The Beguiled

by Thomas Cullinan

  After a while the sound of the horses died out. We found a place where McBurney could pull himself out of the ditch. Then we started across the field. I could see our Mattie working in the kitchen garden as we approached the back of the house.

  “There’s one other person in the household I forgot to mention,” I told him. “Our old Mattie, who may well be the nicest person here.”

  Matilda Farnsworth

  I seen her comin with him from out of the woods. I was pickin peas for dinner, lookin up from the row now and then to keep an eye on the smoke to make sure it didn’t start to move our way. The boomin and the bangin wasn’t botherin me too much by then. It’s like a lotta other things. In time you can learn to live with almost anything.

  Well I shoulda stopped them right then, but I didn’t. I should have gone right up to her and said, “Miss Amelia, you turn right around in your tracks now and take that fella back where you found him.”

  Later I thought about why I didn’t do that. It wasn’t because I knew he was wounded bad cause I didn’t find that out ’til later. Oh I could see he was leanin on the little girl and kinda hoppin along on one foot but I didn’t know he was hurt as bad he was.

  In fact I thought at first he was makin her bring him. I thought maybe he was holdin her so’s she couldn’t get away. I thought maybe he’d caught her out there in the woods and had forced her to tell where she lived and now was makin her walk along beside him so’s he could spy out the lay of the land for himself.

  I even thought maybe there was others behind him, maybe a whole lot of others like himself, hidin on the edge of the woods beyond the road, just waitin ’til the first one got to the house and sent up the signal that it was all right for the rest to come on.

  So I suppose I could say now I was scared, and it’s true I was. And maybe that was part of the reason I pretended I didn’t see them and why I turned my back and walked away . . . but it wasn’t the whole reason. Because to tell God’s truth, on top of bein scared I mighta been a little glad about it too.

  Because there was a hope in me sometimes that they would come, that they’d come and destroy this place, just knock it down with their cannons and then burn the rubbish. Course I never woulda wanted any of the young ladies to get hurt but there was times when I wouldn’t’ve cared what happened to anybody else here, and that afternoon mighta been one of those times.

  Oh yes, it’s possible I coulda stopped them before they got to the house. For instance I coulda said to Miss Amelia, “If he’s hurt so bad you can’t take him back to the woods, then put him in my old place in the quarters. I always keep that place swept and clean and we can bring blankets for him from the house.”

  And Miss Martha and Miss Harriet likely woulda gone along with that too. If he was put to bed in there already, chances are they’d’ve let him stay there, seein as how they figured he was trash anyway. And then, if he’d never been taken into the house, most likely he would never have gotten so familiar with anybody here.

  Well I been thinkin about these things lately—about what I mighta done, or at least tried to do. On the other hand I keep tellin myself I didn’t know then what I know now.

  I didn’t have any notion then how much evil we got in us, all of us. Seems like none of us ever stop to think how evil can collect in us . . . how one little mean thought can pile on another ’til finally we got a mighty load of badness stacked up inside us . . . and then all it takes is maybe one nasty word to set off the trigger in us . . . and maybe that’s some little triflin thing that wouldn’t even have raised our tempers in a calmer time . . . and then we rush ahead and do things we coulda sworn to the Lord Almighty in the beginning we never had in us to do.

  Oh yes, I seen them comin all right, though I pretended later that I hadn’t. I seen them comin, but I didn’t do anything about it. I just dumped my apronful of peas in the basket, picked that up and went on back to the kitchen.

  Marie Deveraux

  I was in the parlor that afternoon, at least that’s what most of us call it. Miss Harriet usually calls it the living room, I suppose because her mind keeps going back to when she and Miss Martha were younger and it really was the living room of their house. On the other hand, Miss Martha often calls it the “assembly room” or sometimes “the great classroom.” The library is “the small classroom” and Miss Harriet’s sitting room where the sewing classes are held is called “the upstairs classroom.”

  Well, Miss Martha had warned us all to stay inside and then she hitched the pony to the cart and went to the crossroads for supplies. That was before all the heavy firing started in the woods. There had been a fair amount of artillery fire early in the morning off to the east and we’d heard the troops and wagons on the road all night, but that sort of thing was going on all the time lately so we’d gotten pretty used to it.

  Anyway, Miss Martha would never let a little cannonading stop her. She’s seldom able to buy one-tenth of what she asks for—quite often nothing at all—but she insists on going down there every week anyway. I guess she enjoys the trip, or maybe it’s just the arguing with Mr. Potter, trying to get an extra pound of salt or sugar out of him.

  Sugar is very hard to get nowadays, unless you know someone who might be running the blockade. When I first came to this school more than two years ago—I was barely eight then—I brought a twenty-five pound sack of sugar with me, and I want to tell you I was welcomed with open arms by some of these Virginia girls. Even at that time sugar was getting mighty scarce around here and my Daddy knew it, being in the sugar business himself. So he just had them make up this sack at our Baton Rouge place and he put it under his arm and put my portmanteau on his shoulder and we both got on the cars and came up here to the school.

  I didn’t really want to come but Daddy and Mama both insisted on it and Louis who might have taken my part had gone off with the Baton Rouge Rifles and so Daddy came and took me, by force practically, out of the Ursuline Convent of the Sacred Heart where I’d been going to school practically all my life and we took the railroad cars to Memphis and from there to Decatur and from there to Richmond. Then Daddy hired a carriage and we came over here to the school. Because that was right after General Lee and General Jackson had whipped the Yankees at First Manassas and this whole part of Virginia was as safe as a church. And New Orleans wasn’t because the Yankees had been fooling around with their gunboats between there and Mobile since the first summer of the war. So I came up here to the school and brought the sack of sugar with me. And also some tea and coffee and a half pound of pepper seeds which were hard to get even in New Orleans.

  So Miss Martha and Miss Harriet were very glad to see me, and most of the other girls too, except old Edwina Morrow who wouldn’t be impressed by any such things as sugar and tea because, according to her, her father could get any of those things all the time. I think her father is a smuggler or something. She seemed a very common person to me right from the start.

  And speaking of sugar, it was a piece of sugar candy we were talking about on that very first afternoon. At least the others were talking about it. In this place I’m never permitted to say anything much without being told to be quiet, just like a common child.

  Alice Simms was nibbling on this piece of hard candy as though it were the most delicious thing in the world. Emily and Edwina were watching her. I was studying my Latin verbs and ignoring them. It was just about the dirtiest old piece of candy you could imagine anyway.

  “All right, where did you get it?” Emily finally asked her. That’s what Alice was waiting for of course.

  “From an admirer,” Alice said. She took it out of her mouth and examined it as though it were a precious jewel . . . just a dirty old red candy ball is all it was. If Mama would have caught Louis or I with a piece of trashy candy like that at home she would have chastised us for a faretheewell.

  “There’s more where that came from,” Alice went on. She took the lace h
andkerchief with the crooked edges that she had made in Miss Harriet’s sewing class out of her bosom. Alice just loves to keep things in her bosom as though anyone here cares to have it called to their attention. She unwrapped the handkerchief and there were four more candy balls. Each one a different color and each one dirtier than the other.

  “Aren’t they pretty,” she said, expecting each of us to beg for one. “And they’re very good too.”

  Well, it didn’t look as though Edwina or Emily were going to lower themselves to ask for any. Alice isn’t really a bad sort. She’s certainly the prettiest one in the school by far, unless you care for Edwina’s type, and it’s not because Alice takes any great pains with her appearance.

  Miss Harriet has to be always after her to even trim her nails or brush her hair, sometimes even more than with me. And she’s not nearly as hateful as Edwina or as superior as Emily or as giddy as Amelia. So to save her being disappointed I asked her for a piece of the hard candy. She gave me the one with the most dust on it.

  “Who is this famous admirer of yours?” Edwina asked. “Surely not anyone around here.”

  “It’s a Georgia boy I met on the road,” Alice said matter-of-factly.

  “Ah ha,” Edwina said.

  “I only kissed him,” Alice said, “once or twice. And then he gave me this as a present. He was just a skinny little old Georgia boy about fourteen years old, I’d judge. And let me tell you he was ready to forget all about the war and stay behind McPherson’s barn with me just as long as I wanted. But then some old sergeant came back there and found us and he caught Andy by the shirt collar and hauled him back on the road. There was a whole big long line of them moving up there into the wood this morning. Andy Wilkins was this boy’s name.”

  “From the looks of it, he’s been carrying that candy in his back pocket since the day he was born,” Edwina said.

  “Maybe so,” said Alice licking it again. “He’s had it for a long time anyway. He said he’d been saving it to give to a pretty girl and I was the first one he’d met. As a matter of fact I was the first girl he’d ever kissed.”

  “I’ll bet it was your idea to go behind McPherson’s barn, too,” Edwina said.

  “Maybe so.”

  “I believe I’ll tell Miss Harriet about it,” Edwina said. “Or maybe Miss Martha when she comes home.”

  “Go ahead,” Alice told her. “I’ll just say I considered it my patriotic duty. And that’s just exactly what it was, isn’t that right, Emily?”

  Because Emily’s father is a general she’s almost always called upon to decide questions of what is patriotic and what isn’t.

  “I certainly don’t see how Alice is in any position at all to talk about patriotism,” said Edwina, “because as far as I know she hasn’t got one single solitary relative in the service of our country, and as far as that goes I don’t think she has any relatives or family.”

  That wasn’t exactly true, of course, and Edwina knew it. She was just pretending that she didn’t know about Alice’s mother over in Fredericksburg. From what everybody said Mrs. Simms was one of those what my father used to call a fancy woman. He used to call some of the Market Street girls by that name sometimes when he was having his brandy after dinner with some of his friends in our parlor back home.

  I don’t know whether the stories about Mrs. Simms are true or not, because Alice has never mentioned her mother to me personally and so all I know about her is what the other girls say. As far as that goes I don’t know anything about Alice either except the fact that she’s very poor and Miss Martha and Miss Harriet are letting her stay here. Anyway I was so happy with Emily right then I could have hugged her. Even if I can’t tolerate her half the time I could just have hugged her then.

  “Why certainly Alice has a family,” Emily said. “She not only has her mother in Fredericksburg, whom I’m told is a very charming person, but she also has a father who is a high-ranking officer and who has just been cited for extra brave conduct during some of the recent fighting around Chattanooga.”

  “And where is he now?” Edwina asked suspiciously.

  “He’s just recently been captured by the enemy, isn’t that what you said your Mama told you in her last letter, Alice?”

  Now I knew, of course, that Emily was making it all up because Alice Simms is the one girl in the school who never does get any mail from anywhere. Edwina must have known that too, but she wasn’t about to get into any arguments with Emily. She just sighed wearily, as though she were giving up on all of us, and went back to her Bible history.

  Alice’s eyes had started to water a bit, which certainly proved that the girl had some feelings, but she dried them now. “Here, Emily,” she said, “have a piece of this candy. You can have the cleanest one.”

  Emily took the candy ball very graciously and set to picking some of the hairs and bits of lint off of it. Emily worries more about cleanliness than some of the rest of us. She’s a good bit like Miss Harriet in that respect.

  “It’s very delicious,” I said, thinking I ought to put in my pennyworth. “Once you get past the outer layer and down to the meat of it.”

  “If you girls really like it,” Alice said, “it wouldn’t be much trouble to get some more. Next time any of you spy any of our troops out on the road, just let me know and I’ll go out and hail them. I’ll guarantee you, if they’re young ones just off from home, there’ll be a few of them with hard candy in their pockets.”

  “I wouldn’t go out there any more, Alice,” Emily told her. “You know Miss Martha doesn’t like us outside when there’s troops around.”

  “That means enemy troops, doesn’t it?”

  “It means any kind of troops,” Edwina said sharply from her corner. “Just as Miss Martha says, any kind of strange men are capable of doing harm to women.”

  It was true, of course, that Miss Martha was continually warning us about allowing soldiers or any strangers near the school. I don’t know whether this is mostly to protect us or to prevent them stealing our little Welsh pony or Lucinda, our poor old cow. Anyway on two different occasions around this same time last year when they fought that big battle over east of here near the old Chancellor house, some of our boys came in the yard and asked for water . . . one time it was when they were going to the battle and the other time a day or so later when they were coming away . . . and both times Miss Martha stood out there by the well with a hay fork and made them drink quickly and get off the place. We all thought it was a pretty mean thing to do even after she explained again how afraid she was those boys would do some harm to us.

  Normally no strangers ever come near the school anyway since we’re not on the main Spottsylvania road. Even the neighbors very seldom come around because Miss Martha is not regarded as a very friendly person. And I swear the rest of us will be getting that reputation too because we’re not supposed to mingle with or talk to anybody in the neighborhood. It used to be one or two of us could ride to the crossroads sometimes with Miss Martha when she went for supplies, but even that is not permitted anymore. The only place we ever get to go nowadays is up to Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Church on Sundays. And that’s no particular pleasure for me because I happen to be a Roman Catholic and I don’t exactly go along with the way they run things in the Episcopal Church. However, I usually go on Sundays anyway, just for the change of scenery.

  Because even a war can get dull if all the news you ever get of it is what your family tells you in their letters, and those becoming scarcer every month in my case because it’s very difficult for Mama to get any letters out of New Orleans, even with all the shipowners we know, and Daddy’s in the Army with little time to write. Anyway, for the past year it just seemed as though the interesting part of the war was going on everywhere in the country but around here, until this particular day when the cannons started up again and the troops began to march again along our back roads.


  We had watched them all morning from behind the curtains in the front room. There were even more of them this time on the Cedar Hill road than there had been a year ago, except that this time they were a little more weary looking and a bit more ragged, if that was possible. There wasn’t as much shouting or singing and they were all moving a lot more slowly than before. I expect they knew what they were headed for and they weren’t in any hurry to get there.

  Then about noon they seemed to have all gone past, and if it happened this time like the last time, we wouldn’t see any more of them for a day or two. That was the argument that little Amelia Dabney used anyway when she told Miss Harriet she knew where there was a nice patch of mushrooms in the woods on our side of the creek and that it would be a sin to let them waste there and that’s what would happen because the first rainfall would destroy them and everybody knew that all this cannon fire would surely bring on rain.

  Amelia will use any excuse at all to get into the woods, of course. It’s her favorite pastime to roam around in there and study all the trees and rocks and birds and whatever. In some ways she even looks like she belongs there, she’s such a very plain looking little sunburned thing who sometimes reminds me of a chipmunk or a frightened little deer. And it’s very strange that I think of her in that way because although we’re about the same size, she’s three years older than I.

  Alice was the first to see her coming back that afternoon.

  “Well I will declare,” Alice cried. “Do you girls see what I see? That shy little Amelia Dabney has captured herself a Yankee!”