Fall l863
JoBeth awoke in the depth of the feather bed alone. Dazzling October sunlight spilled in through the bedroom window. Wes was already gone. She must have slept through his departure. She felt disappointed to have missed fixing him at least a cup of coffee before he left, as a proper wife should. She sat up, yawning. Then she saw the note he’d left on his pillow beside hers.
Dearest One,
As you’re beginning to find out, soldiers reveille early. Did not want to disturb you. Love you and will miss you all day until I return this evening.
Ever your devoted husband,
John Wesley Rutherford.
She smiled fondly, kissed the signature, saying softly, “And I am Mrs. John Wesley Rutherford.” Saying it still thrilled her. They had been married nearly six weeks, and Wes still treated her as a bride.
She stretched out her left arm, gazing proudly at her hand, on which the gold pledge ring circled her third finger. The ring she had worn on a chain next to her heart for so long. How lucky she was, how blessed! All the partings, all the sadness, all the heartache, for them was over.
She tossed the covers back, got up, and dressed. She boiled water on the little spirit burner and made herself a cup of tea. Sipping it, she went to the window and looked out. The day promised to be delightful. The leaves on the elm tree outside had turned golden and were dancing in a brisk wind. Perhaps she would go for a walk.
When she had first come to Washington, Wes had cautioned her about where she should go on her own. Washington was a dangerous place these days. All sorts of unsavory people had come to the Union capital for all kinds of reasons, many of them nefarious. Crime and vice were rampant, and certain streets no sane person would risk going into. The police tried to keep the most flagrant lawbreaking in check, and the newspapers were full of floridly written accounts of raids on gambling dens and houses of ill repute.
However, this neighborhood was filled with other homes like Mrs. Hobbs’s and was pleasant and safe. Although in the beginning JoBeth had felt somewhat timid to venture out by herself, she no longer felt at all that way. Washington was a cosmopolitan city and a stimulating one, and she very much enjoyed exploring it. She liked to stroll on the tree-lined avenues, and she especially liked window-shopping along the streets of fine stores displaying all sorts of luxuries and commodities unavailable in the blockaded South. Here was no visible shortage of anything. Certain items that Southerners had long been deprived of having were displayed in abundance.
Sometimes it appeared as if there were no such thing as a war going on. People on the streets were smiling, fashionably dressed women promenaded, others drove by in barouches. Children, often accompanied by black nurses, rolled hoops along the sidewalks or wheeled velocipedes. There were also soldiers in many kinds of uniforms: whole regiments who had rallied to the Union cause, colorful Zouaves who looked as if they were on their way to a costume ball. Vendors of all sorts plied their trades: there were ice-cream dealers in small booths, chestnuts being roasted on small portable stoves, flower stalls, an Italian organ grinder playing melodies as his little pet monkey held out a tin cup to passersby.
All this was fun and entertaining diversion for JoBeth, who, in spite of her new happiness, had times of homesickness. She was often alone, because Wes’s duties in Major Meredith’s office required his putting in long hours, working late. If she had not followed her own inclinations of curiosity about her new surroundings, coupled with her sense of adventure, time might have often hung heavily on her hands.
The letter that JoBeth had both waited for and dreaded receiving came.
Dearest Child,
You may be sure there were mixed reactions here to the news of your marriage to Wes. Although Aunt and Uncle Cady, after their initial shock, were tactful enough to refrain from expressing what I am sure they must have discussed—and certainly how they feel—in private. You know Uncle Madison, and it is understandable when you realize how strongly he feels about the Cause, and of course, they have two sons fighting on the opposite side from Wes. I realize there are other families divided like ours, only none that we personally know of. I truly believe it was mostly dismay that by this you have cut yourself off from the rest of the family—at least for the duration of this horrible war. Aunt Josie came to me later and asked me point-blank if I knew about it before you left. I could honestly tell her only that I felt somehow your love would show you a way to be together. Truthfully, even when you left here to go to Richmond, I wasn’t sure what would be the outcome. I did get a letter from Amelia, which I now enclose so you can read for yourself.
JoBeth unfolded the other letter and read it.
Dear Friend,
I sit down with hammering heart and trembling hand to write to you. I have just seen your precious daughter off into the night with the man she loves. I pray we can trust him to protect and love her as she deserves to be loved. I can only commend you, Johanna, on the job you have done in rearing this lovely young woman. She is a credit to your training, nurturing, and caring love. She is not only accomplished in all the ways our society demands but has an inner goodness that shines out through her outer self. A fine, sweet, true heart and soul. I feel sure by the time this reaches you, you will have received word from her. May God be kind to these two young people who love each other so dearly and face such hard times ahead.
She turned back to her mother’s letter.
Of course, I agree with all that she says about you, my darling. I just hope Wes appreciates the jewel he has now in his possession. God keep you and bless you both. You have chosen a hard road to walk together, but I am sure our Lord will be an unfailing source of strength for you both.
Always your loving mother,
Johanna Shelby Davison
JoBeth finished the letter with mixed emotions. She was not surprised either at her aunt and uncle’s reaction to her elopement or at Amelia Brooke’s dire predictions. Both were to be expected, considering the circumstances. Especially Aunt Josie and Uncle Madison’s response.
The feelings of her relatives could have only been deepened and hardened by the news her mother sent in a later letter.
It grieves me to have to add the news received here that Harvel was badly wounded in the terrible battle at Chickamauga in September. He is in a hospital in Chattanooga, and we hope for the best.
This war was a scourge on the whole country, North and South. JoBeth had seen the trainloads of Union wounded, the lines of ambulances rumbling through the city on the way to the soldiers hospitals. Fatalities on both sides were heavy. Nobody escaped, no family was spared. She felt almost guilty that Wes was safe in his noncombatant duty. However, he had known the horror of the battlefield, although he refused to talk to her about it. When she allowed herself to dwell on it, JoBeth’s heart was wrung with pain. When would it be over?
“Going out, dearie?” Mrs. Hobbs called to her from her parlor as JoBeth came down the stairway.
“It looks like a lovely day, and I need some fresh air,” JoBeth replied, pausing at the door while she pulled on her gloves.
“What a good idea,” Mrs. Hobbs nodded approvingly. “I’m a great believer in fresh air and exercise, even for females.”
Her statement rather amused JoBeth, since the good lady rarely seemed to move farther than from her comfortable chair by her fire to the front gate for the evening paper.
“I’ve been meaning to speak to you, my dear,” Mrs. Hobbs continued, setting aside her sewing, rising, and coming to the parlor door. “To see if you’d be interested in joining me for a project. I make quilts for the soldiers hospital. Of course, they’re not intricate designs or unique in any way. But they are warm and seem to comfort the dear boys. Reminds them of home, I believe, and their own mothers tucking them in at night.”
“I suppose I could, Mrs. Hobbs. My mother makes beautiful quilts. In fact, she’s famous for hers. As are all my great-aunts. It’s a kind of family skill. However—” She hesitated. “I’ve only made one of my own. I’ve helped finish quilts—that is, stitch the tops to the under padding, but—”
“Well, then, that’s good enough. These quilts for the soldiers don’t have to be works of art. I’m sure you’ll do just fine. I’ve made so many of these, I’ll be glad to show you. There’s nothing to finishing. Just a matter of diligence,” she chuckled. “And working with someone else makes it go fast. You know what they say, ‘Many hands make light work.’ We’ll make a fine team, you and I,” she said with a satisfied smile.
They began working one or two afternoons a week on the quilts for the hospital. JoBeth discovered that in spite of the difference in their ages, spending time with Mrs. Hobbs was enjoyable, and they became good friends. On one of the long rainy afternoons they were together, JoBeth told Mrs. Hobbs about the pledge patches she’d made during her separation from Wes.
“And did you complete the quilt then?” Mrs. Hobbs asked interestedly.
“No. I mean, I kept making the patches I’d designed, collecting them. But I didn’t know when Wes would come home—to Hillsboro, I mean. I assumed it would be after the war. I’d made a kind of bargain with myself that I’d continue making them until the war was over and he was home safely.” She paused, took a few stitches before going on. “I guess none of us dreamed it would last so long—this long.”
Mrs. Hobbs nodded her head in sympathetic agreement.
“Anyway, then I went to Richmond, and then Wes came for me and—well, I just never have put it all together. I’m not sure I know how to do it myself.”
“I’d be happy to help you, if you’d like?” Mrs. Hobbs offered.
“Would you? That would be wonderful. Wes has never seen the patches. It would be fun to have it all put together and then show him.”
“A lovely surprise—your work of faith and devotion!” Mrs. Hobbs’s bright eyes sparkled. “He’d be so pleased.”
A few days later JoBeth got the patches out from the bottom of her trunk and laid them out over her bed to see if she had enough to make into a quilt.
When Mrs. Hobbs saw the squares with their unusual original design, she exclaimed, “Why, you’re quite an artist, my dear. I’m sure your mother was happy to see you follow in her footsteps, wasn’t she?”
JoBeth looked sad. “Well, not exactly—she never saw it. I had to keep it a secret, even from her. You see, ever since my father died when I was a little girl and we went to live in Hillsboro, it’s been difficult. At least, since the war. All my relatives supported secession. Almost everyone I know is for the Confederacy.” She paused. “So when Wes made his decision, everyone there turned against him, and I just didn’t want to make it any harder for Mama, since she had to continue to live there.”
“I think I understand, dear,” Mrs. Hobbs nodded, then said briskly, “Well, I see we have work to do, but in no time you should have a beautiful quilt—one that you and the lieutenant will always cherish for its meaning.”
Mrs. Hobbs was patient as she showed JoBeth how to complete her quilt. She was generous in her praise of JoBeth’s design, her tiny stitches. Mrs. Hobbs’s romantic soul relished that the theme had stemmed from their secretly exchanged pledge rings.
After that their friendship seemed to blossom. “Do call me Caroline,” Mrs. Hobbs urged JoBeth. Together they pieced the pledge quilt together and attached it to a cotton under-pad filled with fluffy cotton batting. The finished quilt was indeed “a thing of beauty whose joy would last forever,” as Mrs. Hobbs quoted admiringly.
As fall moved into a stormy early winter, there were many afternoons working on the soldiers’ quilts together before a cheerful fire in Mrs. Hobbs’s sewing room. Although Mrs. Hobbs dismissed these quilts as “necessity quilts,” their joint endeavor brought back some of JoBeth’s happiest childhood memories. As a little girl, JoBeth had loved sitting on a low stool by her mother’s chair and going through the over-flowing scrap bag, finding colorful material from which her mother would select appropriate pieces for the squares that would be put together for the top of a quilt. Next there would be the length of flannel for the lining, to be stretched onto the frame and held by small nails all along each side. Usually Johanna whipstitched the lining onto the frame, because these quilts were done quickly so that she could get on with the quilts for which she had orders and that people were waiting to have delivered.
The quilts that JoBeth made now with Mrs. Hobbs were like the ones her mother had made for their own personal use when they still lived in the mountains, before JoBeth’s father died. Those were most often made from clothes that no longer could be mended, pieced, or turned or the many tidbits and pieces left over from the designs of patterns for the ones she made for sale.
JoBeth could shut her eyes and nostalgically feel the warmth of those quilts, remember their smell, recall the feeling of being caressed with love, security, warmth. No wonder Mrs. Hobbs’s quilts were so welcomed at the hospitals by wounded soldiers sick of heart and body, a long way from the comfort of their own home and mother.
Caroline Hobbs had fulfilled Wes’s early prediction that JoBeth would find her delightful company. Their friendship provided JoBeth with the feminine companionship she had known at home and missed. Mrs. Hobbs kept JoBeth entertained with her recital of the daily events of Washington society. She was an avid reader of the society pages of the daily newspaper, and she recounted the social doings of the capital city as though she had attended every fete and levee.
She was a great expert on the president’s wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, a controversial figure, the subject of much gossip ever since she arrived from Springfield, Illinois. “She is a woman of unpredictable temper, apt to explode at the tiniest thing.” Mrs. Hobbs made a clucking sound with her tongue at this deplorable trait. “An implied snub or a gesture is enough to send her into a fury. Those who have been witness to such tirades say they are frightening to behold. It’s said she is insanely jealous of her husband and has caused terrible scenes as a result.”
Mrs. Hobbs’s favorite personality on the social scene was Miss Kate Chase, a popular belle who was the daughter of the secretary of the treasury, and she read every scrap written about her. She served as her widowed father’s official hostess and did a great deal of entertaining, as was required of a member of the president’s cabinet, reaping inches of complimentary newsprint.
“She is a stunning creature,” Mrs. Hobbs assured JoBeth. “Holds herself like a queen, has skin like snow, marvelous hazel eyes, and glorious bronze hair.”
The fact that Mrs. Hobbs had never seen the lady in person did not diminish her knowledge of the details of the beautiful socialite’s life. “She’s being courted by the young senator from Rhode Island, William Sprague.”
Eventually her wedding was the social highlight of the winter and became the topic of Mrs. Hobbs’s monologues to JoBeth for several days. Having avidly read the accounts, she could give JoBeth a full report, as though she had attended the wedding along with the president (but not Mrs. Lincoln: “It’s said she’s extremely jealous of Kate and wouldn’t want to be where she ain’t the center herself—which of course she wouldn’t be, with its being, after all, the bride’s day”).
Mrs. Hobbs relayed almost word for word the newspaper-article description of the elaborate reception following the ceremony, telling JoBeth that “the beautiful bride was a vision in white velvet, lace veil, and the matched set of diamond-and-pearl jewelry that was the gift of the bridegroom.”
Listening, JoBeth could not help but compare this glittering affair with her own wedding—which no one attended or wrote about or deemed in any way special. A wedding far from girlish imagination. But JoBeth was sure the bride of Mrs. Hobbs’s extravagant description could be no happier than she.
Sometimes JoBeth had to pinch herself to believe her own happiness. It seemed strange that she could be so happy, having been cut off so completely from family and friends. But then, she had felt even more isolated and lonely in Hillsboro without Wes. Any doubts that she might have had that she had been foolish to follow her heart vanished entirely. Wes lived up to her idealized image of him: his brilliant mind, his absolute integrity, the sweetness of their intimate relationship. All they had been through to be together had been worth it.