Chapter 24
24
To mourn is to love, Libby thought, the grief nearly strangling her, as she clung to Joseph’s shoulders as if they were the last flotsam or tar-soaked siding from a shipwreck. The two of them were on the ground where Sally fell, and Sally’s head rested in his lap, the rain pounding them all like the rapids that poured through the sluice at the mill. Joseph’s own pain had left him breathless with despair, and he was rocking back and forth, as if he had in his arms an infant, not the woman with whom he had endured decades of slavery and too few years of freedom. Or whatever freedom was allowed a Negro man and woman in the Valley. He murmured her name over and over, whispering it into her ear and the cold air as if it were both benison and endearment.
And, Libby knew now, she had loved Sally, too, she had loved her as she might have loved a welcoming mother-in-law, had Peter’s mother been alive when they wed, and the way an interloper—that was what Libby was, someone new to this property and this patch of land—loved that one soul who saw not an intruder but a stranger in search of kinship. Had Libby done right by her? Had she done right by Joseph? No, clearly not. Because one was dead and one was a widower. And before that? Had she truly viewed them as her equals? Perhaps not. Probably not. And that realization, she knew, would grieve her a long, long time.
She’d feared for three and a half years that the battle, always nearby, it seemed, always a neighbor itself, someday would come here. To this very ground. Now it had, and it was she herself who had brought it here. The earth was but gardens of bullets. She’d saved a Yankee and set in motion the carnage that tonight had enveloped the property, littering her kitchen, the gristmill, and her dooryard with corpses. Six, all told, including Sally.
And, in fact, it wasn’t six. It was seven, she thought. Seven. It had rained so much tonight that she wouldn’t have been surprised if, had she sloshed her way to the brush at the edge of the south woods, she had found churned to the surface the rotting cadaver of the ranger who’d attacked her in those first days of September.
A few minutes ago, Jubilee had helped Weybridge inside the house to retrieve his crutches. Now the child was packing, and Libby could see the lantern lights in both upstairs bedrooms.
She hadn’t done right by Jubilee, either, and that was a betrayal of her sister-in-law and the woman’s last words. Do right by me. Do right by her.
She supposed that when Weybridge returned, the three of them would do with Sally’s body whatever Joseph wanted. Bury it, bring it to the wagon. It would be up to him. The living and the dead couldn’t stay out here forever, though a small part of her, as she stared up into the night sky and allowed the rain to cascade upon her face with such ferocity that it stung, wondered, why not? Why not? At this point, what really did it matter?
But then she turned toward the house and saw Jubilee in the window, a reminder, and shook off the rain like a wet dog and held Joseph a little tighter.
“Should we hide the bodies?” Libby asked Weybridge, referring to Henry Morgan and his rebel posse.
“I see no point. They’ll find them soon enough.”
“But maybe not right away,” she argued. “The hour or two they spend looking for them might be the time we need to get to Harper’s Ferry.”
“The hour or two we spend moving them is time we could be on the road.”
Weybridge had taken from the corpses their guns and any ammunition that was not soaked beyond use. He took the field glasses Henry Morgan had with him.
“It won’t take hours,” she said. “We’ll do it right now, while Jubilee’s packing. We’ll put some of the rocks by the mill in their clothes and roll them into the river.”
“Okay, then.”
For a brief second, she was surprised he had acquiesced so easily to her plan. The man was an army captain. But, then, he was also, she had come to understand, appreciative of her resourcefulness. He was alive because of her. “What about their horses?” she asked.
“If we pass them on the road when we leave, we’ll cut them loose and set them free. They’ll find new riders from one side or the other soon enough.”
The work was grim. Together, Libby and Weybridge dragged the bodies to the river. Weybridge moved like a field horse, looping one corpse at a time by the dead man’s suspenders or belt or whatever twine he could find around his own waist, and hobbled forward on his crutches, while Libby helped pull each of the dead by its cold, wet arm. They had not asked Joseph to help because he was digging his wife’s grave.
Just downstream of the mill, the water frothing and lapping at the top of the bank, Libby took rocks, some the size of human skulls, and shoved them inside each cadaver’s jacket or shirt, and rolled it over the side. There the bodies disappeared briefly beneath the current, but then they bobbed to the surface, rocks be damned, and were carried downriver. As Weybridge expected, even stones that big weren’t enough to sink them when the river was this wild, but Libby continued with her efforts, and he supposed this plan was better than no plan, because the Opequon didn’t widen and grow shallow again for at least another half mile. Maybe further. The bodies might even be lost to a beaver dam downriver. No matter what, she’d been right: it was a good idea to move the bodies. In the morning, rebels would search for them, and it would likely take them more hours to find them than it had to heave them into the rapids.
When they were done, Libby stood under the awning on the porch, her arm around Jubilee, who was shivering in the damp night air. The rain now was barely a drizzle. Libby draped a shawl around her, and the two of them peered out into the mist. To the west, she saw wisps of the moon peeking through clouds and lightening the sky in waves. Joseph had laid out Sally on the couch inside, and was still digging her grave where, over the years, other slaves had been buried: a square patch of earth near a row of dogwood trees, bordered on two sides by a picket fence that Joseph had maintained since he was a young man, and his father had cared for before him. It was after two in the morning, an hour of the night Libby had seen before, and always because she was alive with anger or worry or sadness. Did anything good ever occur in the small hours of the night? No. Never.
Jubilee had told her more than Joseph had about what had occurred in the gristmill. Libby assumed she would learn additional details over time, when Jubilee was capable of sharing more or Joseph was willing to speak more, but the raw outlines were clear: Sally had executed the rebel at pointblank range just as he reached the top of the gristmill steps near the hopper, a shot that none of the living outside in the dooryard had heard. The man fell backwards down the stairs, nearly pulling Joseph with him, and was dead by the time Jubilee and Sally and Joseph stepped over the body on their way outside. Joseph took the rebel’s pistol. The first shots that Libby and Weybridge had heard were the ones Sally had fired to distract Morgan and his man so Joseph could creep up behind them. But, apparently, Sally had just edged closer and closer to the group in the rain. Joseph hadn’t expected her ever to get as close as she did. That hadn’t been the plan. But she’d seen the opportunity and taken it, killing Morgan when she had the chance.
Now they needed to get ready to leave at first light. Regardless of whether it stopped raining, no matter the condition of the pike, what was washed out and what was washed away, they needed to be heading north to Harper’s Ferry.
But the flight would be different than their original scheme. Before the nightmare that had unfolded tonight, the plan had been that when they left, Weybridge would be in the coffin and Libby and Joseph would ride at the front of the wagon. It would be just the three of them. Unless something went horribly wrong, which, of course, was always a possibility, she and Joseph would be home by nightfall.
Now, however, with Sally dead and the property littered with the remnants of battle, they wouldn’t be coming back, at least until after the war. And Jubilee was, of course, going with them. They would still hide Weybridge in the casket, but Jubilee would sit between the adults on the driver’s seat. They would pack as little as possible, because how much could these two horses be expected to haul all the way to the Union garrison? Most of what they would bring would be Jubilee’s, because Libby wanted to give the girl as much comfort as possible.
The last thing they would do before leaving was say a prayer over Sally’s grave. Joseph had insisted. He was clear that he wouldn’t go if Sally had not been buried and they had not said a proper prayer, even though the work right now was likely breaking his back. And the only reason he was even willing to leave was because of his children. They were grown, but he said Sally would want to know he had seen their lives after the war, when they were as free as the white men and women who had once held them in bondage.
Jubilee milked the cow one last time and fed the chickens, the birds clucking in the dark, surprised they had been awakened. She scattered the grain and crumbled kitchen scraps like hail. She patted Flora the cow on her side, hoping she’d be discovered by someone by midday so she wasn’t uncomfortable.
She surprised herself by hugging the animal.
She surprised herself by crying. She hadn’t cried since her mother had died, and she buried her face between the animal’s withers and neck, drying her face against the hair on the creature’s leathery hide.
They left with the last of the moonlight, the moon peering now between the clouds that lolled across the brightening skies, the rain finally having stopped. But they’d gone no more than a few hundred yards from her property when Joseph halted the two horses. The rains had carved a wide runnel in the dirt, and water was sloshing through it like a creek. The horses could have navigated it without the wagon. With it, they didn’t stand a chance. Libby and Joseph knew this instantly, and neither said a word for a moment.
“I don’t see how we can go around it,” Libby said finally.
“No,” Joseph agreed. “I say we loop around the other way. Head up Walker Hill.”
She thought about this. The road was steep there and would further tax the horses. But what choice had they? The detour would add, if there were no other washouts and they could pick up the Winchester Road two miles to the north, perhaps a half hour to the journey.
“Sure. Let’s,” she said. He handed her the reins and climbed down. It was going to take the both of them to turn the horses and wagon around so it faced in the opposite direction.
“Libby?” It was Weybridge.
She glanced back once at the coffin, but returned her attention to Joseph and the way he was already reaching for the bridle of each animal. “Yes?”
“If the roads are bad, leave me here. You and Jubilee ride one animal and Joseph rides the other.”
“No,” she told him. “I haven’t come this far and lost this much to lose you, too.”
As the sun, a blinding white ball against a sky the color of bread dough, began to rise above the Blue Ridge Mountains, they could still see the house, the gristmill, and the outbuildings—the barn, the chicken coop, the slave quarters, and the overseer’s house where Joseph and Sally had lived—in the distance. They were behind schedule, but at least now they were on their way.
Joseph brought the wagon to a stop at the peak of Walker Hill, and she thought at first it was because he wanted one last view of the only place he had ever lived. Or, just maybe, to allow her a final glimpse of what had been her small world for half a decade. But then he raised his hand and pointed, and she saw them. Rebel cavalry, perhaps a dozen riders, roaring down the road toward the Steadman land and descending upon the house and the gristmill. Quickly, he urged the animals forward another thirty or forty feet, where the road began to slope downhill and there was no chance the rebels would spot the horses and wagon. There he climbed down, and Libby joined him.
“Stay here,” she told Jubilee, but the girl shook her head and followed them, and Libby was too tired to argue. And so she retrieved the field glasses that had belonged to Henry Morgan from the straw beside the coffin, and the three of them walked back to the summit where they could see the farm and the mill. She considered freeing Weybridge, but she knew they couldn’t stop here long.
Through the binoculars, she watched some of the men dismount, while others rode acrobatically amidst the small buildings and to the edge of the Opequon, searching for…for, she supposed, them.
“They’ll milk Flora?” Jubilee asked, referring to the cow.
“Yes,” she lied. The animal would be roasting on a spit by suppertime.
When three of the soldiers emerged from the house, they gathered around a horseman still high in his saddle.
And then it began. A few of the rebels disappeared into the barn, emerged a moment later, and soon black smoke was belching from the loft. The roof was wet and would take longer to catch, but it was only a matter of time. There was plenty of hay inside, and the timbers there were dry.
Others were taking torches to the slave quarters, which she expected would burn even faster than the barn.
“Let’s not watch,” Jubilee said.
“No,” she agreed, as the girl started back to the wagon. But she did stay, transfixed by the black tendrils coiling into the morning sky. Soon they would burn her home, the place where she had expected to live out her life with Peter Steadman. This was retribution. Her punishment.
“The Yankees woulda done that if they didn’t,” Joseph murmured.
“Probably.”
“At least they won’t bring in a cannon to tear holes in the mill. They can still use it,” he continued.
“I suppose. But I don’t think there’s much grain left to grind. Anyway, all that means is the Yankees will blow it up when they arrive.”
“They’ll leave the graveyard alone, won’t they? Them rebs?”
“Yes,” she assured him, but once again she was lying. Whether those rebels thought the bodies were slaves or Steadmans hoping to find a final peace wouldn’t matter to the delusional men down there, angry killers with grievances who didn’t understand that the war was long over, and their cause long lost.
Especially a fresh, shallow grave with but a wooden plank stuck into the dirt. They’d string the Negro corpse from any branch they could find that hung over the Winchester Road, not caring that it was a woman.
There was no point in staying to watch them incinerate her house. Jubilee was right to walk away.
“Let’s go,” she said. “We need to get as far away from them as we can.”