Redfield Farm: A Novel of the Underground Railroad (31 page)

Through the spring, Nate and I held long evening talks about the war, out on the porch, after the work was done. Something was going on in my little brother’s head, for sure.

“Joseph Blackwell up and left last week to join the Army,” Nate told us. “Seems to be a pattern. Working in the fields one day and gone the next.”

“Well, I’ll tell you one thing, I won’t be farming this time next year. I hate it. Pa and I trying to make up for the loss of Jesse. It’s too much. When harvest is over, I’m moving on.”

His words alarmed me. “What will you do?”

“I don’t know yet, but not this.”

Amos stepped out from the kitchen doorway. We didn’t know he was listening. “I hope
thee
are not thinking of going to war.”

“I can’t say, Papa.”

“Can’t say? What does thee mean, thee can’t say? No son of mine will take up arms! I won’t have it!”

“Ben and Elias could take over our land,” Nate continued, ignoring Papa’s wrath. “They need it for oats and pasture. Keep it from lying fallow.”

“I’ve thought about that. Maybe a mercantile. I don’t know what I’ll do. But I lack Jesse’s patience. I can’t keep myself at a task I hate, and right now, I hate this.”

I never gave liking or hating a task much thought. If it had to be done, it had to be done. If I didn’t do it, who would? The idea that one had to like one’s work was foreign to me and, I was sure, to Amos. But it certainly mattered to Nate.

In those tense times, I relied more on Rebecca’s friendship and confidence. She invited me over to help can tomatoes for both households, and I welcomed the distraction, even if it was for talk of war. Rebecca and I and her three girls worked through the day in the summer kitchen, the heat and the smell of tomatoes heavy in the air.

“He has his hands full. But so do Ben and Elias. This war is making a labor shortage, I’ll tell you that.” Rebecca ladled hot tomatoes into the waiting jars.

“Nathaniel will do what he will,” she reminded me. “You and Amos can only watch. But, surely Nate, of all people, won’t choose war. Slow to decide, even slower to act. I can’t conceive of him volunteering.”

But the nagging fear would not go away. It was Nate’s to decide, but I held my breath and prayed.

One August afternoon, Pru Hartley’s oldest boy, Thomas, wandered down from the woods, a dead squirrel dangling from his belt. “Wanna buy a squirrel?” he asked, holding up the limp body. Out of pity for the scrawny, dirty-faced child, I offered him two bits, even though Nate could get me a squirrel anytime.

“How’s your mother?” I asked.

He lay his gun on the ground while he untied the squirrel. “Down with the grippe.”

“Oh? Does she need me to make a call?” I was locked in a dance of wariness with Pru. To embrace her was frightening. To ignore her was worse.

“She’ll be all right, but it’s hard now Uncle Cooper’s gone.”

“Gone where?” I hadn’t seen Cooper Hartley in months, but that counted as good.

“Gone for a soldier. Joined the Rebs. Says he has to fight for slavery.” The child’s face showed no expression. Neither approval nor disapproval. “Been huntin’ runaways all these years. Can’t get his mind around the idea they might free ’em. Wish I was old enough.”

I shuddered to think that a man could love slavery enough to go to war for it—and gain a boy’s admiration to boot. I put a coin in Thomas’s hand and took the squirrel. “Tell your mother to stop by when she’s feeling better.” The boy went his barefoot way down over the hill to the hovel by the creek, shotgun slung over his bony shoulder.

Nathaniel didn’t wait for the harvest. He enlisted in September, in Company F, 37th Regiment, Pennsylvania Reserves. They formed up at Camp Wilkins, near Pittsburgh. He joined for three months, but the government went back on their promise, and the 37th was mustered in for three years. He bragged in his early letters about how they’d thrash the rebels and be home by Christmas. I winced at his brashness. Later, he put me in charge of his financial ventures, which, I soon learned, were extensive. “If I don’t come back,” he wrote, “it’s yours to do with as you see fit.” ‘Don’t talk nonsense’ would have been my response had he been within reach. But he was decidedly out of reach now and maybe forever.

One more empty chair. Papa and I looked at each other from opposite ends of a table as wide as all creation, remembering when there were nine. Two was such a sad number.

I tried to talk about family matters to ease the emptiness. “Mary writes that her Martha is opening her own Quaker school this fall.” Amos nodded, barely acknowledging me.

“They’re keeping a close eye on Adam. Fifteen years old and full of romantic notions of war. Mary’s afraid he’ll run off and join up one of these days.”

Amos sat silent at the other end of the table. His face clouded. “You’d think he’d been raised better.” He took a drink of coffee, made a face, and wiped his mouth.

“I’m sure Mary and Noah have done their best. She’s always going on about how hard it is to raise good Quakers with the world intruding all the time.”

“The world will always intrude. That’s why we have to be strong. Not give in to impulse. Think things through.”

I knew he was talking about Nathaniel. He was beside himself with impotent rage. I watched his shoulders droop as he struggled with tasks he’d once done with ease. Getting old.

I was so lonely in those days after Nate left that it felt almost good to see Pru Hartley drop by. She did so fairly regularly now that Cooper was gone and she had to fend for herself. I watched her climb up the path from the creek, bent over a walking stick, carrying an empty basket for handouts, and I steeled myself for her approach.

I nodded. Pru picked up apples and dropped them into her basket, without a care for bruising. She helped herself to more than I would have given, but I reminded myself that we had plenty for two. Pru evidently thought so, too, for she poked around the root cellar in the dim light and helped herself to whatever she wanted. Potatoes, squash, onions, carrots, beets. I truly wondered how she expected to carry it home.

“Let’s get in out of this cold and have a cup of tea,” I invited. The warm kitchen smelled of fresh baked apple turnovers.

“Think I’ll have one of ’em with my tea,” Pru ordered, pulling a chair up close to the stove. “What do you hear from your brother?”

“Indiana. He’s in Indiana. Has an orchard. Apple, cherry, and peach trees. You do hold fast to the idea that we have something to do with helping fugitives. With the war on, I doubt that there
are
many any more.”

Pru scoffed. “If’n I know Jesse Redfield, he’s still in it. Out there savin’ the world for the Quakers.” She picked up the biggest apple turnover as I poured her tea. “Bet if he hadn’t messed up his arm he’d be carryin’ a gun with the rest of them. Well, best he ain’t. If my brother Cooper ever run up against him, he’d get a receipt for all the niggers he saved. Cooper’s right glad to be shootin’ blue bellies.”

She looked away, sat back on her chair, eating her turnover and drinking her tea. After a while, she replied, “No,” picked up her basket and walking stick, and clumped out, leaving the door open behind her.

Amos and I waited for the mail, impatient for every bit of news of the war and the 37th Pennsylvania. Nathaniel wrote few letters and those he did write were brief. The luster of war faded quickly, and he complained of boredom, camp conditions, the food or lack of it, and inaction.

“Don’t ask me. Deborah’s beside herself over it, and Ben is about as bad, but there’s no talking to him. I vow it’s just for the adventure. Some men never grow up.”

I sat in Rebecca’s rocking chair, knitting a pair of stockings for Amos for Christmas. “When does he plan to go?”

“As soon as he can find a company organizing.” Rebecca kneaded bread dough in a wooden trough. “What’s Deborah supposed to do, sitting alone here with Lucy and one of her own and another one on the way?”

“Wait, I guess. And pray he comes home at all.”

“How does he think Ben’s going to handle all the work? First Nathaniel goes off without a thought for Ben, and now Elias does the same thing. I tell you, Ann, I’m getting bitter over these men and their damned war!”

Elias enlisted in Captain Dick’s Company, the 107th Pennsylvania Volunteers, in January of 1862 and departed first for Harrisburg, then Virginia. He rode away grinning like a boy off to the county fair.

Nathaniel’s letters of complaint stopped abruptly that July, just after a battle called the Seven Days. Not knowing where he was, nor if he was alive or dead made us all frantic. The days dragged on; we waited for the mail. When it came, and there was nothing, we grumbled and went back to waiting. Then, in early September, a letter came.

Dear Ann and Papa,

You haven’t heard from me in a while. I and 50

or so others from F company were captured in the

Seven Days. They marched us to Richmond. Spent

all of July and most of August in a Reb prison.

Got exchanged last week. Good to be back in the

thick of it again.

Nate

Rebecca and I groaned as I read her the letter. “I’ll never understand men. Daughter of one, sister of four, wife of one, and mother of five. You’d think I’d get it, but I don’t.” We both laughed. If Rebecca didn’t get it, who would?

I folded the letter and put it away. “Ever since the war began and before, I’ve counted myself thankful to be a woman. Men seem to have an intense desire—even an obligation—to fight. It puzzles me how some seem to welcome war, even to lust after it.”

Rebecca nodded. “Some even form stronger bonds with their fighting comrades than with their wives. And to what end? To be injured, maimed, killed, or to carry horrible memories with them to their graves. She paused for a long, deep breath.

“And women—their mothers, wives, sisters, sweethearts—wait and never understand, can’t begin to know the closeness their men share only with their fellow soldiers. I don’t have to see war to know I hate it.”

But see it she would. Elias Finley died at the Second Battle of Bull Run on August 30, 1862. He never saw his third child, a son born in May and named for his absent father. I grieved for the loss of a friend. Emptiness seemed to close in. The old world was passing away and the new held no promise for me.

S
omething was in the air in mid-September.
Fall, yes, but that wasn’t it. A feeling of foreboding haunted my days. Something terrible was happening. I could almost hear it sometimes—the roar of guns and the agonized moans and cries of wounded and dying men. I visited Rebecca to clear my mind, but that only helped until I started for home, alone, through the orchard.