Homeland (23 page)

I should read the newspapers, study the War … not turn my face from what is happening to this country, and to my home here on the island. Or as Papa says, I should read the Bible, to reconcile God’s purposes with my doubting heart. I read
Vanity Fair
instead, and
find in it the road-map to get me from day to day, and the laughter that lets me close my eyes at night.

And so we carry forward, my friend.

[not sent]

Dearest Cora,

Still raining! In a way it’s useful, because there’s less chance there’ll be anyone but me tromping around in the woods. I assume the Unionist bush-whackers are also sitting around under shelter somewhere, the same way the militia troop has all moved into the Big House. Some of them are perfectly nice fellows, and Emory—and the nice ones—serve to keep the others in line, but I am very tired of hearing their remarks as I pass them. I barricade the door of my room every night. That’s where I am now, with three pine-knots burning, as much to keep me warm as for light to write by.

Julia and I spent the day washing. One of our few remaining neighbors, Mrs. Gitting, showed me how to make soap out of “chimney pinks” (I think they’re also called bruisewort), but you can’t preserve it in jars the way you can with regular soap. Still, there was plenty of lye. Every man in the troop came loitering around the kitchen, asking that we do his shirts or socks, as well. Of course Julia
said we’d be delighted to, and lectured me about how these men were defending our homeland, and providing food for us, and being washerwomen for them was the
least
we can do. Mrs. Gitting lives five miles away, at the foot of Scanlon’s Mountain; she told me she and her children sleep in the woods, their house has been raided by bush-whackers so often. I think it’s her son who sometimes robs my traps.

[sketches]

Happy birthday, my dearest friend! And, a little relief: the regular Confederate Army is moving north into this section to drive the Federals out of Knoxville if they can, and to draft whoever they can find. Most of the militia has high-tailed it into the woods, which means I can scrape the corn I saved for seed. When I hide portions of the provisions the men bring, Julia chides me, that the fighting will be over soon, and this miserliness of mine, besides being selfish, is foolish.

How
I wish there was some other way of getting news, than what someone says someone said to them the last time they were in Greeneville two weeks ago!

It is arctic up here in my room, as darkness falls, and the house seems ominously silent. I tore my blue dress—the last one I have—digging a hidey-hole in the cellar of the old Gordon barn, and there is no thread to sew on a patch with (and only the rags of the kitchen towels, to use for patching). Emory tells me, the bush-whackers hanged Case Mitchell outside of Greeneville yesterday.

I caught a pig!!!

[not sent]

Dearest,

The first storm of winter. Mother, Peggie, and I spent all the day in the summer kitchen, now icily cold, putting the last of the pigs into brine, while rendering lard and boiling the heads in the main kitchen. When the head-cheese was done, and all cleaned and mopped and scoured and scalded, Mother made corn-and-milk for dinner, as she used to when we were children. The wind howls, and when I crossed to the barn for the evening milking I could hear the sea running high beyond the woods on the other side of the road. Still, with my child sleeping at my side, I look forward with the greediness of a child myself to the adventures of Glaucus and Arbaces and the Witch of Vesuvius, and all those others destined to meet a thoroughly un-edifying doom in the smoking ruins of Pompeii.

Evening again. Mother is asleep, at last, after a disquieting day. Much of the time she did not seem to know me at all. Soap-making all last week. My shoulders still ache from stirring the kettle. As Mother had an agonizing headache two days running, Peggie and I did not have her expertise to “prove” the soap, which I fear is too strong.

Peggie, too, is absent this evening, as she is many evenings now. She has begun sewing for money, pieces delivered from a woman in Belfast. This she takes to Elinor’s as soon as the floors are scrubbed in the morning, and I do not see her again, sometimes not even for dinner. In many ways this is a relief to me, yet, her absence heightens the strange Robinson Crusoe quality of my days.

A week ago Saturday, Papa brought one of his Yale colleagues home with him, a Swiss gentleman who specializes in diseases of the brain. He examined Mother carefully, looked in her eyes with a powerful mirror, and tested her reflexes in all sorts of ways. Then he took us quietly aside into the parlor and said, There is nothing that can be done for her. He said had he seen her the very day she fell, it would have been the same. There is a slow effusion of blood into the brain. She will gradually get worse, and sleep more and more, until at last she will die in her sleep.

I feel sad, and very strange. I know not what has befallen you, my friend, in the year since I last heard from you. Nor do I know where Emory is, or if he still lives. All things seem suspended, waiting for this War to end; it’s as if I am indeed stranded on an island of wraiths, unable to leave or to do anything to learn the fate of those I love. Like Lemuel Gulliver, stranded among the Lilliputians—or perhaps like Gulliver’s wife, when her husband returned from his final voyage insane, unable to bear so much as the touch of her hand.

I can only think, that if that silly adventurer had a friend at his side, or access to books, he might not have so slipped his moorings and gone drifting away into the closed circle of madness. This is what they do for us, both books and friends: they remind us what it
is to be human. As you wrote to me, they are the window into sunlight, even if we ourselves are shut in the dark.

[not sent]

Dear Cora,

I am ready to take a switch to Julia! She kept her mouth shut about the pig when the regular commissary men came through—and stole every atom of the food in our kitchen, not just the ten percent “tax” the Confederacy demands,
and
searched the grounds and found the hideout cache I’d dug under the burned ruins of the tobacco-barn—but when Emory and his men came back, she told
them
. She cried when I shouted at her, and hugged little Tommy to her and said, how I shouldn’t be stingy because they were fighting for
him
. I only looked at her, and said wearily,
“I’m
fighting for him, Julia.”

The regular Army caught three of Emory’s militia and drafted them last week; it was two days before they could get away. Even Emory, when he has dealings with the regular troops about raids on the Federals, makes sure he leaves a reserve of troops behind him in the woods when he meets with them, and doesn’t let the Confederate regulars get between himself and his line of retreat. “I wouldn’t say so to Julia,” he told me yesterday evening, “but I sure
wouldn’t put it past ‘em, to give me a choice of goin’ out to Virginia or gettin’ my head blowed off.” His boys spent the night in our house—it rained again—and he left us with a sack of peas and a half a flitch of United States bacon when they all rode off this morning.
And
they took all the firewood I’d chopped!

When they were gone we washed clothes—I will
not
be the camp washerwoman again and I don’t care
whose
homeland they’re fighting for!—and I waited til Julia was washing Tom, before I cut about a quarter off the bacon, and poured three or four cups of the peas into an old pot, and carried both off to one of my hidey-holes in the woods.

These past three or four weeks, if Tom’s not too drunk, I’ve been “reading” to the family in the evenings—telling the stories out of the books I remember, in as much detail as I can, by the light of a pine-knot up in the room Tom shares with Tommy. When I do that I think of you, and the winter darkness closing in on Deer Isle again. I’m “reading”
Bleak House
now (you should have seen Tommy’s eyes, when Mr. Krook caught fire!); as I wander down those fog-shrouded streets of Tom’s All-Alone, I look for you, Cora, in the lighted windows. Tho’ I know we can’t ever speak again, it’s good to see your face.

[sketches]

[not sent]

Dearest Susie,

Well, the house is “banked” once more; the shutters closed until spring. I had meant to wait til Papa came on Saturday, but the wind smells of snow, and today Will said that he would do it now. As I hear the howling of the northeast wind from the Bay, my heart tells me that Papa will not be here Saturday. Winter has truly come.

Heavy snow. I fear Papa will not be able to come tomorrow, either. Nor have any of Mother’s friends visited in these busy days. In a strange way, being so much alone, with only Mother and Mercy, I almost dread any company but Will’s. I fear I would not know what to say to a stranger, should I meet one.

I had meant to re-read
The Iliad
, yet I find the tale of war, and wrath, and men squabbling among themselves over glory and booty and female “prizes of honor,” turns me cold: who was it who ever said that Achilles and his messmates were the heroes of anything? Mother has a truly fearful headache, and it is the first time that I have seen her frightened. Will brought newspapers as well as a bottle of laudanum, with accounts of bloodshed all over eastern Tennessee. Maybe this is the reason for my anger over Homer: fear that you may be caught up in what is happening there. Yet, when I read anything by Miss Austen, I find myself reflecting on how thin a line divides the Dashwood Sisters from Becky Sharp. Only luck:
good connections, benevolent friends. They are themselves powerless to alter their own circumstances without recourse to some man with a little money, to whose arm they can cling.

Papa arrived, with little presents for Mercy and Nollie. Other than crying, “Papa, where have you been all day?” Mother was much as she used to be. We read the Christmas story in the Bible, and had a little feast of turkey and spoon-bread. Yesterday Will came to cut wood, and to make sure all was well here, and gave me the present he had bought for me in Portland: a copy of
Northanger Abbey
. I wept, Susie, thinking of how you enjoyed that book, and that Will would remember how I longed to read it. Will told me, that it being Christmas, the Provost Marshal has men out. They are watching for the deserters and evaders of the draft, who will be sure to be coming to see their families tomorrow. Yet, says Will, the children on Little Deer Isle have organized a warning-system and lookouts, and the Marshals have not caught a man yet!

The moon is nearly full, between the scudding clouds. I suspect—and fear—that Will is playing “Father Christmas” tonight, taking the
Lady Anne
between those tiny islets, with supplies and good wishes for those in hiding. I try not to picture Ollie on one of those little knobs of granite tufted with trees, living on lobster and sea-birds, until such time as he could come home alive. Did Mr. Dickens forget The Ghost of Christmas Never to Come? Or is its absence a part of his message: that such regrets serve us nothing? Only what actually
was
, what actually
is
, can teach us, rather than a sad legion of mighthave-beens.

Thank you, dear friend, for telling me to tell Will I longed for a copy of
Northanger
which he saw for sale in Portland: now I think of it as much your gift as his. It has propelled me, I blush to say, back into the sordid wallow of Udolpho, Otrano, Melmoth, and the Monk … an antidote for an anger too near the surface now even to tolerate Don Quixote’s armed lunacy.

I pray 1864 will bring me word from you.

Your own, Cora

Susanna Ashford, Bayberry Run Plantation Greene County, Tennessee

[not sent]

Dearest Friend, I miss you.

Gray steady rain for days, with snow on the wind. There isn’t so much as a berry in the woods, my traps have been empty for a week, and I’ve nutted out the trees for miles around. Emory rode in yesterday, with “the boys,” and “for the day’s sake,” as Scrooge’s nephew says, I “caught” the oldest of the hens I’ve been keeping up at Skull Cave, and contributed the poor old dear for Christmas dinner. We—the family—didn’t get so much as a feather. Julia didn’t care—she lives in a state of exaltation at her own self-sacrifice these days—but I did, and I know poor little Tommy is starving. Up in my room tonight I
can hear Tom cursing, for of course Lyle Gilkerson brought him some of Pappy Weevil’s finest for Christmas cheer. The men downstairs are quarrelling: they have their Christmas cheer, as well.