Redfield Farm: A Novel of the Underground Railroad (37 page)

“I see a woman whose dreams were dashed but who rose to the responsibilities life placed in her way. I see a woman whose life has been spent in sacrifice, who has taken risks many men would have shrunk from.” He was kneeling at my side, holding my shoulders from behind. Slowly he lifted me, guiding me gently along the path until we came to the same woodlot where Jesse and I had met the two slaves twenty-eight years before. We sat on a fallen log, watching the creek bubble along, listening to the frog chorus.

Preston straddled the log, facing me. “I want you to be my wife, Ann. I won’t have it any other way.” He pulled me to him and kissed me.

I leaned against his chest, my head on his shoulder, breathing in his scent. It felt so good to be there. Tears filled my eyes. I’d waited so long.

“Marry me?” he asked.

“Yes. Gladly.”

So the intention to marry for Ann Redfield and Preston Neff was declared at Second Meeting, Eighth Month, and the ceremony was witnessed by family and friends in September, 1865.

I was thirty-seven, and, having had only one encounter before this, I felt compelled to waste no more of my life in chastity. From our first coupling on the creek bank until our marriage, we indulged ourselves daily, adroitly avoiding Amos’ watchful eye. That made it all the more delicious and the need more pressing. I fully expected to be with child on my wedding day. In fact, I wanted it that way.

Christmas of 1865 should have been the most joyful in years, but as I knew well, the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Preston, Amos, and I agreed to make a special Christmas for Ellen, John and James.

Amos set out early on the afternoon of the 20th to cut a Christmas tree but did not return by supper time. I knew instinctively something was amiss. Preston and I bundled up the children and took them over to Ben’s. Unaware of my fears, Ellen and John immediately fell to playing with their cousins while Preston and I enlisted Ben’s help in the search. We found Amos dead in the snow up on the hill behind the house, beside a half-chopped evergreen.

Preston held me close while Ben picked up the ax and, without a word, finished chopping down the tree. Then he and Ben laid Amos on the sled. Ben and I pulled the heartbreaking burden home while Preston followed, dragging the tree.

A
mos’s will directed that his estate be settled and the proceeds divided evenly among his six surviving children,
Rachel’s in equal shares to James, Ellen and John. In letters back and forth to Indiana, the brothers and sisters agreed that Preston and I should keep the farm, buying out my siblings’ shares. Preston left the negotiations to me, encouraging me to oversee my own financial arrangements. I was grateful for that. Once the estate was settled, we made a few modest changes to bring the place up to date.

The farm is rocky and hilly, so I set aside only a few acres for planting corn and oats. On the rest, we grew hay and pastured Ben and Preston’s horses. The barn stored hay and provided shelter for our cow and a few more horses, the overflow from Ben’s. Even now I sometimes stand in the barn and look up at the hay loft, remembering the people who passed through. It always seemed to me there were ghosts in there.

Slowly, the community—as the nation—returned to normal after the war, but it would never be the same. Too many men and boys had gone away, never to return. Too many had returned scarred or maimed. Some of the scars were invisible, but they played themselves out in unforeseen ways. Ways which couldn’t be clearly blamed on the war. But I always thought bad behavior—abuse and insensitivity to others’ pain—had its roots there.

In July, 1866, I gave birth to a baby girl whose name, Patience, was promptly shortened to Polly. Preston’s joy in having a child again was as deep and wide as mine. Her name was testament to my view of life: good things come to those who wait.

October brought a long anticipated visit from Jesse and Abby, come east to buy more nursery stock. Their family now numbered five: little Margaret Ann, named for her maternal grandmother and her ‘favorite aunt’, and twin boys, Jesse and Josiah, the pride of their father’s heart.

“I wouldn’t have moved west if I’d realized how important it would be for these little ones to know their cousins,” Jesse told me. I listened with hope. I still wished he’d never left.

Timed to coincide with Jesse’s visit, but unbeknownst to me, was a visit from another place. One evening as we all sat down to supper, four adults and six children, there came a knock at the door. A look passed between Jesse and Preston, as Jesse said, “Ann, you’re closest. Would you see who it is?”

I rose and crossed the room, brushing off my apron, and opened the door. There stood a tall, handsome Negro boy of about eleven. He smiled broadly and said, “Hello, Ann Redfield. Remember me?”

With a cry, I reached out and gathered him to me. “Sam! Where did you come from?”

Sam was joined by Josiah, Lettie, Ann, Athena, and Amanda, (or the “Three As,” as Sam called them). Now sixteen people crowded around the table; introductions were made and more food brought forth. It was better than Christmas.

We made beds to accommodate six adults and ten children. When the children were finally bedded down all over the parlor floor and up in the nursery, Preston and I, Josiah and Lettie, and Jesse and Abby sat around the stove in the kitchen, talking long into the night. There was so much to catch up on that letters couldn’t tell.

The company stayed for a week, and the walls of the old house nearly burst with the strain of youthful exuberance. Children everywhere, from Sam on down to Polly, and when Ben’s children and Betsy’s boys came to visit, it seemed the whole world was full of noisy, raucous fun. Mary and Noah Poole brought their family from Osterburg after Meeting, and Nathaniel and Hattie came out from Bedford with young James and the announcement that they would soon add another grandchild to the flock.

It was Indian Summer, a brief respite before the coming winter, and we women congregated on the back porch to watch the rip, race, and tear of the bigger boys contrasted with the quiet pretend games of the girls.

“Wouldn’t Mother and Father love this?” I asked no one in particular. “Twenty-two grandchildren! We have certainly flourished and multiplied!”

“I love a reunion,” Rebecca reflected. “It’s neither a beginning nor an ending, but a touchstone between the past and the future.”

I nodded, satisfied with my part in it. We were strong, hard working, responsible people, the kind the earth needed more of. Amos and Martha were not there to see it, but that in no way diminished their role.

I sought out Preston one evening, longing to touch him and re-establish our bond. It was not threatened—no, it was strengthened by exposure to the broad texture of my family and my life before him. I simply needed to touch him—physically and spiritually—before going out among them again.

“There is very little peace to be found here tonight,” I told him as we walked among the trees of Ben’s orchard.

“Very little,” he agreed. “Praise be to God.”

Peter McKitrick jumped out of an apple tree a few feet in front of us with a shout. He was met by a barrage of crab apples flipped from sticks in the hands of Ben’s twins, Jeremiah and Jonas. Somewhere a few rows over, Sam came pounding down between the trees, pelting Paul McKitrick with apples as he ran.

Passing through Ben’s orchard gate, we followed the well worn path down over the hill. This was a favorite place for us for over a year now. We sat down on the same log we had sat on that July eve more than a year ago, quietly watching the moon reflected on the rippling water.

“It’s beautiful, you know,” I told him.

“What is?”

“Life. Beautiful in its beginning. Beautiful in its ending. Beautiful because it goes on. Because when you think it’s over, it has just begun. One life ends and another begins, and we are all a part of it. None immune to its sufferings; none excluded from its joys. It’s all there for the taking.”

“I love your perspective on things.” He smiled, holding my hand against his thigh.

A twig snapped off to the left, and we peered out of the woodlot to see Sam walking purposefully along the creek path. He approached us, stopping at a respectful distance.

“Ann Redfield?” he asked. “May I talk with you?”

Preston rose, with a questioning look at me. I nodded as he stepped away, passing the boy on the path. Sam moved silently to my side, and positioned himself on the log.

“I just know it. You had to be
somebody
special. All those letters and packages. Papa all the time talking to me about you.” He turned away and looked down the path, very quiet. I watched him, concerned that this knowledge not hurt him. “I’m lighter than Papa and Lettie. That always made me wonder, especially since the “Three As” are darker, too.” He reached in his pocket and brought out the watch I’d given him at the boat dock in Erie. “Then there’s this.”

I smiled. “When did they give it to you?”

“They didn’t. I found it in a trunk when I was ten, wrapped in some baby clothes. I knew it wasn’t from Lettie. That got me wondering. All the wondering pointed to you, but I didn’t know why.”

I laughed. “We’ll see what we can do.” I watched his young face, his quick mind taking it all in. “I would have told you sometime, Sam. I was waiting until you were older. Josiah or I would have told you.”

He was silent for a long time. “I’m sorry you had to give me up.”

“I’m sorrier for that than anything else I can think of. It was the hardest thing I ever did. But, look at you! Look how you turned out—how good your life has been with your father and Lettie.”

“Lettie’s good to me.”

“I knew she was a fine person from the start, or I couldn’t have given you to her.”

Again a long silence. I moved closer to my son and put my arm around him. “You’re so precious to me, Sam. I don’t expect you to understand all this as deeply as you will later. But I hope you’ll think I did the right thing. There is ugliness in the world, and the best thing is to fight the ugliness any way we can. Sometimes that means putting what is most precious out of its reach.”

N
o one ever came back to the Hartley place.
I often wondered about Sawyer, Cooper, and Pru’s boys. The house fell apart. The roof caved in and the porch rotted away. The last time I saw it, someone had torn it down to salvage a few logs for a pig sty and left the rest lay. I don’t get down over the hill much anymore.

Attendance at Meeting fell off after the war. So many people moved west, and cities beckoned with the promise of good jobs and an easier life. The Quaker community shrank over the years. There are only a few of us left now, but I still find comfort there. Everyone needs a place to belong, and that is mine.

My time with Preston was short. In June of ’75 he was up on the hay wagon, forking hay into the barn, when he fell to the ground and never got up. They said it was apoplexy. I didn’t know. All I knew was, the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.