Homeland (32 page)

Oliver’s Colonel wrote to Peggie, after Gettysburg, a kind letter, if brief. Poor man, nine-tenths of his regiment lay dead on the field. If Emory was killed, sometime over the course of the past four years, who would write to me? Peggie said, “Now I suppose you’ll welcome back your traitor husband, though he killed your brother.” How can I even lament her hatred, when it is she who was widowed?

I crossed to Isle au Haut, to see Will’s family. The man who took me over was one of those whom Will helped hide out on Kimball’s Island. When I came back the men at the Landing had a newspaper. It said, Abraham Lincoln was dead. One man was weeping. Another said, “Well, Old Abe had it coming, that’s for sure.” I have worked all afternoon—butter, scrubbing, baking for tomorrow (though like Christmas, Easter is regarded here with suspicion as “popish”), and sewing—and as I work the thought comes back to me, again and again, that he is dead. Why this terrible grief, for a man I never met? Yet as I write this, Susie, I weep as though my heart is broken.

Dawn again. Black darkness and silence but for the ticking of the kitchen clock. Even Mercy still sleeps. Mother was very bad yesterday, and so I did not go to church with Papa and Peggie. I understand the service was one of profoundest thanksgiving and deepest mourning. Last night after I had put Mother to bed, I saw light burning still in the attic, and climbed to see Papa sitting up in his little cot. He said, “Brock will be home,” and our hands closed over one another’s in thankfulness. Though Brock was wounded slightly when New Orleans was taken, back in ‘62, and later ill with malaria, so far as we know he is safe. He wrote us from Virginia, where he is now stationed, in March, and Betsy has heard from him only two weeks ago. And yet I am forced to reflect that everything is only, “so far as we know.” There is in fact no safety in this world. War took Ollie, yet Mother is as surely lost to us, who never carried a musket in her life.

Papa leaves for New Haven after breakfast. I will have him carry this to town. I pray now that your life, too, will be able to return to conditions of safety; that you won’t have to hide your food and your
books; that your Pa will come back from wherever he has been, and sort things out at Bayberry. That you will at least know what is possible, and what can be done. Did the prisoners in the Bastille feel this way, when the walls were broken down?

Please write to me as soon as you can, and tell me, all that is happening there with you.

[not sent]

Dear Cora,

Rumors are flying that Gen’l Lee has surrendered to Grant. As soon as I get my “patches” cleared in the woods for crops, I will walk into town to ask after this. There has been almost no forage for weeks, and I move warily in the woods, and dry the fish I catch in two or three different caves. Now that it is spring, it’s easier to catch grubs for the hens, and they begin to lay well. The rumor is also that several Lincolnites were killed over in Cocke County, for accepting the proposed plan of “Reconstruction.” The Seceshes vow they will kill anyone else, who does likewise.

The rumor is
true
. Also that Richmond has fallen, and that Abraham Lincoln was killed. I remember writing to you from the Academy in Nashville, when everyone was saying that the Yankees had been driven back from Fort Donelson, and that this victory meant the end of the War. I remember how I felt then, strange and disappointed. But, Payne and Gaius were already dead. I think it’s been a long time since I felt anything. It’s as if I’m dead—and have been dead for months—and everyone has been too busy to notice.

Dear Cora,

So good to get your letter! It was worth the blisters and the burn on my hand, and scrubbing
lakes
of tobacco spit out of Mrs. V’s carpets, to know I can write this without worrying about how I’ll post it! We’ve had the news here—I had to walk into town one day to confirm it. Julia is still convinced that it is a lie, put about by traitors to “dishearten” loyal Confederates.

I am more sorry than I can say, to hear of the death of your friend Will. There were times—it sounds silly and horrible to say this—that I was a little jealous of him, because he was able to see you every day. But tho’ I never lost my belief that the Union must be preserved (despite forty-seven days of Mr. Grant’s attentions at Vicksburg) I had a sneaking admiration for Will, for helping the men who evaded the draft. Like Mr. Poole, piloting men over the mountains. Is there
anything I can do, or say, to help you with this? Anything I can give you, but my deepest sorrow and sympathy?

As I said, I don’t even think Pa was in Richmond when it fell. Like a tom-cat, Pa likes a comfortable chair, and I suspect he left before Grant’s army closed in. Julia expects daily to hear from him. Each time I hint to her that we’d be safer in town—and with the Federals out hunting the militia, and the militia attacking the Lincolnites, it would be safer almost
anywhere
—Julia cries that Pa will soon be home, and I must be
patient
.

What is happening here, is, I’m sorry to say, exactly what was happening a year ago at this time,
[only
—crossed out]. Every morning I hunt. I have five little garden-patches in the woods, where I hoe the new-sprouted corn, weed around the pumpkins, pick up every grub and insect I find for the hens. I wish they could eat the bedbugs at Bayberry: they’d be fat as observation-balloons and lay eggs the size of oranges! I check my trap-lines (usually empty, this time of year) and fishing-lines. (I bless your name as I unhook every fish from every hook!) Julia keeps our rooms swept, and mends clothing, and looks after Tom and Tommy. The militia forage, or get drunk, or play cards, or fight (each other, not Lincolnites or the Union Army or anything). At night I bring home all but one fish or two, and a couple of eggs (“I found them … darn hens are laying out
some
where … “) and chop stovewood for the next day.

Well I remember how magic the barns were, to Payne and myself as children—much more ramshackle than yours in New England, I’m sure, with missing slats and holes in the walls you can see daylight through. I told Payne stories about the wars between the Woods-Fairies and the Barn-Fairies (I was secretly in love with the King of the Barn-Fairies), before I packed my heart up, bag and baggage, and moved to fifteenth-century Paris. You are right; it is a Paradise, and the thought that Miss Mercy might be pulling cows’ tails, and sticking her little hands into snakes’ holes and down the corners where the rats hide, and climbing up onto the ridgepole the way Payne and I did, raises the hair on my head. Put her in a room in
the house and lock the door on her until she’s eighteen and knows better!

[not sent]

Dearest Cora,

It’s so clear to me Will loved you, and you him. You wrote once, late at night, “I’ll give this to him when he arrives,” and then it was, “A friend on whom I relied has enlisted,” and you could not even write his name. I loved Art, and Justin, too, and worried so much about which of them I’d choose.

A horrible squabble with Julia, when I came back from town last night with your letter. Mrs. V told me about the Ladies Aid Society sending clothing and household goods, for we are dressed in rags and worse than rags (including the blood-stained dress that Julia mended for me when I “fell on the mountain,” which I can barely endure to put on my body, only I must because there’s nothing else). Julia will not move into town, nor accept “Yankee charity”—”They’ll poke their long noses in our business,” meaning, the Yankees won’t want to give us clothing if it’s going to go straight onto the backs of
the Secesh militia, or be traded to put powder and ball in their guns. When I told her, look around at how we are living here, she wept so violently that she collapsed. I went outside while Emory tried to comfort her. In time he came out to me, and said, “You mustn’t upset her, Susie. She’s so frail, and she’s terrified you’ll leave. Promise her you won’t. She needs you so.”

It was the first time—literally—since he came to walk me home, in Vicksburg when I’d climbed to Sky Parlor Hill on the day Grant’s men came up—that Emory and I had been alone together, and I looked him in the face. I wanted to say,
CORA needs you so. Cora is the one YOU promised not to leave, not to part from until Death
. I said nothing, but either he has some of his Pa’s Sight, or I was madder than I’d thought, for he looked away from me and said, “Julie says you write to Cora. That true?”

He wouldn’t meet my eyes and I know Julia still searches my room for your letters, so I shook my head and lied, “No. What would I say?” He mumbled, “I can’t go back, Susie. You know that. And anyway, she’s likely forgot me by now, and layin’ in some other man’s arms.” I couldn’t say what I had guessed from your letters, and only said, “If you think she’s been untrue to her marriage-vow, Emory, why don’t you write to her and ask?”

“Maybe I will,” he replied.

I write this to you because I have to: you the Pretend-Cora, who lives in a Gothic house in Paris, or is the Queen of the Barn-Fairies, and who understands things I don’t even understand about myself. Who understands that I’m crazy, and selfish, and bad, but that I’m trying to do my best.

How right you were when you warned, how easily a woman’s freedom may be lost. Not even through her own folly, but just by being at the wrong place, at the wrong time, like me on the mountain.

I know he won’t write you.

The Unionists attacked Bayberry last night. I’m told they also hanged a man outside Sevierville in retaliation for Seceshes beating a Union man who was suing in the courts for lands that had been confiscated. Sometimes the view of you through that little sunlit window—of cows and goat-cheese and Miss Mercy singing “Daddy’s gonna buy you a mocking-bird”—seems just as far away as the gardens of Pemberley.

Please forgive me.

Dearest girl,

It was entirely unnecessary and unkind of you, to mention the things Nollie and Miss Mercy may be getting up to in the barn! It reminded me too vividly of what Oliver and I did, that gave Mother gray hair and earned me many a whipping—because, of course, like my daughter, I was the guiding spirit of those expeditions to discover barn-swallow nests up under the barn eaves (with a thirty-foot drop to the ground!), and perilous experiments with hoisting one another up on the hay-pulley.

How odd. I was laughing just now over the memory of being sent to get the paddle so that Mother could spank me, and it
seemed that I saw that stern prophetess of my memory—who quoted Proverbs even as she shut me, smarting, into my room to impress upon me
never
to lead my tiny brother into danger again—saw them blend, without grief, without regret, into the withered old lady who sits silently shelling peas on the other side of the table from me. And I remembered—of all things—the Ghost of Christmas Present asking Scrooge, Had Scrooge never walked forth with the Ghost’s brothers, all the Christmases—all the years, more than eighteen hundred—before that day, that night, that time? And it seemed to me suddenly that I can see Mother-Then and Mother-Now united.

To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under Heaven.

If there is anything that you can give me, dear friend, this is what I would have asked for: the keys of these images that unlock the door into memories, and lead me to the peace I feel now.

Is there anything that I can give you, send you … that will not call down Julia’s accusations of “Yankee charity” onto your head?

A time for every purpose under Heaven … A time for blackflies, which cause me to question Noah’s wisdom in taking
all
insects into the Ark! A time to weed the garden, and tie up the pea-vines, and pluck bushels of snails and caterpillars off the leaves of cucumbers, tomatoes, squash. Yet, how perfect the spiral shell of each nasty little leaf-glutton! Surely these creatures must have also lied to Noah in order to obtain passage? For why would God seek to vex, test, or plague a Humankind destined to keep His Commandments with such scrupulous care?

A time to milk, and churn, and put butter away in the cold safety of the cellar against the time of snow that even in this day’s heat I know must come. (And oh, the selfish little song of pride and delight, at seeing the profusion I will have gathered!) A time to mend, and to
sew endlessly into the evenings, to be able to buy salt and saltpeter to brine next winter’s pork? My green calico having been turned once too often, so that the bodice shredded away in my hands as I unpicked the threads, I am cutting up the skirt this evening to make a new dress for Mercy, whose golden head I can stroke now without bending down … upon all those frequent occasions whereon she loses her sunbonnet. There is fabric enough in the skirt for a dress for Nollie, as well. The dress is one I made in Boston, and as I cut it, I am back in Blossom Street again, in that tiny, sunny parlor, waiting for Emory to come home only from a day at Brock’s law office.