“How you find yourself this morning, Doctor Hawks?” Harriet asked.
“The day finds me well, Harriet, thank you.” The tall young woman reached for Harriet’s hands and leaned down to kiss her cheeks. “My spirits are higher—and hearing better—since I shifted to the hospital. You wouldn’t imagine the din occasioned by three hundred pupils reciting their ABCs. They nearly drove me deaf.”
Harriet smiled. “Didn’t realize you was freed up from teaching, ma’am. How that happen?”
Doctor Durant wiped his brow with an ironed handkerchief that he then tucked back into his breast pocket. He had an unmistakably courtly air in the lady’s presence even though he was married. “I suggested Missus Hawks take charge of Number 10 when General Hunter sent her husband to Florida last month. The brass could hardly object since no other physician was available.”
Esther was taller than the doctor and looked down at him with a benevolent smile. “I’ve been working night and day since,” she said. “No trauma yet—unless you count the soldier whose ear was taken off last week by a Rebel picket across the river. ‘A lucky shot,’ he said, though it sounded more like good aim to me.”
Harriet’s attention sharpened. If Hunter approved the raid up the Combahee, colored troops would have casualties. “How does Number 10 stand for beds and chloroform?”
“We’re finally ready for action,” Esther said. “My husband spent so much time outfitting the Barnwell House that training unavoidably came second. Now every orderly can suture.” The doctor pushed back the dark waves that framed her face. “Though we still beg for supplies. The army apparently isn’t aware that colored patients bleed as copiously as white ones. I believe that’s why I was allowed to take over. It doesn’t bother them if colored soldiers have only a female doctor.”
“The army letting you stay, then?” Harriet said.
“No,” she said with a rueful shrug. “It’s back to the schoolhouse now that Doctor Greenleaf has arrived. What a pity that men insist upon hogging all the glory.”
A cough from the other side of the ward reminded Harriet of the cup in her hand. “Lordy,” she said. “I clean forgot bout Romulus. Excuse me, Doctor Hawks.”
“Don’t let me interrupt. I just wanted to express my regards. My ears still ring with your speeches in Boston. Did you ever write them down?”
“No, ma’am. I wouldn’t know how.”
“Then I hope you’ll come see me when I go back to teaching,” Esther said.
“Thank you, ma’am. I’ll think on it,” Harriet said, though she’d given up the prospect long before. Her head ached whenever she stared too long at letters that spilled across the page, looking like someone had kicked over an anthill. Telling one word from another pressed against some scar deep in her brain.
Harriet continued across the room to the sightless patient. After he emptied the cup of water, she returned to her broom, turning over the problem of General David Hunter. When she was done sweeping, she took a basin from the cupboard, got ice from the icehouse, and filled the pan from a pump in the garden. Patients appreciated the cool bath water.
In her years on the Railroad, she’d helped people strong enough to run. The hospital, built for a family that didn’t mind watching other families suffer, housed bodies too broken to make such journeys. Nursing was her amends for abandoning them all those years. Harriet sighed at the hardest part of her task and began with the old woman in the first bed.
“Morning, Auntie,” she said as she sat down and waved away the flies on the patient’s forehead. “How you doing this sunny day?”
“Well, de Lawd gib me another, so I like it jest fine,” the old lady said with a smile that lifted the tumor on her cheek. “How bout you, nurse?”
“Sassy enough to pester poor Doc Durant.”
The woman laughed. “Bless his soul,” she said. “Dat white fella never miss a day. Laying on his hands like Jesus.”
Harriet held up her rag. “He asked me to clean y’all up. Okay to start with your face?”
The woman closed her brown eyes, which made her easier to look at, even though Harriet focused on only one part of the face at a time. She wiped saliva from the chin and dabbed at the remains of soup on the upper lip. Then she moved her cloth around the tumors that bulged from the forehead and distorted the nose, and finally, she made a second pass at the drool on the chin. Its fine cut hinted at the beauty the woman must have possessed before contracting her master’s French pox.
“How’s the pain in your legs today?” Harriet asked as she dipped her cloth and washed the woman’s right hand.
“If it feels as bad as I do, it sho has my sympathy.”
Harriet laughed and started on the other hand.
“Tell me sumpin’ cheerful,” the woman said. “How yo man?”
“Oh, he all right,” Harriet said.
“Bless you,” the old lady said at the comforting fiction. “Dat nice.”
Harriet returned her rag to the water. She stood and lifted the basin. “I’ll let the doctor know to check on your legs, ma’am.”
“Thank you, chile. P’haps he got a physic,’” she said and closed her eyes.
It took Harriet another two hours to wash every patient. When she finally threw her linen in the basket, she stretched her neck right and left to take out the kinks. Doctor Durant stopped by the cupboard for a clean towel at the same moment.
“Done for the day, Moses?” he said and leaned against the wall to take the weight off his bad leg.
“Done with this part a my day, sir. Now I’m on to the next.”
“Always busy. What don’t you do?”
Harriet thought for a moment. “Well, I don’t insist on glory, sir. Like Miz Hawks, I mostly want to get things done.”
The physician straightened. “Just like a woman,” he said. “I’m afraid men need more motivation.”
Harriet stared as Durant reentered the ward, and she then turned toward the front door. He had made her argument. She didn’t need to convince General Hunter that the plan was foolproof. She just needed to convince the old paymaster that he had one last chance for glory.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Pass the bearer, Harriet Tubman, to Beaufort, and back to this place, and wherever she wishes to go, and give her passage at all times on all Government transports . . . Harriet was sent to me from Boston, by Governor Andrews, of Massachusetts, and is a valuable woman.
Major General David Hunter
A SEA BREEZE SEIZED THE OPEN DOOR behind Harriet as she entered the general’s private office and slammed it shut with a loud bang. It was a terrible way to begin.
General Hunter looked over his newspaper. “You certainly know how to make an entrance,” he said.
The commander’s table was uncluttered. He sat in a chair that had lost one of its arms, reading the paper by the glare of an open window. The bent and fingerprinted glasses at the end of his hooked nose looked like they’d traveled with him all his sixty-plus years. It was hard to imagine he’d ever been young. His freshly combed wig blended more naturally than before with the hair that tickled his veiny ears, but he still looked like a man whose candle had burned low.
“Sorry, sir,” Harriet said, relieved that he wasn’t annoyed. “Must be the Lord making a point. Thank you for seeing me.”
“Colonel Montgomery said you have new information. What is it?”
“I done what you asked, sir,” Harriet said. She stood completely still and straight, hands at her side, saying nothing more. Harriet had often used silence to concentrate listeners’ attention, especially in public forums. Chatter lulled people. Bursts of silence made them listen. From a woman, it was downright unnerving.
The general folded his newspaper and draped it over the remaining arm of the chair. He looked perplexed. “What I asked?”
“What you asked when I last reported, sir. When I brought the news bout Fields Point and Tar Bluff.”
Hunter reached in his breast pocket for a cigar. “
Oh. As I said, we can’t launch against those torpedoes.” He bit off the end of the cigar, spat it on the floor, and patted his other pocket for a match.
“I know, sir. You said we need to map em.”
“That’s correct.” Hunter stood and walked to the wooden secretary in the corner to get a tin of locofocos next to a pitcher of water. He struck a match, took an experimental puff, and resumed his seat under the window.
“My men and I’d like to show you,” Harriet said.
“Your men?” he said, as if confused by what she meant. The breeze coming through the window wafted the cigar’s reek across the room.
“My scouts,” she said. Hunter sometimes seemed to forget that he’d asked her to recruit them, as if he couldn’t credit that he’d put a woman in charge, even the famous Harriet Tubman. But he had, and she’d recruited all of them with the exception of Walter, who had found her. “The contraband who help out. May I bring em in, General?”
“How many?”
“Jest Walter Plowden and Samuel Heyward, sir,” Harriet said. “You met Plowden before. Heyward, he’s new.”
“Proceed,” Hunter said, and he drew again on his weed.
Harriet opened the door, taking care to hold the knob tightly. She peered into the anteroom. Samuel read a farmer’s almanac with a finger under the words while eating a hunk of bread. Walter examined the tips of his shoes. A bearded, sour-faced clerk watched the pair with folded arms. The two men looked up. Harriet nodded. Samuel put the bread in his pocket and brushed crumbs from his lap. He and Walter stood and followed her into the smoke-filled room.
Hunter had moved to the head of the conference table. “Men,” he said and motioned to the chairs next to him.
Walter looked uncomfortable at the invitation, but Samuel sat down without any change of expression. Harriet gave the waterman a wide berth and took a chair on the opposite side of the table, next to the general. She placed her satchel on the floor. Walter joined her.
“Plowden and Heyward went with me up the Cum’bee four nights ago, General Hunter.” Harriet nodded at Samuel. “Heyward here found the first torpedo.”
Hunter examined Samuel’s face as if scrutinizing a federal note for counterfeit. “Tell me about that, Mister Heyward,” he said.
Samuel appeared untroubled by the long stare. He rested his large hands on the table and spoke calmly. “I was scouting the Cum’bee by myself a week ago, sir, when I spotted the barrel in the water near the Lowndes Plantation.”
Hunter’s eyes narrowed. “Alone? What were you doing that far upriver?”
“My missus and chil’ren are on the Heyward Plantation, sir.”
“Surely you weren’t visiting them?”
“I stash food in a hollow oak near the river when I can,” Samuel said. “I took em a piece a salt pork.”
Harriet stiffened. The image of Samuel portioning rations in the dugout sprang to mind. The rotten cheater.
“That’s a long haul for one man,” Hunter said. It was a statement of fact that could double for an accusation of lying.
“Master Heyward used to race me on the river, sir. Like his horses at the Jockey Club,” Samuel replied. “I got fast. And good at timing the tide.”
“So what did you see?”
“I was coming back on the ebb, when I spotted a snag jest in time to dodge it. Thought it was a gator. I seen the barrel below the surface as I nicked past.”
Harriet spoke up. “We confirmed it, General.”
Confirm was a word with the power to make doubts go away, she knew. Men in authority liked it.
“How?” Hunter asked.
“My brother Jacob done told us,” Samuel answered for her.
“I got onto the Lowndes place,” Harriet said. “Samuel’s brother gave me the location a the torpedoes. He laid em.”
“Did he say how many there are?” Hunter said.
Harriet reached down into her satchel. She withdrew the small map from the inside pocket and unfolded it on the table. “Jacob said there are five. I used a nail to mark the spots where the Secesh anchored the barrels.” She pushed the pocked chart in Hunter’s direction.
Hunter tapped the ash off his cigar into a tin can that looked as if it had come from the officers’ mess. He took the paper and held it to the light coming in from the window. “I see only four holes.”
Earlier that morning, Harriet had taken out her nail, then put it back in her satchel, unable to commit the lie to paper and certain that God Almighty was looking over her shoulder. She’d known it was Him by the way the sun slanted through the window.
Hunter set the paper on the table.
“Robert Smalls confirmed that the fifth bomb is across from the ferry,” Harriet said. Confirm wasn’t truthful, but it was close enough.
“Smalls? How does he know?” General Hunter asked.
Walter broke into a cough. The wiry scout placed a fist over his mouth and hacked until his narrow chest heaved. When Harriet reached behind to clap him on the back, he shook his head, unable to speak.
“Water?” she said.
Walter nodded vigorously. “Yes,” he croaked.
The general pointed with his cigar to the pitcher atop the secretary. Harriet got up and poured a glass, which Walter downed in noisy gulps.
“Smalls said they done the same on the Stono,” she said as she took her seat, thinking how best to phrase the information without lying outright. “They laid mines on either side a the ferry. He told me to watch for snags.”
“You know what to look for, they plain as rice,” Samuel added.
Hunter balanced his cigar across the tin can, took a pencil from his pocket, and placed a fifth mark near the ferry landing. “In a river that black?” he asked. “A man can’t see to the bottom in five inches around here.”
Samuel replied like he had a hand on the Bible. “Yes, sir. I’m sure. I done it once already.”
General Hunter studied the map again. The room quieted, and someone opened and closed a door in the antechamber. Hunter nodded to himself. He pocketed the piece of paper and leaned back in his chair with his hands behind his head. His mouth twisted in an attempt at a smile. “Thank you. I’m sure my replacement will find the information useful.”
Harriet’s toes curled in her shoes, and her heart started thumping. She struggled to stay in her seat. The Rebs could refortify Fields Point any minute. The entrance to the Combahee would swing shut. If the Union didn’t free people when it had the chance, what was its purpose? What did the abolitionists’ fine words add up to? She pictured the last ship for the Promised Land sailing without them. Thousands left behind. When it came to morality, a woman could sometimes say things a man couldn’t. Usually, she hoped Hunter would forget she was one, but now was the time to remind him.
“To everything, there is a season, General, and a time to every purpose under Heaven,” she said. “A time to be born, a time to die.” Harriet leaned forward. “This the time to do what you come for, sir. What we all come for. This ain’t the work of another man, General Hunter. The good Lord waiting on you to lead His chil’ren to freedom.”
Hunter’s jaw squared. “Lincoln appears to be waiting on someone else,” the general muttered. But he took the map out of his pocket and looked at it again.
“No one but you believed in recruiting colored regiments til you went and done it, General Hunter,” Harriet said. “You were the one man in America ready to give em a chance.”
“You’ve got to treat men like men,” Hunter said. “It’s taken a year to get the 1st South Carolina close to a full complement, and the 2nd South Carolina has barely three hundred. We can’t afford to lose a single soldier.”
Harriet at last understood. Hunter had battled Congress, the War Department, and the president for his regiments. He couldn’t bear to see them destroyed. “We can’t afford not to lose em, sir. Your troops want to fight and die for something important—just like you,” she said. “As you say, you got to treat men like men.”
Hunter stared hard at her. Then he held the map to the light again. The old soldier took a deep breath.
“I’ll consider what you’ve brought me.” Hunter looked at Samuel and pointed a heavy finger. “If I decide to go forward, I’ll want you on the lead vessel—where you can scout the torpedoes or be first to get your head blown off.” He looked at Plowden. “You, too.”
Walter had recovered his voice. “’Course, General. What bout M-M-Moses, sir?”
“What about her?” he said. “This is a military expedition, boys.”
“Won’t work without Moses, sir,” Samuel said. His tone was respectful but definite. “The slaves gone be frightened. She knows best how to coax em.”
“Once the t-t-tide turns, the river moves fast,” Walter added. “Them Secesh reinforcements won’t be far away. We ain’t got much t-t-time to get everybody off.”
“Who’s everybody?” Hunter asked.
Walter and Samuel looked at Harriet.
General Hunter stared at her in puzzlement. “The plan is to recruit troops. Fill our regiments for an assault on Charleston.”
“Men don’t want to leave without their wives and chil’ren, sir,” she said. “We gone get more recruits if we don’t make em choose between family and freedom. And if we get all the planters’ hands, rice fields won’t pay. Secesh gone dry up.”
Hunter picked up his cigar, which had gone out. He seemed not to notice and merely flicked cold ash into the tin can. “Thank you for coming by, men.”
The three of them stood. Harriet leaned over for her satchel.
“No, Moses. Not you,” Hunter said. He turned to her as Samuel and Walter left the room, closing the door behind them. “The space on the gunships is limited. What we need are soldiers, not civilians.”
“Yes, sir. But it’s bout impossible for a man to get on board without the woman standing next to him.”
Hunter looked reluctant.
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