by Murray Pura
Another pause. And all Clarissa could think of to say was, “I’m sorry, Liberty, I am … I am so very sorry.”
He pushed on, and she wished now she had never asked, for she knew that the telling of his story was like cutting himself with a knife. “My family must not grieve and mourn a second time. They must not be disgraced or lose their home or income—even though it be off the sweat of slaves. At least my father is not a tyrant or unjust or fond of the lash. No, Miss Ross, at least he is not the Simon Legree of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I must not be discovered. They must not bear any more pain on account of me. What I have chosen to do is on my head. Not my mother’s. Not my father’s. Not my sisters’ or brothers’ or aunts’ and uncles’. Not my neighbors’. I alone am responsible for my actions. And I alone will pay the price for them. I am happy to do so. Better I am lynched than my father and my brothers and my father’s brothers in Natchez. But even if I am strung up, my murderers will never see my face. Not in a thousand years.”
Then she swore he chuckled under the hood.
“At first, I thought a beard might be sufficient,” he went on. “But I had a very good beard when I sailed to England. Clean shaven, bearded, it makes no difference. I’ve been seen with my family a hundred thousand times in either configuration, if I’ve been seen once. So the hood it is, and whenever I’m moving passengers, I have it on. Awake, sleeping, out in the woods, hiding in a barn or farmhouse, it covers my head. If I am captured, I put my revolver to my face and pull the trigger. No one from the South must see what I look like. No one from Mississippi. No one from Natchez. No one who knows my family name. As far as anyone is concerned, Iain Kilgarlin, heir to the estate, was lost at sea. I am not him. I am someone else. He can never resurrect.”
Now she felt eyes like knifepoints on her again. “Is that trust enough for you, Miss Ross? Before God, no one else knows.”
He turned away and began to climb the ladder to the loft.
Clarissa sat and did not move or shift her weight. She felt as if she had been struck by a stone. A large one. Many large ones. There was nowhere she wanted to go. Nothing she wanted to say. No one she wished to chat with. She looked at the hands—her hands—that were folded in her lap, and the spots of water from her eyes that spotted them.
“You are the most impossible man I have ever met,” she said under her breath. “One moment you can infuriate me like no man alive and drive me into a towering rage. The next you are capable of filling me with pity. And the next … the next, sir … all I can feel for you is love.”
July
Gettysburg
Clarissa had spent several hours plying the needle as a seamstress with her mother and a group of ladies, including her young friend Ginnie Wade, and was walking away from the Wade house on Breckenridge Street, parasol held high against an already hot sun at eleven thirty in the morning. She loved the seamstress work, for she earned a few dollars from it, could chat with Ginnie—who was only a year younger—could laugh and listen and forget about the things that she felt were pulling her far underground. However, strolling on her own, with no walking companion, she found it difficult to keep her mind from straying to her troubles. Look at the roses in people’s gardens, she told herself. Look at the peonies. There—someone still has a patch of irises opening in the most perfect purple hue. That puppy is darling, the way he’s leaping and bouncing. And there goes Professor Saxon in his elegant carriage. Occupy yourself, Clarissa. Fill your mind with color and images and cheerful faces. And wave, for heaven’s sake. Your beau is a student of the professor’s and, this summer, a tutor working under him.
But she could not keep the thoughts out that she didn’t want in. Such as the ones that swirled around the battle that had occurred a few days before on Monday the twenty-first—the North utterly routed and defeated. Smashed like a bowl of eggs. She had not wanted war to come. How foolish of her to cry out on New Year’s Eve, “It will not come. It will not come.” But once Virginia had joined the Rebellion, along with Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee, she had accepted the inevitable and hoped for a quick, easy victory, a Confederate surrender, and the world returning to sanity and normalcy by autumn. Now everyone was opining that it would be a long and bloody war, and that the North had better pull itself up by the bootstraps or it would lose it.
Lose it!
Before the battle—they were calling it Bull Run in the New York, Boston, and Philadelphia papers, but papers out of Richmond used the name Manassas—she was confident the clash would sound the death knell of slavery in the Republic. Now, with the Union defeat, she had to wrestle with the fear of slavery extending from coast to coast and north to south, with no end in sight.
Oh God, that can’t happen, can it? Will You permit the travesty to exist forever and blight our country perpetually? What will we do? Run slaves across the border into Canada for another hundred years? With slave catchers growing bolder and bolder, and enlisting the aid of Northern sheriffs who would act on behalf of the slave owners in an increasingly ruthless fashion?
“I hate war, but we must win this one,” she muttered. “If we don’t, this republic will be hell. We need better generals. Better officers. More infantry. More cavalry. More cannons. More of everything, including courage—they say our boys outran jackrabbits! No more of that. Never again. Please, Lord God, never again. Fix our minds and hands to finish this task and win this war and snap the chains off every man and woman and child working cotton and cattle and sugarcane on the plantations. Yes, in Alabama and the Carolinas and Florida, but in Maryland and Kansas and Missouri too. And Mississippi—even in Natchez, even on the Kilgarlin estate. No, especially there. It must end there most of all. Loss of income and inheritance? Let them grow corn. Or tobacco leaves. Let there be miles of wheat waving in the sun. But no more slavery, Iain Kilgarlin, not a drop more of blood from the veins of those God has declared free—‘He hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth.’ There is no difference. We are all the same.”
Several women walked past going the other way. They gave her odd looks as she spoke to herself, but she didn’t even notice them. Thinking of the Kilgarlin plantation made her think of Liberty, which made her think of Kyle Forrester, which made her feel confused: I cannot sort out the country or this war or the prolongation of slavery, and much less can I sort out the affairs of the heart. Liberty was in Gettysburg right now. She had no idea who he was, yet he had been fighting against the slave trade for two years. He had most certainly been waging his own war, which showed her that, for all his faults, he did not lack principle or moral fiber or the kind of bravery that did not flinch from the hounds or guns or hate of the wretched Southern slave drivers. Had he not proven how far he was willing to go at Christmas when he shot those four men? He would see to it that the Republic did not become a slave nation. They would have to kill him before he let America perpetuate human bondage ad infinitum.
But what about Kyle? What was he doing? Yes, he’d built a fine sermon around slavery and freedom last December, but what was he doing now when President Lincoln had called for five hundred thousand additional men, while their enemy was calling for four hundred thousand? Was Kyle willing to fight? Would he enlist? Her father had said they would make him an officer in a snap of the fingers. Why, even her father had tried to enlist, but the army had told him they needed the manufacture of boots and tack more than they needed him to fire a musket and march twenty miles a day. That was an enormous relief to her mother and her but did not stop the question from spinning about in Clarissa’s brain: What about Kyle Forrester? What would he do?
“Excuse me, miss. Excuse me, if you please.”
Several men rushed past her at a run, all carrying luggage of various sizes, almost knocking her off her feet.
“I suppose I do excuse you!” she called after them, the heat rising inside her. “What on earth puts you in such an all-fired hurry, young sirs?”
One of them glanced back and grinned.
“I apologize, miss.” He was a redhead like her. “We’re afraid we’ll miss our train. My friends and I are on our way to Washington to join the army.”
“Oh.” She calmed immediately, like a kettle taken off the boil. “That’s tremendous then. Good luck to you and God bless.”
“There’s thousands of Pennsylvanians heading there now. We all plan to show up in one great mob.”
“Why do you find that necessary?”
“We were refused before Bull Run. For ridiculous reasons. Hundreds and hundreds of us were. They won’t refuse us now.”
Clarissa instantly decided to change course and follow them to the train station. A large black locomotive was hissing and steaming there, and she quickly discovered that the men who had almost bowled her over weren’t alone in their mad rush to get to Washington and enlist. The platform at the depot was teeming with at least two dozen like them, and they were accompanied by family and beautiful young sweethearts who were hanging off their beaus’ arms. Imagine saying goodbye to someone you had fallen in love with, knowing they could take a musket ball to the chest and die a few weeks after you gave them a final kiss. She shook her head. That she would not be prepared to do today, and she doubted any of the other young women were prepared to do it either. Yet here they were—making a huge sacrifice for God and country and for the chance to strike a death blow to American slavery.
But they are not all enlisting to end slavery, Clarissa Avery Ross. You know that from the papers and the talk about town. They are joining the army to save the United States of America, to keep it intact as one nation. Not to shut down the plantations.
Perhaps not. Perhaps not yet. But in time they will see that is a big part of the fight. In time it shall sink in.
Do you think so?
I do.
She continued to watch as several more men joined the throng, juggling bags that bulged with who knew what sort of items—shirts, trousers, suspenders, socks, loaves of bread, jars of jelly. From what little she knew of army ways, she doubted any of the shirts or pants would be worn. The men would all be in uniform in a few weeks’ time and the many items of civilian life discarded. Fathers shook their sons’ hands. Mothers hugged their boys who had grown up too fast—some looked hardly older than sixteen or seventeen to her. The scene both excited and depressed her. She was grateful to see so many Adams County boys rallying to the cause—it made her proud of Gettysburg and the people from the farms that surrounded it—but it also put a grim November in her soul when she thought of battlefields scattered with broken limbs and sightless eyes. She shuddered. Why must it be so? Why must this be the way the world resolved its most difficult issues—war and maiming and death?
Then she saw him.
Towering over most of those around him.
Kyle Forrester.
Her heart roared in her chest. What, was he leaving for Washington too, and not a single goodbye to her, not a kiss on the cheek? He was her beau—at least sometimes she thought he was—but certainly no less than a friend to her and a friend to her mother and father, now up and gone to war without a word, without a note? A fiery mix of emotions boiled up in her. She was proud that he had decided to enlist and fight slavery in a tangible way. But she was upset that he had not talked about it with her. And she was even more upset that he felt it was all right to leave her without saying goodbye, even though he might never see her again. Perhaps she did not matter as much to him as she thought she did. Perhaps she did not matter at all.
You yourself have been unsure about whether you have feelings for him or for Liberty.
I have feelings for both. That is what makes me unsure about whether I ought to commit to one or the other.
Well, then, it may be that he senses that indecisiveness on your part. So it makes him unsure of how to act toward you or who you are to each other.
But we are friends. We are at least that. A friend says goodbye to another friend. Especially if a long journey is involved.
Are you friends?
Of course we are.
But not more than friends?
Yes. No. I don’t know.
If you don’t know, I’m sure he’s picked up on that, and I doubt he knows who you are to him or who he is to you.
Well …
You are both one big mess.
Clarissa made a sour face, which she knew would look awful to anyone watching her.
Then made up her mind. Thrust out her lower lip in a pout. Folded her parasol shut. And marched toward the crowd of women and men on the train platform.
Kyle was shaking hands with several young men who had just joined the group surrounding him. She arrived on the scene and stood defiantly behind them, face and eyes set like stone. I am not so short at five-six that you will not notice me, Mr. Kyle Forrester, nor so far back in this press of bodies that you will not recognize my face. I shall remain rooted to this spot, regardless of how I am jostled by the multitude, until you address me. And if you refuse to address me, well then, sir, I intend to board the train and travel to Washington too. And I will glare until my eyes drill holes in your head. Perhaps I’ll join the army. As a nurse. Or disguise myself as a boy with a fair complexion and enlist. What will you do then, if you find me marching into Virginia at your side, my dear young seminarian? Hmm? Will you still pretend I don’t exist and shy away from speaking with me? I am a Yankee woman, sir, and I will have my way. It is not just Southern women who are strong, oh no. I am twice the lady any of them are, and I say I shall have my way with you. You cannot ignore me or resist me forever, and this Yankee woman shall have her way and she shall have her say. As God is my witness.
“Miss Ross.”
An older man was at her side, lean and wiry. The president of the Lutheran seminary, Professor Samuel Saxon, whom she knew very well.
“Professor Saxon.” He had startled her. “Sir.”
“What brings you here at his portentous moment in Gettysburg’s history, my dear?”
“Why, I …”
“Have you come to see our seminary students off? Has Mr. Forrester introduced you to any of them?”
“No, yes, no…. I mean, I have not been formally introduced to any of Mr. Forrester’s fellow students … but I am here to show my support of their sacrifice for our nation … and of their desire to fight to end the American notion that slavery is any sort of particular or peculiar state’s right … sir.”
Saxon grasped her by the elbow and tugged her gently aside. “Have you told Mr. Forrester what you do?” he whispered.
“I … I …”
“Have you confided to him your work with the Underground Railroad? Have you mentioned my name or how I have assisted your efforts?”
“No, no, sir.”
He nodded. “Very well.” He smiled. “It does not matter to me if you have, Miss Ross. The South is now a belligerent. It cannot send their men across our borders to secure escaped slaves and African freedmen for their plantations anymore.”
“Yes, sir. Is our work done then?”
“By no means. There are still slaves escaping bondage in Missouri and Maryland and Kansas. Not to mention the entire Confederacy. We must help the ones in Missouri and Maryland obtain their freedom, just as we shall continue to assist those from the secession states make their way to our borders and liberty.”
“I understand.”
“Now then, allow me to introduce you to the four students who are traveling to Washington to enlist in the grand cause.”
“All right.”
She managed to compose herself as Professor Saxon brought her into the cluster of friends and her eyes met Kyle’s. His widened in surprise. She kept hers flat and a very dull green and noncommittal.
“Seminarians, allow me to introduce to you one of the fairest flowers of faith in Gettysburg,” Saxon began. “She is a member of Christ’s Church and was confirmed there. Her name is Clarissa Avery Ross … Miss Clarissa Avery Ross.”
All the young men except Kyle Forrester mu
rmured, “How do you do, Miss Ross?”
She inclined her head in its white summer bonnet. “How do you do, young sirs?”
“This is Theodore, our brightest theologian. And this is Thomas, truly our Greek scholar par excellence. Now, this strapping fellow from Ohio, our James, is a preacher of preachers, a master of the homiletical enterprise. And, finally, here we have Bartholomew, our wizard with Latin and Hebrew and Aramaic.”
“Uh.” Clarissa shook each of their hands in turn, caught off guard that Kyle’s name had not been mentioned. “It … it … is an honor to meet you all. Thank you for your service to our nation and to the godly cause of setting the enslaved at liberty. Thank you, sirs, thank you. I shall most certainly keep you in my prayers.” Then, gritting her teeth, she deliberately turned to Kyle and extended her white-gloved hand. “And good luck to you too, sir. God bless you as you put on the blue uniform of the Union and take your faith and beliefs to the battlefield. May you soon return home to us. May you all soon return to Gettysburg and to your friends. And I hope I may now count myself as one of your friends, young sirs.”