Redfield Farm: A Novel of the Underground Railroad (32 page)

At night I lay awake, tearful, filled with a nameless fear. I distracted myself with getting up, lighting my lamp, and writing letters, but nothing gave me comfort.

Around the 20th, Ben’s Jeremiah rode in astride a big workhorse and slid down to tell me news. “There’s fightin’ down to Maryland,” he said, his face flushed. “Somethin’ awful. Down by Sharpsburg. Pa heard about it at the mill.”

I drew in my breath. So that was what had dogged me for the past week. The war was closing in.

“Pa says the fight was along Antietam Creek. A terrible battle, they said. Thousands of men killed in one day! Worst battle of the war so far!”

My apprehension now burst into full blown terror. Something was wrong with Nathaniel. He’d been wounded there. I didn’t know how I knew it, but I did. Death was hovering over him, waiting to bear him away. I had to find him and bring him home. I had to save my brother.

Persuading anyone else of my intuition was beyond me. Amos stared blankly when I told him, unwilling or unable to believe my nightmarish ranting. I left him standing in the kitchen and rushed through the orchard to Ben’s house. Ben and Rebecca stood mute as I tried to enlist their support. “I need a buggy and a team. Nate is hurt. He was in that battle. That Antietam Creek battle.”

“This is nonsense,” Ben scolded. “You can’t just drive off on a fool hope. Wait until you at least know something.” Rebecca nodded, siding with Ben.

Ben hitched up the buggy amid much grumbling, while I went home to gather what I’d need for the trip. I knew of Quaker families in McConnellsburg and Hagerstown, where I hoped we could stay overnight and get directions and news of where the wounded could be found.

Ben and Rebecca watched me stow my belongings in the buggy. “Sometimes I think you’re mad,” Ben muttered. “There’s no use talking. You’ll do what you will, with or without my approval.”

Rebecca was skeptical, too, but more gentle. “I worry for you, Ann. We’ll look after Amos. God bless you and keep you.”

Ben instructed Adam. “Take care of her. Do as she says, but try to keep her out of trouble.”

Adam Poole nodded, swung easily up beside me, and took the reins, his face flushed with excitement. It would take two days hard traveling to get to Hagerstown. Sharpsburg was a few miles farther south. We could be gone a week or more. I didn’t wonder that Ben and Rebecca thought I was mad.

We pushed hard that first day and made it to Saluvia, a tiny village outside McConnellsburg. We were welcomed by a Quaker couple whose name I knew by association with the Underground Railroad. The next morning, they packed us a lunch and sent us on to Hagerstown, where we sought out Adam’s uncle, Matthew Poole, whose farm was situated to the west of town.

The farther south and east we went, the more intense was my certainty that this was no fool’s errand. An unshakable gloom hung in the air. A sense of death and foreboding, side-by-side with beautiful autumn weather and the early turning of the leaves. Adam was good company, always willing to do my bidding, no matter how strange it seemed. He never argued or criticized but simply did as he was told. I think it was his first experience with a woman on a mission, but I suspected it wouldn’t be his last.

At Hagerstown, we saw houses and tents transformed into makeshift hospitals, the first evidence of tragedy. Wagons transporting dead and wounded men clogged the streets.

I stopped a man walking by to try to make sense of the situation. “Do you know if there is anyone keeping track of the wounded? Where they’ve been taken?”

We made our way down the crowded street amid chaos. Adam pulled up by a house with a flag in front and several military horses standing by. I went in.

“Could you help me?” I asked a mustached man seated in a chair and writing a letter on a field desk. “I’m looking for my brother. He’s with the 37th Pennsylvania.”

The man shook his head. “Ma’am, I’d be lucky if I could find my own regiment, and they’re camped out back.” He looked worn out, exhausted. “Men from Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Ohio, Wisconsin . . . share whatever space and care there is. They’ll be burying the dead down in Sharpsburg for weeks.”

My instincts told me Nate wasn’t down there. He was somewhere else, his life ebbing away.

“I doubt anybody can help you. The units left behind to pick up the pieces, we’re tryin’ to keep track of who’s who and who’s where, but it’s beyond us. Just go around town, askin’. That’s the best I can tell you.”

Back in the street, the sweet, foul smell of rotting flesh hung in the air, so strong it made me want to vomit. The hope of professional medical care was ludicrous. Townspeople gave what care they could, often simply holding a hand, wiping a brow, while nature took its course. Dressing wounds, providing nourishment, the lowest, meanest bed or shelter was most often the extent of it.

Into this morass of wounded and dying men, Adam and I plunged, frantically searching for Nathaniel. Adam’s young face sobered at the sight of so many boys no older than he, broken and desperate for home. Our task was hopeless from the start. We wandered from one field hospital to another, asking, sometimes calling out, for Pennsylvania men who could tell us of the 37th. We spent three days, passed back and forth on the tiniest shred of hope, driving, exhausted, back to Matthew Poole’s farm each night. Then, early on the fourth day, as we wandered disheartened between the rows of cots in the sickening air of a school-turned-hospital, I heard my name.

“Ann Redfield!”

I turned and saw Charles Conley, a Bedford County boy from Cessna, not far from home. I knew his sister, Emma—had visited their home more than once. His head was bandaged over his left eye, and his left arm was in a sling, but compared to many others, he looked almost healthy.

“Yeah. Tell her I’m fine,” he said, with a sadness that touched my heart. I knew with tragic certainty that he would never be
fine
again.

Three days of walking among the dead and semi-dead made Adam Poole physically sick. Boys his own age, mortally wounded, waiting with haunted eyes for the end of a too short life. Piles of amputated limbs, their former owners staring vacantly into an uncertain future. Any romantic notions he harbored about war evaporated in the foul air. Once, he left my side and bolted for the door of a makeshift, inadequate hospital. He returned, wiping his mouth on his sleeve, his young face pale. “I’ll be more than glad to be gone from this place. I just hope I don’t dream about it forever.”

He turned the buggy north to Chambersburg, and after five hours of bumping and jolting along rough roads, we reached the town around three in the afternoon. On the southern edge, we came to a farm where increased traffic told us something was going on. Turning in at the lane, we passed a wagon carrying three partially uniformed corpses.

Adam cracked the reins over the horses’ rumps and drove away without even a thank you or a goodbye. He stopped the buggy by the barn and helped me climb down. I hiked up my skirts and hurried into the dark, cavernous building. In the dim light, I saw rows and rows of the most hideous and pathetic victims of man’s worst endeavor. I leaned on Adam’s arm as we wended our way among the wretched souls, some silent, others moaning, sobbing, a few reaching out to touch my skirt as I walked by. Most of their wounds had been treated and bandaged, but a nauseating smell oppressed us as soon as we entered.

It was futile to ask the orderlies to identify anyone. These hollow-eyed men didn’t know who they were themselves, so Adam resorted to the only way he knew of finding Nate. “Nathaniel Redfield!” he shouted as he walked. I joined him. “Nathaniel Redfield!”

“Over here.” The first reply was weak. I shouted again.

“Ann! Is that you?”

There he lay on a soiled blanket, his left arm gone just below the shoulder. He wore a tattered, dirty uniform, the left sleeve ripped out, his face ashen, his brow wet with sweat, mud encrusted boots beside him.

“Nate, I’ve come to take you home.”

He looked at me with dazed eyes, struggling between delirium and reality. “I’m ready,” he whispered.

I sent Adam to make a pallet on the floor of the buggy and searched for someone in charge to complete the formalities. The attending physician, weary from overwork and lack of sleep, took a look at Nate and signed the paper releasing him.

“He’ll never make it, you know. He’s lost so much blood, and I suspect infection has set in. But he’d die here, anyway, so take him,” he mumbled, and turned back to his ghastly tasks.

I did not respond, refusing to give in to despair. Looking around, I spied an orderly staggering up the crowded aisle, carrying a bucket.

“Young man! Could you please help my nephew carry my brother outside?”

He looked at me as though I were talking out of a dream. He put down the bucket of offal and wiped his hands on grimy blue pants, once part of a proud uniform. “Yes, Ma’am. I’d be honored.”

He and Adam picked Nathaniel up by the bloody blanket and carried him to the buggy. I followed, leaving the muddy boots behind. The army could have them. I climbed up beside Adam as he slowly guided the horses back down the lane. It was late, after four o’clock, but I was determined to get my brother out of there—away from the war—as far and as fast as possible.

Sometime after seven we drove into the hamlet of Fort Loudon, looking for a place to stay the night. We didn’t know anyone, so I directed Adam to drive up to a neat looking cottage, got down from the buggy and knocked at the door.

“Do you have any place you could put us up for the night? I’m taking my brother home. He was wounded at Antietam.”

Without a word the woman, round-faced and full of energy, swung the door wide and hurried out to see what Nate needed.

“We can make a stretcher out of the blanket.” She peered in at Nate’s face and struggled to hide her dismay. He was slipping in and out of consciousness, unaware of what was happening.

The woman turned to me, her face grave. “Let’s get him inside.” We carried him into the dining room, and laid him on the table. Our hostess, Mrs. Eckhart, bustled around the kitchen, placed bowls of stew in front of Adam and me and tried to spoon some broth into Nathaniel. We spent the night under Mrs. Eckhart’s watchful eye. In the morning, she tried to persuade us to stay for a few days to let Nathaniel mend a little, but, haunted by the possibility that he would die before we got home, I chose to press on. I couldn’t tell her how afraid I was. Speaking the words might somehow make my fears a reality.

The next night, we stopped at a Friend’s house in Breezewood, more or less repeating the rituals of the night before. People were curious to see the wounded soldier, but once they looked at him, their faces betrayed their lack of hope. Nathaniel’s breathing was shallow, his face gray. He looked like death.

That night I bent near his ear and spoke to him. “Don’t leave me, Nate. One more day and we’ll be home. You can hold on till then. Once we’re home, you’ll be all right. Just stay with me.”

He slept more soundly that night. The next evening, as we drove slowly up the road from Fishertown into our dooryard, Nate seemed to know he was home. He stopped thrashing about and moaning. His breathing calmed.