Candle in the Darkness - Lynn N. Austin [108]
The battle raged for more than three and a half hours. I felt each blast in the pit of my stomach. But while we could tell from the thunderous sound that the fighting was very fierce, the shelling didn’t seem to be drawing any closer to the city. We continued to pray.
As evening fell, the sound of artillery fire slowed, then finally stopped. We all looked at each other. The silence was as heavy as the cannonading had been.
Esther stood. “Enough of this nonsense. Kitchen fire’s gonna go out if I don’t tend to it.”
As she strode away, chin held high, Eli began to laugh. “Seems like fear is a more powerful enemy than the Yankees.”
We learned the next day that the Union fleet had not been able to get past the eight Confederate guns at Drewry’s Bluff. For now, Richmond was safe. But more important, my own faith had won a victory over my fear.
Throughout the month of May, General McClellan’s massive army made its ponderous way up the Peninsula through torrential rain and oozing mud. We all knew that the two armies were about to clash, and city officials were determined to be better prepared to handle the thousands of casualties this time. Our latest sewing project was to stitch yards and yards of ticking material into mattress covers for the three-thousand-bed Chimborazo Hospital, on the hill just east of my home. That’s what Tessie, Ruby, and I were doing one afternoon when we heard a carriage arrive at our door.
“Sounds like we got company,” Tessie said. She started to rise, but I quickly stood instead.
“No, let me go.”
I lived in dread of the day that a messenger would arrive with news of my father, or of Charles or Jonathan, but delaying the news would never change it. I laid down my sewing and hurried to the door behind Gilbert. It wasn’t a carriage that was drawing to a stop out front, but a battered farm wagon, its wheels caked with mud. It took me a moment to recognize the tired, bedraggled-looking people climbing down from it. They were my grandmother, my aunt Anne, and my young cousin Thomas from Hilltop.
Their driver and the two Negro maidservants accompanying them were coated with mud clear to their waists from pushing the mired wagon out of ruts. I opened the front door wide and welcomed my family inside as Gilbert led the horses, the wagon, and the dripping servants around to the back door.
“Where’s George?” my grandmother demanded to know before I could utter a word of greeting.
“He . . . he’s not home, Grandmother. My father’s ships sailed last March, and we—”
“Where’s George?” she repeated. “Did any of these useless servants tell George I’m here?”
“George isn’t home, Mother Fletcher,” Aunt Anne shouted. I remembered then that my grandmother had been nearly deaf when I’d met her eight years ago. Judging by the way she peered all around with her eyes squinted and her head thrust forward, her eyesight was probably failing, too.
“What? This isn’t George’s home?” Grandmother said. “Where are we, Anne? You said we were going to George’s home.”
“This is George’s home, but George isn’t home,” Aunt Anne shouted.
“Stop repeating everything! Is this George’s home or isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Aunt Anne and I both shouted together.
“Then why doesn’t somebody tell George I’m here?”
Aunt Anne looked at me helplessly.
“George is at work,” I shouted in a moment of inspiration.
“Of course . . . at work.” Grandmother reached for my arm and let me help her to a chair in the parlor. She was alarmingly thin and frail, her skin as fragile as tissue paper. “Make me a pot of tea, Ellie,” she told Ruby, who was watching all of this, wideeyed.
“Yes, ma’am,” Ruby replied and scurried out to the kitchen. But where she was going to get tea was a mystery to me. We’d had nothing but steeped blackberry leaves to drink for months.
“You’re looking very well, Mary,” Grandmother said. It took me a startled moment to realize that she was talking to me—and that she had mistaken me for my mother.
“Um . . . Mary was my mother. I’m her daughter, Caroline.”
“Where is Caroline? At school, I suppose?”
“No, I’m Caroline,