All Things New (14 page)

“I’m fine, thank you, Mr. Chandler. And you?”

“Just fine.” He tied his horse to the hitching post and halted at the bottom porch step. “Are the new arrangements going well so far?”

“Yes. I can’t tell you how grateful Mrs. Blake and I are for all your help. We had breakfast cooked for us this morning for the first time. We’ve been coping rather poorly up until now, I’m afraid, since neither of us has any experience in a kitchen.”

“I’m very glad I could help. The Blakes are the first family in this area to take advantage of the bureau’s services, and it has been very gratifying for me, too. I hope your enthusiasm catches on.” He continued to grin like a schoolboy who had just been given a peppermint stick.

“I hope it does, too. My plantation could use more help. I wish my brother Daniel would listen to what you have to say and—”

Josephine stopped. As she looked at Mr. Chandler’s boyish grin, she suddenly realized how false Harrison’s smile had been, how abrupt his change of heart. People rarely changed that quickly. Dread washed over her like icy water.

“Miss Weatherly? Is something wrong?”

“I . . . excuse me.” Josephine ran into the house and into Harrison’s bedroom, her heart leaping wildly, her feet stumbling in her torn shoes. The first thing she saw when she opened the door was a swath of crimson splashed across the bed sheets, as if a child had spilled a container of paint. But it wasn’t paint, it was blood. Harrison’s blood. It gushed down his arm and spilled onto the bed from a deep gash in his wrist. He was transferring the razor to his left hand, about to cut his other wrist when she cried out, “No! Stop! Harrison, stop!”

Josephine leaped on top of his bed, grabbing the hand that held the razor in both of hers, wrestling with him as she tried to take it from him. His hands and forearms were slippery with warm blood, and it quickly soaked her hands, too.

“Leave me alone! Go away!” he yelled, the angry, bitter Harrison she knew only too well. She continued to grapple with him, desperate to take the razor away, to make the bleeding stop. He was
surprisingly strong. She felt a sharp pain as the blade accidentally sliced into her hand. Harrison was going to win. He would get his wish. He was going to die.

“Help! Somebody help me!” she screamed, hoping one of the servants would hear her. They had been told to stay out of Harrison’s room, but surely they would come to her aid, wouldn’t they? “Help me! Please!”

At last, she heard running footsteps, then Mr. Chandler’s voice. “Miss Weatherly? What . . . ?”

“Help me take the razor away from him! Hurry!”

Mr. Chandler ran to her side and grabbed Harrison’s arm, opening his fingers and prying the razor from his hand. Josephine heard it hit the wall beside the bed and clatter to the floor as Mr. Chandler flung it aside. He was stronger than Harrison, stronger than she was, and she could finally let go and step back as he pinned down Harrison’s flailing arms.

“Get out of here!” Harrison bellowed, cursing at Chandler. “Leave me alone! Let go of me!” He struggled in vain. The Yankee was too strong for him. But blood continued to gush from Harrison’s wrist, and the sight made Josephine sick with fear. She didn’t know how to stop it. He was going to bleed to death.

“Miss Weatherly, please . . .” Chandler said, breathing hard. “I need you to unbuckle my belt and pull it off.” It was an outrageous request. When she didn’t move, he said, “Please, we need to use it for a tourniquet to stop the bleeding. Otherwise he could bleed to death.” Both men were covered in blood. So were Jo’s hands and the front of her dress. “Hurry!” he pleaded.

She forced herself to move, crouching next to Mr. Chandler who was kneeling on the bed. The buckle was hard to undo with shaking fingers and sticky hands, but she finally managed to release it and pull it free from the belt loops. All the while, Harrison groaned and growled like a crazed animal, cursing and struggling.

“Wrap it around his arm and buckle it, Miss Weatherly. . . . Good. Pull it tightly. . . . Tighter!”

At last, the bleeding seemed to slow. “Good . . . good,” Mr.
Chandler soothed. “Now, see if you can find me something to use for a rope. Is there a necktie or another belt handy?” Jo found Harrison’s bathrobe and removed the sash. Chandler instructed her to tie Harrison’s uninjured arm to the bedpost while he kept both arms pinned down. Harrison was no longer thrashing and seemed to be weakening from loss of blood, but he still moaned and cursed. His blood had gushed everywhere, soaking the sheets. Josephine’s dress and the bed linens were probably ruined.

“If you can find something to tie his other arm, Miss Weatherly, I can ride back to Fairmont and fetch the doctor.”

“Yes . . . of course.” Josephine stumbled from the room and grabbed the first thing she spotted—the cord to the living room draperies. Two servants, Beulah and Mable, stood in the hallway, their eyes wide with fright at the sight of her.

“Is everything all right, Missy Josephine?” Mable asked. “You needing help?”

“I-I’m fine. This isn’t my blood.” She hurried back into the bedroom and watched in a daze as Mr. Chandler fastened Harrison’s other arm to the bedpost. When he was sure the bonds were secure, he rested his hands on Josephine’s shoulders for a moment as if to steady her.

“You’d better stay right here and watch him. I’ll be back as soon as I can. Make sure the tourniquet stays tight.” She heard the front door close, then the sound of a horse galloping away. She sank down on the edge of the bed, her knees too weak to support her any longer. Harrison pulled against the restraints for a moment as if testing them, then lay still. He resembled a corpse. This was how he would look lying in his coffin, she thought. Exactly like this.

Now that she was sitting down, Josephine became aware of the throbbing pain from her cut finger. It was still bleeding. She put her finger in her mouth, tasting blood, then took it out again and wrapped it tightly in a fold of her skirt. As her shock gradually began to fade, anger took its place.

“Why would you do such a stupid thing?” she asked him.

“Why do you think?” He glared at her for a long moment before
looking away. “I would have done it a long time ago, but I didn’t want my mother to be the one to find me.”

“You ignorant . . . selfish . . . self-centered man!”

“You have no idea what it’s like to lose everything.”

“Oh yes, I do! In case you haven’t noticed, your mother and I and everyone else in Virginia have suffered losses, too. We’ve had to learn how to adjust to a new life, and so can you.”

“I have nothing to live for.”

“You could have plenty to live for—your plantation, your home, a fiancée who loved you. It’s your own fault for driving Emma away.”

“I had nothing to offer her.”

“You know what? I am sick to death of listening to you. When are you going to stop seeing everything through your own selfish eyes and start thinking about someone else for a change? The Yankees didn’t have to kill you the way they killed my brother. You’re letting your own selfish self-pity do the job.”

“Don’t you understand? I don’t want to live this way!”

“Do you think any of us do? Don’t you think we wish our lives were the way they used to be? We all have to get on with it, though, every last one of us.”

“But you aren’t crippled! You don’t know what it’s like to feel like you’re no longer . . . whole.”

But perhaps she did. Something was missing in Josephine’s life, something invisible, and she didn’t know what it was. There were holes in her soul like the spaces on the floors at White Oak where the rugs used to be, like the spots left behind on the wallpaper when the Yankees stole her family’s paintings. Something inside of her had been stolen away, and she didn’t feel whole, either. Harrison often complained of feeling pain in his missing leg, and Josephine’s heart felt that phantom pain, too. If only she knew how to make the aching stop.

“None of us are whole, Harrison. But if you would stop trying to die, maybe you could start living. You keep pushing everyone away, acting mean and hateful, hoping no one will care if you live or die. Hoping we’ll say good riddance. Well, it won’t work. I’m
not going to give you the privilege of dying. I’ve had to figure out how to hang on to hope after losing my father and my brother and our way of life, so you’d better figure it out, too. You were brave enough to go into battle and fight—why can’t you be brave enough to live with the results of your stupid war?”

“I was willing to die for the South.”

“Then it’s time you mustered the same courage to
live
for the South. If you don’t like Yankees coming down here and taking over and telling you what to do, then fight back by
living
, not by taking your own life.”

“I have no reason to live,” he said, pulling weakly against the restraints. “Slaves and Yankees are running my plantation . . . my mother has you to console her . . .”

“I’m only here temporarily. I hope to go home after you make up your mind to get out of bed.”

“Go home now, then . . . and leave me alone.” He closed his eyes.

“I would love nothing better than to leave you alone. And believe me, I will just as soon as Dr. Hunter arrives.”

She folded her shaking hands in her lap and gazed out the window instead of at him, waiting in silence for help to come.

14

Josephine didn’t know how much time passed before she finally heard Mr. Chandler galloping back with the doctor. She stood, smoothing her bloodied skirt, and looked down at the pitiful man in the bed.

“Harrison, listen to me.” She waited until he looked up at her. “I’ve been thinking. I don’t ever want your mother to know what you tried to do today. We’re going to clean everything up before she comes home, and if she does see the blood or the gash on your arm, I want you to tell her you cut yourself by accident.”

“What difference does it make if she knows the truth?”

Josephine stepped closer to him, glaring at him. “Don’t you understand? If she finds out that you tried to kill yourself, she’ll know you don’t love her enough to rebuild this place and take care of her. Maybe you don’t mind hurting her, but I refuse to stand back and allow you to do it.” She heard the front door open and close, footsteps in the hallway. Then Dr. Hunter and Mr. Chandler strode into the room.

“Harrison, you fool!” the doctor said. “After everything we did to save your life, this is how you repay us? What were you thinking?” He lifted Harrison’s arm, still tied to the bedpost, and examined the wrist. “Someone did a good job with this tourniquet. It saved his life.”

“It was Mr. Chandler’s idea,” Josephine said. Harrison would hate the irony of being saved by a Yankee.

“We had to learn how to use tourniquets during the war,” Chandler said. “This wasn’t the first time I had to make one, I’m sorry to say.”

The doctor’s shoe crunched against something—Josephine’s mirror, lying on the floor. He bent to pick it up and handed it to her. The glass resembled a spider’s web, casting dozens of reflections instead of one. In every image, Josephine saw herself covered with blood. The sight made her dizzy. She closed her eyes to stop the room from whirling and groped for something to hold on to, to steady herself.

“Mr. Chandler, please take Josephine outside for some air,” she heard the doctor say. She was only dimly aware of Mr. Chandler’s arm around her waist as he helped her from the room, leading her outside to sit on the front step.

“Are you all right?” he asked after she was seated. “No, of course you’re not. You’re shaking!” He took off his jacket, stiff now with dried blood, and draped it around her shoulders, then sat down beside her. She laid the mirror in her lap and unwrapped her throbbing finger to look at the cut. “You’re injured. How did that happen?”

Josephine shrugged. “I don’t know. In the struggle, I guess.” He pulled out his handkerchief and wound it tightly around her finger, squeezing her hand for a moment before letting go. Why was he being so kind? “I’m sorry for the way Mr. Blake acted,” she told him, “and for the terrible names he called you.”

“I’m used to it. You, Mrs. Blake, and Dr. Hunter are just about the only people in Fairmont who are civil to me. I don’t blame the former slaves for not trusting a white man, and I’m trying to figure out how I can win their trust. I think the new school has been slowly winning them over. But sometimes I doubt if I’ll ever get men like Mr. Blake to trust me.”

“He’s hateful toward everyone, including me. He’s barely civil to his own mother.” She lifted the shattered mirror from her lap,
gazing at her multiple reflections. Mr. Chandler gently took it away from her and set it on the step.

“I would hate for you to cut yourself,” he said.

“That mirror was a present from my father . . . and now it’s broken.” She was afraid she might cry. After everything else she had endured, was she going to cry now, over a silly mirror?

“I’m so sorry,” Mr. Chandler said.

“Why? It wasn’t your fault.”

She heard him take a deep breath and slowly let it out. “What is your relationship to Mr. Blake? . . . If you don’t mind me asking.”

“Our families have known each other for ages. Harrison was my brother’s best friend. They were together when Harrison was wounded and Samuel was killed. Mrs. Blake was here all alone with him, so I agreed to stay and keep her company—well, it was my mother’s idea really. Heaven knows Harrison isn’t good company for anyone.”

“I thought maybe you were his fiancée.”

“Never! Why would you think that?”

“You seem to care about him. You knew him well enough to figure out what he was about to do, and you cared enough to stop him.”

“I couldn’t stand by and let him die. His mother would never get over it. She’s nearly lost all hope as it is. She’s starting to revive now that she has servants again and me for company, but his suicide would kill her.”

“How about your own family? Are they doing all right? Your mother never came to my office for help. I was certain she would after advising Mrs. Blake to work with me.”

“My brother Daniel is home now. He’s the one who’s running the plantation. He may have survived the war, but he hasn’t recovered from it any more than Harrison has, if you know what I mean.”

“I’m not sure any of us will ever recover.”

“My family is slightly better off than the Blakes, because two of our servants agreed to stay with us. And my mother is a very strong woman. She’s determined to have her life back the same
as it used to be—except for my father and brother, of course. I haven’t been able to convince her that our lives can’t possibly be the same. We’ll never get back what we lost.” Josephine halted, embarrassed to be baring her soul to this stranger—and a Yankee at that. What had gotten into her? “I’m sorry. I’m keeping you from your work.” She started to lift his jacket from around her shoulders, but he stopped her.

“Please, keep it for a while longer. And I’m not in a hurry to start working. I want to make sure you’re all right first.” She wasn’t. She was trembling all over, and she wondered if she would ever stop.

“There was so much blood!” she said with a shiver. “I can’t imagine being desperate enough to do that. I’ll never forget the look on Harrison’s face when he was lifting the razor—” To her horror, Josephine started to cry. Mr. Chandler slid closer to her and wrapped his arm around her shoulders. His embrace was so comforting that Josephine forgot who he was for a moment and leaned against him, grateful for someone to hold on to, someone who would listen to her and care about her.

“After everything that Harrison has been through,” she wept, “all the bloodshed he’s seen, you would think life would be precious to him. That he’d consider himself fortunate to be alive at all. Instead, he wants to die.”

“Unless you’ve been to war, Miss Weatherly, you can’t understand what men like Harrison and your brother have really been through and how it changed them.” He spoke quietly, gently, and she felt the strength in his arm as if he were holding her together. “After a while you see so much death that you become numb to it. You start to realize how close we are to dying every single moment of the day. We’re just a heartbeat or a bullet away from it. In war you face death day after day, watching your friends die, facing it yourself, and you stop fearing it. It seems inevitable. You become a walking dead man.”

“Harrison watched my brother die. Samuel was his best friend.”

“We all watched our friends die. In one battle right here in Virginia, they ordered us to attack an enemy entrenchment at the
top of a hill. One squadron after another had to run straight into enemy fire, and they got mowed down like hay. Men I had marched with and lived with and laughed with lay on that hill, dead, dying, screaming in agony. But as fast as they fell, the commander simply ordered the next squad to charge up the hill right on top of them. I watched five thousand men fall in twenty minutes. I was lined up with my squad, waiting for my turn, waiting for them to order me to die next, and it seemed so inevitable that I simply didn’t care.”

He paused, and when he didn’t continue right away, Josephine looked up at him. Tears shone in his eyes.

“Someone finally saw the stupidity of it and called a halt to the slaughter. But I can understand why your friend would stop caring whether he lived or died. Death is nothing. It’s an ordinary, daily occurrence during wartime. A razor across your wrist is nothing after what he faced.”

“I don’t know how to help him. How do I get him to move forward?”

“He never will as long as he remains bitter. Bitterness is one of the deadliest emotions we ever feel. You can’t look forward when you’re bitter, only backward—thinking about what you’ve lost, stuck in the past, despairing because it’s gone. In the end, it devours all hope.”

He was describing how Josephine felt about her unanswered prayers: bitter. And she suddenly remembered that she was talking to her enemy. She shouldn’t be sitting here alone with him. It wasn’t proper. Josephine sat up straight and slid out of his embrace, shrugging off his jacket. “What are you even doing here in Virginia, Mr. Chandler? Don’t you have a home and a family up north somewhere?”

“When I first returned home from the war, I felt the same bitterness that Mr. Blake does and—”

“I doubt that very much! You were on the winning side.”

“Nobody wins a war, Miss Weatherly. We all lose in one way or another. I lost my family, the girl I hoped to marry, my self-respect . . . but I don’t want to bore you with my story.”

“No, please. I would like to hear how much you think you lost.”

“Well,” he said with a sigh, “my family belongs to the Society of Friends—we’re Quakers. I was raised in that faith and became deeply involved in the abolition movement. I couldn’t understand how people could
own
someone, like a possession. I had read
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, and we all heard the terrible stories about slavery in the South. My faith teaches that it’s wrong and inconsistent with Christianity to live a life of wealth and ease while making others suffer and toil. We also believe that God is greatly displeased by slavery.”

“My father was always kind and fair to our slaves. He never whipped or mistreated anyone.” She pulled his handkerchief off her finger and handed it back to him.

“But he
owned
people, Miss Weatherly. Human beings. I just didn’t understand that, and I hated Southerners for it.”

“Did you even know any of us?”

“No, of course not. Did you know any Yankees when you started hating us?”

“We had good reason to hate you. Your army invaded our sovereign nation and destroyed our land.”

He held up his hands for peace, briefly waving his handkerchief as if in surrender. “I understand. I’m sorry.” He paused for a moment. “Quakers teach nonviolence. We’re pacifists—or at least we’re supposed to be. But I wanted to fight. Other men my age were putting on uniforms and learning how to fire weapons and marching off to war, and they made it seem so manly and courageous. I could have claimed conscientious objector status and become a noncombatant when I was drafted, but I didn’t want to. I told my father my motive was to help set the slaves free. He said I was fooling myself, and I was. In truth, I was twenty years old and I wanted to travel and fight like everyone else my age and earn glory. As you can imagine, my family was horrified. The woman I hoped to marry wanted nothing more to do with me.”

“Was it worth it? Was killing us everything you hoped it would be?”

“It was hell,” he said, shaking his head. “Or the next closest thing to it. The first time I went into battle and had to aim my rifle at another man and pull the trigger, I couldn’t do it. I knew I had made a huge mistake. But I had to shoot. I had to kill or be killed. If I didn’t participate but I somehow managed to live, I’d be branded a coward. If I walked away, I’d be shot as a deserter. If I didn’t kill my attackers, I would likely be killed by them—and I didn’t want to die. I had created an impossible mess for myself, and there was nothing I could do but follow orders and shoot.”

“And when the war ended?”

“My home may not have been invaded like yours has been, but I had nothing to return home to. I understand how you and Mr. Blake and your families feel. I may have won the war, but I lost everything that was important to me. My old way of life was gone forever, everything I took for granted. Worse, I’d made a shipwreck of my Christian faith. And so I wallowed in bitterness, thinking about what I’d lost and despairing because it was gone.”

He paused for a moment, twisting his handkerchief. “It’s hard enough to come home when you’re on the winning side. I can only imagine the bitterness and shame of defeat for the Confederates. The South fought hard and well, and that’s the truth. Men like your brother and Mr. Blake lost this war through no fault of their own. The Union simply had more weapons and men than they did. And you’re being made to suffer for their defeat.”

“So why are you here, Mr. Chandler?”

“The Bible says we’re supposed to love our enemies, so that’s what I came down here to do.”

“How very righteous of you.” Josephine heard the scorn in her voice.

“I’m sorry if it sounds that way, but it’s true. Everywhere I went, the Lord kept speaking the same words to me: ‘Love your enemies, love your enemies.’ I didn’t know what it meant at first. I knew love couldn’t be a feeling in this case; it had to be an action. I had seen all the destruction down here. I had taken part in it. I had seen how the Negroes had been set free with no place to go and
no way to support their families, so I decided the best way to love my enemies was to come back here and help. Believe me, I didn’t want to, but I was compelled to. So, here I am.”