The Daily Novel

Epilog

Tuesday June 12 1864

(Near St. Louis on the Illinois side of the Mississippi)

Megan stood on the brake as the Conestoga pushed the hefty Percherons down the steep grade toward the riverbank. The team dug in their heels. The wagon skipped from rut to rut. Megan clenched her teeth and tried to remember how to pray.

Behind her, Kathin bounced on the feather bed while Loren gurgled with delight in a padded box nailed to the back of the driver’s seat. Megan’s foot slipped off the brake, and her team broke into a frightened run.

“Wheeeee,” Kathin teased as the heavy wagon bounced across the flat and zigzagged between sparse trees. Megan hauled the big drays to a sit-down stop inches from the bluff.

Thousands of wagons cluttered the fields beside the river. One would have thought the addition of three more canvas-hooded homes on wheels would tumble the entire assemblage into the broad avenue of murky brown water.

Megan glanced at Loren, and Mignonette’s chubby arms reached upward like a happy puppet. The journey had defeated all efforts to protect the babies from the sun, which had toasted Mignonetté’s face two shades darker than her mother’s while giving Loren a serious burn.

Megan climbed past Loren into the wagon, where she reached into a pocket on the underside of the canvas and withdrew a squat jar of rose-scented glycerin. Loren’s bright aquamarine eyes followed her every movement as she applied a drop to Kathin’s parched lips. When she did the same for the babies, Loren’s tiny pink tongue touched the salve on her lips, and she eyed her with disgust. Megan snatched both of them up before Loren’s bellow had time to build. Mignonette locked her arms behind Megan’s neck. Megan winced as Loren’s tiny fingers grabbed a hank of hair.

“Give them to me,” Angelique offered from beside the high front wheel.
Megan peeled Mignonette from her neck then bent close to let Angelique untangle Loren’s fingers from her hair, surprised by the strength of her grip. Mignonette kneaded Angelique’s bosom, contentedly suckling until Loren pushed her aside. Angelique smiled and shifted her daughter to her other breast while Megan wondered what insanity had prompted her to undertake an arduous journey with a miniature monster and an invalid on her hands. A monster and a semi-invalid that I love beyond reason she admitted with a rueful smile.

An hour later, she stood cooking over an open fire as a storm loomed overhead. Hilda, who probably should have been relieved of work at her age, had set up their camp, then gone to help other émigrés with their animals. Megan suspected that working helped relieve the blacksmith’s grief. In contrast to Hilda’s forced pleasantry, Sam acted as happy as a colt in a field of wild hemp. No wonder, Megan thought, as Angelique joined him beside their wagon.

The sky clouded over. Misty rain settled the dust of gathered wagons and dampened the spirits of weary travelers anxious to move on. Megan remembered other rainy days as she grabbed an umbrella to protect their dinner. The raindrops stopped their assault on her back and she looked up surprised to see a second umbrella. When she turned to see who held it, her umbrella tilted a stream of water onto the fire, and steam billowed. Through it, Megan heard a familiar laugh.

“Luke,” Megan gasped.

“Best give it up and come over to our lean-to, Miss Megan. Sally’s cookin’ extra. I told her to put more taters in the pot soon as I spotted you.”

Luke’s gentle smile beamed through the dissipating steam. “Luke Conners. What are you doing here?”

“A person who didn’t know you might ask you the same thing, Miss Megan. You look like a shipwrecked rat.”

“And you look a whole lot better without a bonnet.”

***

Her dinner ruined, Megan’s party had no choice but to take the Conners up on their gracious invitation. After consuming a goodly portion of Sally Conners’s stew, Sam, Angelique, Hilda, and Kathin returned to their respective wagons. Megan stayed beside the Conners’s fire. The Conners’s baby, Lucy, snored delicately in her mother’s arms.
Luke glanced around and said, “Looks like you don’t need to travel any further, Miss Megan. Looks to me like you’ve got enough younguns to start yourself a school right here.”

“Aren’t they somethin’?” Sally nodded toward where Loren and Mignonette lay in a puppy huddle with Luke Junior and Luke’s surprise homecoming gift, Sally Jean. “Little Yanks and Rebs all snuggled tight together.”

Megan shook her head to rid it of a vision of other piles of Yanks and Rebels.

“I thought both of them belonged to Miss Kathin,” Luke confessed. “That Mignonette looks more like Lainy Mercer than she does like Angelique or Sam.”

“Probably because she’s Lainy’s cousin,” Megan said. She did not offer further explanation. Instead, she said, “Sally, did Luke tell you how much he helped me with the wounded?”

“Seems you helped him more,” said Sally, her voice thick with pride and gratitude. The look she gave her husband lit her face and turned plainness into beauty in a way that Megan envied.

“It weren’t all that much,” Luke said. “Anybody woulda done it.” He gave the fire a left-handed poke. When it flared, Megan noted his blush and she smiled.

“It was you did it,” Sally bragged, “and with your hand hurtin’ so.”

“Don’t know if it hurt or not,” Luke said. “It and me had parted company by then.”

Sally grimaced. Megan held her face expressionless. Sally glanced from one to the other, then needlessly adjusted the blanket around the babe in her arms. “Was you wrote that letter for him,” she said when she again looked up. “Was you got him home.”

“’Twas the Underground Railroad,” Luke whispered. “That’s why I couldn’t tell ya before, Sal. Too many folks want to kill abolitionists. War didn’t change the south in that respect. Miss Megan and her friends and family would have been in major trouble if folks knew they helped darkies slip through to freedom. Them and folks they was connected with got me south of the Union lines slick as a weasel through a henyard fence.”

***

Megan tossed on feathers gone lumpy after two months of constant use. In her dream, she saw hay gone sour with the blood of hundreds. Next morning she sat on the tailboard of the Conestoga and watched a lone buzzard swoop across the river then fly northwest in a clumsy flurry of dark wings.

From the interior of the wagon, she heard Kathin whisper “Chris, oh Chris, where are you now? Do you really love me? Will you be able to love my daughter when I bring her to you?”

Of course, he does, and he will. He has to, Megan thought as she gathered her soggy skirts into a bunch and climbed to the ground for a necessary stroll to the surrounding woods. She heard the crunch of footsteps, and her pace quickened.

“Wet sure looks good on you, girly girl.”

Megan frowned, turned, shielded her eyes, and stared into the rain. A skinny-ugly muleskinner grinned back at her. “Jo! Jo Fletcher! What are you doing here?”

“Waitin’ for you.”

Afterword

When the tide of battle receded from Gettysburg, 21,000 wounded and dying men were left behind; 7000 dead lay where they fell or in shallow, hastily covered graves; 3512 Union soldiers were eventually reburied in Gettysburg National Cemetery. Over 7000 Confederates were interred in temporary graves; the remains of 3320 were later removed to Richmond, Virginia, and other southern states.

Mary A. Brady, a forty-year-old mother of five, was typical of the women at Gettysburg. When, having worn herself out tending and feeding the wounded, she died a few months later, she was given a military funeral with full honors and escorted to her grave by the widows of men who had fallen in the battle.

Dr. Emeline Horton Cleveland, a member of the Sanitary Corps medical staff at Gettysburg, later became the first female resident physician of the Women’s Hospital in Philadelphia.

For those readers who wish to know more about the courage of their forebears, the author recommends: South After Gettysburg; The Letters of Cornelia Hancock, ed. Ophelia Stratton Jaquette (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell 1956) and Lincoln’s Daughters of Mercy, Marjorie Barstow Greenbie (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons 1944) Both are out of print but available through interlibrary loan.