Homeland (28 page)

An interruption, occasioned by the kettle boiling—one can make a fair substitute for tea or coffee by parching barley, and it has the advantage of not keeping one awake—which turned into an argument with Peggie about cleaning the bedroom china. I am teaching Miss Mercy to use these articles, and Peggie vehemently objects to their presence in the far corner of the summer kitchen. I suspect in my darker moments that this is because my nephew Nollie is slow, though only a few months younger than my Mercy, and has not the least concept of the matter. Or it may be that Peggie simply relieves her own unhappiness by picking holes in the conduct of others.

The summer kitchen is filled with tubs of laundry soaking, and the smell of lye. My hand smarts from a scald, but Mother, for once, is well enough to sit at the table, listening to Papa reading the Bible. The Book of Numbers—not, I would think, the most comforting
portion of the Holy Writ, but it is the day for it, and Papa will not deviate from his schedule. Mrs. Greenlaw came to visit Mother—a rare instance, and I was careful to leave the house, until she was gone.

You ask, Are women citizens rather than subjects? I have noticed, in all the ferocious discussions under way now about giving the franchise to freed blacks, that Congressmen are neglecting half of that population—while half of the white population has for three years now managed farms and found food for their children, pretty much on their own, with nothing more than the satisfaction of having the Propaganda Societies praise them for duty well done. And some of us, not even that!

The Bible speaks often of the wailing of women and orphans in the wake of war, yet never does it recommend searching for ways to avoid war; even as it enjoins slaves to obey their masters, never decrying the evil of slavery itself. I trust that, being inspired by God, there is a good reason for this. Yet I find sharper food for thought in that portion of
Vanity Fair
, wherein it speaks of the Battle of Waterloo, and how each bold British hero left a trail of French widows, bereft for life in his wake.

I am so sorry, that to get this letter you will have to walk half the day, to town and back
—and
hide it under the floor-boards. I look forward to the day, when that will no longer be the case.

P.S. I will inquire of Aunt Hester about soapwort and chimney pink. They can’t be any worse than the execrable soap Peggie and I managed to make last fall—which, thank Heavens, is running low. I will bespeak Aunt Hester’s assistance this year!

Dear Cora,

Thank you for the wonderful, wonderful needles! And the fishhooks! What better birthday present could I ask? Except your letter itself!

If you ask me, Peggie is very lucky not to have the bedroom articles in question broken over her head.

I did not say—and I meant to—how sorry I was, to read that Peggie is now a widow. I know how deeply you cared for Oliver. I remember in one of your letters, you speak of your brother Brock being home on furlough, and I trust that he is still well?

And please, tell me, if there is anything I can do—at this distance with Secesh militiamen all over the property—is there anything I can do, to make your life easier, with your parents? It was so hard for me to lose Payne and Gaius, Henriette and her children, but (does this sound insane?) my memories of them are unclouded. I remember them as they truly were. I don’t pity you, but admire you, for your ability to keep cheerful—to make soap, and dry peaches, and comfort your Father, and teach Miss Mercy to use the bedroom china—under I think the most horrible conditions a human can endure. You have my deepest respect.

All the town was in a turmoil today, as Sunday night, the Confederate raider John H. Morgan was ambushed, shot, and killed. Despite the fact that there is a Federal camp close to Greeneville, Confederates are in and out of the town all the time. Gen’l Morgan was staying with the Williamses, who have one of the biggest houses in town (and have entertained plenty of Union officers, as well). He
was shot, in dense fog, at the bottom of their garden, pretty much right in the center of town, and Julia is livid with rage, not remembering the number of Union men who have been ambushed, shot, killed, beaten to death, or hanged by Secesh partisans. The soldiers were saying, too, that Sherman has taken Atlanta.

No barley is grown in this part of the world (for reasons explained in the Geography lectures at the Nashville Female Academy, which I have forgotten). There’s a plant here called Revolutionary tea that makes a pretty fair tea—Mammy Iris used to tell us that it’s what people drank in the United States after the Boston Tea Party—and I’ve gathered that. I’m lucky in that Justin taught me about wild foods, because he was such a terrible miser he would sell almost the whole of his corn crop, and live on ramps and wild sweet potatoes! So even though Mrs. Gitting and the bush-whackers got most of what I’ve been raising in my woods gardens, I can still find food in this season, that they miss.

I will try to “read”
Vanity Fair
in my imagination again, (having now no access to the book) but so much happens, that I keep forgetting incidents. Others, like Becky tossing her preceptress’s treasured Dictionary out the window of the carriage, are not to be forgotten under any circumstances!!!! I’m glad you have Justin’s copy. I am consumed with guilt every time I raid his books for end-papers to write to you. This letter comes to you care of
The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
.

Please give all my love to your poor Papa, and tell him that I remember him—and your Mother—in my prayers.

[not sent]

Dear Cora,

Thank you, thank you for the needles, and the fish-hooks—and I am sorry, that I mentioned our needs here: I won’t do so again. I feel such shame, that I sounded like I was begging—and I
wasn’t
!—that I want to send them back, but I can’t. Julia talks as if everyone in the North is eating roast beef and ice-cream every day, and between courses asking themselves, “Shall we send food supplies to poor starving Southerners? No, let’s feed them to our dogs.” It doesn’t sound as if you’re teaching this summer—how could you, with your Mother to care for, completely aside from being a Damned Copperhead? And goodness knows what else Elinor is saying about you, and to whom.

I hate hunger. I hate war. And I hate Lyle Gilkerson.

And, I hate whoever it was, who went in and took all the corn from my gardens—all but one of them!—that I’d hoed and weeded and walked ten miles a day to care for, since March. When I came on that last one, after walking the whole circuit of them and finding each one cleaned out, I sat down on a log and cried, as I haven’t cried in a long time. Whoever it is, they know the potatoes are there, and unless I stand guard over them, they’ll come and get them, too, unless I dig them up before they’re big.

Sometimes, when I’m prowling the woods with my bags and satchels, gathering berries and nuts, checking my trap-lines and fish-lines, passing the ruins of farms that I’ve picked clean even of
the rag-rugs (that’s what the satchels are made of) where people I used to know, used to live … sometimes it feels like I’m the last person on the face of the earth. That everyone else is dead, and I’m alone.
And I’m happy that it’s that way
.

Shooting. I don’t know whether it was bandits come to steal the troop’s horses and food, or Lincolnites. I had my rifle up here but the moon was down, and not enough ammunition to waste on shadows. From the window now, by starlight, I can just barely make out the militiaman walking patrol through the wasted ruin of Henriette’s garden, waiting for daylight when they’ll go after them. Julia is crying again—I hear Emory’s voice, comforting her—and, closer, poor tiny Adam wailing in Tom’s room.

Don’t ask me what I’m feeling, Cora, because I can’t even say.

Dearest,

What on earth is a “ramp”? And, what you can “do” for me, to make my life easier, you are doing. Every letter I get from you raises my spirits, and scatters the shadows that sometimes threaten to swallow me. My ability to “keep cheerful” I learned from you, my friend, and from those dear unfailing friends to whom you introduced me: the Dashwood Sisters, and Miss Esther Summerson,
and Eliza Bennet, and even the disreputable but indefatigable Becky Sharp, who never seems to let anything get her down.

I blush to remember, when first we came to know each other, that I had the
temerity
to regard novel-reading as a “childish flaw” in your character that you would one day outgrow! Now I see myself as having been one of those truculent illiterates who takes pride in “not knowin’ nuthin’ about book-learnin’,” or perhaps more accurately, a bleak impenetrable soul like Claud Frollo or Miss Havisham, who boast to themselves that they are impervious to love.

Mr. Poole may have set before me the medicines that heal the heart, but it was you who convinced me to drink them. They remind me, too, that no condition lasts forever. That change comes.

Papa has returned to New Haven. Peggie and I work like squirrels, to store up what we can for the winter. She spends as many days as she can with Elinor, sewing and accompanying her to visit other Daughters of the Union, and various church groups and Ladies Aid Societies about the island. She leaves Nollie with Elinor’s young sister Katie, along with Elinor’s children, and I am certain that at every one of these meetings my character and conduct are subject for discussion.

I begin to feel quite wealthy, as provisions accumulate. All summer I have been making butter, trading some to Mr. Lufkin for necessaries like sugar and salt and wax to make candles, now that kerosene is so costly, and the rest, salting and caching in the coldest corner of the cellar. Today Jabel Dow delivered the barrels of cider and vinegar that Aunt Hester was so good as to have pressed with her own. For weeks now, after all the other tasks of the day are done, I have been peeling and slicing apples, and threading them to dry; a task done by others turn and turn about, with neighbors to help. While working, alone in the stillness of the summer kitchen by the
light of the long twilights, I have adopted your method of “reading” while I work; seeing how closely I can recall every incident of
Emma
, or
Hard Times
, or Heaven help me!
The Monk
, starting with Chapter One, while Miss Mercy makes strange designs from the discarded peelings until she falls quite abruptly asleep on her cot. Mother, thank Heavens, has had a good week, but she sleeps a great deal these days. Mercy seems to accept that this is how Grandmother is—as I accepted, at her age, that all winters were spent by everyone buried in the dark, and as Emory once accepted that a father was someone who goes out and sleeps on the ground in the woods with his dogs.

How wonderful and how terrible are the things that children accept as the unavoidable nature of the world!

I have thought much about Emory lately; wondering if he is alive, even. Wondering where he is, and what things have befallen him, in the three years that we’ve been apart. Wondering if he has been wounded, or maimed, as your Tom is, and whether we will—or can—live in Boston again when he returns. Eliza Johnson has written me, very kindly promising that the Senator will find some employment for Emory, but I know now—as I did not before—how profoundly people can change, and
have
changed, from having been hammered in the forge of war. For this reason, Susie, perhaps more than for any other, I am grateful that our friendship has been resumed. It gives me the hope of other things.

A walk to Aunt Hester’s tomorrow, who was so good as to take our butter into town to trade for camphor and turpentine, to do the mattresses before the onset of winter again. The air is sharp: frost soon.

P.S. Convey my thanks to HIH Marcus Aurelius for the paper. I am grateful for his loan of it to you, beyond what words can express.

Dear Cora,

A ramp is a sort of wild onion, that grows all over the mountains here in Tennessee. They can be cooked or eaten raw, though raw they’re a bit vehement. If the Federal troops pull back to defend against the new Confederate attacks in the west (and take their cornmeal supplies with them!), they’re what we may be eating all winter.

And, your fish-hooks work like champions!

We’ve had a sort of
Rob Roy
existence here lately. The militia lifted somebody’s cattle over from Carter County (I didn’t think anybody in the mountains
had
cattle anymore!
They
must have stolen them from someone in North Carolina), and last week about sixteen Carter Countians came to get them back. The house wasn’t burned, so I’m pleased, but goodness knows what poor Tommy is going to accept as the unavoidable nature of the world. Julia, of course, is all ruffled up that those “damned Lincolnites” would
dare
refuse to contribute to the support of the lawful forces of the Confederacy.