The Secrets of Mary Bowser (53 page)

Not a half hour after we started walking, it began to rain. At first I was glad for it, hoping the water would wash away some of the blood, some of my fear, too. But the drops came hard and fast. The angry deluge soaked us through, Sophronia’s teeth chattering from the cold. We left the road for what cover the woods offered, none of us remarking on the artillery rounds that burst out from time to time, thundering yet closer than they had in Richmond.

We made slow progress as we navigated the mud-thick tangle of trees. Just a quarter mile from the road the land was cleared, but we didn’t dare edge along those fields. A Virginia farmer might not take too kindly to discovering three trespassers on his land, one a fugitive slave and another a killer.

A killer. That’s what I was. What in an instant, I had made myself.

The razor-sharp realization cut at me, when from deep in the woods a man shouted, “Halt there. Identify yourselves, and state your business.”

“My name is Elizabeth Van Lew, and these are my servants.” Bet gestured for us to come stand beside her. “We were traveling on New Market Road when our cart horse went lame. We are trying to find Darbytown, but I fear we’ve gotten lost in this downpour.”

I heard tree limbs sway and leaves rustle as the man pushed closer. But all I could see was the glint of a bayonet.

“Miss Van Lew? Is that really you?” Wonder curled the soldier’s voice. “I wouldn’t hardly have recognized you, you’ve grown so thin.”

Bet squinted into the rain, frowning and shaking her head in confusion.

With another bout of rustling, the scout came into view, asking, “Don’t you know your old friend?”

I gasped in surprise. “I’d know that gap tooth of yours anywhere, George Patterson. Only you ought to know by now, these days I answer to Mrs. Bowser.”

Hattie’s husband shouldered his rifle as he came up close to us. “I stand corrected, Mrs. Bowser. But I do suppose there’s some correction warranted all the way around. You three look like you’ve had a sight more trouble than just a horse gone lame.”

Bet was ready to spin him who knows what story, but I spoke up before she could, explaining that Sophronia was in the family way, and we needed to get her someplace she could have her baby in freedom. I told him that Bet was a Unionist and an ally, maybe Wilson had mentioned her to him. When he nodded, I added that I’d bloodied myself shooting our horse, to put it out of its misery. To keep him from questioning my tale, I asked what he was doing wandering by himself in the Virginia countryside.

“Reconnaissance.” He drew himself up, looking more of a man than the boy I remembered. “We took New Market Heights yesterday, Fort Harrison as well. Spread the Rebel lines thinner than ever, giving us some vantage from which to push them back toward Richmond.” But then the pride seeped out of him, and he seemed older still. “Only, I hate to have to tell you. Wilson’s been shot.”

Shot. The word hit me hard. Hard as the recoil from the bullet I put into a man hours before.

The uncertainty of all the months I’d feared my husband killed or captured was wholly eclipsed by the hellish surety of knowing he was wounded. All I could do now was follow, as George led us through the battle-weary Virginia countryside.

The sky brightened into day but held its grayish hue. We stopped at Four Mile Creek, where Bet tore a makeshift washing cloth from her underskirt. I stood numb while she cleaned my face and hair and hands. I felt like I was outside myself, watching everything that happened as though we were players on a stage.

From Lavinia Whitlock to Flora Stuart, these three years I’d witnessed a stunning sorority of grief. I wanted no part of that sisterhood. But it didn’t much matter what I wanted, or what I’d worked for or prayed for all this time. Not now that my husband was shot.

The stun that had cloaked us since our encounter with the Confederate weighed heavier as we walked on, George’s report choking not just words but also the very breath from me. Every minute he led us along might be taken from the death hour. The hour Papa sat with Mama. The hour Bet sat with Papa. An hour I didn’t get with either of them.

That death might take my husband, this knowledge had been the ugly companion plaguing me these many months. That he might die with me so near but still not there, this was a new horror in a world I hadn’t thought could grow more horrible.

Here at last was the singular truth of war: A hundred thousand soldiers might take the field together, yet each who fell could die alone.

At last we reached the Union encampment, rows and rows of low, bone-hued tents, hundreds of negro soldiers milling between them. Our foursome drew plenty of curious stares as we made our way along the trampled meadow grass to a larger tent, tall enough for a man to stand in and wide enough for several rows of bed-cots. Bet and Sophronia waited beneath the yellow hospital flag while I followed George inside. Followed to the cot that held my husband, the trouser leg of his uniform cut away, a bloodied bandage wound tight against his bare thigh.

Wilson lay still. Too still for my comfort. It seemed nothing could be so quiet and peaceful amid all these years of war. Seeing the lids closed heavy on his eyes, my brain made out the words
too late, too late
.

The air within the tent was an acrid distillation of the deathly stench that hung so often upon the streets of Richmond. Fearful my husband would never look on me again in this world, I touched the back of my hand to his cheek, a tender, tentative farewell. I nearly didn’t believe it when those dear eyelids blinked slowly open.

He looked thunderstruck from me to George and back again. “Tell Doc I must be delirious. I’m having visions of a ministering angel.”

“No angel here,” I said. “Just a woman who loves you.”

A woman whose each braced muscle eased again, though the fear of losing my husband was yet but palliated. I bent and kissed his brow, not bothering to hold to modesty in front of the nurses and the other injured soldiers.

George muttered something about seeing to Sophronia and Bet, and exited the tent. One of the nurses offered me a small stool, and I sat as close to Wilson as I could, willing myself courage to utter the question I couldn’t hold from asking but wasn’t sure I was ready to hear answered. “What does the doctor say?”

“The ball passed through my leg and right out the other side, missed the bone entirely. Figures I’ll be fine, maybe just a limp if the muscle doesn’t heal right.” The seven long months since I’d last laid eyes on him might have been as many years, for all that time had worked upon him. “Hurts so bad, I didn’t believe it when the surgeon told me I was a lucky man. But seeing you, I guess he’s right. How’d you come to be out here just now?”

“Sophronia’s got herself in the family way. Bet and I were trying to bring her out to one of the contraband camps. We lost our horse and were wandering around afoot when George happened upon us, brought us back here.” Not wanting to dwell on what I wasn’t telling, I leaned forward and kissed my husband again.

After promising me he wasn’t suffering much, he grinned and told me I looked terrible. “I suppose that comes from having to eat your own cooking.”

“My poor cooking can’t do what little food there is much harm,” I said. “General Grant’s doing the best job yet of keeping Richmond hungry. Summer was hard enough, who knows what winter will bring.”

“Winter might bring peace, if we take the city in the next month or two. If we don’t, Grant will hold the line tight, then press it forward in spring.” He squeezed my hand with all the strength a wounded man might muster. “It won’t be any longer than that. Even Lee’s men know it, you can feel it along the Petersburg line. Victory’s coming, and freedom with it.”

Coming
and
already came
weren’t the same, and in the difference between them, it was hard for a soldier’s wife to rest easy. “Plenty more battles to be fought before then,” I said.

“The worst thing I faced in this war wasn’t in battle.” He shifted, pain flashing across his face. “Back in May, when we landed at Bermuda Hundred and established Fort Pocahontas, one of our patrols came upon a local planter. Eppes Clayton—a true FFV and nasty as a slave-owner comes, from what folks said. One of the men in the 1st had been his slave, and when they brought Clayton into camp, General Wild ordered the private to whip him.

“That soldier must have given him twenty lashes. And then he handed the whip over to some colored ladies. Fugitive slaves who’d also belonged to Clayton, they’d fled to the fort just days before. Each of those women took up the whip and set another fifteen marks across Clatyon’s back. People were cheering as though the whipping was a party, with General Wild smiling and clapping like he was watching one of them coon shows they love so much up North. That man led us into battle, and still we were nothing more than that to him.”

The remembrance turned my husband’s features nearly ugly. “Wild ordered the chaplain to preach a sermon on the whipping, and we all had to stand round and give praise while he blustered about how the righteous demanded blood.”

“Hebrews 9:22,” I said. “
And almost all things are by the law purged with blood; and without shedding of blood is no remission
. McNiven told me John Brown preached it over and over, when he was being held at Charlestown after Harper’s Ferry.”

Wilson didn’t find much comfort in that. “Brown is dead. But there are plenty of negroes who are going to be living once this war is over. If all we have is bloodlust, what kind of life will freedom bring? So long as we want to hurt and harm even when there’s no battle raging, how different are we from the overseers and slaveholders?”

I felt the weight of the water jug in my hands, the force of my foot ramming the Confederate’s skull. The ease with which I picked up the gun, pulled the trigger, and shot him dead.

What would my husband think when he learned what I’d done? What would he make me think of myself?

Screams erupted outside the tent. A nurse rushed in, addressing me in a hushed, official tone. “Two of our scouts were ambushed an hour past. The surgeon is operating now. You’ll have to go, so I can make up places for them.”

Wilson began to protest, but I shook my head, glad enough to take my leave from our conversation.

George had settled Sophronia and Bet before a sputtering campfire, where they breakfasted on what rations of hardtack he managed to wrangle from his fellow soldiers. He offered me a tin plate, but I waved it away.

“What we do now?” Sophronia asked.

“The supply wagons come later today. They’ll take Wilson and the rest of the wounded out of the field,” George said. “They can bring you to Bermuda Hundred, and from there you’ll go by boat out to Fort Monroe. Thousands of former slaves are living there, with ladies from up North come to teach them reading and writing. Including that Quakeress you were always so fond of, Mary.”

“Zinnie Moore?”

“Yes indeed. She came down when we did, said she meant to do whatever she could to aid the freedmen. Though with her funny way of speaking, who knows how those poor negroes will sound when she’s done with them.”

I tried to smile at George’s joke. But I was haunted by the words Zinnie had said to me the day I left the sewing circle.
Take care that neither a blow to thy body nor a mark on thy soul will be the consequence of whatever work thou chooses
. The patchwork of lamp-oil burns no longer pained my flesh. But I felt the fresh-made mark upon my soul keenly.

“You come, too?” Sophronia’s face was pinched with worry.

I shook my head. “I have to get back to Richmond. It would be too much work for Hortense with both of us gone, and—”

Bet cut me off. “Perhaps you ought to go with Sophronia.”

I stared at her, not believing she meant for me to give up our spying. “Like I said, there’s work to be done in the Gray House. I best be back there.”

Bet’s eyes bore icy blue into mine. “Whatever work is to be done will be seen to one way or another. I think it best for you to go out to Fort Monroe.”

I told myself she just wanted to believe it didn’t matter whether I was in Richmond or no, because she never could bear to admit how much of the espionage was my doing. But when I looked down and saw the dance of bloodstains along the hem of my skirt, for once I wondered if maybe Bet was right.

The rain let up by mid-morning, and George somehow connived to move Wilson out of the hospital tent for a few hours. I was plenty apprehensive when I took my place beside where he sat wrapped in an army-issue blanket, his back propped up against the trunk of a maple tree. Much as I longed to be with my husband, I wasn’t any too desirous of taking up the conversation we’d left off.

I waited until he was eating a bit of salt pork and cornmeal fry, then said, “Maybe I ought to stay and tend you while that wound is healing. After you’re well, I can go out to Fort Monroe. Bet suggested I help with the teaching at the school there.”

He set down his fork and looked at me hard. “When Bet means to get you into danger, you’re glad enough to take up whatever she proposes. Lord knows, I’ve tried to make my peace with that. But since when do you let her talk you into something so fiddle-come-foolish as giving up important work? Don’t you think what you’ve been doing means more to slaves’ freedom than teaching a bunch of
ABC
s?”

I’d long grown leery of Bet drawing me into danger. But what I did just hours earlier proved I had my own vast well of danger, bubbling hot-headed and murderous, inside of me.

“What’s the matter?” Wilson asked. “What’s keeping you from going back to Richmond?”

I kept my gaze on those dull tines, unable to meet his eyes as I told him everything that passed with that Confederate. Once I related it all, I swallowed hard over the lump of shame in my throat and forced myself to look up, as I asked if he was angry.

“Of course I’m angry. Maniac like that, threatening my wife, Sophronia, even that Crazy Bet. What sort of a man wouldn’t be angry to hear it, knowing he was nowhere near to protect you?”

“I mean, are you angry at me?”