Homeland (29 page)

I’d cheerfully sell one of the militiamen into slavery for a copy of
Emma
—or even
The Monk
. (Except it would probably take eight or ten, to make up the value of a book.)

The days shorten and grow cold. The last of Henriette’s roses, in the overgrown wilderness of the old garden, has withered away. In addition to forage, I’ve made a little laboratory up at the Holler, to make enough ink to last me the winter. Boiling the stuff keeps my hands warm, and hereabouts I have to be careful, at who might see the smoke. Some evenings I don’t get back til after dark. I wish
there were a way to get the bugs out of the bedding here, but that’s yet another thing on the list of, What to Do When the War is Done, like poor mad Miss Flite in
Bleak House
, anticipating Judgement Day. Last week I boiled my mattress-cover and blanket, and put smoke-smudges under my bed, nearly burning up the bed
and
the house in the process, but as long as we have big houseguests sleeping downstairs (and I will admit, they
do
keep other bandits away) we’ll have
little
houseguests as well.

[not sent]

Cora,

I don’t know how much longer I can continue this. Every letter I get from you, I want to write back … What? I don’t even know. How can I tell you that Emory, as far as I can gather, has not the slightest intention of leaving Julia, who clings to him like an imperiled Princess in a Gothic novel? Which is, I am sure, exactly how she sees herself and how he sees her. And if Emory left, what would we have? Lyle and his robbers? Emory, by the way, was
furious
when Lyle and his boys came in with the cattle—and of course, had eaten most of them before their rightful owners showed up. It was only due to Emory’s diplomacy that our house
wasn’t
burned.

And it’s only the fact that I pretend that I actually
like
sleeping
with Lyle, that keeps Lyle’s band, which is almost as large as the militia troop, from murderous war with Emory’s.

Julia keeps asking, When is Lyle going to
marry
me? It’s very hard to keep my mouth shut. Lately at night—when he’s lying there beside me drunk—it crosses my mind that the only way out of this that makes any sense is for me to die. I know you’ll find out one day, when the War is over … Only, it sometimes seems that the War never
will
be over. Not here in Tennessee. The people who think a State has the right to leave the Union, still think it. And nothing the Federal government can do will make them say they don’t think what they think. And the men who think Tennessee should be in the Union, are bound and determined to exterminate them, one man at a time.

And I don’t want to live in that situation, any more than I want to live if you come to hate me for betraying you.

Dear Susie,

News reached the island today, that Abraham Lincoln has been elected for a second term as President.

So the War will continue. Not, I think, that anyone had any doubt of it, once Atlanta fell. But the conditions that you tell of, with such grim good-humor, appall me. And as you say, there is a vast list, of things (“Gammon and Spinach”) that can not even be contemplated until the fighting is over. Not knowing what will be possible, I can not even plan or imagine. Last month notices went out here for a second draft. Almost two hundred men were called up: nearly half
of those remaining on the island. Close to eighty of them simply vanished, joining the fifty or so already in hiding on the tiny islets of this granite coast. Fifty of those remaining hired substitutes. Mother’s poor friend Jem Duffy, having mortgaged his house and farm to buy himself free from the first draft, was drafted in the second, and for the sake of his family—he has seven children, the oldest being eleven—he has sold both farm and house, and works now as a laborer … for those who have the money to hire him. I traded him two cheeses, to cut wood for the winter, and half of one of our pigs, for the labor of his wife, himself, and his oldest son, in butchering out the other two. All over the island, one now sees houses shut up, as those who can not make their livings either fishing or farming move to the mainland.

I am told, most curiously, that, so many men being in the Army now, in Boston and New York young women who can write a good hand are being taken as clerks, in both offices and shops. I would smile, if I did not know the cost of those victories in blood.

Why should I not send fish-hooks to one who holds Open House for Secessionist militia, if poor General Grant is supporting the entire Confederate Army in East Tennessee,
and
their dependents, on his own rations? My local reputation as a Copperhead surely can not suffer more, even if the news were to become generally known.

I have not yet had the joy of reading
Rob Roy
, and dare not ask Papa to seek a copy of it for me in New Haven. As you can see, I, too, have been reduced to plundering my poor father-in-law’s volumes of their title-pages and end-papers. Please send me your recipe for ink, as that commodity has risen to a
dollar
a bottle at Lufkin’s.

Dear friend, how I wish you were here! After Peggie left, and I had begun to render out the lard from the pig-killing, so that soap-making can commence Monday, Mother began one of her headaches, the worst yet, I think: staggering blindly from room to room, trying to beat her head against the walls. All the laudanum I dared give her seemed to have little effect, and even when she was half-stupefied, the pain remained. I did what I could for her, sitting beside her bed, holding her hand, then retreating into the kitchen to wrestle with wood, vats, stove until her cries brought me back. There was no one I could send for help, nor any way that I could leave her. The day was cold, wind blowing savagely, and though I did not want Mercy to see her Grandmother so, yet I kept remembering the story of how Emory, as a child, left his Father’s cabin and wandered away onto the mountain in a storm. So I kept my daughter, silent and terrified, by my side.

Mother fell asleep, finally, hours before Peggie came home—and here I sit, with kettles full of cooling grease, in the dark summer kitchen as it grows cold with the howling of the wind outside, and I am so glad that you are there, my dear friend. Sometimes it seems to me that Mother will be in this much pain forever, and will never die. This afternoon, I did wonder, if—I can not write it, and I won’t. But I did wonder.

I dread her waking up in pain again. By the sound of the storm, Papa will not be able to cross from the mainland tomorrow. And I must clean the summer kitchen yet tonight, and scald the pans from the evening’s milking.

Tell me about
Rob Roy
, my friend, or
Quentin Durward
, or how to find wild sweet potatoes, before we sleep tonight, you and I.

[lost]

[not sent]

Dear Cora,

Adam is sick again, poor little fellow. He wasn’t much bigger than a skinned squirrel when he was born, and at seven months it almost doesn’t seem that he’s grown at all. Usually he’s such a silent baby, but now he cries with fever. Last night some of the men shouted to Shut that little bastard up! and others took umbrage at this (I heard all this through the floor of my room) resulting in a battle royal, that made poor Adam cry all the worse. Emory finally went downstairs and broke some heads. I think there was moonshine involved on all sides. I’ve been dosing Adam with willow-bark, which seems to bring the fever down, and wrapping him in wet cloths. Julia and Tom have taken turns, sitting up with him in the night. One of the men—a stringy old devil with a gray beard down to his waist—care
fully gathered nearly a bushel of fresh horse-droppings from the corral and brought it to me, with the earnest advice that his Ma had always buried him up to his neck in it for fever. He assured me—unnecessarily—that they were absolutely fresh and still warm.

Last night, passing the nursery where Julia sat with her baby in her arms, I am ashamed to say I thought, If Adam dies, maybe Emory will go back to Cora … I wanted to weep, because I’ve become the kind of person who thinks like that, but I can’t. And in any case, I don’t think it’s true. What Emory will do, when the War is over—if the War ever ends—I don’t know. I don’t even know what he thinks, or wants, or thinks is going to happen. There is a look the men have in their eyes, flat and a little glazed, as if none of them thinks beyond the War. As if none expects he will live to see peace, or anything but what he now knows. Sometimes it crosses my mind that they—including Emory and Julia—don’t actually
want
the War to end, because they no longer know how to live in any other fashion. These days Emory is as careful to avoid being alone with me, as Julia is to keep us from any possibility of speaking unwatched.

This isn’t difficult. Tho’ winter is closing in and I did secure about a bushel of potatoes, I still go out to forage daily. I shot a woodchuck yesterday, and have seen hog tracks close to the house. Emory and his men hunt, as well as forage. Often, tho’ he is living in the same house, we barely speak for days on end. Tho’ I have heard there is a great thrust of men in the west, to take back Nashville, neither Emory nor Lyle is inclined to join the regular forces. At least Emory—unlike Lyle—makes his men cut wood for us.

Forgive me, for praying that Adam lives.

[not sent]

Dear Cora,

Bitter cold, rain, and a little snow. Nothing in the traps, and with the Federal troops pulled back to Nashville, the major source of supply for the militia is gone. I must be very careful, bringing the fish I’ve dried down to the house, lest Lyle ask, Where did they come from? Or Julia feel moved to confide to Emory that she thinks I have a hidden store that those poor militiamen really need more desperately than we do. We’ve argued half a dozen times over this, and she’s wept, and called me selfish: “The only thing you’ve ever thought about is yourself,” she says. “You just want to go away and draw or read, and you don’t care about us at all.” And it isn’t true, Cora! Can’t I care about Julia—can’t I love Julia—and not want to be with her twenty-four hours out of every day?

It’s been nearly two months since your last letter, but I know if I walked to town, there’d be nothing. The Confederates have surrounded Nashville, and no mail is getting through from the North. Even with the Federal camp gone, Julia doesn’t like to see me walk into town: “Full of damn Lincolnites gossipping about what isn’t their business,” she sniffs. Every time one of Lyle’s boys comes back from there, he’s brimming with news about who “came for” whom.

Emory is away, “foraging.” Lyle and his boys are camped in our parlors and the hall, and he’s up here with me every night, and Julia’s started asking again about when are we going to marry? Sunday I went up to the cave, and took a potion of pennyroyal and blue cohosh, which Mrs. P at the Federal camp had told me would bring on my menses if they stopped. It’s so hard to tell, because even when I
haven’t been with Lyle, my periods will stop. The pennyroyal made me bleed a little, but it’s awful, and I feel sick and queer. I wish there were someone I could talk to about this, someone I could ask. But, it would get back to Julia, or would get around town, and I
will not
have people saying that I sleep with Lyle only so he’ll bring us food. Anyway there’s no doctor in town.

I miss your letters. They’re hidden up at the cave, but I know most of them, the same way I know books, and at night I “read” them in my head, the same way I “read” books.

Dearest Susanna,

Although no newspapers have come to the island with details, Peggie announced with triumph—as if I had been praying for the contrary—that the Confederates have been driven from Nashville. I will take the chance that it is once more possible to write to you. One hears such terrible things now, about those who have been driven from their homes in Tennessee, camping in hundreds around the railway stations or on the fringes of Army depots. I pray that it is only the armies around Nashville that have kept your letters from me, and not that you are no longer on Bayberry to send them.

Snow lies thick here, and the night, though almost cloudless, is profoundly dark. I’ve made up the fire in Mother’s room, and in the parlor, for Papa is expected sometime tonight, and there is a little chicken pie, and an apple tart—made with maple sugar—ready on the kitchen sideboard, waiting until he shall come in. As Papa’s salary will no longer purchase the things we need—salt, which is
fifty
cents a box,
over five times what it was at the start of the War!—I, too, have started sewing, stitching together caps and bodices for a woman on the mainland. I hate to sell the little time I have in the evenings by lamplight, that used to be my own to read. Yet, I would rather do that, than trade away the food I have accumulated. So, like you, I “read” in my mind and memories, for except on the most stormy nights, Peggie still prefers to seek Elinor’s company. It is desperately lonely sometimes, listening in the silence for the small sounds from Mother’s room.