stephens and I’ll be staying here for quite some time.” His Southern drawl and green-sashed, grey uniform triggered alarm in Libbie’s mind. Yet she could make no sound.