Freedom Stone

by Jeffrey Kluger

  “You ain’t gonna die again, Papa!” Lillie said. “You gonna come home!”

  “If I’m s’posed to, I’m s’posed to,” Papa repeated.

  Lillie threw herself against him and held him tight. He gathered her up in one more long embrace.

  “Go now, girl,” he whispered. “You gonna get through.”

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  LILLIE AND CAL hurried through the battlefield as best they could, both of them struggling against the pull of the mud and Cal struggling with his wounded foot. They kept their eyes to the ground most of the time, figuring that the less they looked around themselves, the less they’d see of the waste and death everywhere. What’s more, any soldiers inclined to stop them and question them might decide not to bother if they knew they’d have to call out to them and give chase first. It took more than an hour and a half of such hobbling running before the children began to reach the end of the muddy plain that was the field of war and encounter untrampled grass, unbroken trees and a sky free of smoke. They stopped to catch their breath, their hands on their knees and their heads hanging down.

  “I didn’t know . . . it’d be . . . so far,” Cal panted.

  “We got a while ... still to go,” Lillie answered.

  They collected themselves, stood back up and then hurried on, the directions Papa had given them for the rest of the journey running through their heads. Right turn, dry goods store, plank bridge, forked road, Lillie repeated over and over to herself—the words falling into the rhythm of her feet.

  Right turn, dry goods store, plank bridge, forked road, Cal recited silently too.

  At last they reached the bridge and raced across it—their footfalls making a terrible clatter in the otherwise quiet afternoon. “Over there!” Cal said, pointing ahead.

  Lillie looked and saw that the forked road that was the last landmark was just where Papa had said it would be. One hundred paces down the left-hand side of it should be the Appleton farm. Lillie and Cal trotted and hobbled down the road and, as Papa had also promised, came upon a small sign bearing the single name APPLETON in red paint. Beyond it was a dirt drive and a large farmhouse.

  “What do we do now?” Lillie asked.

  That was a question neither one of them had considered. The farm looked tidy and quiet, with the shutters on the top floor closed and only a few on the ground floor open. There was a carriage house next to the main house and its door was partway open, but no one appeared to be inside. In the distance, Lillie could see the fields—far smaller than those at Greenfog—with just a few slaves at work. It was a quiet and peaceful scene—until it was suddenly broken by an angry voice.

  “What do you want?” a man snapped.

  Cal and Lillie jumped and turned to the sound, which seemed to be coming from off to their right. They could not see the person who was speaking.

  “What do you want?” the voice repeated, more angrily this time.

  “We don’t mean no trouble,” Lillie called back, her own voice quavering.

  “I didn’t ask what you mean! I asked you what you want!” came the answer, and now the man who owned the voice appeared. He had been inside the carriage house, hiding behind the partly closed door, and he emerged now with a shotgun at his shoulder, pointed directly at Cal and Lillie. The children took hold of one another and backed up a few steps. The man slowly approached, walking with a terrible limp, but holding the gun steady. He wore an old work shirt, a dirty pair of pants and a battered jacket. From where Lillie and Cal stood, the jacket looked midnight blue. With a start, Lillie realized it was the tunic of a Union soldier.

  “What are you starin’ at?” the man now barked. “Eyes on the ground and get off this land!”

  “Yes, sir,” Cal stammered.

  He grabbed Lillie’s arm and began pulling her backward. At first Lillie stood her ground, but the man waved the gun barrel at her and she too began to retreat. Then there was another voice.

  “Lucas!” the voice cried. “Put that gun down!”

  A man came bounding from the house, leapt down the porch steps and raced across the grass. “Lucas!” he said again. “Do what I say.”

  Lillie and Cal stood absolutely still as the gunman slowly lowered his weapon and pointed it toward the ground. The other man reached him, grabbed the barrel and wrested the gun away from him. “These’re children! Do you know who they are? Did you even ask who they are?”

  The man named Lucas shook his head. “I don’t care who they are. What I care about is them askin’ who I am.”

  “Well, so far they ain’t asked. Now go inside the house,” he ordered. Lucas stood his ground. “Go inside the house, I say, before I’m the one who turns you in!”

  Lucas grumbled but did as he was told, stomping up the porch steps on his one good leg and one lame one, and going into the house. He slammed the door behind him. The other man unloaded the gun, put the shells in his pocket and then turned to Lillie and Cal.

  “Now, what is it you want?” he asked.

  Lillie cleared her throat. “We’re lookin’ for a man named Appleton.”

  “I’m Appleton,” the man answered. “He’s Appleton too,” he added, jerking a thumb in the direction of the house.

  “The Appleton what owns this farm?”

  “That’s me.”

  “I want to talk to you ’bout my papa,” Lillie said.

  Appleton cocked his head at her and studied her face. “I don’t think I know your papa,” he said. “I’ve got mostly women slaves working here, and the two men I do have are too old.”

  “He doesn’t work for you,” Lillie said. “He works for the Army.”

  “A slave man soldier?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “A nurse soldier?”

  “That’s him! Yes, sir, that’s him!”

  “Come over here, girl,” the man instructed. He said it with a tone Lillie couldn’t quite read. She took a wary step forward, and Cal held her arm and stopped her. The man smiled. He opened the shotgun once again and showed the empty barrels, then tucked it backward under his arm. “I ain’t gonna hurt her, son,” he said to Cal, “nor you.”

  He waved them over again, and Lillie and Cal approached. When Lillie was standing in front of the man, he studied her face once again. Then he smiled.

  “This way,” he said.

  Without another word, he led them across the grass and up onto the porch and then, remarkably, opened the door of his house to them. Lillie and Cal had never been allowed to walk through the front door of a white man’s house before. They stopped, having no idea how to proceed, then looked down at their shoes, which were covered with battlefield mud.

  “Don’t worry ’bout that,” Appleton said. “There’s nothing but rain and mud around here this time of year.” He nudged them inside.

  The children entered the parlor and looked around at the sheer loveliness of the place. Beneath their feet was a plank floor that was polished and smooth and covered with colorful rugs. The furniture was polished too, and softened with cushions that were woven with colorful patterns. There were bits of lace on the arms of the chairs and a footrest in front of one of them. A pair of oil lamps with tinkly crystals hung on the walls, and the cut glass caught the light streaming through the lace-curtained windows. Appleton pointed them to the dining parlor, where there was a long table with six chairs around it. There were more crystal lamps on the walls and a cabinet full of delicate-looking china. He pulled out the chair at the head of the table and motioned the children to the ones on either side of him.

  “Sit,” he instructed, and Lillie and Cal did as they were told. Then he called out over his shoulder. “Sissy,” he said, “bring some water.”

  A slave girl appeared, gaped at Lillie and Cal, then hurried away and returned with a pitcher and three glasses on a tray. She set the glasses on the table and filled each one. Lillie and Cal looked down at their hands and squirmed in their chairs. A slave was serving slaves, and they could not meet the girl’
s eyes. Lillie murmured, “Thank you,” when the glasses were full, and the girl vanished. Appleton now turned to Lillie.

  “I expect you been told that you look like your father,” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” Lillie answered.

  He next turned to Cal. “This can’t be your brother—the boy with the funny name.”

  “No, sir,” Lillie said. “That’s Plato.”

  “Plato, yes,” the man said as if remembering.

  “This here’s Cal,” Lillie said. “A slave boy.”

  “Happy to meet you, Cal,” Appleton said.

  “Thank you, sir,” Cal said hoarsely.

  “And I’m Lillie,” Lillie said.

  “I know,” Appleton said. “I been told. You live in South Carolina, don’t you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That’s a long way. You runaways?”

  Lillie and Cal looked at him and said nothing. The truth—that they’d come here by charm—would be taken as a lie. A lie—that they were runaways as he thought—would land them in worse trouble. They stayed silent until Appleton spoke, and what he said surprised them more than all the other surprising things that had happened today.

  “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 ga
thered 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.