Dear Mr. Harnett knew me well. The Confederacy might be Davy’s great opponent; but there was no doubt that waiting idly for his return would be mine.
Meanwhile I had to be available to Kate, so it was arranged that I spend the summer with various Chase cousins in Springfield to be near Kate and help her care for Josey. There were seven married middle-aged Chases — each with a large young family, visiting back and forth between adjoining houses. It was like finding oneself swimming among a school of friendly rollicking whales! Kate’s little house was peaceful by comparison, and we talked as easily as ever while Josey slept in the golden summer afternoons. One day in August, we were drowsing in the back garden. The sun and the humming cicadas had almost put us to sleep. We spoke as if we were dreaming.
Like Mr. Harnett, Kate understood exactly about my feeling adrift — without Davy, without the academy, and without her.
“It’s lots easier when life hands you your duties, isn’t it?” Kate mused. “I was very lucky, I see that now. As soon as I was ready for my real woman’s life to begin, then it did! And you, Miranda . . .” She waggled a finger at me. “Your need is always to be heading somewhere, pointing in a definite direction. You must find a way to best spend this waiting time so it will connect with your years after the war.”
“Father actually made me an appointment with Dean Griswold at the college,” I told her. Mr. Harnett had suggested it — the plan that he had hoped would evolve for me. “Then the dean read my education paper and decided I could take one course at a time at the college. They’ve always taken students from the academy — and I had Father’s tenure in my favor.
“Anyway, the dean said he’ll take me on trial. I must arrive early and sit in back and not wear hoops!” We giggled at the thought of my seductive hoops inflaming the whole student body. Then our drowsy conversation took a different turn. “Kate, how do you really feel about this baby?”
“Of course I’m afraid of the delivery. They told me I wouldn’t remember the pains, but I do — every single one. You feel as if you are being split open.”
“Did you have to — start this baby?”
“Miranda, there are a hundred answers to that question! How do I explain it?” Her eyes grew distant; I imagined she was searching for the right words for this delicate topic. “You and your husband both want — love, and then the wife thinks ahead and is afraid of a baby, and the husband never does. And sometimes the wife forgets too — and then she’s sorry and angry later.”
This did not sound like a blissful state to be in. “Do you think there will be more babies after this one, Kate?”
“Unless Ethan changes a whole lot, there certainly will be others!” She frowned and sighed. “God makes a terrible bargain with us, Miranda. He gives us this — joy, this way of showing love, and a license to use it . . . and then we pay with regret and pain and danger. We take what . . . precautions . . . we feel we can, but nothing is foolproof.” She sighed. “Sometimes I wonder if I’m strong enough.”
We basked in the sun till Josey woke from his nap; then I started supper. I thought about everything Kate had said, especially about the joy that married couples had, and about what it would be like to have a child with Davy. And with these thoughts came once again the dread, the empty, hollow knowledge, the welcome numbness. I ate as an automaton would eat, and I did not tell Kate, then or ever, that I didn’t think I would see Davy again.
Aunt Helen came to Springfield at the end of August. The doctor promised Kate he would use ether this time, so we were all hoping for a shorter and easier experience than before — but when it came, it still seemed to me the most fearful of ordeals. Kate was utterly helpless, owned and used by pain in relentless waves. I thought of the great impersonal storm rollers in Barbados — cresting and breaking, cresting and breaking — as I held her desperate hands.
Helen Miranda Howland took twelve cruel hours to reach us. Dr. Smedley, as weary as Kate, said, “You must promise me, Mrs. Howland — no more babies. This is the last baby for you.”
The leaves had long lost their gold and scarlet by the time I got back to Amherst, exhausted and shaken by Kate’s ordeal. I had also turned eighteen. It was the time when a young woman’s fancy turned to thoughts of beaux and wedding bells and babies; but while I had a beau, he was absent, and as I took my place again in the lecture hall, the old rhythms of a schoolgirl’s day were the ones to which I conformed.
I chose medieval life as my course at the college. I wanted to learn more about the education and training of the highborn children of those centuries. Both girls and boys were taken from their parents’ castles and sent to be raised by another noble family — to learn the arts and skills of war and castle keeping from adults who were not their parents. They had teachers, as such, in only Latin and music. This unusual tradition endured for centuries.
Mr. Chester, our instructor, treated me like any other student when he saw I was in his class only to study and not for social activity. I chose “troubadours” as my research topic, and I lost myself in other wars: in the Crusades, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and Bertran de Born. As I walked to class under the autumn trees, smelling the wood smoke, I felt nearer to happiness than at any time since Davy went away. Study would be my salvation.
My new schedule had interrupted my regular Mondays with Emily, but when she was silent for several weeks, I became disturbed, partly because I had not kept my promise to Mrs. Austin this summer. Aunt Helen had no news of her through her sewing circle, so I called on Mrs. Austin. The Evergreens’ front door was autumn gold, with an overflowing cornucopia of harvest symbols.
“It’s true, I’ve not seen her in her garden lately,” Mrs. Austin told me. “And you know she never comes here! But there’s been a steady stream of poems, I assure you. I wonder if their girl has time for her other work.”
“Has Emily seen Ned?”
“Yes, I’ve had him at The Homestead several times. She sends poems about him too — about his immortal soul, that is.”
“What should I do, Mrs. Austin?”
“Write her a note this minute, and her girl can take it to The Homestead the next time she delivers a poem. Now, Miranda, what is the news of Davy?”
Sure enough, a return note came from Emily, asking me to call on Monday. I found her unusually animated, with a flush and a sparkle I had not seen before. She was like a girl with a love letter, secretly elated.
“My dear Miranda, I have heard Kate’s good news! What a happy relief for your family! But then after that, no one told me you were home again. Or if they did, it went past me.
“I have literally closed my eyes and ears to village doings these last months. I cannot AFFORD the time away from my writing. These years will be the ZENITH of my career, and I dare not waste an hour of them!”
I heard a new, shrill edge of hysteria in her voice. This explained why she had not tried to renew our regular visits — she was too preoccupied even for me.
“Does this mean you have decided to publish, Emily?”
She laughed merrily, flirtatiously. When in these good spirits, her round face, her dimples, her tip-tilted, sherry-colored eyes, were most attractive.
“Don’t PUSH me, Miranda! These days I am writing as never before. Sometimes I feel like one of Mr. Mesmer’s mediums! Another self seems to take hold of my pen, and I simply go where it leads. I don’t fight it; it writes better than I ever did.”
“Are you satisfied with these poems?” I was curious about her writing; was it indeed improving or was Emily becoming lost in her miniaturized world?
“Some — not all.” She sighed even as she smiled. “I’ll rework them later. Right now, I’m being swept toward the sea. I just have to let the SPATE carry me onward. Why, I hardly have time for my FRIENDS!”
“Who mails your letters?”
“You remember Nancy. She seems very closemouthed, and I care less and less about IDLE TALK. If people never see me, then the worst that they can say is ‘She stays in her room
.’ Meanwhile, I write my poems and work for IMMORTALITY. That is my BUSINESS; even Lavinia says so! I will arrange my life so nothing and no one can interfere with my poetry.”
“Do you think your father will permit this isolation?” If she was rarely seeing me, it was likely that the few visitors she allowed had dwindled down to nothing.
“You don’t understand the arrangement he and I have reached, Miranda dear. We have never spelled it out, but it’s clear as ice between us: if I don’t create a scandal around the Dickinson name, then he will not force me into society, and we have each kept our word. This may seem like MADNESS to others, but it suits the two of us very well.”
She handed me a small poem to keep and then sat at her desk with her back to me. I took that as my cue to leave. I read the poem once I arrived at home.
Much Madness is divinest Sense —
To a discerning Eye —
Much Sense — the starkest Madness —
’Tis the Majority
In this, as All, prevail —
Assent — and you are sane —
Demur — you’re straightway dangerous —
And handled with a Chain —
She was right; her poetry was gaining strength. Emily’s desire for immortality just might come to pass.
Autumn of 1861 seemed to have more direction, more momentum for me than the summer. The leaf smoke brought the memories of last fall’s bittersweet bonfires — being with Davy, walking, studying, singing around the flames — but I could recall them with more equanimity, and even joy, remembering our happiness. Kate was safe with her little daughter; Emily was writing well, steadily and sanely; and being a student had given a shape to my life again. I had the satisfaction of knowing my present was once again attached to my future. If learning was to be the connection between my childhood and my adult years — well, there was plenty to learn.
Davy too was studying his new subject: war. He had had a part in two skirmishes this fall. He wrote:
You could not call them battles. I have never yet seen Johnny Reb — though I know he’s aiming at me when I hear his bullets whistling past. It still seems very impersonal. “The enemy” is still an abstraction, not an American man my age who wants to kill me.
Instead I am more concerned with the practicalities of camp life, and getting better at it every day. After we march, I can drop down and sleep anywhere, even in the open rain — though sleeping out of doors as we do can make a fellow’s clothes moldy. But now we have matting on the ground, and my friend Chuck Baird has a small iron bed, and I have three stools to sleep on.
When night falls a few of our young officers come to talk awhile. Each has his own pipe and somebody comes up with a brandy flask, and the conversation flows briskly about the last Fight, the next Fight, and whether it is better to change our shirts now or wait until the end of the month. Of course, when I dream, it’s always of you.
In December, Battery B, Chicago Light Artillery, received a new general: Ulysses S. Grant, a West Point graduate and an Illinois man. Davy wrote, “They say he was a star in the Mexican War. Now at least we will be led by experience. This is no place for amateurs!”
Father and Aunt Helen and I went over to Springfield for a quiet Christmas with the Howlands; Kate’s babies were the only ornaments. Helen Miranda had now become Elena, which was Greek for “Helen.” She was miraculously like Kate, gentle and beautiful and affectionate. Kate happily sang carols for us — “as a change from lullabies!”
On New Year’s Eve, we toasted “Victory in 1862!” Then I wondered what that toast might mean. Any victory implied death and suffering on both sides. We spoke of “victory” as a beacon on a headland, like the signal fires that told the end of the Trojan War. But what pain, what loss, had been required before those ancient bonfires blazed their glorious news!
In February of the New Year, Davy was involved in an authentic battle. Fort Henry, a Confederate gun emplacement on the Tennessee River, fell to General Grant and a fleet of Union gunboats. I followed this on the huge map Father had mounted in our entrance hall, banishing a Latham portrait to do so. The map explained the Union’s urgency to reach and hold the great central artery of the Mississippi, and thus divide the Confederacy.
Fort Donelson, in Tennessee, also fell to Grant in February. Thousands of prisoners were captured, along with what Davy called “the biggest and best guns in the South.” During this battle in the bloody snow, Davy met rebels close-to, alive and dead — but he still imagined a distance and a detachment from the enemy in combat.
His Battery B was honored for their marksmanship by Grant himself. He chose them to salute the Stars and Stripes with thirteen guns, as it rose over the captured fort. Davy reported all this with a zest that made him sound like a schoolboy on holiday: “Everybody was shaking hands with everybody else and embracing one another. Miranda, my own dear sweetheart, this war can’t last long. When the birds wing their way back north for the summer, I shall surely be among the flock.” Perhaps this lightheartedness was his defense, in the way that feeling nothing was mine.
Then in April 1862 came a great battle — Shiloh — and the war and the men fighting it changed forever. For the past year, the Civil War had still seemed a political gesture, with long encampments punctuated by short thrusts and parries, and significant intervals when diplomacy might yet have been possible. After the holocaust of Shiloh, a single bloodbath that claimed more lives than all of America’s previous wars together, both the Union and the Confederate nations were committed to the very last death.
By the Tennessee River, among the freshly plowed fields of spring, a hundred thousand men fought in bloody mud for three rainy days and nights. At tiny Pittsburg Landing, a random cluster of wharves and sheds, twenty thousand casualties waited on the docks for help. Three thousand corpses lay in the fields around the little log chapel named Shiloh. The bodies sprawled so thickly on the ground that those who went to seek out the wounded treaded on the grisly carpet of dead and dying. Hastily organized burial details interred bodies two deep. Davy wrote me: “And all the monument raised to the bravery of these poor souls was a board on which I cut with my pocketknife the words ‘35 Union’ or ‘110 Rebels’ — which I affix to each separate trench.”
For a week, the news swung back and forth; then we heard it had been a Union victory. But in that week, the spirit and concept of the war had changed forever. Now I saw it as a terrible entity with a life of its own. It was an implacable monster, a machine grinding up our flesh and treasure, insatiably devouring the future.
I was in Hell for a week. I will be there in dreams and memories of Shiloh all the rest of my life. Hell is a night sky full of screaming shells, falling on boys asleep — what matter the uniform? Hell is a wounded man drowning in a puddle, too weak to raise his head.
I have seen a flowering orchard shot bare with rifle bullets. I have seen two generals bleed to death. I have seen yesterday’s battlefield, ghastly by lightning, where hogs root at the bodies. Days later, we ate the hogs.
I worried for him, not just for his physical safety but for the impact this war was having on his interior, on his soul. Would these heart wounds ever heal, and if so, what hidden scars would remain?
Later in April, he wrote again:
It is all settling down in my mind, Miranda. I know there will be many other battles, but Shiloh was my coming-of-age. Now I see that I reached twenty-one amazingly innocent. I had a comfortable, happy childhood; then I met you and loved you. How could I know what the world was really like?
I always thought men were basically good and wished each other well. I thought the human body was noble and beautiful. Now, I know the body is no more than a fragile covering over the unspeakable — and as to the character of man, every sort has been revealed to me. I have known the very best — but, oh, the worst!
Uncle Thomas Bulfinch came to visit after Easter. He had never met Davy, but he knew about our engagement. He was particularly gentle with me. When he as
ked of Davy’s spirits, I showed him the two letters about Shiloh, and he shook his head sadly.
“A young Greek might have written these from the Trojan beaches.” He gave me a weak smile. “Except the Greek couldn’t write!”
“Do you think he’ll ever be the same after this?”
“No, Miranda — but neither will you. We have always taken our best citizens and changed them in our wars. How are you managing?”
“By hiding,” I admitted. I smiled, remembering Emily’s poem and the mollusk in Barbados. “By wearing the mail of anguish.”
“I guess that wearing armor is your way of surviving. You’ll come back out someday, when it’s safe. Meanwhile you can study. You don’t need feelings for that.”
His compassion touched me. And Miss Adelaide’s insight was moving too:
Your Davy and my three nephews must have tried to kill one another, there at Shiloh. There is death all around us — neither the ivory tower of your lecture hall nor my walls of sweet fragrant stalks protects us from it. But nothing will ever come between us, Miranda — not between you and me, not ever.
Yes, I thought as I put the letter into my desk, there must be Davys on both sides.
Aunt Helen was very disturbed about the ignorance of her women friends, the good wives and mothers of Amherst. After Shiloh, she spoke her concern.
“You should see them, Jos! They’re all chasing around in circles like chickens in a thunderstorm. They know what has happened, but they don’t know why — so they just flap and cluck! Couldn’t we put them to work instead?”
Afternoons with Emily Page 28