Chapter Thirty-Six
I was forty-three years old and seven months pregnant with my eleventh child, with four still under the age of ten, when my
second oldest, Julia Ann, caught a fever that would not break. She was nineteen.
As a child, she’d been prone to winter coughs and fainting spells, but I’d long since stopped worrying. She had grown into
a young woman with a hearty laugh and a mind quick enough to trounce her brothers at chess. Her father’s black, shining hair
framed her golden-brown skin and bright brown eyes. She was engaged to Thomas Reece, a bashful, sweet-natured boy from Mount
Airy who’d enlisted with the 21st North Carolina. He was recovering from a shoulder wound at a field hospital near the Shenandoah
Valley, where the fighting had turned fierce.
At first, I told myself it was a winter cold, nothing more. Only a week earlier, she’d been out mending a broken fence in
the icy wind, brushing mud from her skirts with a laugh. But within days, her cough deepened, and her breath turned wet and
labored. Soon, she was too weak to leave her bed.
The doctor came and went, his visits brief. “She’s strong,” he said at first. “It’ll pass.” But by the second week, she could
barely sit up. Her ribs pressed against her skin with every shallow breath. He placed a hand on her forehead, and I saw the
truth in his eyes before he said a word.
Pneumonia.
Then she began coughing up blood.
Over the next few days, Eng spent hours sitting near her bed, reading aloud from her favorite books when she was lucid enough
to listen. When Chang grew impatient, Eng spoke low, urgent words to him in their native dialect. He refused to abandon his
vigil.
On her final night, the three of us sat beside her. The wheezing that haunted her childhood had returned with a vengeance.
Her fingers twitched in the sheets, grasping at something beyond her reach. “Dear Julia Ann,” Eng murmured, grief contorting
his features.
Her eyes flickered open, as if she were waking from a light sleep. Then her chest rose once more, shuddered, and stilled.
It was February 27, 1865. She was a month shy of her twentieth birthday.
We laid our daughter’s body out in the front parlor, the hearth left cold to help preserve her.
That morning, Eng and Chang had carried in the plain pine casket they built together. It had taken the better part of a day,
working mostly in silence, shoulder to shoulder. Even when Chang declared it finished, Eng insisted on sanding the rough edges
smooth by lamplight, his hands stained with pitch, as if the labor might grant him penance, or peace.
We dressed Julia Ann in a blue floral gown, her Sunday best. She looked so small inside the box, her face chalky, lips slightly
parted as if she’d just exhaled, eyes closed like a porcelain doll.
For two days, the house filled and emptied, neighbors slipping in and out, speaking in hushed voices. Women from White Plains
Baptist arrived with platters of food, a generous gesture in this time of strict rationing. Someone placed a sprig of rosemary
in Julia Ann’s hands—for remembrance, they said.
The preacher arrived on the third day. Members of both of our families crowded into the house, spilling onto the porch and into the yard.
Julia Ann’s fiancé, Thomas, arrived just before the service began. He had come by rail and horseback from the Shenandoah,
granted a brief leave after weeks in the field hospital. His uniform hung loosely on his frame, his left arm bound in a sling.
He moved carefully, as if something inside him might break if rushed. He stood apart, staring down at Julia Ann, his jaw clenched
so tightly I could see the muscle twitch.
I barely registered the murmurs of the mourners, the shifting of feet, the scraping of chairs. There was no grand sermon,
no choir to lift our voices. Just the familiar words of Scripture—ashes to ashes, dust to dust—and the sound of the wind rattling the windowpanes.
I held my fussing baby, Georgianna, close to my chest, as if my fierce love might calm her. When her cries rose to a wail,
Eng reached out and took her from me. It was a small, welcome kindness.
Eng had aged in these last days—his shoulders stooped, his eyes red-rimmed and watery. Julia Ann’s funeral was one of the
few times I ever saw him cry. He never said as much, but I always suspected she was his favorite. Ever since her childhood
bouts of coughs and fevers, he’d watched over her with special care, his worry sharpening as winter approached. He was the
one who taught her to play chess, explaining each piece’s movement when she was still small enough to perch on his knee. His
face lit up with pride the first time she outmatched him. Now I watched grief contort his features as he stood half turned,
shielding his sorrow from Chang, who remained impassive at his side.
When the service ended, Eng removed the lid from the coffin. We looked into Julia Ann’s sweet face, more serene than it had
ever been in life, even in sleep. Eng reached forward, lifting the muslin winding-sheet, fingers trembling as he drew it over
her. A final act of protection, as if he might shield her one last time.
Julia Ann’s fiancé made a small, strangled noise, then straightened his shoulders, composing himself.
Eng replaced the lid. He and Chang lifted the coffin, joined by Thomas and James. We all followed them outside.
The cold pressed in around us, seeping through layers of muslin and wool. The sky was the color of slate, low clouds sagging
over the field. I let my eyes drift over our gathered family—the cluster of children standing stiffly in their dark coats
and jackets. Young faces made pale by grief and cold, breath clouding the air.
I thought of Stephen, somewhere in the thick of war, and Christopher, trapped in the same grim fate. It had been months since
we’d heard from either.
I thought of baby Rosalyn, also laid to rest under a gray sky.
The ground was half frozen, the earth reluctant to give way. The men had done their best to dig the grave. The preacher read
from the Psalm 51: Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy lovingkindness.
They lowered her down.
A gust of wind swept over the graveyard. I pulled my shawl tighter, the wool scratchy against my wrists. Addie, beside me,
did the same. She leaned into me, and I felt her warmth.
Eng took a shovel and covered the coffin with dirt. The mourners began to disperse. A few hands touched my arm in passing,
brief gestures of condolence.
I pressed a hand against my belly, where a new life stirred. This poor child would be born into a world still filled with
hunger and grief, into a future I dared not imagine.
That evening, after the house quieted, I sat by the parlor window, where the last of the daylight touched the cloth in my embroidery hoop: Leah at the well.
Over the decades, it had softened beneath my hands.
In places, the stitches wandered and sprawled.
More than once, I’d nearly given it up altogether.
But some part of me wasn’t sure I wanted to finish it.
Each time I threaded the needle, it felt as if I were gathering something frayed inside myself and drawing it taut.
I traced a finger over the stitches. The swallow hovered on Leah’s hand; the rippling stream caught the light. I reached for
a spool of vibrant green and began outlining a vine along the edge of the cloth. A patch of herbs began to take shape—spiky
rosemary, vivid mint, blue-gray sage. Tiny leaves curled outward. Wildflowers bloomed violet, crimson, gold.
There would be no marble, no carved stone, only a wooden marker, simple and unadorned. I kept Julia Ann’s nightgown embroidered
with flowers. The tattered notebook she wrote her stories in. I longed to gaze into her eyes, stroke her cheek. I imagined
how she’d look at twenty-five, at thirty. Standing at the altar. Holding a child of her own. It was the injustice of it I
couldn’t get over—the finality. I knew, now, that anything good could disappear at any time. Death swept through the world,
taking what it pleased.
Eng grieved privately, as men often do. I saw it in the way he lingered outside the door to Julia Ann’s room, in the care
with which he repaired the broken hinge on her sewing box, as if to restore some small order in a world gone awry. Now and
then, without a word, he placed his hand at the small of my back. He knew the shape of my sorrow because he carried it too.
Some days grief came on sudden and intense, and I crawled into bed, seeking oblivion, the only salve that seemed to help.
I drifted in and out of sleep, curtains drawn against the light, the seams of my nightgown twisted around my knees.
Dreams blurred into waking. My limbs ached from stillness, but I couldn’t bring myself to move.
The thought of standing felt like trying to lift a plow from the mud.
One afternoon Adelaide came into that dark room, sat at the edge of my bed, and patted my hand. “You’ve got to get up,” she
said. “Keep your hands busy. Find something to do. Letting your mind dwell . . . well, it never helped anyone. You’re too
much in your head, Sallie, you always have been. You take after Mama that way.”
Two of my children dead. Addie did not know, yet, what it was like to lose one.
Almost exactly two years later, her eldest child and favorite daughter, Josephine, rode her gray mare to visit a sick friend
and collapsed on the way home. She was twenty-three. The doctor said heart disease. Some said a romance gone wrong, a broken
heart.
I did not remind Adelaide, then, of her advice to me.
People speak of their faith as if it’s constant and unwavering. For me, it was a thread I clung to, just to keep from slipping
under. I lit candles, letting the quivering flames be the prayers I didn’t voice.
It offered some comfort, but my faith warred with doubt.
The Quakers spoke of God’s mercy, of grace in suffering, of reunions in heaven, and I tried to believe it. I wanted to make
sense of a world—and a war—where children died, and parents were left to bear the weight of their grief. Well-meaning folk
told me it was God’s will, that He called the innocent home first.
But what kind of God would demand such a price?
Time doesn’t heal so much as teach you how to carry your sorrow.
I learned to tuck it away like a stone in my pocket.
I forced myself to laugh with my living children, trying to focus on what I had instead of what I’d lost. Sometimes joy broke through and I felt a stab of guilt, as if any scant happiness was a betrayal.