Widow of Gettysburg (4 page)

Rolling the brim of his hat in his hands, he surveyed the narrow stained-glass windows. If the sun were shining, mosaics of vibrant color would depict inspiring stories from the Bible.

But the sun was not shining. So he closed his eyes, listening for God to speak to him anyway, and heard—nothing. Felt nothing. He sighed.
If I were God, would I want to talk to Silas Ford?
His mama had called times like these dry spells. “But the important thing,” she had said, “is to keep talking to God anyway, even if He isn’t talking back.”

Forgive me
, Silas prayed.
Show me the way out.
And he left the church feeling as much like a hypocrite as he ever had.

Chambersburg Street was springing to life as he reached Bullet and untied him, with women and children and a handful of men all headed toward the center of town.

“Excuse me,” he called down to a young lady carrying a tray of bread down the sidewalk. “Is there a parade somewhere?”

The girl beamed up at him. “Better,” she chirped. “Our soldiers are back!”

He raised his eyebrows. “Did they take a holiday? You must forgive me, I’m not from around here.”

“I know.” She laughed. “I’m sure I’d remember you if I’d seen you before.” She flashed a smile that made his skin creep, but he waited for more information. Girls were always ready to talk. “Last week, after President Lincoln called for a hundred thousand more volunteers to defend us from the Rebels, Governor Curtin issued a call asking for fifty thousand of those men to come from Pennsylvania.”

Silas swallowed his surprise. Fifty thousand? One hundred thousand? Did they have that many men to spare?

“So about sixty—or was it seventy?—of our boys from the college and seminary here signed up and went to Harrisburg. They are part of Company A, of the 26th Pennsylvania Emergency Infantry regiment. And now the 26th has just arrived by train!”

“Is that so?” Silas’s gaze followed the people now streaming past them into the square. College and seminary recruits? They’d be as green as the apples he’d eaten yesterday, and softer, too.

“Yes indeed!” The woman’s chipper voice grated on him. “They were supposed to arrive last night, but their train hit a cow on the track and it derailed them.” She giggled. “Let’s not bring that up to them. I’m just glad they’re here to protect us now.”

“Protect you from …”

“My goodness, you really are not from anywhere around here, are you? Haven’t you heard? The Rebel army is around here somewhere! They’ll be on to Washington next, if we don’t stop them!”

“We?”

“They.” She laughed brightly. “I meant ‘they.’ Women have no part in war. Come on, we’ll miss them!”

Soon Chambersburg Street opened into the town square, or The
Diamond, as locals called it, and the girl ran off to join some friends. A young boy tugged on his stirrup and offered to sell him a plug of tobacco.

“No thanks, can’t stand the stuff.” Silas smiled at the puzzled expression on the boy’s face before the child shrugged and tried for another customer.

Silas remained on the edge and watched smooth-faced boys in blue peacock about.
So you traded your textbooks and Bibles for rifles, did you?
His stomach soured for them, for their mothers and sweethearts. The beat of a drum hammered in Silas’s chest as the high-pitched fife played Yankee Doodle to a backdrop of feminine cheers. Even the dripping, sullen sky seemed unable to dampen the throng now filling The Diamond.

How pitiful. How pathetic.
They would not cheer if they knew what he knew. They would not believe him if he told them.

Their march ended, the uniformed students milled about the crowd, accepting pies and coffee from grateful townsfolk.

“You a seminary student?” Silas called down to a soldier near him. With cheeks bulging with cherries, the boy nodded in the affirmative. “Is Rev. Schmucker still teaching? He was my professor once upon a time.”

The student-soldier’s eyes brightened. “You don’t say! When did you graduate?”

Silas rubbed a hand over his stubbled jaw. “Let’s see—I was there in ’57 and ’58.”

“Why then, you must have known Silas Ford!”

“As a matter of fact—” He stopped himself. “Why do you say that?”

“Oh every student from ’57 on knows him. For pity’s sake, the whole town knows about him. He’s a legend! You know—‘Silas Ford, man of the Lord’?”

Silas was stunned. “Man of the Lord?” He dared to believe it was true of him once, but—

“Of course! ‘Silas Ford, man of the Lord, took slaves to bed and shot Pa dead’! Remember him now? Did you have any idea he was a bad egg?”

His blood turned to ice in his veins. “No, no, you must be mistaken.”

The boy shook his head. “Hardly. Watch this. Hey Blevens!” he shouted to another soldier. “Finish this rhyme: Silas Ford, man of the Lord …”

“Took slaves to bed and shot Pa dead!” Blevens hadn’t missed a beat.

Silas was going to be sick.

“You see?” The boy took another bite of cherry pie. “I can’t understand how you don’t know about him. Silas Ford is a cautionary tale. His mother wrote a letter to Rev. Schmucker explaining why he wasn’t coming back, and word got out quick. Just goes to show no matter how close we feel to God, we can all fall away as he did …” Another bite of pie.

Silas had heard enough. Clucking his tongue to Bullet, he began threading his way out of The Diamond.

Then he saw Liberty on the other side of the square, a simple blue dress gracing her frame as she climbed down from her buggy and joined the crowd. So she decided to put off mourning after all.
Does she know the rhyme too? Does she believe it?
Silas was glad she didn’t see him. He wanted to watch her, unnoticed. She hadn’t recognized him this morning, but what if she had a sudden recollection? Still, he couldn’t help but watch Liberty one more moment as the old protective instinct for the orphan girl swelled in his chest.

Then he remembered why he was here in the first place, and the smile faded. Protecting the innocent was not part of his line of work. And it was certainly not what he was known for in Gettysburg.

B
ella could still smell that rye bread and rhubarb pie she’d made at the Holloway Farm as she let herself into her modest two-story house on South Washington Street. She was tempted to bake a pie for herself just to have that heavenly smell of buttery crust and tangy-sweet rhubarb permeate every corner of her comfortable home.

Large pink flowers bloomed on the creamy papered walls of her kitchen above wainscoting painted a mellow green. Open shelving revealed crocks of coffee beans, flour, lard, and sugar, while jelly pots sparkled with cherry and peach preserves. It was not furnished as finely as the homes of the white women she worked for, but it was her home—together with Abraham—and that was what was important. No mistress above her here. No master, no overseer, no driver. Here, she was her own mistress. As long as Bella had a choice, she would never consent to live in someone else’s home again.

But there was no denying she still needed white folks as employers. Her eyes drifted to the baskets of laundry waiting to be ironed, and a sigh escaped her. At least it was already washed. Just the thought of
toiling over a washboard in a bucket of water made her back muscles tie themselves up in knots. She much preferred tasks that allowed her to stand straight. Some days, judging by the way she felt, even she didn’t believe she was only thirty-six years old. Maybe her body still suffered from years of bending over harvesting rice down on Georgia’s St. Simons Island. Maybe the memory alone was enough to cause the ache.

Balderdash.
She scolded herself as she dropped some kindling into the stove and lit the fire that would heat the iron on top.
That was a lifetime ago.
But a nest of hornets had buzzed in her belly this morning when she was hiding with the horses. Her past was not so distant that the idea of repeating it couldn’t shake her to the core of her being. She had been lucky today.

Foolish is more like it
, she could almost hear her friend Missy Pratt say. Not that Missy was anywhere near here anymore. She and most of her neighbors had packed up their belongings as best as they could and skedaddled as soon as Governor Curtin announced the Confederate army was now in Pennsylvania. Balancing bundles on their heads, pushing wheelbarrows or driving wagons of their earthly possession, some fled to Yellow Hill, seven miles north of Gettysburg, some to the capital, Harrisburg, and some to Philadelphia. Others took the path of the Underground Railroad farther north, as if they were runaway slaves and not free blacks minding their own business in a free state. The western section of town was now all but vacant of its nearly two hundred colored folks.

The rain drummed harder outside, and Bella shivered as she tossed a glance at the Log Cabin quilt draped over the couch in the next room. How many times had she thrown that quilt over the clothesline outside as if she were airing it out? To the people who needed to hear it, the message was clear:
Welcome, night travelers. This is a safe house on your journey.
Only seven miles north of the Mason Dixon line, Gettysburg was among the first stops for many of them. The passing of the Fugitive Slave Law thirteen years ago gave slave catchers every “right” to come hunting for humans with their bloodhounds, and hunt they did.

Even Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of six months ago did not entirely stem the tide of runaway slaves. Freedom did not apply to slaves within the border states of Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri. Bella and Abraham would harbor the souls seeking freedom until it was time to secret them away to the McAllister Grist Mill where they would hide under the mill wheel until it was time to move again. Everyone hoped that Rock Creek and the pond by the mill would throw the dogs off the scent.

Humming “Wade in the Water,” Bella gripped the iron with a potholder, turned it over and spit on the surface to test the heat. It was ready. As she ironed Mrs. Shriver’s blouse, Bella wished it were as easy to smooth out the wrinkles in her life.

A sharp rapping on the door snapped Bella out of her reverie. As soon as she opened the door, the shining black face of old Hester King, or Aunt Hester, as everyone called her, beamed up at her.

“I saw a light in your window, baby, and just thought I’d step in to check on you.” She entered, and a whoosh of humid air came with her, like a puff of hot breath, sticking to Bella’s skin.

She latched the door behind her and bent down to kiss Aunt Hester’s cheeks in greeting. “I thought you’d be working at the Fosters’ today.”

“I have today off. I was fixin’ to work in the garden, but not in this wet mess.” She hung her shawl on a wooden peg inside the door and sat at the kitchen table, her usual sign she was planning to stay for tea. Bella moved the copper teakettle to the spot on the stove that was still hot from heating the iron, then sat across from her old friend.

“It’s mighty quiet around here now, isn’t it?” Bella folded her arms across the red and white checked tablecloth.

“Should be, after all that racket they all made skedaddling the place. Did you hear the way they were carrying on? The mamas and daddies scaring their children to death to keep up the pace.”

“But you’re not scared.”

“No. If things turn ugly, the Foster family said they’d protect me.”
It was only right. She’d been their washerwoman for more than a decade. “And you? You’re not afraid?”

Bella shrugged. “My feelings have little to do with my options.”

Aunt Hester nodded slowly. “Don’t I know that’s right.”

“If I leave, who will protect our home?” Bella raised her eyes. “Besides, three of the women I work for have all told me if I leave I won’t be getting my job back.”

“Ain’t there no money coming in from Abraham?”

Bella clenched her teeth before responding. It was a question she’d asked herself every time the mail failed to bring her the answer she so desperately desired. “No. I don’t understand it. He’s off fighting only God knows where—and still no sign of a paycheck.”

She clamped down on the rest of her thoughts on the subject before they spilled out of her. She wasn’t proud of her sentiments. But how she wished she would have hidden the copy of
The Christian Recorder
advertising the fact the Frederick Douglass was speaking in Philadelphia in March! If he hadn’t gone, if he hadn’t heard the call for colored men to serve in the 54th Massachusetts, he’d still be here. She wouldn’t be alone.

No, those were thoughts best kept hidden in the dark corners of her mind—the ones that needed to be swept out the most, but were most often neglected out of pure denial. Instead, all she said was, “My work is all I’ve got to keep us afloat right now. If I leave, we’ll have nothing left.”

Aunt Hester reached across the table and squeezed Bella’s hand.

“It’s not right that he should be fighting for freedom somewhere else when ours is in jeopardy right here.”

“Don’t you be listening to no nasty stories now, baby. You free, and I is too. Our days in bondage are over. We in charge of our own lives, and ain’t nothing going to change that.”