The Rebel raiders did no harm to Harmony Hill. The Shakers fed them gladly as they do all who come hungry to their doorsteps and in gratitude the men went on their way without stealing so much as one horse. The elders and eldresses were much relieved. But there is great consternation that General Morgan’s raid is only a beginning. A Union cavalry troop camped out in the Shaker pastures not four days after Morgan passed through here. It is unthinkable what would have been the result if they had met in our village.
I remain with the Believers. Sister Martha still instructs me in their ways and says I will surely someday know the peace she carries in her heart if I open my ears to her words. Aunt Tish, Sister Latisha, has embraced the life. In one way she was sorry to hear Grayson was ashes for she knew how it wounded me, but I think she cared not a whit for herself. Grayson wasn’t her home. It was her prison.
Every day I recall a new thing to mourn. My mother’s portrait. The book of children’s poems my grandfather often read to me before he died. The silver bell my mother gave me when I was four so that I could call for help if I was afraid in the night. But they are only things. As Sister Martha says, it is better to give up ownership of all things and to gather only spiritual gifts.
My mother’s garden is gone, destroyed by Selena long before the fire completed her work. We will never again walk among the roses at Grayson.
Sadly,
Charlotte
She was becoming one of the Shakers, Adam thought as he looked up from reading through the letter for a second time. Charlotte a Shaker with no will or spirit of her own. It was almost more than he could imagine, but the proof was there in the words in front of his eyes. He scanned through them again. Our village. Remain with the Believers. Someday know the peace. Spiritual gifts.
He shut his eyes and pulled her image into his mind. He longed to look into her green eyes and perhaps take the pins from her beautiful red hair. At times in the last year, Charlotte’s letters were all that had kept him sane as he followed first Grant’s army in the west before Sam urged him back to the east to be on hand for McClellan’s great victory as the general launched his Peninsular Campaign.
The Yankee army marched to within six miles of Richmond, but the Confederates didn’t give ground. McClellan was forced to fall into retreat before he was ordered to load his army on boats to join General Pope in northern Virginia where once more the armies were fated to meet at Bull Run Creek. The Union army attacked, this time sent into battle by General Pope in a rash bid to conquer the Southern forces before all of McClellan’s men had time to reach the field of battle. But Robert E. Lee, now in command of the Southern army, turned the tables on Pope’s forces and launched a surprise counterattack. In a tragic repeat of the first battle at Bull Run, the Union troops once more retreated back to Washington. Yet again there was no great victory to encourage the Northern people.
On the march away from the Bull Run battleground, Adam gave up his horse to a wounded soldier and trudged along the muddy roads with Jake’s Massachusetts regiment. Since he often bivouacked with the men, they had become his company. He knew each of them by name and had done sketches of many of the men to send to their wives and mothers. And now those sketches would be all that ever returned home of some of the men who had fought their last battle.
Jake no longer worried aloud to Adam about what he would do when he saw the elephant. He knew, for he had charged forward in the face of deadly fire time and again. He had loaded and fired his gun at the men in gray and seen them thrown backward when the bullets found their target. He had heard bullets sing past his head and watched the men beside him fall. His horse had died under him, but he had stood and not run. He had survived to fight again.
But though he came through the battle unwounded, he’d been weakened by a bout with dysentery the week before and began coughing as they marched away from Bull Run back toward Washington in defeat yet again. A defeat made even more disheartening by the heavy rain beating down on their heads.
The rain made talk impossible, but there was nothing to say anyway. Nothing to be done except plod on through the mud. To move one foot in front of the other and try not to remember the sight of too many young soldiers sprawled in death, too many exploding shells, too many wounds from minié balls that tore muscles asunder and made amputation the only treatment.
Adam wanted to shut from his ears the sounds of horses dying, artillery shells screaming overhead, wounded men crying for help. He wanted to get on a train and ride away from it all. Maybe go west again and be in the wide open spaces where he could sketch the faces of the pioneers pushing the nation westward. In the last year, his pen had drawn too many scenes of battle, sent back too many sketches of Union defeats. Gone were the early dreams of a quick victory and a fast return to peace. At times peace no longer seemed possible. And now it seemed that even the peace he’d always imagined at Harmony Hill was being disturbed by the war.
He looked up from Charlotte’s letter as Jake stirred on the narrow bed in front of him. What the enemy hadn’t been able to do on the battlefield, the miserable weather and wretched conditions in the camps were doing to his once strong young brother. Jake tried to lift his head up off the pillow, but he was too weak as he was wracked with coughs that tore at his lungs but gave him no relief. Adam stuffed the letter inside his shirt and moved to hold Jake’s head. When his coughing was spent, Adam gently wiped the flecks of blood from his brother’s lips and held the draught of medicine the doctor had prepared for him to his mouth. He got him to swallow a bit.
Jake’s captain had moved him into the makeshift hospital the night before when he’d begun to burn with fever. Adam hadn’t been at the camp. He’d gone to the hotel to put the finishing touches on his sketches of the battle. If he’d been there when his brother most needed him, Adam would have never let him be brought to this long, narrow building that had been turned into a hospital for soldiers like Jake who had survived the battle only to be felled by disease. Cots were set up so close together that the men could have reached out and held hands all the way down the line if most of them hadn’t been too sick to even realize there was a man in the next bed.
Nurses wearing long white aprons and caps that made him think of Charlotte in her Shaker dress moved among the men to comfort them with a gentle word or, if they were very bad, a dose of laudanum. Most of the women had no training, but simply showed up at the hospital to care for the men. A couple of doctors made the rounds. Twice while Adam watched, the doctors stood up after examining one of the men and let the nurse with him pull the sheet up over the soldier’s face. And though he hated himself for it, Adam knew that when he next took out his sketchbook, he would draw that picture.
As the hours dragged by, Adam began to fear the face his pencil might draw under the sheet would be Jake’s. Adam had come to sit with Jake as soon as he received word he’d been brought to the hospital, but he should have never left Jake to go to the hotel. He knew his brother was getting sick as they marched back to Washington. He’d heard his cough. He should have stayed in the camp to take care of him.
If he’d been there when Jake first began to burn with fever, he could have loaded him on a train and taken him to their mother and Phoebe. Even now he wanted to pick him up in his arms and carry him home. There Jake might fight off the pneumonia, but the doctor claimed moving him would surely kill him. That his only chance was to ride out the fever. To fight off the pneumonia. He was a young man. He had a chance.
The second morning, Jake seemed improved. The sheen of fever still sat on his face and the coughing continued to bring up blood, but at least there was recognition in his eyes when he looked at Adam.
“What are you doing here?” Jake’s voice was little more than a hoarse whisper.
“What do you think?” Adam helped Jake sit up a little as he put a glass of water to Jake’s lips. The nurse had promised to bring broth when she saw Jake was awake.
Jake turned his head and looked around. The water had moistened h
is mouth and made his voice stronger. “I don’t know. For sure, there’s nothing to draw here that any of the people back home will want to see.”
“You’ve got that right,” Adam agreed in a voice that he knew at once was too hearty.
Jake eyed him for a moment before he said, “I must be fearful sick.” He made a sound that might have been an attempt at a laugh, but it triggered his coughing.
Adam held Jake’s shoulders while the coughs tore at his lungs. In the last few weeks, Jake had lost so much weight while he battled dysentery and now the pneumonia that his bones almost protruded from his skin.
When at last the coughs eased, Jake wiped his mouth and looked at the blood on the rag. He stared at it a long time before he whispered, “I am fearful sick.” He looked up at Adam as if hoping he might deny it.
Adam didn’t. Jake needed the truth. “You are. Pneumonia, the doctor says.”
“Giles Whited died of pneumonia in May. Homer Martin went down to it in June. Or was it typhoid that got Homer?” He frowned a minute before he shook his head a little. “Doesn’t matter. Either way it seemed a wrong way to die in a war.” He stared across the room. “Funny, you think about somebody shooting you or maybe getting torn apart by a shell, but you don’t think about your body letting you down by getting sick. Not my body anyway. I never got sick back home.”
“When you feel a little better, I’ll take you home. Once there, Phoebe will see to it that you get well.”
Jake smiled. “She would, wouldn’t she? This wouldn’t be in her plan for me.”
“Did she have a plan for you?”
“Oh yeah. Marry well and have handsome children and become a gentleman with the means to do good. Said it would make Mother happy.”
“Not a bad plan,” Adam said as he pushed another drink on Jake. “Till the war got in the way.”
“That did disrupt her plans. Or at least me joining up did. How about you? Did she have a plan for you too?”
“Probably, but if she did, she gave up on it some time back. For one, she had to accept that I’d never settle for hearth and home over art.”
“Couldn’t you do both?” Jake asked.
“I never thought so. Maybe because I never met the woman that made me want to try.” At least until now, Adam added silently as he felt Charlotte’s letter touching his skin inside his shirt.
Again Jake looked away from Adam to stare across the room. He turned the rag and spat in it before he muffled a few coughs and wiped his mouth again. His face was very pale as he closed his eyes and sank back on the pillow Adam had propped behind him.
Adam pulled the chair a nurse had found for him up closer to the bed so that he could steady Jake if his head fell to the side in his sleep. But Jake wasn’t through talking. He kept his eyes closed as he said, “I was in love once.”
“Were you?” Adam said.
“Oona was beautiful. And fun. Her father sold fruits and vegetables to us. He and her mother came over from Ireland. She claimed they had a big farm there. Were richer than we ever thought of being before the potato blight. Her mother hated America, wished for Ireland from the time she got up in the morning until she went to bed at night, but her father refused to speak of Ireland at all. He said there was no purpose to looking back. He had such an accent I could barely understand him when he brought the produce for Mother’s kitchen.”
“What happened?” Adam asked. Of course, he knew the story. Jake’s youth, barely seventeen at the time. The inappropriate girl. Phoebe taking charge and nipping the romance in the bud.
Jake looked at Adam. “You know what happened.” A touch of anger sparked in his eyes.
“Phoebe.”
“And you helped her.” Jake was hit by another spasm of coughing.
Adam waited until the coughing subsided and Jake was once more lying back on the pillow before he said, “I didn’t help her, Jake, but neither did I try to dissuade her. You were too young to think of marriage.”
“That didn’t mean I couldn’t be in love.” Jake shut his eyes as if he didn’t have the energy to hold his eyelids open. It was a long time before he went on, but Adam knew he wasn’t sleeping. At last he said, “Phoebe told me it couldn’t be real love, as if she could know. Not married to that old stick she latched on to for his money. If it wasn’t your money she used to pay Oona’s father to send Oona away, then it must have been his.”
“I don’t know,” Adam answered honestly.
“I should have gone after her, hunted until I found her. I should have, but instead I listened to Phoebe saying what was best for the family. As if that was best for me.” Jake blew out a breath that made him cough again. “And now look at me. About to die with nothing to leave behind to ever show I walked this green earth. At least it used to be green before we started blowing up the pastures.”
“You’re not going to die.”
“We all die,” Jake said. “Every last one of us.” Jake opened his eyes and stared straight at Adam. “Have you ever been in love?”
“I think so,” Adam said, shifting in his chair. Why couldn’t he just admit to his brother that he loved Charlotte? Perhaps because he hadn’t fully admitted it to his own heart yet.
“If you ever are, you won’t have to think so. You’ll know. I’m glad I at least felt the feeling. You think people will fall in love in heaven?”
“If it makes them happy.” But again he was thinking of the Shaker community that was turning Charlotte into one of them. They claimed to be making a paradise on earth, but there was no love between man and woman there.
“Love takes you past mere happiness. At least until you lose it.” Jake coughed again and shut his eyes before he went on. “But you never have to wonder with love. If you love somebody, you know. Just like with Jesus. You know.”
“What do you know?” Adam leaned forward in his chair to be sure he didn’t miss what Jake might say next.
But Jake didn’t answer. He had finally fallen to sleep or slipped off into unconsciousness again. Adam stared at his brother’s pale face and wished he did know whatever it was Jake knew about the Lord so that he could pray for him. Instead he pulled out Charlotte’s letter and read her words again. He wondered if she prayed. It sounded like she might. If only he could rush a letter to her and ask her to pray for Jake. But a letter would take weeks. Jake might not have weeks.
Adam laid his hand gently on his brother’s arm. His fingers were trembling and his heart began to pound as he whispered the words, “Please, Lord.”
31
September 18, 1862
Dear Charlotte,
Please forgive me for not writing sooner to convey my sympathy for the loss of your father, but it has been a time of sadness here as well. My brother, Jake, the one in the sketch I sent you some months back, succumbed to pneumonia on September 10 after the Union army’s retreat from Bull Run once again. You would have liked Jake. He embraced life and ran after adventure. He was only twenty and had escaped death on the battlefield several times, but what the enemy couldn’t do, sickness did. Snuffed out his young life in less than a fortnight.
Phoebe, my sister, holds me directly responsible for Jake’s death. I don’t disagree with her. He was not much more than a boy and not ready for the army. But he showed staunch courage and acquitted himself well in battle. In spite of what Phoebe believes, I don’t think I could have convinced him to quit his company. That said, I could have been with him when he fell so ill. Then I might have been able to see he got better treatment. The army doctors try, but there are so many succumbing to illness in the camps. Pneumonia isn’t even the biggest killer. Dysentery is rampant and typhoid and measles have felled many more than bullets thus far. Although too many have died on the battlefield as well.
We are receiving news of the battle at Antietam and are told it is one of the most tragic yet with reports of thousands dead or wounded on both sides. Some other artist did the illustrations you will see in Harper’s. I had to take Jake’s body back to
Boston and have continued here with my mother for a few days. In truth, I am glad I wasn’t there to draw the scenes. I am weary of death.
How many men can we keep losing? Why don’t sensible heads find a way to peace? Bud Keeling, the reporter I may have told you about, says things have gone too far to achieve any peace now except that wrested from the enemy on the battlefield. He claims that with the Union finally claiming a victory here in the east at Antietam, there are reliable reports Mr. Lincoln will issue some sort of emancipation proclamation. Few here harbor the least doubt any longer that the President plans to put an end to slavery. The South will not accept that and so the fight will continue until the Union finally overcomes. I cannot imagine our nation divided into two countries if the Union falls. The President must find the generals to win the war.
Forgive me for continuing on and on about the war. I would like to retreat from the conflict. Perhaps go to California far from the sound of cannons. But that is not to be. It is my job to draw the scenes even if they are scenes no one, including myself, wants to see. The people deserve to know what is happening, and at times a picture can tell more than a page of words.
I hear Lexington has been occupied by the Confederates. I hope that has not caused the Shakers at Harmony Hill undue trouble. I don’t know where Sam will send me next, but wherever it is, I will take the memory of your mother’s roses with me and think upon the beauty in her garden when I am most filled with despair. Keep in mind, as I think I told you once before, that gardens lay dormant every winter and grow afresh each spring.
If you have a moment or your Sister Martha has a moment, your prayers for my mother who mourns her son would be most appreciated.
The Seeker Page 29