The Union Quilters (3 page)

She placed her hands on her sons’ shoulders and turned them toward the front room. “Check your father’s pack one more time. Make sure his rifle’s ready to go and he didn’t forget his powder and bullets.”

They nodded and obeyed. Gnawing on her lower lip, Constance balled her skirts in her fists and went to the bedroom she and Abel shared, but hesitated before entering. “Abel, you ready?” she asked as she opened the door. He had finished dressing in his best suit and stood motionless in front of the mirror above the bureau. It was old and cloudy, and offered a wavy, distorted image no matter what angle they regarded it from. Constance had learned to bob and weave and tilt her head and assemble the different glimpses in her mind, but she had long ago decided that her husband’s admiring glances were a far more accurate measure of her appearance.

He quickly turned to smile at her as if embarrassed to be caught staring at himself in the mirror. “Just imagining what I might look like in a blue Union uniform.”

She pictured a blue cap trimmed in gold covering his short, graying black curls, his shoulders square and straight in a smart blue coat with a stiff collar and brass buttons up the front. “You’d look mighty fine.” Catching her mistake, she said, more forcefully, “You
will
look fine.”

He regarded her ruefully, understanding her doubts. “When the Twelfth Pennsylvania Volunteers organized in Allegheny County back in April, they took men of color.”

“I know. I read the papers too.”

“Company I, the Zouave Cadets under Captain George W. Tanner. They guarded the Northern Central Railroad from the Mason-Dixon Line all the way to Baltimore.” He turned back to the mirror, adjusting his suit and squaring his shoulders. “They need men, Connie. Not just white men. When they see I’m a sharpshooter, they won’t waste me on guarding some railroad depot or frying up corn cakes in a cookhouse away from the front lines.”

“I’d rather they did.” Constance sat down heavily on the edge of the bed, stroking the string-pieced star quilt she had brought with her out of Virginia, wrapped around her few worldly possessions. The piecing of it, begun after Abel had proposed and promised to buy her freedom, had given her hope in hard times, but the soft cottons and muted colors offered her little comfort now. “I don’t want those white folks shooting at you, nor do I want them to capture you. What do you suppose they’d do with a colored man they catch down South in Union blue? If they don’t kill you outright, they’ll sell you so far south you’ll never know freedom again. After a year as a slave, you might find yourself wishing they’d killed you.”

He didn’t know what slavery was like, not really. She had told him, and he had seen the nature of it on his visits south, but he didn’t truly know the horror, the fear, the constant strain upon the spirit, because he had not lived it. Freeborn in a Northern city, he had bought land in central Pennsylvania and set himself up as a dairy farmer when she was still a girl. He traveled south to Virginia every few months to sell his cheeses, and Constance’s mistress had been one of his best customers. Constance had not known what to think when the cheese man, freeborn and fifteen years her senior, began seeking her out in the tobacco fields or the curing barn to tell her about life in the North. He had brought her cheese, of course, and other gifts, and after a year of this odd courtship, he had begun to talk to her about running away. He had helped other slaves, he confided, and his home in the North was a station on the Underground Railroad. He knew the best routes and manners of deception to see her safely to the North. Fearful of capture and punishment, she had refused to hide in his wagon and escape with him, even after she had accepted his offer of marriage. It took years for Abel to save up the two thousand dollars her resentful master demanded, but eventually he had purchased her freedom and brought her to the Elm Creek Valley. He hated slavery as a Christian, as a colored man, and as a loving husband, but it was not only to end slavery that he wanted to fight.

Abel took her hands and gently pulled her to her feet. “If I lay down my life for my country, if hundreds or thousands of colored men do, our deaths will serve a greater purpose.”

She wrenched her hands from his grasp. “You ask the wives and children of all those hundreds and thousands of colored men what they think, and I bet they’d say they’d rather have their menfolk alive and safe at home, and hang your greater purpose.”

“Constance,” he reproached her gently. “I don’t want to die any more than the next fellow, but I do want to fight. Our people, enslaved and free, North and South, need colored men like me to fight.”

“I know.” The Nelsons and the Grangers and the Bergstroms all said the same: If colored men fought for the United States, the nation would have no choice but to recognize them as full citizens of the land of their birth, to grant them all the rights and privileges established in the Constitution. Constance was proud of her husband and knew how he chafed at being treated as less of a man than their neighbors, but she had come to love him dearly since that long-ago day she had married him for security rather than affection, and she would not choose to sacrifice him to any cause, however noble.

“I know,” she said again, and took his hand. “You’ll make us all proud. Let’s go or we’ll be late. I don’t want the boys to miss seeing the whole town cheering their father as you march off with the other soldiers. They’ll never forget this day, not even when they’re gray-haired old men, the warʹs long over, and slavery’s just a memory.”

She would let him go and cheer him on as loudly as any proud wife, but all the while she would pray the Union Army saw fit to waste his sharpshooter’s eye on some safe, dull duty miles to the north of the nearest Confederate cannon.

 

Gerda heard the cheerful strains of a Scottish march as she leaned out the second-story window of the courthouse, hanging on to the sill with one hand and the end of the last rolled banner with the other. “I’ll toss it to you on three,” she called to Prudence Nadelfrau, who nodded from the window above the far side of the portico. Unseen within, Gerda’s sister-in-law, Anneke, held Prudence by the waist to keep her from tumbling into the street three stories below.

“Eins
,
zwei
,
drei!
” Gerda threw the rolled end of the banner to Prudence, unfurling it as it flew through the air. Too late, Prudence made a startled grab for the free end, but grasped only empty air. Muttering under her breath, Gerda rolled up the banner as it blew gaily in the wind. With their luck, it would snag on the roof of the portico and tear.

“You said ‘on three,’” Prudence protested. The faster they raced to finish their preparations, the more mistakes Prudence made, and the more frustrated Gerda became with her.” Dry’ isn’t ‘three’ ”.

“I assumed that with a name like Nadelfrau, you’d know the German.” The truth was, Gerda often slipped into her native tongue when distracted, upset, or fatigued, and at the moment, she was all three. In her foul mood, she was unwilling to admit that the fault was hers rather than her friend’s. “Let’s try again, one last time. One, two, three.”

This time, Prudence anticipated the throw and caught the other end of the banner between her palms. Quickly they pulled it smooth and tied it securely to the drapery hooks with sturdy twine. A few impudent boys who had been watching from below and jeering the ladies’ first half dozen failed attempts cheered and applauded before wandering off down the street in search of some other entertainment. For the adults, the banner and the rousing music signaled that it was almost time to begin, and they pressed forward into a semicircle at the base of the courthouse steps, where the mayor’s assistant was setting up a podium. Somewhere in the courthouse, Gerda knew, the mayor himself was rehearsing his remarks, and elsewhere, throughout the town, mothers, daughters, wives, and sweethearts were preparing themselves for a bittersweet parting.

Carrying the spool of twine and her second-best shears, Gerda met Anneke and Prudence in the hallway, her frustrations forgotten in her anticipation of the moment. They hurried downstairs to the foyer, where thirty-four of the most beautiful young women of the valley wore sashes of red, white, and blue embroidered with a name of one of the states. There had been some debate about whether only the twenty-three loyal states should be represented and not the eleven in rebellion, but Dorothea had decided that since the object of the war was a unified nation, the pageant should depict all of the United States. Near the doorway to the prison, Mary Schultz Currier was sorting out a disagreement between two young ladies who both wanted to portray Pennsylvania, and along the opposite wall, Mrs. Claverton was distributing baskets of late summer flowers to a dozen young girls while instructing them on the proper time and manner to toss them in the path of the departing soldiers. Mrs. Claverton’s daughter, Charlotte, was by her side, holding fast to her young son’s hand as she straightened one girl’s bonnet and knelt to coax another to hold her basket so the blossoms didn’t spill upon the floor. Her glossy black hair hung in glorious ringlets down her back, and although she hadn’t announced her news to the rest of their sewing circle, Gerda suspected she was again with child—unless she was simply getting fat.

Except for those who, like Dorothea, were still occupied saying private farewells to their menfolk who intended to enlist, the ladies of the sewing circle bustled about, in and outside the courthouse, putting final touches on the rally now only moments away. Gerda wished she could steal a private moment alone with Jonathan to bid him a proper good-bye, but she knew it was unlikely. He knew her heart, she told herself resolutely, and she knew his, and no words they could exchange in the minutes before he set out could make their feelings any clearer to one other. They had promised to write as often as they could, although Gerda had prepared herself to send three letters for each one she received from the battlefield. A few days before, she had given Jonathan the gift of an ingenious writing case with a hard surface suitable to serve as a lap desk and compartments for paper, pens, nibs, and two small bottles of ink. She had doubted that he would be able to find them in the soldiers’ camps or field hospitals and wanted to remove any potential impediment to their continued intercourse. He had thanked her profusely, and assured her that he could transport the writing case with his medical supplies by wagon and would not have to carry it on his back. “My first letter will be to you, to describe our camp,” he had promised, knowing how she longed to share his experience, to witness the war through his eyes, the good and the bad, the mundane and the harrowing. She hoped in turn to offer him as much comfort and encouragement as the written word could provide.

They had both long believed that war was inevitable, their certainty going as far back as the previous December when South Carolina had seceded from the Union. In those days, most of their neighbors had believed that the standing national army could quickly and decisively quell any minor skirmishes that might erupt, and some northern newspapers pleaded for negotiations and appeasement.

Gerda felt as if she had held her breath all through that Christmas season and into the New Year, waiting for President Buchanan to declare war, although he had seemed inclined to sit out the rest of his term without taking action and to pass along the crisis to Mr. Lincoln once he took office. At times she marveled that life in Water’ s Ford went on as it always had. Neighbors called, and worked, and gossiped, and feuded, and made merry. Gerda took pride and pleasure in cooking three meals a day for herself, Hans, and Anneke, glad to be spared the tedious work of the household sewing, which thankfully Anneke enjoyed. She helped Anneke keep house and care for two-year-old David and Stephen, a pair of charming and delightful boys who got into everything their weary parents and distracted aunt forgot to put out of reach. And at least once a week, there was Jonathan.

Unless he was busy tending to an ailing neighbor, Jonathan came for supper every Saturday afternoon, as he had almost without interruption for years. He and Gerda would linger at the table hours after Anneke had cleared the dishes away, poring over the latest newspapers from Philadelphia and Baltimore and New York as well as the Copperhead rag out of Bellefonte, dissecting and debating every last detail until Hans cleared his throat and pointed out that unless Jonathan intended to stay the night, he should leave for home while his horse still had enough light to see by. But for all their talk and worry and waiting, day after day had passed with only increasingly agitated newspaper stories to suggest that South Carolina’s secession had changed anything for the residents of their rural Pennsylvania valley. So Gerda had planned her spring garden by the warmth of the fireside and waited for winter to end, pondering the Union blockade of Charleston Harbor and wondering how much longer Major Robert Anderson’s men would be able to hold out at Fort Sumter, their supplies and hopes for reinforcements dwindling after the
Star of the West
was turned back from Charleston Harbor.

Whenever the sewing circle had gathered at Two Bears Farm for a quilting bee, their conversation had quickly turned to the latest news from beyond the Elm Creek Valley. While many women of their acquaintance were content to think of Water’s Ford as their entire world, the women of the sewing circle—the most well read and well informed of Gerda’s acquaintance—knew their shelter was illusory. Surrounded by the rolling Appalachians, with the nearest train station a difficult half day’s ride through the southern pass, they had often felt isolated from the outside world, but the threat against their nation had filled them with apprehension, for they had known that even if war did not find them in their homes, their men would go forth to meet it.

By the end of February, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas had seceded from the Union and joined with South Carolina to form the Confederate States of America, giving the sewing circle much to speculate about and worry over. Letters from friends and family in those far-flung states had been passed around the circle and analyzed line by line. “To think, my cousin now lives in a foreign land,” Charlotte had marveled as she handed Dorothea a letter recently arrived from North Carolina.