The Seeker (38 page)

“No, Papa,” Landon cried out and laid his head on her father’s chest.

“Now, don’t take on so, Son.” He stroked Landon’s head a few times before he looked back up at Charlotte. “You’re going to like Landon. He’s a fine boy. Wants to be a whale boat captain when he grows up.”

“So I’ve heard,” Charlotte said.

Her father looked back toward the fire. “Might be a good place to be right now. Floating on the open sea. The salt air in your face. Searching for that one whale that might take you on the ride of your life.”

“You can sail with me, Papa,” Landon said.

“You just think about me when you stand in the helm. That will be my ride, Landon.” He smiled weakly down at the boy. Sweat beads popped out all over his face. He reached for Charlotte’s hand again. “Do you forgive me, Charley? After you left, I wanted to follow you to Virginia to talk to you, but everybody said it was too dangerous, and now look at me. Grayson conquered by the Rebels.”

“Not conquered. Never conquered,” Charlotte said. “Under us is still Grayson land. Our land.” She wanted to take off her shoes and stockings and feel the grass and dirt between her toes.

“Grayson land, yes. But not my land. Your grandfather just endured my presence here. I was the necessary evil to see that the Grayson blood continued even if the name did not.” He looked around. “Yours now, Charley. Or what’s left of it.”

“What of Selena?” Charlotte wanted to sling the woman’s deceit in his face, but he looked so sad that she didn’t have the heart to add to his sorrow.

“Ah, Selena. I fancied I loved her. You can forgive me for that, can’t you, Charley? I tried to explain in my letters. An old man’s last folly.” He made a sound that started out a laugh and changed to another gasp of pain as he grabbed his chest. “Too tight.”

“Hold on, Father. We’ll get a doctor.” Charlotte pushed her words at him, willing him to listen and keep breathing, but his eyes glazed over as his head slumped down on his chest. She grabbed him and tried to shake life back into him. “Wait, Father! Wait.”

Ruben bent down in front of her with tears streaming down his cheeks. “Ain’t no use, Miss Lottie. He’s done gone on.”

Beside her, Landon let out a pitiful whimper.

Charlotte blinked her eyes and let Ruben gently ease her father away from her hands. “I didn’t get to tell him I forgave him. That I never saw his letters,” she said softly more to herself than to Ruben or Landon. “I wanted to tell him.”

“He knows now,” Landon said.

Charlotte looked at the child. “But he died before he heard me.”

“The Lord will tell him,” Landon assured her with true faith. “The Lord will want him to be happy in heaven, so he’ll tell him. My first papa told me that before he died. He was real sick, but he told me everybody’s happy in heaven. That all the tears stay down here.”

“Listen to the child. He knows what he’s talkin’ ’bout. Things is always good up in paradise even if there is plenty of tears falling down here,” Ruben said as he laid her father back on the couch with great care. He pushed her father’s eyelids down over his eyes and folded his arms across his chest. “I’ll get a blanket out of the carriage house.”

Charlotte stared at her father’s body and desperately wished he would even yet gasp and rise up off the couch to talk to her again. But of course he didn’t.

Landon edged closer to Charlotte and spoke in a small voice. “I wish I could go hide. It’s easier when you can hide.”

Charlotte put her arm around him. “Does it frighten you to look at him?”

“No. It only frightens me that he’s gone. I liked my second papa. I might not like my third. Or he might not like me.”

“Will there be a third?”

“Oh yes. I think Mother already has him picked out. She doesn’t like to leave things to chance. She says it’s best to always have a plan.”

“I used to think that,” Charlotte said. She tightened her arm around the boy and felt the trembles shaking him. She turned him toward her. “Here, Landon, hide against me.”

He buried his face in her dress. His voice was muffled as he asked, “Can I cry? Mother says young gentlemen don’t cry, but I don’t think I can keep from it.”

“Everybody cries sometimes,” Charlotte whispered as tears rolled down her cheek and fell on Landon’s messed curls. “Even whale boat captains.”

And behind them Grayson burned.

30

August 22, 1862
Dear Adam,

My father was buried last Thursday. Elder Logan, Sister Martha, and Dulcie came to be with me as the preacher from town spoke words over his grave. I’m sure my father’s political friends and our neighbors were shocked to see me in Shaker dress with a cap covering my hair. What a change for them to witness, but then the whole nation is in a constant state of flux with the way the current conflict is tearing us apart.

There is much sorrow. Neighbors down the way, the Jacksons, just got word their son was killed at White Oak Swamp. Other neighbors, the Andersons, lost their son at Bull Run a year ago. One fought for the Confederates and the other for the Union, but at my father’s funeral, Mr. Jackson and Mr. Anderson stood shoulder to shoulder and grieved with me and with each other. Death is the great equalizer.

Behind us as we stood around my father’s grave, smoke still rose from the skeletal remains of my Grayson home. General Morgan’s raiders set it afire when they came through here. They did not shoot my father, but the result was the same. His heart could not bear the destruction of his home and his life.

Selena disappeared the night of the fire and was not at the graveside to be a grieving widow. Landon, her young son, is in the charge of his governess and they are at a hotel in town waiting for her to return. The governess says Selena has left him in her charge for extended periods before and that she is confident Selena will return for him. As a mother should. Landon was very sad the day we laid Father to rest. He and Father had established a family bond. So much so that he considers me his rightful sister. I don’t mind. He is a charming child. So charming I wonder if Selena can really be his natural mother. I, of course, would not suggest such a thing to him.

The Rebel raiders did no harm to Harmony Hill. The Shakers fed them gladly as they do all who come hungry to their doorsteps and in gratitude the men went on their way without stealing so much as one horse. The elders and eldresses were much relieved. But there is great consternation that General Morgan’s raid is only a beginning. A Union cavalry troop camped out in the Shaker pastures not four days after Morgan passed through here. It is unthinkable what would have been the result if they had met in our village.

I remain with the Believers. Sister Martha still instructs me in their ways and says I will surely someday know the peace she carries in her heart if I open my ears to her words. Aunt Tish, Sister Latisha, has embraced the life. In one way she was sorry to hear Grayson was ashes for she knew how it wounded me, but I think she cared not a whit for herself. Grayson wasn’t her home. It was her prison.

Every day I recall a new thing to mourn. My mother’s portrait. The book of children’s poems my grandfather often read to me before he died. The silver bell my mother gave me when I was four so that I could call for help if I was afraid in the night. But they are only things. As Sister Martha says, it is better to give up ownership of all things and to gather only spiritual gifts.

My mother’s garden is gone, destroyed by Selena long before the fire completed her work. We will never again walk among the roses at Grayson.

Sadly,
Charlotte

She was becoming one of the Shakers, Adam thought as he looked up from reading through the letter for a second time. Charlotte a Shaker with no will or spirit of her own. It was almost more than he could imagine, but the proof was there in the words in front of his eyes. He scanned through them again.
Our village. Remain with the Believers. Someday know the peace. Spiritual gifts.

He shut his eyes and pulled her image into his mind. He longed to look into her green eyes and perhaps take the pins from her beautiful red hair. At times in the last year, Charlotte’s letters were all that had kept him sane as he followed first Grant’s army in the west before Sam urged him back to the east to be on hand for McClellan’s great victory as the general launched his Peninsular Campaign.

The Yankee army marched to within six miles of Richmond, but the Confederates didn’t give ground. McClellan was forced to fall into retreat before he was ordered to load his army on boats to join General Pope in northern Virginia where once more the armies were fated to meet at Bull Run Creek. The Union army attacked, this time sent into battle by General Pope in a rash bid to conquer the Southern forces before all of McClellan’s men had time to reach the field of battle. But Robert E. Lee, now in command of the Southern army, turned the tables on Pope’s forces and launched a surprise counterattack. In a tragic repeat of the first battle at Bull Run, the Union troops once more retreated back to Washington. Yet again there was no great victory to encourage the Northern people.

On the march away from the Bull Run battleground, Adam gave up his horse to a wounded soldier and trudged along the muddy roads with Jake’s Massachusetts regiment. Since he often bivouacked with the men, they had become his company. He knew each of them by name and had done sketches of many of the men to send to their wives and mothers. And now those sketches would be all that ever returned home of some of the men who had fought their last battle.

Jake no longer worried aloud to Adam about what he would do when he saw the elephant. He knew, for he had charged forward in the face of deadly fire time and again. He had loaded and fired his gun at the men in gray and seen them thrown backward when the bullets found their target. He had heard bullets sing past his head and watched the men beside him fall. His horse had died under him, but he had stood and not run. He had survived to fight again.

But though he came through the battle unwounded, he’d been weakened by a bout with dysentery the week before and began coughing as they marched away from Bull Run back toward Washington in defeat yet again. A defeat made even more disheartening by the heavy rain beating down on their heads.

The rain made talk impossible, but there was nothing to say anyway. Nothing to be done except plod on through the mud. To move one foot in front of the other and try not to remember the sight of too many young soldiers sprawled in death, too many exploding shells, too many wounds from minié balls that tore muscles asunder and made amputation the only treatment.

Adam wanted to shut from his ears the sounds of horses dying, artillery shells screaming overhead, wounded men crying for help. He wanted to get on a train and ride away from it all. Maybe go west again and be in the wide open spaces where he could sketch the faces of the pioneers pushing the nation westward. In the last year, his pen had drawn too many scenes of battle, sent back too many sketches of Union defeats. Gone were the early dreams of a quick victory and a fast return to peace. At times peace no longer seemed possible. And now it seemed that even the peace he’d always imagined at Harmony Hill was being disturbed by the war.

He looked up from Charlotte’s letter as Jake stirred on the narrow bed in front of him. What the enemy hadn’t been able to do on the battlefield, the miserable weather and wretched conditions in the camps were doing to his once strong young brother. Jake tried to lift his head up off the pillow, but he was too weak as he was wracked with coughs that tore at his lungs but gave him no relief. Adam stuffed the letter inside his shirt and moved to hold Jake’s head. When his coughing was spent, Adam gently wiped the flecks of blood from his brother’s lips and held the draught of medicine the doctor had prepared for him to his mouth. He got him to swallow a bit.

Jake’s captain had moved him into the makeshift hospital the night before when he’d begun to burn with fever. Adam hadn’t been at the camp. He’d gone to the hotel to put the finishing touches on his sketches of the battle. If he’d been there when his brother most needed him, Adam would have never let him be brought to this long, narrow building that had been turned into a hospital for soldiers like Jake who had survived the battle only to be felled by disease. Cots were set up so close together that the men could have reached out and held hands all the way down the line if most of them hadn’t been too sick to even realize there was a man in the next bed.

Nurses wearing long white aprons and caps that made him think of Charlotte in her Shaker dress moved among the men to comfort them with a gentle word or, if they were very bad, a dose of laudanum. Most of the women had no training, but simply showed up at the hospital to care for the men. A couple of doctors made the rounds. Twice while Adam watched, the doctors stood up after examining one of the men and let the nurse with him pull the sheet up over the soldier’s face. And though he hated himself for it, Adam knew that when he next took out his sketchbook, he would draw that picture.

As the hours dragged by, Adam began to fear the face his pencil might draw under the sheet would be Jake’s. Adam had come to sit with Jake as soon as he received word he’d been brought to the hospital, but he should have never left Jake to go to the hotel. He knew his brother was getting sick as they marched back to Washington. He’d heard his cough. He should have stayed in the camp to take care of him.