It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity …
“Epoch” and “incredulity.” Two new words for Webster’s when I returned home.
… it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope ….
I looked up and stared out the window. The cannon and caisson were out of the bog, moving down Washington at a fast clip, the officer still cursing his men and waving his saber.
“It was the spring of hope,” I said aloud.
That afternoon, I never read another word. Rare for me in Mr. Mendenhall’s store. I had devoured Simms and Dumas and Shakespeare and Milton and Hawthorne and Cooper and Poe and Lord Byron. Or thumbed through Harper’s Monthly Magazine or Phunny Fellow or National Police Gazette or the newspapers from Arkansas, Texas, Missouri, and Tennessee. Once, Mr. Mendenhall had even handed me a copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, with a warning. “Put this away when Miss Mary comes to say it’s time to take your leave. Hide it under the cushion and show her The Big Bear of Arkansas instead. I dare say it would be a trifle unpleasant to be run out of town on a rail and see my bookstore burned.”
I watched soldiers marching or riding through the mud. I studied the faces of the civilians, women in their calico dresses, men in their top hats and suits, children, even the preachers. I tried to imagine what they were thinking. Then I saw Uncle Willard walking down the boardwalk, spitting tobacco juice into the mud, and I looked away, turned from the window, buried my face in A Tale of Two Cities but not reading a word, praying that he would not recognize Miss Mary’s carriage or Mowbray, who was leaning against the hitching rail in front of Stinson and Dodge’s Jewelers, not daring to make eye contact with anyone passing by.
Uncle Willard must have been too preoccupied, because after an eternity of thirty or forty seconds I looked up and carefully turned around. He wasn’t standing there, glowering. Nobody passed by, but then I almost leaped off the chair when the door opened and the bell chimed.
The door closed quickly, shutting out the noise of soldiers and horses. Light steps sounded across the hardwood floor before a timid voice called out: “Mister Mendenhall?”
It was a woman. My heart resumed beating. I closed Dickens and heard Miss Mary greeting the newcomer, who spoke so excitedly her voice rose and cracked.
“Mary, Mister Mendenhall, those soldiers … I think they are preparing to leave.”
I had started to reopen A Tale of Two Cities. Now I listened.
“Does Old Pap confide that much in you, Missus Andersen?” the bookstore owner said lightly.
“I have not spoken to General Price,” the woman said. “But the soldiers speak plainly. They speak bluntly. The Yankees are moving toward the capital.”
Little Rock? I shook my head. The Yankees already controlled Little Rock. Then it struck me. Washington. The new Confederate capital of Arkansas.
“And if Price leaves us to those horrid, horrid barbarians … I … I fear for my … for our safety.”
“Now, now, Joyce.” That was Miss Mary. “I think the Yankees will leave you alone. Mayhap they will even leave Camden alone. Don’t you think so, Mister Mendenhall?”
His silence betrayed any confidence felt by anyone in the store, probably in the entire city.
“But …” Mrs. Andersen said, “I’ve heard that the Yankees have darkies fighting for them. Darkies! I am a white woman, a widow living alone. I fear for my very life.”
I shook my head and reopened Dickens. Mrs. Andersen was just another crazy old lady living in troubled times. She likely feared what the Confederate soldiers under Price would do to her when they first returned to Camden.
Still I didn’t read. Mr. Mendenhall suggested to Mrs. Andersen that some hot tea might steady her nerves, and then Miss Mary bid them both good day. It was time for us to leave on our other errands. Miss Mary had a package, wrapped in brown paper and secured with twine, and the Ouachita Herald in her hand. I offered to take it, but she said she was not old and feeble although she thanked me for my kindness and consideration. We stepped outside, leaving behind the worlds of Dumas and Dickens and Simms. She handed me the newspaper, which felt funny in my hand.
“It’s printed on foolscap,” she announced. “As it was when Joshua Ruth published his first edition almost twenty years ago.” She sighed. “‘What goes around, comes around,’ as the saying goes. Paper is hard to find, too.” She held up a five dollar Arkansas banknote. It had been printed on the back of wallpaper.
Back down the street we rode to Mr. Kroger’s mercantile.
“Don’t be disappointed, Travis,” Miss Mary said, “if there’s no letter from your father.”
“I won’t be,” I said, but I would be. Miss Mary knew. She put her hand on my shoulder and squeezed, and said hopefully: “If not today, then maybe tomorrow, Travis.”
Tomorrow was Sunday. I was beginning to fear there would never be another letter from Papa.
At the store, Miss Mary stocked up on tea, flour, beans, and bacon, never balking at the outrageous prices Mr. Kroger charged, although he was apologetic, noting how everything was hard to get these days. Except bacon.
And wood, I thought, thinking back to Mama’s crazy idea about reopening the sawmill.
We never even looked at fabric for drapes in the formal parlor. I imagine Miss Mary didn’t care a whit if the drapes were red or brown or blue. That had been just her way of getting me to Mr. Mendenhall’s, or maybe she had just wanted someone to talk to on the drive to and from Camden.
“Well, Travis, there’s one more stop, then it’s back home for you,” she said.
I became curious immediately, hoping our last stop would be at one of the restaurants, but instead we went out of town to the Fountain Timber Company.
When we turned off the pike, even though the mill lay two miles down the woods road, I could hear the saws whirling. Circular rotary saws, not old muleys. I could smell smoke, see the white plumes rising above the pines that shaded the road, coming from the giant incinerator where the Fountains burned sawdust and small wood pieces.
“I warrant that Ezekial wouldn’t charge Confederate rates for some sawdust, do you, Travis?” Miss Mary said.
“Ma’am?”
“Sawdust,” she said. “What do you think a fair rate for sawdust would be?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re a sawyer, aren’t you?”
I shrugged for an answer, then said: “Papa was one. Is one.”
“Yes. He is. But you’re not?”
This time I let my shrug suffice.
“I’m building a new carriage house,” she said. “And I would like Mowbray to be warm in the winter. Wouldn’t you like that, Mowbray?” addressing her driver.
“You don’t have to worry about ol’ Mowbray, Miss Mary,” he answered, keeping the grays focused on getting us down the road.
Back to me, Miss Mary said: “So I need sawdust.”
“What for?”
“Insulation.”
Insulation? That was another new word for me and Webster’s, along with epoch and incredulity. Then I forgot about spelling and vocabulary and the “spring of hope.” I thought about Mama, and her far-fetched dream.
“You need sawdust?” I said.
“For insulation.”
“Well, Miss Mary, we can get you sawdust. At Papa’s mill. There’s plenty of it there. And you can use it for your incredulity.”
“My what?”
I muttered an apology. I was too excited. “Your insulation,” I corrected. “How much do you reckon you’d need?” Before she could answer, I fired out: “It don’t matter. Doesn’t matter. We have tons. We could haul it to ….”
I had hit a snag. Our mules were gone. Those wagons I
’d seen at the mill weren’t good for anything except firewood.
“Well …” I said, determined. “Well, we can get it to your place.”
The wagon kept taking us down the path toward the Fountain Timber Company. Miss Mary stared at me until I looked away, embarrassed. Suddenly the woman everyone thought was crazy did something absolutely insane.
“Mowbray,” she said, “turn this wagon around. I shall do business with Master Ford. It’s much better to do business with a neighbor, and, honestly, I despise Ezekial Fountain and his loathsome brood.”
Chapter Five
The ride home turned pleasant. I evolved from thirteen-year-old boy to entrepreneur. I stopped imagining an adventure story called “the spring of hope” and began thinking of how Mama, Edith, and I could get barrels of sawdust to Miss Mary’s place, five miles down the road from our home, even farther from Papa’s sawmill.
Put lids on the barrels? Roll them from the mill up the road to the Camden-Washington Pike, then roll them down to Miss Mary’s? But there were a lot of hills. Rolling them uphill would prove backbreaking. Rolling them down? I could picture them smashing into a pine, spraying sawdust like grapeshot. I saw them rolling down the hills and wiping out a group of Yankees marching to Camden. I liked that idea. I hoped I could remember it later. Well, rolling barrels of sawdust might make for a good adventure, a scene worthy of Simms or Dumas, but for transporting insulation, it wasn’t practical. Those barrels could hold forty-two gallons, and I recalled Papa’s workers moving the barrels, their muscles bulging, straining, their grunting and groaning, until they finally just dragged them over the floor. A hundred pounds? Maybe. And wet sawdust would weigh even more.
We had no mules. We had no wagon. But I was bound and determined to figure out a way to make this deal work. If I possessed one talent, it was imagination, which I would definitely need for Mama to agree to my idea.
* * * * *
“Sawdust?” Mama said.
She sat in her chair on the porch, staring down the road as Miss Mary rode back home in her fancy carriage. Miss Mary hadn’t mentioned my scheme again, even when dropping me off. I reckon she figured that would best be left to me.
“Yes, ma’am. We got plenty of it.”
Edith and Baby Hugh stood silently in the shade. I was kneeling in front of the steps.
“And she needs this for …?”
“Insulation.” I remembered the word. “She’s building a new carriage house. The insulation would keep Mowbray warm.” That’s when it began to hit me. I had thought maybe the sawdust would be used for fuel for the fire. We had used it often ourselves, but now I began to see the purpose, and the definition of insulation. Miss Mary was building a frame house, not a cabin like we lived in, and not brick like her mansion. She had told me that on the fifteen-mile ride home. The outside of the house would be plank boards, nailed to the two-by-four frames. The sawdust would fill the gap between the outside and inside walls. Or maybe in the roof. Or underneath the floor. Insulation. I’d look it up in the Webster’s just to make sure.
“Do we have enough sawdust?” Mama asked. She glanced at the brown-paper package Miss Mary had left with her as if she might find the answer there.
“There’s a lot.” It was as specific as I could be. “If we don’t, we can always get some from the other sawyers in the area. They usually just burn theirs. They’d probably just give it away.”
“And how much would you charge Mary?”
“We ain’t … we haven’t gotten to dickering yet.”
“You won’t dicker with Mary Frederick, Travis. She has been too good of a neighbor.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’ll ask her what she thinks is fair, and that’ll be it.”
“I think it’s a good idea, Mama,” said Edith, speaking as the oldest child.
“I ate all the pound cake,” Baby Hugh said. “Didn’t save none for you.” He stuck out his tongue.
“Be quiet, Hugh,” Mother said, contemplating, and I knew her next question would likely sink my money-making idea.
“How do we get the sawdust to Mary’s? That’s seven, eight miles from the mill.”
“The wagons!” Edith sang out. She hadn’t seen the condition of those wagons. “The wagons Papa always used to haul ….” Then she remembered. “Oh ….”
Even if those timber wagons could carry one-hundred-pound barrels of sawdust up the woods lane and down the main pike to Miss Mary’s plantation, we didn’t have the livestock to pull the wagons. Yet Edith, like me, wasn’t about to let the idea go.
“We could borrow a team of mules from Miss Mary.”
“I suppose so,” Mama said.
“We’d have to borrow a wagon, too.” I let out a heavy, dream-killing sigh.
Edith and Hugh looked at me in disbelief.
“Those wagons at Papa’s mill couldn’t carry a pine cone,” I said.
“But …” Edith began.
“Travis is right,” Mama said. “I suppose we should just offer to give the sawdust to Mary. She’s been such a wonderful neighbor.”
“I offered that, Mama,” I lied. “But you know Miss Mary. She’s a prideful woman. Wouldn’t hear of it.”
“Yes,” Mama said, “but if we’re using her mules and her wagon, it would only be fitting ….”
“How about Uncle Willard?” Baby Hugh interrupted, and my stomach turned. I had thought of him, too, but couldn’t see him at Papa’s mill, working his slaves.
Mama, thank the good Lord, couldn’t see that, either.
“No,” she said. “Not Willard. He’d take over the mill, run it with his slave labor.” Her Abolitionist was up. “By the time Connor came home, Willard would be running the mill. No, we won’t use him. But … there is … Reverend White.” I didn’t know what she meant, but the subject had been tabled. “It’s time for supper,” Mama said as she rose, and held out the package Miss Mary had given her. “This is for you, Travis.”
Baby Hugh’s previous smug look became one of envy. All he had gotten was pound cake. I had something wrapped, something solid, something that would last a lot longer than a full belly, or so I imagined.
“What is it?” I asked.
Mama smiled. “It’s a present. I don’t know what it is.”
“But it’s not his birthday,” Edith argued. “I would know.”
“Hush,” Mother said, still holding out the package.
I moved toward her, and took the package as if I thought it would disappear.
“Open it,” Baby Hugh said, and my mother stepped back, folding her arms, smiling.
The bow was easy to undo. I handed Baby Hugh the twine, and then pulled back the brown paper. That I gave to Edith, who muttered something under her breath that she was really lucky Mama had not heard, or at least had pretended not to hear.
“That ain’t no present,” Baby Hugh said, and the smug look returned. “That’s for schooling.”
I held a writing tablet and a box of pencils.
“Mary Frederick must know you well,” Mama said softly.
I studied Mama closely. Did she know my secret, too?
“She should,” Edith complained. “She takes him to Camden once a month.”
“I’d rather go to Little Rock,” Baby Hugh said. “And I’d rather eat leftover pound cake.”
Miss Mary did know me well. I wondered how. Had she read my mind when I had imagined all those adventures—pirates hanging out in the pine trees, the carriage Mowbray drove a balloon full of wild Argonauts. I had always imagined those stories. Now, at last, I could try to write one down.
“You’ll write her a note thanking her for her kindness,” Mama said. “And you’ll keep this in mind when she tells you what she considers a fair price for the sawdust.”
After supper, I retired with my writing tablet and newly sharpened pencil. Having referred t
o my Webster’s, on the first page of the tablet, I wrote:
epoch: In chronology, a fixed point of time.
Which was one of the bothersome things about Webster’s. I kept reading the definition, writing down the examples—The exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, and the Babylonish captivity ….—then turned to chronology. And wrote:
chronology: The science of time; the method of measuring or computing time by regular divisions or periods.
I didn’t write the rest. I found insulation, and decided that my definition was right. Incredulity took longer, because I didn’t have an inkling how to spell it, but eventually I located it.
incredulity: The quality of not believing.
That was a good word, I decided. I’d likely use it a lot more than insulation or chronology, but I liked epoch the best.
So once I was sure no one was watching me, I turned the page and wrote,:
THE SPRING OF HOPE
By Travis Ford
It was the epoch of adventure.
* * * * *
Sunday morning we walked to the meeting house.
Mama made a vinegar pie, and made Edith carry it on the long, wet walk to church. The Reverend White was like most preachers, and I found his sermon boring—like most sermons—until he began preaching of the dark days that lay ahead for all of us. The Yankees were marching toward Washington. General Price was sure to meet the enemy. The South could not, would not, be defeated. Arkansas was just. Arkansas was Eden. Arkansas would prevail.
Although he did not cite chapter and verse, he then said something that I considered divine. “Last Sunday, y’all might recollect, was a day we call Easter.” He waited for the chuckling, mostly his own, to subside. “This is a spring of hope, my friends. A spring of hope.”
A spring of hope. I didn’t hear anything else. My mind went to the story I had begun. An adventure story. Full of sword fights. The Reverend White had put me in a Dumas frame of mind, mostly because he had always reminded me of Porthos. Without a doubt, he was the biggest, jowliest man I’d ever seen. Whenever I pretended to be d’Artagnan or read The Three Musketeers in Mr. Mendenhall’s bookstore, I always imagined the Reverend White as Porthos. ’Course, he didn’t speak in a French accent—he had a molasses-thick drawl—nor, as far as I knew, did he partake of wine, and instead of wielding a sword nicknamed Balizarde, he carried a big, well-used Bible.
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