Homeland (11 page)

It is as if winter never existed, nor ever could again. On this June morning I love all the world.

Dear Susanna,

I am so angry, and so troubled in my heart, I do not even know if this letter will make sense. Yet I must tell someone of what happened yesterday. The Union is the only hope of true human freedom in this world: this I truly believe. And, I believe that its preservation takes precedence over—I know I should write the word “everything” and I can not. But I do not know what to write instead.

Oliver has joined the Army. Recruiters came to the island’s Fourth of July Fair and Celebration yesterday, giving away free liquor and accompanied by a small company of soldiers doing very smart drill in their wool uniforms in spite of punishing heat. The Captain engaged Ollie in talk, saying, I’m sorry to hear you have a broken leg—or is it the consumption, that’s keeping you from joining up? Or is it only that your “wifey-ifey won’t wet her ‘ittle man go?” Will Kydd, who fetches the mail from Belfast every Monday, tried to answer back, but the Captain dismissed him as “one of those men who’d rather see himself walking around safe, and his nation crippled.” At length Oliver, in a burst of pride, signed the recruiting papers, before I could get to him.

Elinor assures me that Peggie “would rather die in childbed” than be “married to a coward”—which, in fact, I don’t think is the case. She further assures me that it’s only a three-month enlistment—until apple-picking time—and pressed into my hand one of her Propaganda Society pamphlets, the verse enclosed. Yet, even if Ollie only goes to Virginia for that short while, it does not lessen the danger while he is there. Through the wall that separates my room from theirs I could hear Peggie crying, all night.

I am still angry today. Should I be angry with myself, for feeling as I do? Is it evil to love my brother [
more than
—crossed out] [
as much
as
—crossed out]? Is it wrong of me even to write these questions to you, who have lost two precious brothers and the home you loved?

Remembering your letter, I went to the attic and searched out
David Copperfield
, which I knew I had seen in Mr. Poole’s trunk: seeking proof I suppose that I am not insane or wicked to feel, at the same time, genuine love and blinding rage. Bless you for not holding me to any of what I have said above.

Your letter came like an answer to the thoughts tearing at my heart.
Everyone sounds the same. Hating the Yankees. Wishing every one of them would die
. I cannot say the relief it brings me, to read that you don’t hate
me
, or wish my family impoverished or my house burned, in revenge for your brothers’ deaths. Sometimes I feel as if I were surrounded by strangers, who only
look
like the people I used to know …
as if everyone who favored the Union had conspired to murder our brother
. Like Mother, I suppose, telling me horrible tales of children’s deaths, to lessen the hurt she still carries for the little girl she lost.

I take back what I’ve said about Elinor. I suppose it just shows how mixed are the elements of the soul. That was she who came to the door of the summer kitchen just now, with the news from her father, a selectman of the island, that I’ve been offered the position
as schoolmistress on Isle au Haut. Among the men who volunteered along with Ollie was Peletiah Small, the Isle au Haut schoolteacher. The town is now offering a bounty of a hundred dollars for enlistment, but hired men are dearly expensive now, if they can be found at all. I think this is Elinor’s way of making good this loss.

Laundry; a task infinitely easier in summertime when it can be done every two weeks instead of every six or eight. I still feel as if
I
, rather than the sheets, had been boiled in a tub. Ironing tomorrow, nearly all day, and picking the first of the cucumbers and stoning cherries for Mother to put up. How I love the feel of garden-earth between my fingers! The sky holds light until ten or ten-thirty at night. We all live in the summer kitchen, as late into the evening as we can stand the mosquitoes, which seem to be insatiable. I am generally the last one left, and sometimes write with a pillow-slip draped over my head like a hood, in which ridiculous attitude I sit now, dear, dear Susie, aching shoulders and all.

The cod-fleet has gone out again, and Papa has not found a man yet. I wanted solitude, and quiet, to re-read what you wrote of my father-in-law, and the death of my husband’s mother. I will admit that Mr. Poole’s letter surprised me, in both its erudition (for in person he makes a Spartan look like a chatterbox) and in its kindliness. Even as I write those words, I remember how difficult Elizabeth Bennet finds it, to reconcile Mr. Darcy’s cold haughtiness—or Mr. Wickham’s facile charm—with the truth, until more information is received. This gives me pause with regard to my father-in-law, and his estrangement from his son. As Miss Bennet did
not
do—to her sorrow—I will withhold my judgement, and wait upon events. I will say, things seem to be much simpler in the Bible, where men are good or bad, than in one of Miss Austen’s novels!

Oliver has gone. It is the time of year when the girls go over to Isle au Haut “a-plummin’”—that is, gathering blackberries, a task with which I will not be able to help, nor with the making of the jam. Tomorrow I begin my career as a teacher. Isle au Haut stands six miles farther out to sea than Deer Isle, and is so primitive as to make Deer Isle appear cosmopolitan. I’ll cross back and forth every day with Will Kydd (“If you can stand the thought of sailing with a Copperhead,” sneers Elinor). Elinor, who is still nursing Columbia, promises she will look after sweet little Mercy Susanna, as well. I’ve always gotten on well with Will Kydd, and I would rather that arrangement, than board on the island five days a week, and only see my beloved treasure Saturday evenings and Sundays. Before last Friday, I have not been away from Mercy for more than a few minutes at a time. There is no pleasure on Earth comparable to holding her in my arms, to bathing her, changing her (now you know I have gone insane!), touching her tiny hands and feet. And yet, I find the thought of going off to work each day—of earning money to help my family—fills me with an unladylike relish that is almost savage.

Thank you, dearest friend, for your kind thoughts, and your words of encouragement about my darling’s birth. Yes, I fully expect a portrait of her—in oils!—one day … if you can make time among your other commissions.

I will refrain from writing to inform Mr. Poole of your new suitor. The prospect of a duel between two gentlemen of such venerable years can cause nothing but revulsion to ladies so refined as ourselves!!!

[enclosure—clipping from propaganda pamphlet]

[lost]

My darling Susanna,

A hundred times in the past three weeks I’ve thought
—Susie needs to know about this!
And by the time I finish cleaning the school-house, and step off the
Lady Anne
at Green’s Landing, and walk, through peaceful summer woods at twilight, the mile and a half to Elinor’s to get Mercy and then another mile and a half home, and feed Mercy, and help Mother with supper, and tell Papa about teaching (there are youngsters in my class under the impression
that all United States Presidents are lineally descended from George Washington), and—and—and … it is ten o’clock, with dawn, breakfast, and the walk to Green’s Landing again all due at five.

I must and will write, though once again it is nearly ten, with the prospect of even-yet-earlier awakening tomorrow. Uncle Mordacai is taking Mother, Elinor, and myself to the mainland, to deliver the news to Ollie of the birth of his beautiful son Oliver Lincoln Smith, who is wailing fretfully in the next room. Mercy, very much set up in her own opinion of herself as
far
too adult to give way to bouts of babyish weeping, sleeps like a furled rose-bud in her basket, hung over with cheesecloth to keep the mosquitoes away.

You need to see all the thousand tiny islets of Merchant Row in morning’s first light—tabletops of granite each with its little tuft of pine-trees—garlanded about with diamond waves breaking, wreathed in crying gulls. You need to see the lobster-boats going out of Green’s Landing when the
Lady Anne
sets forth, the air chill enough to require a shawl and the smell of the sea filling the whole of the world. You need to know what a deck feels like underfoot when the wind takes the sails and the sloop surges forward like a team of matched horses settling to gallop. I’d so love to see you sketching all this!

Dearest friend, I read the news of gunboat battles near Vicksburg, and huge Confederate raids in Kentucky, and I pray that you are safe.

Uncle Mordacai took us across to the mainland in the
Gull:
Mother, Elinor, and myself. Recruits are still coming in, and the rows of little shelter-tents along the Kennebec look sloppy and half-finished, little more than strips of muslin draped in an inverted V over a pole about three feet from the ground, open to the elements
at both ends. The men of Company B—Ollie’s company—haven’t gotten their shelter-tents yet. They share a single marquee, sleeping on bare ground. The men crowded around us, clasped our hands, stammered greetings, even men from other parts of Maine, men we had never met before. Someone gave Mother half a barrel to sit on, and I was handed a visibly unwashed tin cup full of the sort of coffee the Devil must brew in Hell. Mother gave Ollie the molasses-cookies she’d baked and he promptly distributed them among his mess-mates. Looking at their faces, as Mother told him the news of Peggie’s safe delivery, I realized that Mother wasn’t just Ollie’s mother now, but the mother each of them left back in Kittery or Bangor or Portland. I was the sister each of them grew up with. The news of little Nollie’s birth was to each man tidings of the birth of his own son, the safety of his own wife.

The men shouted congratulations and thumped Oliver on the back, but I wondered if he was ill, for he was curiously silent, and he looked so much thinner than when he’d left home three weeks ago. But only when he walked with us back to the train-station in the late afternoon, did he break the news to us: his Colonel had that day informed him that his enlistment was for three
years
, not three months as he had originally supposed when he joined!

Elinor of course put her arms around my waist and Mother’s, and declared stoutly, “Three years or three months, Ollie, does that change your country’s need? You know Peggie will understand” But Peggie wept until she was sick, when she heard the news upon our return, and could not nurse poor tiny Nollie. Between doing double duty, and comforting her, I was not in bed until long past midnight.

One of the lobstermen who’s been over to Belfast says, Word is that the Rebels have attacked Baton Rouge. To the best of our knowledge, the Thirteenth (Brock’s regiment), though in Louisiana,
is not at Baton Rouge … or wasn’t, as of his last letter. But Elinor’s Nathan is in the Fourteenth, as is John Henderson, whose brother Alex—in the same company—died of fever in New Orleans only weeks ago. Papa is still not yet back from Northwest Harbor (it is nine now, and growing dark) where he walked to learn more, if he can.

Bless Will Kydd! Though he greatly objects to the War, he crossed to Belfast last night, the moon being nearly full, to fetch what news he could. With it, he fetched your letter. (With all this, he remembered to ask the postmaster if there was something for me!) He vows he will cross again tonight.

The whole island holds its breath. Almost fifty island men are in the Fourteenth, a great many of them married men with families. Those who aren’t thinking of Charles Grey and Alex Henderson, surely cannot keep from their minds poor Charlie Noyes, and George Herrick and Billy Dunbar, who were returned alive but will never be anything but charges upon their families for the remainder of their lives.

It is as though the Angel of Death passes over the island this night:
There was a great cry in Egypt, for there was not a house where there was not one dead
. Would that we could avert it, by prayer, or obedience, or blood smeared on the lintels of our doors!

I read that the shelling has ceased at Vicksburg, at least for the time being. By the time tonight’s words reach you, Susie, tonight’s fears will be part of the past. Yet in my heart I see you hiding in the cellar with Julia, I smell the churned earth and see the ruined homes of your friends, as if those events took place just today. Would matters be different, if women could vote? I don’t know. Elinor’s devotion to the cause of the War—and the equal devotion of your Aunt Sally’s friends—makes me doubt it. Would matters be different, if women could go out and get work, and support themselves and
their families? If we were equals in the sight of Mammon as well as of God? I would like to think so. At least then we would not be waiting upon the choices of others, to learn how we must live the rest of our lives.