So calm. So practical.
Inside, she’d been screaming.
The embalming process took time but would be done that day, she’d been informed, and there was a small charge.
Caroline had not questioned the fee, but simply paid it, kissed Jacob’s icy forehead, and gone to find the paymaster, who would issue her something called a widow’s benefit. The sum was nominal, but she couldn’t afford to leave it unclaimed, so she found the appropriate tent and, after much waiting and signing of documents, she’d been presented with a draft.
From there, she had proceeded to a nearby bank, and waited again, in a long line of civilians and soldiers, and when her turn at the teller’s cage finally came, she had exchanged the draft for currency.
With so much to do, it had been relatively easy to forget the reason behind her errands. After stashing the bills in her reticule and pulling the strings tight, she’d walked to the train station and found someone traveling to Gettysburg who agreed for a small fee to deliver an urgent note to her grandmother, Geneva, who lived in town. She relayed the news of Jacob’s death, asked that Enoch be told, although not Rachel, since she wanted to do that herself. Unless there was a delay, she would stop for her child at Geneva’s house before going home to the farm.
In closing, she requested that Enoch be asked to meet the afternoon train from Washington City the next evening with a wagon and someone to help him load Jacob’s coffin.
Having dispatched the message, Caroline had found a modest eating establishment, washed her hands and face in the cramped room set aside for the use of ladies, and seated herself at a table next to a smudged window overlooking the street. She had ordered a bowl of stew and a basket of bread and forced herself to eat, overruling the protests of her stomach. She would need all the stamina she could muster.
From there, Caroline’s recollections were blurred. She knew she had returned to the morgue and waited on a bench outside the room where Jacob had lain, with dozens of others, but she couldn’t have said what she thought about, beyond the comforting fact that Rachel was safe at Geneva’s house.
Eventually, the grim process had been completed, and she’d been escorted to another part of the building, where Jacob rested inside a coffin still smelling of pine pitch. He’d looked better, even handsome, in a clean uniform, his skin a little rosier, though still waxen.
She’d sat with him until a soldier came and made her leave.
Another blank space opened after that; Caroline had a vague memory of finding Bessie, offering to help with the patients.
At some point, she’d returned to the nurses’ tent, accepted a light supper served on a tin plate, swallowed another dose of laudanum.
And now, here she was, the following afternoon, aboard the train, perched on Jacob’s pine box and surrounded by others like it, some stacked, some resting on the floor, all splintery and marked with hastily scrawled names. Frederickson, Williams, McCullough, Johnston, Beckham.
She thought about their various homecomings, these dead men, so different from what they and their loved ones must have hoped for. Presently, the conductor, an elderly man of small stature sporting a heavy white mustache, opened the door to the baggage car and peered in at Caroline. “You changed your mind yet, Missus?” he asked hopefully. He’d made it quite clear when she boarded that he didn’t approve of her riding with the trunks and crates and coffins, especially when there were perfectly good seats up front, in the passenger section. “Train’s hardly crowded,” he added when she didn’t answer. “Seems like there are more folks headed to Washington City than away from it.”
“I’m fine here, thank you,” Caroline said politely. She was aware of the picture she must present, a widow unhinged by sorrow, in need of a wash, a good night’s sleep, a change of clothing, brazenly ignoring the proprieties. Before the war, it would have been unthinkable for a decent woman to make a journey of any distance without an escort. Since the Southern Rebellion, the rules had changed out of necessity, but even now, ladies did not ride in baggage cars with their departed husbands.
“Might be spooky in here,” the conductor persisted, his mustache twitching a little. “Besides, there aren’t any—” he paused, cleared his throat “—facilities.”
Caroline did not move. She could make her way to the “facilities” if the need arose, though she hoped it wouldn’t, because the cubicles were small and smelly and anything but sanitary.
“Are you afraid of ghosts?” she asked.
The old man reddened, took off his conductor’s cap, then put it on again in a show of agitation. “No, ma’am,” he said, plainly offended. “There’s no such thing, far as I know.”
She spread her hands. “I quite agree.”
The conductor had no answer for that. He blustered a little, reminded her that she would have half an hour to stretch her legs at the next stop. Maybe buy herself a bite to eat.
She thanked him.
Caroline did not get off the train at the next stop, or the one after that, where two of the coffins were unloaded. The boys sent to fetch them stole curious glances at her, but said nothing.
The conductor brought water, along with two hard-boiled eggs and a slice of bread. Caroline was touched, suspecting he’d meant to eat the food himself.
She accepted with thanks and, when she was alone again, she ate.
There were more stops. Another coffin was unloaded, along with several crates and travel trunks.
“Still plenty of seats up front,” the conductor announced, when he returned sometime in the late afternoon to refill her cup with water and offer her a much-read copy of The Philadelphia Inquirer.
“I’ll stay here,” Caroline told him.
When he left shaking his head, she stretched out on top of Jacob’s coffin, covered herself with part of the travel cloak, and slept.
3
Hammond Farm, on the Emmitsburg Road
Near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
June 18, 1863
Enoch
The sun had begun its slow slant westward when a neighbor boy of Caroline’s grandmother Geneva, a boy named Harvey Bellows, came rustling through the cornfield toward Enoch, waving an envelope.
Harvey was painfully skinny and so white his face resembled a waning moon. His britches were too big, held up by frayed braces and the grace of God, and his shirt, worn thin by three older brothers long before it came down to Harvey, had faded to no particular color and had come untucked on one side.
“Mr. Enoch,” Harvey blurted, out of breath, shambling to a stop. Had he run the whole way from town? Enoch hadn’t heard a horse or a wagon coming, but then, he’d been hard at it with the hoe, trying to work off the fear that had been souring in his belly like spoiled milk ever since the Missus lit out for Washington City a few days before. “Miz Prescott sent me out here. I brung you this note.”
The envelope rattled in Harvey’s hand as he held it out to Enoch, as if the bad news it carried was burning his fingers.
Enoch let his hoe drop to the ground, there between the rows of whispering green. He took the envelope from the boy, opened it and read the note inside, even though he already knew what it said. Had known since the Missus first saw Jacob’s name listed in the paper as fallen at Chancellorsville.
Yes, he’d known all along, though he’d dared hope his practiced instinct for trouble might be wrong, just this one time. Hoped the constant burn in his stomach owed itself to the threat of warfare, drawing closer by the day, and by his worries about the dangers the Missus might run into, traveling alone like she was.
Now, the worst had happened; he held the proof in his hands.
Jacob, one of the few white men who’d ever treated Enoch as a true equal, like a brother almost, was dead and gone. The news came as no surprise and yet, in those moments, it rolled over him like a boulder headed downhill, crushing some essential
part of him beneath its weight.
He wanted to howl with the pain of this loss, but that would have scared young Harvey Bellows, who was already nervous.
He took a five cent–piece from the pocket of his work-worn trousers and handed it to the boy.
Harvey nodded, pocketing the coin. “Miz Prescott told me to make sure you’re gonna meet the train tonight, with a wagon. My pa and my brother Jonathan will be there to help you load up Mr.—the casket.”
Enoch knew that the two older brothers had recently left for war, although he’d never heard which regiment they’d joined.
He managed to answer Harvey, his voice a hoarse rasp. “I’ll be there,” he said. Go, he thought, when the boy lingered, fidgeting, shifting his negligible weight first to one side, then the other.
“Mr. Enoch?”
Go. Now. “Yes?”
“You gonna be all right? Here all by yourself, I mean? It’ll be hours yet before the train gets to town.”
Enoch nodded brusquely.
At last, Harvey turned to leave, his scuffed shoes kicking up dust as he dragged his feet. He looked back over his shoulder once, shook his head and finally walked away.
Through a humming fog of sorrow, Enoch heard the boy whistle, caught the answering snort of a mule somewhere nearby. Watched numbly as Harvey stepped off the strip of dirt and disappeared into the stalks.
Enoch waited, unmoving. Listening for the sound of the animal’s hooves thumping over hard ground, growing fainter and then fainter still.
When he knew Harvey and the mule had reached the road, he dropped to his knees, right there in the cornfield, covered his face with both hands and wept.
The howl rumbled within him, and when his will finally gave way, the sound erupted from him, a force as elemental as nature itself. It wasn’t a roar, as he’d expected, but a long, low wail of pure despair, reminiscent of the lonesome whistle of a faraway train winding through the night.
Presently, when that first flood of sorrowing rage had spent itself, Enoch rallied enough to get to his feet. He picked up the hoe he’d discarded earlier, carried it back through the rows and into the open.
He didn’t look toward the big stone house; if he did, he figured he would see the memories it held, hovering at the windows like ghosts. Waiting in vain for the return of a young husband and father, dead long before his time.
Enoch made straight for the barn, where he put the hoe away, alongside other tools. A few minutes later, he fetched his favorite fishing pole from his cabin on the far side of the orchard, along with a rusted tin and a hand shovel reserved for digging worms.
Long acquainted with trouble, Enoch had his own methods of dealing with it, and catching a mess of fish for dinner was one of them. Because the warning signs were familiar—a barely noticeable singing in the shaft of his bones, a quiver in his middle, a twitch in the smallest of muscles—he did what he could to prepare himself.
Raised on a cotton plantation outside Charleston, South Carolina and sent to the fields as soon as he could pick bolls and drag sacks between the rows, Enoch had soon developed a quiet but powerful sense of bad things on the way. The skill had proven valuable, with practice, allowing him to sidestep more than one disaster. Sometimes, of course, there was little he could do besides dig in his heels and endure, but he was seldom caught off guard.
And Jacob’s death was no exception; he’d known it was coming. The pain was not lessened by this knowing, and the grief still cut a deep path, carving out canyons within him, leveling mountains, forever altering the terrain of his soul.
For all the shock of confirmation, Enoch had been holding his breath for a long while now, figuratively speaking. The nightmares, always the first sign of coming calamity, had commenced months before those of the Missus—dark and sweat-drenched dreams, pierced by unearthly shrieks, the boom of cannon, the sharp crack of carbines, vivid scenes of violence veiled in crimson and shifting smoke, gore so ludicrous it beggared belief.
Even Enoch, a freed slave well acquainted with brutality, had never imagined such tales of carnage. He’d heard them from Jacob when he was home on leave, read about them in the Gettysburg Compiler. No, trouble seldom took him by surprise, though there had been that one time, when he sure as hell should’ve known what was bound to happen, and he hadn’t. He understood, now that he was older and, he hoped, wiser, that love could turn a seeing man stone-blind and a smart one plain stupid.
Which was how he’d found himself, on a hot Savannah afternoon in his sixteenth year, standing bewildered and scared on the auction block, about to be sold away from everything and everyone he knew.
Even after hours jostling over Georgia roads in the back of an ox cart, then spending a long night in an iron-barred cage, shoulder to shoulder with more than a dozen other men, he’d been startled to find himself for sale to the highest bidder.
A slave, livestock, not a man.
Never mind that he’d worked in the fields from sunrise to supper, and then seen his mama Sophie skulking toward the big house in the twilight, summoned by the master. He’d hear her crying on her pallet hours later when she returned.
Never mind that she’d always been subdued the next morning, this good woman, waking Enoch with hurried whispers so he wouldn’t miss his breakfast, wouldn’t be late getting to the fields.
He’d wanted to tell her the master ought to be the one to feel ashamed, not her, but he hadn’t, knowing his mama needed to believe that her son, her only child, hadn’t noticed that she disappeared on nights when the mistress was away from home.
So, for her sake, for the sake of what little pride she’d managed to hold on to, he pretended.
Inside, he knew, always, that he was as good as any other man, and better than some. He knew he was smart, for one thing, and he’d never once wished to be anyone but who he was, never wanted to exchange the deep ebony of his flesh for a lighter shade.
No matter what the world saw when it looked at him, or how it treated him, Enoch knew the truth. In his mind, in his soul, he was a free man, with choices he alone was entitled to make.
But mounting the block that afternoon in coarse trousers and nothing else, Enoch finally faced the possibility that he’d been foolish, believing himself to be the equal of any white man.
Maybe it was all true; he was just somebody else’s property. Fit for work, but owned, nonetheless.
The gravity of all this came home to him as he stood there on that block, his skin sizzling beneath a cold sweat. He was free only in his mind; the reality was, he would probably never see his mother again, nor his beloved Tillie Mae, either.
Enoch refused to let his fear show. He set his jaw, stood up straight and held his head up high. He did not let his gaze fall upon the gathering of white men murmuring below the platform, in their tall hats and their tailored suits. Instead, he fixed his eyes on a faraway nowhere, a place that existed only in his imagination.
The auctioneer had referred to him as a fine worker and said he was fit for any kind of field work.
Enoch had let the words roll right on past him; they weren’t anything he hadn’t heard before.
No, it was the master’s reason for selling him away from the only place he’d ever called home, from his mama and his friends and, worst of all, from Tillie Mae, that threatened to buckle his knees. Enoch had loved that sweet gal since he and Tillie Mae were both too little to be of much use to anybody, and that was a good while ago.
Way back, Jethro, Tillie Mae’s pa, had given his word, promised that soon as his little girl turned sixteen, she and Enoch could jump the broom, hand in hand, and commence to live as man and wife.
Just a week before that long-awaited birthday, the master’s eldest son, Cyprian, had come home from boarding school for a visit, taken a liking to Tillie Mae, and cornered her out behind the springhouse one afternoon, meaning to have his way with her.
Blinded by a fury stronger than any he could remember, Enoch had rounded that shack, hauled Cyprian Wilcox off Tillie Mae and told him to git.
Wilcox had laughed, straightening his fine and fashionable clothes. There would be another time, he’d said. He could do what he liked with Tillie Mae, because his father owned her, and one day soon, she’d belong to him, right along with the plantation house, the fields and every other slave on the place.
“Enoch,” Tillie Mae had pleaded, taking backward steps, weeping so hard her face glistened with her tears. “Don’t. Don’t do nothin’ to young massuh—”
“I told you to git,” Enoch had growled, his back teeth clamped down so hard his whole skull throbbed from the pressure.
“It seems your man here,” Wilcox had told Tillie Mae smoothly, his placid gaze locked with Enoch’s blazing one, tugging idly at the cuffs of his shirt as he spoke, “is out to get himself whipped, good and proper.”
“Enoch,” Tillie Mae said. “I’ll do what he say to do, and then maybe everythin’ can be all right again, and we can still git married, and you won’t have no whippin’ at all.” She dashed at her face with the back of one small, pretty hand.
Every word she said had lodged in Enoch like a poisoned arrow shot from a bow. He’d looked into Cyprian Wilcox’s smirking face and seen every white man who had ever mistreated a slave, heard his mama weeping in the darkness of their cabin after another nighttime visit to the big house—and something red and wicked and all consuming had burst open in Enoch’s mind, like a fiery explosion.
He’d lunged at the master’s son, closed his big hands around the man’s throat and squeezed. Tillie Mae had screamed, again and again, although the sound barely penetrated Enoch’s brain. There were shouts, pounding footsteps, but he barely heard them.
Finally, Wilcox’s eyes had rolled back in his head, and he’d gone limp as a kitchen house rag, and Enoch kept right on squeezing.
The Yankee Widow Page 5