Homeland (35 page)

The President clasped my hand, and said, We will find Emory, my child, if he is above the ground.

September is nearly gone. The War’s end in April seems tiny, like an event viewed far off through the wrong end of a telescope. Yet I remember as if it were yesterday, weeping for President Lincoln as I scalded the milk-churn and rolled pastry for a chicken pie. In my mind I see the summer kitchen, closed up now and shuttered tight, and the bare bedstead in Mother’s room, as it looked when I made the last walk through the place, to make sure nothing was forgotten, nothing left behind. Snow will cover it soon.

In the same way I see Elinor’s face, and Oliver, and poor little Nollie whom I would have liked to know better—and the loft in the barn, bare now of its beds of hay, where Will and I would meet one another. Enough time has passed that I can say, “He was good to me, and I was a fool in need of comfort.” All these things, like the Ghosts of Christmas Present fading into the echoes of Christmas
past: a stage-set struck, living, as you said once, only in my memory. It is time to move on.

I remember what you wrote me once, that before every door that we ought not to pass through, there stands an angel with a flaming sword. Now that angel has stepped aside, and opened for me a door whose existence I never dreamed of. I stand on the threshold, looking at the road stretching ahead of me, and I only wait here for Emory to join me, so that we may undertake it, hand in hand.

I hope that your silent, beautiful woods are becoming a little safer, my friend; that the squirrels you catch are fat, and the berries plentiful, and your Pa comes home soon.

Dear Cora,

I’m sending you the enclosed, not in the hope of forgiveness, but in the hope that you will at least understand that I did the best I could.

Emory is dead. I know this—I talked to the man who saw him shot, and who buried him. Don’t linger for him anymore, Cora. Don’t say No to the road that stretches before you, to the promises of what your new life will bring.

I’m sorry I didn’t tell you all this before. I’m sending you all the letters that I wrote to you during the War—or wrote to the Pretend-You, after we could no longer get letters through. I don’t even remember all that’s in them, but they will explain what happened, and why I didn’t write to you even when I could have, and why I can’t see you again.

You have always been the only person who truly respected me; I am ashamed at how little I deserve that respect. Your kindness and your faith should have better payment, than what I’ve given you. Ensnared as I am by people who are still fighting a war that can never be either won or lost, who will not give up or let go—reading your accounts of the new life on whose threshold you stand—I know how terrible a disservice I do you, every day that I tell you a lie that will hold you back, that will keep you waiting for someone who will never arrive. You deserve better than that—and that is something that I
can
give you.

I love you very much. I’m just not very good at loving anybody.

[packet of letters enclosed]

[returned unopened March 30, 1866]
[burned unread]

[returned unopened March 30, 1866]
[burned unread]

[returned unopened March 30, 1866]
[burned unread]

[returned unopened March 30, 1866]
[burned unread]

Mrs. Poole,

Enclosed are the letters you’ve been writing to my sister. I’m sorry to say she took her own life last October. May God damn you and every other Yankee to the Hell you deserve, for eternity.

[not sent]

Dearest Susanna,

Back during the War—I don’t really remember when—I remember asking you, what is this capacity of the human heart, to sustain the flame of hope for years, without visible fuel. You were there—I
knew
you were there—and that sustained me, during the worst days I have known. I do not know how I would have survived them, without your laughter. As I wrote to you then—to the Pretend-Susanna who would invariably get my letters the day after they were written—so I write to you now. I hope you’ll get this one.

Not to say,
Forgive me
, for the anger that kept me silent for those months—for you must have done what you did very shortly after you sent me that last letter, and you did not know how many months it took, for my anger to run its course. But to say,
Thank you, for setting me free
. Like Elizabeth Bennet—pushing her way through her anger at Darcy to re-read his letter and see what he actually said—I have forced myself to read and re-read your letters. I have indeed been lingering on the threshold of life, waiting for Emory. Had you not known of his death, and had the courage to tell me, how long would I have waited?

Justin has been in Washington since February. This evening, after I had read Julia’s letter, he called: I think it must be true what everyone always said of him, that those curious gray eyes do see beyond the present and the visible. He said he had dreamed of you, walking away from Bayberry early one morning at first light; had dreamed of Julia weeping, and known that it was because you never would return. He had hoped, he said, that it meant that you had—or would—take the courage to leave that place.

And so I shall think of you, my friend: that you did take up your courage, and you did leave that place, and walk away into the dawn-light. But, the place where you went to—the place where you will be happy—has no mail delivery. Would I grudge you your happiness there, just because you could never write to me again?

I write you this last time, to tell you that I will be happy here.

Probably not in Washington. The country has changed because of the War, and will change more drastically in the wake of the bloodshed and death that it took, to settle the questions: Do the local interests of the States or the higher commands of the government have the right to say what is permitted and not permitted? And, shall men and women be subject to slavery?

My dear friend Will once said to me, that he found it hard to fight for his homeland, knowing that the fight itself would transform that homeland into something it had not been before. Those questions were answered, but the answers left a vast and bitter stain on the hearts of those who lost their husbands and brothers, their homes and their children’s hopes. Politicians and men hardened by violence and greed now pick at the looted ruin of the South, and that poison, too, will spread down the years. The land that we hoped to save has changed, and like all change, the result doesn’t look as we expected it would.

I think it will be years, before I return to Maine. I may never again walk along those roads where the houses I knew are shuttered up and empty. Justin has spoken of beginning again in the West—he currently makes his living driving a cab here in Washington—but it takes money to make a new start. President Johnson has promised to help us, as and when he can.

And so we will go on, dear friend, into this new homeland, that is not the place where I grew up. I will carry you with me in my heart, and read your letters—all of them—for what they are: letters from a time and place that are dear to me, despite the grief and pain. And I will be happy.

But my dear friend, I will miss you so.

Dear Miss Ashford:

At the exhibition at the Académie des Beaux-Arts this afternoon, I was struck speechless by your painting,
Federal Gunboats Run the Vicksburg Battery—Night
. It was not merely the beauty of the work which arrested me, but the resemblance it bears to a sketch in my possession, made by a dear friend of mine during the late American war. The clerk in charge of the exhibition directed me to the Galerie LaFontaine, where M. Taschler was kind enough to show me some of your other paintings—I was particularly taken by the
Barbarian Chieftain Shown How to Write
—-and to forward this note on to you.

My friend and I were estranged after the War, and I was told by members of her family that she had died. Not a day has passed since then that I have not cursed both my anger and my silence—for the fault was mine, and the circumstances leading to the break, far beyond her control. Yet, not until today did it ever occur to me to ask, Was the report of her death the truth?

If it was indeed the truth, and my friend is forever beyond my power to ask her forgiveness, please have no hesitation in dropping
this letter into the fire. I have no wish to cause further pain, nor to avoid the harvest of what I have sown.

My daughter, my father-in-law, and I came to Paris in November of 1866, in the household of General Dix, the new American Minister: my father-in-law as the General’s coachman, I as companion to the General’s invalid wife and governess to their nieces. Here I met—and this spring, married—an English gentleman, Mr. Broadstairs, the kindest and most scholarly of men. I am most happy.

Please do not feel any obligation to respond to this, if it will bring discomfort to you or to members of your family. Though I sorely miss my dear friend, I take great joy in seeing the beauty of your work, knowing with what pain all good work is wrought. Forgive me if I presume, but I bought your painting of the little Devil’s paintbrush flower. It sits before me as I write.

Dearest Cora—

Dearest Friend—

The first letter that you wrote to me, back in May of 1861, you
pointed out that were I my father’s son, rather than a daughter (and a homely one at that), no one would question my desire or my right to seek my right work, the calling of my heart. That meant so much to me, more than I can ever say. During those awful last years of the fighting, your letters saved my life, more than once. When you ceased writing, I felt it was I, not you as you say, who was reaping what I had sowed. I never knew you’d written: I think my sister Julia must have had a friend in town who intercepted whatever you tried to send me. But to tell the truth, after my betrayal of your trust, I did not expect you to write.