Homeland (10 page)

And I will say, that when Justin took me in his arms in the cave, suddenly I
did
understand why girls let themselves be seduced. (And suddenly a lot of novels make a lot more sense.)

The night before Julia and I left Greeneville, I asked Mrs. Johnson about Patsy Poole. She told me that the night of the storm, when Justin brought Patsy back to the cabin, it was to find that Emory had gotten out of the cabin and into the woods. It was looking for him, that delayed Justin taking his wife down the mountain, until the road washed out.

While the battle was going on at Shiloh, I thought about Justin a lot. If he were killed, I’m not even sure who his commander would tell. I got a letter—with a beautiful little drawing—from Mr. Cameron in Virginia. He was drafted, as little and as sick as he is. The draft was suspended in Tennessee because
so
many men were sneaking across the border, that there was no one to raise crops, but the other States made such a fuss they may put it back.

The blockade has everyone grumpy and on edge, because it’s very hard to get coffee or tea or wine or
PAPER!
This is the last of the precious, precious cache from Aunt Sally’s first husband’s desk. You
must
find, and read,
Northanger Abbey
, whose heroine keeps thinking
she is in a book by Mrs. Radcliffe instead of by Miss Austen. If that does not make you laugh, nothing will.

Every morning and every night, dearest Cora, I pray for you when your baby comes. I wish I could pull Peggie’s hair, too, or at least tie a gag in her mouth. I promise you, everything Dolly and the midwife told me about childbearing sounded awful, but
not something that you couldn’t get through
. (I don’t know why I’m writing this: by the time you get this letter, your Little-Miss-Fidgets will have been born and probably be heaps prettier than Tommy. Aunt Sally says he looks like a jack hare).

Even though Aunt Sally’s right and Tommy does look like a hare, I’m making a chalk portrait of him and Julia. I wish I could be there, to make a portrait of your child. One day I will.

Dear Cora,

Julia turned twenty-one today. I gave her a portrait of herself and Tommy, and reaped unexpected dividends in the form of three (!!!)
commissions to do portraits of other people’s children. And, Aunt Sally’s best friend Mrs. Bell (her dear departed was some relation to one of Aunt Sally’s early husbands) has given me a
carte de visite
of one of her nephews now serving in Virginia, with the request, would I do a portrait? The photograph on it isn’t very good, but I’ll try.

All this is because, tho’ as usual no one will admit there’s anything wrong, a number of people are sending their children elsewhere if they can. A few weeks ago, ships from the Federal fleet put in just beyond the town landing, and the Union Commander Farragut demanded that Vicksburg be surrendered. Gen’l Smith, who’s in charge of the town, told the Yankees to take a long walk off a short pier (or words to that effect). Now from Sky Parlor Hill you can look down-river and see the Federal fleet, just out of range of our guns. More troops are pouring into town every day. The labor of every field hand for miles has been requisitioned to dig breastworks, rifle-pits, and gun-emplacements.

Got your letter! You wrote it to me care of Mrs. J in Greeneville, but the “postman” in Kentucky knew by the time it reached him that she had gone to Carter County, and had it taken to her there. A miracle!

Still snowing on the sixteenth of April!! You must be going insane, cooped up all those months! And yes, I will definitely paint Pa into a historical panorama, tho’ now I’m inclined to do something like
The Discovery of Writing
, with Pa as one of the skin-clad barbarians goggling in amazement at whatever monk it was who first wielded quill and ink. “What are those little squiggles? I don’t believe it! You tell me a man can actually
inform
his daughters who are about to be attacked by our Nation’s Foes when he’s going to come visit them?
Never!
The thought is too fantastical!”

Like you, I was always told that it wasn’t “nice” to talk or even think about “unladylike things,” that is, where babies or for that matter kittens and puppies come from. But nobody could ever explain to me
why
it isn’t “nice.” The ancient Greeks and Romans thought statues of people without clothes on were “nice.” Mrs. Acklen had some in that style, and I’ve never seen anything so beautiful in my life! Even Mr. Cameron had me draw statues (“semi-draped”), while any boy art student would have already started on models. I am eternally grateful to Mr. Cameron for taking me “down the line” so I could actually see what goes on there. The way “young ladies” whisper and giggle and pretend not to see things—like their fathers and brothers treating the parlor-maids exactly like prostitutes—makes me wonder who started all this “don’t look it isn’t nice” business. And
why
.

I am glad and grateful that your sister-in-law in Boston could at least give you some accurate information.

Your baby has to have been born by this time. That’s so strange to think about. I wait
EAGERLY
for your next letter!!

Woke this morning to the pounding of guns. Federal mortar-boats had come down-river overnight, and started shelling the shore batteries. I’m writing this in the cellar, which has a tiny window looking out the back where the hillside slopes away towards Adams Street. You can feel the impact through the ground every time a shell hits a few streets away. Julia is huddled in a corner, with Tommy wrapped in a quilt, Julia rocking and sobbing while the wet-nurse attempts to comfort her. Aunt Sally is upstairs doing the accounts. I should be helping her, except that Julia clings to my arm, screaming, “Don’t leave me! Don’t leave me!” which sets Tommy off. It waxed pretty dramatic.

Aunt Sally just sent down lunch.

The shelling quit when evening fell. The whole town smells of churned-up dirt, Cora, and smoke, tho’ the breeze off the river cleared most of the dust. Aunt Sally and I walked to the bluff’s edge, and in the very last of the evening light, we could see the dark shapes of the Federal boats, dozens of them on the shining water, both north and south of town. The sight made me feel queer, and very angry. I keep thinking there should be some better way of ending this Secession problem, without destroying the homes and lives of innocent people.

Would women run the country any better, if
we
had the vote? Or would Julia just vote the way Pa tells her to? And that would give Pa two votes instead of one.

On the way home we walked past Mrs. Bell’s house, and that of the Petrie Sisters (other “nice folks,” married to two brothers, both in the Army), to make sure they’re all right. Both are close enough to the river to be in peril. Shell fragments had torn huge holes in the street a few dozen yards from the Petrie house, and Mrs. Bell was just coming home, with her servants and her Persian cat Mithridates tucked into a picnic-basket with his tail hanging out the back (see sketch). She’d taken the whole household to visit friends at the back of town, above the ravines where the troops are digging rifle-pits.

Shelling all day. Aunt Sally asked Mrs. Bell and her household to visit, as if the house is merely being painted!

Shelling continued last night after dark. So of course Julia refused to leave the cellar, and refused to let
me
leave. About two a.m., after she fell asleep, I went upstairs. I found Aunt Sally in the parlor still, though Mrs. Bell and her servants had long gone to bed. We could hear other noises from the river, shots and explosions, and together we went up to the top of the house, and looked out the attic windows. The whole Yankee fleet was coming up-river in two columns—you could see the glow of their smokestacks.

The boats traded shots—muzzle-flashes, like volcanoes in the dark—with the shore batteries for the rest of the night, until dawn. Aunt Sally sent me downstairs to wake Cook and get us some coffee; of course Cook and the others were all wide awake and at their work, like nothing was going on. The batteries sank three Union boats, but the rest got past.

When we walked Mrs. Bell home we found a shell had torn clear through her house, punched a succession of holes through the parlor window, the dining-room door, the rear wall of the dining-room, and a corner of the pantry, lined up as if someone had hit the house with a ramrod. Mrs. Lillard’s house on the next street had the parlor chimney shot off, so that daylight and squirrels come right in. Nobody’s been hurt up here—yet.

Seeing these things—knowing how little money the Petrie Sisters have—I’m angry all over again. Mrs. Lillard served us tea (or what was supposed to be tea) and the ladies all joked about it, as if all this stupid damage had been done by some malicious child. I think about what it will take to bring Bayberry back to production, even if we can get hands to work the land again, and I had to bite my tongue not to say, “The politicians who got us into this mess are idiots! This should never have happened!”

I don’t tell Aunt Sally this. She’ll talk about things nobody else will, like babies, and who in town drinks, and how to run a plantation—not just the bookkeeping, the way I did, but marketing crops and getting loans from Northern banks. But she is a true daughter
of the Rebellion. However, she is also my best hope to pay for me going to the Pennsylvania Academy of Art when this is all done, so I’m working extremely hard to stay on her good side.

Dressing for the Great Round of Calls after church and dinner with Dr. Driscoll, who is 70 years old and jokes that he means to marry me. Aunt Sally is resolved to “make a lady” of me and get me a husband, so her maid Nellie has the fire lit in here to heat irons to curl my hair, and the room is hot as a stove. I’ll mail this tomorrow, care of Mrs. Johnson. After the noise of the shelling and battle, the silence feels so ominous, dearest Cora. Everyone’s saying, “Whew, that’s over,” but it’s not. It will come again, and worse. They’re organizing hospital committees, as they had in Nashville.

I wish there were some way to talk to you, face to face, even for five oh-so-precious minutes. I feel as if I’m in a trap, when I look down-river and see Yankee boats, but it’s considered almost treason to admit the Yankees are anything but a silly nuisance that will be swatted away very shortly.

It’s
got
to be summer on your island by this time, so you—and your beautiful baby—can have milk and eggs. You can finally get your egg-custard! Tell me how you are, and who you would like me to kill in trade for your cake of sugar. How is your mother, and Ollie, and even Peggie? Your father will be home from Yale, to be with you all summer and get the harvest in. I envy you so much.

Dear Susanna,

Little Mercy Susanna Poole asks me to send you her regards, and her abject apologies at not being able to take pen in hand herself! But, she says, she is feeling quite well. Needless to say, she is the most beautiful girl in the world. She is three days old, today.

I, too, am feeling well. It is like falling in love a second time, differently. The world looked different, the morning after my wedding to Emory. It is more profoundly altered now, with my child in my arms. With
his
child in my arms. She was born Friday afternoon, at about three o’clock, after a very short travail. Mother and Aunt Hester were present, with Ollie, Peggie, Papa, and Uncle Mordacai exiled to the parlor. I’m sorry to say Peggie was deeply upset by the whole proceeding, and has clung all the more closely to her husband ever since. Her own child is expected in five or six weeks, and Mother and I are doing what we can to bolster her spirits.

I cannot wait, to be up and helping Papa in the garden.

Your “trial-balloon” arrived from Vicksburg only a few days before Mercy’s birth. I cannot express my relief and gladness, to hear from you. Only days before that, a letter reached me from Mr. Poole, now in camp in Jackson, Tennessee. I will write to him of the birth of his granddaughter, and give him the news of your whereabouts and safety.

Elinor called upon us yesterday. She said that Charles Grey’s things had arrived, sent back by his commander from New Bern, North Carolina. With them in the box was the bullet that killed him! Elinor showed it to me—a chunk of lead as big as a quince. They intend to display it to the Daughters of the Union at their meeting tomorrow night.

Papa is to go to Northwest Harbor in quest of another hired man, Isaiah having joined the fishing-fleet with his father. I will end this note, and send it on with him. I sat in the summer kitchen this morning, with Mercy in my arms, while Mother churned the butter and spoke at length of Herod’s slaughter of the Innocents at Bethlehem, and what a good thing this was for those murdered babies. I should not laugh at her, not even within my secret heart, for she means well with her tales of Biblical horror. My little treasure I named for the sister who was born when I was seven, and lived barely two weeks. Of course Mother seeks to steel my heart against such a loss, in the only way she knew how to armor her own. For an encore she treated me to the tale of the Biblical hero Jephtha. He, it seems, slaughtered his little daughter in fulfilment of a vow too rashly made to God. Mother is nothing if not thorough.