Homeland (17 page)

Dear Susanna,

Church in Northwest Harbor, for the first time in nearly a month. Friends crowded around Peggie and Nollie; Nollie fretted and cried
through both services and the dinner-hour between them. Yet it was as if, like Scrooge, I had been rendered invisible and unheard.

A letter from Oliver. He will be home on furlough, in the second week of March.

Nollie feverish, wailing all night. Early this morning Mother and I started a regimen of cool baths for him. Mother brewed a willow-bark tea that Grandmother Howell used as a febrifuge. It is bitter, and poor Nollie spit most of it up. Brock’s letters, and Ollie’s too, speak of the sicknesses that race through the Army camps like grass-fire. I wonder if the recruiters—who were indeed at work before the church Sunday—bring in illness with them.

Snow yesterday, beginning shortly after Mother, Papa, Peggie left for church, six inches deep by the time they returned. Nollie seems better, though still sleepless, crying, thin as a bundle of sticks. My little Mercy ran a fever for a day or so, but not nearly as badly. Friday, when Nollie was at his worst, Peggie confessed to me that she was convinced they
both
would die: it was all I could do not to snap at her, and Mother of course was no help on the subject. You would not tell Julia such a thing about little Tommy, no matter how sick he
might be! I try to tell myself that Peggie’s fears for my brother run over into all her perceptions of the world, yet I find that knowing (or suspecting) the cause of her sensibility does not make me more forgiving of it.

This morning was much warmer, and we had no fears for Papa’s safety, as Uncle M took him away again to Belfast in the
Gull
. Still no luck in finding a hired man. A girl to assist with household tasks would help also, but few will undertake the work for room and board only, as they used to.

One day I fear that I really will shout at that girl! Are all those sweet, calm heroines I read about complete figments of fantasy? Snow again today, and much colder, freezing yesterday’s thaw to ice. Mother slipped, coming back from feeding the cows, and struck her head on the boot-scraper beside the back door. It was only a shallow cut, but it bled copiously. Peggie flew into such a panic that I had to order her outside to bring in snow to melt for wash-water. Both babies were wailing, but I didn’t dare let her pick up either one. Mercy would probably survive being dropped on the kitchen floor, but poor little Nollie doesn’t look like he could stand being so much as sneezed on! After that I turned Peggie out of the kitchen, in spite of the fact that as usual there was no fire anywhere else in the house. Now she is in a pout. Once I am a little calmer I will need to go in and apologize. How on earth did—and do—people manage, who are locked together with dozens of total strangers in prisons? Or crowded into the holds of emigrant ships? And why has no one written a novel about
that?

[not sent]

Dearest Susanna,

A blustery morning, with threat of snow again by night. I am home with the two babies, the rest of the family having gone to Mount Adams cemetery, to the funeral of our cousin Farnum Haskell. His coffin arrived from Louisiana the day before yesterday. It was “thought better” that I do not go: “You know the funeral does not mean to her what it does to us,” said Peggie, who has become very friendly with Elinor over the winter. I did not argue the point. The day is very cold, and Nollie is still quite weak.

Oliver has been home six days, and returns to camp Monday. All week I have not been able to dismiss from my mind your letter in which you spoke of your brother Gaius on his last furlough home: that he moved as if he were in pain, though he bore no wound. Oh, Susie, I read that same expression in Ollie’s eyes! Last night he came to my room, where I sat up reading
Vanity Fair
long after the others had gone to bed, a spare quilt wrapped around his shouders: “I just want to hold him,” he told me, because I had taken Nollie in with me for the night, as I often do. We sat silent for many minutes. Peggie has often pressed my brother for accounts of camp-life and battle this week, recollections he is loath to share. But last night he began quietly to volunteer pieces of information to me: how just before they go into battle, the men will throw away the cards and dice with which they entertain themselves in the camp, lest being killed, such things be found in their pockets, and reported to their parents. He showed me a scrap of paper, much stained with sweat and dirt, bearing his name, that he’d pinned inside his shirt before going into battle at Fredericksburg. “Sometimes the ambulance-men don’t get
to you for three days,” he whispered. “It’s hard to tell, then.” I said,

“Ollie, don’t.”

“I have to,” he said. “Corrie, I have to tell.” And then he told me: he is thinking about
deserting
. This is only partly, he says, because he is afraid: most of the men are afraid. It would not be so bad, he says, if they believed their officers knew what they were doing, but they don’t. “They’re politicians,” he told me. “So many of them got commands because they got votes for Lincoln and his party. When we were kids playing soldier out by the pond,
we
knew better than to charge up-hill at other kids who were dug in behind a wall. I wouldn’t mind—not so much—if I thought any of it was going to do any good. But it is senseless.” He laid Nollie down again, and clasped my hands, and whispered, “If I decided to do it, Corrie, would you hide me?”

Susanna, what could I say? It shames me to relate, that among my first thoughts was, Elinor had told Peggie I was disloyal to the Union—that I would rejoice at any “true-hearted man” taken out of the lines—and she had told Ollie. And Ollie believed her, and so came to me. I was silent, struggling to find the right thing to say, and then I told him, “You could not come back here.” Which is the truth. In Indiana, when citizens rioted to protect deserters from the Army authorities, both citizens and deserters were arrested. And, Mother would never permit it. Ollie has to know this. I stammered, “Papa is very proud of you,” and Ollie turned his face away, knowing, as I know, that Papa would be flayed with shame. We held one another, and both wept. It is hard for me to know—

I feel better. The interruption was Will Kydd. He had fetched kin of Farnum’s from Isle au Haut for the funeral, yet knew himself, like me, to be
persona non grata
at the graveside. Driving back to Green’s Landing to wait, he saw the smoke of our chimney. I asked him,
Did
the Copperheads go about trying to get men to desert,
to weaken the Army? Before he replied, I reconsidered what I had asked, and asked instead,
Are
you a Copperhead, Will? Or is this only what Elinor says? There are, says Will, different degrees of Copperheadedness: from those who believe strongly in the principle of Union but do not approve of the actions of President Lincoln and Congress, all the way to men and women who are actually getting money from the Confederate government at Richmond, to interfere with our efforts to prosecute this War. These different groups are not under any central organization, any more than are the various denominations of the Christian church, nor the many organizations before the War that pursued freedom for black men and women. You remember how different they were: Immediate Abolitionists, Gradual Emancipationists, Immediate Emancipationists, and several species of mutually antipathetical Colonizers—and they would squabble amongst themselves like girls in a boarding-school. “‘Tis easy to say,
He who is not with us is against
us,” Will told me. “But ‘tis hard to justify fighting for your homeland, if the fight will change that homeland into something it wasn’t before.”

He meant that Congress has approved a Conscription Act. Too few men are volunteering, and battle losses have been appallingly heavy. Mother quashed it as a topic of conversation this evening, but Will told me that the men of the island are outraged at the idea, particularly in light of the fact that any rich man may hire a substitute, or pay outright a sum of three hundred dollars to be excused.

Ollie has not spoken to me again of desertion. Forgive me for writing of this to you, Susanna, you who have lost two brothers, and your beloved home, as well. Even were it possible to do so, I might not even send this sheet to you, but might simply fold it away: send it only in thought, to that ideal Susanna of my imagination, that Dickens heroine whose superhuman compassion will effortlessly surmount her grief. Forgive me, for separating Her from the real You, human and in at least as much pain as I.

[not sent]

Dear Cora,

Bandages to wash. Wounded flooding in, from the terrible fighting on Steele’s Bayou. Unmarried girls to work among convalescents only—I can just hear Mrs. J’s Dolly say it “isn’t fittin’” Julia declared herself ready to die for Our Boys, and burst into tears: has been weeping since. This will prove a useful qualification in times of crisis. Unmarried or not, I long to work in the hospital, with Nellie. It doesn’t seem to matter that
black
girls see white men naked. Steele’s Bayou is ten miles north. From the window of my attic I can hear gunfire.

Asked Aunt Sally, Would it be safer to move to Jackson? She replied, Yankees would need to take Jackson before they could come here, because of the railroad. Confederate High Command all being imbeciles (she says) we might not defend Jackson; even imbeciles can see they
must
defend Vicksburg. After dinner, Emory playing with Tommy while Julia and Aunt Sally played duets, piano and harp: Dr. Driscoll took me aside, asked me quietly, Did I think I could work as assistant in an operating theater, if it came to that? I said yes immediately.

Julia sent home from first day of hospital work. Between fainting and tears, she takes one or more other nurses from their work as well as not doing any herself. Nellie and men servants at hospital, so Julia and I clean house, wash dishes, chop kindling, air bed linen, get dinner ready with brief pause while I bandage up Julia’s burned fingers (ref. dinner, above), do mending, search for Tommy (found playing in the “cave” Aunt Sally had Zed dig in case of further shelling), wash Tommy (a
lot
), and of course wash bandages. Julia faints at smell of bandages. Almost too tired to think now. I envy you, my friend, buried under mountain of snow in the dark with Mr. Poole’s novels.

Drat it. I’m still experimenting with making ink, and as you can see, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. I’ve been experimenting with different woods to make charcoal (when we heat water to wash bandages). Willow works well, and cane from the brakes down by the river is good also. Most of the men in the shore batteries aren’t like Regal’s militia. You have to have some education and training, to be in the artillery. Maybe they’re just too tired to be nasty. Aunt Sally and Julia are up in arms, at the state my dress gets into. The lamp oil is gone. More can not be gotten anywhere, and even candles are getting woefully expensive. Aunt Sally of course refuses to even consider rush-lights.

Shelling last night. Julia woke me screaming, refused to go down to the shelter without me. When Nellie dragged her and Little Tommy away, I ran up to the attic. It was filled with the smell of powder-smoke and magnolias. Aunt Sally stood in the gable window, looking down over the river; red light, gold light coming up from below. Tar-barrels were burning all along the river’s bank, dyeing the red-gold bluffs. Across the river, the whole town of DeSoto was in flames. Black masses of Union gunboats against the fire-glare on black water, and even from up in the attic I could hear the men shouting in the shore batteries, the clatter of hooves on China Street and the whistle of flying shells. I asked, Were they attacking? and Aunt Sally replied, “Just running the battery. Taking supplies down to Grant. He’ll be getting ready to cross over to our side of the river.” A shell hit near-by and shook the house, and she only remarked, “That’ll be a Parrott. They’re accurate over a mile. Damn Yankees. And Damn Jeff Davis for an imbecile.” We both leaned our elbows on the sill and looked out and down, and after a time Aunt Sally said, “Even if they come ashore, they’ll never get up the bluff. Our men can pick them off from above, every foot of the way.”

“Like in the Middle Ages,” I said. “We could pour boiling oil on them.”

“Not with the cost of oil these days,” remarked Aunt Sally. “Don’t lean your elbows on the sill, girl, they’ll be wrinkly as a camel’s knees before you’re twenty!”

I knew I should go down to be with Julia, but I had to keep looking, how the gunflashes reflected in the black water, and the glare of the fire on the banks outlined the boats. One of them was hit, and took fire. I could see little black figures running back and forth against the flames, like when the Tories burned the tobacco-barn a year ago. The boat turned as it blazed, and drifted with the current, falling behind the rest of the fleet. I could see it burning long after the others were out of sight, like a crimson star in the darkness.