The Face of Heaven (33 page)

“I know that, sir.”

“May God have mercy on you and your husband, Mrs. King. And may you save as many of our boys as the good Lord will allow.”

He turned to go, folding the standards again before tucking them under his arm, and pausing to place his black hat back on his head.

“Our prayers remain with you, Mr. President,” Lyndel said.

He smiled and turned back briefly to face her. “I thank you. It may be that this July or August the door of war will creak back on its hinges enough to give us a glimpse of sky and an early sun rising from the crops. I don’t expect an end. But I should like that crack of light from the old open door and the sight of a round sun rising free and easy from the land.” He began to walk briskly over the flattened grass of the parade ground. “For the present, the nation’s future aside, I see I must rescue Lieutenant Stewart from Tadpole or risk losing a fine artillery officer to my son’s unyielding advance of burnished steel.”

From that day, the month of April flew like pigeons through Lyndel’s hands. Nathaniel was up before the dawn each morning to drill the men of his company and platoon and didn’t return until supper. Lyndel was always back from the field hospital well before that and had a meal prepared using the pots and pans the women had placed by the fireplace. Most evenings they were able to spend together and this brought into her soul a peace and contentment she hadn’t known since leaving Elizabethtown the year before. She couldn’t forget it was spring planting for the Amish of Pennsylvania but she saw that God was putting seed into the ground of her heart and mind with each moment Nathaniel and she had alone.

“Do you not miss the people of the church?” he asked as he held her in the spring dark of their home, no lanterns lit, only the flicker of the soldiers’ fires making its way through the bedroom window to move across the walls and their faces. “Do you not miss watching the hay come up in your family’s fields?”

“It came up too slowly to watch. I’d rather be here with you.”

“You could be there with me also.”

“No. I couldn’t. You would still have enlisted and left me, married or not.” She pulled away to look at him in the play of light. “Am I not right?”

He didn’t answer for a moment. “It would have been difficult to leave a young wife so beautiful as you,” he finally said.

“Still. You would have done it.”

“To save the country. To free the slave. Yes.”

She came back to his arms and his chest. “So and I would have become a nurse and followed your regiment just as I have done. Why begin all over again? We’re together. Let’s remain where we are and stay together.”

Often enough the officers and their wives were invited for evening get-togethers. And often enough the men from the platoon and company came for a bonfire and to enjoy popping corn, which Lyndel purchased by the sackful for them. Private Groom now drank Captain Hanson’s rough coffee as part of his regular diet, allowing that it fashioned a cast-iron stomach that was proof not only against Confederate minie balls but all forms of dysentery, bad food, rank water, and biting insects. Nip and Levi used the fireplace to concoct different stews and soups with forage from their many expeditions to the Rebel side of the Potomac—forays that Hanson, Nicolson, and Nathaniel pretended to know nothing about. Ham enlisted the help of Jones and Plesko in working on an elaborate house of cards they added additions to every time they visited the King home.

For Levi and Joshua it was a garden. They confessed that farming was in their blood—they couldn’t pretend they didn’t enjoy seeding and growing and harvesting, so they planted vegetables in a plot they worked at the side of the house that faced south and west. Using manure and shovels and cultivating as rich a soil as they could manage, they purchased seeds from the sutler and planted radishes and lettuce and peas, hammering poles into the ground for beans as well.

“I know the radishes and lettuce will come up quickly,” Lyndel laughed, “but who will be here to tend the peas and beans in July?”

Levi was on his hands and knees in the dirt and putting the beans to bed. “You follow the regiment as our nurse, that’s true. But I’m hoping a few of the officers’ wives will stay on at Belle Plain after the army has moved out. I intend to ask a few of them to take care of the harvest.”

“Levi, all of the women will go back to their homes once their husbands have left.”

“A few may linger. Like a late spring rain. It’s not so bad here, Ginger. You never know.”

The hundreds of cards Ham, Plesko, and Jones used came from decks thrown away by men who had sworn off gambling and found faith in God. Ham declared he was grateful the soldiers and God had met one another and left sin and card-playing behind them. In celebration, with pockets full of kings and queens and aces, he decided they should expand their house of cards into a cathedral and they began to fill Lyndel’s twelve-foot harvest table from one end to the other.

“Mind you have that done by the fall,” Lyndel would tell them. “I’ll need that table for my pumpkins and squash and corn.”

“Mrs. King,” Ham would reply, “by harvest we’ll be too busy chasing Stonewall and Lee south to Atlanta to be tending to our card house. You may do with our engineering marvel whatever you wish at that time.”

“A door gets slammed or a draft darts in and I have to rebuild one of your rooftops or walls,” she pretended to complain.

Ham laughed. “Mrs. King, we all think you enjoy playing about with these cards as much as we do. So we slam the doors and leave the windows open on purpose to give you the opportunity you crave.”

“Nonsense, Corporal. Wherever on earth did you get that idea?”

Yet, in truth, when Nathaniel was out and Lyndel hadn’t yet reported to the field hospital, she sat at the long table and added another wing or repaired a collapsed corridor of jacks and deuces, finding a certain quiet and a deep satisfaction in balancing card edge against card edge and establishing something that remained erect simply by an act of air and paper and faith. She didn’t say so to the men, not even to Nathaniel, but she called the vast structure the New Jerusalem.

One evening near the end of April, well aware that the Army of the Potomac would soon be ordered out against the Army of Northern Virginia, Lyndel and Nathaniel worked side by side to refashion a broken roof. At first their attempts were not successful as card after card fell to the tabletop, often bringing others with it. Eventually, however, they found a rhythm and speedily fixed the roof and added a new wall. They were about to erect a tower, when a knock thudded against their heavy wooden door. Lyndel looked at her husband.

“Perhaps this is it,” she said.

“We’ll see.” He turned in his chair to face the door and barked, “Yes? Who’s there?”

“Sorry to disturb you, sir.” It was Ham. “But Private Plesko was on picket duty and was approached near the wharf by a sergeant wishing to speak with you.”

“It’s quite late, Corporal. Can’t the sergeant wait for the morning?”

“He says he’ll be gone by morning, sir.”

“Gone? Gone where?”

“West, sir, to campaign with Generals Grant and Banks in Mississippi. He only has a few hours and insists on meeting with you and your wife.”

“Me and my wife?” Nathaniel got to his feet. “My wife? Whatever for?”

“Calm yourself, dear,” Lyndel said softly.

“I don’t know, sir.”

Nathaniel started for the door. “What is the sergeant’s name? What unit is he with?”

Nathaniel threw open the door before Ham could respond. A mixture of firelight, moonlight, and wood smoke tumbled into the house. Beside Corporal Ham in his black hat was a tall man in blue uniform with the stripes and diamond of a first sergeant on his sleeves. Nathaniel stared.

“Sergeant…” he began but didn’t finish.

Lyndel pushed back her chair and stood up. “Who is it, Nathaniel?” Then saw the man’s face.

“Sergeant Moses Gunnison, First Louisiana Native Guard, assigned to the Department of the Gulf under General Nathan P. Banks,” said the visitor cheerfully. “I was hoping I’d find the two of you at home this evening. And I hoped you would allow the intrusion.”

21

T
hey talked for hours, seated at the small table where Lyndel and Nathaniel ate their meals, the short candle at the center fluttering in the air from an open window.

McClellan’s battles with Lee the year before had disrupted life on the Hargrove Plantation where Moses worked as a slave. A skirmish that swept through the farm fields and barns provided enough confusion for him to make his escape through Maryland and Pennsylvania and New York, this time getting across the border into Ontario. The war prevented pursuit but Confederate agents were present in Ontario planning raids into Northern territory and he had to elude several bands before finding a community of ex-slaves who had settled there. Most of them had crossed the border by means of the Underground Railroad before the war started.

“I prospered there,” Moses told them, sipping at what Nathaniel called his Cannonball Coffee. “I had many skills that brought me good money from the Canadian farmers. Some of whom were Amish. After the Emancipation Proclamation came into effect Frederick Douglass sent recruiters into Canada to enlist ex-slaves. They were having trouble getting a great many to sign up in the Northern states.”

“Why was that?” asked Nathaniel.

Moses bit into one of Lyndel’s oatmeal biscuits. “Same as with the whites—everyone was roaring for a fight in ’61, when they thought the war would be quick and easy and over by New Year’s. But freedom is never easy—not to get it, not to keep it, not even to live it. What with
all the hard fighting and dying in ’62, and here we’re heading into our third summer of warfare, none of my people are much interested in trading what they finally have now for a fight in which they could lose everything—their very lives. We Africans are doing well in New York and Ohio and everywhere else—liberty, employment, a working economy, our own roofs over our heads. Up in Canada, we’re living high on the hog too. Why, all black men can vote in Ontario, can you imagine? I confess I felt no great urgency to enlist in the army to do battle with Jeff Davis and the Confederacy.”

Lyndel pushed the plate of oatmeal biscuits and a tub of butter at Moses. “I know the South has threatened to hang Africans who put on the uniform of the Union army.”

“That gives some men pause. There are others who are worried about coming up against blacks in combat, those fools fighting in gray for the slaveholders so they can hold on to the miserable scrap of a life they’ve got. Myself, I’d run a bayonet through them as easily as I would a slave driver. They’re traitors in my book the same way Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee are traitors to Washington and the Constitution. No, none of that made me hold back. It was the freedom and the peace I was enjoying.”

He leaned back in his seat with the fresh coffee Nathaniel had poured him. “Charlie changed my inclination. Come at me in my dreams like one of them fiery seraphim with a sword. Showed me the marks of the rope burn on his neck. Practically walked me through the South, plantation after plantation, all the slavery and whippings and degradation. Asked if I was going to let this carry on another two hundred years while I got rich and fat north of the 49th. My heart was going like a steam engine when I woke up. So I came down to Boston and they put me in the 54th Massachusetts, a black regiment, which was the unit I trained with. More recruits started coming in so they made up a sister regiment, the 55th, and had a mind to transfer me over to give the new troops some feeling of stability.”

But a general found out Moses had originally come from New Orleans and been sold at an auction for more than 15,000 dollars before being carried off to Virginia in his twenties. African units were
being formed in Louisiana and were certain to see action long before their eastern counterparts. There was a strong need for New Orleans men to serve as noncommissioned officers. So Moses was on his way west to the Mississippi.

“That’s the long and short of it.” His pocket watch chimed. He pulled it out of a pocket and opened its silver lid. “I’ve got a bit more time. Big Frank said they’d be unloaded and ready to head back to Washington by two.”

“Moses.” Lyndel put her hand over his. “We gave Charlie a proper funeral. He’s buried in the Amish cemetery at Elizabethtown.”

Moses nodded. “I’m glad to hear it.” He fixed his eyes on her. “What puzzles me is finding the two of you here. I read about the lieutenant’s promotion in the newspaper. You I’ve read about several times as Miss Lyndel Keim the nurse. The other day I caught mention of your wedding in Belle Plain. So I got leave to ship up here for a few hours before they send me west to serve under Generals Grant and Banks.” He stared at them. “I never forgot your names. And I’m pleased to see you married. But you’re Amish, aren’t you? It was my understanding you don’t take up arms or resort to any form of violence.”