Chapter 11
11
There was no time to question what she had done. There was no time to ponder whether there had been other, better options or ruminate upon the shape of her character and this new blot.
No: blots.
Because now there were two dead men staining her soul. She had shot them both. The second one fell to his knees, and she was prepared to spare him, convinced—if only briefly—that he’d tell no one anything, say not a word, not ever, but the second she started to lower the gun, he’d reached for it. But he wasn’t fast enough. Almost. But not quite. His face and her hands were speckled with black powder, the stippling like certain birds: a flicker, an owl.
It was the powder on her fingers that finally caused her to fall to her knees and vomit. But it was also those smudges that reminded her to empty each man’s haversack until she had retrieved their powder flasks and bullets.
Now she and Joseph dragged the bodies into the woods, Libby not bothering to wipe the ebony flecks from her fingers until the two corpses were hidden beneath the fallen branches of a dead evergreen easily a hundred yards into the forest, and she could brush the dirt aside, too.
The dead men would not remain hidden for long. Both she and Joseph understood this. At some point that day or that week, someone would find them—or parts of them, if bobcats or turkey vultures discovered them first. She and Joseph picked the spent cartridges off the pike and ground the blood into the dirt with their shoes, but soon enough someone would miss one or both of the dead men or, at the very least, wonder at their whereabouts. Briefly she and Joseph considered bringing the pair’s horses with them to the Union garrison, an offering of sorts, but they still had a long way to travel, and it was possible that they would be stopped by people who recognized the animals or wondered where they had gotten them. And so they decided they would lead them a half mile or so from where she had executed their riders and there set them free. They’d be spotted. Soldiers, scoundrels, and civilians alike needed horses and these two were healthy and strong.
“Their guns?” she asked Joseph. She wanted them. She wanted them badly.
He nodded his head, not necessarily suggesting they should take them, but pondering the idea. “If we’re stopped by other scalawags, it might be helpful to have ’em. But if we do reach Harper’s Ferry, it might not look good. These are Colts, a course.”
Unspoken was also the reality that if Confederate soldiers stopped and searched them or some of Mosby’s men detained them, the fact they had five pistols—the one they had brought plus the four that had belonged to these interlopers—and a carbine would get Joseph strung up from a tree on the spot. That was certain. And her? Very likely, she’d be hanged tomorrow as a Union spy.
“I say we keep them,” she decided.
“All right, then. We keep ’em. Seems you got the ammunition you wanted.”
She closed her eyes for a moment, trying to suppress the idea this was selfish, and convince herself it was purely self-preservation.
“One thing,” he said. She waited.
“Maybe up the road apiece, we find a spot to hide the weapons. We can pick ’em up again on the way home. Somehow I don’t think a bunch of Yankee soldiers are goin’ to let a rebel lady and me into the garrison with five pistols and a rifle.”
“What if someone else finds them first?”
“Better that than someone thinkin’ we’re there to kill a colonel.”
He was right. He was usually right. One of the smartest Negroes—no, one of the smartest men—she knew. And so she agreed.
As Joseph drove the wagon northeast, they spoke little of the men she had killed, though Joseph reassured her that they hadn’t had a choice. She tried to convince herself of this, but she also couldn’t deny the reality that she and Joseph would not be on this road today were it not for her belief that she needed—and needed was the right verb, it was a compulsion—to save the life of a Yankee stranger. It was as if she were in a fairy tale and under a spell. Bewitched. Weybridge had tried to thank her with Shakespeare. She gazed up at the canopy of trees and this shadowy stretch of forest and thought to herself, perhaps instead he should have quoted the Brothers Grimm.
They passed the charred timbers of barns, the skeletal framing awash in soot, fields of deep black ash that once were acres and acres of corn. A copse of dead trees, splintered by battle, the ground chewed up by horses and rutted by limbers and caissons. What once was a cluster of houses, one of which was now but a stone chimney rising from the rubble like a sentinel, and another that could have been a doll’s house, one wall so perfectly collapsed that they could see the furniture and wallpaper inside.
She’d had a dollhouse like that. Jubilee may have once, too. Perhaps it sat even now in her bedroom in her own house, waiting for her to return.
Ah, but the Jubilee who someday would greet those dolls would be nothing like the child who had left them.
Neither she nor Joseph said a word, and if she were to see into his mind, would she see the dead men they had left in their wake? She turned to him: his eyes were fixed on the road with grimness and determination.
It was already after twelve thirty when they were surprised by two soldiers in blue uniforms covered in dust. The pickets emerged from the woods with the suddenness of deer. They were younger than Libby. Teenagers, she supposed, one trying to grow a pathetic moustache, his shoelaces untied. He commanded them to halt, while the other aimed his carbine at Joseph and her, moving it back and forth between them.
“You don’t need to shoot,” she told them. There had already been too much shooting today. And while she was able to feign equanimity, inside she was a riot of regret and horror at what she had witnessed and what she had done. “My name is Libby Steadman. I’ve come to plead on behalf of one of your soldiers. One of your men.”
“One of ours?” He was incredulous.
“Yes. Captain Jonathan Weybridge. Vermont Brigade. He’s alive, but wounded. Badly wounded. He needs help.”
The young man ignored her and untied the canvas atop the wagon.
“Empty,” he told his partner, the one aiming a rifle at them. He sounded surprised. Then he asked, “Weybridge, you say?”
She nodded. “He’s from Middlebury, Vermont. Lost a leg and a good part of his hand,” she answered. “I have a list from a doctor of all the things he needs. Things that might save his life. I was hoping the garrison could give us—”
“Lady,” he cut her off, shaking his head and silencing her, “I don’t know what you think you’re going to accomplish, but I’m not a toddler with a leading string on my back. You can’t just sashay here and expect to walk out with the pharmacy. I know you rebels are desperate, but no one’s going to be fooled by a lady smuggler.”
“I’m not a smuggler.”
“And I ain’t a soldier.”
“I told you—”
“She’s a blockade runner,” the other picket said, attempting a small joke. “But she lost her ship so she’s gotta do this.”
“Maybe she’s a spy in a petticoat,” his partner agreed, chuckling.
“I’ve come from Berryville,” she insisted. “We’ve been on the road since dawn. Please, at least let me talk to a doctor.”
“A doctor? You’re serious.”
“I am.”
“I don’t see it. I just don’t. We ain’t going to shoot a woman, even a rebel, so I see two options. Your best option is to turn around and skedaddle back to wherever you came from. A worse option is we let you through and you talk to Sergeant Chittenden, and then he sends you back—or arrests you. He might do that instead.”
“That’s what I’d do,” said the one pointing the gun.
She reached into her pocket and held up the envelope and the letter. “I have proof I have a Union officer in my care. Here it is.”
The soldier examined the papers. “This ain’t blood on it, is it?”
“It is.”
“His blood?”
“Yes.”
“In that case, seems more likely he’s dead than alive. And you just want medical supplies for your secesh army.”
“Or that devil, Mosby,” added the other picket.
“He’s alive, sir.” It was Joseph, and Libby turned to him. Usually he was so careful not to speak unless addressed. “At least he was when we left. I swear on my life he was alive. And I think he still is. He’s in this woman’s house. My wife and this lady’s niece are carin’ for him as best they can. But they need medicine we ain’t got.”
“You her slave?” the Yankee asked him, and Libby couldn’t decide whether there was more sympathy in his tone for Joseph or anger toward her.
“I ain’t nobody’s slave,” Joseph answered. “I am a freedman. My name is Joseph.”
“Then what are you doing with a rebel?”
“I run a gristmill. I am paid to run a gristmill,” he said, and Libby thought about how little she had in fact paid him since the war had started and Peter had left. The truth was, he was more her partner than her employee, and they were running a concern where their largest client was the army, and Confederate currency had about as much value as sheets of old newspaper.
The privates seemed to take this in, and so Libby pressed her case. “Your army left a captain to die when you moved on after the fighting at the Opequon. Me and my people have kept him alive. So far, anyway.”
“Must have been pretty far gone.”
“Fine. But you left him behind with a few opium pills and a canteen. A captain. An officer.”
“Have you heard of this captain?” the first picket asked the other.
“It’s a big army, Lucius. No.”
“Me neither.”
“But that doesn’t mean anything. The sergeant might.”
“Or Colonel Duffy.”
“Yup.”
“You got the proof he’s real in your hands,” Joseph said, pointing at the letter and the envelope.
The private glanced one last time at the papers and then handed them back to Libby. She looked gratefully at Joseph because of the way he seemed to have changed the pickets’ minds—or, at least, planted a doubt in what they thought was a rock-solid truth a few moments earlier. She knew they were going to let her pass.
In the hours between when she killed the two brigands and they reached the garrison at Harper’s Ferry, she was able to quell her beating heart. Her anxiety had not diminished, but its outward and obvious manifestations had. She was not cool, but she was collected. They crossed the bridge near where the Shenandoah River met the Potomac, passed the railroad, rode parallel to the tracks, and reached the stone and thick-timbered structures nestled amidst the hills. She could see how the arsenal was still damaged, its roof pockmarked and riddled from, she supposed, when it was blown up back in 1861, but even it was being used as a warehouse now—because the town was nothing like the sleepy place she remembered from before the war. The first hint of change had come as they were arriving, when three dozen immaculate Union cavalry soldiers raced past them, riding in the opposite direction, their guidon’s swallowtail tips flapping like birds’ wings. The town had felt dark and small to Libby when she had been here years ago, human civilization shadowed by tall trees on steeply sloping ridges, perhaps even a little sorrowful and bleak. Now it was crowded with soldiers and teamsters, and she had never seen such plenty: barrels upon barrels of pork, walls of crates filled with condensed milk that blocked most of one building, wagons lined up as if for a parade that stretched to the railroad depot, some empty and some packed. And then there were the guns. There were piles of old muskets and chests of new Sharps carbines, fresh from—according to the stamp on the side of each chest—the factory in Hartford, Connecticut. The cavalrymen’s horses were gorgeous animals, Morgans and Thoroughbreds, and the teamsters couldn’t unload the trains and fill the wagons fast enough. The sutlers were everywhere.
One of the pickets had told them where to find Army headquarters and whom to ask for, and a blacksmith pointed out precisely the building. Joseph was frisked by a sergeant outside Colonel Duffy’s office, and the Federals found a washerwoman to search her. Then she and Joseph were escorted inside by the sergeant. Duffy was a squat man with dark hair and a handlebar moustache, and he stood when he saw that it was a woman being brought to him. Then, as if he were showing off a prized painting in a living room, he gestured outside his window.
“See that building? John Brown’s last stand before he was hanged,” he told her, shaking his head. “Crazy man…but good. Good to his bones. It was your ‘peculiar institution’ that got him killed.”
She considered correcting him: regardless of whether what John Brown did was right or wrong, the old man got himself hanged. But the last thing she wanted to do was antagonize this Yankee.
“Damn fool was ahead of his time,” the colonel added.
She recalled the panic and the fury that Brown had unleashed in the Valley—across all the South.
Altogether, there were four Union soldiers crammed into the office with them, including the colonel, two guards, and a captain from Vermont named McKenna. Duffy had summoned the captain because the soldier had been in the skirmish near the Opequon and, apparently, knew Weybridge. Now the colonel turned to McKenna and said, “Tell me: You think it’s possible this woman is telling the truth and this Weybridge is still alive?”
McKenna had a long, tired face for a man not much older than she was. He was roughly the same age as Weybridge, Libby guessed.
“Weybridge was tough. Maybe is tough,” he told the colonel, shrugging. “You wouldn’t have known it to talk to him. Calm demeanor. He was bookish, after all. But he was big.”
“You’re not answering my question.”
“When I saw him after the surgery, he was in a bad way.”
“Surgeons think he’d live?”
“When they finished the surgery, they thought he had a chance,” the captain replied. “Not a good one. But a shot. After they brought him to that abandoned house near where we were camped, they grew less confident. Just getting him there nearly finished him off. When the army moved on, two soldiers stayed with him, figuring he’d pass in a few hours.”
“And the soldiers saw him die?”
“No idea, sir. Their orders were to stay with him, unless he died.”
“You believe them?”
“I don’t know them. But when I got the word that Weybridge was gone, I wasn’t surprised. I expected it.”
“We’ve both seen soldiers run, Captain.”
The captain looked down at his boots. “Yes, sir. And two boys left behind with the rebel army right there and John Mosby’s men lurking about? I can see boys running like rabbits. Even good boys.” Then he raised his eyes to Libby and said, “Ma’am, you say Captain Weybridge is alive. Is he awake? Speaking?”
“He is,” she answered. “He’s weak, but he’s talking. He improved considerably once we got some food and water in him.”
McKenna took this in. “Maybe, if that’s true, you can tell us something he’s told you that isn’t in this letter.”
She understood the challenge. “The letter mentions his boys, but not their ages. I can tell you that. One’s five and one’s three. The letter mentions the college, but not what he teaches. I don’t know the details, but he certainly knows his Shakespeare.”
“What else?”
“He’s spoken more to my niece. We have a gristmill, and I have work to do.”
“What’s he said to her?”
Joseph raised his fingers. “May I, sir?”
“Go ahead,” agreed the colonel.
“When I was shampooing his hair and trimming his beard—”
“You washed and shaved him?”
“He was filthy,” Libby interjected without thinking. “You all left him to lie on the floor, soiled by his own grime and muck!” Then, afraid her irritation might jeopardize the goodwill that she needed, she softened her tone. “So, yes, Joseph cleaned him up. We were trying to do right by him.”
“He said somethin’ about a friend named Marsh. A lieutenant,” said Joseph.
“Eustis Marsh?” pressed the captain.
“I think that’s it.”
“Man was the closest thing Weybridge had to an adjutant,” McKenna told the colonel.
Duffy had been grinding his teeth, the bones on both sides of his jaw moving with the constancy of a metronome. He sat forward. “Was?”
“He’s fine, sir. I meant he was by Weybridge’s side until the captain was wounded. If Weybridge is alive, it’s because Marsh got a tourniquet on his leg at Gilbert’s Ford—that’s where we were along the Opequon—and then got him to the surgeons.”
Libby restrained herself from adding that he was alive because of her and Joseph and Sally. She could feel that the attitude of these Union officers was shifting in her favor. She understood the magnitude of her request and did not want to endanger her momentum.
“The fighting has been all around Berryville this fall. But your home was spared?” the colonel asked.
“So far. But I’ve heard the cannons. The fighting was close yesterday. It’s been close often the last three years. Seems like there’s always an army coming and going through Winchester.”
McKenna looked down at his boots, exhaling through his nose. When he glanced up, she saw a flicker of something—sadness, perhaps—in his eyes, and he seemed about to speak when the colonel shook his head, silencing his junior officer. “You said your husband is a prisoner,” Duffy remarked.
“He is. Captured and wounded at Gettysburg. Peter Steadman, Second Virginia.”
“Ah, once the Stonewall Brigade,” he said, as if speaking of a house or a family that had fallen on hard times.
“Yes. Once.”
“How is he?”
“I’ve no idea. I’ve no idea if he’s even still alive. It’s been months since I got a letter,” she answered. She sensed that the moment was nearing when she should press them about Peter, see whether they might be willing to help her find him—or, at least, find out if he had survived his ordeal.
Duffy took this in. “So, you’re doing all this for Weybridge out of…what? Christian charity?”
“I was thinking of my own husband after he was wounded.” She shrugged. “I suppose I’m doing this because I didn’t have much choice in the matter. I couldn’t just let the man die.”
“Oh, you could have. Lots of rebels would have done just that,” the colonel said.
The remark was cutting—as it was meant to be. But he had still tacitly acknowledged that he believed Weybridge was breathing. “As I told the doctor in Berryville,” she said, “I would have wanted a Yankee woman to do the same thing for my husband.”
“A doctor knows you have Weybridge?”
“Yes.”
“Rebel?”
“Yes. But he…”
“Go on.”
“He can be bought. The doctor.”
McKenna looked at his colonel. “Why don’t we send a few cavalry soldiers and a wagon to retrieve Weybridge? Bring him back?”
“Because he’d die in the back of the wagon,” she told them. “He barely lasted the two miles or so between the house where you left him and mine. If you tried to bring him here right now, the jostling would kill him. It took Joseph and me six hours to reach this garrison.”
The colonel stood up, an indication that he’d had enough and made a decision. “We’re not going to risk cavalry soldiers—not six or sixteen or sixty—their horses, and a wagon to try and save one man who may die anyway. But bring this woman to the Sanitary Commission and have a doctor there give her whatever she needs.”
“Whatever?”
“Whatever…within reason.”
“I believe this woman is telling the truth, sir,” said McKenna. “But even if she is—”
“I am, Captain. You know very well I am,” she said.
“Even if she is telling the truth, Colonel, you’re not afraid that whatever we give her will just fall into rebel hands? It must be twenty miles back to Berryville, and we don’t control those roads.”
“I’ll risk whiskey and iodine, Captain. I’ll risk a whole damn portable drug chest. But I won’t risk more men.” The colonel turned to her. “Thank you, Mrs.Steadman. The Union Army thanks you.”
She nodded and took a deep breath. This was her chance to lobby on behalf of Peter, to call in that favor. “May I ask one more thing, Colonel?”
“Of course.”
“As I said, I’ve not heard from my husband in months. Is there any way—any chance—you could find out how he is? Where he is?”
“We have a lot of rebels in our camps. You have a lot of our boys.”
“I know. I was hoping for a prisoner exchange and—”
“And those are done,” he said, his voice firm. “But where was your husband when you last heard from him?”
“Camp Chase.”
“Ohio?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll see what I can find out.”
“That’s most kind of you.”
“You plan on staying in Berryville?”
“I do.”
The captain smiled mordantly and jumped in. “Well, then,” he said, “with any luck, General Sheridan himself will drop by and tell you whatever the colonel was able to learn.”
She didn’t think McKenna had meant to be hurtful: this was just soldierly gallows humor. But it was stinging nonetheless. The colonel glared at the other officer and said, “I’m sure all Captain McKenna meant is that the war won’t last forever.”
“Sorry, sir,” the captain murmured.
“If we discover your husband’s whereabouts,” the colonel told her, “we’ll be sure a letter reaches you through the proper channels. We’re not monsters, Mrs.Steadman. You’re trying to save the life of one of our soldiers—a man whose wife never expected to see him again. At our end? We’ll see what we can learn for you about the man you married.”