Homeland (24 page)

“Marley was dead, to begin with. Let there be no doubt about that.” I don’t remember the wording exactly, but I open up the book tonight in my imagination, and read it along with you, under your quilts in your little room behind the stairs, with little Miss Mercy at your side.

Gen’l Longstreet’s Confederates have retreated into the mountains, and there’s a Federal troop in Greeneville. It doesn’t seem to have changed anything. Monday Jimmy Deakins, who came back in the Federal wake and re-opened his shop, was beaten nearly to death by bush-whackers, half a mile from his own front door. At least now I’ll be able to go into town—or maybe even into the Union camp—and see about a doctor for Julia.

[
I think about writing you
—heavily crossed out]

The men downstairs are celebrating—again—and I’ve pushed the bed up against the door, as I do every night. It’s
far
too cold to open the shutters, to look out at the stars as I do in summer, or really even to go anywhere near the window; I can see the last twilight outlining the cracks. It hasn’t snowed yet—and doesn’t, really, not Deer Isle style snow—yet I feel, every night, as if I’m buried, with my invisible books, and the sketches that I hide behind the paneling in the walls, and the packet of your letters tucked under the floor-board. I hear Julia pass my door, and sometimes I hear Tommy, when he cries alone in the night and Tom is too deep asleep to waken and comfort him.

Please think about me.

[sketches]

[not sent]

Dear Cora,

An argument with Julia as I was re-”reading”
P&P
to the family: “Now, you’re making Mr. Bennet sound so nasty!” She said that about
Bleak Houses
Mr. Skimpole a few weeks ago—that Mr. Dickens never made him that evil in the Real Book: “Gosh, I’m like an innocent child in matters of the world, I have no idea how my wife and children live, but they manage to … Isn’t that charming?” But at heart, aren’t they both lazy? (And their daughters adore them both.) Is that what Hamlet means, when he says, “Let me make a note of this, that a man can smile, and smile, and be a villain”? Mr. Bennet is just nicer than Mr. Skimpole, that’s all. It’s been four months since Pa left, and there has been (such a surprise renders me faint!) no word from him. Some days I want to kill them all.

Julia, of course, is absolutely convinced that Pa’s going to send us money any day. All I can say is, it better be in Union greenbacks. And then, she’d just spend it on new boots for the militia troop!

Then again, I’m the one who walks miles to comb the attics of empty houses for paper, and burns my fingers making ink, to write a letter I’m never going to send, to a friend who I know I can never see or speak to again. So who is the more
insane?

All day working on green dress. The blue dress (although it’s so faded it hasn’t been blue for a long time) having finally worn to tissue, Julia helped me pick apart the bodice, and sew it as a lining into the green, with layers of religious tracts (“A Voice from the Flames,” “The Fleshpots of Sin,” and “The Livery of Iniquity”) in between, to cut the wind. It has been raining for nine days. Last night there was a tremendous fight downstairs, and shots fired—wasteful, considering how little ammunition they have. It’s strange, not really knowing what’s going on anywhere but here. Has someone invented a perpetual motion machine? Don’t know. Has the earth opened up and swallowed Mexico City? Could have happened. I have great sympathy now for poor Dr. Manette in the Bastille (whose adventures I hope you’ve become acquainted with by now).

Maybe that’s the reason I keep such careful track of the days, which I do with a stick of charcoal on the wall of my bedroom (see sketch). I feel that if I miss a day, I could suddenly lose a week, or a month.

My hens up in Skull Cave have quit laying, but I feed them what I can, and go check on them—and on Justin’s books—every day, even in the rain. All the streams are high between here and the cave, rushing torrents. There isn’t an acorn between here and the Georgia border, and I am sometimes in terror of meeting bush-whackers (or even some of our own militia boys). Still after the tumult in the house here, the silence and the smell of the trees, are almost as good as food. Yesterday evening I saw the fog moving down the mountain, like an army of silent ghosts. Breath-taking! I hope your winter days pass more quietly than mine.

[lost]

[not sent]

Dear Cora,

Night again, and drunken voices downstairs. Will I dream about this for the rest of my life? It’s been cold enough to snow, but I foraged up to Indian Creek and Spaniard’s Leap, just to see if by chance it had rained hams up there, but it hadn’t. The trap-lines hadn’t even been touched, except one that some bastard bush-whackers had stolen the string out of. It’s so hard to get anything these days, hard to get anything to make anything out of, even. The farms and cabins on the mountains, where people gave up and left when their menfolks were drafted or fled to avoid it, have all been picked clean, even of things like rugs and curtains, let alone traps. Julia and I have been using hairs out of the horses’ tails to sew with. Even the horses are stolen from the U.S. Army.

Yet the winter woods are so peaceful. Streams that were cataracts two weeks ago are down to trickles with ice, murmuring in the stillness. I keep careful watch on tracks, because there are men even worse than the militia boys up there (it’s hard to imagine
anyone
nastier than Lyle Gilkerson). Only the presence of the militia here has kept Bayberry from attack. But the silence, and being alone to watch the clouds move across the mountains; being able to just sit for a time and sketch a pine-branch—it’s like when I write to you.

Found a dead man up near the Gilkerson place, someone I didn’t know. I’m ashamed to say the first thing I did was search his pockets, but whoever had shot him had thought of that already. I built a blind, and sat there with the rifle Emory gave me, and waited. I shot two foxes before nightfall. Their meat tastes just awful, but the boys haven’t managed to steal anything from the Army in Greeneville for weeks. I hid the carcasses and the skins in a tree in the laurel hell at the Holler. (I hide
everything)

Dreamed last night about Mr. Fox-Bait’s wife, sister, and children. As soon as it got light, smuggled the shovel out of
its
hiding-place, and lost almost a day of foraging, to dig a shallow grave for him. The ground was nearly frozen, and my chilblains hurt like the Devil, but I did what I could. His shirt’s a little big on me, (somebody else had already got his boots) but I don’t care. While I was digging, I remembered Mrs. Willis at the Nashville Female Academy teaching us the proper form for a letter of acceptance to an informal evening
party, and how to make facial restorative out of cucumbers, and I don’t know if I should laugh or what.

[sketches]

Dearest Susanna,

Forgive me, if my previous letter reached you, asking all the same questions that I will ask you again in this one, like a child tugging at her mother’s skirt—as my beautiful daughter has begun to do. When I heard that Union forces had taken eastern Tennessee, my first thought was of you and your family. Eliza Johnson has written to me since, that the section is in turmoil, and I know that it is possible that my letter was lost. Such is my hope, rather than that, with the horrific conditions she describes, you have come to hate me as a Yankee.

So I write again: Are you well? Are you safe? If in fact hardship and bitterness have made it impossible for you to greet me as a friend—and if such be the case, please believe that I understand how it would be so—might you at least write me the briefest of notes, informing me that the correspondence is at an end. Thus at least I will be spared the wretchedness of doubt.

For myself, I am well. My mother is ill, and there are many days now on which she does not know me, nor where she is, though it was in this house that she drew her first breath. Such has been the storminess of the season, that Papa has not come since the New Year. My sister-in-law is estranged from me, and whenever the weather permits, carries her sewing and her child down to Elinor’s, leaving me here alone. Were it not for Will Kydd, I do not know how I would manage.

I have had three letters from Justin, asking if I have had, by any chance or mischance, word of Emory, or of you. I hope there is at least someone at Bayberry, who might know where you can be reached. I do not know what you might have endured since last I had a letter in your hand. Yet I will say, that I hope.

[not sent]

Dearest,

I told myself, that having written two letters to you in the flesh—to a real young woman who might or might not be living in Greene County, Tennessee, who might or might not be too embittered to write back—it was childish to resume this correspondence with a phantom built from memories and the dreams of loneliness.

Yet without hope the heart dies, and even phantom comfort is
better than the darkness in which I sit tonight. I pray that it is my letters, and not you, who are lost.

Mother has been very bad all week. Laudanum does not seem sufficient to quell the pain. Many hours I have spent at her side, and when sweeping, and cleaning the grates, keeping up the fires in the kitchen and in her bedroom—or making simple meals for myself and for her—I find myself always listening for sounds from her room. Saturday for the first time she did not recognize Papa when he came, though that might have been the laudanum. He was completely unmanned by the sight of her distress, and I spent as much time looking after him as her. What unspeakable relief, after Papa’s departure Monday, when Will arrived, to chop the wood, and help me shovel out the stables, and dig out (yet again) the paths from the door of the summer kitchen to the houses of office, and the barn. What unspeakable relief, to talk to someone,
[to
—crossed out]

How I abominate this soap! All winter it has burned holes in the clothes, if not carefully diluted, and my hands are always red and itching. Today Mother was very much herself. She helped me clean, and scolded me for keeping up fires in her bedroom, and for burning up all the kerosene, when it is so expensive. In fact, there is no kerosene because I haven’t bought any: it is well over a
dollar
a gallon now! She had no recollection of her days of pain, nor apparently any awareness of its being February now rather than December—so similar are the winter days. She and I made a peach cobbler, none the worse for being made with maple syrup, and I am ashamed to say I congratulated myself, and thanked Ollie for understanding how I continued with life, in the very wake of his death. Yet perhaps the gods of the dead do have their revenge: each time I take an egg from the brine-barrel in the cellar, or open a jar of the summer’s
cucumbers, it is as if, with the scent of the vinegar, I hear my brother’s footstep in the next room. Was it so for you, even six months after Payne’s death? Does the hurt of loss ever ease?

Dear friend, wherever you are, take care of yourself, and know that you are always in my thoughts.

[not sent]

Dear Cora,

Bad as it’s been, having the militia permanently camped in the parlor, having them gone on forage is
worse
! Last night we were waked by hooves in the yard, and feet grinding stealthily in the slushy ice. Julia tried to keep me from getting out of bed (she’s been sleeping with me, these last few nights) but I crept to the window and opened the shutters a crack. By starlight I could just see riders. Maybe they thought Emory had left men in the house. They didn’t come in, whoever they were, but I heard them moving around for probably half an hour.