Homeland (16 page)

We are both much engaged in sewing after dinner has been made, eaten, and cleaned up after in a great sloshing of water and scratching of scouring-sand. I am making new dresses for Mercy, who rapidly outgrows her old ones; Peggie is picking apart and turning her own frocks, for even homely calico is four or five dollars a yard at Lufkin’s store. Nollie will inherit Mercy’s dresses, though he is so tiny yet that the garments that fit her at four months swallow him up, like a corn-cob dropped into a pillow-case. Other prices are high, too. With the cutting and hauling of wood to be hired, and money set aside for spring plowing, Mother must budget Papa’s salary very carefully, until school resumes in June.

I try to keep Peggie’s fears from kindling anxieties in my own heart—things I can not even know, much less remedy. Is Emory well? Is he even alive? I find it easier not to think of my husband at all, than to go through the pain of uncertainty: of wondering what my life—our lives—will be, when the fighting ends. Yet in the evenings his face, and his voice, return to me … as do yours, my dearest friend. I will close this letter, and pinch out my candle, with a prayer that you are well.

[not sent]

Dearest Cora,

At last, a letter from Pa. (Is there a mark that conveys non-excitement, as a ! denotes delight?) He complains bitterly of the food in Richmond, and hints that much money can be made there, so he’ll stay, and maybe bring us out to join him. I’ll believe that when I see train tickets in the envelope! Elsewhere he spoke of coming back to Greeneville to take over command of our militia. Why are we so disappointed when those we love behave precisely like themselves? He concluded with, “I will be sending you money shortly.” O be still my heart. But, it was good to hear he is well, and Julia—of course—wept as she read and re-read his words.

Aunt Sally and I took the ferry across to De Soto to meet the trains when they come in from Texas, and buy flour, cornmeal, molasses, etc. Neither coffee nor tea to be had. Nor paper—as you see I’m writing this on the back cover of “Rosalie, the Prairie Flower” (with titles of additional songs available appended). This expedition took half the day.

In the reading group we’re reading
Persuasion
, yet, no one seems to see beyond the simple actions of the characters:
Will
Anne be united with Frederick? Will she lose him to the machinations of the dreadful Musgrove Sisters? My mind keeps going to what you wrote:
Would the world be different, if we could be equals to our husbands in the eyes of Mammon as well as God?
I keep wanting to ask, How does it come about, that Anne Elliott, and the Bennet girls, and all those others including myself and Julia, are bound in the ropes spun by their fathers’ improvidence, and dependent upon the next generation of potential fathers for their liberation? And for that
matter, Where are Napoleon and his armies, while all this romantic heart-rending is going on in Bath?

Tommy is teething: feverish, fussy, crying. Julia accuses the nurse of dosing him with opium (she isn’t—I searched the nursery), yet orders her quite crossly to keep him quiet. She made Aunt Sally give her half of
my
paper, so she can write Tom seven-page letters about how much she loves him and Tommy and what she wore Sunday to go visiting. It is a comfort to know Tom will be able to get his camp-fires lit without trouble for a while.

[sketches]

[not sent]

Dearest Cora,

Great excitement here yesterday: the Union ram
Queen of the West
rammed a Confederate steamer practically under the Vicksburg guns. Everyone in town crowded the windows that overlook the river to see. The
Queen
is a huge ironclad double side-wheeler, easy to pick out even miles away from the lookout on Sky Parlor. The sound of the guns shook our walls. Because Aunt Sally was having—

The guns started up again as I was writing. This time for propriety’s sake I got Nellie and Aunt Sally’s good Swiss field-glasses, and almost ran all the way up the zig-zag wooden steps to the top of Sky Parlor. A dozen people were there already. We could see the
Queen
below, guns blazing and smoke everywhere from the shore battery. She drove three of our steamers ashore, one after the other. Old Dr. Driscoll lent me his spyglass when I was letting Nellie use the field-glasses, and he walked us home. I asked, did he think the
Queen
‘s guns could get up as far as the town? He said, “I guess we’ll find that out.”

[sketches]

Of course, nobody in the reading-circle wanted to read. There are six of us—seven, before Selina Boyette dropped out when her husband was killed last September at Antietam—and they only wanted to talk about the Union ships on the river, and how quickly our Army will sweep them away. That, and what new dresses everyone would make if it weren’t for the blockade. I said I had a headache, and excused myself, and walked home alone.

I wish there were enough light to draw. I’d dearly love to work the sketches I made from Sky Parlor into real drawings. Before everyone started talking about the attack, I read the first paragraph of
Tale of Two Cities
, and it comes back to me now:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness … we had everything before us, we had nothing before us …

And we have no way of telling right now which it is. I will seek refuge for a while in the sixteenth century, Cora, where one has only to worry about what lurks behind the Black Veil, or whether a
mysterious monk will emerge through the wall of your room at night by means of a magic branch …

[sketches]

[not sent]

Dear Susanna,

Still no snow. Still the hard bright sunlight, the slush-filled roads that keep us from even venturing to Northwest Harbor to church. This is just as well, for I understand from Will Kydd, whom I met at Green’s Landing Saturday when Mother and I walked there to meet Papa, that half a dozen of the children there are down with the measles. Moreover, in the fine weather Army recruiters have been back to the island nearly every week. The town council has voted to borrow money in order to offer bounties to those who join. I can not say I am surprised that few men will enlist these terrible days. Of the sixty island men who have enlisted so far—including the five who believed themselves to be enlisting for three months only—eleven have been killed. A dozen returned home as invalids, some of them clearly crippled for life. Of these, the recruiters—and the Daughters of the Union—do not speak.

Will was delighted to see Miss Mercy again. He promised to convey my good wishes to all my dear students on Isle au Haut.

How strange still, not to hastily finish a letter on Saturday night, that Papa may take it to post in Belfast Monday morning. Dinner is done, the kitchen cleaned. It sounds so selfish to say, I miss my brothers intensely while cleaning the knives, for to get sufficient friction on the knife-board to remove all the stains is really beyond the strength of a woman’s arm. It was Brock’s chore before he went to college, and then Ollie’s. The sharp smell of the cleaning-paste on the board seems to bring back the momentary expectation that I will see one of them or the other, coming into the room.

In the early hours this morning I dreamed about being back in Mrs. Johnson’s house in Greeneville. I was frantic with dread, as was the case then, that Emory would announce to me that he could not leave his home State, with the battle over Secession just beginning. If we missed the train that morning something else would happen later in the day that would demand that Emory remain in Tennessee, and I would be condemned to live, for who knew how many months, among strangers who regarded me as a hated Yankee alien; who would not even ask what my actual feelings on any subject were. In my dream I kept trying to pack my trunks, but someone had hidden all my things. I wandered upstairs and down, searching for Emory in growing terror. I called out for him, which woke me, and in that strange state between sleeping and waking—dreaming that I lay in my bed at home on Deer Isle, in the icy darkness of my shuttered room—I heard his voice very clearly speak my name.

Then I fully woke, and lay in the stillness for a time, knowing it had been a dream. I could hear Mother in the kitchen, so knew it was dawn or nearly so. I put on my shoes, and my robe, and my coat over all, and walked out, through the kitchen, through the dark
summer kitchen, into the dawn world pink and gray and unbelievably cold, ground and dead grass bleached the color of sand. I went past the lines of frozen laundry, and the barn, and through the belt of woods to the pond, and walked along its iron edge until the sun came over the trees and glittered on the ice. The stillness helped me, as reading does. Yet, for a time I felt that I was the only person left alive, not only on the island, but in the whole of the world.

[not sent]

My Dear Cora,

I’m troubled tonight, and missing your counsel. I tried to talk to Aunt Sally about Mr. Poole (Emory is coming to dinner Sunday), but the subject quickly turned to how I will never get a husband if I am “cold,” which she declares I am. Yet, I now realize that for all her flirting and husbands, Aunt Sally is the coldest woman I know. She isn’t shallow and she isn’t stupid, but, to her, men are a crop to be harvested, and she goes about it carefully and deliberately. When last together you showed me how to fix my hair; it was (as you said) to show my respect for those around me,
not
to get men to fall in love with me so they’d do me favors or will their plantations to me when they die. Yet don’t men look at women the same way? Will she be a good housekeeper? Will she bear me sons? Will she bring in a little money? It reminds me about how Pa used to talk about a new slave.

Nobody ever talks about this—I mean men, and money, and how we should live and what we should expect—at least not in the South. Everyone tells you, It’s important to “get” a husband, and mocks you if you don’t. If you even wonder if things
could
be different, you’re “eccentric” or “queer.” You learn never to speak of it—never to think of it. Is it different in the North? I think it must be—I take comfort in that fact.

More excitement. Last night the lookouts on the river set up the alarm as what looked like a
huge
vessel armed with cannon came out of the Federal fleet up-river. The night was overcast and the vessel bore no lights, so all that could be seen by the flashes of the battery guns was a shape. It didn’t return fire, but bore down under fire on the
Indianola
, the big gunboat the Confederates captured last week from the Union fleet, so inexorably that the crew of the
Indianola
panicked, abandoned the ship (carefully taking with them all their liquor supplies), and blew it up so it wouldn’t be re-taken. Daylight showed this mysterious monster vessel was actually an empty Union coal-barge fitted up with tree-trunks for guns. Aunt Sally remarked how much money it saved the Yankees, that instead of
them
fighting an expensive battle to blow up one of the best ships in our fleet, they got
us
to blow it up and save everyone a lot of trouble.

Aunt Sally is having Zed dig a bomb-proof shelter behind the house, where the hill slopes down sharply to China Street.

This morning Julia demanded half of my remaining paper (I told her I hadn’t any left) to write to Tom. “My husband could be dead
this very minute, and I would know nothing of it!” she sobbed (in which case he wouldn’t need to have a letter written to him, I
didn’t
say). It crosses my mind that
you
could be dead, Cora, and I not know it … or precious Mercy, or your parents. You could have spent all Sunday grieving, thinking that Emory is dead, when he was in fact sitting across the dinner-table from me, flirting with Aunt Sally.

But, this is a line of thought productive of nothing but madness. We will become like those heroines imprisoned in dungeons, who pound on the stone walls and shriek “I am alive! I am alive!” (Or, “He is alive!” Whichever.) I can pretend that you are dead, or that Mercy is dead, or that Deer Isle has mysteriously sunk beneath the waters of the sea—or, I can pretend that you are safe and well (tho’ still buried in snow) and have somehow acquired a copy of
Tale of Two Cities
. Curiously, I find it far easier to believe that something terrible has occurred. Do you?

[sketches]

[not sent]