The Secrets of Mary Bowser

by Lois Leveen

  Bet squinted into the rain, frowning and shaking her head in confusion.

  With another bout of rustling, the scout came into view, asking, “Don’t you know your old friend?”

  I gasped in surprise. “I’d know that gap tooth of yours anywhere, George Patterson. Only you ought to know by now, these days I answer to Mrs. Bowser.”

  Hattie’s husband shouldered his rifle as he came up close to us. “I stand corrected, Mrs. Bowser. But I do suppose there’s some correction warranted all the way around. You three look like you’ve had a sight more trouble than just a horse gone lame.”

  Bet was ready to spin him who knows what story, but I spoke up before she could, explaining that Sophronia was in the family way, and we needed to get her someplace she could have her baby in freedom. I told him that Bet was a Unionist and an ally, maybe Wilson had mentioned her to him. When he nodded, I added that I’d bloodied myself shooting our horse, to put it out of its misery. To keep him from questioning my tale, I asked what he was doing wandering by himself in the Virginia countryside.

  “Reconnaissance.” He drew himself up, looking more of a man than the boy I remembered. “We took New Market Heights yesterday, Fort Harrison as well. Spread the Rebel lines thinner than ever, giving us some vantage from which to push them back toward Richmond.” But then the pride seeped out of him, and he seemed older still. “Only, I hate to have to tell you. Wilson’s been shot.”

  Shot. The word hit me hard. Hard as the recoil from the bullet I put into a man hours before.

  The uncertainty of all the months I’d feared my husband killed or captured was wholly eclipsed by the hellish surety of knowing he was wounded. All I could do now was follow, as George led us through the battle-weary Virginia countryside.

  The sky brightened into day but held its grayish hue. We stopped at Four Mile Creek, where Bet tore a makeshift washing cloth from her underskirt. I stood numb while she cleaned my face and hair and hands. I felt like I was outside myself, watching everything that happened as though we were players on a stage.

  From Lavinia Whitlock to Flora Stuart, these three years I’d witnessed a stunning sorority of grief. I wanted no part of that sisterhood. But it didn’t much matter what I wanted, or what I’d worked for or prayed for all this time. Not now that my husband was shot.

  The stun that had cloaked us since our encounter with the Confederate weighed heavier as we walked on, George’s report choking not just words but also the very breath from me. Every minute he led us along might be taken from the death hour. The hour Papa sat with Mama. The hour Bet sat with Papa. An hour I didn’t get with either of them.

  That death might take my husband, this knowledge had been the ugly companion plaguing me these many months. That he might die with me so near but still not there, this was a new horror in a world I hadn’t thought could grow more horrible.

  Here at last was the singular truth of war: A hundred thousand soldiers might take the field together, yet each who fell could die alone.

  At last we reached the Union encampment, rows and rows of low, bone-hued tents, hundreds of negro soldiers milling between them. Our foursome drew plenty of curious stares as we made our way along the trampled meadow grass to a larger tent, tall enough for a man to stand in and wide enough for several rows of bed-cots. Bet and Sophronia waited beneath the yellow hospital flag while I followed George inside. Followed to the cot that held my husband, the trouser leg of his uniform cut away, a bloodied bandage wound tight against his bare thigh.

  Wilson lay still. Too still for my comfort. It seemed nothing could be so quiet and peaceful amid all these years of war. Seeing the lids closed heavy on his eyes, my brain made out the words too late, too late.

  The air within the tent was an acrid distillation of the deathly stench that hung so often upon the streets of Richmond. Fearful my husband would never look on me again in this world, I touched the back of my hand to his cheek, a tender, tentative farewell. I nearly didn’t believe it when those dear eyelids blinked slowly open.

  He looked thunderstruck from me to George and back again. “Tell Doc I must be delirious. I’m having visions of a ministering angel.”

  “No angel here,” I said. “Just a woman who loves you.”

  A woman whose each braced muscle eased again, though the fear of losing my husband was yet but palliated. I bent and kissed his brow, not bothering to hold to modesty in front of the nurses and the other injured soldiers.

  George muttered something about seeing to Sophronia and Bet, and exited the tent. One of the nurses offered me a small stool, and I sat as close to Wilson as I could, willing myself courage to utter the question I couldn’t hold from asking but wasn’t sure I was ready to hear answered. “What does the doctor say?”

  “The ball passed through my leg and right out the other side, missed the bone entirely. Figures I’ll be fine, maybe just a limp if the muscle doesn’t heal right.” The seven long months since I’d last laid eyes on him might have been as many years, for all that time had worked upon him. “Hurts so bad, I didn’t believe it when the surgeon told me I was a lucky man. But seeing you, I guess he’s right. How’d you come to be out here just now?”

  “Sophronia’s got herself in the family way. Bet and I were trying to bring her out to one of the contraband camps. We lost our horse and were wandering around afoot when George happened upon us, brought us back here.” Not wanting to dwell on what I wasn’t telling, I leaned forward and kissed my husband again.

  After promising me he wasn’t suffering much, he grinned and told me I looked terrible. “I suppose that comes from having to eat your own cooking.”

  “My poor cooking can’t do what little food there is much harm,” I said. “General Grant’s doing the best job yet of keeping Richmond hungry. Summer was hard enough, who knows what winter will bring.”

  “Winter might bring peace, if we take the city in the next month or two. If we don’t, Grant will hold the line tight, then press it forward in spring.” He squeezed my hand with all the strength a wounded man might muster. “It won’t be any longer than that. Even Lee’s men know it, you can feel it along the Petersburg line. Victory’s coming, and freedom with it.”

  Coming and already came weren’t the same, and in the difference between them, it was hard for a soldier’s wife to rest easy. “Plenty more battles to be fought before then,” I said.

  “The worst thing I faced in this war wasn’t in battle.” He shifted, pain flashing across his face. “Back in May, when we landed at Bermuda Hundred and established Fort Pocahontas, one of our patrols came upon a local planter. Eppes Clayton—a true FFV and nasty as a slaveowner comes, from what folks said. One of the men in the 1st had been his slave, and when they brought Clayton into camp, General Wild ordered the private to whip him.

  “That soldier must have given him twenty lashes. And then he handed the whip over to some colored ladies. Fugitive slaves who’d also belonged to Clayton, they’d fled to the fort just days before. Each of those women took up the whip and set another fifteen marks across Clatyon’s back. People were cheering as though the whipping was a party, with General Wild smiling and clapping like he was watching one of them coon shows they love so much up North. That man led us into battle, and still we were nothing more than that to him.”

  The remembrance turned my husband’s features nearly ugly. “Wild ordered the chaplain to preach a sermon on the whipping, and we all had to stand round and give praise while he blustered about how the righteous demanded blood.”

  “Hebrews 9:22,” I said. “And almost all things are by the law purged with blood; and without shedding of blood is no remission. McNiven told me John Brown preached it over and over, when he was being held at Charlestown after Harper’s Ferry.”

  Wilson didn’t find much comfort in that. “Brown is dead. But there are plenty of negroes who are going to be living once this war is over. If all we have is bloodlust, what kind of life will freedom bring? So long as we want to hurt and ha
rm even when there’s no battle raging, how different are we from the overseers and slaveholders?”

  I felt the weight of the water jug in my hands, the force of my foot ramming the Confederate’s skull. The ease with which I picked up the gun, pulled the trigger, and shot him dead.

  What would my husband think when he learned what I’d done? What would he make me think of myself?

  Screams erupted outside the tent. A nurse rushed in, addressing me in a hushed, official tone. “Two of our scouts were ambushed an hour past. The surgeon is operating now. You’ll have to go, so I can make up places for them.”

  Wilson began to protest, but I shook my head, glad enough to take my leave from our conversation.

  George had settled Sophronia and Bet before a sputtering campfire, where they breakfasted on what rations of hardtack he managed to wrangle from his fellow soldiers. He offered me a tin plate, but I waved it away.

  “What we do now?” Sophronia asked.

  “The supply wagons come later today. They’ll take Wilson and the rest of the wounded out of the field,” George said. “They can bring you to Bermuda Hundred, and from there you’ll go by boat out to Fort Monroe. Thousands of former slaves are living there, with ladies from up North come to teach them reading and writing. Including that Quakeress you were always so fond of, Mary.”

  “Zinnie Moore?”

  “Yes indeed. She came down when we did, said she meant to do whatever she could to aid the freedmen. Though with her funny way of speaking, who knows how those poor negroes will sound when she’s done with them.”

  I tried to smile at George’s joke. But I was haunted by the words Zinnie had said to me the day I left the sewing circle. Take care that neither a blow to thy body nor a mark on thy soul will be the consequence of whatever work thou chooses. The patchwork of lamp-oil burns no longer pained my flesh. But I felt the fresh-made mark upon my soul keenly.

  “You come, too?” Sophronia’s face was pinched with worry.

  I shook my head. “I have to get back to Richmond. It would be too much work for Hortense with both of us gone, and—”

  Bet cut me off. “Perhaps you ought to go with Sophronia.”

  I stared at her, not believing she meant for me to give up our spying. “Like I said, there’s work to be done in the Gray House. I best be back there.”

  Bet’s eyes bore icy blue into mine. “Whatever work is to be done will be seen to one way or another. I think it best for you to go out to Fort Monroe.”

  I told myself she just wanted to believe it didn’t matter whether I was in Richmond or no, because she never could bear to admit how much of the espionage was my doing. But when I looked down and saw the dance of bloodstains along the hem of my skirt, for once I wondered if maybe Bet was right.

  The rain let up by mid-morning, and George somehow connived to move Wilson out of the hospital tent for a few hours. I was plenty apprehensive when I took my place beside where he sat wrapped in an army-issue blanket, his back propped up against the trunk of a maple tree. Much as I longed to be with my husband, I wasn’t any too desirous of taking up the conversation we’d left off.

  I waited until he was eating a bit of salt pork and cornmeal fry, then said, “Maybe I ought to stay and tend you while that wound is healing. After you’re well, I can go out to Fort Monroe. Bet suggested I help with the teaching at the school there.”

  He set down his fork and looked at me hard. “When Bet means to get you into danger, you’re glad enough to take up whatever she proposes. Lord knows, I’ve tried to make my peace with that. But since when do you let her talk you into something so fiddle-come-foolish as giving up important work? Don’t you think what you’ve been doing means more to slaves’ freedom than teaching a bunch of ABCs?”

  I’d long grown leery of Bet drawing me into danger. But what I did just hours earlier proved I had my own vast well of danger, bubbling hot-headed and murderous, inside of me.

  “What’s the matter?” Wilson asked. “What’s keeping you from going back to Richmond?”

  I kept my gaze on those dull tines, unable to meet his eyes as I told him everything that passed with that Confederate. Once I related it all, I swallowed hard over the lump of shame in my throat and forced myself to look up, as I asked if he was angry.

  “Of course I’m angry. Maniac like that, threatening my wife, Sophronia, even that Crazy Bet. What sort of a man wouldn’t be angry to hear it, knowing he was nowhere near to protect you?”

  “I mean, are you angry at me?”

  Puzzlement sowed troughs along his brow. “Why would I be angry at you?”

  “What you said before about bloodlust, and violence outside battle …” My voice trailed off.

  “This wasn’t the same as all that. That man meant to harm you.”

  I laced my fingers, clasping my palms tight together, wanting to feel myself solid, instead of feeling the cold, heavy memory of the jug I used to strike a man down. “Once I knocked him out, he didn’t stand much chance of harming anyone. But I kept at him. I kicked him, and I shot him, because I wanted to. I liked it.”

  “You don’t much look as though you like it now.”

  “Of course not. I’m sick with it. But when it was happening—”

  “When it was happening wasn’t the same as now. If something like that happens again, you’d be right to do as you did, protecting Sophronia and Bet and yourself that way. But I’m not much worried you’re about to do so to just any white man you come across. Are you?”

  “Wilson, I killed a man. Don’t you know what that means?”

  “I surely do.” He set a hand over where the thin wool blanket covered the hole blazed by the metal ball that had traveled through his body. “I hope I’ve killed a man or two, and I won’t be sorry to try again, once this leg is healed.” I started to object, but he stopped me. “Don’t go telling me it’s not the same for you as for me, Contrary Mary. If the Confederates would rather die than see negroes free and safe, that choice rests on them, not us.”

  I ached to believe him. Still, I wasn’t sure. “Mama said so many times that Jesus had a plan for me. I guess I wanted it to be true, wanted to know I was special. But Jesus couldn’t have planned for me to do what I did. Maybe that means there’s no plan after all.” Maybe I wasn’t so special. “I just don’t see how you can love me, knowing what I’ve done.”

  My husband answered me like only he in all the world could. “Years back, there was some baggage I took North in a hurry. Wisp of a thing, no more than a girl. Young as she was, she’d killed her master. He’d got her with child then sold the baby off, kept coming at her. I don’t know if she planned it or just did it without thinking, but by the time the Railroad people got to her, she was lying as still as the dead. Even as she lay there, I prayed she’d live and get North. I wanted to believe she could fall in love, make a family, in freedom. Because if that could happen, it meant I wasn’t a fool to hope in the face of slavery, even though bondage took so many that carrying a few here or there to freedom sometimes didn’t seem to make much difference.”

  It was the first we ever spoke of that girl. Wilson never was much for talking about his Railroad work, knowing how many fugitives’ freedom, how his own safety, too, depended on him holding such things secret. But my reticence wasn’t quite like his. Speaking of that troubled child, what she’d been through, all her owner did to her—how could I talk of such horror, when I just wanted it to be over and done?

  He took my hands into his. “For all I know, that girl never did say another word. But I hope she did. I hope someone loves her like I love you, and she can tell him what passed and have him soothe her, without her needing to carry it like a guilty secret in her heart.”

  I didn’t hold from him what glimmer I had that his hope might have come true. “That girl spoke again, I know that much,” I said. “She spoke to me.”

  I related how I helped carry her toward New York. “When McNiven told me it was David Bustill Bowser’s cousin who
fetched that girl out of harm’s way, I never much thought I’d meet the man.”

  “Well, maybe that was part of Jesus’s plan. Much as I care for you, I do like to believe perhaps He had a hand in bringing us together. But even if He didn’t, I know I’ll always love you. Just like I know the work you do in Richmond is important, even if He didn’t plan for you to do it. Don’t you know that yourself?”

  I nodded, loving Wilson all the more for showing me it was true.

  “Well then, forget about Bet and your mama and all the rest. What do you mean to do? Strongheaded as my wife is, I wager she must have some opinion of her own on the matter.”

  I thought of the tantrum Queen Varina would throw once she discovered another of her slaves was gone, how much harder I’d have to slave in the Gray House to make up the loss of Sophronia’s labor. How sharp the hunger of the last few months had cut, how much sharper it would slice come winter.

  I regarded my sweet, precious husband and tried to imagine leaving him to be nursed by strangers, when we both knew that many a convalescing soldier took a turn for the worst if camp fever hit. I thought of how I missed Zinnie Moore, how good it would be to work beside her again.

  But then I thought about that girl we brought to freedom, me and Wilson working together before we even knew of each other. I thought about Dangerfield Newby and the sermon Wilson’s cousin preached on him. And I thought about Timothy Smith of Augusta, Maine, and the CSS Virginia, and the Bread Riot. I thought about Early’s raid, how together McNiven, Bet, and I might well have saved Lincoln from assassination, and the Union from dissolution.

  All my life, the hardest choices I made were about leaving. Leaving Mama and Papa to go North. Leaving off with Theodore once I realized I couldn’t be the docile wife he wanted. Leaving Zinnie Moore and the rest when I grew impatient with the Female Anti-Slavery Society. Leaving Philadelphia when I believed war was coming, and with it the only real hope for emancipation.