Phoebe gazed out of Julia’s bedroom window, watching the carriages roll by in the street below. The trees that lined the boulevard blazed with color, but to Phoebe there was something very sad about them. Their leaves would soon fall to the ground and blow away on the wind, leaving them stark and bare. And deep inside she longed to drift away on the wind along with the leaves.
“Are you ready to go?” Julia asked, moving to stand beside her.
“Would you be mad at me if I stayed here instead of going to the tea?”
“Why? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. It’s just that…” Phoebe sighed. “I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Julia. You been so good to me these past three months, buying me pretty dresses, opening your home to me, taking me places. … But I don’t belong here. This ain’t my life, and I’m never gonna fit in.”
Julia moved away and sat down at her little dressing table, her back to the mirror. “I don’t think I belong here, either. This feels like such a vain, meaningless life to me.”
“That ain’t what I meant. You and your family do a lot of good things for people, and you’re very generous with your money. But I didn’t grow up rich, living in a fancy house like this, and I ain’t never gonna fit in. I don’t talk proper, I’m scared to death to move around in these hoop skirts for fear I’ll knock something over and break it. And I just can’t get used to people doing stuff for me that I can do for myself—helping me get dressed, combing my hair, making my bed. Your servants do just about everything but feed me. I ain’t an invalid.”
“I know. I don’t like it, either. I wish…” Julia sighed. “I don’t even know what I wish for anymore.”
Phoebe felt sorry for her friend. Most people would see Julia’s fancy life and envy her. Phoebe might have envied her, too, in the past. But now she understood why Julia felt so unhappy, why she longed to do something useful.
“Are you girls ready?” Mrs. Hoffman asked, sweeping into the room. “Our carriage is out front.”
“We’ve decided not to go,” Julia said. “Please give Mrs. Rogers our regrets.”
“You can’t do that. She’s expecting you—both of you. Now please hurry. We’re already running late.”
“Neither of us feels up to this ordeal,” Julia said.
“It isn’t an ‘ordeal,’ it’s a tea, for goodness’ sake. Besides, Mrs. Rogers is a very influential member of our church. You’ll need her good will, for Nathaniel’s sake.”
“But I don’t feel like going.”
Mrs. Hoffman waved impatiently. “It doesn’t matter if you feel like it or not. Nathaniel’s career and his best interests always take priority over your own wishes. You’re a reflection of him.”
“No, I’m not. I’m me!”
Mrs. Hoffman stared at her daughter as if she’d lost her mind. “You’d better get over that ridiculous notion before he puts his wedding ring on your finger or you’ll ruin his chances for a decent career in the ministry. You’re not allowed to be Julia Hoffman once you become Mrs. Nathaniel Greene. Why do you think you give up your name and take your husband’s? It’s more than a symbol— it’s a fact of life.”
“I don’t want to have this discussion right now,” Julia said.
“Good. Then get your coat and let’s go.” She swept from the room again, an army commander leading her troops into battle.
“The invitation to tea included your name, Phoebe,” Julia said after a moment. “They want you to come.”
“Yeah, so they can stare. I see the way everybody looks at me, like I’m odd—because I am. Even your folks don’t know what to make of me. Your ma’s been real good to me, but I think she’s a little scared of me, to tell you the truth—like she’s worried I’ll put a bullet between someone else’s eyes if I get riled up.”
“She’s very grateful to you for saving my life.”
“I know. She’s told me a hundred times. But none of the other ladies who’ll be at the tea this afternoon ever killed a man. They never even met a killer face-to-face before. They all look at me like they can’t forget the killing part, even if it was to save you.”
“I understand, believe me. For the rest of my life I’ll always be ‘the girl who was nearly raped.’ Most people secretly believe I deserved it for running off to be a nurse in the first place.”
“Maybe they think that now, but their tongues will stop wagging sooner or later. Especially after you marry Reverend Greene. You’re one of them, you belong here—I don’t. You know that it’s true, Julia. I think it’s time I moved on.”
“I know that you’re my friend. And that I’ll miss you terribly if you leave.”
“I’ll miss you, too. But I have to go. There’s something I got to do. I promised Ted I’d bring all his things to his mother, after…” Grief welled up inside Phoebe, as forcefully as if Ted had died that morning. She sank down on the edge of her bed and picked up his knapsack, which she always kept nearby. She lifted it onto her lap, hugging it, resting her cheek against it.
“I been wanting to hang on to all his things because …because they remind me of him. I look at his frypan or his silly old bottles of tonic, and I remember—” She couldn’t finish. She wiped her tears as they fell. “His shirts still smell like him.”
“Then you’re not ready yet, Phoebe. It isn’t time to give his things away.”
She looked up at Julia. “Is it wrong to remember a man who isn’t yours and never was, a man you’ll never see again?”
An odd look crossed Julia’s face. Her eyes filled with tears. “I’m the wrong person to ask that question. We can’t stop our memories any more than we can stop falling in love with someone. … But Ted did love you, Phoebe. He gave his life for you.”
“He told me to make each day count. And I ain’t living like that.” She swiped impatiently at her tears. “I have to stop remembering and move on, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to as long as I keep hanging on to his stuff. I need to give it all back, Julia. And I need to go see where he’s buried. Otherwise I’ll just be stuck in the same rut in the road all my life. It’s time I went to see Ted’s mother to give her these things—like I promised.”
“I’ll go with you.”
“Thanks for offering, but I don’t think you should run away again.”
“I’m not running away, I just want to keep you company so you won’t have to travel alone.”
“No …you’re unhappy here, and this would be a good excuse for you to run off again. I been traveling alone most of my life. Ain’t nothing new for me. But this is your home. You don’t feel like you fit in yet because you haven’t been home long enough to get used to this life again. But you will—if you don’t keep running away from it. You were born into this.”
“I wish I hadn’t been.”
“Don’t you want to marry Reverend Greene and settle down here with him?”
A look of panic crossed Julia’s face. She shivered like a cornered rabbit. “I don’t know, Phoebe. I don’t know if I want to marry him or not. It scares me to think of him swallowing up my life the way Mother just described. Nathaniel knows exactly how he wants his wife to act and what she should say and do every moment, and I don’t know if I can live up to his standards. Or if I even want to anymore. I don’t know if I love him or not.”
Phoebe felt another wave of pity for her friend. “You’ll figure it out, in time. Just like it took me a while to figure out what I got to do next.”
Julia’s maid suddenly appeared in the bedroom doorway. “Mrs. Hoffman says to see what’s taking you so long. She’s about to lose her temper, she says.”
“Tell her we’ll be there in a minute.” Julia sat very still for a moment as if composing herself, then turned to Phoebe again. “What will you do after you see Ted’s mother? Where will you go?”
“I don’t know. I ain’t thought that far ahead.”
“Promise me that you’ll write to me and tell me where you are and what you’re doing. Even if it’s just a short note.”
“Why?”
“Because the war isn’t over yet—the one inside of us, I mean. You’re the only person I can talk to about what it was like to be on those battlefields, to see all those wounded men. And until we get over it, neither one of us is going to be able to figure out who we are or what we want. Am I making any sense?”
“Yeah. I reckon we’re as different from each other as a porcupine is from a polecat. But we been to the same place, and it made us the same inside, in our hearts.”
“Which one am I?” Julia said, smiling through her tears, “the porcupine or the polecat?”
Phoebe grinned. “I’ll be hanged if I know. Let’s flip a coin.”
Western Pennsylvania
October 1864
Ted’s hometown was very much as Phoebe remembered it, even after three years of war. Three years. The number startled her. On that warm October day in 1861, she and Ted had both signed up to fight for three years. Their enlistment would have expired this very month. Ted should be the one returning home alive and well, not her.
As the train pulled into the station, Phoebe felt like she was walking backward through time. She remembered sitting alone on the train the last time, too, watching the tearful farewells outside on the platform. Ted’s mother had clung to him, weeping, begging him not to go. She’d been so afraid she would lose him, and she had. Ted had returned to her in a coffin. Phoebe felt bad for coming back and poking at a wound that probably hadn’t healed yet. But she didn’t suppose a mother would ever get over the loss of her only son.
Phoebe stepped off the train and looked around. The hotel where she and all the other soldiers had stayed was down the street a little ways. She had already decided to take a room there for the night after she went to see Ted’s mother. Phoebe was still unsure where she would go tomorrow. Or the next day.
She walked slowly into town and turned down the main street. She realized that she was doing it again—searching all the faces she passed, looking for Ted’s. She’d done it back in Philadelphia and in Washington and on all the battlefields she’d been to. She’d done it all the way here, too. How long would it take to break the habit, to accept the fact that Ted was dead?
Phoebe paused in front of the store that had been used for a recruiting office. It was where she had met him for the first time, where he’d been given the knapsack she was now carrying. She remembered how funny he’d looked wearing his enormous uniform coat, grinning up at her and saying, “Hey there …want to trade?”
Cut it out, she told herself. You can’t walk around town bawling or they’ll put you in an asylum.
Two old men sat on the narrow porch in front of the general store, spitting tobacco. She asked them for directions to Cherry Street, the return address on the letters from Ted’s mother. They told her it wasn’t far, but Phoebe walked there slowly, as if she had miles and miles to go, clutching the pack in front of her with one hand, the valise Julia had given her for her own belongings in the other.
Number fifteen Cherry Street was a small, plain-looking house, worlds away from Julia’s enormous mansion in Philadelphia—and worlds away from Phoebe’s own rustic cabin back in West Virginia. It was the sort of place she always pictured when she heard the word home—a snug, one-story clapboard house surrounded by a fence that needed paint. She was about to go up the front walk and knock on the door when she noticed a string of laundry flapping in the breeze on a clothesline behind the house. She walked around to the backyard and saw Ted’s mother, reaching, bending, reaching again as she unpinned the linens and piled them in a wicker basket. Phoebe watched her for several minutes.
She looked so much like Ted with her small stature, tawny skin, and curly brown hair that Phoebe wondered what Ted’s father had contributed to his son’s appearance. Mrs. Wilson didn’t see Phoebe at first. But when she suddenly looked up, she gasped and dropped the sheet she was holding.
“I’m sorry,” Phoebe said, hurrying forward to pick it up. “I wasn’t trying to sneak up on you, Mrs. Wilson. My name’s Phoebe Bigelow, and I came—”
“Phoebe…” she repeated, studying her. “Oh, yes. You’re Ted’s friend …Ike.”
“H-how did you know?”
She pointed to his knapsack, her eyes filling with tears. “You brought his things home. Ted told me you would come.”
“He did?”
“I still have the letter that one of the nurses wrote for him. It was his last one.”
Phoebe swallowed the lump of grief that stuck in her throat. Julia must have written it for him. That was why he’d asked Julia to come that last day—that terrible last day.
“You must come inside,” Mrs. Wilson said, reaching to take Phoebe’s arm. “I’ll make tea. We have so much to talk about.”
Phoebe stayed the night. She slept in Ted’s old bed, even though it was so short her feet hung off the bottom edge. His mother hadn’t changed anything in his room since the day he left it three years ago. The next day Mrs. Wilson took Phoebe to the cemetery and showed her Ted’s grave beside his father’s.
“Please stay, just a little longer,” she begged every time Phoebe mentioned that it was time for her to go. And so she stayed, allowing her grief to heal as she shared her sorrow with Ted’s mother.
One week turned into two, then three. The presidential election was held in November, and the two women celebrated when they learned that President Lincoln had defeated the other candidate, General George McClellan. “Ted thought the world of General McClellan at first,” Phoebe said, remembering. “But he got pretty disgusted with him after he hightailed it off of the Peninsula without a decent fight. Ted would have voted for Mr. Lincoln for sure because he promised to free all the slaves.”
Phoebe was still living with Ted’s mother when the news came that General Sherman had burned the city of Atlanta. She was there at the end of November when President Lincoln proclaimed a National Day of Thanksgiving. Mrs. Wilson prepared a chicken dinner for the two of them, teaching Phoebe how to make cornbread stuffing and apple pie. Together they read in the newspapers how Union cooks had served more than one hundred thousand Thanksgiving dinners to Grant’s army in the trenches at Petersburg. And together the women followed the progress of Sherman’s march to the sea and read how he’d presented the city of Savannah, Georgia, to President Lincoln as a Christmas present.
On January 31, 1865, Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery. Phoebe and Ma Wilson wept and hugged and wept some more. “Ted told me your story, Ma,” Phoebe said. “It was his dream to find that plantation where you used to live and bring his grandmother home to you after the war.”
Ma passed the long winter nights teaching Phoebe how to sew and knit, and telling stories of everything she remembered about her childhood as a slave. She had become the mother Phoebe had never known. As the two women read about the path of destruction General Sherman left across Georgia and South Carolina, Phoebe wondered what would become of the thousands and thousands of former slaves who’d been left homeless and hungry.
“The first time I ever worked as a nurse,” she told Ma, “was the night I helped Dr. McGrath take care of some former slaves living in a shantytown.” She wondered who was taking care of them now.
In early March, President Lincoln was sworn in for a second term. Phoebe read the words of his inauguration speech aloud to Ma: ‘“Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword …so still must be said, “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.””’
Later that afternoon Phoebe stood at Ted’s grave, her arm linked through his mother’s. The long, cold winter was nearly over; spring was struggling to break through. And Phoebe knew that her own dark winter was drawing to an end. The time had come for new life to begin—in the countryside all around her and in her own life, as well.
“I have to go, Ma,” she said quietly. “The war is gonna start up again soon, and I need to go back and help take care of the soldiers.”
“No, stay here, Phoebe,” she begged. “Let me take care of you.”
Part of Phoebe longed to stay. The pull of her comfortable surroundings was strong, secured by the ties of love that had been knit between the two women. But in another part of Phoebe’s heart, she knew she had to go. Before the war started she would have jumped at the chance to stay in a home like this, where she was loved. But things were different now. Phoebe wasn’t the same person she was before the war.
“I ain’t leaving forever,” she said. “I’ll come back and see you again when the war ends.”
“Why do you have to go?”
“Because …because love ain’t meant to be kept to ourselves, Ma. It’s meant to be shared.”
“But it’s dangerous near those battlefields. I’m afraid for you. What if something happens to you, too?”
Phoebe looked down at Ted’s tombstone for a long moment, studying his name deeply etched into the stone marker. “Ted wasn’t afraid to die. He knew what he was living for. Seems like if you know why you’re living, you can face death a whole lot better. One of the last things Ted told me was that I should serve the Lord. He said it was the only thing that mattered. That’s what I aim to do.”
Mrs. Wilson wrapped her arms around Phoebe and hugged her. The tiny woman’s head didn’t even reach Phoebe’s chin. “I love you, honey. Promise me you’ll come back and see me again?”
Phoebe remembered the tearful farewells on the train platform three years ago and how she’d wished for a mother like Ted’s. Now she had one, and it broke her heart to leave her. “I’ll be back,” she said through her tears. “I promise.”
“Honestly, Julia! Is it really necessary to read three newspapers every morning?” Julia looked up from her reading to find her mother standing beside the breakfast table, her hands on her hips. “You’re getting worse than your father.”
Julia glanced at the mess she’d made, strewing papers all over the table and even onto the floor. “I’m sorry,” she said, bending to gather them. “But Nathaniel is in Petersburg, and I need to find out what’s going on there. Things are happening so fast it’s hard to keep up.”
“Well, what’s the latest news?” Mrs. Hoffman asked as she sat down to drink her coffee.
“The Rebels are all but defeated. I think the war is going to end soon.”
“Thank God,” her mother sighed. “Maybe we can all get back to normal around here.”
Julia buried her nose in the paper again. She couldn’t seem to get enough information as the war swiftly drew to a close. But each time she read about the latest battles that were taking place, she couldn’t help but wish she were there, working beside James again, caring for all the wounded soldiers. She hated observing events from far away through a newspaper, and she felt as though her own life was passing by as she watched other people live theirs. Something huge and important seemed to be missing.
“The city of Richmond fell,” Julia read to her mother a few days later. “It says that the Rebels burned everything as they fled. Much of the downtown area is in ruins.”
Mrs. Hoffman had to sit down as she absorbed the news. “I pray that your cousin Caroline made it out safely. Maybe our letters will finally get through to her again, and we can find out how she’s doing.”
“She’s probably all right. It says here that most of the residential areas of the city were spared,” Julia continued. “President Lincoln paid a visit to Richmond the day after it fell and was met by mobs of cheering slaves.”
“I wonder what will become of them all now that they’re free,” her mother said.
Julia thought of Loretta and Belle
and the desperate condition they and their children had been in
before she’d hired them to work in the laundry. “I wonder, too,”
she said. She didn’t share with her mother the fact that Union
troops had found Richmond’s citizens close to starvation. Here in
Philadelphia, their family had never gone hungry for a single day
during the past four years. Nathaniel had remained safe as a
noncombatant, and Rosalie’s husband had paid a substitute to serve
in his place. Julia couldn’t help wondering what life had been like
for Caroline in Richmond all these years and if her fiance
had
survived the war as a Confederate soldier.
Then one morning Julia read of General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House, and she rested her forehead on the table and wept. It was over—the war was truly over. No more young men would have to die, and she wouldn’t have to wrestle with her longings to be a nurse anymore. She could, as her mother said, get back to normal life. But what was “normal”?
She read how the Confederate soldiers had been spread so thinly across miles and miles of battlefront that they hadn’t stood a chance against hundreds of thousands of Yankees. Many of the men who died in the Rebel trenches had been as old as Julia’s father; many others had been mere teenagers. They’d spent the winter without uniforms or shoes or food, starving, while Union soldiers had eaten fresh bread every day, still warm from the bakery in City Point. Now the army hospitals were filling with Union soldiers who had been held captive on Belle Isle and Libby Prison and in other Rebel prison camps. They would need medical attention and nursing care in order to get well. As she read about their desperate condition, Julia longed to care for them herself.
“I guess this means your Nathaniel will be mustered out of service soon,” her mother said when victory was announced. “We should start preparing for your wedding.”
Julia tried to feel enthused as they visited a dressmaker to look at patterns and fabric samples for her gown. Her future stretched ahead of her, filled with exciting new changes. Why did she still feel so uneasy about starting a new life as Nathaniel’s wife?
“It’s perfectly normal to feel jittery when you’re about to become a bride,” her mother told her. “We’ll go visit your sister tomorrow. She can tell you that she once felt the same way. She adjusted to her husband.”
Julia had learned to do all sorts of things she had never imagined she could do—washing laundry, dressing wounds, working near a battlefield with shells exploding around her, assisting with surgery. She would learn this new role, too. She would adjust to becoming Nathaniel’s wife, allowing him to order her life.
As she was preparing to visit Rosalie the next day, Julia heard the worst news of all—President Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated. It was one final blow after four years of death and sorrow, and it shook her to her core. The world had gone insane. Who could ever imagine that someone would kill the president?
“Such a tragedy,” Judge Hoffman said, “for that man to have led us through a long, terrible war, only to be killed barely a week after it ends.”
The nation came to a standstill to mourn. When the funeral train passed through Philadelphia and Lincoln’s coffin lay in Independence Hall, Julia joined the three-mile-long line of mourners to pay her last respects.
The war was over, the guns silenced at last. But she knew that the hatred that had divided a nation for four years, enslaving millions of people and leading to the murder of a president, was far from healed. Nathaniel could preach against that hatred from his pulpit— Julia would serve tea to his parishioners. She remembered how God’s presence had surrounded her the night her first patient died: “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these…” The “least” hardly described Julia’s wealthy church. Sister Irene had told her that any task would have meaning if she did it for the Lord, even baking bread—or serving tea.
But as Julia helped her mother draw up a long list of guests for her wedding reception, she couldn’t help wondering if this was really the life she was meant to live.