Mrs. Myers scolded her soundly for worrying her mother and little sister Sylvie inquired eagerly about whether she’d seen Eddie and Zan or even their cousin Jerry while she was away.
Feeling a little weak in the knees, she allowed them to lead her into the living room where she was glad to see Grandpapa Forrest, asleep in his big chair, his afternoon nap not disturbed by the fuss over her arrival.
Nobody had heard from him in long months back in the place where she’d just come from and Lavinia was frantic with worry. But here he was, safe and sound and she rejoiced for what that meant for the past.
Betsy helped Dottie make supper, marveling anew at the abundance of supplies with which she had to work and hoping each time she stepped across the threshold that she would be sent back to Caleb and the past.
At the same time it was pleasant to be in the comfortable world of the Lavender in which she’d grown up with indoor plumbing and a ‘modern’ cook stove.
While she whiled away the time with Susan or Dottie and staged her latest story telling session for the family, she began to have nightmares about the war and envisioned it coming closer and closer to Texas and to Lavender.
She’d studied the war at school and knew that another terrible battle loomed in the future: Antietam, another excess of blood-letting that would strike a sense of tragedy in the hearts of both north and south in the years to come.
Chapter Twelve
On the first day of each month by arrangement she borrowed the buggy from her papa and drove to the edge of Lavender to the familiar spot where the creek turned and leaving buggy and horses, walked across to the other side where a highway carried streaming traffic to a city that lay within sight, waiting by the side of the road for an hour or two in case Eddie and Zan wanted to pay a visit. As the one resident of Lavender with the ability to cross the line that shut off the little community, only she could offer her sister a way back home.
She’d come fruitlessly twice, but at the beginning of the third month she stepped across the line to find Eddie waiting for her.
They hugged and Eddie explained that Zan was tied up with one of his all-absorbing projects and she’d felt the need to spend a few days in Lavender.
Reassured that not only her brother-in-law, but her aunt, uncle and cousin were well, Betsy took her sister’s hand and together they walked back to that other time where Lavender lay.
She never asked about what was going on in that future time where Eddie made her home and Eddie rarely made any mentioning of happenings there. Eddie knew that what Betsy wanted was in Lavender, the peace and contentment of a simple life in a less complicated time. Eddie enjoyed the challenge of the future and her life with Zan there, but when she came home, she left what would be too much knowledge behind her and entered wholly into the life of her family and neighbors.
She exclaimed over the beauty of the landscape and drew in deep breaths of fresh air. “I had to come back,” she said now, “even if it was only to feel uncrowded space around me again.”
Betsy had spent some time herself in the busy modern world and had no wish to return. “And you don’t miss the rest of us a bit,” she teased.
“You know better.” Eddie’s delicately chiseled face which had more than a hint of her father’s somber expression in its features showed a variety of emotions. She was happy with the man she loved, Betsy knew that. At the same time she daily missed the mother, father and sisters she’d left behind.
She missed the big house on Crockett Street, the wide streets and downtown square of the little town where she’d grown up.
Betsy was more aware than ever of exactly how she felt. Each minute she was here she longed for Caleb and those others back in the 1860s and felt something of a coward for evading those desperate times. Not by choice, she reminded herself.
And when she was there, she missed all the things Eddie missed in her faraway future.
“What is it?” Eddie with her keen perception of others asked now. “What’s happened? Mama, Papa, they’re all right? Grandpapa, Sylvie . . .”
Betsy put a finger to her lips in a shushing gesture. “Everybody’s fine,” she said. “Nothing to worry about. They’ll be so glad to see you.”
They climbed into the buggy, Eddie taking the reins this time and gently urging the horses into motion. She seemed in no hurry to get back to town, but acted as though she wanted to savor each moment of her return.
“Eddie,” Betsy said suddenly. “Tell me about Civil War days.” While Betsy was the town’s storyteller and with a severe shortage of paper, made up tales that she told aloud to the community, Eddie was its verbal historian. With an amazing memory, she could recount material she’d read or heard.
Now she laughed. “The drive back to Lavender doesn’t give us enough time to cover the entire war,” she said.
Betsy nodded, but didn’t smile.
“You haven’t gone back,” Eddie said in sudden alarm. “That’s a terrible and dangerous time.”
Betsy stayed silent, trying to think how to explain what she needed. Of all of her family, Eddie was the one person she could tell most anything. They’d shared their growing up years, two very different personalities yet always closer than most real sisters. Eddie’s life had been as strange as her own; she would understand.
“I don’t want to know about Lincoln and Lee and all the big battles, or even the less well known ones that happened here in Texas. It’s Lavender in those years I need to hear about.”
Even as she focused her gaze on the narrow dirt road ahead of them, her hands steady on the reins that controlled the team, Eddie took on that look that told Betsy she was inside her own head, remembering with an acuteness few people possessed.
“When I was little an old man told me about those days and I’ve talked to others who lived through them. The stories they told are mostly left out of the history books.”
“That’s what I want to know.”
“You’ve been there,” Eddie accused. “Do Mama and Papa know?”
Betsy hesitated. “They know I’ve been away, but I suppose they think I’ve been visiting you.”
“We had our own little war right here,” Eddie blurted out the words. “You’ve always enjoyed the peace of Lavender so much, how can you bear to hear this?”
“Because I must,” Betsy answered simply.
Eddie didn’t question her further, but told her story after story as they rode along of real people who had lived through those days of division. Betsy heard of hangings and shootings, of men hiding out in the brush from the vigilantes and of families parted because they were on opposite sides.
At this point Eddie took a sidebar from her main story, “Did you know that even the president’s wife was a southerner and had family fighting for the confederacy?”
Betsy nodded. “It’s no wonder Mrs. Lincoln had problems,” she put it as delicately as she could, “considering she lost her little boys too. And then the assassination . . .” She allowed the thought to trail off.
Eddie went on with the story she had been telling of a slave family separated just before the start of the war when the children were sold away from their home. “Miranda told me that story,” she said when she was finished, “the slaves came from a place called Cottonwood Plantation near here.”
“Cottonwood Creek Plantation,” Betsy corrected. “Bolter Jackson’s place.”
Her sister stared at her. “I haven’t been there,” Betsy said defensively, “but Doc sneaks out there sometimes to treat the people. It wasn’t considered right back then for a white doctor to treat the slaves.”
“Doc who?” Eddie asked in a bewildered tone. These days when the people of Lavender referred to someone as ‘Doc,’ they meant Evan Stephens, her father. “Maybe you should be telling the stories to me, Bets.”
“Dr. Tyler Stephens, your great-grandfather.” Betsy sighed. “This isn’t one of my made-up stories, Eddie.”
“I figured that much out. You’ve been back ther
e and you met Papa’s grandpa and this Bolter person, didn’t you?”
She’d planned all along to admit the truth to her stepsister. “And I met Caleb Carr,” she said in a very small voice.
They rode another mile in silence before Betsy responded to the question Eddie didn’t ask. “Caleb is a confederate soldier, or rather he was. He got his leg badly hurt at Bull Run and came home to heal, but he’ll never be well enough to fight again. He’s lucky to be alive and still have two legs, Doc says, but he has to walk with a cane and, though he never lets on, I’m fairly sure he’s in pain every step he takes.”
The words just spilled out until she had to catch her breath.
“And you love him, this Caleb person?” Eddie guessed with her usual astuteness. “After all the flirtations and engagements and the ‘I’ll never marry,’ you’re caught at last.”
“Oh, Eddie,” Betsy confessed softly. “He’s gray and I’m blue and that’s terrible back then.”
“We don’t make easy choices, do we?” Eddie asked thoughtfully, though it was more a comment than a question. “First my Zan and now your Caleb.”
Betsy sniffed, holding back tears. “There’s just no hope for us and he hasn’t said he loves me or anything like that. But he did kiss me and the way he looks at me, well, I just know, Eddie. But the worst part is that here and now, nobody seems to remember him or talk about him and he wouldn’t be easy to forget. He’s handsome and intelligent and has a strong sense of what’s right and wrong, though he doesn’t seem to see slavery for what it is. Oh, Eddie, why is he like that?”
“Standing too close, most likely,” Betsy contributed, “but you’re telling me he’s a slave holder. He approves of slavery!”
“No, no, not that. He’s not well off like Bolter; he couldn’t afford slaves even if he wanted them. In fact, he was practically raised from the time he was twelve and his parents were killed by Hetty, who was Miranda’s mother.”
“Hetty!” Eddie exclaimed. “I remember her from when I was little. She taught me to make pickled peaches and how to look for herbs in the woods. And she told the best stories. Miranda is so much like her.”
“You can make pickled peaches! You don’t cook,” Betsy protested.
Eddie ignored her. “And you got to meet her back there when she was young. You’ll have to take me back.”
“I can’t do that,” Betsy said mournfully. “It’s not like when I cross out of Lavender. It’s like an accident, I just trip into it when I walk over the threshold to the kitchen and time after time, it doesn’t happen at all. It may never happen again.”
“Then how are you and Caleb going to be together?”
“I guess we won’t. Don’t you understand, Eddie, he’s never mentioned by Grandpapa or anybody else. Something terrible must have happened to him that nobody seems to remember him.”
Eddie took this in and then began to tell more of the accounts she’d heard of those early days in Lavender as though trying to distract her sister from her darker thoughts. This time all the stories she told were of cheerful family moments of the life that managed to go on in spite of the war.”
Betsy knew what she was trying to do and allowed herself to be drawn into the mood Eddie was creating. She even told about Evan, the man who they both thought of as their father, as a naughty little boy.
Laughing together, they drove into Lavender and, leaving horses and buggy in the shed, they went into the house where Eddie was welcomed just as enthusiastically as when Betsy herself had arrived.
Chapter Thirteen
A letter finally came, but it wasn’t from Forrest. “It’s from his commanding officer,” Lavinia whispered, her face white.
Caleb wanted to urge her to open the envelope so they could hear the news whatever it was, but he couldn’t say the words. Right now she was suspended in time. Until she read the words within that envelope, everything was all right and Forrest was safe.
He understood how she felt, but at the same time was impatient with such thinking. Whatever had happened, had already happened. Delaying the reading of the news didn’t change anything.
But he refrained from speaking and Doc didn’t say anything either. Little Evan, all unknowing, played with the toys his grandfather had made for him, on the floor.
She tore into the envelope with careful hands so as to least damage the paper, unfolding a single sheet of paper and began to read.
Caleb tried to interpret her expression, but her features seemed frozen, her pallor deepened. He watched as she read through what was obviously a brief message, then her eyes went back to the top as she read it a second time.
Her hands shook as she lowered the letter to her lap. “He’s not killed,” she said, then took a deep breath. Finally she looked up at Doc, remembering that he was her husband’s father. “It’s a funny letter. This colonel seems to think he’s written to us before and told us Forrest was missing, presumed killed.” Her voice shook as she said the last two words.” “He’s giving us the good news that Forrest is a prisoner and they’re trying to arrange a trade.”
Doc creaked to his feet, stamping his feet hard as he went over to look out a window. “First letter most likely got lost,” he said and Caleb guessed he couldn’t bear for either he or Lavinia to see the raw emotion in his face. Missing, presumed dead, then prisoner all at one swipe. It was more than an old man should have to take in.
“Does he say where he’s being held?” Caleb thought to ask.
Lavinia glanced at the letter again, than frowned. “Elmira,” she said, “Where’s that?”
She burst into tears and without waiting for an answer ran from the room. Evan stared after her, then asked quietly, “Mama?”
Caleb picked the toddler up from the floor, murmuring soothingly to him. He wished Betsy was here.
But then he wished that every day.
Everything certain seemed to be vanishing around him. He was one of the few young men left in Lavender and he pushed his weakened leg to limp around doing tasks for older folk and the women with young children who so desperately needed help.
Supplies were short, food choices limited, and except on the slave-holding plantations it was women, children and old men who would be harvesting the cotton this year, if there was any point in bringing it in at all when they had to struggle to get it across the Mexican border to market.
At their house they’d concentrated on growing vegetables and a little feed for the cow and horses. Lavinia with Hetty’s help had canned and dried what they could for winter meals and given away any excess to the most needy.
They’d heard of nearby skirmishes, but no battles close to their own community, though there was more word of hangings even in the county and Doc had been getting anonymous death threats left on the front porch.
Each word of the loss of a local boy to the war enraged kin and acquaintances so that hatred was reaching a high pitch on both sides and old neighbors passed each other on the streets without speaking.
Theirs was not the only divided household, but Lavinia excused Doc’s politics on the basis that he was old and didn’t perhaps think quite clearly and as far as Caleb was concerned, he wasn’t entirely sure what he thought these days. All he knew was that he had to be loyal to his own, but he didn’t argue with Doc anymore. There didn’t seem to be any point.
Each time he heard an unexpected sound, he turned around hoping to see Betsy. But as the summer faded into fall, she didn’t return.
Eddie stayed as long as she could, torn between her two worlds, but finally she could bear the absence from her husband no longer and set next Monday as the date she must return.
It was late summer in Lavender with all the lush beauty of that season and the two young women trailed behind the rest of the family as they returned from the school auditorium where they had presented conjoined performances for the benefit of their neighbors, Betsy telling her made-up stories while Eddie gave a recital of a portion of their history.
When they
got home, Mama and Papa went into the kitchen to put together the cold supper planned for the evening in the absence of both Dottie and Mrs. Myers who were attending a family get-together of their own.
Grandpapa Forrest sank a little wearily into the big chair reserved for his use and Sylvie perched on one of the arms of his chair while Betsy and Eddie settled onto a nearby sofa.
“Hate to see you go so soon, Eddie,” Grandpapa said grumpily.
Eddie refrained from pointing out that her visit had been weeks long and no doubt Zan was fretting to see his wife again. “I’ll miss you too, Grandpapa,” she said.
“And I suppose Betsy will be jaunting off to wherever it is she goes,” he complained, “I suspect she has a gentleman friend.”
Startled, Betsy didn’t deny. Instead she impulsively asked “Grandpapa, are you sure you don’t remember a man named Caleb Carr?”
Then she sat in terror, afraid he was about to tell her some disastrous tale of Caleb’s death. Eddie, aware of her deep unease, touched her fingertips to her hand in a gesture of reassurance.
“Caleb,” Grandpapa seemed to savor the name on his tongue. “Certainly I remember Caleb. Showed up in Lavender when he was about twelve having lost his parents. I put him to work around the place, home and store, just to see that he was proper fed. Came to be like a member of the family. Was a real support after he was crippled in the war and came home. A real favorite of my father’s and with Evan too, I’m told.”
“But whatever happened to him?” Betsy asked desperately and then wished she hadn’t.
Forrest shrugged. “A lot happened during the war. When I came back, he was here for a while.” He studied her thoughtfully. “Then he left.”
Betsy and Eddie looked at each other. This was just another enigma. Maybe they weren’t meant to have answers ahead of time. Perhaps they could only come one step after another, even in the past.
On Monday morning, Betsy drove Eddie out to the edge of the community. They waved as they passed farms where their neighbors were busily at work, reaping the late summer fruits and vegetables before the weather chilled and moved into autumn. Though they had talked steadily on the way in, both were now quiet, each thinking her own thoughts, as they drove toward parting.
Lavender Blue: A Time Travel Romance (Lavender, Texas Series) Page 9
