A Snow Country Christmas (The Carsons of Mustang Creek #4)(48)
That one phrase had chafed the consciences of thinking people since it flowed from the nib of Thomas Jefferson’s pen, as well it should have. Willing or unwilling, the entire nation had been living a lie.
It was time to right that particular wrong, Jacob thought, once and for all.
And if by chance there were warrior angels, he prayed they would not abandon the cause of liberty, but fight on until every man, woman and child on the North American continent was truly free.
With that petition made, Jacob raised another, more selfish one. Watch over my beloved wife, our little daughter, and Enoch, our trusted friend. Keep them safe and well.
The request was simple, one of millions like it, no doubt, rising to the ears of the Creator on wings of desperation and sorrow, and there was no Road-to-Damascus moment for Jacob, just the ground-shaking roar of battle all around. But even in the midst of thundering cannon, the sharp reports of carbines and the fiery blast of muskets, the clanking of swords and the shrill shrieks of men and horses, he found a certain consolation.
Perhaps, he had been heard.
He began to drift then, back and forth between darkness and light, fear and oblivion. When he surfaced, the pain was waiting, like a specter hovering over him, ready to descend, settle upon him, crush him beneath its weight.
Consequently, Jacob took refuge in the depths of his being, where it could not yet reach.
Hours passed, perhaps days; he had no way of knowing.
Eventually, because life is persistent even in the face of hopelessness and unrelenting agony, the hiding place within became less assessable. During those intervals, pain played with him, like a cat with a mouse. Smoke burned his eyes, which he could not close, climbed, stinging, into his nostrils, chafed his throat raw. He was thirsty, so thirsty; he felt as dry as last year’s corn husks, imagining his life’s blood seeping, however slowly, into the ravaged earth.
In order to bear his suffering, Jacob thought about home, conjured vivid images of Caroline, quietly pretty, more prone to laughter than to tears, courageous as any man he’d ever known. She loved him, he knew that, and his heart rested safely with her. She had always accepted his attentions in the marriage bed with good-humored acquiescence, though not with a passion equal to his own, and while he told himself this was feminine modesty, not disinterest, he sometimes suspected otherwise.
Caroline shouldered the chores of a farmwife without complaint, washing and ironing, cooking and sewing, tending the vegetable garden behind the kitchen-house and picking apples and pears, apricots and peaches in the orchards when the fruit ripened. She preserved whatever produce they did not sell in town, along with milk and eggs and butter, attended church services without fail, though she had once confided to Jacob that she feared God was profoundly deaf. Caroline was an active member of the local Ladies Aid Society, a group devoted to making quilts and blankets for soldiers and gathering donations of various foodstuffs, including such perishables as cakes and bread, all to be crated and shipped to battlefronts and hospitals all over the North. She did all this, and probably much more, while mothering little Rachel with intelligence and devotion, neither too permissive nor too stern.
In addition, Caroline endured every hardship—crops destroyed by rain or hail, the death of her beloved grandfather and several close friends, the two miscarriages she’d suffered—with her chin up and her shoulders back.
Of course she’d wept, especially for the lost babies, but she’d done so in solitude, probably hoping to spare Jacob the added sorrow of seeing her despair. Now, with death so close it seemed palpable, he wished she hadn’t tried to hide her grief, wished he’d sought her out and taken her into his arms and held her fast, weeping with her.
Alas, there was no going back, and regret would only sap what little strength that remained to him.
Besides, remembrance was sweet sanctuary from the gathering storm of pain. In his mind’s eye, he saw little Rachel running to meet him when he came in from the fields at the end of the day, filthy and sweat-soaked and exhausted himself, while his daughter was as fresh as the wildflowers flourishing alongside the creek in summer. Clad in one of her tiny calico dresses, face and hands scrubbed, she raced toward him, laughing, her arms open wide, her fair pigtails flying, her bright blue eyes shining with delighted welcome.
Dear God, what he wouldn’t give to be back there, sweeping that precious child up into his arms, setting her on his shoulder or swinging her around and around until they were both dizzy. Caroline usually fussed over such antics—she’d just gotten Rachel clean again, she’d fret, and here that little scamp was, dirty as a street urchin—or she’d protest against “all this rough-housing,” declaring that someone was bound to get hurt, or any one of a dozen other undesirable possibilities—but she never quite managed to maintain her dour demeanor. Invariably, Caroline smiled, shaking her head and wondering aloud what in the world she was going to do with the two of them, scoundrels that they were.
It was then that the longing for his wife and daughter grew too great, and Jacob turned his memory to sun-splashed fields, flourishing and green, to sparkling streams thick with fish. In his imagination, he stood beside Enoch once more, both of them gratified by the sight of a heavy crop, by the knowledge that, this year anyway, their hard work would bring a reward.
“God has blessed our efforts,” Jacob would say, quietly and with awe, for he had believed the world to be an essentially good place then. War and all its brutalities merely tales told in books, or passed down the generations by old men.