Homeland

by Barbara Hambly

  But, this is a line of thought productive of nothing but madness. We will become like those heroines imprisoned in dungeons, who pound on the stone walls and shriek “I am alive! I am alive!” (Or, “He is alive!” Whichever.) I can pretend that you are dead, or that Mercy is dead, or that Deer Isle has mysteriously sunk beneath the waters of the sea—or, I can pretend that you are safe and well (tho’ still buried in snow) and have somehow acquired a copy of Tale of Two Cities. Curiously, I find it far easier to believe that something terrible has occurred. Do you?

  Your fellow-prisoner,

  S

  [sketches]

  Cora Poole, Deer Isle, Maine

  To

  Susanna Ashford, Vicksburg, Mississippi

  [not sent]

  SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 1863

  Dear Susanna,

  Church in Northwest Harbor, for the first time in nearly a month. Friends crowded around Peggie and Nollie; Nollie fretted and cried through both services and the dinner-hour between them. Yet it was as if, like Scrooge, I had been rendered invisible and unheard.

  MONDAY, FEBRUARY 23

  A letter from Oliver. He will be home on furlough, in the second week of March.

  WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 25

  Nollie feverish, wailing all night. Early this morning Mother and I started a regimen of cool baths for him. Mother brewed a willow-bark tea that Grandmother Howell used as a febrifuge. It is bitter, and poor Nollie spit most of it up. Brock’s letters, and Ollie’s too, speak of the sicknesses that race through the Army camps like grass-fire. I wonder if the recruiters—who were indeed at work before the church Sunday—bring in illness with them.

  MONDAY, MARCH 2

  Snow yesterday, beginning shortly after Mother, Papa, Peggie left for church, six inches deep by the time they returned. Nollie seems better, though still sleepless, crying, thin as a bundle of sticks. My little Mercy ran a fever for a day or so, but not nearly as badly. Friday, when Nollie was at his worst, Peggie confessed to me that she was convinced they both would die: it was all I could do not to snap at her, and Mother of course was no help on the subject. You would not tell Julia such a thing about little Tommy, no matter how sick he might be! I try to tell myself that Peggie’s fears for my brother run over into all her perceptions of the world, yet I find that knowing (or suspecting) the cause of her sensibility does not make me more forgiving of it.

  This morning was much warmer, and we had no fears for Papa’s safety, as Uncle M took him away again to Belfast in the Gull. Still no luck in finding a hired man. A girl to assist with household tasks would help also, but few will undertake the work for room and board only, as they used to.

  WEDNESDAY, MARCH 4

  One day I fear that I really will shout at that girl! Are all those sweet, calm heroines I read about complete figments of fantasy? Snow again today, and much colder, freezing yesterday’s thaw to ice. Mother slipped, coming back from feeding the cows, and struck her head on the boot-scraper beside the back door. It was only a shallow cut, but it bled copiously. Peggie flew into such a panic that I had to order her outside to bring in snow to melt for wash-water. Both babies were wailing, but I didn’t dare let her pick up either one. Mercy would probably survive being dropped on the kitchen floor, but poor little Nollie doesn’t look like he could stand being so much as sneezed on! After that I turned Peggie out of the kitchen, in spite of the fact that as usual there was no fire anywhere else in the house. Now she is in a pout. Once I am a little calmer I will need to go in and apologize. How on earth did—and do—people manage, who are locked together with dozens of total strangers in prisons? Or crowded into the holds of emigrant ships? And why has no one written a novel about that?

  Your crotchety friend,

  Cora

  Cora Poole, Deer Isle, Maine

  To

  Susanna Ashford, Vicksburg, Mississippi

  [not sent]

  FRIDAY, MARCH 13, 1863

  Dearest Susanna,

  A blustery morning, with threat of snow again by night. I am home with the two babies, the rest of the family having gone to Mount Adams cemetery, to the funeral of our cousin Farnum Haskell. His coffin arrived from Louisiana the day before yesterday. It was “thought better” that I do not go: “You know the funeral does not mean to her what it does to us,” said Peggie, who has become very friendly with Elinor over the winter. I did not argue the point. The day is very cold, and Nollie is still quite weak.

  Oliver has been home six days, and returns to camp Monday. All week I have not been able to dismiss from my mind your letter in which you spoke of your brother Gaius on his last furlough home: that he moved as if he were in pain, though he bore no wound. Oh, Susie, I read that same expression in Ollie’s eyes! Last night he came to my room, where I sat up reading Vanity Fair long after the others had gone to bed, a spare quilt wrapped around his shouders: “I just want to hold him,” he told me, because I had taken Nollie in with me for the night, as I often do. We sat silent for many minutes. Peggie has often pressed my brother for accounts of camp-life and battle this week, recollections he is loath to share. But last night he began quietly to volunteer pieces of information to me: how just before they go into battle, the men will throw away the cards and dice with which they entertain themselves in the camp, lest being killed, such things be found in their pockets, and reported to their parents. He showed me a scrap of paper, much stained with sweat and dirt, bearing his name, that he’d pinned inside his shirt before going into battle at Fredericksburg. “Sometimes the ambulance-men don’t get to you for three days,” he whispered. “It’s hard to tell, then.” I said,

  “Ollie, don’t.”

  “I have to,” he said. “Corrie, I have to tell.” And then he told me: he is thinking about deserting. This is only partly, he says, because he is afraid: most of the men are afraid. It would not be so bad, he says, if they believed their officers knew what they were doing, but they don’t. “They’re politicians,” he told me. “So many of them got commands because they got votes for Lincoln and his party. When we were kids playing soldier out by the pond, we knew better than to charge up-hill at other kids who were dug in behind a wall. I wouldn’t mind—not so much—if I thought any of it was going to do any good. But it is senseless.” He laid Nollie down again, and clasped my hands, and whispered, “If I decided to do it, Corrie, would you hide me?”

  Susanna, what could I say? It shames me to relate, that among my first thoughts was, Elinor had told Peggie I was disloyal to the Union—that I would rejoice at any “true-hearted man” taken out of the lines—and she had told Ollie. And Ollie believed her, and so came to me. I was silent, struggling to find the right thing to say, and then I told him, “You could not come back here.” Which is the truth. In Indiana, when citizens rioted to protect deserters from the Army authorities, both citizens and deserters were arrested. And, Mother would never permit it. Ollie has to know this. I stammered, “Papa is very proud of you,” and Ollie turned his face away, knowing, as I know, that Papa would be flayed with shame. We held one another, and both wept. It is hard for me to know—

  LATER. EVENING

  I feel better. The interruption was Will Kydd. He had fetched kin of Farnum’s from Isle au Haut for the funeral, yet knew himself, like me, to be persona non grata at the graveside. Driving back to Green’s Landing to wait, he saw the smoke of our chimney. I asked him, Did the Copperheads go about trying to get men to desert, to weaken the Army? Before he replied, I reconsidered what I had asked, and asked instead, Are you a Copperhead, Will? Or is this only what Elinor says? There are, says Will, different degrees of Copperheadedness: from those who believe strongly in the principle of Union but do not approve of the actions of President Lincoln and Congress, all the way to men and women who are actually getting money from the Confederate government at Richmond, to interfere with our efforts to prosecute this War. These different groups are not under any central organization, any more than are the various denominations of the Christian
church, nor the many organizations before the War that pursued freedom for black men and women. You remember how different they were: Immediate Abolitionists, Gradual Emancipationists, Immediate Emancipationists, and several species of mutually antipathetical Colonizers—and they would squabble amongst themselves like girls in a boarding-school. “‘Tis easy to say, He who is not with us is against us,” Will told me. “But ‘tis hard to justify fighting for your homeland, if the fight will change that homeland into something it wasn’t before.”

  He meant that Congress has approved a Conscription Act. Too few men are volunteering, and battle losses have been appallingly heavy. Mother quashed it as a topic of conversation this evening, but Will told me that the men of the island are outraged at the idea, particularly in light of the fact that any rich man may hire a substitute, or pay outright a sum of three hundred dollars to be excused.

  Ollie has not spoken to me again of desertion. Forgive me for writing of this to you, Susanna, you who have lost two brothers, and your beloved home, as well. Even were it possible to do so, I might not even send this sheet to you, but might simply fold it away: send it only in thought, to that ideal Susanna of my imagination, that Dickens heroine whose superhuman compassion will effortlessly surmount her grief. Forgive me, for separating Her from the real You, human and in at least as much pain as I.

  Your own,

  Cora

  Susanna Ashford, Vicksburg, Mississippi

  To

  Cora Poole, Deer Isle, Maine

  [not sent]

  TUESDAY, MARCH 17, 1863

  Dear Cora,

  Bandages to wash. Wounded flooding in, from the terrible fighting on Steele’s Bayou. Unmarried girls to work among convalescents only—I can just hear Mrs. J’s Dolly say it “isn’t fittin’” Julia declared herself ready to die for Our Boys, and burst into tears: has been weeping since. This will prove a useful qualification in times of crisis. Unmarried or not, I long to work in the hospital, with Nellie. It doesn’t seem to matter that black girls see white men naked. Steele’s Bayou is ten miles north. From the window of my attic I can hear gunfire.

  SUNDAY, MARCH 22

  Asked Aunt Sally, Would it be safer to move to Jackson? She replied, Yankees would need to take Jackson before they could come here, because of the railroad. Confederate High Command all being imbeciles (she says) we might not defend Jackson; even imbeciles can see they must defend Vicksburg. After dinner, Emory playing with Tommy while Julia and Aunt Sally played duets, piano and harp: Dr. Driscoll took me aside, asked me quietly, Did I think I could work as assistant in an operating theater, if it came to that? I said yes immediately.

  WEDNESDAY, MARCH 25

  NIGHT

  Julia sent home from first day of hospital work. Between fainting and tears, she takes one or more other nurses from their work as well as not doing any herself. Nellie and men servants at hospital, so Julia and I clean house, wash dishes, chop kindling, air bed linen, get dinner ready with brief pause while I bandage up Julia’s burned fingers (ref. dinner, above), do mending, search for Tommy (found playing in the “cave” Aunt Sally had Zed dig in case of further shelling), wash Tommy (a lot), and of course wash bandages. Julia faints at smell of bandages. Almost too tired to think now. I envy you, my friend, buried under mountain of snow in the dark with Mr. Poole’s novels.

  THURSDAY, APRIL 2

  NIGHT

  Drat it. I’m still experimenting with making ink, and as you can see, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. I’ve been experimenting with different woods to make charcoal (when we heat water to wash bandages). Willow works well, and cane from the brakes down by the river is good also. Most of the men in the shore batteries aren’t like Regal’s militia. You have to have some education and training, to be in the artillery. Maybe they’re just too tired to be nasty. Aunt Sally and Julia are up in arms, at the state my dress gets into. The lamp oil is gone. More can not be gotten anywhere, and even candles are getting woefully expensive. Aunt Sally of course refuses to even consider rush-lights.

  FRIDAY, APRIL 17

  Shelling last night. Julia woke me screaming, refused to go down to the shelter without me. When Nellie dragged her and Little Tommy away, I ran up to the attic. It was filled with the smell of powder-smoke and magnolias. Aunt Sally stood in the gable window, looking down over the river; red light, gold light coming up from below. Tar-barrels were burning all along the river’s bank, dyeing the red-gold bluffs. Across the river, the whole town of DeSoto was in flames. Black masses of Union gunboats against the fire-glare on black water, and even from up in the attic I could hear the men shouting in the shore batteries, the clatter of hooves on China Street and the whistle of flying shells. I asked, Were they attacking? and Aunt Sally replied, “Just running the battery. Taking supplies down to Grant. He’ll be getting ready to cross over to our side of the river.” A shell hit near-by and shook the house, and she only remarked, “That’ll be a Parrott. They’re accurate over a mile. Damn Yankees. And Damn Jeff Davis for an imbecile.” We both leaned our elbows on the sill and looked out and down, and after a time Aunt Sally said, “Even if they come ashore, they’ll never get up the bluff. Our men can pick them off from above, every foot of the way.”

  “Like in the Middle Ages,” I said. “We could pour boiling oil on them.”

  “Not with the cost of oil these days,” remarked Aunt Sally. “Don’t lean your elbows on the sill, girl, they’ll be wrinkly as a camel’s knees before you’re twenty!”

  I knew I should go down to be with Julia, but I had to keep looking, how the gunflashes reflected in the black water, and the glare of the fire on the banks outlined the boats. One of them was hit, and took fire. I could see little black figures running back and forth against the flames, like when the Tories burned the tobacco-barn a year ago. The boat turned as it blazed, and drifted with the current, falling behind the rest of the fleet. I could see it burning long after the others were out of sight, like a crimson star in the darkness.

  LATER. EVENING

  This afternoon after I wrote to you, I went up to Sky Parlor. The river’s a half-mile wide here, but from Sky Parlor you can see across it, to where the Union soldiers were building concealed gun-emplacements. By daylight, with Doc Driscoll’s spyglass, I could see the town of DeSoto, reduced to cinder and ash, the people who lived there—and Union soldiers—moving around in the ruins.

  Always your friend,

  Susie

  [sketches]

  Cora Poole, Deer Isle, Maine

  To

  Susanna Ashford, Vicksburg, Mississippi

  [not sent]

  WEDNESDAY, MARCH 18, 1863

  Dear Susie,

  Disquieting visit to Lufkin’s store yesterday with Mother. Mother told me, troubled, on the way home that she had heard a shocking rumor about Will Kydd stealing parcels entrusted to him for transport about the islands. She rebuked the gossip with a suitable passage from Holy Writ, yet, she told me, with the cost of cloth, and molasses, and salt so high, surely a man so poor as Will would be tempted? Exasperatingly, a few miles farther, Mother turned to me and repeated the identical rumor, as if she had forgotten that she had already done so: a trick she has acquired since her fall two weeks ago. She tries to conceal it, but the blow on her head affected her memory a little. She let slip yesterday a remark that made me realize she has no recollection of the fall, nor how she came to have a healing cut and a clipped place in her hair, just above her left ear.

  I wish, just for once, that Mr. Poole’s trunk contained at least one medical book. Surely Fantomina could have been spared, to give it room?

  FRIDAY, MARCH 20

  Uncle M still down with la grippe. Will came to chop wood and sharpen the tools. I was talking with him at the wood-pile when Peggie came out and told him we didn’t need the help of “such as he.” Fortunately Will is the best-natured man on earth. He waited til Peggie went inside again—which she soon did, as it was terribly cold—and resumed chopping. L
ater in the afternoon she regaled me with her suspicion that Will is in league with the Confederate raiders, who have captured and burned so many coastal vessels and taken their crews prisoner. Why could he not, she demanded, only be waiting to deliver the whole island over to these pirates, to use as a permanent base?

  I laughed at this, as I laugh now in retrospect. Yet this kind of hurtful rumor tells me the sort of thing that is probably being said about me, behind my back. He who is not with us is against us. Fear of the raiders makes even the most stupid innuendos seem likely. The wood stores are low, and we are down to the last few crocks of last fall’s butter. Thank Heavens that the cows are freshening again, and will be in milk soon. I am grateful that Will has offered to cut wood, as neither Peggie nor I is strong enough to wield the broad-ax. Mother can cut logs into stove-billets, but this past week she has thrice dropped things in the kitchen—Mother, whom I have seldom seen drop anything in her life—and I do not like to see her, with an ax in her hand. You grew up in the country, dear friend, around work-crews engaged in heavy labor. Do you know how long it is, after a blow on the head like that, before its effects finally dwindle?

  Perhaps you are right, and I should consult Dr. Ferguson in Northwest Harbor.

  Your fellow Spy,

  Cora