Until We All Find Home, page 1
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Until We All Find Home (Finding Home, #1)
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Also by Heather Wood | Until We All Run Free
Until We All Find Home
By Heather Wood
Cover art by Jenna Phillips
Copyright © 2019 Heather Wood
ISBN: 9781686379635
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced
without permission in writing from the author.
To David
You’ve always been the coolest person I know.
Thank you for appreciating the things I love:
God, family, Chicago, and the Civil War
-1-
July 15, 1861
“Does this bring back memories?”
Luke Dinsmore leaned towards his best friend standing at attention next to him on the railroad platform of Great Central Station.
Justin Young glanced over and nodded, sweat causing his black curls to stick to his forehead underneath his smart kepi.
It was beginning to get warm in the midday July sun in his brand new navy blue wool uniform, especially after the grand march the regiment had just completed down Wabash Street. In a few minutes, the 23rd Illinois Regiment would be boarding the train and heading south, to their new station at a garrison somewhere in southern Illinois, to the best of his knowledge. But first they had to wait through mayoral speeches and military band performances, and Justin could feel Luke growing impatient next to him.
Luke had been fascinated by railroads since he was a child and had been working at the ticket counter at the same station when Justin first arrived in the city five years prior, the occasion that prompted his question now. He had never had the opportunity to take a trip himself, and the only thing now standing in his way of boarding the giant iron beast was Mayor Wentworth’s rhetoric.
Unfortunately, the mayor was waxing eloquent, which was ironic, considering that he typically paid little attention to the Irish population on the lower west side of Chicago; but now that the Irish Brigade was preparing to ship out, he apparently felt that a photograph in the paper of him honoring their bravery would appear patriotic and perhaps give him the needed boost in the looming election.
Through the crowd, Luke could make out his family members gathered to see him and Justin off. Only his mother wasn’t there, because watching her beloved son leave for war was not something she was capable of stomaching, and if there was anything that Mrs. Dinsmore hated above all else, it was emotional outbursts. This explained why Luke was her favorite child, a fact that she never bothered to hide. He was one of the most easygoing individuals most people would ever meet, and his even personality was just the thing Mrs. Dinsmore appreciated when she had three daughters surrounding Luke in age.
His older sister Christina hadn’t come today either, but he’d stopped including her in the numbers when she got married two years prior and moved to a farm way out west of the city. His younger sisters were there at the station though, Rebecca and Elisan, and his ten-year-old brother Titan.
What the rest of the siblings lacked in tender loving care from their mother was more than made up for in their father. Reverend Dinsmore had always been his children’s close confidante and wise advisor, and he was there today pulling his daughters close on either side of him as they tried to regain their composure.
Luke wasn’t completely sure if Rebecca’s tears were more for him or for Justin, but the fact was that two of her favorite people were leaving today, and for all their pride in their new uniforms, the sight of them made her feel ill. There was no doubt that Luke was her very best friend in the world, but lately her relationship with Justin had been heightened. There wasn’t an official courtship yet, but there was something growing there, with the escorts home and filled dance cards and the unspoken understanding in the way they looked and spoke to each other.
Luke had never actually asked Justin about her himself, or he would have known that Justin had already talked to the reverend about his intentions. The war had interrupted his plans, for once states began seceding from the union, Justin had held back from taking the next steps with Rebecca. He was completely free, with no ties yet holding him back and therefore the most eligible recruit for the army once the first shots were fired. He knew this, and knew that he would sign up as soon as they asked for volunteers, so it seemed the right thing to do to leave Rebecca completely free should something happen to him and he didn’t come home.
After five years, Chicago was home to him now, and it was all because of the Dinsmores. Standing in the Chicago summer heat next to Luke as the mayor droned on, Justin’s thoughts wandered to the day he had first arrived at that station. He was just fifteen and alone, but he had childlike faith and youthful excitement at what the world was capable of holding for him. He had disembarked the train and was sitting on a bench in the station when Luke first noticed him.
It was his ritual at each station he came to; he would get off and spend some time praying, asking for a sign or some kind of direction whether this was the place he should stay or if he should get back on and keep going. The train had made its way from Paducah to St. Louis and up the length of Illinois, and so far nothing had kept him from reboarding and continuing on his way. He was thus lost in thought when he was approached by Luke.
“That was the last passenger train for the evening; the next one will be in the morning,” Luke told the boy, and Justin looked up at his voice.
“Okay, thank you,” he said without moving.
Luke almost moved on, but hesitated. “I noticed you’ve been here for a couple hours. Are you waiting for someone, or are you staying here overnight?”
“Am I allowed to?”
Luke shrugged. “I’m leaving for the night myself, but I’ll be here in the morning and I won’t tell anyone. The janitor won’t bother you; he’s a pretty understanding fellow.”
Justin bit his lip and thought for a minute. Before he replied, Luke cocked his head.
“Where are you headed?” he asked, surmising that Justin did not, in fact, have anyone coming for him.
“Wherever I have a reason to stay,” Justin admitted. “I was actually just praying about that.”
Luke looked tempted to find out more, but instead he stopped himself.
“Are you hungry? I was about to go have dinner with my family, and we would love to have you join us.”
“Are you sure?” Justin’s eyes widened, but in his heart something was stirring. Of all the prayers he had prayed, this was the first time anyone had spoken to him at any of the stations. He was curious to find out what God was doing that possibly involved the lanky boy in front of him.
“Sure.” Luke held out his hand, his blue eyes smiling from under neatly combed dark brown hair. “I’m Luke Dinsmore.”
“Justin Young.” Justin stood up and shook Luke’s hand. He was on the short side of average height, and a full four inches shorter than Luke, although he figured Luke was about the same age.
“I’d been watching you, and I felt like I should come over and meet you,” Luke said as they left the station together.
Justin glanced over as they headed south through Chicago’s dusty streets, and he felt goosebumps.
“Where are you from?” Luke continued.
“I just came from Louisville. I’m originally from Grayson County, Kentucky, but I was in the orphanage in Louisville until my birthday this year, when I aged out.”
Luke stopped walking and turned to him in surprise. “You’re on your own? I’m so sorry. I take having my family for granted.”
Justin shrugged. “It’s been eight years since I lost mine. In some ways I’ve gotten used to it, but I miss them.”
“Do you mind telling me what happened to them?”
Justin didn’t mind. Luke had an honest face that most people found attractive, but they failed to realize that it was due less to genetics and more to the fact that he was a pleasant person, and that reflected in his face. He had a personality that made people feel comfortable talking to him because he made a conscious effort to be a good listener. From his father he had learned wisdom greater than his years, but mostly he just listened well, and he often found others’ inhibitions were dropped around him and he had a knack at getting them to open up.
“My parents passed away, and I don’t know where my siblings are. The best I can gather, they were divided up among the relatives, but I don’t know where they are or if they are still alive.” He paused. “Tell me about your family, since I’m going to meet them. What does your father do?”
“He’s a minister,” Luke said. “You’ll like him; everyone does. He’s a decent preacher, but mostly he’s one of the nic
“Do you usually bring people home from the station for dinner?” Justin asked curiously.
“So far it’s only been beautiful women,” Luke answered with a laugh, and Justin realized that Luke was already comfortable enough to joke with him, and it felt good.
Justin remembered arriving at the parsonage and meeting the family for the first time, and how they had all welcomed him as part of the family from the start. No one acted inconvenienced or like it was odd to have an unexpected guest, and the next thing he knew, they had persuaded him to spend the night with them. By that point, he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that his prayer had been answered and that he would indeed not be on the train the following morning. He had insisted on not taking advantage of their hospitality, and the next night at dinner, voiced his intention of finding his own lodgings as soon as possible, since he was to stay.
“I know just the place,” Reverend Dinsmore announced immediately. “One of our church members, Mrs. Katz, has an apartment above her bakery about ten blocks from here in the seventh ward. Until recently, a Negro family lived there, but they moved when the husband took a job north of the city. She’s a decent woman, and I know she’ll take good care of you.”
Justin had lived in that apartment ever since, and in that time he had grown fond of his German landlady. The Chicago River formed the southern boundary of the neighborhood, and it was there that Justin found a job as a stevedore at one of the many lumber warehouses. He found that being of Irish descent, he blended in well to his neighborhood, which was largely populated by German and Irish immigrants. Nevertheless, he stayed quiet so as not to cause a disturbance with the revelation that he was actually a Protestant and was in the minority among working class Irish Americans by supporting abolition.
The first Sunday that he went to Reverend Dinsmore’s church, he walked in the door to the strains of the pipe organ playing hymns for the prelude. He quietly took a seat near the back, and was taken aback to realize that the organist was none other than Luke’s thirteen-year-old sister Rebecca, and she played simply but mistake-free. He was further surprised to realize that where he was seated in the rear, he was surrounded by black parishioners, and realized that unlike his church in Kentucky, they worshipped on the same level as white believers. If he had liked Reverend Dinsmore before, that fact alone made him respect the leader of this church all the more.
He fell in to his new life easily, and Luke and he had become fast friends. Justin worked hard during the week, and although Friday night dinners at the Dinsmores’ became their standing tradition, he often spent more time than that with his new family each week, between parties, church events, walks to the lake, and games of chess with Luke in his father’s library. Perhaps some church members had gossiped about “the orphan boy” and his proximity to the Dinsmores, and later about Rebecca Dinsmore’s apparent interest in him, but the family held it on principle to never heed what the gossips were saying. They often reminded each other of this conviction, which was important since, as the minister’s family, they were perhaps gossiped about to a greater degree than anyone else in the church.
As a whole, Justin was happy and grateful for his life. He loved Chicago, his neighborhood, and his friends; and he loved the excitement of the huge barges and railroads daily bringing lumber from the north woods and crops from Illinois farms on their journeys to the far reaches of the country. Chicago felt like it was in the center of everything, until the war started and turned everyone’s attention south, and there the ache deep inside him was inescapable.
In all the years he had been on his own, in the orphanage and in Chicago, a day hadn’t gone by in which he didn’t think of his sister Kellie and his younger brothers. He didn’t even have any idea if his siblings were still in the south, but it was where he had last seen them as a seven-year-old, so it was where he associated them with in his mind. Kellie was the next one in order after him, so she had always been his little playmate. Justin had lost much of his mental image of what she looked like, but he remembered her thick black curls bouncing down her back as they ran through the meadow behind their house together, and that was the picture he always carried in his mind.
His brothers were a toddler and a baby when he last saw them, and his other little sister Katie had died before his parents, so Kellie was the one he had the strongest memory of and the greatest desire to see. The day she was taken from him was etched in his memory. He remembered they were both crying as his five-year-old sister was driven away in someone’s wagon, to go to he didn’t know where, to live with...was it an aunt? He wished he could remember, but either way it was someone he didn’t know, in some far off city. He had stayed behind because his grandparents wanted him. He was big and strong and could be a big help to them, and besides, they always doted on him. But they had lived only a year after his parents, and with no other family in the county, he had gone to live in the orphanage when they died.
The changing seasons always made the ache intensify, and he would try to picture what Kellie would be doing. She’d be ten now, he would think. Is she at school? Carrying water and scrubbing laundry, or sitting in a fancy parlor learning how to embroider? Does she go to church? Then, she’s thirteen–is she at finishing school? Picking out ribbons for her dresses? Tending a hearth? At sixteen, was she taking suitors and attending fabulous balls?
Standing at attention on the railroad platform, Justin thought of Kellie again. She’d be eighteen now; was she still alive? Was she married? Or perhaps she had married young and had a baby now. Justin’s eyes widened at the thought that he could be an uncle. But as always, there were no answers to go with his questions. Just questions. Why didn’t anyone know his relatives or where they were from? Why didn’t his grandparents think to offer to let him write to his sister? Wouldn’t they have known this aunt, or was she an aunt on his other side? Was it even an aunt? Why were they his only other relatives in Grayson County, and where had they come from?
If there was anything he would have done differently, it would have been to try to find more answers before leaving Kentucky as a fifteen-year-old. He had left straight from Louisville without going back to Grayson County, but now he wondered if there was anyone left there who knew his parents and grandparents, or if their death certificates at the county courthouse held any further clues. Making such a big trip again armed just with questions had never really been feasible, though, and he had never seriously considered it.
Next to him, Luke wiped at the perspiration on his face and shifted his weight. He looked over at Justin, and the look on his friend’s face stopped him. He knew that look of melancholy all too well, and knew what Justin was thinking about. Luke literally made a game of learning to be perceptive and understand people. He and Rebecca had started it one day years ago when they were bored waiting for their father in a meeting. They had played it often together ever since, becoming actually really good at it in the process. In the game, they would take a situation of someone they knew, and try to guess what they thought that person would do, based on what they knew about that individual’s situation, personality, and motivations.
For example, when they found out, as pastor’s children were wont to do, that Mrs. McKinley’s husband had been caught swindling customers at his insurance business, they tried to guess whether she would leave him or not. Rebecca thought she would, because Mrs. McKinley was a pious woman who had little patience with others’ shortcomings, but Luke thought that she would not, since she was financially dependent on him and had no other family in the area. In the end, Luke was right, as usual. He had a natural bent for reading people, but Rebecca had spent so much time as his protégé, that she had improved with time and effort.
Justin they knew better than anyone, and within the past year, they had the opportunity to make him the subject of their game. He had come to Friday dinner bringing a lemon meringue pie, as he always did. Cooking was a skill Justin had mastered at the orphanage, and he enjoyed it to boot.
That particular day, Elisan was in the front yard deadheading flower beds when he arrived and she came over, wiping her hands on her apron, to greet him and take the pie into the kitchen. In their brief interaction, he had teased her like older brothers did to their adopted younger sisters, and before she even had time to think, she had flung the pie at his face. It really was quite funny to think about later, for everyone except Elisan, who still got red at the memory of it. At the time, however, no one was laughing. Justin stood on the front walk, wordlessly wiping from his face the pie over which he had labored so hard. He had turned around and stalked home without staying for dinner, and Elisan had cried all evening.
