My Vicksburg (14 page)

He kept his head bowed for a full minute, getting his feelings under control. "Just promise me you won't run off with him if he ever decides he wants more of those delicious blackberries, will you?"

I said yes. I promised.

"Because I'd have to turn him in, Claire. Even if the war was over."

His head was still down. I went around Jewel to stand beside him, to comfort him. He'd said we all had to let Pa run the family, but things like this never reached Pa. Lan-don handled them. We tried to make life as easy for Pa as we could.

I went as close to him as I dared. I touched the white sleeve of his carefully tailored and laundered shirt. "Lan-don? You can trust me. I'd never run off with anybody. My family means too much to me."

He raised his head and looked at me. "You just want a wedding someday like Sarah and I had."

I smiled. He put his arm around me. "I mean it about Robert. If the no-count hooligan comes within a mile of you I'm turning him in, Claire Louise. Remember that."

Jewel whinnied, reminding us we hadn't even offered her anything to eat since she'd come home. So we brought her into the barn, where we fed and watered her. Landon took off her saddle and reins. I kissed her nose. "Well, you have your horse back," Landon said happily. "Just wish she could talk, is all."

Then we went back into the house and I finished icing the cake and Landon licked the bowl.

The people of the town of Vicksburg did not celebrate the Fourth of July the summer of 1864.

They did not celebrate it again for eighty-two years.

It was, after all, not only the birthday of America, it was the day their town surrendered to the Yankees. How could they celebrate?

World War I came and went. World War II followed not too far behind. Men from Vicksburg served and died in both.

On the Fourth of July in 1945, the people of Vicksburg decided it was time to celebrate the birthday of their country again. After all, the country had fought two terrible wars to continue to exist in freedom for everyone.

So two months after V-E Day they brought out their flags and their banners and played "The Star-Spangled Banner" and marched and roasted hot dogs and hamburgers and did all sorts of things that make up the celebration of the Fourth in this country.

After eighty-two years they managed to set aside their sorrow. And if the celebration was a little bittersweet, no one can blame them.

In a book I used for research for another novel I found a Post-it on which I had scribbled a note to myself, somewhere back over the last five years.

"Vicksburg," it said, "great story for a novel."

What brought me around to doing the siege of Vicksburg this time I cannot recall, but I suppose it was always in that file cabinet in the back of my mind where I go when looking for ideas that have been put on the back burner.

"The town where the people were trapped and lived in caves," I reminded myself, "my readers ought to love that premise."

But research and reading told me the story was so much more than that. This was the town where they named one of their 18-pound cannons "Whistling Dick," where the editor of the
Daily Citizen
kept printing all through the forty-seven-day siege, in spite of being shelled and attacked and running out of newsprint. He printed the paper on the back of old wallpaper.

This is the town where the people could venture out on the streets three times a day: eight in the morning, twelve noon, and eight at night, when the Yankee artillerymen ate their meals.

This is the town where "Old Abe," an American bald eagle and mascot for the 8th Regiment, Wisconsin Volunteers, was wounded. It was Old Abe's job to fly, screeching, over the enemy when his regiment fired at them. I have him being attended here by Landon Corbet, our heroine's doctor brother.

In short, I found so many delicious things happening in Vicksburg that I couldn't not write the book. I have followed history scrupulously and did not have to go far afield to fictionalize, but there are things I made up for the sake of story.

The Corbet family, for instance, is fictional, although there were many families in Vicksburg as gallant and well esteemed and confused as were they. I tried to make Claire Louise as true to her age as was possible. Little James I patterned after my grandson James who is near the same age. The trepidation Claire Louise has around her father is the same as I had around my father all my life. Claire Louise finally, in a way, "connects" with her father. I never did.

She calls him "sir" and her mother "ma'am" because that is the way children in the South addressed their parents in those days.

I had some difficulty, at first, with giving Pa malaria. At first I thought it only came to soldiers who fought in World War II, like my late brother-in-law, but I consulted
Doctors in Blue,
a wonderful book by George Worthington Adams, and discovered that malarial fevers were constant and many during the Civil War—522 cases per 1,000.

Which brings me to the many and wonderful books I used for research that are listed in my bibliography. I wish to thank the many authors who wrote them so people like me could
enjoy and use them. I particularly thank the women who penned the hospital books, for my information has been diluted from these.

In particular I am grateful to the personnel at the bookstore of the Eastern National Military Park Service at Vicksburg, Mississippi, especially Nikki Anderson, assistant unit manager, who helped me select research books and got them to me so promptly. The National Park Service has not failed me yet.

It is important to note here that at the same time the siege at Vicksburg was winding down—July
2, 3,
and 4—the battle of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, was raging. The South was defeated at Gettysburg the same day, July 4, that Vicksburg surrendered to General U. S. Grant. No one ever seems to mention this when they speak of Gettysburg. It seems that the siege of Vicksburg is a stepchild in the annals of Civil War history.

I realize, fully, that once my faithful readers finish this novel I am going to receive many many e-mails and letters asking what happened to Claire Louise Corbet. Did she meet Robert again? Did he come back to the stream where the blackberries were? Did she run off with him? My readers always want closure, with everything tied up with a bright red ribbon.

Life is not that way. I don't know what happened to Claire Louise any more than you do. But there are possibilities. In life there are always possibilities. So sit back and make up your own ending. Use your imagination. And if you don't like it, then do it over again tomorrow. That's what writing is all about. And that's why I like it so much.

Adams, George Worthington.
Doctors in Blue: The Medical History of the Union Army in the Civil War.
Dayton, Ohio: Press of Morningside, 1985.

Alcott, Louisa May.
Hospital Sketches.
Boston: Applewood Books, 1992. Originally published in 1863 by J. Redpath, Bedford, Mass.

Ballard, Michael B.
Vicksburg: The Campaign That Opened the Mississippi.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

Boileau, Lowell. "Suspicions: The Real Story of Special Orders 191?"
The Lost Order Mystery.
http://www.bhere.com/
plugugly/lost/story.html.

Child, Lydia Maria.
The Family Nurse.
Boston: Charles J. Hendee, 1837.

Cotton, Gordon A.
Dr. and Mrs. Balfour at Home,
from the
Letters of Emma Balfour,
1847—1857. Vicksburg, Miss.: Print Shop, 2006.

Denney, Robert E.
Civil War Medicine: Care & Comfort of the Wounded.
New York: Sterling Publishing Co., 1995.

Grabau, Warren E.
Ninety-Eight Days: A Geographer's View of the Vicksburg Campaign.
Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2000.

Hoehling, A. A.
Vicksburg:
47
Days of Siege.
Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 1996.

Jones, Katharine M.
Heroines of Dixie: Spring of High Hopes
. St. Simons Island, Ga.: Mockingbird Books, 1974. Originally published in 1955 by Bobbs-Merrill Co, Indianapolis, Ind.

———.
Heroines of Dixie: Winter of Desperation.
St. Simons Island, Ga.: Mockingbird Books, 1975. Originally published in 1966 by Bobbs-Merrill Co., Indianapolis, Ind.

Pember, Phoebe Yates.
A Southern Woman's Story: A Wry and Realistic Account of Work in a Confederate Military Hospital.
Jackson, Tenn.: McCowat-Mercer Press, 1959. Originally published in 1879 by G. W. Carleton & Co., New York.

U.S. Department of the Interior.
Vicksburg and the Opening of the Mississippi River,
1862—63:
A History and Guide Prepared for Vicksburg National Military Park, Mississippi
(National Park Service Handbook 137). Washington, D.C.: Division of Publications, National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, 1986.

Waldrep, Christopher.
Vicksburg's Long Shadow: The Civil War Legacy of Race and Remembrance.
Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, 2005.

Werner, Emmy E.
Reluctant Witnesses: Children's Voices from the Civil War.
Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998.