Fire by Night (57 page)
“I don’t know. I ain’t thought that far ahead.”
“Promise me that you’ll write to me and tell me where you are and what you’re doing. Even if it’s just a short note.”
“Why?”
“Because the war isn’t over yet—the one inside of us, I mean. You’re the only person I can talk to about what it was like to be on those battlefields, to see all those wounded men. And until we get over it, neither one of us is going to be able to figure out who we are or what we want. Am I making any sense?”
“Yeah. I reckon we’re as different from each other as a porcupine is from a polecat. But we been to the same place, and it made us the same inside, in our hearts.”
“Which one am I?” Julia said, smiling through her tears, “the porcupine or the polecat?”
Phoebe grinned. “I’ll be hanged if I know. Let’s flip a coin.”
Western Pennsylvania
October 1864
Ted’s hometown was very much as Phoebe remembered it, even after three years of war.
Three years
. The number startled her. On that warm October day in 1861, she and Ted had both signed up to fight for three years. Their enlistment would have expired this very month. Ted should be the one returning home alive and well, not her.
As the train pulled into the station, Phoebe felt like she was walking backward through time. She remembered sitting alone on the train the last time, too, watching the tearful farewells outside on the platform. Ted’s mother had clung to him, weeping, begging him not to go. She’d been so afraid she would lose him, and she had. Ted had returned to her in a coffin. Phoebe felt bad for coming back and poking at a wound that probably hadn’t healed yet. But she didn’t suppose a mother would ever get over the loss of her only son.
Phoebe stepped off the train and looked around. The hotel where she and all the other soldiers had stayed was down the street a little ways. She had already decided to take a room there for the night after she went to see Ted’s mother. Phoebe was still unsure where she would go tomorrow. Or the next day.
She walked slowly into town and turned down the main street. She realized that she was doing it again—searching all the faces she passed, looking for Ted’s. She’d done it back in Philadelphia and in Washington and on all the battlefields she’d been to. She’d done it all the way here, too. How long would it take to break the habit, to accept the fact that Ted was dead?
Phoebe paused in front of the store that had been used for a recruiting office. It was where she had met him for the first time, where he’d been given the knapsack she was now carrying. She remembered how funny he’d looked wearing his enormous uniform coat, grinning up at her and saying,
“Hey there …want to trade?”
Cut it out,
she told herself.
You can’t walk around town bawling or they’ll put you in an asylum
.
Two old men sat on the narrow porch in front of the general store, spitting tobacco. She asked them for directions to Cherry Street, the return address on the letters from Ted’s mother. They told her it wasn’t far, but Phoebe walked there slowly, as if she had miles and miles to go, clutching the pack in front of her with one hand, the valise Julia had given her for her own belongings in the other.
Number fifteen Cherry Street was a small, plain-looking house, worlds away from Julia’s enormous mansion in Philadelphia—and worlds away from Phoebe’s own rustic cabin back in West Virginia. It was the sort of place she always pictured when she heard the word
home
—a snug, one-story clapboard house surrounded by a fence that needed paint. She was about to go up the front walk and knock on the door when she noticed a string of laundry flapping in the breeze on a clothesline behind the house. She walked around to the backyard and saw Ted’s mother, reaching, bending, reaching again as she unpinned the linens and piled them in a wicker basket. Phoebe watched her for several minutes.
She looked so much like Ted with her small stature, tawny skin, and curly brown hair that Phoebe wondered what Ted’s father had contributed to his son’s appearance. Mrs. Wilson didn’t see Phoebe at first. But when she suddenly looked up, she gasped and dropped the sheet she was holding.
“I’m sorry,” Phoebe said, hurrying forward to pick it up. “I wasn’t trying to sneak up on you, Mrs. Wilson. My name’s Phoebe Bigelow, and I came—”
“Phoebe…” she repeated, studying her. “Oh, yes. You’re Ted’s friend …Ike.”
“H-how did you know?”
She pointed to his knapsack, her eyes filling with tears. “You brought his things home. Ted told me you would come.”
“He did?”
“I still have the letter that one of the nurses wrote for him. It was his last one.”
Phoebe swallowed the lump of grief that stuck in her throat. Julia must have written it for him. That was why he’d asked Julia to come that last day—that terrible last day.
“You must come inside,” Mrs. Wilson said, reaching to take Phoebe’s arm. “I’ll make tea. We have so much to talk about.”
Phoebe stayed the night. She slept in Ted’s old bed, even though it was so short her feet hung off the bottom edge. His mother hadn’t changed anything in his room since the day he left it three years ago. The next day Mrs. Wilson took Phoebe to the cemetery and showed her Ted’s grave beside his father’s.
“Please stay, just a little longer,” she begged every time Phoebe mentioned that it was time for her to go. And so she stayed, allowing her grief to heal as she shared her sorrow with Ted’s mother.
One week turned into two, then three. The presidential election was held in November, and the two women celebrated when they learned that President Lincoln had defeated the other candidate, General George McClellan. “Ted thought the world of General McClellan at first,” Phoebe said, remembering. “But he got pretty disgusted with him after he hightailed it off of the Peninsula without a decent fight. Ted would have voted for Mr. Lincoln for sure because he promised to free all the slaves.”
Phoebe was still living with Ted’s mother when the news came that General Sherman had burned the city of Atlanta. She was there at the end of November when President Lincoln proclaimed a National Day of Thanksgiving. Mrs. Wilson prepared a chicken dinner for the two of them, teaching Phoebe how to make cornbread stuffing and apple pie. Together they read in the newspapers how Union cooks had served more than one hundred thousand Thanksgiving dinners to Grant’s army in the trenches at Petersburg. And together the women followed the progress of Sherman’s march to the sea and read how he’d presented the city of Savannah, Georgia, to President Lincoln as a Christmas present.
On January 31, 1865, Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery. Phoebe and Ma Wilson wept and hugged and wept some more. “Ted told me your story, Ma,” Phoebe said. “It was his dream to find that plantation where you used to live and bring his grandmother home to you after the war.”
Ma passed the long winter nights teaching Phoebe how to sew and knit, and telling stories of everything she remembered about her childhood as a slave. She had become the mother Phoebe had never known. As the two women read about the path of destruction General Sherman left across Georgia and South Carolina, Phoebe wondered what would become of the thousands and thousands of former slaves who’d been left homeless and hungry.
“The first time I ever worked as a nurse,” she told Ma, “was the night I helped Dr. McGrath take care of some former slaves living in a shantytown.” She wondered who was taking care of them now.
In early March, President Lincoln was sworn in for a second term. Phoebe read the words of his inauguration speech aloud to Ma: ‘“Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword …so still must be said, “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.””’
Later that afternoon Phoebe stood at Ted’s grave, her arm linked through his mother’s. The long, cold winter was nearly over; spring was struggling to break through. And Phoebe knew that her own dark winter was drawing to an end. The time had come for new life to begin—in the countryside all around her and in her own life, as well.
“I have to go, Ma,” she said quietly. “The war is gonna start up again soon, and I need to go back and help take care of the soldiers.”
“No, stay here, Phoebe,” she begged. “Let me take care of you.”
Part of Phoebe longed to stay. The pull of her comfortable surroundings was strong, secured by the ties of love that had been knit between the two women. But in another part of Phoebe’s heart, she knew she had to go. Before the war started she would have jumped at the chance to stay in a home like this, where she was loved. But things were different now. Phoebe wasn’t the same person she was before the war.
“I ain’t leaving forever,” she said. “I’ll come back and see you again when the war ends.”
“Why do you have to go?”
“Because …because love ain’t meant to be kept to ourselves, Ma. It’s meant to be shared.”
“But it’s dangerous near those battlefields. I’m afraid for you. What if something happens to you, too?”
Phoebe looked down at Ted’s tombstone for a long moment, studying his name deeply etched into the stone marker. “Ted wasn’t afraid to die. He knew what he was living for. Seems like if you know why you’re living, you can face death a whole lot better. One of the last things Ted told me was that I should serve the Lord. He said it was the only thing that mattered. That’s what I aim to do.”
Mrs. Wilson wrapped her arms around Phoebe and hugged her. The tiny woman’s head didn’t even reach Phoebe’s chin. “I love you, honey. Promise me you’ll come back and see me again?”
Phoebe remembered the tearful farewells on the train platform three years ago and how she’d wished for a mother like Ted’s. Now she had one, and it broke her heart to leave her. “I’ll be back,” she said through her tears. “I promise.”
“Honestly, Julia! Is it really necessary to read three newspapers every morning?” Julia looked up from her reading to find her mother standing beside the breakfast table, her hands on her hips. “You’re getting worse than your father.”
Julia glanced at the mess she’d made, strewing papers all over the table and even onto the floor. “I’m sorry,” she said, bending to gather them. “But Nathaniel is in Petersburg, and I need to find out what’s going on there. Things are happening so fast it’s hard to keep up.”
“Well, what’s the latest news?” Mrs. Hoffman asked as she sat down to drink her coffee.
“The Rebels are all but defeated. I think the war is going to end soon.”
“Thank God,” her mother sighed. “Maybe we can all get back to normal around here.”
Julia buried her nose in the paper again. She couldn’t seem to get enough information as the war swiftly drew to a close. But each time she read about the latest battles that were taking place, she couldn’t help but wish she were there, working beside James again, caring for all the wounded soldiers. She hated observing events from far away through a newspaper, and she felt as though her own life was passing by as she watched other people live theirs. Something huge and important seemed to be missing.
“The city of Richmond fell,” Julia read to her mother a few days later. “It says that the Rebels burned everything as they fled. Much of the downtown area is in ruins.”
Mrs. Hoffman had to sit down as she absorbed the news. “I pray that your cousin Caroline made it out safely. Maybe our letters will finally get through to her again, and we can find out how she’s doing.”
“She’s probably all right. It says here that most of the residential areas of the city were spared,” Julia continued. “President Lincoln paid a visit to Richmond the day after it fell and was met by mobs of cheering slaves.”
“I wonder what will become of them all now that they’re free,” her mother said.
Julia thought of Loretta and Belle and the desperate condition they and their children had been in before she’d hired them to work in the laundry. “I wonder, too,” she said. She didn’t share with her mother the fact that Union troops had found Richmond’s citizens close to starvation. Here in Philadelphia, their family had never gone hungry for a single day during the past four years. Nathaniel had remained safe as a noncombatant, and Rosalie’s husband had paid a substitute to serve in his place. Julia couldn’t help wondering what life had been like for Caroline in Richmond all these years and if her fiance
had survived the war as a Confederate soldier.
