A Sound Among the Trees

by Susan Meissner

  When I awoke minutes later on a couch in the drawing room, the other soldiers had gone off with Eliza to find my mother and grandmother, who apparently were hiding in Tessie’s quarters. I found out later Tessie had run away. As had all the slaves. The gardeners, our houseboy, the cook, the groomsmen. They all left not long after the Yankees arrived because they knew there was no one who could make them stay. John had stayed behind with me and now held a cool cloth to my head as consciousness returned to me.

  “You know Eliza,” I said to him.

  “Yes.”

  “Has she … Is she …,” but I didn’t know what question to ask.

  “Will and I were part of the scouting party to take Fredericksburg. The general didn’t want there to be any reason to use violence. The army is only here to position themselves to march into Richmond. That’s all. Eliza was … helpful.”

  “The Yankees were in the streets, in the stores. They were taking things.”

  John pressed the cloth to my head. “That is unfortunate. We do need places to stay, however. And we need provisions.”

  “Doesn’t your army supply you with provisions?” I said. “Besides, they were taking dress gloves and picture frames. And they didn’t even ask. They just took!”

  “They aren’t supposed to be doing that.”

  “But they are!” I struggled to sit up. “Like common thieves.”

  “Dear cousin”—John shook his head—“I’m afraid war is ugly.”

  “People are ugly,” I said.

  John flicked a curl from my brow and smiled sadly. “Yes. Sometimes they are.”

  He suddenly seemed much older to me. And I seemed older to myself.

  Eleanor, your brother and Will and the other men are sleeping in the parlor and drawing room. They don’t know how long they will be here—not long, they say. Guards have been posted at all the houses and stores so that there will not be any more ransacking. Other soldiers are sleeping in our neighbors’ houses. Many soldiers are sleeping in little white tents all along the river. But many more are in our houses. The haberdashery is closed and locked for now, much of the inventory is gone anyway. A curfew has been imposed, and none of us are allowed out after dark.

  Grandmother found someone to take her out to the farm today. We still have our carriages but not our horse. When she came back she said the foreman and all but the oldest slave are gone. Abner is near to sixty and was reluctant to leave with the others on foot because he cannot walk without limping. The rails for the pasture fence are missing—taken for Yankee campfires, we have heard—and so most of the sheep are gone too. Grandmother made Abner the new foreman and told him to sleep in the farmhouse now. And to keep the few remaining sheep in the barn. I wonder if Abner knows he is a foreman of no one. There is no one there for him to manage.

  Since the cook is gone, Eliza and I are making the meals now. The men eat in the dining room, and we ladies eat in the pantry.

  At dinner tonight Grandmother lamented to Eliza that what had happened to the haberdashery was abhorrent. Then she proceeded to complain that the Yankees sleeping in Holly Oak are eating all our food and using up all our soap and oil and candles. I think Grandmother wanted to know why, with Eliza’s surreptitious liaisons, our house and the business weren’t spared, though she never said it. While we washed dishes I asked Eliza the question.

  “Why do you think we were not spared, Susannah?” she said, in a very tired voice.

  I thought about it for a moment. And then I knew. “No one in Fredericksburg knows that you have helped the Yankees,” I said. “If our house had been spared, if the haberdashery had been spared then—”

  “And no one but John and Will and a few others on the Union side knows either,” she interrupted. “No one needs to know anything. It is not common knowledge that John is your cousin. And that’s the way it needs to stay.”

  I realized then that Eliza had to be in the employ of someone. Someone has to be orchestrating her activities. A secret loyalist perhaps. Someone I would not expect, maybe. “Who … who are you with? Who are you doing this for?” I asked.

  She dried the cup I had handed her and told me it doesn’t matter who she is with. She is not doing this for a someone but because the South cannot win this war. The sooner it is over, the sooner the bloodshed will stop.

  I suddenly thought of my letters to you, Eleanor, all the letters Eliza had been secretly getting to you. It occurred to me that she had used me, used the letters to somehow get an inroad with the Union army. I wondered if you had seen any of those letters at all.

  “What about my letters to Eleanor?” I asked. And she said, “What about them?”

  “Did you use my letters to communicate with Will and John?” I could sense my anger rising at the thought of my letters being opened by Union spies. Read by Union soldiers perhaps. Maybe even read by Will. Those letters were meant only for you, Eleanor. Only for you. I asked her if you had seen any of them or if she just used them to make contact with Will and John’s scouting party. I was very angry. Eliza calmly assured me you probably received every one. But yes, she did use them first.

  I asked her how.

  She told me messages were written in between my lines of writing with a special ink. It can’t be read without a special solution.

  My letters to you, Eleanor. Opened. Trifled with. I was livid. “You said no one read my letters! You said Eleanor most certainly received them. You lied to me!”

  She frowned at me. “Lower your voice, Susannah. I have not lied to you. No one read your letters. I wrote the messages in between the lines. I did. And I assure you I did not read your letters!”

  I didn’t believe her. Eleanor, how could she not have read them?

  She told me she had no desire to read them. No one did. It was only the messages in between the lines that mattered. When the messages were received the letters were sent on their way to Maine. She said it was as simple as that.

  I asked her if Will had read them. I had to know.

  “For heaven’s sake, Susannah.” Her skirt hissed as she turned to leave me. “Do you really think men at war have the inclination to read the trivial journalings of a naive girl?”

  She left me there with my hands red and puffy from scrubbing dishes.

  I stepped outside the house to let the night air cool my face. I was angry, sad, ashamed, and I wished for a soothing touch or a soft assurance that my secrets were safe with you, Eleanor. But the garden was silent, including the slaves’ quarters. There wasn’t a calming voice singing a child to sleep, or a laugh or a cough or even a wisp of music. Nothing. The buildings were dark.

  I went back inside to climb the stairs to my room. The parlor doors were closed, and the Union soldiers were inside. I could smell pipe tobacco and hear their deep voices as I walked past. Will was in that room. Closed away from me. Wearing blue. And your brother, Eleanor. My cousin. They were both in that room where I had sewn Confederate uniforms, and those men were the enemy of Virginia.

  My fingers are aching from writing, Eleanor. Everything is aching.

  Susannah

  10 May 1862

  Holly Oak, Fredericksburg, Virginia

  Dearest Eleanor,

  And so I begin another letter you will likely never read. I do not need Eliza to get it to you. I could easily ask John to put it in his haversack for you. I am sure he would not mind slipping my letter in with his own to you and Auntie. But I don’t want to ask him.

  I spend my days pretending he and Will are insufferable Yankees outstaying their welcome in our house. John told me to show him and Will no extraordinary kindnesses since they will be leaving soon, and Eliza and I will remain in Fredericksburg among its angry people. The scouts will be on their way in a few days to Williamsburg or maybe Richmond. I don’t know. I am not supposed to know. I don’t want to know.

  Sometimes I think the Will that I love is still in Maine and this other man who looks like him and sounds like him is some warped mirror image of him, a d
eviation. I’ve spent so many long weeks sewing abstract gray pieces together, day after day after day, that I cannot quite grasp the notion that I had been creating clothes a Southern militia man would wear, perhaps as he sat inside a Northerner’s house, drinking a Northern woman’s whiskey and eating her food and taking her absent husband’s books and tobacco. I had not pictured Southern soldiers inside those uniforms, doing what soldiers do. I should have.

  Will caught me staring at him after supper tonight. I was clearing the last of the plates, and he was sitting alone at the table, preparing to light a pipe. The other men had stepped out into the garden. I must have lingered, motionless and staring, because he looked up at me. “What is it, Susannah?” he asked, thinking perhaps I was angry about something. But I was contemplating this bizarre paradox of his lovely nearness and yet strange distance, and because I was so entranced in this pondering, I was dazedly forthright. “It’s like you are here but not here,” I said, blushing at once. And he laughed. Light and sweet. The way I remembered it.

  “That is a very interesting observation, Susannah. Are you telling me you think I am invisible?” His smile was wide and perfect.

  I struggled to assemble words that would make sense, that would explain but would not embarrass me further. “The last time I saw you, you were wearing a brown-checked shirt and you had sawdust in your hair and no beard and you chased me with a lizard.”

  His eyes danced with merriment. “Ah, yes. You do not care much for reptiles, as I recall.”

  The memory made me smile too. Do you remember that day, Eleanor? Remember how I screamed? It had been exhilarating. “No. Not reptiles,” I said.

  “But now I am sitting here in your parlor, and a map says we are on opposite sides of a terrible war,” he said. Gently. And I nodded. I told him I just wanted everything to go back to the way it was.

  And he just said, “No, you don’t.”

  Peaceful images of my papa and our pretty house in Washington and the summers we’d spent in Maine and Will chasing me filled my mind. And then I thought of my mother’s mindless mutterings and the empty larder and the Union soldiers laughing at Eliza as she yelled at them in the haberdashery and Lt. Page’s lips on my hand, and I said yes, I do.

  “You want to go back to being a child?” Will laughed.

  No, I told him. I wanted to go back to being happy. And he said happiness is not something we go back to get. We pursue it. It is ahead of us, not back in time. And that’s what the North was doing. Pursuing a peaceful end to the dreary set of circumstances the Confederate Army had set into motion.

  He struck a match and touched it to the bowl of his pipe, puffing on it as it took the flame. The room filled with the sweetest of scents, powerful and painful. I swayed for a moment. My father’s tobacco.

  “Where did you get that?” I whispered.

  Will looked at me quizzically. “This was my grandfather’s pipe.”

  “The tobacco,” I said. “Where did you get that?”

  “I found a whole tin of it in a crate of books and papers in your root cellar. It’s a shame for it to go to waste down there,” he said.

  Tears began to slide instantly down my cheeks. It was if they had been hanging there ready to fall for all these many long months since Papa died. Just dangling there like a curtain poised to drop.

  Will’s brow crinkled and he cocked his head, ready, I am sure, to ask me why I was crying, but the doors to the garden opened and the soldiers began to file back into the house. I grabbed a plate from the table and dashed back into the pantry.

  The soldiers had caught two rabbits for breakfast tomorrow. They are tired of ham, they said. And that is all we have. They have already eaten all our chickens. The soldiers brought the rabbits into the pantry while I was wiping the tears from my face. They wanted me to clean and skin them. I have never touched a dead animal. I bolted from the room. I heard one of them yell for me to come back and he’d teach me, and Will told him to leave me alone.

  I ran to my room and opened the window. The orchards are in bloom.

  18 May 1862

  Holly Oak, Fredericksburg, Virginia

  Dear Eleanor,

  Will is recovering from a fever. Grandmother put him in my bed, and I have been made to sleep with Eliza. The Confederate uniforms are still buried inside my bed. But I suppose it will not be the end of all things if Will discovers them. Eliza had me hide them for Will and John anyway. They were the two men she hid in Tessie’s cabin the night I followed her.

  I miss Tessie. I wonder if she misses us. Probably not.

  I will finish this letter later. Eliza found some stray hens and their chicks out along the river this morning. We need to find a way to hide them.

  Seven o’clock.

  The chickens are in the attic. Eliza made a hole in the roof to let sunlight in and covered it with a pane of glass she took from the carriage house. It is my job to make sure the hens stay quiet and happy. We made a dirt floor for them to peck at, and after supper I had the unfortunate task of catching crickets and grasshoppers for them. We can only spare so much corn. We hope and pray the hens will lay eggs for us.

  Will’s fever returned this afternoon, and he was most angry about it since he and the others are to leave soon. I brought him a basin of cool water and a cloth, and I confess I found much enjoyment sitting at his side, soothing his brow with my cloth.

  He told me fever or no fever, he’s getting up tomorrow, and I told him even soldiers can’t tell a fever what to do. That made him smile. “When did you grow up, Susannah? You’re not the girl I chased with a lizard.”

  I smiled back at him. “I would guess if you had a lizard to chase me with, I would still run.”

  “You must have a string of beaus writing you letters from battle,” he said, still smiling.

  And my heart seemed to take a stutter step. “No,” I told him. I didn’t tell him about Lt. Page. I didn’t want to think about Lt. Page at that moment.

  “Surely at least one,” he continued. “Your grandmother tells me a certain lieutenant is sweet for you. Wants to marry you.”

  My face roared with anger and color. “She … she is … I am not …” But Eleanor, I couldn’t finish! How could Grandmother have said such a thing? It was not her place to say it. And yet Grandmother does not know I love Will. And she thinks I will accept Lt. Page’s proposal of marriage. She thinks it’s just a matter of time before I will.

  “So, the lieutenant’s sweet for you, but you are not sweet for him,” Will said, assessing my stuttering to silence. “You are sweet for someone else perhaps?”

  I could do nothing but stroke his brow with my cloth. Words utterly failed me. The door opened, and I was at first glad for the interruption. Eliza came in bearing a tea tray. But then I saw Will’s eyes brighten at her approach. His body, so close to mine, seemed to tense with veiled anticipation regarding her presence. Surprise walloped me.

  And I seemed to sink into a gray place of denial, sitting there on my bed with Will lying inches from me, and him watching my aunt cross the room with a tray in her hands. I did not want to accept what I was seeing.

  Eliza set the tray down and left with barely a word. And for that small miracle, I was grateful.

  She is not in love with him, Eleanor. But I think he might be in love with her.

  Susannah

  29 May 1862

  Holly Oak, Fredericksburg, Virginia

  My dear Eleanor,

  Will and John have left, along with the other soldiers who were staying here, and Holly Oak is ours alone once again. More soldiers came after the scouting party left, wanting to sleep in our bedrooms, but Grandmother told them no. I worried that they might insist, but they didn’t. They went to the house next to ours, and I saw them go inside. I don’t know why they were allowed in. Surely our neighbors put up the same resistance.

  The curfew is still in effect, and Yankee soldiers still walk the streets, bored, but there aren’t as many. Many of them are staying on
the hill across the river, including the commanding officers, at the Lacy house. We hear the Lacys have left. Other Fredericksburg families have left too. Grandmother says we will never leave Holly Oak.

  There are cooking fires at the slaves’ quarters at the edge of the garden again. Negroes making their way north are spilling into occupied Fredericksburg to rest, organize, and disperse for destinations they have probably dreamed of their whole lives. At first Grandmother said she would not allow runaway Negroes to sleep in our slave quarters, but this was something she could only complain about while we women ate together in the pantry. There was nothing she could do about it. Eliza told Grandmother she could not stop what was happening by simply ordering it not to happen.

  After supper yesterday, Eliza took me down to the slaves’ quarters to see if those who were staying there for the night needed anything. There was a Negro woman with a new baby who was very ill. The baby was weak with hunger and listless. Eliza handed me the baby and asked me to go ask all those staying in our slaves’ quarters if there was a nursing mother who could feed the child while she tried to help the woman eat something. She pushed me out the door before I could protest.

  I did what she asked, but there was no one who could feed the child. I took the baby up to the house, and Grandmother tried to feed it some watered porridge, but the infant could not swallow it. Grandmother told me the child would likely not last the night and that I should take it back to its mother so that it would die in her arms, not mine.

  I went back to Eliza and the sick mother. Eliza was mopping the woman’s dark brow with cool water, and the woman kept whispering, “My child, my child.” And Eliza told her I was right there in the room with her and I was holding her baby. Eliza started to sing to her. And to the baby. To me too, I think. And I fell asleep in Tessie’s rocker with the baby in my arms.