Widow of Gettysburg (42 page)

She scuttled after him out the door, and he closed it on her opportunity.

Nerves buzzing like the flies near her patients, Liberty rapped her knuckles on the door at 319 South Washington Street, and tried to imagine what she would say when Bella opened the door. Soggy heat wrapped around her like a used towel, until sweat soaked her already soiled dress. She knocked again, and looked down at her Sunday best, now her everyday worst. Rumpled, stained, limp. She looked like a
wilted tulip trampled in the mud, and felt like it too.

Still no answer. Liberty opened one of the shutters and peered in through the window. There was a book lying on the kitchen table. She could just read the title on the cover.
Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation.

She went back to the door and pounded harder.

“Bella? Please let me in, if you’re in there!”

An older woman Liberty recognized as the Fosters’ washerwoman came up to her then. “Bella’s gone, baby. Left four days ago with some gentleman from Philadelphia.”

The reporter from Philadelphia?
“I need to get in, I need to see that book.”

“Why?” Her tone was not sharp. Why indeed?

“I think there may be some information in it about my—my—Bella.” Her head still ached.

“Your Bella?” She smiled. “And who are you?”

“Liberty Holloway. Bella is my—”
Hired help. Mother?
Somehow, she could not bring herself to complete the sentence.

“I know who Bella is, child. And I know who you are too.”

“You do?”

She nodded, dark eyes twinkling. “You are special to Bella. And somehow I know, that if she were home, she would fling open that door to you and welcome you in to her table for a cup of tea, like she always does for me.”

Remembering her manners, Liberty extended a hand. “I don’t believe we’ve properly met.”

The woman grasped it with her gnarled hand. “You can call me Aunt Hester. Everyone does. Now. Let me see if I can help you out, baby.”

She walked around to the back of the house and felt around a window until her fingers pulled a key from a deep notch in a sill. Liberty stood back while Aunt Hester jiggled the key in the back door and swung it wide for Liberty.

“I’ll come by and check on you in a little bit to see how you’re
getting along. But for now I best get back to my laundry while the sun still shines.”

And Liberty stood in Bella’s house for the first time in her life, alone. It was tidy, but not clean at the moment. Dust swirled in the sunbeams and layered the furniture, confirming that Bella had not been here in days.

Fatigue settled on Liberty. She sagged into a chair at the small kitchen table and opened Fanny Kemble’s
Journal
, ashamed that she had never wondered much about Bella’s life prior to Gettysburg.

As she began reading the book, she was transported to a time and place completely foreign to her. Deeper and deeper she sunk into the text. Then she saw it—the first mention of Bella, marked by the presence of Harrison’s card.

Daphne and Bella, twin sisters. Mulatto, about twelve years old, although neither of them know their birthday. The only living children of Judy. Five siblings in the grave. Bella asked me to teach her to read. It is illegal for her to read, and just as illegal for me to teach her. But I believe I shall do it. They also begged for flannel, the red and cream pinstripe being an especial favorite.

Liberty stopped. The flannel patch of her baby quilt, now part of Silas’s crutch, grew bright in her mind. She pressed a hand to her forehead and flipped through a few more pages.

Judy told me a miserable story of her former experiences on the plantation under Mr. K—’s overseership. It seems that Bella and Daphne were born of Mr. K—, who forced her, flogged her severely for having resisted him, and then sent her off, as a further punishment, to Five Pound—a horrible swamp in a remote corner of the estate, to which the slaves are sometimes banished for such offences as are not sufficiently atoned for by the lash.

Liberty put down the book. Was this Judy her own grandmother? She could not fathom such an experience, and slowly, Bella’s resistance to Silas fell into place.

Later in the journal, Liberty read that not only was Judy forced and flogged by Roswell King Jr., but that after she bore his children, his wife
came to the hospital, flogged her again, and sent her back to Five Pound. Could such horrific accounts be believed?

As if in anticipation of Liberty’s reaction, Fanny Kemble had written:
I make no comment on these terrible stories, and tell them to you as nearly as possible in the perfectly plain unvarnished manner in which they are told to me. I do not wish to add to, or perhaps I ought to say take away from, the effect of such narrations by amplifying the simple horror and misery of their bare details.

This was the life Bella had escaped. Chills swept over Liberty’s skin.

But when she read the beginning of the next chapter, she thought she was going to be sick.

Found Bella, Judy’s girl, near death on the floor of the hospital today. She had taken a knife with which she sought to defend her mother against Mr. K— last week, and he had used it to gash her neck instead, then flogged her to within an inch of life. I have sent for Mr. Holmes, the Darien town physician immediately. Keep in mind, the girl is twelve years old. I fear that by next year, Mr. K— will drag her into his bed as well.

He had gashed Bella’s neck?
But Liberty had never seen a scar.

She had never seen her neck.

In an entry dated some months later:
Young Bella is not safe from Mr. K—. He has taken her, though she fights, to his bed. She bears new scars for every time. Thank goodness her menses has not yet begun. I have seen girls of fourteen with babies of their ow—

Enough!
Liberty shoved the book away from her and let it thud to the floor. She buried her face in her arms as the voices of Aunt Helen and Bella clashed together in her mind, along with the words of Lt. Pierce Butler Holmes, who had called Liberty the very likeness of Roswell King Jr. Her heart bled as the lines of the
Journal
resounded in her spirit. She wept for Bella, for Judy, for untold numbers of women whose stories had never been recorded. She wept because she had never once asked Bella what her life was like before she knew her, had not fully considered the agony the last month’s ordeal must have meant to her.

She wept.

The door creaked on its hinges, and Liberty looked up to find Aunt Hester standing over her. In an instant, Aunt Hester wrapped her arms around Libbie, in a lye soap-scented squeeze. Liberty melted into it, wet Aunt Hester’s shoulder with her tears.

“There, there, honey child,” she cooed. “You found what you was lookin’ for, didn’t you now? There, there. You can tell me about it.”

Liberty did. Aunt Hester’s face crinkled as she nodded throughout the story, peppering it with “That’s just so,” and “That’s the way it was, too.”

“But Aunt Hester, could Bella be my mother? Is this my heritage, too?”

A sad smile pushed the wrinkles back on Aunt Liz’s face. “She’s never told me so. But if Bella Jamison is your mama, you can be sure of one thing. She would have to love you more than life itself to do what she did for you. Don’t you see that, child? This—” She thumped her knuckles on the journal. “This is what she protected you from. The child of a slave is born a slave, even if the father is free and white. Bella didn’t want any child of hers to have any kind of life like she knew. So she gave you up, like Moses’s mama in the Bible. She thought it was better you didn’t know.”

Liberty’s head spun.
Born a slave?
She pushed back from the table and began to rise. Her legs didn’t hold her, and she stumbled over the table.

“You sick? Lie down, child.” Aunt Hester ushered her over to the couch in the front room.

“I’m s-s-so cold.” Liberty’s teeth chattered. “I’m freezing.” Aunt Hester covered her with a quilt while mumbling about the sweltering heat. “Can I just wait here for a little bit? Maybe Bella will come home.”

Aunt Hester left, and Bella did not come. Chilled with fever, Liberty clutched at the quilt to pull it tighter around her shoulders—and froze when her fingers felt a familiar patch of flannel. Holding the quilt up to the light that slanted through the shutters, a piece of red
and cream pinstripe shone back at her. At that moment, Liberty knew. This patch, and the one on her own quilt, had been cut from the same cloth.

Just like her and Bella.

A
grove of live oaks, dripping with moss and shadow, crowded down a grassy bank as if to dip their giant toes in the river that curved around Beaufort in a watery embrace. Waves of wet heat washed over Bella as she and Harrison turned onto Church Street, each one triggering memories of her childhood in the South.

“Are you ready?” Harrison mopped his damp forehead with his handkerchief and nodded toward the Episcopal Church, now serving as hospital for the 54th Massachussetts. The white building was nearly blinding in its sunlit brilliance, while in the cemetery before it, amputations were carried out on tables made from tombstones. Fanning herself with a palmetto branch, Bella averted her gaze from the pile of black limbs as Harrison escorted her through the front door.

Inside, chandeliers hung high over pews packed with men. It was a better hospital than the barn at Holloway Farm, but wooden benches
did not make soft beds. Moans bounced between the walls and high ceiling of the sanctuary like discordant organ notes. Though the air was heavy with the smell of injury, Bella’s senses had mercifully dulled to it. A sidelong glance at Harrison told her he was not so lucky.

“I can find him on my own.” She waved Harrison away. “I’ll find you outside when I’m done.” With a tug on his collar and weak smile, he stepped outside again.

Slowly, Bella walked down the center aisle, craning her neck as she turned right and left in search of her husband, until she found him. Heart in her throat, she squeezed between the pews and sidled closer, finally kneeling by his side.

“Abraham? It’s me, Bella.” After so many weeks without communication, she felt like reintroducing herself.

He awoke. “Bella? You’re here?” He reached out and grasped her hand, brought it to his cracked lips and kissed it. “I heard about the battle at Gettysburg. You’re all right?”

She fanned him with the palmetto branch. “I’m all right.” It was such a relative term. But a crowded church hospital in South Carolina was not the place to share the details of her recent ordeal. Anyone who overheard her say she worked at a Confederate field hospital would not be likely to be sympathetic. “How do you fare?”

“It’s nothing, a wound in the thigh, but it will heal. How did you know, how did you get here?”

“It was in the papers, of course. A reporter brought me here to find you. Will you come home now?” Cicadas thrummed through the open windows as she waited for his answer.

“No. I can still fight.”

“For pay?” She had not intended to sound so shrill. But she had been without his support for months, and it wasn’t getting any easier to live on the income from her employers. She may not even have any left by the time she got home after this trip.

“For honor.”

Her hand stilled for a moment. “What does that even mean, Abraham? The army feeds you, but it doesn’t feed me. I’m hungry. Do you hear me?”

Surprise—disappointment in Bella, she guessed—played across his features, and she was ashamed that their reunion had grown bitter so quickly. “They offered us pay, but it wasn’t what we agreed to. They said they’d pay us thirteen dollars a month, same as the white soldiers. Now they say they’ll give us ten, but they’ll take three dollars out for uniforms. Seven dollars—it’s almost half-pay.”

“And seven dollars more than nothing! Take the money, Abraham, I would take it if I could.”

His face knotted in frustration. “Don’t you get it? We gotta fight on equal terms with the white soldiers or they’ll only think of us as hired labor. We have to help win this war or we’ll never be granted full citizenship. We’re going to hold out and keep fighting until they give us what they promised us. Equal pay.”