Miss Katie's Rosewood

by Michael Phillips

  “As I have listened to what everyone’s been saying,” Katie went on, “I realized something. This—right here, all of us together . . . this is Rosewood. We didn’t leave Rosewood . . . Rosewood left Greens Crossing. We are Rosewood. It is the family that made it a home for us all. I will miss that dear house and everything there, my special place in the woods, all the memories. And the graves of our loved ones are here and we will never forget that. I’ll even miss dear Mrs. Hammond.”

  We all laughed, and for the first time realized how fond of her we had become.

  “But I would rather be with you all,” Katie went on, “even here like this, around a campfire, sleeping on the ground or in that wagon, with no home at all, than to have ten Rosewoods without you.”

  I looked into Katie’s eyes as she spoke, and I could see she was doing what she always did at a time like this. When things got really hard, Katie always seemed to go down inside herself and think about things and come out stronger in the end, stronger than most people knew she was, maybe even stronger than she knew she was herself.

  But I knew. I had known all along. She said that we were all Rosewood. But I knew that more than anybody or anything . . . Katie herself was the strength of Rosewood. She was what held us all together.

  We were all quiet and stared into the fire.

  There was no more talk after that night of splitting up. Wherever we went, we were going together.

  The following day Rob rode up beside our wagon.

  “Could I talk to you a minute, Mr. Daniels?” he said.

  “Sure,” Papa answered. “One of you girls want to take Rob’s horse?”

  “I will,” said Katie as Papa reined in.

  “I’ll go ride with Jeremiah awhile,” I said, jumping to the ground.

  I ran back to Jeremiah and he pulled me up behind him. Katie mounted Rob’s horse and Rob sat down on the seat beside Papa.

  “Something on your mind, son?” said Papa as they continued on.

  “Yes, sir,” said Rob. “I mentioned this to Katie a while back, but I didn’t want to say anything about it to everyone until I saw what you and Mr. Daniels thought.”

  “Go on,” said Papa. “I’m listening.”

  “I know you don’t have definite plans yet . . . but I had hoped that Katie and I would be able to settle reasonably near my family. And you have your sister in Philadelphia, and as I understand it, you were raised not far from there.”

  “Just outside the city,” nodded Papa.

  “Well, there is a nice piece of property near where I live for sale, with two houses on it, and fifty prime acres. I don’t know, but I wonder if it might be a region where there would be family ties, and also where Henry and Josepha and Jeremiah and Mayme, I am reasonably sure, would find a higher level of acceptance.”

  Papa nodded with interest as Rob spoke.

  “Mr. Evans raises cattle and horses and a few sheep. I’m not sure what crops he grows—not cotton as far as I know, but I think sweet corn, tomatoes, maybe a little wheat, a few potatoes.”

  “And he’s selling, you say?”

  “His wife died a few years ago and he wants to move to New York to be with his son’s family.”

  “Hmm . . . sounds interesting, all right. Go back and tell brother Ward about it,” he said. “Then talk it over with Kathleen. If they agree that it is something we should look into, we’ll talk about it as a group. It might have real possibilities.”

  NORTH

  58

  It is amazing how far you get if you just keep steadily going.

  We only went maybe ten or twelve miles a day. But within two weeks we were into Virginia and moving closer and closer to Baltimore where Rob’s parents lived and to Pennsylvania where Rob lived in Hanover and Aunt Nelda lived in Philadelphia.

  After what Katie had said around the campfire that night, and then when we all talked together about the property that Rob knew about, new life and hopefulness began to blossom within us. We began to be excited about the future, and anxious to see what God had for us next. We felt like we were on an adventure, almost like Micah and Emma on their way west, or even like Josepha had been so many years ago on the Underground Railroad. We weren’t in covered wagons, and we were going north, not west. And we didn’t have to hide out like fugitive slaves. But we were going to a new life together . . . somewhere, though we didn’t yet know where.

  If anyone had wanted, as Papa said, they could have taken the train, or we could have stayed in hotels. But nobody wanted to. We wanted to stay together. Even Aunt Nelda, who was the least used to hardship of any of us, was happy and excited to be part of this with the rest of us.

  Though we hadn’t even seen the place that was for sale, after Rob described it to us, everyone began talking about it and getting excited. Pretty soon Papa and Uncle Ward and Henry were discussing possibilities and Henry was talking about what he’d like to do differently if he had the chance to build a new house for himself and Josepha. When Jeremiah and I were together, Jeremiah talked about what kind of job he’d like to find. Suddenly it seemed that everybody had ideas and plans and hopes and new dreams. If good could come out of bad, then maybe good would come out of our leaving Shenandoah County after all.

  Rob wired ahead about the property. Mr. Evans was expecting us. When we arrived in Hanover, Rob led us with our wagons right into town, where we stopped in front of the telegraph office. We must have been a sight, looking like poor homesteaders with our wagons piled high with everything from saddles to kitchen supplies! Rob jumped down and ran inside to tell Mr. Evans we were there, then to the sheriff’s office to see Sheriff Heyes. Mr. Evans said we could pitch camp right on his land, or use his barn or even the empty house if we wanted until we made a decision. He told Rob to take us out to his place and he would saddle up and follow us directly.

  As we got closer, Aunt Nelda and Katie and I began to recognize the scenery and realized we’d been along this same road before . . . and not so long ago! I noticed Papa getting real quiet too.

  “Are you getting a strange feeling, Ward,” he said as soon as we pulled up and got down from the wagons, “that we’ve been somewhere around here before?”

  They were both looking around in every direction. In front of us stood a large white house with a barn and two or three other small buildings behind it. About two hundred yards away, up a small hill at the edge of a grove of trees, sat a smaller house.

  “I’ve never thought of myself as superstitious,” said Uncle Ward, “but I was getting goose pimples up the back of my neck as we rode up. I think we’re near the old Daniels claim.”

  “That’s just what I was thinking,” said Papa.

  By then the rest of us were clustered around them listening. I was getting goose bumps too!

  “Couldn’t swear to it, of course,” said Uncle Ward. “I haven’t been here in probably fifty years. But I’m getting faint recollections of a day when Mama and Papa brought us out near here somewhere when we were kids. I couldn’t have been more than six or eight. You were younger than that. This house wasn’t here then, but something about the road coming up, and that hill over there . . . I don’t know, it’s mighty familiar in a strange sort of way.”

  By then Mr. Evans was riding up. He dismounted and walked toward us. “Come on inside and I’ll show you the house,” he said.

  We all followed him toward the house, though Papa and Uncle Ward seemed distracted and were still looking around toward the fields and woods and pastures surrounding the house. So was Aunt Nelda.

  It was a big house, not as big as Rosewood, but bigger than a lot of the houses we had passed on our way. And almost the moment we walked in, something happened inside us and we realized that we could live there and be happy there, and that this could be our home.

  Mr. Evans showed us all the rooms, took us upstairs, then back down and out the back door. Still Papa and Uncle Ward were looking away from the house more than at what Mr. Evans was showing us. As we walked into the
barn, Papa drew in a deep breath. I could tell he had missed those smells. I saw the hint of a smile cross his lips and he gave a slight nod. I knew inside he was thinking, “Yes, this just might be good . . . I think I like it here.”

  Knowing that he liked it made me like it. And I could tell that Katie liked it too. And that made everybody like it.

  Mr. Evans was as nice to Henry and Josepha as he was to Papa and Uncle Ward. It was like he didn’t even notice that they were colored. And the same with me and Jeremiah—he treated us and spoke to us just the same as he did Katie.

  “Then over yonder,” said Mr. Evans, pointing up the hill to the second house, “is the place I built a few years back to move into myself. It’s pretty small, but I figured it would be enough for my wife and me when my son and his family took over the main house. But now it’s just sitting vacant.”

  We walked up to see it, and then returned back the way we had come. When we had seen everything, we all wandered about in different directions, thinking our own thoughts. I saw Henry and Josepha walk off together hand in hand, then Henry put his arm around her. I knew she was probably crying again. This had been so hard on her. I knew Henry was reassuring her. Little Seffie had finally made it to the North.

  “I hope you don’t mind my asking,” said Uncle Ward, “—I mean, this is a nice house you’ve got and all, but . . . did there used to be an old place somewhere near here . . . an old Quaker homestead? Do you know if it’s still standing?”

  “You know about the old Quaker place?” said Mr. Evans in surprise. “Yes, it’s still standing—it’s only a couple miles away . . . that dirt wagon track there leads to it,” he added, pointing behind the barn. “Or there’s a turnoff from the main road, but that’s about a mile longer.”

  “Anyone live there?” asked my papa.

  “No . . . no one’s lived in the place for years. But it’s mine too—it goes with the property. I always intended to fix it up one day. I figured my son and his family would occupy the main house. But now that that’s not going to happen, all three houses go together. I’ve been doing my best to keep the old one from falling apart, but it needs a lot of work. I had a man out there working on it recently, in fact.”

  “Could we see it?” asked Papa.

  “Sure . . . of course,” said Mr. Evans, a little puzzled why an old dilapidated house seemed more interesting to these potential buyers than the new ones. “Why don’t you leave your wagons here and we’ll ride over on horseback. The road’s pretty bumpy and uneven.”

  We all wanted to go, everyone except for Henry and Josepha, that is. They stayed at Mr. Evans’ main house. Twenty minutes later we were on our way, Jeremiah and I together on one horse, Rob and Katie on another.

  The moment the old house came into view, we knew why we had all been getting goose bumps. It was the very place Katie and I and Aunt Nelda had visited! It was the old Daniels home!

  Papa and Uncle Ward got off their horses, shaking their heads in disbelief.

  “This is it, isn’t it, Ward?” said Papa.

  “This is what?” asked Mr. Evans, glancing back and forth between the two men.

  “Unless we’re mistaken,” answered Papa, “this place used to be in our family.”

  “You’re not mistaken,” said Aunt Nelda. “Ward . . . Templeton, come over and look at this.”

  She led the way to the small plot of gravestones as the rest of us followed. Mr. Evans was obviously surprised that she knew her way around. For several minutes Papa and Uncle Ward and Aunt Nelda stood staring at the graves and their name-markers.

  “This is the place the girls and I visited this past summer.”

  “This is the place you were telling me about!” exclaimed Rob. “I had no idea it was on the Evans property. I can’t believe it. To think that you would wind up here after all that has happened.”

  “Of course,” said Mr. Evans after a few seconds. “Daniels! I never put it together with your names before. I’ve seen these stones before but never thought much about it. I bought the whole place when I came to Hanover years ago. When did it pass out of your family?”

  “I don’t really know,” answered Papa. “Do you, Nelda?”

  “No—I think maybe in Grandma and Grandpa’s time when most of the family moved nearer Philadelphia.”

  “Well, maybe it’s time that it came back into the Daniels family,” said Ward.

  “I definitely think so, brother Ward,” said Papa.

  Sometimes things can happen fast, and sometimes slow. We probably could have thought about it for weeks or months, or looked at other places for sale and taken a year to make up our minds what to do. But somehow I think we all knew that this was the right place for us to start our new life together. The moment Papa and Uncle Ward had seen the “Daniels” names on those gravestones, they knew we had all come home. So it didn’t take us long to decide to buy Mr. Evans’ place. Rob worked right there in town, his parents were less than fifty miles away, Aunt Nelda’s home was only two hours away by train. What Mr. Evans was asking for the whole property and all three houses was only about half what Papa thought we would eventually receive from Mr. Watson. And he was leaving most of the furniture and his farm equipment to go with it, so it wouldn’t be like moving into a house with nothing in it. And Mr. Evans was so happy to be able to sell his home and farm to people who would love it and had such a connection to the property. I think he might have been happier about the arrangement than the rest of us!

  I think Mr. Evans knew almost immediately that we were going to buy his property too because when Papa started talking about finding us a hotel, he just laughed and said there was no need for that. We’d be welcome to stay on the property. We’d been camping out all the way anyway, so it wasn’t a hardship to keep doing so. But he insisted, even on that first night, that all of us women stay in the extra rooms in the house and use the kitchen and anything else we wanted. And within days he was happy to have us there because he enjoyed Josepha’s cooking along with the rest of us! The next day Katie and Rob left to visit the Paxtons in Baltimore.

  Aunt Nelda stayed three days, then Papa and Uncle Ward took her to catch the train home. I don’t think she wanted to leave. But after that we saw a lot more of her and she came to visit at least once a month. The extra room in the house gradually came to be called Aunt Nelda’s bedroom. Within a week Jeremiah had a job at a mill near Hanover about four miles away, and Papa and Uncle Ward were settling on the arrangements with Mr. Evans for the purchase of his property.

  As soon as we were settled, Papa wired Mr. Watson, then Mr. Taylor at the bank in Greens Crossing. Mr. Watson had already paid off our taxes. Papa made arrangements with Mr. Taylor for closing all our bank accounts. Mr. Taylor sent us all papers to sign. Mr. Watson suggested that Papa and Uncle Ward come down to Greens Crossing in a few weeks, after he had sold all the cotton from the harvest to the company from Charlotte. By then he would have the money to pay them for Rosewood.

  When they returned, there was money to pay Mr. Evans for his property and money left over for what we would need and to get started with the following year’s crop planting.

  It was time to begin our new life.

  NEW ROSEWOOD

  59

  What are we going to call this place?” asked Uncle Ward once the decision had been made.

  “Why don’t we call it New Rosewood?” suggested Katie.

  We all looked around at each other.

  “I think New Rosewood it is!” laughed Papa.

  Papa and Uncle Ward rode over to the old Daniels farm every day and immediately began making plans. It was still an area where lots of Quaker people lived. They knew that they would spend the rest of their lives on the Daniels homestead, and I’d never seen them both so content and at peace with their lives.

  They began working on it before Katie and Rob were even back from Baltimore.

  Mr. Evans and Papa and Uncle Ward hit it off so well that before the final papers were signed, Mr. Evans
wanted us to move in so that we would be all settled in before winter. We had arrived about the third week of October and the weather was slowly beginning to turn. So after a few days of getting settled, Katie and I shared a room together, Papa and Uncle Ward shared another room. The house had five bedrooms, a nice sitting room, a kitchen not quite as big as Rosewood’s, but adequate for us. It had an inside washroom with both a clothes washtub and a bathing tub with a water pump and separate wood stove to heat the water, with drains to the outside. We all thought that was about the most wonderful thing we had ever seen.

  Jeremiah moved in with Rob at the boardinghouse in town where Rob had been living since coming to Hanover with Sheriff Heyes. Since it was just temporary, the lady let Jeremiah stay in Rob’s room with him and pay a little extra for meals.

  Henry and Josepha stayed up in the small house that Mr. Evans had built, thinking that he and his wife would retire there when his son took over the farm and would raise his family in the main house. It had been empty for a long time.

  Most suppers we ate together. It was almost like being at Rosewood again, except that the terrain and weather and sounds and the look and feel of everything was different. That took some getting used to. But it didn’t take long before we settled into our old routines and got to work on the new place. Hard work is the best thing in the world to drive out sadness, and we were all hard workers. Even though the Evans place was in wonderful condition, we found plenty to keep us busy and there were so many new things we wanted to do. Papa and Uncle Ward were talking about fields and woods they wanted to clear and roads they wanted to build and areas they wanted to fence, and Mr. Evans was as excited about the proposed changes as they were.

  The three men rode over to the old homestead every day and got to cleaning and repairing and furnishing the upstairs to make it livable. Some of the time Josepha and Katie and I went with them to help, sometimes we stayed at Mr. Evans’ place because there was a lot to do there too. It was hard to get used to a new house with new things in it—different chairs and beds and wardrobes that had belonged to someone else’s family. The house wasn’t as spacious as Rosewood, but it was much closer to town, which was a great benefit. People were so welcoming and nice that we began to make new friends almost immediately. Katie and I and Josepha got dressed up and walked through town almost every day looking in the shops and meeting people. Within days we were greeted with, “Oh, you must be the people buying the Evans place!” And not once did Josepha or I feel anyone looking at us resentfully because of the color of our skin.