The Union Quilters, page 2
Then don’t go, she almost asked, but she knew her arguments would not persuade him now where they had failed before. Though he considered himself a humanist, he did not share her philosophy of nonviolence. He was willing to fight and sacrifice his own life if necessary to defend those he loved and to protect the noble principles he held most dear. Dorothea was prepared to give her own life on those same grounds, but she would not take anotherʹs life, and that was where their opinions diverged. What she dreaded most of all was that Thomas would not survive the war, but after that, what she feared most was that he would return to her entirely changed by the violence he had seen—seen, and inflicted.
Sighing, Thomas bent to kiss Abigail’s cheek and led Dorothea from the bedroom, leaving the door ajar. Mrs. Hennessey met them at the foot of the stairs, red-eyed, and gave Thomas a fierce hug. “I’ll say the rosary for you every night,” she vowed. “God bless and keep you safe from harm.” He thanked her quietly and asked her to take care of his family while he was away. She pressed her lips together and nodded before fleeing for the kitchen.
With a heavy heart, Dorothea helped Thomas gather his pack and provisions. She followed him to the barn, and as he hitched up the horses, she suddenly remembered. How could she have forgotten something so treasured, so essential to his comfort?
“I’ll be right back,” she gasped, hurrying back to the house. She startled Mrs. Hennessey, who sat at the kitchen table with her head in her hands, weeping openly, and raced upstairs, her heeled boots clattering on the wooden staircase. At the foot of their bed, she threw open the lid to the steamer trunk Uncle Jacob had bequeathed her and withdrew a quilt she had packed away for the summer. She draped it over the bed, sparing only a glance for the painstakingly arranged triangles and squares of Turkey red and Prussian blue and sun-bleached muslin, some scraps carefully saved from her household sewing, others shared by a dressmaker friend and others among her sewing circle. She folded the quilt in half lengthwise, quickly rolled it up into a tight bundle, and tied it off with a wide length of ribbon she had been saving for a hatband. When she returned outside, Thomas had the horses ready and waiting. He watched, silent and perplexed, as she placed the quilt into the back of the wagon with his pack and provisions.
“It’s the Dove in the Window,” she said, climbing onto the seat beside him as he gathered the reins. “I know it’s your favorite.”
“It’s yours as well. I shouldn’t take it.”
“It’s hardly my favorite. I prefer our wedding quilt and the Delectable Mountains I made for my uncle. But even if it were, I would rather you had it.”
He shook his head. “It’s too fine to take on the road. It could be soiled or torn or lost. Likely the army will issue us sturdy blankets with our uniforms.”
“And if they don’t, or if those blankets are delayed?” Dorothea countered. “You’ll be grateful for this quilt when winter comes, even if you can’t appreciate it now.”
“I do appreciate it, all the more so because I recall how hard you worked on it. Think of the conditions we’ll face—”
“I am thinking of the conditions you’ll face.” She felt wretched, helpless, but she fought to keep her voice even. “Take the quilt. It’s not much to carry, and it’ll comfort me to know that it’s keeping you warm when I can’t.”
He fell silent, his eyes searching her face. “Very well.” He chirruped to the horses. “You’re right. If I don’t take it, I’ll regret it later.”
Unwilling to trust herself to speak, she nodded and pressed herself against him on the wagon seat, heartsick, resting her head on his shoulder, imagining she could feel the warmth of his skin upon hers, his arms around her. She longed to lay her head on his chest, pull the quilt over them both, and sleep, sleep until the war passed over them like a thundercloud, holding the worst of its torrent until it cleared the mountains.
After her sons finished their chores, Constance sent them back outside to the pump to scrub their faces and necks and behind their ears before they changed into their Sunday suits. She never let them go into town unless they were as clean as a whistle and dressed in their best. The Wrights were a respectable family, decent and hardworking, and if they needed to dress twice as fine as every white family in the valley to prove that point, she would do it. She wouldn’t give anyone cause to look down on her boys, not when ignorant folk could invent plenty of fictitious reasons on their own.
She paced from the kitchen to the front room, calling up the stairs to the attic bedroom George and Joseph shared, to urge them to hurry, picking up darning and setting it down again, restless, keeping busy so she wouldn’t have time to sit and think. She checked Abel’s pack again, though of course nothing had fallen out or otherwise changed since the first five times she had checked it that morning. She wrung her hands, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath. Abel wanted to fight and would be restless and unhappy to stay at home while the battle raged on, and she knew better than anyone in the Elm Creek Valley that the cause was just.
At the sound of the boys’ shoes on the attic stairs, her eyes flew open. She forced a smile as she turned to face them. “Why, don’t you look fine,” she said, straightening George’s collar, smoothing a wrinkle on Joseph’s suit coat. Usually the boys basked in her praise, but now they merely nodded and murmured, “Yes, ma’am,” their voices subdued, their dark eyes solemn. Suddenly, Joseph blinked furiously as if he were fighting back tears. His elder brother, all of eleven years old, nudged him and shot him a look of warning. Joseph swallowed hard and looked at the floor, clutching the banister.
“It’s gonna be all right,” Constance assured them with more confidence than she felt. “He won’t be gone long. You know what a crack shot your father is, especially with that powerful new rifle. He’ll take out any Rebels in firing range before they have time to load their powder.”
“They really gonna let him fight, Mama?” asked George.
“Course they will,” said Joseph with a nine-year-old’s confidence and innocence. “Didn’t the newspaper say Pennsylvania has to send ninety thousand men? He’s not too old.”
Though Abel was fifteen years older than Constance, he was strong and vigorous and sharp-eyed, and while at forty-seven he would likely be one of the older men to enlist that day, he was certainly not too old to fight.
“They wouldn’t turn him away because of his age,” George informed his brother, “but because he’s colored.”
Joseph’s brow furrowed as he glanced from his brother to Constance and back. “But those colored men from Pittsburgh signed up. Father said so.”
“They guarded a railroad,” George retorted. “In the North. They didn’t shoot at anyone.”
“Hey, now,” Constance admonished. “Don’t you mock their service. That railroad moved soldiers and supplies and a lot more besides, and you’d better believe the Rebels would have been very happy to blow it up. Losing those railroads would cripple the North. Any service to the Union is honorable, whether it’s guarding a railroad or firing a gun or patching up folks like Dr. Granger’s gonna do.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said George, chastened, but uncertainty clouded his dark eyes. He surely remembered the two colored regiments that had formed in Philadelphia earlier in the spring—formed and dispersed when the Union refused to muster them in. Constance wished she could assure him that his father would be allowed to enlist alongside the other men of the Elm Creek Valley, but she couldn’t. Until Abel wrote to her from the soldiers’ camp and described the drills, the marching, the uniforms, she wouldn’t believe that the Union would encourage a colored man to shoot at a white man, even a Rebel.
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.
Sighing, Thomas bent to kiss Abigail’s cheek and led Dorothea from the bedroom, leaving the door ajar. Mrs. Hennessey met them at the foot of the stairs, red-eyed, and gave Thomas a fierce hug. “I’ll say the rosary for you every night,” she vowed. “God bless and keep you safe from harm.” He thanked her quietly and asked her to take care of his family while he was away. She pressed her lips together and nodded before fleeing for the kitchen.
With a heavy heart, Dorothea helped Thomas gather his pack and provisions. She followed him to the barn, and as he hitched up the horses, she suddenly remembered. How could she have forgotten something so treasured, so essential to his comfort?
“I’ll be right back,” she gasped, hurrying back to the house. She startled Mrs. Hennessey, who sat at the kitchen table with her head in her hands, weeping openly, and raced upstairs, her heeled boots clattering on the wooden staircase. At the foot of their bed, she threw open the lid to the steamer trunk Uncle Jacob had bequeathed her and withdrew a quilt she had packed away for the summer. She draped it over the bed, sparing only a glance for the painstakingly arranged triangles and squares of Turkey red and Prussian blue and sun-bleached muslin, some scraps carefully saved from her household sewing, others shared by a dressmaker friend and others among her sewing circle. She folded the quilt in half lengthwise, quickly rolled it up into a tight bundle, and tied it off with a wide length of ribbon she had been saving for a hatband. When she returned outside, Thomas had the horses ready and waiting. He watched, silent and perplexed, as she placed the quilt into the back of the wagon with his pack and provisions.
“It’s the Dove in the Window,” she said, climbing onto the seat beside him as he gathered the reins. “I know it’s your favorite.”
“It’s yours as well. I shouldn’t take it.”
“It’s hardly my favorite. I prefer our wedding quilt and the Delectable Mountains I made for my uncle. But even if it were, I would rather you had it.”
He shook his head. “It’s too fine to take on the road. It could be soiled or torn or lost. Likely the army will issue us sturdy blankets with our uniforms.”
“And if they don’t, or if those blankets are delayed?” Dorothea countered. “You’ll be grateful for this quilt when winter comes, even if you can’t appreciate it now.”
“I do appreciate it, all the more so because I recall how hard you worked on it. Think of the conditions we’ll face—”
“I am thinking of the conditions you’ll face.” She felt wretched, helpless, but she fought to keep her voice even. “Take the quilt. It’s not much to carry, and it’ll comfort me to know that it’s keeping you warm when I can’t.”
He fell silent, his eyes searching her face. “Very well.” He chirruped to the horses. “You’re right. If I don’t take it, I’ll regret it later.”
Unwilling to trust herself to speak, she nodded and pressed herself against him on the wagon seat, heartsick, resting her head on his shoulder, imagining she could feel the warmth of his skin upon hers, his arms around her. She longed to lay her head on his chest, pull the quilt over them both, and sleep, sleep until the war passed over them like a thundercloud, holding the worst of its torrent until it cleared the mountains.
After her sons finished their chores, Constance sent them back outside to the pump to scrub their faces and necks and behind their ears before they changed into their Sunday suits. She never let them go into town unless they were as clean as a whistle and dressed in their best. The Wrights were a respectable family, decent and hardworking, and if they needed to dress twice as fine as every white family in the valley to prove that point, she would do it. She wouldn’t give anyone cause to look down on her boys, not when ignorant folk could invent plenty of fictitious reasons on their own.
She paced from the kitchen to the front room, calling up the stairs to the attic bedroom George and Joseph shared, to urge them to hurry, picking up darning and setting it down again, restless, keeping busy so she wouldn’t have time to sit and think. She checked Abel’s pack again, though of course nothing had fallen out or otherwise changed since the first five times she had checked it that morning. She wrung her hands, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath. Abel wanted to fight and would be restless and unhappy to stay at home while the battle raged on, and she knew better than anyone in the Elm Creek Valley that the cause was just.
At the sound of the boys’ shoes on the attic stairs, her eyes flew open. She forced a smile as she turned to face them. “Why, don’t you look fine,” she said, straightening George’s collar, smoothing a wrinkle on Joseph’s suit coat. Usually the boys basked in her praise, but now they merely nodded and murmured, “Yes, ma’am,” their voices subdued, their dark eyes solemn. Suddenly, Joseph blinked furiously as if he were fighting back tears. His elder brother, all of eleven years old, nudged him and shot him a look of warning. Joseph swallowed hard and looked at the floor, clutching the banister.
“It’s gonna be all right,” Constance assured them with more confidence than she felt. “He won’t be gone long. You know what a crack shot your father is, especially with that powerful new rifle. He’ll take out any Rebels in firing range before they have time to load their powder.”
“They really gonna let him fight, Mama?” asked George.
“Course they will,” said Joseph with a nine-year-old’s confidence and innocence. “Didn’t the newspaper say Pennsylvania has to send ninety thousand men? He’s not too old.”
Though Abel was fifteen years older than Constance, he was strong and vigorous and sharp-eyed, and while at forty-seven he would likely be one of the older men to enlist that day, he was certainly not too old to fight.
“They wouldn’t turn him away because of his age,” George informed his brother, “but because he’s colored.”
Joseph’s brow furrowed as he glanced from his brother to Constance and back. “But those colored men from Pittsburgh signed up. Father said so.”
“They guarded a railroad,” George retorted. “In the North. They didn’t shoot at anyone.”
“Hey, now,” Constance admonished. “Don’t you mock their service. That railroad moved soldiers and supplies and a lot more besides, and you’d better believe the Rebels would have been very happy to blow it up. Losing those railroads would cripple the North. Any service to the Union is honorable, whether it’s guarding a railroad or firing a gun or patching up folks like Dr. Granger’s gonna do.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said George, chastened, but uncertainty clouded his dark eyes. He surely remembered the two colored regiments that had formed in Philadelphia earlier in the spring—formed and dispersed when the Union refused to muster them in. Constance wished she could assure him that his father would be allowed to enlist alongside the other men of the Elm Creek Valley, but she couldn’t. Until Abel wrote to her from the soldiers’ camp and described the drills, the marching, the uniforms, she wouldn’t believe that the Union would encourage a colored man to shoot at a white man, even a Rebel.
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.
