GRIFFIN, 1863
JOHN HENRY’S HOMETOWN WAS ONE OF THE PRETTIEST LITTLE CITIES in Georgia, dotted with red brick shops and white frame houses on the tree-lined streets that rose up from the railroad tracks. Griffin had been born in the prosperous 1840’s as a cotton shipping center on the Macon & Western Railroad, and by the start of the War it boasted a population of three-thousand, making it the busiest town between Atlanta, forty miles to the north, and Macon, sixty miles to the south.
Henry Holliday had come to Griffin soon after its founding, looking for the opportunities a railroad town could offer a young war veteran, and Griffin had rewarded him well. From his first job in town as a clerk for the local druggist, he quickly rose to become a landholder, joining in the buying frenzy whenever a new section of town lots was opened up. But the biggest opportunity that Griffin had offered Henry Holliday was the chance to meet and marry Miss Alice Jane McKey, the eldest daughter of one of the wealthiest plantation owners in that part of Georgia. Alice Jane’s father, William Land McKey, owned hundreds of acres of prime cotton land on Indian Creek in nearby Henry County, and dozens of slaves to make the land produce; her mother, Jane Cloud McKey, was kin to the Elijah Cloud family who had first settled the area and had thousands of acres of cotton and hundreds of slaves of their own. So when Henry Holliday, who had plans to become a wealthy planter himself, married into that Southern aristocracy, his future was pretty much assured.
John Henry took his aristocratic heritage for granted, since many of the children he knew in Griffin had wealthy planter relatives, too. It was the bounty of his grandfather’s Indian Creek Plantation that he had enjoyed, caring little about the cotton that had made the McKeys rich. It was the peach and plum orchards he loved, the Muscadine arbor heavy with ripening grapes, the beehives humming with honey bees, the clean-swept dirt yard where he could sit under the shade of a dogwood tree and eat bowls of bread and fresh sweet milk. On his grandfather’s plantation, there had always been good things to tempt a visiting grandchild’s appetite: beaten biscuits, red-eye gravy, farm-raised chicken with doughy dumplings, peach pot pie smothered with cream and cane sugar, and sometimes, on special occasions, a glass of Syllabub made of sweetened milk curdled with homemade wine. To John Henry, the plantation was the Promised Land and he was one of the chosen people, fed on the manna made by the Negro slaves who worked his grandfather’s land.
Slavery may have been a “peculiar institution” as Northern abolitionists liked to call it, but for the wealthy planter class of Georgia and the rest of the Southern states, it was an institution that worked well. The whites ruled, the blacks obeyed, the cotton economy prospered, and the rising generation was taught to expect that things would always go along as they had for two-hundred years of Southern slavery. John Henry had been raised that way, knowing that when he turned twenty-one he would inherit some of the McKey land and the slaves that came with it, and he had fond memories of going with his grandfather to the auction block down by the railroad tracks where Mr. Daniel Earp, Griffin slave trader, sold males and females right out in the open.
The Earps and their kind held a unique place in Southern society. Though the service they provided of procuring human chattel for the slave trade was an essential part of the plantation economy, the slave traders themselves were despised. Slave dealers were commonly known to be liars and cheats, using unscrupulous means to obtain slaves for sale, since the legal importation of Africans had been ended by federal law in the early part of the century. Wise plantation owners were cautious when dealing with slave traders; nice folks avoided them completely.
While John Henry’s parents didn’t own dozens of field slaves, they did have enough House Negroes to keep their home running smoothly. The Holliday’s pretty cottage on Tinsley Street in downtown Griffin was kept clean by the colored housemaid, the meals prepared by the colored cook, the clothes cared for by the colored washerwoman, the buggy driven by the colored driver. The slaves were such an integral part of the family’s life that when nightfall came and they went to their own cabins behind the main house, the big house felt quiet and empty without them. For John Henry, it was hard to imagine a world without slavery, a world where black and white weren’t so completely dependent upon one another. But that was the world the Yankees were fighting for. For nearly two years, the War of Secession had ravaged the land as the North fought to abolish slavery and save the Union, and the South fought to preserve the Constitution and its guarantee of States’ Rights. And though both sides claimed to be guided by divine providence, neither side had made much progress. The North was out-generaled, the South was out-numbered, and the war thus far had been one long, bloody stalemate.
Griffin felt the continuing weight of the war more than most Georgia towns, as it served as one of the main training centers for Georgia troops. Every week, the trains went out carrying men armed with devotion to the Cause and shouting the Rebel Yell, high and wild as a band of banshees. The sound of that yell would always remind John Henry of the war: of streets filled with soldiers dressed in Confederate gray, of shops emptied of goods as the Union blockade closed all the ports from Charleston to New Orleans.
Times had gotten hard in the promised land in the two years since the war began, and the once-rich cotton economy was nearly at its breaking point. By that spring of 1863, flour was selling for $65 a barrel, bread was going for $25 a loaf, and the Confederate dollar was as good as worthless. In April there were bread riots in Charleston. In May the Confederate States’ government asked planters to give up their cash crop cotton land for planting corn and potatoes to feed the starving people of the South. In June General Lee’s army, having already foraged away all the food in Virginia, moved north through the Shenandoah Valley and into the farm land of Pennsylvania looking for rations and a chance to wage one final battle that might end the war while the South still had the strength to win. In July, in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains, in the quiet Cumberland Valley town of Gettysburg, the army found its fight.
All four Griffin newspapers carried the story of the Battle of Gettysburg as front-page news, but it wasn’t until a letter from cousin Mattie’s father arrived that the family realized how close the battle had come to home. Uncle Rob Holliday had been there at Gettysburg during the fighting, serving as a Captain Quartermaster under General Longstreet, though his own regiment had been kept back to cover the retreat. It was a heavy blow, he wrote, a hard defeat to accept, with twenty-five thousand Southern casualties in two days of desperate fighting and entire divisions decimated.
Then, before the news of Gettysburg had even grown cold, came reports of the fall of Vicksburg on the Mississippi River as the Yankee General Ulysses S. Grant completed the encirclement of the Confederacy. There would be no more easy victories for the South, with the shipping lanes of the Mississippi River cut in two and General Lee’s army limping back from its defeat in Pennsylvania. But the war wasn’t over yet, and Henry Holliday was more determined than ever to move his family far from the battlefront.
Though John Henry’s mother never complained about moving away from Griffin, there were tears in her eyes as she packed their things, and her younger sisters complained enough for everyone, anyhow. How would they get along in such an uncivilized place as south Georgia? Where would they live? Where would they go to church in that God-forsaken wilderness? Nineteen-year-old Ella and seventeen-year-old Helena worried that their brothers, Will and James and Tom, all of them off fighting, might not be able to find them once the war was over. And Margaret, twenty-four years old and promised to a young soldier named Billie Wylie, worried that he might not find her, either, and she’d end up an old maid. But Henry Holliday gave little heed to his sisters-in-law. He was their guardian; they would be obliged to go wherever he wanted to go, and he wanted to go south.
John Henry was the only member of the family who joined Henry in looking forward to the move, though he felt like a traitor to his mother for doing so. But for a restless twelve-year-old boy, going south seemed like the adventure of a lifetime. Two-hundred miles to Valdosta! It would be the longest trip he had ever taken and the longest time he’d ever spent on a railcar, and that was fine by him. He had always loved the railroad, ever since he first knew the sound of the steam engines coming into town. The trains roared in on iron rails, bringing people from places he had never seen, taking them away again to places he had only heard about. To him, the railroad was a romance and an adventure, and now it would be his turn to travel off into the unknown. If only his mother weren’t so sad about leaving . . .
But how could she not be sad, leaving her baby behind, buried on a hill outside of town? Nearly every Sunday that John Henry could remember, his mother had made a pilgrimage to the city burial ground to lay flowers on his sister Martha Eleanora’s grave, and many a time he had happily accompanied her. He liked sitting beside her as she drove the buggy out of town and across the low wooden bridge that led to Rest Haven Cemetery. He liked kneeling beside her on the grassy ground as she wove fresh cut flowers into pillows or wreaths to adorn the grave. He liked being alone with her and the sister he had never known, feeling close to them both and special as the only living child of his beautiful mother. So when Alice Jane asked him to go with her to the cemetery one last time to say a final farewell to little Eleanora before they left Griffin for their new home, he was glad to go along.
It was sultry hot that August afternoon and John Henry was sweating in his wool jacket by the time they reached the Holliday plot at the top of the graveyard hill. He would like to have been coatless in his cotton shirtsleeves on such an uncomfortable day, but visiting the cemetery was almost a religious event for his mother, and religious events demanded a certain amount of decorum, so he wore his suit coat and tried not to complain of the heat. His mother was nearly as warmly dressed as he was, in her high-necked blouse and wide-sleeved jacket, her full cotton skirt and layers of petticoats, though she seemed not to be feeling the heat as badly as he was. His young aunts said it was the hoop skirts the ladies wore that helped to keep them cool, holding up the weight of all those petticoats and allowing a little breeze to blow past the legs. Of course, he would never dare to discuss such delicate things as skirts and petticoats with his ladylike mother.
“John Henry, you clear away the weeds from Ellie’s grave while I sort these flowers,” his mother said as she gracefully gathered her skirts and climbed down from the buggy, and he obediently set to work pulling at the long grass that threatened to cover over the granite headstone. In Memory of Martha Eleanora, Daughter of H.B. and A.J. Holliday who died June 12th 1850 aged 6 Months 9 days.
John Henry did the ciphering in his head, adding up that his sister Ellie would have been thirteen years-old now, had she lived, and wondered as he always did what it would have been like to have had a living sister instead of this small grave for a sibling. Her simple stone stood upright on a marble base at the head of the tiny plot, the footstone only two feet away. And underneath, six feet down in the red Georgia clay, lay the baby girl who had died before he was even born—died of the same malady that would likely have killed him, had his Uncle John not intervened.
“Ma, tell me again how Uncle John saved my life when I was a baby.”
His mother sighed as she set to arranging the flowers she would lay on the grave: yellow jonquils and purple petunias intertwined with glossy green magnolia leaves. “You know how your sister was born with a cleft in her mouth,” she said softly, though there was no one around to overhear the sad tale. “Ellie’s beautiful little face was disfigured by a gash in her lip. But worse than the appearance of it was how it made her unable to nurse properly. The poor little thing couldn’t suckle, and when we gave her cow’s milk in a pap, the milk ran back out of her mouth before she could take much of it in.”
“So she starved to death,” John Henry said with childlike bluntness, and his mother nodded.
“When you were born with the same condition, we knew we had to do somethin’—anything—or we would lose you the same way. That’s when your Uncle John brought Dr. Long down here from Jefferson County to assist him in an operation.”
“Dr. Crawford Long,” John Henry added, proud that his life was connected to the famous surgeon who had pioneered the use of ether in surgery. He’d heard that story a hundred times as well.
“That’s right. Dr. Long was your Aunt Permelia’s cousin on her Ware side, so he came as a favor to the family. Permelia came too, as a nurse to your Uncle John. You were only two months old at the time. So tiny, so helpless! But tiny as you were, they didn’t dare wait any longer to do the surgery.”
“So Dr. Long gave me the ether in a cloth over my nose, and Uncle John mended me up.”
Alice Jane nodded. “Your Uncle John did a wonderful job. He sewed the cleft in your lip together, and did the same with the opening in your mouth. And then there was nothin’ to do but pray that you would survive the surgery, and recover.”
“But I did. You can hardly even see the scar on my lip anymore, and I don’t lisp at all . . .” though he still remembered the pain of being laughed at by taunting schoolmates.
“No, sweetheart, you are just perfect now. You’ve done well with your voice lessons, learnin’ to speak properly, and when you’re grown to be a man, you can wear a nice mustache to cover that little scar line that remains. No one will ever know how close you came to joinin’ your sister here in the cemetery. I will always know, though, and be forever indebted to your sweet Uncle John for savin’ my precious baby. He’s a brilliant man, a talented physician.”
John Henry sat quietly for a moment, though his thoughts were racing. If his uncle were indeed as brilliant as all that . . .
“Ma? Do you reckon Uncle John might find a cure for other kinds of sicknesses someday? I mean, he cured me, didn’t he?”
“He did indeed.”
“Maybe someday he’ll find a cure for typhus,” he suggested, “or cholera,” and when his mother nodded, John Henry gathered his courage and went on. “Maybe he’ll even find a cure for—for consumption,” he said quickly, his words rushing out with childish hopefulness. “Do you reckon he could, Ma? I reckon he could. I reckon he could cure anything. I’ll bet, if he worked on it hard enough, he could figure out what causes the consumption, and make it go away. Oh, Ma!” he said, his heart coming up in his throat, “he has to find a cure for it. He just has to!”
“John Henry, sweetheart,” his mother said in surprise, “what is all this? Whatever is wrong?” Then she laid down the wreath of flowers she had been fashioning and looked into his distraught face, her voice a worried whisper. “You haven’t been talkin’ with your uncle, have you? Surely, your Uncle John has told you nothing . . .”
“I heard, Ma! I heard it all! I was right next door, listenin’ from the other room when Uncle John told you about havin’ the consumption! I didn’t mean to hear about it, honest I didn’t. I was just tryin’ to learn something . . .”
Alice Jane let out a sound like a painful sigh, then touched a hand to his hair and said sadly: “Well, I suppose you learned somethin’ all right. I’m sorry that you had to hear. I didn’t mean for you to know so soon. I’d hoped to keep it private for a while longer, at least until we’d got moved and settled in. Your father doesn’t need to be dealin’ with this just now . . .”
“But maybe Uncle John can cure you, Ma, before Pa has to know. Maybe he can save you like he saved me.”
“Oh, my sweet boy!” his mother said as she pulled him close to her. “I do hope you are right. I pray to God for such a miracle! But I also trust in God’s divine providence. If Jesus means for me to be cured, I will be. Of that I have no doubt. But if this illness should take me . . .”
“No, Ma!”
“. . . if this illness should take me, then that is God’s will. You must believe that. But John Henry, your mother is not dead, so there’s no need to mourn just yet. And God willin’, I’ll live long enough to see you grown and with a family of your own before I die, as a proper mother should. That’s what I want, more than anything, for you to grow to healthy manhood and find a life that’ll make you happy. I want you to know the joy that I’ve known in raisin’ you, for you’ve been the light and the love of my life. But for now, we must decide how to keep your father from findin’ out.”
“You’re still not gonna tell him?” he asked in surprise.
“No, I am not. It’ll do him no good to know, and may harm his own recovery. So, my dear boy, you’ll have to share my secret a little longer. Now it must be our secret, together.”
“Our secret,” he repeated, and somehow having a confidence with her made him feel better, though it was a heavy secret to share.
“Now promise me one thing, dear. Promise me that you will never forget your sister here, for I fear that when I’m gone no one will remember to care for her grave. Promise me that you’ll come back here in days to come, and tend to Martha Eleanora’s grave for me.”
“But all I can do is weed. I can’t make those fancy flower things like you do.”
“Why, of course you can. You have good talented hands—you’re learnin’ how to play the piano, aren’t you? It won’t take you long to catch on to flower weavin’. Just take a stem like so . . .” and she nodded for John Henry to follow as she pulled a jonquil from her basket.
“But flowers are women’s work!” he protested. “That’s what Pa says, flowers and sewin’ and tendin’ to babies . . .”
“Is that so? Well, if your Uncle John hadn’t done such a fine job sewin’ up your lip when you were a baby, you wouldn’t be nearly so handsome now. He’s handier with a needle and thread than any woman I know, and he’s a fine man all the same.”
She had him there. “I guess I could try and make one of those wreath things like you do. Just as long as you don’t tell Pa, all right? I’ll catch hell for sure, if he sees me makin’ pretty things.”
“Mind your tongue, John Henry. Gentlemen don’t need to curse to make their point. But I promise I will keep your secret, as you must promise to keep mine, and not tell a soul until I give you leave. Now take those flowers left in the basket there, and do as I do, but make haste, for this heat will make them wilt before we’re half done.”
The Hollidays weren’t the only refugees that hot summer of 1863. It seemed that everyone in Georgia was going somewhere on the trains, trying to get out of the way of the Yankees. And swelling the crowds of civilians were thousands of Confederate troops, packing the rail cars as they followed their orders east to the sea and along the Georgia coast.
John Henry had never seen so many soldiers at one time or heard so much commotion, with the shouts of military commands, the frantic cries of lost children and frightened women, the roar and hiss of the steam engines and the grinding clang of the wheels on the rails. Everyone was hurrying, panic driven to get from where they were to somewhere else, and at every stop there was a fight for tickets, hoping that the cars weren’t already full of troops, vying with the other refugees for space on a box car, some place to put the household belongings that had been dumped on the side track at the end of the last leg of the journey. And when his family finally did get settled, crowding into the dark and airless back of a boxcar with the crates and Alice Jane’s piano, the train slowed to a stop at every little village so the conductor could pass along the news of the War to the anxious crowds gathered by the tracks.
“What do y’all hear from Gen’ral Lee’s army?”
“My boy’s in Virginia, have y’all heard anything from up there?”
“Is the fightin’ still goin’ on in Tennessee? We haven’t heard from Uncle in more’n two months now.”
“Where’s that damned Yankee Sherman? Give us one good fight and we’ll whip ‘em yet!”
Then finally Valdosta, near end of the line for the Atlantic and Gulf Rail, sixty miles from Thomasville, hundreds of miles from anyplace else one could call civilized. South Georgia was barely out of the woods and Valdosta was still just a frontier outpost in a humid, insect-infested wilderness. But rough as it was, just a scattering of business houses around a wooden courthouse, Valdosta was full of the bustle and building that filled all refugee towns.
Henry Holliday listened to the commotion, breathed in the thick piney air, and smiled. For $35,000 Confederate, his entire inheritance from his father’s estate, he bought three-thousand acres north of town, past Cat Creek. It was beautiful land, high fertile ground that ran across a ridge between the road and the woods. An old house faced onto the road, and behind the house the land spread out, sandy and level, covered in tall grass and dog fennel that waved in the slow summer breeze. Past the house, the road wound on around a bend and disappeared into the woods again. It was new land, wild country that still had a soul to it, ready for a man and his family to settle and tame.
They were far from the battlefront now, but in that primitive environment life itself was often a battle. Henry took his son out and taught him how to use a rifle—how to tear the paper cartridge open with his teeth and pour the black gunpowder down the barrel, slide in the mini ball and ram it home with the ramrod, set the percussion cap against the hammer and pull the trigger back to half-cock, then aim and wait. The waiting was the hardest part for John Henry, the huge gun pulled up to his shoulder, near as long as he was tall and near as heavy as he was, too. Even his father’s Colt’s Walker pistol was heavy in his hands, but John Henry seemed to have a natural feel for it, learning how to shoot the eyes out of a rabbit when it stopped to look at him before it started running.
There were other lessons Henry had for his son, things every Southern gentleman should know, like honor and responsibility and the importance of hard work. And with his father’s guiding hand, John Henry learned to care for a horse of his own, and spent long hours racing across the grassy fields and dirt roads that led from the farm toward Valdosta. He learned to hunt from horseback, one hand on the reins, one hand on his gun, firing low from the hip without slowing to aim. And in the cool evenings after his mother had gone to bed, he learned to play a friendly game of cards, bluffing without blinking, and besting his father so many times that Henry said he was glad he hadn’t taught the boy to wager as well. Those were happy days for John Henry, with his father’s time and attention, the sun on his skin, the wind in his face, and a wild new world to explore.
But his mother made sure it wasn’t all too wild. She continued his music lessons on the spinet piano in the parlor, saying that his agile fingers seemed to have a natural affinity for the instrument. And though his father thought piano-playing sissified, his mother insisted that it was manners, not muscles, that were the real proof of a man. But a gentleman must be educated as well as mannered, so he was enrolled in the day school over in Valdosta, where the local children were taught grammar and history, mathematics and penmanship, and recited together the opening lines of their reading primer. His mother nodded in approval as he practiced for her:
“Do not lie, my son; a good boy will not lie. It is a sin to lie; and a good boy will not sin.”
The day school wasn’t the caliber of the fine institutions in Griffin, of course, but at least it was an education, and John Henry was sent packing every morning for the seven-mile ride into town, leaving the farm before daybreak so he wouldn’t be tardy. The first class sessions were held in the rough wooden courthouse until a real school building could be readied, though even that was a slap-dash affair with no sash or shutters and only boards nailed across the windows to keep out the weather, and the students had to do their work by the weak light of a lamp of plaited rags dipped in melted tallow. By the time class was over for the day, twilight was coming on and John Henry rode home watching out for “haints” and “boogeymen” as the darkness closed in. The woods were full of such things, he knew. He’d been raised on the stories told by the Negro slaves who worked the land and knew what kind of spooks hid out in the shadows. And just to be safe, he kept his right hand on the butt of his gun, ready to draw and fire at the first frightening sound.
But the most frightening sound of all in that wilderness was his mother’s coughing in the night. Her miracle hadn’t come yet, and she often took to her bed with fever and exhaustion. And though Henry was concerned and wanted to send for the doctor, she insisted that there was no need.
“I’m fine, Henry,” she would say with eyes closed as she drifted off to sleep soon after supper. “I just need a little rest, that’s all. I’m sure I’ll be feelin’ better soon enough. Now tell John Henry to play something for me on the piano while I rest. I do so love to hear him play.”
In the north the War dragged on as the Union General Sherman kept pushing his forces deeper into the Confederacy, and every week more refugees arrived in Valdosta fleeing ahead of the Yankee destruction. One Southern village after another was becoming a ghost town as the families refugeed and neat town squares and comfortable old homes were left empty, waiting for the destroyer. Sherman had promised to enter the South with the sword in one hand and the torch in the other and carve a forty-mile wide road to the sea where a crow could not find its supper. He meant to punish the rebels, and if the helpless wives and children of the South suffered, so much the better; their husbands and fathers, hearing of the carnage, would give up their Cause and surrender to save their families. But the Yankees had never understood the heart of the Southern people.
On through the summer of 1864 the Federal troops kept moving south, driving the Army of Tennessee and destroying the rail lines that kept the Confederacy alive. If the rail hub of Atlanta could be taken and her railroads crippled, the Confederacy would suffocate. The Yankees pushed on toward that goal, moving south into Georgia from Dalton to Resaca, past Kennesaw and on toward Decatur, where they made their headquarters while the siege of Atlanta began. The Confederates fought valiantly to defend their ground, but they couldn’t counter the flanking movements of a hundred-thousand Yankee soldiers. Soon Atlanta was surrounded on three sides with only the southern roads toward Macon and Savannah still open. But as long as the Confederates could hold the southern railroad, Atlanta could survive.
John Henry listened with the excitement of a thirteen-year-old boy to the stories of the battles, imagining the gunfire and the cannon blasts echoing against the brass hot summer sky, the smoke hanging thick as thunderclouds before the sun. Then late in August, the fighting suddenly stopped as the Yankees disappeared into the wooded Atlanta countryside. At first there was the desperate hope that Sherman had given up and moved his troops back north to Tennessee, but it was only a hope. The Yankees were moving south in force, heading on toward the Macon and Western rail line, the final iron road that connected Atlanta to the coast. The Confederates tried to hold them at Rough and Ready, ten miles south of Atlanta, but the Yankees pushed on and headed for Jonesboro and the final bloody battle of the War in Georgia.
When John Henry heard about Jonesboro, the War suddenly ceased to be just an exciting story for him. His cousin Mattie’s family lived in Jonesboro, in a pretty house on a shady lane near the railroad. He remembered it with fondness and disbelief. Jonesboro wasn’t a place where battles were waged. Jonesboro was sunlit summer afternoons and backyard barbecues, birthday parties and Christmas gatherings. Jonesboro was old trees big enough to climb and grassy hills just right for rolling down. Jonesboro was little girl cousins who played dolls on the front porch and dress-up in the attic, and let him be the hero of all their make-believe stories. Jonesboro was warmth and home and family, but not war; never war. But the Yankees were moving south, and Jonesboro would be caught in the firestorm that Sherman was lighting from Atlanta to the sea.
Surely the family would leave before the fighting started, surely Aunt Mary Anne would take the children and refugee south to safety as Uncle Rob had instructed her to do if the Yankees ever came near. Soon now they would hear from her, have a message that she was safe and coming to Valdosta with the children to wait there until Uncle Rob returned from the War. But no message came, not in the first days following the battle, not in the days and weeks that came after that. All through the warm days of Indian Summer and into the first cool days of fall they waited, and still no word came, and John Henry pondered on what the Yankees could do to the families of Confederate soldiers.
It was a crisp day in mid-October when Henry Holliday made the seven-mile trip to Valdosta to take care of some business and left his horse saddled at the rack across from the depot, and was done and about to go on home when the train pulled in. So he took his time packing his saddlebag, always waiting for what news the trains might bring. Maybe there would be some mail with a message of hope from Jonesboro, or word from his brother Rob, and he waited and watched as the passengers left the train. Then, in the steam that rose up from the engine, he saw a small woman climb down from a boxcar and help three little girls down after her. She turned to find her bearings, and for a moment she disappeared into the steam as if she’d only been a phantom and not there at all. But as the air cleared, Henry saw her again and recognized her at last. It was his own brother’s wife, Mary Anne Fitzgerald Holliday, and she was crying thankful tears at the sight of him.
That night after her little girls had been settled down to sleep, Aunt Mary Anne tried to tell her brother-in-law what had happened to the family. Alice Jane had already gone on to bed, worn out from the excitement of the day, she said, but John Henry stayed up, lingering in the shadows, hoping to hear about the War and the battle that had finally taken Atlanta. And he wanted to hear about Mattie and Lucy as well, away in Savannah for the time being, safe behind convent walls. But it would be ill-bred of him to interrupt the conversation and ask questions, so he watched and waited and listened.
Aunt Mary Anne looked weary as she sat in the old rocking chair in front of the parlor fire, her face drawn and dark-shadowed around deep blue eyes. She’d been beautiful once, he’d heard tell, in those long-ago days when she was the sixteen-year-old bride of his father’s younger brother. But five baby daughters and four years of wartime had aged her, like all the women he knew. Her voice was still beautiful though, a lovely lilting combination of Irish brogue and Southern drawl.
“I never believed the Yankees would get past Atlanta,” she said, speaking softly so as not to wake her sleeping children. “Who could? With General Hood in command I thought surely we were safe. Rob served with him and said he was a fighter if ever there was one.”
John Henry’s thoughts ran ahead of the story. He knew his Uncle Robert Kennedy Holliday’s line of command and recited it to himself: Seventh Georgia Regiment, Anderson’s Brigade, Hood’s Division, Longstreet’s Corps. Hood’s men served with General Lee at Gettysburg, some of the hottest fighting of the War. But General Hood had been injured there, and in Georgia he’d proven that the fight had gone out of him.
“Hood’s a fool,” Henry said, “sendin’ half his cavalry off to Tennessee. An army’s blind without the cavalry as scouts. He didn’t even know Sherman was movin’ on Jonesboro.”
“We had no word the Yankees were comin’,” Aunt Mary Anne went on, “not until Kilpatrick’s raiders came through town. They burned all the business houses and tore up the railroad tracks. We hid in the attic and watched them do their work—a whole regiment on horseback with their guns at the ready.”
“And why didn’t you leave?” Henry said, his voice was softly critical, but Mary Anne took no offense.
“I couldn’t. My old Uncle Roddy was desperately ill, and couldn’t be moved. He lived with us, you know. All I could do was pray that the Yankees wouldn’t come back, or that Uncle Roddy would be taken soon . . .” She stopped talking for a moment and lowered her eyes in shame. “It’s a hard thing, Henry, prayin’ for someone’s death. But that is what I did, prayed for his release so the children and I could leave Jonesboro.”
“There was nothin’ wrong in it, Mary Anne. We do what we have to do in wartime.”
She nodded, understanding more of war than she ever should have known. “I sent for a priest, but no one could come. There were so many soldiers dyin’ in Atlanta—they said the streets were full of the wounded. I feared that Uncle Roddy would die without final confession, as if God wanted him to prove his perfect abandonment to the Holy Will, but Father O’Reilly blessedly came down from Atlanta in time for the last rites. Uncle Roddy passed away the end of August, peacefully, in his sleep.”
“Well, God rest him,” Henry said. “Roderick O’Carew was a fine old man.”
Mary Anne crossed herself, honoring her dead. “I had to take his body to Fayetteville for a Catholic burial in the family plot, but there were rumors the Yankees were comin’ back. A regiment of our boys, down from the fightin’ at Rough and Ready, warned us that Sherman himself was on the way.”
“And were the Yankees comin’?” John Henry spoke up from the shadows, so intent on the story that he forgot himself.
“Hush son! Remember your manners,” his father scolded.
“It’s all right,” Mary Anne said as she turned to look at her nephew. “Yes, John Henry, the Yankees were comin’. The day after we buried Uncle Roddy the Fayetteville Road was filled with bluecoats. We heard them comin’ before we saw them, like a low rumblin’ of thunder movin’ in from the west—thousands of men and hundreds of wagons, comin’ right toward us. The clouds of dust they kicked up turned the whole sky red as blood. I watched that red cloud movin’ in and knew that it was too late for us to get out of Jonesboro.”
John Henry’s eyes opened wide, picturing the whole Yankee army invading the town and the brave Confederate soldiers frantically digging in for the defense.
“By the time our boys got there the Yankees had the high ground outside of town, waitin’ for them, and we were trapped between the Confederate lines and the railroad. And just across the river was the Yankee artillery, pointed right toward Church Street. I had to get the children away from there before the firin’ started, so I loaded the wagon with everything I could carry out of the house and set out toward my Uncle Phillip Fitzgerald’s plantation.”
“But Rural Home is south of Jonesboro,” Henry said, “right along the line toward Lovejoy’s Station. There must have been Yankee cavalry all through that countryside!”
“I kept to the old trails we used to use before the railroad came through, and took to the trees every time I heard a sound.” She paused before going on, sighing. “The Yankees had gotten there before we did and set up headquarters in Uncle Phillip’s house, but we were not harmed. Some of the Yankee soldiers were Catholic raised and remembered their duty as Christians, though they were not so honorable about Uncle Phillip’s property. They ruined his farmland, drivin’ their wagons and runnin’ their horses through the cotton and the corn. Then they set fire to everything else that remained, and when they left they took all the animals along with them, leaving Uncle Phillip destitute. I couldn’t ask him to care for my family when he had nothin’ for his own. At the end of two weeks when the soldiers moved on, I took my girls and went back home.”
She stared into the fire and John Henry watched the light flicker across her face, thinking of the fires the Yankees had set when they took over Jonesboro. They’d torn up the tracks and heated the rails over bonfires until the metal was soft enough to twist around the trunks of pine trees, leaving “Sherman’s Bow Ties” that couldn’t be straightened and re-laid by the Confederates.
“All along the road there were mounds of dirt where the dead had been buried—there must have been thousands of them. At the edge of town were trenches where the troops had dug in and breastworks beyond. Church Street was just behind the lines and had taken heavy fire from the Yankee artillery, and our house had been right in the middle of it. It was all but torn apart by the shelling, the windows shattered, the walls filled with spent bullets, everything inside broken or stolen.”
John Henry’s heart was fairly bursting out of his chest. Now the story was getting really good—breastworks and trenches, artillery and gunfire! He held his breath and waited for more.
“Behind the house, in the garden, were two more graves: Confederate dead, Colonel Grace of the 10th Tennessee and his chaplain. They say that Colonel Grace was wounded during the first day of the battle so his troops moved him behind the lines to the garden of our house. His chaplain went there to minister to him and was givin’ him the last rites of Holy Church when he was struck and killed by a shell. There’d been no time to move them before the Yankees came over the lines, so Colonel Grace’s men buried them there where they died, under the trees in our backyard. I like to think that at least they were near a Catholic home when they passed. Maybe one day they can be moved to a proper site, in consecrated ground.”
John Henry had to bite his tongue to keep from asking Aunt Mary Anne to tell the story again. To have a garden that was a cemetery was gruesome enough, but to have two war heroes buried there—now that was really something! His father shot him a look of warning, and he quickly wiped the hopeful smile from his face. He’d be sent on to bed for sure if he acted childish at a time like this. Still, dead heroes buried in the garden was mighty exciting!
Mary Anne didn’t see the look that passed between father and son. She had closed her eyes for a moment, exhausted by the memory and the retelling of it. “There was nothin’ left to stay for, so we set out to make our way here. I had no way to contact you, Henry—I didn’t even know for certain where your farm was. But I prayed for guidance, and look at the miracle of it: when we finally arrived in Valdosta there you were at the depot, as if God himself had led us every step of the way.”
John Henry was moved by her faith, and in her telling of the story, it did seem that some providence had saved the little family.
“But what about Mattie and Lucy?” He was startled to hear his own voice speaking his thoughts out loud. He looked quickly at his father, but Henry said nothing this time, and Mary Anne turned to answer him directly.
“They are still safe, praise God. I was able to see them when we passed through Savannah. The convent will keep them until the end of the term. Their father thought it the best place for them during wartime. The Confederate soldiers were always gentlemen of course, but I wouldn’t trust the Yanks, not even the officers.”
Henry nodded his approval. “Did Rob take the girls there himself?”
“Yes, in February, when he was home on furlough.”
She rested her hand absently against her full gathered skirt, and Henry asked softly, “And when is the baby due?”
John Henry started with surprise. He hadn’t even noticed his aunt’s swollen figure hidden under the long shawl that stayed draped around her. But Mary Anne didn’t blush at Henry’s question, though men weren’t supposed to comment on such things.
“Christmastime, or sooner. It’s been hard on the baby, I fear, all this refugeeing. But I think it’ll be a boy this time, Henry. I’ve prayed for Rob that it be a son.” Then she looked up and her eyes were filled with tears. “I want a son to carry on his name, if he doesn’t come home again.”
She said it with such courage, acknowledging the danger of her husband’s long years in the War, and Henry reached out and took her hand in his, speaking gently.
“He’ll be home, Mary Anne, and he’ll be proud of that son. A man always is.”
John Henry was surprised to hear the compassion in his father’s voice. Henry had never spoken so gently to Alice Jane, even while he tended her on her sick days. He was always polite, of course, cool and efficient in seeing to her needs, but never did he treat her with such heartfelt kindness. And suddenly, John Henry understood something elemental about his father, something his mother surely already knew. Henry hated weakness, and illness was weakness, and poor Alice Jane, through no fault of her own, was both ill and weak. But Aunt Mary Anne, in spite of all she’d been through, was still strong, and in the quiet shadows, John Henry could see the admiration in his father’s eyes.
Aunt Mary Anne’s baby came early as she had thought it would, but the tiny boy was all Holliday and a fighter from the start. Mary Anne named him James Robert after his grandfather and father, but the family soon shortened that to Jim Bob, a good Southern nickname that John Henry had suggested. The baby was the center of attention from then on, and even Alice Jane found the energy to join in the adulation.
Infants were a mystery to only-child John Henry. He watched with bewilderment as the women and girls all fussed endlessly over the new baby, envying his father’s freedom to leave the house every time the baby wailed, as Henry was suddenly finding town business more demanding than usual. Still, having Aunt Mary Anne’s brood wasn’t such a hardship, as long as cousin Mattie was on her way -- she and Lucy would be leaving Saint Vincent’s Academy at the end of the term in mid-December, and with the Yankees moving ever closer to Savannah, the girls wouldn’t be going back to school.
John Henry went along with his father to the depot to meet their train, eager to see Mattie’s familiar face and have her company once again. He was already full of plans for how they would spend the time together, riding and exploring the wilds around his father’s farm. But as the train pulled in and the passengers stepped down from the cars, his plans vanished into the thin winter air.
The little girl he loved was gone and in her place stood a stranger with Mattie’s eyes and a woman’s body, her long auburn hair pulled up from her neck, her small shoulders squared against the world. John Henry’s heart fell—did everything always have to change? He’d already lost the rest of his childhood, and now Mattie was gone too.
But then she saw him standing on the platform and her face broke into the wide smile he remembered, and she ran down the steps to embrace him.
“John Henry, it’s so good to see you again! I hoped you’d be here! How’s my mother? Is the baby well? Oh, I just know we’re gonna have the most wonderful Christmas!” And she kissed him on the cheek and hugged him again.
Her words tumbled out so fast that he hardly had time to answer, but it was just as well. For having her arms around him gave him a strange new sensation, pleasant and unfamiliar. She was still Mattie, but someone new as well, and he hardly knew what to make of it. And it was hard to keep his eyes on her face as she spoke, and not let them stray down to the curving figure in her small-waisted traveling dress. She looked like the girls who had grown too old for school, and left to stay with relatives and look for husbands in other towns. She looked like the girls he silently stared at as they walked home from Church, hips swaying in wide hoop skirts.
She was still talking, asking his father a hundred questions, telling Lucy to help with their bags, and still hanging onto him with one hand that sent shivers up his arm and made him dizzy. She didn’t see the blush rise up in his face when she spoke his name. She didn’t hear his young voice crack when he stammered an answer to her questions. And she didn’t know that, for the first time in his life, John Henry Holliday was falling in love.