With great love,
Your William
Front Royal, VA
Mon. November 21st 1864
My dear CW,
I woke up very early this morning to find it had been sleeting in the night. The early part of the day was so cold and disagreeable we spent it around the fire eating nuts until it turned bright and fair. Which was good news, I hope, for you in camp. The sunset tonight was filled with crimson and gold.
I chastise myself for having but little system in this writing. It’s as if the first thing I conceive is the first I write down, up one side of the sheet and down the other. I commenced this letter yesterday, but laid it by unfinished at bedtime. After the boys retired I had the light and fire all to myself. Before then we had a discussion as to whose letters you read first. They said you choose mine and I said you choose theirs.
We had a bad Sabbath. I upset the churn and inundated the kitchen with sour cream. The boys were unhappy with the feeding boxes they made, so they just spread the fodder around in the hopes that on the frozen ground what the sheep left the cows would eat. I made jelly in the afternoon, but then my hands were all stained, so I couldn’t sew. I paid a bridal call on Kattie Wetherell. She was full of chat and of the opinion that all the manly virtues are concentrated in her husband-to-be. Ah! Welladay: may she ever believe thus. She also reported that a drunken cavalry officer rode through town and dismounted from time to time to smash windows.
Thank you for what you sent. You ask how we are fixed for money. Well it goes about as fast as it comes. Even after all this time it is still an adjustment for me to be running a household. We women are told that our fragility is our strength and protection our right, but this War no longer allows us our frailty, or to assume the presence of guardians that are supposedly our due. I never thought things would go on as well as if you were here, but at least things have gone better than I anticipated.
You wish me to tell you about myself but there’s not much to tell. I’m lately not able to stand going out into the cold, as it seems to take my breath and set me to coughing. But I feel well when in the house. No one has been sick of any consequence. Wellie is very careful of my health. He said tonight, “Mother, you had better go to bed. You can’t stand it to work so.”
Next week will be our anniversary. Nine years have passed on wings, it seems to me. I feel so widowed that I stay at home mostly. I am a wonder to myself when I think of all this time without you. Your mother talks of you with Asa and Wellie as if you were still about. Our nights together come back to me as sad as the sleet and as sweet as heaven. Last week when the house was quiet I dreamed I heard your footsteps, and you came to the bed and stood over me. And then I heard your name called, away in the distance and yet so plain. And then my body grew unruly and furious, however much I wished for sleep.
I cannot think of half I want to say but am thankful for what I can express. My mind is more harassed and unsettled without yours. Tell me if the cold has settled on your lungs, or if your cough is any worse. How much you are missed no one can tell but a wife who has had such a husband. You may not suppose I ever go to our warm bed without thinking of you. Wellie sends his regards to your messmates Georgie and William. Asa is determined to shoot a duck for Thanksgiving. I persuaded him to wear your coat and it looks much better than his.
Your loving wife,
Hattie
Camp near the TN River
Wed. November 23, 1864
Dear Lucy,
2 corporals returned with the brigade’s mailbag but there was nothing for me. Rabbit today for dinner. He thought he had us outpaced but an emaciated Reb can give any sort of animal a lively run.
Your old friend Raselas Buck has gone. He asked his parents to write letters to our Captain telling tales of woeful conditions at home & when they had no effect he said he would write his own furlough. We all signed up together, 2 years & 2 months ago now, goaded on by the fire-eating element of editors & preachers & politicians. & C.W., who still tells one & all he despises the North for flouting the law requiring the return of fugitive slaves & for making a martyr of the likes of John Brown, who took an oath to murder Southern women & children. Do you remember I told you that when I dallied about volunteering C.W. sent me a petticoat in the mail? He was a one-man recruiting station. He asked Raselas if he intended to stay in his store & measure out his days weighing sowbelly, & in his presence I remember wondering if I wished to be that teacher who watched the seasons pass while laboring with middling success to drill some wisdom into wayward heads.
Maybe because we had no proper goodbye on my furlough I linger on our first parting back then, & the effects of our kisses on the platform. Remember our vexation with the brigade of other people’s relatives & friends bidding them farewell & loading them down with parting gifts? Before you arrived we were addressed by a veteran of the Mexican Wars & a Miss Josephine Wilcox, accompanied by 3 maids of honor & a regimental color sergeant. She fancied herself quite the orator but C.W. said she went about it as smooth as you might come down a rocky hill in the dark. After we left it was so hot we broke holes in the boxcars’ planking & stuck our heads out like chickens in a poultry wagon. At intermediate stations bolder swains took advantage of the slowdowns to leap off & steal kisses from the girls who graced the rights-of-way.
You mention your cousin’s complaints in his letter about his training. I never told you but our officers & men started out in equal ignorance & blundered along through drill, drill, & more drill, & loading in ranks & preparing to fire, & in our first mock assault my messmate ran his bayonet through the back of the man in front of him. I remember one day some of the boys with their smoothbore muskets fired 200 shots at a flour barrel 150 yards away & registered only 13 hits. & yet we were fire-eaters all: on the march we yelled at everything we saw & heard. The cry might start at one end of the regiment & get taken up by brigade after brigade without anyone knowing or caring what it was about. & when we had a tent, C.W. & Georgie placarded it with a sign that read “Sons of Bitches Within.”
See, Lu? I am trying to be the more candid correspondent you crave.
Tell your cousin we all wonder if we will stand the gaff or play the quaking coward, but with their first shot most become new men & give themselves over to the fight. He need only keep his courage through the preliminaries, whether he glimpses the surgeons preparing their kits or the litter-bearers stacking their stretchers, or that first flash of sunlight on an enemy rifle. & that he probably won’t be so frightened that he can’t obey all the orders, & that every fool mistake that can be made has already been made, from conscripts who forget to bite off the end of the paper before loading the charge, or fire so high they hit only those Yankees already in Paradise, to 2 of our recruits who pulled the trigger before withdrawing their ramrods, thereby sending their odd little missiles out over their fellows’ heads.
Remind him that there will always be someone with whom to rally. At Peachtree Creek if it hadn’t been for C.W. we would have all gone to hell in a pile. He led a group of us that returned fire prone in a bed of pennyroyal & came out looking like the latter end of original sin. Then he sat cross-legged & morose beneath a tree while we overran the Federals’ position, & at a tipped wagon got some tin washpans & drew them full of molasses, which we scooped up with some good Yankee crackers.
But it’s my turn at the picket so now I’ll close with love—
William
Boone, NC
Tues. November 22
Dear William,
I received your letter of 7 November last evening and was so excited and happy I did not close my eyes until one. Awoke this morning to a hard rain and roads so awash that Nellie was weather-bound and unable to get to school. While circumambulating the chicken coop I lost my footing and rose from the mud covered from waist to hem, and Nellie enjoyed the spectacle so wickedly she needed to sit to regain her breath. Midafternoon when the skies cleared, Father seeing Nellie and me unusually mournful proposed a w
alk, and upon our return we found sitting on the porch a strange soldier who proved to be Cousin Mack. We had bread and a little fried meat and onions and beets for dinner, and we did enjoy it so. While I made up the bread Nellie read aloud from “Marmion,” and Cousin Mack tarried with us until late: we played What’s It Like, and he requested Nellie and I sing “There’s Life in the Old Land Yet.” Father thought he heard heavy cannonading in the distance and Cousin Mack reported that to the west the Yankees have supposedly been repulsed thirty miles. We had quite the discussion as to just how comprehensively the command “children, obey your parents” was to be heeded where matrimony was concerned, and it was all unprofitable, since at the close of the debate we each retained our original positions.
Mack promised to return tomorrow afternoon with a horse he found in the mountains and offered to carry any mail we wish to send on with him, so upon his leaving we drew up our table before the fire and commenced writing.
Friday is my birthday! 20 years old! How long I have lived on this sphere for all the good I have done. I am older than I am wise, and wiser than I am beneficent, and now a woman, decline the unwelcome thought as I might. What good has all my schooling done me? However much I wish to stay careless and free I am a woman not only according to the hunger of my heart but because I can now measure my deficiencies in every respect, from my awkwardness to my self-indulgence to these flashes of temper. Winter’s harvest is nearly ended and I have planted few seeds of improvement in the meantime, so that the future will likely prove barren of the fruits of firm resolve or self-control. At least those we love, most of us, have been preserved and protected, but who knows what will come with another revolution of the year’s wheel.
We sheltered two soldiers a few days ago, one intoxicated who came into the kitchen from out of the rain and commenced swearing and frightening everyone until Father settled him, and the other just a boy barely older than Nellie, who limped terribly and when we asked if he was wounded explained that he was crippled with rheumatism and that it had been a full year since he had slept under a roof.
William! Please report more of how you feel. You choose to bare enough of your heart to induce the belief that you have communicated all when in fact at times you have reserved so much as to have communicated nothing.
Remember when our tongues ran away with our fatigue and we talked as if for dear life until so late in the evening? When did I ever say so much, and in so short a time? You have always possessed an odd fascination for me, about which I give a poor accounting when cross-examined by Father or Nellie. They never tire of pointing out the number of opportunities you have flouted to expand your promise to me, but I still believe you have more depth of feeling than your acquaintances would suspect. And I am glad that in all we have been called to pass through at least you have been able to view the earnest desire of my heart. And I continue to trust that in a short time we will be permitted to enjoy each other’s fascinations again.
And Cousin Mack is now waiting, and so here I cease—
Your faithful
Lu
Camp near the TN River
Sat. November 26, 1864
Dear Lucy,
Our Lieutenant died of fever. He leaves a wife & 4 children.
I was relieved from picket duty around 9 & have a little leisure & will improve it by writing to you. We had so much rain that for a mile & a half beside a marshland we were in it knee-deep, through country already flooded & rendered more inhospitable still by the downpour. I remember when we would take advantage of such rain to stay in the house courting all day, but here it turned to hail, & we had a freeze, a thaw, a rain, & another freeze. We all wish for a pair of boots. We keep a poor fire in a miserable little stove, & it is now so cold Georgie tells everyone the North has come down to shake hands with the South. Despite all this I have been afflicted with only a sore throat.
We may stay here 2 months or 2 days. If we further improve our sleeping-holes we will have to move as usual. Georgie & a few others begged provisions at farmhouse doors with anguished recitations, & today we each got 4 potatoes. Thoroughly cooked they were very good. Of the sick some were able to eat but were not much benefited. Otherwise we’ve had only hard bread & feed corn. For the hard bread we use a rifle butt & some water, after which we skim off the weevils, & for the feed corn an old coffee mill, which makes a workable mush but gives everyone the quickstep. Another forage returned a barrel of whiskey so villainous only the old soakers could stomach it. A cupful produced a beehive in the head & the boys all called it Nockum Stiff. It was a particular favorite of one of our corporals, shot through the hand & with such a terrible hole that when the dressings are changed he lets his friends peer through at objects in the distance.
During the night a man was taken with the tremens & performed some of the most horrid noises & gestures that any of us had ever witnessed. It took 5 men to hold him. Our newest messmate, a bog-trotter named Blayney, seems so pained by the joviality of others that few wish him welcome. Around the cook kettle he stands silent while the rest of us join the social round, & should the atmosphere get too congenial he takes his leave even before eating.
Georgie sends his regards to Nellie, & warns her to be careful of all soldiers. He claims he has not seen a girl in so long he would not know what to do with himself if he did, but reckons he’d learn before he let her out of his sight. He has a girl he’s been writing but his method of courtship is so indirect & his advances so halting that the war will end before she becomes aware of his interest. He lives in fear that all the eligible women in his town will marry shirkers & civilians.
The Yankee lines are very close. On picket one shouted at me, “Ain’t you got any better clothes than those?” & I shouted back, “You think we put on our good clothes to go & kill the likes of you?” I think if the question were left to the contending armies we would restore the peace tomorrow & hang both Presidents’ cabinets at our earliest convenience.
Before our last engagement the Federal artillery gave us their usual full force & good practice, & at our advance there was such heavy fire that boys were leaning forward as if pushing into a wind. We drew our heads down into our collars the way we would in a storm. The regiment before ours delivered its fire & then broke & ran. Men were flying in all directions from the field, & that scattered our regiment from hell to breakfast. Afterward the bodies lay around like loose railroad ties, the dead 3 & 4 deep, & after they froze to the ground the burial details had to resort to pickaxes. I have seen more depravity in the last month than in all my days previous. This war is a graveyard for virtues. Even our drummer boy could stare the devil out of countenance. C.W. bayoneted a boy who had killed our bugler after asking for quarter, & then dragged the boy’s body onto the road so that the hospital wagons would make a jelly of his remains. He is very low & says that it requires the faith of a prophet to see any good resulting from so much mayhem, & that perhaps both nations must be destroyed when we consider how much corruption runs riot in high places, & that it may be that our country’s day of grace is passed. But he also says that he will all the same see the thing play out or die in the attempt.
I regret having failed to be as unselfish to you as you have been to me, & I wish that while we were together I had made your happiness a more earnest study. I have considered of late how often promises of amendment are made & broken. I hold to hope that those favors forgotten & duties neglected will not rise up in judgment against me. I am grateful for the way during our goodbyes your kisses took each rebellious & ungenerous thought in my heart & hushed it to silence, & I pledge to improve my demonstrations of affection in return.
If Nellie would like to see where we are, tell her to map the Elk River up north of the Tennessee, toward Franklin. & now it is snowing, & I can hardly keep my eyes open, & so I will close—
With love,
William
Front Royal, VA
Fri. November 25th 1864
My dear CW,
I still ha
ve received no word from you since your letter of 20 October. How long is each day that brings no tidings.
Snow last night and freezing rain today. Not a soul on the roads. Even at noon it was windy. Did anyone ever see such cold?
Asa this morning coughed so hard he threw up his breakfast. I stewed some dried fruit and swept, and that used up much of the light. After dinner we walked over to see old Mrs. Hale, whom we found very blue but cheered before we left. She is always prophesying brighter times and telling us the news. She says Mary Hall is married and Mattie and Addie Burnham are better. I don’t know how she lives but we brought her some flour, and the Newtons keep her in wood. I had my first coffee in 14 months, and she distilled it to such a strength that I was something like wild for the rest of the night. She compared our Republic to Hercules attacked in his crib, and I said all we sought was to go our way alone, and she reminded me that Dr. H in his sermon this last Sunday gave the most excellent discourse on “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord,” and we agreed that we liked his views with regard to retaliation very much.
Your mother says she worries about my superintendence of our home, but I know you will not find fault with it. I have paid Mr. Sargent and am glad to have that bill straightened up anyway. Our mare has the stifles. I have decided that we will need the north lot for pasture this spring, and that the boys should not undertake to do too much and I would rather they do less and do it well. We have not yet dried any apples. They have been so busy through the days I have not had the heart to ask them to work nights. Asa is not interested in his studies and is taken up with the chores at home. As for Wellie, each dawn brings its changes and he finds what he can to interest him. I couldn’t get him to write you, though it was so foul out and he had the time.
The Best American Short Stories 2019 Page 37
