by Cindy Kelley
“Colonel Chapman,” Elijah said.
“Yes, yes. Colonel Chapman,” the clerk said.
“Those are records from the commanders at the fort?” Elijah asked.
“Not just the commanders. The enlisted and officers alike. We wanted an accurate count for our county records. Figured someday it might matter what the population of this area swelled to during the war.”
“Good thinking,” Elijah said. “I’m just a little confused, then, as to why the name we’re looking for isn’t there.”
The clerk sighed impatiently. “These are all the names of all the Federals that were in a twenty-mile radius of Dover from ’62 through ’65.
“We think John Chapman was a Confederate,” Elijah said.
The clerk raised his brows. “That right? Well that makes a difference, yes sir. That makes a big difference.” He slammed the book closed, reached under the counter and pulled out another book. This one was treated a little more reverently as he gently turned to a section that was bound with a ribbon.
“These are names of the Confederate war heroes that served at Donelson before General Buckner surrendered to General Grant.”
He started at the top of one column and went down row after row of names. “You know they say when we lost Donelson, we lost the war, yes sir. Gave the Yanks the darn rivers to move supplies and whatnot. Brave men tried to hold ’em off—did it, too, for a while, but they were just outrationed. Yankees had twice as many men and twice as much ammunition.
“Here he is!” the clerk said. He turned the book around so that Elijah and Mercy could see for themselves. “Says right there, John Chapman, September, 1861. He was there, all right.”
“Is there any other information about him?” Mercy asked, leaning closer to look at the page.
“It should show the age and the military man’s home of record,” the clerk answered. “And in some cases it gives the profession before they were soldiers. Some men answered the question, but some felt like we were snooping into something that was none of our affair.”
Elijah followed the line from Chapman’s name across the page. “Doesn’t have his age … but it does list his home of record as McIntosh County, Georgia.”
“Does it give his profession?” Mercy asked.
Elijah traced his finger down to the next row where the words rice plantation owner had been scribbled into the small space. Mercy turned to look up at Elijah.
“A plantation in Georgia,” she said. “All along I’ve been thinking Tennessee.”
“So now, we think Georgia.” He said it with conviction, but prayed this was the lead they needed to get her home. He turned to the clerk and asked the next logical question.
“Do you have a map?”
Chapter Ten
Elijah waited with Isaac in front of the Dover train depot. Isaac paced and Elijah kept an eye peeled for Mercy.
“Maybe she run again,” Isaac said.
“Not without Lucky,” Elijah said.
Isaac nodded. “That be true, Cap’n.”
Finally, Mercy came from the general direction of the station and headed straight for them. Isaac beamed.
“You be right, Cap’n. Here she comes.”
“You all right?” Elijah asked her.
She flushed. “Yes.”
“Good. The stationmaster says the tracks are intact as far as Savannah.”
“I know we talked about taking the train, but I’ve been thinking about it and I say we ride the horses the rest of the way,” she said.
“It’s five hundred miles. That’ll take us a week,” Elijah said. “It would be hard on the horses and on us.”
“You hear that, Miss Mercy?” Isaac asked. “It be hard on us.”
She ignored him, looking at Elijah, and frowned. “I thought you were in the cavalry.”
“I am,” he said.
She raised her brows. “Getting soft, Captain?”
“You’ve been through a lot physically,” he said. “The train would be for your benefit.”
“I don’t want you to spend any more of your money on my account,” she said.
“The tickets have already been purchased.”
Her jaw dropped. “Then return them and get your money back.”
“I can’t. Besides, the horses have already been loaded into the freight car,” he said.
“Get them off! Get Lucky off that train. I can’t believe you did all of this without consulting me!”
“Cap’n had to decide on account a’ da train leaving soon, and you was in dat outhouse a terrible long time,” Isaac said.
The blush started at her neck and worked its way up. Elijah lifted a brow at Isaac, who suddenly found the ground fascinating.
Elijah broke the uncomfortable silence. “If we take the train, we can be in Savannah in two days. The plantation is a day’s ride from there. If it’s the wrong place, at least we’ll know quickly and I won’t be burning through all my military leave.”
“That make sense,” Isaac said. “Don’tcha think that make sense, Miss Mercy?”
“That does make sense,” she conceded.
“Besides, I would think you’d be in a hurry to get there,” Elijah said. “It could be the answer to all your questions.”
She nodded, but didn’t feel sure at all. “I know. It could be.”
Isaac grinned. “Glory be, we takin’ the train!”
Since Isaac wasn’t permitted to ride as a passenger in the white’s only car, Mercy and Elijah rode with him in the colored car. Once they were under way, the conductor came through to collect their tickets. “You turn your eyes out those windows,” he told them, “and you’ll see things that’ll make your heart bleed for the towns we pass through. It’s a pitiful sight to behold what war does to everything.”
The conductor had been right. In the passing scenery, over the next two days, they saw indelible scars across the land General Sherman and his army had left in the wake of their devastating march to the sea. Rolling through the town of Marietta, Georgia, they saw burned-out skeletal remains of buildings that spoke of a previously thriving town. Brick chimneys, once the heartbeats of family homes, stood like abandoned sentries against the otherwise beautifully green countryside. But over and over again, they witnessed teams of people wielding hammer against nail, frames being erected over charred ground and piles of rubble. Towns were being reborn.
It was the middle of the morning when they arrived in Savannah, leaving them plenty of time to begin the ride toward their final destination. At the end of the line, Isaac was even more enthralled with traveling by rail than he had been when they started.
“Was plannin’ on being a sheriff when I’m all growed up, but maybe I might get me a conductor job,” Isaac told Mercy as they waited for the horses to be unloaded from the freight car.
“I think that’s a fine idea,” Mercy said. “You might even want to be the engineer. Be the man who drives the train down the tracks.”
Isaac grinned. “I just might do that. Or I just might be a train-ridin’ engineer who is a lawman too. I could see me the whole country that way and keep da peace besides.”
Mercy smiled. “It sounds ambitious, but I think you could do it, Isaac.”
“I been pesterin’ da Cap’n for some shootin’ lessons, but he says no on account of da laws ’bout Negroes and guns.”
“Someday those laws will change,” Mercy said. “But until then, Elijah’s right. You can’t break the law—even when it’s an unfair law.”
Elijah joined them. “I spoke to the stationmaster. He knows the Chapman Plantation,” he said. “We head south from here.”
Mercy had been vaguely aware of the change in landscape since she left St. Louis, the different types of trees, grass, and spring flowers, but now, riding through Georgia, she couldn’t help but appreciate
the scent of pine and the perfume of yellow jasmine. Above them, gray moss hung like a gossamer veil from the branches of cypress and magnolia trees. When they arrived at the mouth of the Altamaha River, she could smell the water and feel the slick humidity of the air across her skin. She felt … content. How could that be? Mercy looked around her with heightened senses. It wasn’t familiar. But it was comfortable.
They skirted the edge of Darien in the late afternoon. According to their map, the town was the last stepping-stone to the Chapman Plantation. Even from the fringes of the place, they could see ruin and devastation everywhere. But people here were rebuilding too. Mercy could hear the monotonous sound of hammer hitting nail after nail somewhere in the bowels of the town. The harbor to the Altamaha Sound boasted a few small fishing boats tied to the dock.
The road to the Chapman Plantation was as fragrant as it was beautiful. Ten-foot-high walls of wild myrtle lined the road, and white dogwoods and a bright spectacle of magnolia blossoms spilled across the dark green foliage and onto the red clay soil of the path. The perfumed scent of the flowers, the earth, and the nearby water teased Mercy’s memory. At least she thought it did, but she worried it was more a hopeful mind-set than anything else—hope that someone from the Chapman Plantation could give her some clue to her identity; hope that there would be a moment when life wouldn’t be such a mystery. They rounded a bend in the road and finally saw a large white house in the distance. Even from her vantage point of a quarter mile away, she could see how imposing the structure was. Twin chimneys stood at either end, tall white columns lined the front, and wide matching verandas on the first and second floor looked out upon lush green grass. To the side of the house, she could just make out the edge of the rice fields.
“Whoa!” Elijah called out to his horse. Mercy and Isaac stopped on either side of him. They all stared at the house.
“At least it’s still standing,” Mercy said.
“I think there’s something we need to talk about before we go any farther,” Elijah said.
“What?” Mercy asked.
“I’m wondering if you want me and Isaac to wait here while you go the rest of the way alone. If the people in that house know you, it might be a moment you want to keep private.”
She didn’t hesitate. “No. You’ve come this far with me. I think you should be there whether this is the place or not.”
“All right. But if we spend any time here, then I think it’s prudent we don’t say much about my … Northern background,” Elijah said. He turned and looked at Isaac. “While we’re here, you need to call me Elijah, Isaac. Not Captain, all right?”
“All right, Cap’n … Elijah,” Isaac said.
He turned back toward Mercy. “The wounds in the country after the war—particularly here in the South, are fresh and painful. If these people do know you, then they’ll have enough to adjust to with your sudden appearance without adding a Yankee to the mix.”
Mercy nodded. “Agreed. But surely they’ll ask who you are to me.”
“We’ll tell them the truth. I’m the man who escorted you home,” Elijah said. “Best case, they turn out to be your family. Then I’m sure they’ll be so happy to see you, it won’t matter who I am in the short time I’ll be with them.”
“What do you mean?”
“If this is the right place, the last thing you need is for me to stay,” he said.
“It’s late in the day. You can’t just turn around and leave. You will at least spend the night?”
He nodded. “All right. Are you ready to knock on the door?”
Mercy’s thoughts flew back to that awful day over a year ago when she awoke in Doc Abe’s clinic. “Your mind is most likely protecting you from what was certainly a traumatic experience. I can hear a trace of the South in your speech. Where are you from?” Her answer that day had been “I don’t know,” but now she might be on the precipice of finding out—or not. The entire thing might be a mistake. A very expensive, time-consuming mistake.
She didn’t immediately answer him. She just stared at the house in the distance.
“Mercy?”
“What if I just wanted to believe I knew the man in that portrait?”
“I think you need to trust your instincts,” Elijah said.
“My instincts say to turn around and ride away as fast as I can.”
“That’s not instinct. That’s fear. What are you afraid of?”
“The truth!” She turned and looked at him. “I’m not sure what scares me more though—that someone in that house may have those answers or that they won’t know me at all.”
Mercy gave Lucky a nudge and they started forward again.
Chapter Eleven
They’d barely traveled ten feet down the long road toward the house when a Negro boy came crashing out of the tall green wall of wild myrtle, his bare feet digging into the road and nearly catapulting him right into the path of Mercy and her horse.
Lucky stopped before she even gave him the signal. Elijah and Isaac did the same. The boy’s eyes widened. “Sorry, missus.”
“It’s all right,” Mercy said. She dismounted. “Can you tell us if we’re at the Chapman Plantation?”
The boy took a look behind him at the wall of green, then looked at her. “Yassum. This be da Chapman Plantation.”
A man on horseback came down the road toward them. The boy seemed to shrink and stepped closer to be in Lucky’s shadow—then glanced at the green hedge again. Mercy looked toward the greenery and nearly gasped when she saw the black face of a man peering out.
The rider stopped, and even from her vantage point on the other side of Lucky, Mercy could see he was handsome and fair skinned, with light blond hair. He didn’t acknowledge anyone but the boy.
“What are you doing out here, Moby? Aren’t you supposed to be working?”
Moby bobbed his head. “Yassuh, Mista’ Beau. Sorry, sir.”
The green wall rustled and the head in the bushes became a large Negro man, who glared at the boy. The man on horseback looked at him. “Bram? Is there a problem?”
“Caught Moby napping, suh. He say he sick but he don’t run like he sick,” Bram answered.
“Get yourself on back to work then, Moby. You’re not paid to sleep in the fields.”
“Yassuh,” Moby said. “Sorry, Mista’ Beau.”
Mercy felt sorry for the boy as he made his way back toward the hedge and the angry-looking man called Bram. The two of them went back through the bushes and disappeared.
Mercy stepped out from beside Lucky, and the man put a hand across his forehead to shield his eyes from the late afternoon sun.
“We don’t mean to be trespassing,” Mercy said, “but we’re hoping to see someone …”
“I don’t believe it …” He quickly dismounted and came toward her.
Mercy’s heartbeat picked up speed. She didn’t know him, but the slight tilt of his head, his eyes that never left her face, the way his hands clenched at his sides as he walked toward her, all spoke of a man who recognized her.
Mercy sensed, rather than saw, Elijah dismount as the man closed the distance toward her. He was young, his face unlined and nose slightly reddened from the sun. He started to say something, then stopped. He opened his mouth to speak again, but then just ran his tongue over his bottom lip as he stared at her.
Mercy squirmed under his gaze. She finally broke the silence. “I don’t know if I’m in the right place …”
“It is really you,” the man said, quickly crossing the last few steps between them. He wrapped his arms around her and held her close. Mercy stiffened from the intimate contact with the stranger. He was only a few inches taller than she was, allowing her to look over his shoulder at Elijah, whom she noted looked simultaneously concerned, relieved—and a little sad. Though it seemed like a long time, the embrace lasted only a few seconds before
the man stepped back and frowned.
“I truly thought you were dead!” he said. “Where the devil have you been, Charlotte?”
For a moment, it seemed as though time stopped. Charlotte? He called me Charlotte. Is this possible? Could I have finally found someone who knew me before the war? Now it was her turn to be tongue-tied.
She’d often thought about the moment when she might finally meet someone from her past—and here it was. But she had no idea what to say. In fact, she couldn’t force words out even when she tried. The man’s frown deepened, and he turned from her and stuck out his hand toward Elijah.
“It seems the proverbial cat’s got Charlotte’s tongue.” He spoke with a pronounced Southern drawl. “I’m Beauregard Chapman. People call me Beau. And you are …?”
“Elijah Hale.”
Mercy watched the two of them shake hands and had the most jarring thought. What if he’s my husband? Oh, please, God … don’t let that be true. Don’t let me be married. A husband I can’t remember would be too much right now. Too much …
Beau turned to regard Mercy once again. “I can’t believe you’re here.”
She finally found her voice. “Neither can I.”
“It’s astonishing. Have you been to the house yet?”
She shook her head. “Umm … no. Not yet. We were on the way. But there’s something I should tell you. I don’t re—”
“I know, I know. You don’t regret your actions,” he said. Then he threw his arm across her shoulders and grinned. “Some things never change, big sister. Some things never change.”
She nearly buckled with relief. Sister? He’s my brother. Not my husband. My brother! He’s family … my family.
She automatically looked at Elijah with wide eyes. “I have a brother.”
Elijah smiled in response. “So it seems.”
Beau dropped his arm from around Mercy’s shoulders and looked at Elijah. “My apologies. I didn’t make that clear when I introduced myself.” He tilted his head again and studied Elijah, then Isaac, who had yet to say a word.