Homeland (5 page)

I’m making a drawing of Gaius, as a Christmas present for Henriette. My brother is much thinner than he was last April, and he moves as if he’s in some kind of pain, though he has no wound. He hardly ever speaks, when he used to always have an opinion about
everything
, but he’s so tender and gentle when he plays with his children, it scares me sometimes.

I’m writing this in Payne’s old room, which is quiet, and warm because it’s over the kitchen. The rest of the house is freezing. I can hear Pa, Regal, and some of the militia, talking and shouting in the big parlor. We go back to Nashville Monday.

I got Den to take me into town this afternoon to see Mrs. Johnson. It felt so strange, to have everyone ready to hang one another, over what used to be just politics. They’re seriously talking about turning Mrs. Johnson, sick as she is, out of her house, in spite of her oldest son swearing the Loyalty Oath. Her daughter’s husband swore the Oath only after they caught him leading a band of about four hundred armed Lincolnites to seize Rogersville. It sounds so insane! Men from the Confederate Army camp outside town have ambushed and beat up men, only for
speaking
out for the Union, not even for taking up arms.

It was Mrs. Johnson who told me, Justin Poole is leaving Tennessee. I will give him this letter tomorrow.

I wanted to send you this to say,
please
keep writing to me, even if my answers to you get lost. Everyone around me—Pa, and Julia, and the Elliotts back at the Academy—talk as if Secession and the
Confederacy and how terrible the Yankees are, are the
only
things that exist anymore: as if the world ends at the Mason-Dixon Line. I need you to keep reminding me that that isn’t true.

Dear Cora,

I wasn’t going to write again until I heard from you, but something has happened—or I
think
something has happened. You are the only person I would speak to of this; you are the only person who saw what happened at the depot, that day you and Emory left for Boston.

Saturday I got Den to ride up to the Holler with me, to hand your letter to Justin Poole. I hadn’t seen him since that day at the depot. The whole house is in ruins now, not just the side he nailed up after his wife died. He and his dogs were waiting in the laurels, and because of what happened at the depot all those months ago, I didn’t know what to say. He asked me, “Are you happy, Susie? Barrin’ your
grief.” And I said, Yes, I am, because in a strange way it’s true. Being at the Academy, and getting proper Art lessons, and being able to copy good paintings—knowing that I really am on the road that will take me to Philadelphia and beyond. It’s as if nothing—not even the War—really matters, not deep down where the Real Me lives.

Mr. Poole said that he had a favor to ask of me, and we left Den at the Holler with the horses, and climbed part-way up the mountain to Skull Cave. (You remember, I took you there last March?) On the way he said he was sorry that he could do no more at Payne’s funeral than stand in the church door, but I knew if he’d done that, he must have seen your Emory. And yet he did not mention it.

I asked him about what had happened to his wife. He told me that she’d run out of the cabin after they’d quarrelled, and when the storm came up he shut Emory (who was only three) into the cabin, and went looking for her. He found her broken body at the bottom of Spaniard’s Leap, but the storm was too fierce then to get down the mountain. “I was no fit husband for her or any girl,” he told me, and added with a little grin that’s very like Emory’s, “luckily for you, Miss. I know I was crazy, after. But I did all I was able, just then.” I remember Mrs. Johnson telling me that her husband tried to take little Emory away from his father and that Justin drove him off with a shotgun.

There are all kinds of stories about Justin Poole’s treasure, because he was the worst miser in five counties while Emory was growing up, saving the money to send him to Yale. But you’ll never guess what’s in the cave! It’s even better than gold, Cora! Way down deep past where I took you, is the rest of his books. “I wanted somebody besides me to know where these were,” he told me. I peered into one of the trunks and saw the
Inferno
and
Jane Eyre
and Marcus Aurelius’s
Meditations
in Latin, and
all
Walter Scott’s the Waverly novels, which I
desperately
wanted to take back with me to Nashville except I knew stupid Nora Vandyke would cut the pages out of them for curl-papers. “You’d think, in forty-five years, I’d have more to show,” Justin said. I promised him that I’d come to check on them, every time I was back in Greene County. “You did ask Pa for my
hand,” I said, to make him smile. “Keeping these safe is the least I can do for you. Will you join the Army, when you get to Kentucky?”

“Not Kentucky,” he said. “If I join there, Emory and I would meet, sure as death. I can’t shed my son’s blood.” He said he’d go to his sister in Illinois, and join there. “And when the War is done,” I asked, “will you be back?” He said, “I see it bringin’ me nuthin’ but pain,” which made me feel strange, because everyone in the mountains swears Justin Poole has Second Sight. “When the War is done, you’ll be gone,” he went on, and put his hand to my cheek, the way he did in the depot, the day he went to watch his son get on the train with you as his new bride last April. “To Philadelphia, and Paris, and wherever artists must go.” And just the way we did in the depot that day, I put my arms around him and we kissed, and if he’d asked me to go with him then, to Illinois or the Moon or back to the Holler to live the rest of our lives, I would have gone.

I thought that Art was the only thing I cared about, Cora, the only thing in the world for me: the road out of being the housekeeper at Bayberry all my life, the road out of the South, out of a world where everybody expects girls to marry and have babies when the only thing that makes me happy is drawing and painting. But with everything in me I also want to be with Justin. And I know I can’t have both things. If I’m an artist, I would be a
terrible
wife, and a mother worse to my babies than Pa is to me. And I would hate them, and Justin, too. I can’t be what
I
need, and what everybody else needs.

And I can’t imagine living without either one.

I don’t know whether to tear this letter up and throw it in the fire, or put it in an envelope and send it.

Dear Cora,

The Christmas present I most wanted (since it isn’t likely anyone’s going to give me a painting by Caravaggio); your letter from Deer Isle, about those awful ladies of the Southeast Harbor Reading Circle telling you that you must divorce your Emory. Being buried in snow like that with everything smelling like smoke sounds horrible, and it’s hard to imagine how trapping
more
snow around the house is going to keep you any warmer. I love cheese-making but I’m afraid the only time I’m glad Pa is a slave-owner, is when it’s time to make soap. But there’s no cheese this fall because the militia has eaten most of the cows.

I’ve enclosed some of the drawings I made of one of the taverns on Spring Street. Use your best judgement about showing them to anyone. Nora and the other girls here all squeal when I paint things like old shoes and broken glass and ask, “Why do you always paint such ugly pictures?”
She
should talk! Her flowers all look like cauliflowers and her butterflies look like ducks.
Dead
ducks. I replied, “I don’t know, Nora—why do
you
paint such ugly pictures?”

Most of the girls have gone home to their families, and the school halls echo strangely tonight. Mr. and Mrs. Elliot gave those few who are left here presents at supper. (New pen nibs! Heaven only knows how Mrs. E got them!) I will go to the Russells’ tomorrow for dinner.

Well, everybody who said last spring, “The War will be over by Christmas” is wrong. Last Christmas was the last time I saw Payne. Now my dearest brother is gone, and Bayberry … isn’t really Bayberry anymore. I hope and pray your brother Brock is well, and having a happy Christmas, wherever he is. I pray for Emory, and for you, buried under a hill of snow on Deer Isle.

Last night I pretended I was there with you in your snug bedroom behind the stairs; that we could whisper to each other the way Julia and I used to do. I pretended I still had all my brothers (even one whose wife would rather sew than read!) and a Papa to spend Christmas with, and a Mother who’s strong and kind. Since I can’t have those tonight, I’ll settle for Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and d’Artagnan, savored secretly like candy in the stillness here that’s broken only by the sounds of the troop trains.

I will send this off to Mrs. Johnson tomorrow, and hope she still “knows people who know people” (she should—her middle son is riding with the bush-whackers!). Mrs. Polk—widow of the President—gives a ball at her house. There is much dashing about the hallways and lending back and forth of gloves and laces, and you can smell burnt hair even downstairs in the parlor. Henriette’s sisters will be there, but Julia begged Henriette to stay home with her. She would have begged me to stay home with her (she is due in March), except she and Henriette are trying desperately to marry me off. Both tell me I should change to second mourning for the occasion, to better my chances: Henriette’s sister has a black-and-white that will fit me, they say, and hint that six weeks is “enough” for a brother. But I remember dancing with Payne, and in his honor will go to Mrs.
Polk’s ball in my best black. Not that Payne would care, but I feel better so.

To be honest, I’d rather stay here at the Academy tonight reading
The Three Musketeers …
or better still, be magically transported to Maine, with a bottle of Mrs. Polk’s blockade-run champagne in my hand, to toast in 1862—and all it may bring—with you!

Dearest,

The same boat that brought Papa home to celebrate Christmas brought your letter of early November. I am so sorry, to hear about your brother—if there is anything that I can do, to help you or Julia, please let me know.

It feels strange to write that I’m glad you saw my darling Emory. Thank you for not upbraiding him on my behalf. You asked how you could make his departure more bearable for me, and you have done so already, in greeting him as a friend. Did he look well? Thank you, too, for that wondrous sketch in the margin, of him on the gravel of Bayberry’s drive, wearing a borrowed black coat.

And thank you for the drawing of me in my room. I laughed at the portrayal of me reading that mammoth pile of newspapers in bed: would that there were so many available here! Yet more often—my preceptresses at Hartford Female Seminary would grieve to hear—bedtime finds me lost utterly in
Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility
, or the beguiling
Emma
. How often I have been told,
and have told others
, that the reading of novels “rotted” a girl’s mind and rendered her unfit for “serious” mental effort. I suppose, if my mind is rotting this winter as a result of the contents of Mr. Poole’s trunk, I would not be aware of it. Yet it is to Miss Austen—and to yourself, Susie—that I owed my ability to laugh and shake my head
after my “speech” before the Southeast Harbor Ladies Reading Circle, rather than weeping with vexation and rage!

To give the Reading Circle its new and proper name: it is now the Daughters of the Union Propaganda Society. Do you have Propaganda Societies in the South? They have sprouted up over the East since the War began, to encourage recruitment and promote the purchase of government bonds to finance the War. I spoke of the people I met in Tennessee: said that many Southerners sincerely support the Union but favor slavery as well, that many are kind, good-hearted, Christian people who do not deserve to be judged by their leaders or by their neighbors. Of Emory I only said, “My husband made a hard choice, one with which I cannot agree. But he has not ceased to be my husband, before the eyes of God.” This was when Elinor went to the melodeon and said, “Why don’t we all sing ‘May God Save the Union’?” The only person who spoke to me afterwards was Sukey Greenlaw. She said that her cousin is a lawyer in Portland and if I wished to divorce Emory for treason, her cousin would see to it at a quite nominal charge. When I crept to my bed that night, throbbing as if from a poisoned wound, I seemed to hear kindly Mr. Bennet say to his daughters, “For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and to laugh at them in our turn?” I managed one rich laugh, and slept.