My Heart Belongs in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

by Murray Pura

  For the first quarter hour, she was tense, expecting trouble at any minute. Then she looked at the stars more often, reminded herself it was Christmas morning, thought about the children she was setting free, wondered how Kyle was doing—surely, he was fast asleep by now, or might he still be up, worrying about her, missing her, praying for her? What if he stayed awake all night on account of her?

  “I hope so,” she murmured with a smile. “That would be so romantic.”

  Two men suddenly slipped onto the roadway with muskets and forced her to stop her wagon.

  Reining back, she saw that another pair had halted Liberty.

  “Merry Christmas, Corporal,” rumbled one of the men to her. “Mind if we take a look at what’s so all-fired important that you have to carry it north from Harrisburg in the dead of night?”

  Liberty had stepped down from his wagon and brought the two that had stopped him back to Clarissa’s wagon. “It’s army business, sir, and no concern of citizens like yourselves. Rest assured that it’s stores and equipment urgently required in Lewiston over the holiday season, or the corporal and I would be at home with our families and opening our presents. Or fast asleep with visions of sugarplums dancing in our heads.”

  He laughed, but the four men with guns did not laugh, and neither did Clarissa, for she did not want any of the strangers to hear her less-than-masculine voice.

  “Why are you wearing the hood?” one man demanded.

  “An ugly wound. My musket misfired.”

  “Since you mention presents,” another of the men growled, “I’d take kindly to you opening up them wagons as a kind of Christmas gift to all of us. We’re a long ways from home, the weather’s bitter, and our families are missing us at the table. Seeing what you got will make up for some of that and put our minds at ease.”

  Liberty shook his head. “I repeat, it’s army business and strictly army business, sir. I do wish you a Merry Christmas, however, and I hope your own affairs hereabouts are quickly settled so you can return to your loved ones. Now we’ll need to be on our way.”

  The man he had been speaking with, bundled in a heavy coat and wearing a scarf wrapped around his head and ears, shook his head and stepped to the back of Liberty’s wagon. “Once I see what you’re carrying you’ll be free to pass. But not until then.” He yanked open the cover and poked his head inside. “Well, well, well, now who have we here?” He laughed and turned his head to his companions. “Lookee here, boys, this really is our Christmas present after freezing ourselves half to death the last couple of nights.”

  The other men gathered around him at the back of the wagon, dropping their guard, lowering their muskets, peering inside, and while doing so, ignoring Liberty and Clarissa for the briefest of moments. She wished she had a pistol—why on earth hadn’t she brought hers? Though whether she’d have the nerve to use it, to actually aim the revolver and pull the trigger four times, she had no idea. But not having it, all she could think of to do was to hurl herself on the men like a wildcat and slash at them with the bayonet in her boot. She knew it was a crazy idea, but how else could she possibly save Moses and the children?

  She didn’t give a thought to what Liberty might do. He didn’t even cross her mind in her split second of indecision. Her long knife was suddenly in her fist, and she got ready to spring. Lord! she cried out a prayer in her mind. Lord, Lord, Lord!

  “Gentlemen.” It was Liberty’s voice.

  The men turned around quickly and lifted their muskets.

  Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack.

  The shots, so close at hand, startled Clarissa and made her grip her bayonet so tightly her knuckles went white.

  Liberty’s hand was extended before him, straight and rigid, and sparks and smoke spewed from the cap and ball revolver he was firing.

  The four men collapsed in a heap.

  On the coat of one, as he fell backward, Clarissa saw a stain spreading like water.

  “If not you, I would have had to handle it, Liberty.” Moses’s head appeared at the back of the wagon. “I best get the children to Joshua’s wagon. Then you can place the bodies in here.”

  “Yes.” Liberty nodded inside his black hood.

  He stood in front of the bodies in the dark, obscuring them from the children as Moses began to herd them to the back of Clarissa’s wagon. Clarissa jumped down to help, returning the knife to its sheath in her boot. When all eleven were in and under the cover, Moses turned to Clarissa and placed a small but firm hand on her shoulder.

  “You’re pale, Joshua,” she said. “I take no more delight in the death of the wicked than the Lord does. But those men would have strung you and me and Liberty up in two shakes and dragged all our young’uns back to slavery in the South, I could not countenance that, I could not, For slavery is the next thing to hell.” She patted a pocket in her heavy coat. “If Liberty hadn’t pulled the trigger, I would have. Now you make peace with him and help him with those men. Make sure you cover them with blankets. We’ll bury them proper in Lewiston. Go now.”

  Clarissa hesitated. “I … I wonder if he felt anything at all when he fired at them. He stood there like … a statue. Cold. Unmoving.”

  Moses stared at her. “You don’t know anything ’bout Liberty. He felt that shooting right down into his guts. But you never wound a snake, Joshua. You kill it.”

  Clarissa walked slowly to Liberty’s wagon. She was not anxious to see him or the bodies. Before the shooting, he had simply been irritating. Now she realized she was frightened of him, and his black hood had taken on an ominous aspect in her mind. As if he were some kind of executioner.

  He was struggling with the last man he was loading into his wagon. The man was probably twice the size of the others. Clarissa hung back a moment, then did her Lord, Lord, Lord prayer and came up to grasp the booted feet of the corpse.

  “I can handle it,” grunted Liberty.

  “I’m sure you can,” Clarissa responded. “But I need to do more than just watch.”

  “You are managing a four-horse team. That’s a difficult task and more than enough for you.”

  “I’ve managed horses since I was nine, sir, and handling this team is not difficult. I can put my hands to a great deal more than that on this trip.”

  Together they lifted the body into the back of the wagon and made sure all four of the men were covered up. One was still staring upward, and Clarissa closed his eyes before drawing a ragged blanket over his face. A prayer for all of them began to form in her mind.

  “It troubles you,” Liberty said.

  “A little.”

  “If I had not been here, what would you have done?”

  “I had my bayonet out.” She looked at his eyes that gleamed like dark wet stones from the slits in his hood. “You remember my bayonet.”

  “I remember it.”

  “I would have used it.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure. And if I’d had my Navy Six with me, I would have fired before you did, sir.”

  She could almost feel a smile under his hood. “Would you have? Truly?”

  “Long before. Others hesitate in such a situation. You hesitated. I would not have.”

  Of course, she had hesitated, and she knew it, and she knew Liberty knew it, but she saw no reason to make an admission that would give him an edge over her.

  “Are you a praying woman?” Liberty asked her.

  “I am.”

  “Then I’d be grateful if you’d pray for their souls and pray for our safety on the next leg of our journey.”

  “Why … I’d be … honored to give them that much. That would be the Christian thing to do.”

  “I take no delight in the death of the wicked, Clarissa.”

  “I’ve asked you not to use my name.” Whenever he used her real name, it startled and bothered her. As if he knew all about her when she knew absolutely nothing about him. It was too intimate. And it broke the rules of secrecy of the Railroad. “Moses takes no deli
ght in the death of the wicked either. Nor do I. Nor does God Almighty.”

  They both spoke the scripture reference at the same time: “Ezekiel chapter thirty-three, verse eleven.”

  Liberty nodded his head within his dark hood and jumped down from the wagon. He held out a hand to help her. Normally she would have ignored his offer of assistance. It annoyed her that, acting on an impulse, she did not. She took his hand and let him take her weight as she sprang from the wagon.

  For heaven’s sake, Clarissa Avery Ross, where did that come from? The dark side of the moon?

  What was doubly annoying was that she let him help her up into the driver’s seat of her commissary wagon as well. She even thanked him and gave him a smile that was bigger than her smallest smile. He snapped her a playful salute. She smiled even more and snapped one back.

  “Thank you, Liberty,” she said.

  “I’m glad I was here, Miss Ross.”

  “Surprisingly, I am too, sir.”

  “I am just as surprised to hear you say that.”

  “Often enough, I surprise myself.”

  Such as in this instance. Which made her think her polite behavior toward Liberty must have come from the four moons of Jupiter, never mind the one moon of Earth that was close at hand.

  He insulted you only an hour ago.

  I know that.

  He belittled your attractiveness.

  Yes he did.

  Yet now you treat him as if he’s a prince.

  Oh, I do not. Honestly, I do not.

  It looks that way to me.

  Well, and what do you know about it, miss?

  The reins were tight in her hands as her team trotted behind Liberty’s wagon. Again, she felt tense as they started out. Again, she gradually relaxed more and more as the miles rolled by under her wheels. The night swept by overhead, and now and then a few bits of snow swirled down. Images of the shooting kept appearing in her mind like daguerreotypes, and these brought her anxiety back for several minutes at a time. But then the darkness and the cold and the sound of the horses’ hooves and the creaking of the wagon all combined to bury the bodies for a while. And she remembered that the children were alive—alive and free. And that it was Christmas Day.

  New Year’s Eve

  Gettysburg

  Think of all the things the Lord has done for you this year past. Think of His many blessings. Think of how His chastisements have benefited you and made you a stronger man or a stronger woman, just as an apple tree that is pruned properly yields much more fruit. Spend the next few minutes meditating on all the good the Lord has done in your life. And thank Him.”

  It felt odd to be thinking about Liberty with Kyle seated beside her in the pew, but it was impossible for Clarissa to follow the minister’s directions and exclude the black-hooded mystery man from her thoughts and prayers. Especially after Christmas Day.

  They had made their way to the barn an hour before sunrise. Then the children had been spirited into the house to eat and sleep. Moses and Liberty and herself had said goodbye to them there and placed them in the hands of other conductors who would guide them farther north. They had prayed with them and returned to the barn to care for the horses, bury the men several hundred feet behind the barn in the soft earth under a dung heap, and curl up in the straw with thick woolen blankets. Liberty, out of respect for her and Moses, had taken himself up into the hayloft. Somehow, Clarissa had sensed he was watching her while she fell asleep, and it made her feel more peaceful and secure. That night, when she awoke to an operator gently shaking her shoulder, a mug of coffee in his hand, both Moses and Liberty were gone.

  She kicked herself for looking about the barn for a note from him, but she looked just the same. He had not left a note or a word for her with any of the operators. However, Moses had asked the farmer who owned the barn to show Clarissa a verse from the family Bible: “But he knoweth the way that I take: when he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold. My foot hath held his steps, his way I have kept, and not declined.” Treasuring the words in her mind, she had taken the train back to Gettysburg alone in a prim and proper, but lush, burgundy and forest-green dress the woman at the farm had given her. Saved from when her daughter had been twenty-one and slender, it fit surprisingly well.

  So, with all that, it had truly been the most wonderful Christmas of her life. And while her feelings about Liberty had not changed completely—she still found him scary and more than a little rude and arrogant—they had shifted enough for her to thank God she had met him and was working alongside him on the Railroad.

  All of which did nothing to diminish her feelings for Kyle Forrester, who had burst into her life in 1860 like the hot blast from a cannon’s mouth. She went to bed thinking about him and woke up in the same frame of mind. After which, he darted in and out of her thoughts each and every waking moment of each and every day. It was easy to thank God for him. And pleasant. Just as it was easy and pleasant to thank God for all those who had been rescued from a lifetime of bondage and set free—her freedmen. Which brought her mind around to Liberty once more.

  It was as if the two men were sitting beside her on the pew, Kyle to her left and Liberty to her right. She supposed that sort of imagining ought to have made her uncomfortable, but it didn’t. She flirted with the idea of Liberty being as handsome as Kyle and of both men vying for her attention—well, why not, that’s the way courting was done—and it made her feel happy and warm to her leather-booted toes. In another hour, Kyle would be waltzing with her at the New Year’s ball, and in another two or three weeks, she would be slipping through a cold January night and ferrying runaway slaves into the next county alongside Liberty. Despite the sense that other states might soon be following South Carolina out of the Republic, and the anxiety and stress the country felt because of it, Clarissa could not suppress her joy and excitement at having two men in her life she liked, and who she knew liked her—oh yes you do, Liberty—and she knew there was a happy smirk on her face as she sat with head bowed at her pew. And the excitement wasn’t just about the two men. She was doing something that made a difference in the nation and the world—she was setting God’s children free.

  Then she was at the ball, and Kyle had one arm about her waist, and he was whirling her with speed and grace and precision over a polished wooden floor in the burgundy and green dress she had worn on her return from Lewiston. As soon as the music slowed, she sank her head upon the white shirt and black coat of his chest and decided the night was as perfect, in its own way, as the rescue of the children on Christmas Eve.

  “Penny for your thoughts, Miss Ross,” Kyle whispered as they moved in circles across the dance floor along with other couples, candles and oil lamps gleaming all around them.

  “Oh, you’d need at least a twenty-dollar bill, Mr. Forrester,” she replied, eyes closed, lips curving into a smile.

  “Would I?”

  “You would.”

  “Well, I hope there’s room in there for some thoughts of me.”

  “I don’t know if there is any more room, sir.”

  “No more room?”

  “Hush. Don’t pout.” She laughed softly. “There’s no room because you’ve already taken up most of it.”

  “I have?”

  “Most certainly you have. So set your mind at ease, my young gallant.”

  Even while she was saying these words to him, and saying them most sincerely, the thought darted into her head: I wonder if Liberty can dance as well as Mr. Forrester.

  But she shook it off.

  Stay with Kyle Forrester, if you please, Clarissa Avery. You don’t know anything about Liberty. You don’t know what he looks like or how he presents himself in public without that ridiculous black hood of his. Steer clear for the present until you gain more information about the real man.

  But I do know things about the real man.

  No you don’t. You know the man who acts as a conductor on the Railroad. You know absolutely nothing about the man under t
he hood.

  Surely they are not two entirely different personalities.

  They could well be. It is a trick of human nature. Remain with Kyle Forrester. With him there is no hood and no secrets.

  Oh, everyone has secrets.

  “It’s just about midnight, my little dreamer.”

  Clarissa blinked several times and then smiled up at Kyle. “I know.”

  “I trust I may be able to collect my year’s end bounty.”

  She laughed her silver chimes laugh. “I’m sure you shall, sir. There’s no one else I’d rather surrender it to.”

  Someone shouted, “Happy New Year!” and Clarissa watched people throw the doors open to 1861. Church bells began to toll, and a group of men with deep baritone voices began to sing “Auld Lang Syne.” Kyle touched her cheek gently, and she closed her eyes and tilted her chin up toward him.

  Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack.

  Clarissa jerked her face away from Kyle and stared wildly around her.

  Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack.

  “Shooting!” she exclaimed. “Someone’s shooting a pistol!”

  She saw Liberty aiming his pistol with his arm as straight and rigid as an iron bar.

  It snapped and smoked and tossed off sparks.

  Four men fell dead.

  Forty men fell dead.

  Forty thousand men fell dead.

  She gasped and fell back into Kyle’s arms.

  “What is the matter?” he asked her, alarm scribbled all over his face. “Those are firecrackers, nothing more.”

  “It’s gunfire. So much gunfire. Men dropping everywhere … everywhere …”

  She saw a stain spreading over a hundred men’s chests as rapidly as water spilled from a bucket into the dirt.

  “Clarissa. It’s fireworks. Only fireworks.”

  Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack.

  “They are harbingers.” Her heart was thudding in her chest. “I do not want the new year to be one I dread, but I cannot stop it, I cannot.”

  Kyle hugged her. “You don’t have to. You don’t need to. Regardless of what occurs, no year is all bad. No year ever is. There will be sunlight, trust me, Clarissa, sunlight and sunrise and stars in the night. No matter what else transpires. God will not leave us bereft of hope.”