Redfield Farm: A Novel of the Underground Railroad (33 page)

Papa stepped out on the porch when we arrived. Adam jumped down to help me carry Nate inside. Papa took one look at Nate and hurried ahead to clear the way. He stood silent as we laid Nate down on the bed, his gnarled hands helpless at his sides. He didn’t ask any questions. He stood, head bowed, as Adam and I tried to make Nate comfortable.

“Adam, run and get Ben and Rebecca. Papa, you unhitch the team,” I directed.

Ben and Rebecca arrived within minutes, their eyes answering most of their questions for them.

“I’ll ride for the doctor.” Ben was down the steps and out the door before anyone could respond. I suspected he wanted to be alone when his stomach gave up its contents. Men had a hard time with these things. Rebecca and I stripped Nate and bathed him. He was unconscious all the time now, and I tried not to look at his face; it was so gray.

When the doctor arrived, he examined Nate’s arm, his face grave. The dressing was soaked and foul-smelling. I took it downstairs and burned it in the stove while the doctor was still there. He shook his head.

“I don’t think there’s much hope,” he said as he redressed the ugly amputation. “If he rallies, I’ll try to make that look a little better, but I don’t think it’ll matter.”

I sat by my brother’s bedside for three days, leaving only for the direst necessity. I spooned broth into him, wiped his brow, changed his dressing, held his hand, sang to him, read to him, prayed for him, all with no response. I stayed stubbornly, willing him to get better, aware that hope was futile but hoping just the same. I kept telling myself that at least he wasn’t dead. On the fourth morning, he opened his eyes, looked around the room and whispered, “I’m going to make it.”

And he did. Slowly, steadily, the fever and chills subsided. By mid-October, he was sitting up. By the end of the month, he could walk. His frame was nothing but skin and bone, but his color came back, and, along with it his appetite.

Nathaniel Redfield would not die in 1862, but another of our own did. Two weeks before Christmas, Amos brought a letter from Altoona.

“Oh, good. Open it and read it to me. She’s probably had her baby.” I was heartened to hear from Rachel.

Amos began to read and stopped. His hands shook, holding the letter. His eyes sought mine. “She’s gone,” he said. “Baby was a girl. She died, too.”

The weather was bad. Amos, beaten down by our travails with Nate and grieving for the daughter he’d lost, wasn’t up to the trip, nor was Nate. So Rachel was buried on a hillside lot in a cemetery called Fairview with no one from her family in attendance.

O
ne morning in April I heard a wagon pull into the dooryard.
I looked out and saw Jacob Schilling get down and lift his three children, one by one, to the ground. Much as I disliked him and blamed him, however irrationally, for my sister’s death, I felt sorry for him standing there with three motherless children in tow.

The children stood in a row near the door, watching. “What I come for, Ann, is this. Can you—would you—take care of them until I can make arrangements?” He jerked his head toward the children. “I can’t do for them and run my business, too.”

I smiled at Rachel’s babies, lest they think themselves unwelcome. “Of course, Jacob. I’d be glad to.”

Jacob fairly jumped up and went to unload the children’s trunks. He struggled up the stairs with them, reminding me of the day years ago when he and Rachel had struggled down the stairs with her trunk. Life has a way of coming round to where it started. Once the trunks were put away, Jacob drank up his coffee, still standing, wiped his mouth and turned to me. “I’d best be going. Can’t afford to take much time off work.” He was gone within the hour, and I knew I’d never see him again. Sympathy misplaced.

Three big-eyed, sad-faced children stood in my kitchen, watching me in silence. James, six, was tall for his age and what you might call skinny. He spoke with a lisp, unsure of himself, cautious. At four, Ellen was his exact opposite. Short, pudgy, confident, and full of pee and vinegar, according to Amos, who carried on delighted conversations with her. John, only two, was in many ways still a baby. Round, fat, full of giggles, only he of the three was completely unaware that he had lost anything. More rearranging was done to create a nursery in Betsy’s old bedroom, next to mine. Suddenly, the house was full again. Spring was here; there was work to be done.

The children proved a tonic for us all. James attached himself to Nate, followed him everywhere, asking endless questions, and filling Nate’s need for a ‘right hand man.’ Buoyed up with reflected glory, James was soon regaling his cousins with war stories, mostly made up but nonetheless attributed to Uncle Nate. Ellen was her grandfather’s favorite, with a ready smile and disarmingly forthright observations about the world. John, delighted to be babied again, filled the void in my heart left years ago by Sam. While no one could accuse me of lacking proper grief for my sister, it was clear that these children were a gift.

One might think that once the war was on, the flow of fugitives would stop, but it didn’t. They came in greater numbers at first, and the flow tapered off to a trickle as the war dragged on. But even after the Emancipation Proclamation, which we cheered so fervently in January, some poor, hapless creatures wandered by. No longer needing to fear slave catchers, they came in daylight, but their plight was sad beyond words.

I had put baby John and Ellen to bed one night, late in June, a few months after they’d come to live with us. James and Nate were off buying supplies in Bedford when I heard a timid knock at the kitchen door. I went to open it, but no one was there. At first I thought it was James, playing a joke, but after I sat down, there came another knock—very quiet. This time I took a lamp, thinking to catch James at his game, but even when I walked out on the porch, holding the lamp high, I saw no one.

“James!” I called. “Come, now, boy! It’s past your bedtime!”

Still no answer, and, looking out at the barn, I saw no sign of either James or Nate. I’d turned to go back in the house when I heard a cry—soft, muffled, like a baby. I stepped off the porch toward the sound, which seemed to come from the spring house. Caution gripped me, but something told me to trust. I moved to the door and pushed it open a few inches.

“Is anyone there?” I asked. “Come on out. No need to hide. You’re among friends.” I don’t know what made me think it was black folk—maybe years of working with runaways. But now there was no need to run. Still, I knew in my bones that’s what it was.

Out of the shadows of the cold, damp springhouse stepped a black boy, smaller and looking younger than James. He was barefoot, even though it had been a cold, wet spring and wasn’t yet fit weather for going without shoes. In the lamplight, he looked up at me with huge eyes, his face full of fear.

“Well, who are
you
, young man?” I asked gently. ”What can I do for you?”

The boy nodded in the direction of the shadows behind the door. I pulled the door to and held up my lantern. There, curled up on the damp floor was a thin black woman not more than twenty-five years old, with two smaller children clinging to her ragged skirts. If Gideon looked afraid, the other two were engulfed in terror, and the woman was barely conscious.

“Oh, Gideon! Come, let’s bring your mama inside where it’s warm,” I said, softly so as not to add to their fear. I bent down to help the woman up, and a piercing squall rose from the throat of the smallest child. Barely three, I guessed, and terrified of a white face. “Gideon, you take your little brother’s hand and I’ll help your mother and sister.”

The boy obeyed, tugging the baby along against his will and amid ever louder protests. I looked into the woman’s eyes as I helped her to her feet. “Don’t be afraid. You’ve come to the right place.”

The middle child, a spindly five-year-old, held onto her mother’s skirt and watched me in dreadful silence, her thumb in her mouth. I led the sad little party across the yard and into the house. Once there, I nearly cried at the sight of them. Gideon told me he was seven, but he was smaller even than six-year-old James. The mother, gravely ill, held fiercely to the two younger children.

“You must be hungry,” I smiled, trying to put them at ease. I had a pot of soup on the back of the stove, thinking Nate and James might be hungry when they came, so I dished it out to the little family, and they ate it and chunks of bread with surprising energy.

I let them eat in silence. While they ate, Nate and James came in, surprised at my company. I served up soup to them, and they sat down on the bench opposite Gideon and his mother.

“This is Gideon,” I told them. “Gideon, this is my nephew James and my brother Nate.”

Gideon nodded solemnly from behind his soup bowl, then held it up to me for more. His sister ate more slowly, her eyes on us, but spoke not a word. The mother alternated bites between herself and the little one, thus keeping his crying at bay. When they were fed, the woman looked up at me, gratitude in her eyes.

“Thank you, Ma’am,” she whispered. “I don’t know how much farther we could have gone. We’s wore out.” She held out an emaciated hand. “My name Maggie.”

“Happy to meet you, Maggie. You look exhausted. What can I do to help?”

Maggie looked around at her children, now quiet in the warmth, their tummies full. “We goin’ to Canada. My brother there. He can help us. You know how to get to Canada?”

“Yes, we can help you get to Canada. It’s still a long way, though. Why don’t you stay here with us for a while until you’re stronger? There’s no need to run anymore. You can travel in daylight. You’re free.”

“I knows I’s free. But that don’t keep
him
from findin’ me.”

“Who?”

“Abe. He want me to marry up with him. Send my children away. He won’t let me be, so I run.” She looked around at the two little ones still clinging to her skirt. “This be Della, and that be Andrew.”

I smiled at the two children, hoping to push their fears aside. “Is this Abe fellow following you?”

“Was. Don’t know if he’s still. We been runnin’ more than a week now. Ain’t seen him since he sic his dog on Gideon.”

I turned to the boy and he lifted his dirty, ragged pant leg to reveal an ugly, jagged tear in his calf. It was swollen, oozed pus, and looked to be infected.

“Maggie, you’ll
have
to stay here for a while. That wound needs tending or he might lose the leg. You’ll be safe here. We’ll take care of you.”

Nate nodded. “We won’t let anyone hurt you. If Abe shows up, we’ll run him off.”

“He a mean one.” Maggie’s attention was drawn to Nate for the first time. She noticed his empty sleeve, neatly pinned up, and drew in her breath. “You get that in the war?” she asked.

Nate nodded.

“Oh, my God. Thank you. Thank you for fightin’ for us. We’s ever so grateful. Now if I can just get my babies to Canada, and find my brother, I be fine.”

I cleared the table and drew bath water for the children in a small oaken tub. “Maggie, let’s bathe the little ones and I’ll see to Gideon’s leg. We’ve lots of clothes to fit all of you.”

Nate led James upstairs to bed, and returned to watch me tend to Gideon’s wound. It was deep and ragged, but the child never whimpered as I cleaned and dressed it with strips torn from an old sheet. Once the younger children were bathed, I went upstairs and rummaged in our children’s trunks for clothing. Maggie was combing Della’s hair, holding Andrew on her lap, when I returned.

“Had to. Abe would have killed him. Abe the overseer once the war start. He worse than the white ones. He make everyone work like dogs. Say the South gonna win and he be rewarded for bein’ loyal. My husband say no, the North gonna win, an’ Abe be nobody. Abe get mad, and my husband run for fear Abe gonna kill him.”

“Do you know where he is?” I asked.

“No. Abe say he caught him and beat his head in, but I don’t believe him. That why I go to Canada. My husband know my brother there. He might of got there somehow.”

“Where did you run from?”

“Virginny. Prince Edward County. Long way from here. We hide out from the soldiers—blue
or
gray. Soldiers want to abuse me.”

I drew more bath water for Gideon and Maggie and went upstairs to get my nightgown. I’d sleep in the kitchen. Once everyone was clean and settled, I lay on Amos’ old bed in the corner thinking about my guests. I thought of Rachel’s babies, so close in age to these but, even with the loss of their mother, so much better off. I thought of Sam, and how he might have shared their plight. Finally, after hours of racing thoughts, the Gods of sleep took mercy on me.