Everyone else would remember that Saturday as the day President Lincoln died. Gretchen Miller would remember it as the day the ragged man collapsed at her feet.
Gretchen was tugging at weeds and swatting at gnats when a thud made her whip around. The war was over, but Confederate supporters were everywhere. They lingered after General Lee’s surrender, and President Lincoln’s reconciliation speech, and in pro-Union Columbus.
Gretchen swung from her hunched position to lean back on her barefoot heels. Her skirts puffed out with the movement. She slapped them down, annoyed.
Sharp sunlight made it difficult to see. Gretchen thought she saw a collapsed man just yards from her hem. She adjusted her straw hat so it shaded her eyes.
The man was sprawled across the oak tree roots. Gretchen could not tell his age or condition from where she crouched. His back was to her, his dark head resting on his outstretched arm. He was not moving.
“May the angels have charge of me,” Gretchen whispered. She patted the revolver in her skirt pocket.
His leg twitched.
Gretchen’s heart leaped. That dark, matted hair gave her a turn. Maybe it was her brother Werner, returned from war at last. A hundred men from the Grove City area had answered President Lincoln’s call for soldiers. Everyone was afraid of the number that would return.
Gretchen grabbed her skirts as she scrambled to standing. She flailed her arms at the log farmhouse she called home. She could not shout, in case the man had faked his injury and was waiting for an excuse to attack.
Her aunt, Tante Klegg, stuck her head out the kitchen door. “What is it?” Tante Klegg’s heavy German accent was strident in the quiet morning. It matched the severity of her hair braided and twisted tight against her head.
Gretchen put her finger to her lips. She cupped her hands around her mouth so her whisper would carry. “There is a man.” She waved at her aunt to come outside.
Tante Klegg tiptoed across the rocks Gretchen had overturned gardening. She held her skirt layers high above her ankles.
The man remained quiet, only his twitching foot letting them know he lived. Gretchen did not know if that meant he was dangerous or that he was too injured to move.
Gretchen brushed a strand of reddish hair from her mouth as the breeze picked up. Though it was April, the humidity was heavy and stifling. The wind still carried the scent of cooling bonfires from yesterday’s elaborate celebrations.
Last night, Gretchen had danced until her feet ached and sung until her voice was hoarse. She had been ready to do anything to help her country heal. She held onto the president’s words of reconciliation that she read in the newspaper. She hoped everyone could see the Confederates as prodigal brothers and sisters. She hoped the Confederates would be humble and welcomed home.
With a stranger at her feet, Gretchen realized such things were easier said than done. She gripped the revolver hidden in her pocket and held out her other hand to stop her aunt from advancing. Holding her breath, she crept closer.
The man perhaps could have been her brother, once upon a time. His body was gaunt, worn thin by trials Gretchen suspected she would never understand. His left hand did not bear Werner’s distinctive strawberry-shaped birthmark.
This was not her brother.
“So young,” Gretchen said. Like Werner, the man could not have been more than two years older than she was.
Gretchen noted the hollows in his cheeks, which gave him a stark, haunted air even as he slept. His breath was shallow, but labored. His skeletal shoulder jerked under her light touch. He heaved a shuddering breath and turned dazed eyes on her.
The revolver in Gretchen’s skirt pocket had the hammer pulled and the bullet loaded. She could yank the trigger and shoot a bullet through her skirts and into his chest, but the recoil would hurt. She would have to decide fast.
“Have I done it?” he said. His voice cracked and had a distinct drawl.
“Have you done what?” Gretchen said.
“Escaped.”
The hairs on the back of Gretchen’s neck stood on end. “Escaped? From where?”
“Camp Chase.” He watched her a moment before his eyes rolled back.
A chill ran down Gretchen’s back. Camp Chase was the training barracks four miles due west of Columbus. The government converted a part of it into a Confederate prison not too long after the war started.
Gretchen shook him. His eyes opened to slits.
“Water. Been walking two days.” He lost consciousness.
He hardly looked well enough to have made the five-mile walk to her farm from Camp Chase. Her brother Werner had done it often in a day, but he had been healthy and energetic.
Gretchen frowned.
Tante Klegg approached. “He is not dead?” She sounded annoyed by the inconvenience.
Gretchen shook her head. She wondered how a dead man would have been any more convenient than a fainted one.
“What is it you plan to do?”
“What I plan to do?” Gretchen echoed. Somehow, because she had found the stranger, he was her responsibility. Gretchen might have felt peeved had the idea of solving a mystery not taken hold. “He looks like Werner, doesn’t he?” she asked, her head cocked to the side.
Tante Klegg lifted her hands, signaling she did not care. “And?”
“And… I… think we need to move him in the shade. He is bleeding, and thirsty, and likely starved.” Gretchen did not bother mentioning he had escaped from prison.
Tante Klegg grunted. “We will bring him inside.” She rolled him over so they could grab his arms and legs.
Gretchen wondered if her brother was as starved as this man. She imagined Werner trying to get home and failing. She imagined Werner falling at the feet of a girl who wanted to do her part to bring the country back together.
Her father and brother had disappeared fighting for the Union’s sovereignty. Gretchen would do her part, though she was just a farm girl from little Grove City, Ohio.
Gretchen hoped her father and brother had someone like her to help them. She hoped they were in a safe house, with someone who cared about bringing together North and South, Union and Confederate, abolitionist and slaveholder.
In the meantime, Gretchen needed to get this man out of sight.