LYLBURN SMILED. THE GRAPEVINE SAID THE YANKEE PRESIDENT Lincoln would issue an order any day freeing the nation's slaves. Though the Confederates would reject any such action, Northerners, he believed, would not. The Fugitive Slave Law would be voided. Northerners would thus allow slaves escaping from the South to remain in the North, free.

He had long pondered the issue of escape. Big Ben McDowell and others, including a couple from the Russell plantation, had made it safely to the Yankee states already on the Underground Railroad established years before by Harriet Tubman and others, and many had made it on to Canada. Now that Russell was back from the war, minus an arm and badly scarred, he had been a terror to be around. Lylburn believed that if old “Goober” or someone like that owned him, he would not be so eager to leave. In fact, the specter of cross-country travel in the middle of a war terrified him. But he had had his fill of Russell. And that vicious Sam McDowell had made that girl Hannah over on his plantation pregnant. Hannah had been the only girl for whom Lylburn had ever caught a fancy. Now McDowell had spread the word he wished to sell the girl and her child, devil take her parents.

I have had enough, Lylburn thought as he strode down the road to the Prestons’, where Russell had sent him with money for a mule. Russell had one gimpy horse and one old mule left on his whole spread. Lylburn knew the Prestons did not like his master, but they had been the only ones kind enough to part with an animal they themselves sorely needed. Lylburn believed it was more because of his and some of the other slaves’ well-being than Russell's that John Preston had acceded to his wife's request to practically give the animal to Russell.

But within the next few days, he planned to be headed north, Bible in hand, on the Staunton Quakers’ buckboard.

Ahead, he saw several horses tied out front of the Prestons’. Hey, maybe Mr. Willy come home to rest up and heal from his wounds, Lyl-burn thought, his countenance brightening. Yea it'll be good to see Willy Boy one more time before I pushes north.

Whistling, Lylburn pushed open the white picket gate, flecked paint fluttering off onto the ground. He scurried up the walkway toward the large house when Mrs. Pendleton came out, covering her red face with a kerchief. Her eyes looked dark and wet.

“Oh, Lylburn,” she said, sobbing and touching his shoulder. “Oh—” She burst into tears and rushed away.

Lylburn stood there for a moment, unsettled. He had never before seen Mrs. Pendleton cry, even as the bitter roll calls of the dead and wounded cascaded in from the war. He walked slowly up the steps to the portico. Pastor White came out of the house, his expression grave and his eyes watery.

Then it was like a dream. Lylburn hurried into the house. He heard sobs from a sitting room to one side. He went from room to room. In one corner, he spotted an old fishing pole. Where is Willy? he wondered, becoming frantic. From upstairs, the brittle frightful sound of a crying young girl—no, a weeping young girl—penetrated the back of his mind. Willy's brother Frank, minus the arm he had left at Winchester, came around a corner from the back staircase, his eyes rent with sorrow.

Lylburn found himself staring out the back door. Alone, in the yellow dress he had always adored—frayed though it now was—sat Maggie. On a table before her appeared to be a letter. And a cluster of yellow flowers brighter, now, than her dress—jonquils, Lylburn thought. She sat still and stared out into the fields that sloped gently down into the Valley of Virginia.

Lylburn lowered his head and walked slowly from the house. No one had told him anything. But he knew. And if he had not, he would have when he glimpsed through a doorway Colonel Preston sitting at the desk in his office, his head on the desk, wrapped in his arms.

Lylburn staggered numbly down the front steps. “Willy,” he whispered. Then he began to run, faster and faster. He ran the five miles back to the plantation. He did not care about the Underground Railroad. And he did not remember the mule. It did not matter; Russell had drunk himself into another stupor. He would retrieve the animal the next day.

Maggie did not feel like writing a few nights later when she sat in near darkness at her desk, but in her numbness, something persuaded her the time had come to write out what thoughts she could bear to record.

Oh, poor Thomas, she thought with grief, reading again the letter that had arrived that day. “He was in my very first Sabbath school class, later he was the first person who volunteered to help with the black Sabbath school class,” Stonewall wrote, “and I have loved him since he was a little boy. I planned in but a few days to name him one of my aides, but God in His providence has ordered otherwise.”

Smudges stained the writing in a few places, though the outside of the letter and envelope were crisp. Tom's tears, Maggie thought with a pang.

Never had she realized just how much she loved Willy. God had used him to open up an entire new world to her that she had before kept shut tight. She heard her two little boys giggling in the next room as Phebe put them to bed. I can love them… because of him, she thought.

Her chest felt like it would burst through the yellow dress as she inked her pen.

“Willy, the gentle, tenderhearted, brave boy, lies in a soldier's grave on the Plains of Manassas,” she wrote. “My heart is wrung with grief to think that his sweet face, his genial smile, his sympathetic heart are gone. My eyes ache with weeping.”

She sat up and tried to clear her clutched throat. She could not, so she continued writing.

“Dear Willy was the darling of this entire family—I daresay of this entire village. Selfless, without guile, and ever concerned more about the other person was he. His love and care for his father had a womanly tenderness in it. He was ever gentle and kind to me, and loving to my children.”

“Slain in battle.”

The words jolted Maggie and she looked out the window down onto the darkened veranda. With her poor eyesight—Oh, how they ache tonight—she could not see her husband, but down there he was. Her blood ran cold at the sound of the words. Over and over he had repeated them, ever since returning from Manassas and his attempt to retrieve Willy's body.

He had not known for certain which grave was Willy's, and had opened the one he supposed to be the boy's.

“Alas! For our poor humanity!” she wrote on the used old Christmas wrapping paper. “When he opened the blanket in which the body was wrapped, he could not distinguish a feature of his boy on the despoiled face—he tore open the shirt, and there where I had written it was Willy C. Preston!” She began to weep her own tears onto the paper, “He thought to bring a lock of his hair—it crumbled to the touch!”

Outside, another haunted refrain of “Slain in battle” wafted up to her. For a moment, she thought she could not go on. But I must, she thought, I must tell of it so others will not forget.

“Such pictures of horror as Mr. P. gives!” she continued. “Unnumbered dead Federal soldiers covering the battlefield; one hundred in one gully, uncovered, and rotting in the sun; they were strewn all along the roadside.”

Horror upon horror struck her. They, too, are some weeping mother's boy, some shattered widow's life, some frightened little boy or girl's—Then came long racking deep sobs from somewhere deep inside her pained tiny body. “Oh, God, oh Jesus,” she wept, her pen continuing in its own power.

“Dead horses everywhere, by the hundred. Hospitals crowded to excess, and loathsome beyond expression in many instances. How fearful is war!”

She bowed her head for a moment, before finishing. “I cannot put down the details he gave me. They are too—horrible.”

Willy's clean, kind visage returned to her. “And how brave was he, so full of manly courage! Dr. McGuire says he died trying to save one of his friends. Thomas himself said when Willy grabbed the flag from him at Cedar Mountain and charged, that it spurred his whole regiment into action and turned the day—and thence, we now know, the entire campaign of Second Manassas, which has thrown another Federal army out of Virginia.

“And additional letters relate how when others of his friends gathered heartstruck with sorrow around him, he said, ‘Don't distress yourselves about me, I am not afraid to die.’ He told Dr. McGuire just before he passed into the upper sanctuary, ‘I am at peace with God and with all the world.’

“Alas! What sorrow reigns over the land! There is a universal wail of woe. Dr. Paine's son has been killed at the same battle, as well as the Patricks’ boy, and our own Pastor White and his family have lost their most cherished one, Hugh. It is like the death of the firstborn in Egypt. Who thinks of or cares for victory now!”

Maggie stopped for a moment, remembering the boy's sweet open freckled face, gooseberry pies, his clear pure voice singing “Away in a Manger” to the little slave children at Christmastime. Remembering his left-behind tears on her bosom that long ago day of a different summer.

“A more faultless character I think I have never known,” she finished. “And he was so consistent a Christian, even through the tribulations and temptations he faced in this world of woe; that is the crowning blessedness of all.”

“Slain in battle.”

Pity etched her face as she glanced again out the window toward where those mournful words came from the darkness. She put down her pen. Then, her throat thankfully clear, she began to sing, softly, the final verse of that hymn of the Savior's birth that Willy had sung so well to little black boys and girls he knew Jesus loved no less than himself.

Be near me, Lord Jesus, I ask Thee to stay

Close by me forever, and love me, I pray;

Bless all the dear children in Thy tender care,

And fit us for heaven to live with Thee there.

She sang it for Willy. She sang it for herself.