“But—”
“Caroline, just go.”
“But...” She dared not hesitate long. It was Rachel who ultimately decided the question by marching to Caroline’s side, looking up the stairway at the Confederate limping down, and called, “Will you teach me to play checkers, please, Mr. Windlesnow? I should like that very much.”
Bridger’s smile was meant for the child, but its warmth spilled over onto Caroline. “All right,” he replied, with pretended reluctance, “if you promise to let me win once in a while.”
“I promise,” Rachel said.
Caroline hurried away without another word, through the parlor, along the short corridor, and out the side door. Lifting her skirts to avoid stumbling over the hem of her dress, she ran toward the orchard.
As she drew closer, she heard Jubie’s cries and ran faster still.
She might have called out that she was almost there, that everything would be fine, but she couldn’t spare the breath.
When Jubie came into view, Enoch was already there, lifting her gently from the ground. Caroline slowed to a fast walk and approached, gasping, one hand on her chest.
“Enoch,” she blurted. “Thank heaven!”
Jubie moaned in Enoch’s big arms, limp as one of Rachel’s rag dolls. “Don’t let nothin’ hurt my baby,” she pleaded.
“Hush, now,” Enoch told her gruffly. “Nobody’s going to hurt anybody.”
Caroline scrambled toward them, still breathing hard from her exertions. “Will you carry her to the kitchen house?” she asked. “I’ll need the stove nearby, so I can heat plenty of water while you go into town to get my grandmother.”
Enoch, heading deeper into the orchard, shook his head and kept walking in the opposite direction, his strides lengthening with every step. His back was broad, its muscles defined beneath the coarse, sweat-stained fabric of his shirt. “No time for that, Missus,” he said. “This child must have important business in this world, because he’s in an almighty hurry to get here.”
“But—how—where—?”
Enoch did not look back or slacken his pace. “My cabin is closer than the kitchen house,” he said with finality.
Caroline offered no argument. Holding her skirts, she followed, weaving her way between the trunks of peach and apple and cherry trees, taking care not to stumble over exposed roots or twist an ankle stepping in a hole.
Enoch’s sturdy cabin, the original Hammond homestead, stood in a small hidden clearing, surrounded by venerable oaks and maples. The little house had been kept in good repair over its nearly ninety years of existence; the roof line was level and the stone chimney freshly mortared. Glass windows, a more recent addition, gleamed in the sunlight, and there were brightly colored curtains behind them.
Although Caroline had seen the cabin many times, she had never been inside. Under less trying circumstances, she might have been curious, even intrigued, but Jubie was in severe pain by then, writhing in Enoch’s arms and calling out for God’s mercy.
Caroline shivered at the sound, remembering her own pain when she’d borne Rachel. She hung back a little while Enoch mounted the steps of the narrow porch, shaded by a small roof. He bent to raise the latch with a deft motion of one elbow, holding Jubie securely all the while.
Jubie continued to wail and keen.
Enoch stepped over the threshold, and Caroline shook off the worst of her fear, forced herself to go forward.
Closing the door and leaning back against it, in need of a few minutes to overcome her cowardice, Caroline allowed herself to look around.
The single room couldn’t have measured more than twelve feet square, but it felt strangely spacious, perhaps because there were so few furnishings—a small cookstove, a wooden table with two chairs, a large trunk and an iron bed covered with a faded patchwork quilt.
Enoch stood Jubie on her feet and threw back the quilt, then eased her down onto the sheets. He spoke a few words to her, soothing ones, although Caroline couldn’t make them out.
Jubie arched her back and screamed.
Enoch smoothed her hair. “You go right ahead and carry on, Jubie, if you feel the need. In the meantime, Missus Caroline and I, we’ll take good care of you, and your baby, too.”
The tenderness in Enoch’s voice brought tears to Caroline’s eyes, but it gave her strength, too. She unbuttoned her cuffs, rolled up her sleeves and took charge.
24
Hammond Farm
August 3, 1863
Caroline
“Enoch has gone to the spring for water,” Caroline said, clasping Jubie’s hands in hers and holding them firmly.
“This child’s coming fast, Miss Caroline,” Jubie fretted, tossing her head from side to side.
“I know,” Caroline said quietly. “It will be over soon. Now, if you’ll try to lie still, I’ll have a look at you.”
Jubie bit down hard on her lower lip and nodded.
Caroline examined the girl, and was startled to see the crown of the baby’s head already emerging.
Enoch would surely be back any moment now, bringing the water he’d gone to fetch, but, like the stove, it would be cold. He would’ve had no cause to build a fire on such a hot day, since he took his meals at the kitchen house with the others.
Caroline, the granddaughter of a physician, yearned to wash her hands, but it didn’t seem as though she’d have the chance to do even that.
Jubie shouted again, but this time, the sound was part fierce effort, part triumph.
The head was out, although Caroline could not yet see the baby’s face.
“Don’t push, Jubie,” she said. “Take a minute to breathe before you try again.”
“Can you see him?” Jubie panted.
“Yes,” Caroline replied, fascinated, her earlier fear forgotten. “He—or she—has a great deal of hair.”
The cabin door sprang open, but she didn’t look away from the task at hand. “I need hot water, Enoch,” she said. “I must wash my hands.”
Enoch grunted in reply, and she heard a stove lid clank.
Another contraction seized Jubie’s small body. “Miss Caroline,” she gasped, “I got to push now. I just got to!”
“That’s fine, Jubie,” Caroline said. “Push for all you’re worth.”
With a hoarse cry of pain and victory, Jubie pushed.
One tiny shoulder appeared, then another. After that, the baby slipped easily from Jubie’s straining body into Caroline’s waiting hands.
The child was very small, but clearly alive, tiny fingers flexing, perfect little mouth working, as though hungry for mother’s milk.
“Jubie,” Caroline said, marveling at the miracle squirming against her palms, “you have a son.”
Jubie lifted her head from Enoch’s pillow, her face gleaming with perspiration. “Why isn’t he crying?”
More out of instinct than actual knowledge, Caroline cleared the baby’s mouth with one fingertip, then turned him over long enough to give him a firm pat on the back.
He squalled, furious, and Caroline settled him on Jubie’s chest, careful of the umbilical cord, still attached.
Beaming, exhausted, Jubie murmured to the infant, kissing his forehead.
“Not much to him, is there?” Enoch remarked lightly from behind Caroline. “Little bit of a feller. I’ve seen field mice bigger than he is.”
Caroline turned her head, intending to reprimand Enoch for insensitivity, only to find him smiling as fondly as if he’d fathered the child himself.
“This here,” Jubie said softly, still gazing into the face of her child, “is no field mouse. This here is Gideon, and he’s going to grow up to be a fine, strong man. A free man, never a slave.”
Caroline did not look at Enoch, and neither of them spoke.
Enoch went back to the stove, opening its d
oor, shoving in kindling and crumpled newspaper, lighting a match. He filled a kettle from one of the buckets, then set it on the stove top to heat, found a basin and soap and put them on the table.
From the trunk Caroline had spotted earlier, he took a towel, worn to near transparency by long and frequent use, and brought it to Jubie.
“Got to tie off and cut that cord,” he said.
Caroline, still standing beside the bed, looked up at him in sudden alarm. “I don’t know how to do that,” she said, in a useless whisper.
“Well,” Enoch said, “I do. I’ve got some twine around here someplace. Soon as that water comes to a boil, I’ll pour a little over the blade of my pocket knife, since I don’t have scissors. Then that baby ought to be washed and wrapped up in the towel. By then, he’ll be howling for his mama’s milk.”
Caroline did not blush or wince at such frankness. After visiting Jacob in the squalid hospital tents of Washington City, tending sick and wounded soldiers in the aftermath of a three-day battle and now assisting a woman in childbirth, she was no longer prone to squeamishness.
When there was plenty of hot water, she and Enoch took turns filling the basin, washing their hands with strong soap. Enoch made sure his knife was clean and sharp, then he showed Caroline how to tie off the umbilical cord in two places, then cut between them.
The baby fussed and slept, fussed and slept, snuggled warm in his mother’s arms. Caroline washed out the basin, filled it with heated water, and waited until it had cooled, then took little Gideon from Jubie’s arms. She bathed him and bundled him loosely in Enoch’s old towel. Again, she was careful not to disturb the stub of cord at his navel; she knew from experience that it must be left to dry and fall off on its own.
There were other tasks, of course.
Jubie was delivered of the afterbirth, and Enoch took it outside in the basin, to be buried, as was the custom. He sat with mother and baby while Caroline went back to the main house for sheets, since the ones on Enoch’s bed were ruined. Suspecting he had owned just that one threadbare towel, now serving as a baby blanket, she took a mental inventory of her own none-too-plentiful stock of linens as she walked. She could surely spare one or two, she thought, full of weary satisfaction.
When she entered the house, she found Bridger and her daughter sitting on the settee in the parlor, the checkerboard between them, Sweet Girl resting against Rachel’s feet.
Bridger looked up when she came in, read her face and visibly relaxed. Then, feigning glum resignation, he indicated Rachel with a slight nod and said, “I knew it would be a mistake, teaching this young lady the game. She is absolutely ruthless.”
Rachel glanced up from the board, which she’d been pondering solemnly, and brightened. “Is Jubie better now, Mama?”
“Jubie is much better,” Caroline replied with a smile. “And there’s a brand-new baby at Hammond Farm. His name is Gideon, and he is beautiful.”
“Boys aren’t supposed to be beautiful,” Rachel said. She made a face at the mere suggestion, although her eyes sparkled with interest.
“Nevertheless, Gideon is,” Caroline said.
“May I go see him?” Rachel asked, sliding off the settee.
“No,” Caroline said, “you may not. Little Gideon has just been born, and that’s hard work. He is not receiving guests yet, and neither is Jubie.”
Rachel’s forehead creased. “But we can’t leave them in the orchard!” she declared. “What if it rains?”
“Jubie and Gideon are not in the orchard. They’re resting very comfortably in Enoch’s cabin.”
“Yes, but... I’m not allowed to go there by myself.”
Bridger, gathering the checkers pieces and returning them to their box, smiled but said nothing.
“Tomorrow,” Caroline promised. “I need to take a few things back to the cabin now, but I won’t be long,” she went on. “When I get back, I’ll make dinner.”
Bridger set the game board aside and slowly got to his feet. “It’s not far to the kitchen house,” he said. “And the walk will be good for me. Give me a chance to stretch my legs and get some fresh air.” He looked down at Rachel. “Suppose you and I go out there and rustle up some grub? That way, when your mama gets back, she won’t have to cook. She can just sit down and eat.”
Rachel considered the suggestion so solemnly that Caroline nearly laughed. “All right,” she finally agreed. “But I would still like to see the baby.”
“Tomorrow, Rachel Hammond. And you won’t see Gideon or Jubie then, either, if you don’t stop pestering me.”
Rachel’s little shoulders rose and fell with her disappointment, but in the end, she relented.
Caroline felt some concern over Bridger’s condition. Clearly he was getting stronger, but she’d seen the strain on his face when he’d navigated the stairs. The kitchen house was at least two hundred yards away, over uneven ground.
“I’m not sure it would be wise for you to walk that far just yet,” she told him.
“While I appreciate your apparent concern for my well-being,” he said, the mild tone of his voice very much at odds with his expression, “I understand my capabilities quite well and do not require your counsel.”
Essentially he was telling her to mind her own business. She would not make that mistake again.
Smiling her brightest smile, she replied, “Why, of course you don’t need my advice, however kindly it might have been intended, Captain Winslow. Believe me, I wouldn’t think of delaying your departure by a single moment.”
“Sweet Girl is hungry,” Rachel interjected. “And so am I.”
Bridger’s smile was genuine, and wholly reserved for the little girl and her dog. “Then I guess we had better address the problem directly,” he said.
Rachel, delighted by his attention, frolicked across the parlor, Sweet Girl scrabbling after her, headed for the side door.
Bridger hesitated for a moment, gazing at Caroline with consternation, as if he might be about to say something conciliatory.
In the end, he merely shook his head, like a man faced with a puzzle that could not be solved, and turned away. He hobbled for a few steps, then muttered something and grabbed a door frame.
Caroline, who had been watching his progress, cried out.
Bridger looked back at her, glaring. “What?” he snapped.
“Nothing.”
The air between them seemed charged.
“It’s just that...you seem to need help,” she finally said.
“There’s nothing wrong with my legs,” Bridger told her with determined patience. “I’m a bit slow, that’s all.”
Although Caroline doubted he could get as far as the kitchen house on his own, she wasn’t about to say so. “Fine,” she said lightly. And then she made herself turn away, mount the stairs and head for the chest where she stored her linens. She selected two towels and a pair of sheets. The small blanket Rogan had sent was no doubt in the back room and would have to wait.
When she heard Rachel chattering, she hurried to the nearest window, the one in her daughter’s room, overlooking the side yard.
She watched as Bridger progressed slowly across the ground, Rachel and Sweet Girl prancing alongside. His strides were deliberate if a bit tentative.
Caroline turned from the window, the folded sheets and towels still in her arms, and noticed that the bed was neatly made up. The nightstand, previously cluttered with the pages of his sister’s letter and the note Rogan had sent, in addition to scraps of paper with their penciled diagrams of imaginary chess games, was bare.
Surely Bridger wasn’t preparing to leave! He wasn’t ready, wasn’t nearly strong enough.
And yet the room looked strangely tidy, with Rachel’s things back in their usual places. It was as though Bridger had never been there.
You should be glad he’s going away, Caroline to
ld herself.
But she wasn’t. Not at all.
She tried to bring Jacob’s image to mind, but it wouldn’t come. His features, so familiar, eluded her; she hurried to the room she and her husband had shared, dropped the linens on the bed, and studied the small likeness Jacob had sent home a few months after he’d enlisted.
There he was, her Jacob, in uniform, a rifle propped against one soldier.
She examined the lines of his face, the set of his eyes and mouth, the way his hair, light brown and a little too long, showed on both sides of his cap, a kepi, he’d called it. His uniform looked new, and the stock and barrel of his rifle gleamed, as if he’d just polished them.
He had been so young, so determined, so self-assured. He’d had no idea—how could he have?—of the horrors awaiting him. So many battles, so much pain and blood and death... How brutally surprised he must have been in that terrible moment when he first realized that war wasn’t the glorious adventure he’d probably imagined it to be, made up of parades and grand reviews and cheering crowds. In some part of his mind, Caroline knew, Jacob had been more boy than man, off to play king-of-the-hill, outfitted in a snappy blue uniform and shiny boots.
Why, she wondered, had she never seen how innocent he’d been, how guileless, how vulnerable?
She had grieved for him, brought his body home in a railroad car, seen his coffin lowered into the ground and covered with dirt. She had wept for him.
Now, she mourned the boy who’d gone away to war, with little thought of dying.
When had it come to him, the knowledge that he was mortal? That combat was no schoolyard game, but a deadly kill-or-be-killed enterprise, and that bullets and cannonballs struck without discrimination or mercy.
It was jarring to think of the ramifications of a single death.
The contributions one man might have made, had he survived, were lost, and so were those of the children he might have sired, and of their children’s, on and on.
Taking up the sheets and towels she meant to bring to Enoch’s cabin, Caroline set out to complete the errand. As she walked, she continued to consider the terrible cost of war, and every other kind of violence. She’d stepped into the clearing surrounding Enoch’s cabin, when she saw him sitting on his front steps, smiling to himself as he whittled at a piece of wood.
The Yankee Widow Page 30