Homeland (15 page)

The dinner went astonishingly well. You will have heard that there are terrible shortages of food in the Confederacy: well, you could not have told it last night. Nellie, tho’ still not at all well, worked like a hero in the kitchen, setting tiny paper-lace crowns around each crawfish and wrapping chicken-livers in strips of bacon. While Julia wrote out place-cards and menus (my handwriting being insufficiently elegant) I polished silver, twenty place-settings of it all covered with curliques which had to be cleaned with an old tooth-brush, and by naked extortion and scouring the countryside, Aunt Sally was able to field eight full courses, including turkeys,
chicken vol-au-vents, duck a l’orange, and a cream soup in spite of the fact that nearly every cow in the countryside has vanished into the maw of the Army.
And
coffee.
And wine
. The butler, and Zed the stableman, both looked strikingly impressive in livery.

Julia, who has been nearly distracted since Friday, when we heard that yes, Emory and Tom got twenty-four-hour furloughs to spend Christmas Day here, flirted outrageously with every man at the table (and there were twenty of them, just about all of the President’s staff, and every single one of them needed a fish-fork
and
a cheese-fork). I pretended to be a Spy in Enemy Territory again and managed a five-minute chat with President Davis about
Waverley
(which his wife is currently reading aloud to him when he has headaches, which he has just about every night, and no wonder). I asked him about Pa. The President says, Pa is making himself extremely useful in the government and waiting for a “good position” to “materialize.” I wanted to ask him, Has Pa got a ladyfriend yet? but didn’t know how to phrase it politely. After everyone left I got unlaced, put on my oldest dress, and helped Nellie clean the knives.

And now the house is still again. I wish you were here. Selfishly, because I miss you, but also, because Emory is asleep in the room across the hall: I know you’d want to be with him there!!!

Last Christmas I was in Nashville at the Academy; the Christmas the War was supposed to be over by. Bayberry was still a little bit the same as the place I remember growing up in. I think of the Dashwood sisters, and the Bennet girls, and saintly Amelia Sedley, who all face being put out of their homes quite penniless; is that why we find those books so appealing? Because when I read them I can say, the Dashwood sisters survived the loss of the place which
brought them close to their childhood: so can I? As you wrote to me, “One small and possible hand-hold at a time.” Even those lurid tales where the heroine is kidnapped and put in dungeons and pursued across the moors in rainstorms at midnight clad only in her nightgown: in most instances (except for poor Esmeralda), she emerges without even catching cold! Reading them, I can think, If Emily or Isabella got through it all right, I will be all right, too.

But I’m beginning to notice that they all involve marrying a man, and him being amazingly rich. And the women who want something else in their lives turn out to be wicked harlots. Or comic figures like Betsy Trotwood, or sinister mad ones like Miss Havisham.

I’m sorry I’m the one under the same roof with Emory tonight, and not you: that you’re buried under snow by this time on Deer Isle, with pine-boughs like a nest all around your home, and a tempest blowing outside. I hope your Papa was able to come home for Christmas, and that Ollie came safely through the battle and both your brothers got furloughs. I hope that you were able to be happy on your daughter’s first Christmas in this baffling world.

A Yankee expedition under General Sherman has landed at Steele’s Bayou, ten miles north of town.

[sketches]

[not sent]

Dear Cora,

It is bitterly cold this afternoon, the wind sweeping down the river straight from the North Pole, it feels like, and cord-wood up to
forty dollars
! I’m in the attic above the kitchen, where it’s warm. There’s a gable behind me facing west, and I get a good strong light for about three hours a day. Mr. Cameron told me to draw something every day, even if it’s only old shoes or old gloves. As you can see by the margins of this page, there are plenty of those up here. Sometimes if we don’t have company for the evening, I’ll creep back here after supper with a couple of candles and read. Nellie will come and say good-night, on her way in to her room on the other side of the attic, and tell me stories her Mama told her, about how you shouldn’t sleep under trees near the crossroad because the witches will ride you. You have witches in New England, don’t you? What tales do people tell? Is that particular shade of blue (“hai’nt blue” Cook calls it) proof against Maine devils the way it is against African ones?

Captain F to dinner tonight. Aunt Sally is more determined than ever to marry me off. When I try to speak to her about why women aren’t allowed to be doctors or lawyers or engineers (or even artists), she looks at me as if I were speaking Ethiopian. “Women just don’t have the capacity, dear” She says this after sending off letters diligently to her business agents in France, New York, and three South American countries.

My friends here—only they’re the kind of friends Miss Austen
talks of in
Northanger Abbey
, that are your friends because you happen to all be in the same place at the same time—have even less of an idea of doing anything
but
getting married and raising children. Lately I find myself two different people: who I am with them, and who I am really. We have a reading-group here—and at last! Somebody has acquired a copy of
A Tale of Two Cities
and we start on that in February!—and we’re getting together to put on “Scenes From Shakespeare” at next month’s Musicale to raise money for the local hospitals. And most of them are mostly interested in trading excerpts from letters from beaux in the Army, or talking about what kind of dresses they’ll make the minute the blockade is “over.” Like Lady Middleton in
S&S
, they suspect me of being “satirical” because I read, without quite knowing what “satirical” is.

Much of the time I feel very strange and alone.

Whew! Every time I think F can not get more boring, he proves me wrong. A surprise guest at dinner—can you guess? Emory came—on errand from Gen’l Pemberton, and Aunt Sally ordered him to remain, and the Gen’l can make the best of it for all she cares. Lottery-tickets and a game of Speculation in the parlor. You will be quite delighted to hear, Emory cleaned F out of his tokens like a picked carcass. Julia played the piano and sang, and Emory reduced her to blushes by recounting how Pa threw him off Bayberry, back in the days when he was courting her.

Back from Sunday calls, in
freezing
wind. Barely any cream in the not-quite-tea, and that had been watered and mixed with chalk,
I think, so it wouldn’t look thin. Would
much
rather have stayed home in the warm kitchen and helped Cook and Nellie do the lamps. Despite the terrifying cost of oil these days, Aunt Sallie
insists
on using at least some lamps, just to prove the Yankees aren’t really a problem. And poor Mrs. Bell’s house, though she’s had some of the shell damage repaired, is like sitting on a particularly drafty iceberg. Such a relief to return to the attic and re-read your letters. Sometimes when I read a book I know you’ve
read—P&P
, or
Bleak House—I
feel as if I’m in that same place—in London, or Meryton, or even Otrano’s accursed castle—and am likely to come around a corner and see you. And if we do not have time to talk that particular day, at least I know that you are well. I am well, too, and ever,

[sketches]

[not sent]

Dearest Susie,

Happy 1863—and may it be happy, and bring us actual letters from one another again!

A strange New Year. The weather has been warm—twenty degrees or more nearly every day—and no snow lies on the ground. Nevertheless the well is frozen, and the thick ice must be broken
several times a day by dropping the bucket down weighted with stones. Mother made the most of the fair weather by doing laundry, a blessing with two infants in the house, and we saw Papa off this morning without last year’s fear of his being caught by a storm in crossing the Reach. I shall miss his conversation sorely. He has never come to approve of my novel-reading, yet he is the only person with whom I can speak now about Shakespeare’s plays, and
The Iliad
, which I have come to see in a different light since my acquaintance with such heroines as the Bennet Sisters—of whom I am sure Mr. S would have approved—and poor mad Don Quixote. Papa and I took many long walks together—such a luxury in winter!—sometimes with Mercy on my back in what Papa calls my
papoose
. Mother is certain that there is something “heathenish” in carrying one’s child about so. Though the ground is dry—and the house looks a little foolish, banked deep in boughs and not an atom of snow in sight—the island is strangely silent without its birds, the woods queer and naked-looking, full of pale winter light. Even far inland at the end of the pond, I can sometimes hear the sea.

Darkness comes early. We return home, Papa and I—or I alone, today—in good time to help Mother with dinner in a kitchen lit by tallow candles and reeking of their scent. No matter how much we rinse and soak, the taste of salt clings to everything. This whole week, we have had fires in the parlor, and by them, chess or dominoes. Tonight it is only we five again: three mothers, two babies, in the kitchen, the rest of the house cold and dark. What a comfort to know that you are somewhere, on the other side of that darkness. What a comfort to have, at least, those friends between the covers of books: to know that such a powerful barrier exists against loneliness!

[not sent]

Dearest,

The unseasonal warm weather continues. Every road on the island is a foot deep in mire, and we are as trapped on the farm, as if snow heaped our walls. Moreover, the shutters remain closed and the walls banked deep in boughs, for not one of us is such a fool as to believe that this situation will continue until spring. Still, my joy at long walks in the woods is rivalled by the pleasure of short dashes to the privy, rather than the blizzard expedient of emptying chamber pots into buckets in the summer kitchen. You wrote to me of what I as a New Englander knew nothing of—the lively second world of black families, black gossip, black friendships in any Southern town—so now I return the favor upon you, who surely have no experience of being trapped by snow and wind within the walls of a six-room farmhouse for days on end. What a pity we have not a third friend—indifferent to both South and North—living on the islands of Hawaii! She could no doubt tell us unimaginable commonplaces of her existence that would leave us both bemused!

I re-read the novels I read last winter, encountering new things even in such completely unedifying works as
The Mysteries of Udolpho
and
Fantomina, or Love in a Maze
. (If Mr. Poole permitted you to read that last one as a girl, he should be ashamed of himself!) It is as if new chapters grew in them while I wasn’t looking. Perhaps, in my feverish haste to discover the nature of Valmont’s Dreadful Disease, or to learn the ultimate fate of Trooper George, I skimmed past these secluded groves and vistas like the passenger on a speeding train. I commenced the winter bemoaning the fact that I have only the same seventy-eight volumes as I did twelve months ago. Now I
see the treasure God has designed for me this winter: that deeper acquaintance, the chance to see both pleasures and lessons missed before. That is, I assume it to be God, though I’m sure Papa would give me an argument about
Fantomina
.

It is hard not to have someone to talk to of this. What was difficult last winter seems yet more so now, perhaps because all summer I have had the teaching of my little scholars. I have acquired the habit of facile conversation with Peggie, though her spirits are easily depressed and she frets herself endlessly over Oliver. This is understandable, but painful to herself and frightening, I think, to her tiny son.