Homeland Read online

  Sorrowfully,

  Cora

  Susanna Ashford, Vicksburg, Mississippi

  To

  Cora Poole, Deer Isle, Maine

  [not sent]

  TUESDAY, DECEMBER 9, 1862

  NIGHT

  Dearest Cora,

  Well, as you can see, the Awful Mrs. R came through and I now have actual writing-paper again, and real ink, and nibs. That drawing at the top of the page is how she actually looks: rather like Lady Southdown in Vanity Fair, don’t you think? Julia and I have been cutting and sewing and fitting and sticking pins in our fingers for weeks, since we will need not only one new dress apiece, but two. Tho’ the Awful Mrs. R is having a reception for President Davis, Aunt Sally has scored over her because we are having His Excellency (or whatever the proper term is—His Confederacy????) for dinner (as a guest, that is—judging by his pictures he would make a rather scraggy entrée).

  Between making two dresses, and turning out the best good china that Husband #2 brought from France, and Nellie still being very weak (tho’ Julia says, like Pa, that she’s just lazy), I have little time to either draw or read. At night I’ve been reading my way through Waverley and all its sequels, like a rat going through cheese.

  WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 10

  You spoke of carrying Baby Mercy back and forth to Isle au Haut on Mr. Kydd’s boat; how did that answer? Does she like the sea? What does she look like now? Is her hair golden like Emory’s, or that lovely flax-straw color like yours? Are her eyes as beautiful as yours? Is she big or little for her age? I wish, wish, you could tell me what Isle au Haut is like, for I need to picture you there!

  Here I conjure your reply:

  My dearest Susie—The inhabitants of Isle au Haut dwell in caves, dress in skins (tho’ quite warmly and decently), and live chiefly upon raw sea-gull. I have introduced them to the works of Miss Austen, having first taught them the alphabet for that purpose. Your affectionate, Cora.

  SATURDAY, DECEMBER 13

  NIGHT

  News of the battle in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Even first reports sound hideous, and I pray, pray, that your brother isn’t there, Cora. Curse this distance between us! Curse that I can’t fly there to be with you and little Mercy until it’s done and you know he is safe. I pretend you’ll get this and I pretend I’ll get one from you but sometimes it comes back to me that I won’t know, I won’t be able to give you any comfort—and I don’t know, if he’s killed, if you’ll come to hate me.

  WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 17

  As we were coming out of headquarters today, I heard my name called and turned around and saw—Emory! I stood quite foolishly open-mouthed, and then in spite of all Aunt Sally’s instruction about good manners, flung myself into his arms. He looks well, Cora, and extremely handsome in his uniform (even if it is the wrong color). He embraced me so that he almost swept me from my feet, to hear that he has a daughter, that I had heard from you as late as October, that you still loved him and were true to him, despite the disapprobation of your friends. I told him what you had said, to the Daughters of the Union: That your loyalty to the Union, and your love for him, are alike unaltered, and he laughed and kissed me and pulled my hair the way Payne used to. He is an aide to General Pemberton, and on the train home I wrought upon Aunt Sally, to invite him, and Tom (who is in the same regiment), for Christmas, if they can get furlough from their duties.

  How I wish this was a real letter, so that I could really tell you that he is well!

  Your friend,

  Susie

  P.S. Here’s a sketch of Emory, kneeling in the street to kiss Aunt Sally’s hand.

  Cora Poole, Deer Isle, Maine

  To

  Susanna Ashford, Vicksburg, Mississippi

  [not sent]°

  FRIDAY, DECEMBER 12, 1862

  Dearest Susanna,

  So much for the week’s warm weather! Wild wind bringing down snow; I hope the storm was bad enough in New Haven, to discourage Papa from setting forth, for there is little hope he will be able to cross the Reach tomorrow. But we are well for diapers, for many weeks to come. As I direct these letters to you, and drop them one by one into the “post-box”—an old candle-box tucked into a corner of Mr. Poole’s trunk—I imagine them flying straight to you, now freed of the tedious process of being carried across to Belfast, and delivered to some horny-handed bush-whacker in Kentucky, to be passed on to Eliza’s guerilla son and thence to Eliza …

  And all, all to tell you, that we are well-stocked for diapers! I picture you reeling under the impact of this revelation. Yet could I get a note in your hand, recounting who said what at your Aunt Sally’s Sunday tea—or a scribble from Emory telling me how many thousands in Confederate money he has won on the cockroach races—I would rejoice in them. Perhaps, as Dora Copperfield says, it is better to be stupid than uncomfortable. Forgive your silly friend.

  SATURDAY, DECEMBER 13

  More steam, more fogs: baths in the kitchen, with the wind howling dimly on the other side of cushioning snow. I write this in bed, tucked to my chin in feather-ticks, Mercy curled sleeping at my side. It is the New England way, to bathe on Saturdays as if in expectation of being able to attend services, and to dress in our best on the Sabbath, and spend the day in quiet sitting and reading the Bible in the parlor, where a fire has been laid ready—the only day of the week, in winter, that it is so.

  A family of mice has taken up residence in one of my dresser drawers. I have put out flour mixed with plaster, and a vessel of water, yet have found no corpses yet.

  THURSDAY, DECEMBER 18

  Newspapers at last! And, God bless Will Kydd, he has brought me the New York World, the Chicago Tribune, as well as the usual paper from Portland. The storm did not abate until yesterday, and like a cold shadow on the island, worse than any storm, came news of the bloodshed in Virginia. Only preliminary reports, but the Sixteenth was engaged. Peggie huddles weeping in a corner of the kitchen, “I know he’s dead! I know he’s dead!” and I struggle not to shout at her. Does she think Mother loves Ollie—her baby and her favorite—less than she? This evening, after supper, I read aloud the Psalms of hope, and the Acts of the Apostles—tales of faith and courage, whose end we know was good. But alone here in my room, with Nollie as well as Mercy at my side, I weep.

  SATURDAY, DECEMBER 20

  Why do I think it more likely that Ollie will be killed in battle, than that Brock will take sick with fever in Louisiana? Brock has written many times of the poisonous heat there, the deadly fevers that have felled one man in four in their camp, and have killed already seven of our island men in the Thirteenth. Little comfort to tell myself that tonight—Saturday—the battle is over and done, one way or the other, because I know Ollie may in fact be wounded unto death.

  How does the imagination produce so many ways of tormenting oneself? God gave us the capacity to dream into the future, and the gift of faith, double-edged swords that can tear as well as mend. Yet these are the angel elements of our nature, for I feel certain that Mrs. Brown and her bovine sisters in the barn feel no anxiety about the quality of their fodder next Tuesday. Or perhaps they do—I can hear you saying, “How do we know?” How indeed, my dear friend?

  You have passed before me along this road. I will take courage from your cheer.

  Your own,

  Cora

  P.S. One mouse dead at least—and a great deal of flour and plaster dust tracked about my room.

  Cora Poole, Deer Isle, Maine

  To

  Susanna Ashford, Vicksburg, Mississippi

  [not sent]

  MONDAY, DECEMBER 22, 1862

  NIGHT

  Susanna,

  Though the moon is new and the clear night moonless, still Will Kydd snowshoed to our door, to give us Ollie’s letter. He is safe, Susie!

  THURSDAY, DECEMBER 25

  NIGHT

  Papa arrived yesterday, and this morning the six of us traversed the marble-white world to Northwest Harbor to church in Uncle
M’s sleigh. Only one brief service: there are chores to be done, wood to be cut and sawed, diapers—how many diapers!—to be rinsed and stacked in the corner of the summer kitchen, where they will freeze solid until next laundry-day. Still, for all the disapprobation of Pastor Wainwright and Uncle M and Mother, Christmas is not a day quite like other days. I can see it in Papa’s face as he plays with his grandchildren in the parlor. A rare fire has been kindled there, to the indignant horror of the spiders in the chimney.

  Peggie declined my invitation, to read A Christmas Carol together as we did last year. So I have lain here, huddled under all my quilts, reading it to myself, sometimes aloud to my precious Mercy, who seems fascinated at my attempts to give different voices to Scrooge, and the Ghosts, and Mr. Cratchit, and Tiny Tim. At least she does not yet say, “Oh, Mama, you’re doing it all wrong!” as I’m sure she one day will.

  I hope your Christmas is as kindly, my friend. I hope your New Year will be as blessed.

  Love,

  Cora

  Susanna Ashford, Vicksburg, Mississippi

  To

  Cora Poole, Deer Isle, Maine

  [not sent]

  MONDAY, DECEMBER 22, 1862

  Dear Cora,

  With every good intention in the world, to write at least a line to you last night, I couldn’t do it. Here is an advantage to not being able to post these letters at all: I can pretend that as I write them, you will receive them the very next day, and know about Emory already, and the dinner for President Davis.

  The dinner went astonishingly well. You will have heard that there are terrible shortages of food in the Confederacy: well, you could not have told it last night. Nellie, tho’ still not at all well, worked like a hero in the kitchen, setting tiny paper-lace crowns around each crawfish and wrapping chicken-livers in strips of bacon. While Julia wrote out place-cards and menus (my handwriting being insufficiently elegant) I polished silver, twenty place-settings of it all covered with curliques which had to be cleaned with an old tooth-brush, and by naked extortion and scouring the countryside, Aunt Sally was able to field eight full courses, including turkeys, chicken vol-au-vents, duck a l’orange, and a cream soup in spite of the fact that nearly every cow in the countryside has vanished into the maw of the Army. And coffee. And wine. The butler, and Zed the stableman, both looked strikingly impressive in livery.

  Julia, who has been nearly distracted since Friday, when we heard that yes, Emory and Tom got twenty-four-hour furloughs to spend Christmas Day here, flirted outrageously with every man at the table (and there were twenty of them, just about all of the President’s staff, and every single one of them needed a fish-fork and a cheese-fork). I pretended to be a Spy in Enemy Territory again and managed a five-minute chat with President Davis about Waverley (which his wife is currently reading aloud to him when he has headaches, which he has just about every night, and no wonder). I asked him about Pa. The President says, Pa is making himself extremely useful in the government and waiting for a “good position” to “materialize.” I wanted to ask him, Has Pa got a ladyfriend yet? but didn’t know how to phrase it politely. After everyone left I got unlaced, put on my oldest dress, and helped Nellie clean the knives.

  THURSDAY, DECEMBER 25

  NIGHT

  And now the house is still again. I wish you were here. Selfishly, because I miss you, but also, because Emory is asleep in the room across the hall: I know you’d want to be with him there!!!

  Last Christmas I was in Nashville at the Academy; the Christmas the War was supposed to be over by. Bayberry was still a little bit the same as the place I remember growing up in. I think of the Dashwood sisters, and the Bennet girls, and saintly Amelia Sedley, who all face being put out of their homes quite penniless; is that why we find those books so appealing? Because when I read them I can say, the Dashwood sisters survived the loss of the place which brought them close to their childhood: so can I? As you wrote to me, “One small and possible hand-hold at a time.” Even those lurid tales where the heroine is kidnapped and put in dungeons and pursued across the moors in rainstorms at midnight clad only in her nightgown: in most instances (except for poor Esmeralda), she emerges without even catching cold! Reading them, I can think, If Emily or Isabella got through it all right, I will be all right, too.

  But I’m beginning to notice that they all involve marrying a man, and him being amazingly rich. And the women who want something else in their lives turn out to be wicked harlots. Or comic figures like Betsy Trotwood, or sinister mad ones like Miss Havisham.

  I’m sorry I’m the one under the same roof with Emory tonight, and not you: that you’re buried under snow by this time on Deer Isle, with pine-boughs like a nest all around your home, and a tempest blowing outside. I hope your Papa was able to come home for Christmas, and that Ollie came safely through the battle and both your brothers got furloughs. I hope that you were able to be happy on your daughter’s first Christmas in this baffling world.

  Thinking of you,

  Susanna

  P.S. FRIDAY, DECEMBER 26

  A Yankee expedition under General Sherman has landed at Steele’s Bayou, ten miles north of town.

  [sketches]

  Susanna Ashford, Vicksburg, Mississippi

  To

  Cora Poole, Deer Isle, Maine

  [not sent]

  FRIDAY, JANUARY 2, 1863

  Dear Cora,

  It is bitterly cold this afternoon, the wind sweeping down the river straight from the North Pole, it feels like, and cord-wood up to forty dollars! I’m in the attic above the kitchen, where it’s warm. There’s a gable behind me facing west, and I get a good strong light for about three hours a day. Mr. Cameron told me to draw something every day, even if it’s only old shoes or old gloves. As you can see by the margins of this page, there are plenty of those up here. Sometimes if we don’t have company for the evening, I’ll creep back here after supper with a couple of candles and read. Nellie will come and say good-night, on her way in to her room on the other side of the attic, and tell me stories her Mama told her, about how you shouldn’t sleep under trees near the crossroad because the witches will ride you. You have witches in New England, don’t you? What tales do people tell? Is that particular shade of blue (“hai’nt blue” Cook calls it) proof against Maine devils the way it is against African ones?

  Captain F to dinner tonight. Aunt Sally is more determined than ever to marry me off. When I try to speak to her about why women aren’t allowed to be doctors or lawyers or engineers (or even artists), she looks at me as if I were speaking Ethiopian. “Women just don’t have the capacity, dear” She says this after sending off letters diligently to her business agents in France, New York, and three South American countries.

  My friends here—only they’re the kind of friends Miss Austen talks of in Northanger Abbey, that are your friends because you happen to all be in the same place at the same time—have even less of an idea of doing anything but getting married and raising children. Lately I find myself two different people: who I am with them, and who I am really. We have a reading-group here—and at last! Somebody has acquired a copy of A Tale of Two Cities and we start on that in February!—and we’re getting together to put on “Scenes From Shakespeare” at next month’s Musicale to raise money for the local hospitals. And most of them are mostly interested in trading excerpts from letters from beaux in the Army, or talking about what kind of dresses they’ll make the minute the blockade is “over.” Like Lady Middleton in S&S, they suspect me of being “satirical” because I read, without quite knowing what “satirical” is.

  Much of the time I feel very strange and alone.

  LATER. NIGHT

  Whew! Every time I think F can not get more boring, he proves me wrong. A surprise guest at dinner—can you guess? Emory came—on errand from Gen’l Pemberton, and Aunt Sally ordered him to remain, and the Gen’l can make the best of it for all she cares. Lottery-tickets and a game of Speculation in the parlor. You will be quite delig
hted to hear, Emory cleaned F out of his tokens like a picked carcass. Julia played the piano and sang, and Emory reduced her to blushes by recounting how Pa threw him off Bayberry, back in the days when he was courting her.

  SUNDAY, JANUARY 4

  Back from Sunday calls, in freezing wind. Barely any cream in the not-quite-tea, and that had been watered and mixed with chalk, I think, so it wouldn’t look thin. Would much rather have stayed home in the warm kitchen and helped Cook and Nellie do the lamps. Despite the terrifying cost of oil these days, Aunt Sallie insists on using at least some lamps, just to prove the Yankees aren’t really a problem. And poor Mrs. Bell’s house, though she’s had some of the shell damage repaired, is like sitting on a particularly drafty iceberg. Such a relief to return to the attic and re-read your letters. Sometimes when I read a book I know you’ve read—P&P, or Bleak House—I feel as if I’m in that same place—in London, or Meryton, or even Otrano’s accursed castle—and am likely to come around a corner and see you. And if we do not have time to talk that particular day, at least I know that you are well. I am well, too, and ever,