So Many Beginnings: A Little Women Remix: 2 (Remixed Classics)

by Morrow, Bethany C.

  “Well,” Meg said.

  “Well what?” Jo asked, breathing heavily.

  “Write it down!”

  Jo looked from Meg to Mammy, who tipped her head as though there was nothing more to say.

  “Right.”

  “Right!” Meg insisted, adopting a contagiously wild expression despite her own woes.

  “Right!” Jo echoed once more before the three fell into laughter.

  * * *

  There had been another letter in Mammy’s possession, but that one she needed time alone with. When three of her daughters were cobbling together a satisfying supper that did not require a fire and Beth was napping in their bedroom, Mammy had slipped into her own. She hadn’t closed the door, lest Amethyst immediately grow curious. Closed doors inspired that in the child. Instead, Mammy took to her rocking chair in one corner of the room, so that if anyone interrupted, she would have a moment to collect herself before their eyes found her.

  The envelope she’d handed her eldest daughter had been almost bare, she’d noticed, though of course she hadn’t drawn Meg’s attention to it. Perhaps the girl had thought her suitor lacked the time to embroider the white space with drawings, but Mammy knew that men in the field or on the road had precious little but time. Except for the brief and ugly interludes that were their enlisted purpose, she heard they craved the escape, and the beauty—many discovering artistic abilities they might otherwise have never displayed. Thankfully, her dear husband was not away in battle, but still he devoted himself to sending her thoroughly embellished envelopes.

  On this one, he’d left a white trim around the address, but everywhere else, he’d painstakingly drawn sassafras. Three-lobed leaves were arranged all over the paper, shaded beautifully so that despite the lack of color, she could almost smell the plant’s lemony aroma. He’d even drawn the berries, perfect little orbs that outside of pictures were an alluring dark blue. He’d drawn five of the berries, of course, and nestled them on a bed of leaves in the right corner of the envelope, on the front, where his wife was sure to see them. She smiled when she did, hearing his voice, and the adoring way he might describe them.

  Five sassafras berries, for my five girls.

  Five wildflowers …

  Five kisses …

  Five huckleberries, he’d said once, for my five sweet girls. He’d presented a rather unamused wife with less than a handful of them, enlisting their youngest to keep the full tin hidden behind her back. Amy had waited until her mother was just about to ask if the two would like an imaginary pie, because there was nothing she could do with only five huckleberries, and then bouncing, the girl had produced their harvest, some of which were jostled onto the kitchen floor. Mammy hadn’t minded. Fallen fruit could be gathered and cleaned. Her husband and her child were pleased with their deception, and she was pleased he loved them so.

  Now she looked back at the envelope in her hand and wondered why sassafras, when its berries weren’t fit to eat. The thought stung, just a bit, like a pinprick in the tip of a finger, and she knew before she opened the letter that something sour weighed on her husband’s mind.

  After she’d read the letter, Mammy put it away. They would have dinner first, she decided, on the back porch, the way they did when they’d waited til sundown and the heat still hadn’t abated. The girls would take turns rewetting their rags at the pump before replacing them on the backs of their necks, and Amy might eventually stick her whole head under the stream. She couldn’t decide whether it was best to let them laugh together before she read their father’s letter, or whether it was cruel to tell them so near to when they’d all retire to their room and be left with their thoughts as they tried to sleep. They wouldn’t be alone, at least, two of them to a bed.

  “Thank you, Lord, for four daughters,” Mammy whispered her commonly expressed and genuinely felt gratitude. Tonight she meant it even more.

  “Papa’s sent a letter,” she told her children when they were together on the back porch, and water was beading off of Amy’s hair.

  Four breaths caught, followed by excited chatter, as they gathered closer to their mother’s skirt and sat down to hear.

  “Dear wife, my darling Margaret, beloved Mammy,” she read, amid happy sighs. They were each hearing it in their father’s voice, she could tell, the way she always did when she read his letters.

  “I will not bore you with missives detailing your beauty, as familiar with your own face, and the mahogany of your eyes, and the curve of your delicate chin as you are.” The girls smiled and exchanged approving glances. Even Meg, who could not be blamed for being less enthusiastic about a letter that immediately extolled its author’s adoration, having received such a different one in the same day. “I will not tell you how often I say your name aloud, as though it might cause you to appear before me, or how frequently I am the subject of gentle ribbing for asking you a question you couldn’t possibly hear.”

  Mammy made a fragile laugh, but in the company of her daughters, no one could tell the way it tapered. Her eyes were wet now, but they must have thought her moved by their father’s precious words.

  “I will not ask if Meg is still a skilled and remarkable teacher, and whether the Union and the colony are lucky to have her. Nor whether Joanna builds houses as well as I—or as well as she builds pictures in our minds with the elegance of her words.”

  “No one will have a home as lovely as the one you built, Papa,” Jo said, as though the letter might capture her voice and transport it back to her father. She didn’t say how few builders there were, or how few tools, and how even the Union officers were constantly pleading for supplies on their behalf, not to mention pay. There were probably worries enough in Corinth, or else Papa would have come home.

  “I will not ask after Bethlehem’s latest masterpiece,” Mammy continued reading, “or whether she has recently spun gold from straw, as she is known to do. Nor whether Amethyst has been keeping the dust away by dancing on the wood floors I laid.

  “I will not ask if you are keeping each other well, and whole, and happy, because I know you always do. No man has ever been luckier than I, and none has greater cause to take up the Union’s banner, when it is finally offered.”

  Mammy’s voice broke then. All four of her daughters noticed, and one by one, their faces slackened or stilled, and Meg’s eyes fell. Mammy didn’t return the three gazes that still held her. She was afraid they might be quivering as terribly as hers. She held the letter as though she were still reading, though now that paper trembled.

  Jo had to take her father’s letter, gingerly, and then one of her mother’s hands while the woman cried quietly, and Jo read in her place.

  “I will only ask your forgiveness, Margaret, for thinking you would agree to this. That you would know I’d choose to fight, when I have so very much to fight for. I’ll ask you to forgive me for leaving from Corinth without coming home first, because I couldn’t. The officers in command would not allow it, and I would not have come, lest I lose my nerve at the sight of my five angels and decide to stay.

  “Know that it’s not the Union’s side I’m on, Margaret,” Jo read through her own tears, “but yours. Always. My love to you, and then to our children. May God bless and keep us, Alcott Josiah March.”

  Joanna looked down at her mother, around whom all her sisters huddled, Amy almost entirely in her lap. She sank down to the porch to join them and wrapped her arms around Mammy’s shoulders.

  The sky had finally fallen dark, piercing bright stars gleaming throughout it. The humidity had broken, or else grief masked it. The March women could hardly feel the weather when they were occupied with the breaking of their hearts.

  They should feel proud, someone like Joseph Williams might have told them. In their heartache, they should be buoyed by the courage their husband and father displayed, and know that whatever happened, he would be a hero. It didn’t matter that to these five women, he was already so much more.

  Mammy held her fourteen-ye
ar-old daughter curled in her lap, and thought of all she was privileged to know because of her work with the officers. There were dangers only a Black soldier faced, in addition to the terror of battle. In the short time since President Lincoln had begun allowing them to enlist, she’d heard more than one report about what befell their men who were captured by Confederates. The Confederates’ illegitimate President Davis ordered them delivered to the law officers in whichever state they were captured—only it rarely ever got that far. There would be few Black prisoners of war, even for the purpose of reenslavement. For daring to resist their oppressors, for having the audacity to fight as white men did, Black soldiers captured by the Confederacy were executed.

  If Alcott March survived the battle, he might still not come home.

  Mammy would not dare tell that to her children. She would keep it to herself, lodged in her throat like a hot stone rather than let it scald even the eldest two.

  “Come on,” she said, leaning down to kiss a still-crying Amy’s cheek. “We might as well cry in bed.”

  Jo unwrapped herself, and then Meg, who had to help Beth to her feet. It was despair that weakened her just now, but Mammy saw the way Bethlehem winced. She’d done the same during supper, twisting away then so that her family might not see her face.

  “I’ll put Amy in bed with me, and then I’ll be in to kiss you all goodnight.”

  Somehow they dispersed, shutting the kitchen door behind them and closing out the starlight.

  As she promised, Mammy tucked Amethyst into her bed, and then came to sit first beside Bethlehem.

  “How have you been feeling?” she asked quietly. Meg was sitting in her bloomers, her back against the wall, with Jo’s head in her lap. Both girls were still, but Mammy could see from the look in their eyes that their thoughts and attention were miles and miles away.

  “I’m all right, Mammy,” Beth answered. “Only tired.”

  “You have been for days.”

  “I didn’t want to worry you. It must be the summer’s heat dealing harshly with me, and missing Papa all the time.”

  “No child who has ever tried has managed to spare their mother worry by hiding things from her,” she said, stroking the hair Beth hadn’t captured beneath her sleeping cap, before tucking it inside. “Tell me what’s going on.”

  “I don’t understand it,” Beth said, barely above a whisper. “Pain, sometimes, in my chest. Aching behind my knees, and sometimes pain there, too. And dizziness, for no reason. As though I’ve been twirling with Amy, even when I haven’t.”

  “And fatigue,” Mammy added.

  “Always. Sometimes I can’t keep myself awake. I’ll go to the big house expecting to work, and before I know it, I’ll lie down on the carpet and hours will pass.”

  Mammy’s brow creased, and she took her daughter’s hand.

  “What’s happening?” Beth asked. “Am I ill?”

  “I don’t know.” A fresh tear slipped down Mammy’s face. She had questions of her own. Was the whole world coming undone? Was freedom to be just as fraught as the old life? It’d been miraculous to keep a family together back then, not to mention taking in a child whose mother had not been so blessed, but they’d done it. Now her husband—who was only meant to be gone another week or two, or until a migration of Union soldiers made it safe to travel from Mississippi back to North Carolina—was going toward danger, rather than away from it. Now one of her children was unwell, and she didn’t know with what.

  Mammy stopped herself.

  Beth was asleep already, praise God.

  Praise God, that was what she would do. He’d brought them out of Egypt, and not into a desert but a paradise they would have a hand in cultivating. Roanoke Island was Canaan, and every time a little rain fell, she would not worry it might flood.

  “Some of the missionary teachers have trained as nurses, haven’t they?” she asked aloud.

  When she turned, Meg and Jo were exactly as they’d been when she looked last. Her heart threatened to sink, but she straightened her shoulders and went to their bed.

  “Meg,” she said gently, sitting in the sliver of space that remained. She took her eldest daughter’s face in her hand and waited while the girl’s eyes slowly drifted to hers. She felt as if she could take no more of seeing her family hurt, but she’d lived a very different way not so long ago, and so had they; she knew all of them could manage much more than any one should be required. “I need to know which of the missionary teachers have nurse training. Beth isn’t well.”

  Meg’s eyes focused at that, and she turned toward her younger sisters’ bed.

  “She’s sleeping now, but I’d like someone to come and see to her.”

  “Constance.” Her voice rattled a bit, as though it’d sat on a shelf for some time without use, instead of a matter of minutes. “Constance Evergreen was training to be a nursing missionary before they began recruiting teachers. I’ll ask her to come between lessons tomorrow, if you don’t mind her coming inside the house.”

  “We never had a say before,” Mammy said when her daughter reminded her that now they did. “Everything was theirs, even the dirty mat and the floor where we laid our heads.”

  She looked around the room her daughters shared and tried to recall what she’d hoped for in the old life. Her imagination had been big enough to know that one day they’d be free. She’d known there’d be a house, but it had only been a word. The feeling of having her husband and her daughters near, with no threat of sale, had seemed more than enough. Even if she’d pictured a real homestead, she’d had no way of knowing there’d be any rooms but one. One would have seemed enough back then, with hanging sheets for privacy. Now here they were in a room just for her children. They slept in beds raised off the floor, built by their father, on a small plot of land that belonged to them, and it was up to her who came inside.

  Praise God.

  “Give Constance Evergreen my permission, and my thanks, if she’ll come and see to Bethlehem.”

  VI

  “Good day,” Constance said when the door was opened a modest sliver. Amy’s face was only visible in part, and the young woman tilted her head as though that would reveal the rest of the girl. “My name is Miss Constance Evergreen, and I’ve come to see about your sister.”

  “I know,” Amy informed her, and then widened the opening without stepping back to let the woman in. “Mammy told me to expect you.”

  A quiet fell over the two of them, during which Constance was not sure what to say. Clearly she didn’t know why she hadn’t been invited into the home, as she’d already removed her hat. Amy gave her no assistance, standing uncharacteristically flat on her feet in her lovely brown boots and watching the young white woman flush in the hot day.

  “May I come inside?” Constance asked at last, and Amy broke into a charming smile.

  “Why, of course you may,” she said cheerfully, and stepped back to let the woman in before twirling on her tiptoes farther into the room and extending one arm toward the hall. “Beth is resting in the room with the open door.”

  “Thank you,” the missionary teacher told her, and went where she’d been directed. Amy carried on, performing a solo waltz before the open shutters.

  A short time later, Constance reemerged from the bedroom, but went farther into the house, taking the jug from just inside the kitchen door. Amy heard the pump not long after, and then the woman reentered the house and made her way back to the bedroom.

  Peeking around the doorframe, Amy watched Constance help her sister sit up with her to drink the water, and some of the lightness left her. One of her shoulders sank, and she nibbled the inside of her lip.

  “Forgive me, Bethlehem,” Constance said, “I don’t mean to be indelicate, but have you been using the rag recently? You do bleed each month by now?”

  Beth nodded her head as though if left to herself for a moment or two, she might fall immediately back to sleep.

  “And has it come recently?”

  Bet
h shook her head, and reached for the water jug again.

  “And you haven’t partaken in activities that might have interrupted it?”

  “Do you mean with a man?”

  “Oh!” Constance’s cheeks blushed, but it looked to Amy like all her visible skin did. Her hair was brushed flat and pulled into a harsh bun, low against her neck. It wasn’t very becoming on a woman only a few years older than Meg, though Amy thought it very much matched the teacher’s name. It seemed a hairstyle that someone named Constance, or perhaps Prudence, would wear. Worse, around her hairline, Constance had very short and therefore unruly hairs that disrupted the desired sleekness. It seemed clear that they were the result of pulling her hair back too tightly, and they stood straight up despite that when the young woman was very concerned or in thought, she laid her hand against the sides or top of her hair as though to smooth it down. It looked dreadfully painful, and not only because Amy despised having her hair tied down at all, but because when Constance’s pale skin brightened and rouged, it made it look like the tight hairstyle was to blame.

  “No, no. I’m sorry, Bethlehem, I meant have your chores been too strenuous? When a woman is on the rag, doctors prescribe a bit more rest, and a lessening of work, so as not to interrupt it, which can make one ill.”

  “We were never given that option,” Beth answered before adding, “but it isn’t time this month.”

  “I see.” The woman applied the back of her hand to Beth’s forehead and then to her chest. “You are warm, but then it’s August. You don’t feel feverish. And you share this bed with your younger sister?”

  Beth nodded, eyes closing.

  “And she seems in good health.”

  Amy presented herself, fully, in the doorway, in case Constance wanted to analyze her, but the woman only felt Beth’s forehead again and sucked her teeth. She seemed genuinely concerned, at least.

  “I’m sorry,” Beth said, and scooted down to lie flat. “I’d like to go back to sleep, if that’s all right.”