Where the Sunflowers Grow

Chapter 1: The Barn at Brackenfold

The cow had been dead since Tuesday, and by Thursday the smell had become a problem.

Adeline Vickery stood in the doorway of the lower barn, pressing a rag soaked in lavender water against her nose, and tried to calculate what the loss would cost her. Buttercup had been her best milker—twelve quarts a day in good season—and now she was a bloated carcass drawing flies in the corner stall. The rendering man wouldn't come until Saturday, and even then he'd want paying.

She pulled the barn door shut and walked back toward the house, her boots leaving deep prints in the spring mud. Brackenfold spread around her in the gray morning light: the stone farmhouse her grandfather had built, the dairy with its cool slate floors, the chicken coop listing slightly to the east, and beyond it all, the rolling green hills of western Maryland, dotted with dogwood just coming into bloom. It was beautiful country. It was also, in April of 1862, country that couldn't decide which side of a war it belonged to.

Adeline was twenty-six years old, tall and angular, with dark hair she kept pinned in a practical knot and hands roughened by years of dairy work. She had her mother's sharp jaw and her father's gray eyes—eyes that people in Sharpsburg sometimes called "reading eyes" because they seemed to take in everything and give back nothing. Her mother had died of typhus when Adeline was fourteen. Her father had followed two winters later, his heart giving out in the milking shed on a January morning so cold the pails had frozen solid. Since then, Brackenfold had been Adeline's life, her purpose, and her prison.

She climbed the porch steps and scraped her boots on the iron bar her father had bolted there for that purpose. The kitchen was warm—she'd banked the stove before dawn—and the smell of coffee, real coffee bought at ruinous prices from the general store in town, filled the room. She poured herself a cup and sat at the scarred pine table where her family had eaten every meal for three generations.

On the table lay a letter, already read twice. The paper was thin as onionskin, the handwriting cramped and slanting.

*Dear Addie,*

*We are encamped near Winchester. The food is bad and the rain is worse. Corporal Henning lost three toes to frostbite last month and considers himself lucky. I think of Brackenfold every night and dream of your butter. Tell the cows I said hello. Do not worry about me. I am too stubborn to die and too ugly for the Rebs to waste a bullet on.*

*Your loving brother,*
*Thomas*

She folded the letter and slipped it into her apron pocket, where it joined the three others she carried like talismans. Thomas had enlisted the previous autumn, walking into Hagerstown with his good boots and his squirrel rifle and coming back in a blue uniform that didn't fit. He'd been twenty-three, full of fire about the Union and the Constitution and things Adeline understood in theory but couldn't feel the way he did. She'd stood on the porch and watched him go down the lane, and when he turned to wave, she'd lifted her hand and held it there until he disappeared around the bend by the old oak.

That had been six months ago. Six months of running the farm alone, of milking and churning and hauling water and mending fences and doing the work of three people with the body of one. She'd sold two of the cows to keep up with the feed bills. She'd let the kitchen garden go to seed. She'd stopped attending church in Sharpsburg because she couldn't bear the whispers—poor Adeline Vickery, all alone up there, what a shame, what a waste.

She finished her coffee and rinsed the cup in the basin. There was work to do. There was always work to do.

The rendering man came Saturday morning, a gap-toothed fellow named Suttles who charged her two dollars to haul Buttercup away in his cart. Adeline watched the cart rattle down the lane and did the arithmetic in her head. She was down to seven cows now, producing maybe sixty quarts a day between them. The army contracts paid well enough, but the quartermaster in Hagerstown was slow with his vouchers, and the general store wouldn't extend her credit much further.

She was standing in the dairy, skimming cream into stone crocks, when she heard the sound. It came from the south, carried on the spring wind—a low, rolling thunder that wasn't thunder at all. She'd heard it before, distant and abstract, like a storm on the far side of a mountain. Artillery. Someone was fighting, somewhere down in the valley.

By afternoon, the first wagons appeared.

They came up the Boonsboro road in a ragged line, farm wagons and ambulance carts and one fine carriage with its curtains drawn, all of them carrying wounded men. Adeline stood at the end of her lane and watched them pass. Some of the men were sitting up, their arms in slings or their heads wrapped in bloody bandages. Others lay flat, their faces the color of tallow, making sounds that weren't quite words.

A teamster pulled his wagon to the side of the road and called out to her. "Ma'am, you got water? These boys ain't had a drink since morning."

She brought buckets from the well. She brought bread and cheese and what was left of the morning's milk. The teamster told her there'd been a skirmish near South Mountain—nothing big, he said, just a cavalry action that had gone wrong—but the field hospital was overflowing and they were sending the walking wounded north to Hagerstown.

"Walking wounded," Adeline repeated, looking at a boy who couldn't have been more than seventeen, unconscious on a pile of straw with a tourniquet around his thigh.

The teamster shrugged. "That's what they call 'em."

By evening, three wagons had stopped at Brackenfold. The drivers said they couldn't go further—the horses were spent, the road was washed out past Keedysville, and night was coming. Adeline looked at the wounded men and thought about her barn, empty now except for the cows and the hay.

"Bring them in," she said.

She cleared the upper barn, spreading straw and old quilts on the plank floor, and helped the teamsters carry the wounded inside. There were eleven of them, Union soldiers, boys from Pennsylvania and Ohio and one from as far away as Maine. Their injuries ranged from minor—a grazed arm, a sprained ankle—to terrible. The boy with the tourniquet had a shattered femur. A sergeant had taken a minie ball through the palm of his hand, and the wound was already going septic, the flesh around it swollen and streaked with red.

Adeline had no medical training. She had a copy of Gunn's Domestic Medicine that her mother had kept on the shelf above the stove, and she had common sense, and she had strong hands that didn't shake. She boiled water and tore sheets into bandages and cleaned wounds as best she could, following the book's instructions with the grim focus of a woman who had no choice but to learn.

The sergeant with the ruined hand watched her work. "You done this before?" he asked through gritted teeth as she packed the wound with a poultice of bread and milk.

"No."

"You're doing fine."

"I'm doing what I can."

He almost smiled. "That's more than most."

She worked through the night. By morning, the boy with the shattered femur was dead. She covered him with a quilt and went outside and stood in the yard, breathing the clean air, watching the sun come up over the eastern ridge. The dogwood was in full bloom now, the white blossoms catching the early light like scattered paper. Somewhere in the barn behind her, a man was crying. Somewhere down the valley, the artillery had started again.

Adeline wiped her hands on her apron and went back inside.

Over the next two weeks, Brackenfold became something it had never been: a waystation. More wounded came, in twos and threes, some delivered by ambulance wagons, others stumbling up the lane on their own. Adeline converted the upper barn into a proper ward, building pallets from planks and sawhorses, hanging canvas curtains for privacy, digging a latrine behind the dairy. She found a battered copy of a field surgery manual in the knapsack of a dead corporal and studied it by lamplight, teaching herself to suture with a curved needle and silk thread, to splint a broken bone with barrel staves and strips of muslin, to recognize the signs of gangrene and infection.

She was not gentle about it. She couldn't afford to be. The men who came through her barn needed efficiency, not sympathy, and Adeline gave them what she had: clean bandages, hot broth, a steady hand, and a voice that brooked no argument.

"You'll drink this," she told a private who refused his medicine.

"It tastes like horse piss."

"I wouldn't know. Drink it."

He drank it.

The neighbors helped when they could. Old Mrs. Plunkett from the farm down the road brought soup and gossip in equal measure. The Showalter boys hauled water and firewood. Even Josiah Baines, who owned the general store in Sharpsburg and was known to have Confederate sympathies, sent over a case of carbolic soap without being asked.

But the work was relentless, and Adeline was tired. Tired in her bones, tired in her hands, tired in the part of her mind that kept track of everything—the milk production, the feed bills, the bandage supply, the names and wounds of every man who passed through her barn. She fell asleep at the kitchen table most nights, her head on her arms, and woke before dawn to start again.

It was on a Tuesday night in late April, during a rainstorm that turned the yard to a lake of mud, that everything changed.

Adeline was in the kitchen, boiling bandages on the stove, when she heard a sound from the upper barn that didn't belong. Not the groaning of wounded men—she'd sent the last three on to Hagerstown that morning, and the barn was empty for the first time in weeks. This was different. A scraping, dragging sound, like something heavy being pulled across the floor.

She took the lantern from its hook and crossed the yard, the rain hammering her shoulders, the mud sucking at her boots. The barn door was closed but not latched—she was certain she'd latched it. She pushed it open and held the lantern high.

Nothing in the lower barn. The cows shifted in their stalls, their eyes catching the light. She climbed the ladder to the hayloft, the lantern hanging from her wrist, and pulled herself up onto the platform.

The woman was in the far corner, half-buried in hay. She was Black, young—maybe Adeline's age, maybe younger—and she was hurt. Her left shoulder was a mess of blood and torn cloth, and her eyes, when they found Adeline's face in the lantern light, were wide with a terror that went beyond pain.

For a long moment, neither of them moved.

"Please," the woman whispered. "Please don't."

Adeline set the lantern on the floor. She looked at the wound—a gunshot, she could see that much, the ball still lodged somewhere in the muscle of the shoulder—and she looked at the woman's bare feet, cut and swollen from running, and she looked at the iron scars on her wrists where manacles had been.

She knew what this was. She knew what this woman was. In Maryland, in 1862, in a border county where slavery was still legal and the Fugitive Slave Act was enforced with enthusiasm by men who considered it their patriotic duty, Adeline knew exactly what she was looking at.

A runaway.

The arithmetic was simple. Harboring a fugitive slave was a federal crime. The fine was one thousand dollars—more than the farm was worth. The penalty could include imprisonment. The neighbors, even the sympathetic ones, would turn their backs. The army contracts would dry up. Brackenfold would be lost.

Adeline looked at the woman in the hay. The woman looked back at her. The rain hammered the roof.

"Can you walk?" Adeline asked.

The woman's eyes changed—the terror didn't leave, but something else came in alongside it. Hope, maybe. Or just the desperate calculation of a person with no choices left.

"I think so," she said.

"Then come with me. And be quiet."

Adeline helped her down the ladder, one rung at a time, the woman biting her lip against the pain. They crossed the yard in the rain, Adeline's arm around the woman's waist, and went not to the house but to the root cellar behind the dairy—a stone-walled room dug into the hillside, cool and dry, with shelves of preserves and bins of potatoes and a heavy oak door that locked from the outside.

She settled the woman on a pile of burlap sacks and brought the lantern close to examine the wound. The ball was embedded deep in the deltoid muscle, and the flesh around it was hot and swollen. Infection hadn't set in yet, but it would soon.

"I'm going to have to take the ball out," Adeline said. "I've done it before. It's going to hurt."

The woman nodded. Her jaw was set, her eyes dry.

"What's your name?" Adeline asked, laying out her instruments on a clean cloth—the probe, the forceps, the curved needle, the silk thread.

"Eliza. Eliza Mayfield."

"I'm Adeline. This is my farm." She poured whiskey over the forceps and held them in the lantern flame. "Eliza, I need you to tell me something, and I need you to tell me the truth. Is anyone following you?"

Eliza's eyes met hers. "Yes," she said. "They will come."

Adeline nodded. She'd known the answer before she asked. She picked up the probe and leaned in close.

"Then we'd better work fast."