My Heart Belongs in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

by Murray Pura

  Liberty had had plenty to say to get her prepared for the slave catchers. But not once had he spoken to her while they embraced. And she knew why. He did not want her to hear his voice. What did it matter? But once their explosive passion had died down, he had turned the hood back to front, ensuring his mouth was covered again, and cut new slits for his eyes. And when he finally did speak to her, his voice was as muffled and distorted as it had always been.

  And where had that explosion come from? Yes, she was impulsive. Yes, she hurled herself into situations. But she’d had no idea she had that much desire for Liberty bottled up in her. After the fiery hug was over, it frightened her that it had happened at all. Well, perhaps frightened was too strong a word. But she certainly felt uneasy.

  Yet even that was not the whole of it. Part of her was uneasy. Another part was thrilled. Jubilant. Ecstatic. So, as she crouched there in the early hours of the first day of October, one moment she was sure she had made a mistake by taking Liberty into her arms and holding him tightly like that, and another moment she was overjoyed at what had happened and at how good it had felt to have his arms around her. She relived the entire event over and over again, and it never ceased to both alarm her and excite her.

  So, which was it? An impulsive redheaded mistake? Or a bold redheaded conquest? As far as she was concerned, the only way open to her that would make it clear whether Iain and Clarissa were right for each other was to have what had just happened happen all over again. And there needed to be a kiss. Then she’d know. But another opportunity like that might not present itself for a good while. So if it didn’t take place over the next few days, it might never take place at all, because he’d go back to his Gettysburg, and she’d go back to hers, and they’d never see each other again until they were summoned to get slaves across the border into Pennsylvania once more. If they were ever summoned.

  My brain is working like a windmill in a hurricane. The only business I can truthfully deal with is the business at hand. And the business at hand is to shoot into the dark. Maybe I’ll hit a slave catcher, and maybe I won’t. I’m not keen on hitting anyone really. But it would devastate me if I hit a horse or dog. So I hope I just scare everyone off. That seems doubtful with hard-edged men like that beastly Alexander McGinty. But I’m praying for it anyways. I want them to feel they are being attacked by ghosts.

  “Hear that?”

  She jumped.

  Liberty was suddenly right beside her.

  “I wish you wouldn’t do that anymore,” she complained.

  “What?”

  “Just pop up like some kind of wild jack-in-the-box. After all, we’ve embraced now.”

  “We’ve embraced?”

  “Oh yes, didn’t you notice? Or was your mind elsewhere?”

  “You can hear the baying of hounds.”

  She stopped thinking of what words she was going to stab at him with next. The sound of the dogs was unmistakable, and it grew louder every second she listened. Her head and hands went to snow and ice.

  “Some of them will be on this side of the creek when I open fire,” Liberty told her. “Some will be crossing over and in the water. Others will still be on the far bank. The gunfire will throw them into panic and confusion. And they won’t know how many of us there are. Two? Three? Four? They won’t be able to tell. They’ll be too busy trying to get out of the way of the bullets. Even after we’ve stopped firing, they’ll be spooked and cautious. It will take them some time to feel safe enough to move about and get organized. Every minute they hang back gives our people time to reach Lancaster. Do you understand?”

  Some inner heat flared up and thawed the frost in her hands and head. “Of course I understand. I’m not a child.”

  “How fast can you ride?”

  “Faster than you, sir.”

  “Then we are ready, Miss Ross?”

  “Yes. We are. Mr. Kilgarlin.”

  “Good luck.”

  “And God bless you, sir. May your hand be steady and your nerves on a cake of ice.”

  He was gone. She peered ahead into the darkness. Was certain she heard the splash of men and horses and hounds. Took her finger off the trigger guard and placed it on the trigger itself. Was grateful her mind grew sharp and calm, something that often happened to her under duress, even though she understood better than anyone that she was only known for her temper and her tantrums. But her mind had a way of settling in when she truly needed it to. And for that she did thank God, not out of habit or because her Lutheran and Christian faith required it, but because she honestly was thankful she could hold her concentration, almost indefinitely, until a crisis had passed or resolved itself. It was as if another Clarissa Avery Ross took over, that a doppelgänger lived in a corner of her body and soul—ready to assume command of her faculties when life became cold and dark and deadly, and to bridge the abyss of fear and doubt, bringing her safely to another side of the world she dwelled in along with millions of other Americans. It was a gift she never took for granted. She praised God it was with her now.

  Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack.

  Liberty’s shots yanked her from her thoughts and prayers.

  Huge gouts of yellow flame lashed out from his gun barrel.

  She counted to three, four, five, and then squeezed the trigger of her Navy Six.

  Sparks and fire burst in front of her eyes.

  She heard men cursing and hounds yelping and horses shrieking.

  Once her revolver was empty, she jumped onto the buckskin that Tad Whitehead, the conductor, had left for her. The saddle was flimsy and worn, but it was good enough. She kicked the mare’s flanks with her heels.

  “I’m going!” she shouted above the snap and bang of the second revolver Liberty had pulled from his boot.

  “Go!”

  She made her way through the tangle of brush at a trot, but once she reached the open road, she urged the mare into a lope. For three or four minutes, she was on her own, one eye on the North Star, the other on the path that led to Lancaster. Then Liberty was there, hood and all, his large white gelding pounding the hard-packed earth with its hooves.

  “Faster!” cried Liberty. “Let’s put some distance between us and them!”

  “Are they coming?”

  “Not yet. Still cowering. And shooting at phantoms. But in another five or ten minutes, with no return fire, they’ll set the hounds on our trail. So let’s make tracks.”

  “I’m fine with that, sir. I like giving a spirited horse its head.”

  “Is that because a spirited horse reminds you of yourself?”

  “Perhaps, Mr. Kilgarlin.” She laughed and tossed back her mane of curly red hair because she was certain he would like that. “Perhaps.”

  They flew side by side on the horses. After fifteen minutes, Liberty told Clarissa to rein in and dismount. Then he ordered her to reload. She had done it only once before—powder, patch, ball, crimp it down, move on to the next chamber. Her heart thudded in her chest.

  “What are we doing, Liberty?” she demanded. “You know they’re on our heels.”

  “When we see the first rider, we shoot,” he said. “They won’t be expecting an ambush.”

  “I don’t want to shoot a dog,” she told him, struggling to reload all six chambers in her revolver.

  “Or a horse,” he added. “Am I right?”

  “Or a man.”

  “Then shoot over their heads. Once they see the gun flashes, they’ll make for cover. That’s what we want to do—slow them down and give the runaways more time to reach Lancaster.” He tugged his horse into the bushes. “Hide in here.”

  In ten minutes, horses and riders and hounds came racing along the roadway. Clarissa began to shoot as soon as Liberty did. One of her chambers misfired, but the others were good. Two riders were thrown, and the others yelled in fear and anger and galloped off the road into the dark. The hounds kept coming.

  “Ride!” snapped Liberty. “Ride, Clarissa!”

  She swung up
into the saddle and dug in her heels. Liberty kicked two dogs away and thundered after her. Once again they rode for fifteen minutes, dismounted and reloaded, waited for the slave catchers, then ambushed them a second time. Clarissa fired over their heads, as she had done the first time, but this time she saw a man hit the ground with a scream: “I’m hit, Mr. McGinty!” She may have been missing on purpose—Liberty wasn’t.

  In moments they were mounted and roaring north on the roadway once more.

  “You ride well!” Liberty shouted over to her.

  “I’ve been with horses all my life!”

  “We’ll pull one more ambush and then go like arrows for Lancaster, no more stopping. Can you handle that?”

  “I can handle anything.”

  “I believe that.”

  “I’m glad I’ve made a believer out of you, Iain Kilgarlin.”

  This time they rode at a fast canter for half an hour before doing a third ambush. The catchers were moving more cautiously, and it took them twenty minutes to reach Liberty and Clarissa, which was a decent rest for the pair’s mounts. The gunfire made the catchers holler and scatter. A man cried out and fell backward off his horse, and the catchers let loose with a fusillade of shots. Clarissa took off at a gallop, assuming Liberty was right behind her. When she glanced back, he was not there.

  She wanted to rein in. She wanted to go back. But she knew Liberty would be furious with her if she did. She could almost hear him saying, “I can take care of myself.” She was certain he’d say that because she was certain she’d say the same thing, and somehow she felt increasingly connected to him, as if a rope bound each one tightly to the other.

  Clarissa went on without him for at least fifteen minutes. Then he was beside her, bent low over his horse’s neck. Even in the dark, she saw the blood, blood that made it look as if his coat and shirt had been splashed with a tin cup of water.

  “You’ve been shot.” Her whole body went cold. “Liberty, Iain …”

  “You did well to keep riding. If I fall back again, keep moving forward. You can just see the glimmer of Lancaster’s lights.”

  “I’m not leaving you now that I know you’ve been hit.”

  “They’re right on our backs. They’ve left the dogs behind and are coming full gallop. We don’t both have to die. Just keep going.”

  “Nobody is going to die, Iain Kilgarlin. And you can’t keep telling me what to do.”

  “I’m a chief conductor.”

  “And I’m the woman who held him in her arms. I’ll do what I think I have to do to protect you.”

  “You are so stubborn.”

  “And you are so lucky I am. Any other woman would have stopped talking to you months ago, Underground Railroad or no Underground Railroad. It wasn’t that long ago I considered you the rudest and most obnoxious man on earth.”

  “And now?”

  “I intend to tame you and bring out the best in that ornery soul of yours. So don’t try and order me around anymore.”

  If he replied to her retort, she did not hear it. She glanced to her front a moment, and when she glanced back, his saddle was empty. Crying out a cry she had never heard herself utter before, she wheeled her horse around, saw his body on the road, swung down, and ran to his side. He was on his stomach, and when she turned him over, her hands were slick with his blood.

  “No,” she groaned. “No, no, no.”

  “Leave me.” She could barely hear him. “Get back on your horse and get into Lancaster where you’ll be safe.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “You’re helping runaways. They won’t spare you.”

  “I don’t care what they think they can do to me. I’m getting you up on my horse.”

  “How is an itty-bitty scrap of nothing like you going to do that?”

  “An itty-bitty what? You said that last December! I’ll show you how itty-bitty I am!”

  “Sure. Show us all. And when you’re finished with your show, we’ll hang you.”

  The voice was rough.

  And emerged from the darkness around her.

  There were no dogs. Just four men on horses. All had their pistols pointed at Clarissa and Liberty.

  “End of the line, slave lovers,” said a huge man with a thick beard. “You owe Alexander McGinty a debt you can never repay. So I’ll take your lives as partial payment on that debt. Then I’ll go into Lancaster and find my property, and that will settle the debt for good.”

  “You aren’t going into Lancaster, Mr. McGinty. You’re turning around and heading back to Maryland.”

  Clarissa watched a dozen men walk their horses out of the night and form a circle around her and Liberty. They all wore badges. And carried muskets or shotguns.

  “The law has always cooperated with me in Pennsylvania,” rumbled McGinty fiercely. “What’s going on, Sheriff?”

  “A war, Mr. McGinty. And laws formed by Southern judges and Southern congressmen just don’t hold water with us Pennsylvanians anymore. Now turn around.”

  “This ain’t justice. Those slaves are my property by right. By right?!”

  “We don’t recognize that right anymore, Mr. McGinty. Turn around.”

  “I’ll go to Washington about this. I’m an American citizen from Maryland, not the Confederacy, and I own those slaves, body and soul.”

  “While you’re at it, you can go to the Quakers and see what they have to say about it. Find out what they think about you owning men’s and women’s souls, souls that only God Himself can create. Ask the Amish too. Heck, you can even ask me.” The sheriff poked his shotgun at McGinty. “Ever see what this can do to a human brain? Turn around, Mr. McGinty. This is your final opportunity to get home in one piece.”

  Clarissa listened and watched, but all the time she was ripping at her coat and making bandages for Liberty’s wounds. A deputy holding a lantern climbed down to help her, about the same time as McGinty let loose with a string of the rawest curses she had ever heard and began to angrily lead his men back the way they had come.

  “You’ll hear from me again!” he shouted. “You’ll for certain hear from me again, Sheriff!”

  “He’s bleeding out,” the deputy said, putting the lantern close to Liberty’s body. “It’s no use.”

  “I’m not giving up on him!” snapped Clarissa. “I’m not!”

  “Get his coat off. Pull off his shirt. We’ve gotta find those wounds and stop ’em up.”

  “Then help me.”

  The deputy began tugging at Liberty’s coat with her. “Someone get his boots off.”

  Several other deputies joined them.

  “He’s a goner,” said one.

  Clarissa felt like slapping him. “I don’t care.”

  “It’s a waste of time.”

  “I told you, I don’t care. And I didn’t ask for your opinion. I’m going to save him. You can stand and watch if that’s all you’re good for.”

  “Tear off that shirt,” said the first deputy. “Someone loosen his belt. And get that thing off his face.”

  “He doesn’t want it removed,” Clarissa told him.

  “Get it off. Cut it off. For all we know he took a bullet to the brain. That hood is soaked in blood.”

  One man was yanking Liberty’s boots from his feet; another was helping Clarissa rip off his shirt; the sheriff was removing the belt and tossing it to the side. Someone had a canteen of water and was kneeling and ready to put it to Liberty’s mouth, and a frail man with a large black mustache was struggling with the hood. Clarissa wiped the back of her hand across her forehead and knew she’d left a bloody streak. A bearded man placed a hand on Liberty’s chest and said he felt a heartbeat, the sheriff was tying a strip of cloth to a bullet hole in Liberty’s arm, and the frail man continued to wrestle with the hood. She finally thrust him aside, used both hands, putting all her strength into it, ripping the black hood free. And gasped as she stared into Kyle Forrester’s dying face.

  January 1862

&nb
sp; Gettysburg

  It was as if she wanted to etch every part of her hometown into her head and heart. Wanted to exchange bad memories for new and better ones, get rid of ghosts and replace them with flesh and blood, thrust murky and upsetting experiences far away and embrace experiences that were fresh and appealing and filled with hope.

  Clarissa marched—not walked or strolled, marched—from her house just off York Street, along Baltimore until she turned right on Breckenridge, waved to her friend Ginnie who was shoveling snow by her front door, carried on until she decided to double back and take South Washington Street to Gettysburg College, crossing the railroad tracks. Then she chose not to carry on to Mummasburg Road, turned around, recrossed the tracks, and headed to her right when she reached Chambersburg Street, putting the Lutheran seminary with its distinctive cupola, a larger version of the one atop Christ’s Church, squarely in her line of sight, along with Seminary Ridge, upon which the seminary had been built thirty years before. At this point, she made up her mind to stretch her legs far more than she’d planned when she set out, headed straight to the seminary, nodded to several students who tipped their caps, carried on past them, and took an icy path that wound its way down and across a flat field and then up to another prominence called Cemetery Ridge. On the way, she first crossed Fairfield Road, stepped gingerly over a frozen part of Winebrenner’s Run, clambered over a five-foot fence, crossed the Emmitsburg Road after three carriages had rattled past, climbed another five-foot fence, then tramped up the short slope to the top of the ridge.

  “Oh my. Thank You, my Lord; this makes the long hike all worthwhile.”

  Cemetery Ridge gave her a magnificent view of Gettysburg as she caught her breath, breath that wound about her face and dark blue winter bonnet in threads of white. Smoke from hundreds of chimneys rose straight into the gray sky like pencil lines. After a few minutes of taking the view in, she carried on into the cemetery itself, Evergreen, past its handsome brick gatehouse, which served as the caretaker’s residence, and meandered among the gravesites with their black iron fences and their white and gray monuments, pausing to read several epitaphs of persons she had known growing up.