Alice's Tulips: A Novel

by Dallas, Sandra

  Your loving sister,

  Alice Bullock

  September 12, 1863

  Dearest Lizzie,

  Oh, my poor darling Lizzie! You have had such heaps of trouble already that I can’t bear for you to have this, too. I know “skins” are costly, at five dollars the dozen, and money is close. Still, that was a poor choice not to purchase them, because now look at what you’ve gone and done—or James has gone and done. But that is all water under the bridge, which is a most appropriate saying, the bridge being where you and James should not have walked out that day and stopped to have connection. Lizzie, what if someone had seen you? But that is the least of your worries at present.

  What can’t be helped must be endured, as Miss Charlotte Densmore used to say, and I urge you to remember her words, for I am afraid of what will happen to you if you try to intervene. Still, you didn’t ask what you should do but how you should do it. I have heard that violent exercise is the best way, so a fast horseback ride might save the day. Would you dare to ride astride? If you did what you did under the bridge, you can’t care much what people think.

  Cold baths are supposed to bring about the desired result, too, if they don’t bring on pneumonia. And I recollect someone in Fort Madison saying mint or horehound brought about the menses. Oh, dear, that was Miss Hoover, and she was got with child later on and hadn’t a husband, and drowned herself for shame, so I wouldn’t depend on mint and horehound.

  Lizzie, is there no doctor in Galena who specializes in chronic diseases of women? If you can find such a doctor, then I would just take the money from James’s purse and let him think he has lost it somewhere. I know James doesn’t approve of that course of action, but men don’t understand about babies too close together, and best you rid yourself of it before James knows your condition. Once he has pleasured himself, a man thinks his responsibility is done, and the outcome is a problem for you alone—even if he has made such a muddle of his nail factory and has no money to pay for a decent servant or to support a wife and two babies, and he might even go to jail.

  Oh, Lizzie, I wish I could put my arms around you and dry your tears, just as you have done for me so many times. I will pray for you, although I have not much hope that will work. God, being a man, he may have no more sympathy than James. I would rather put my faith in a fast horse.

  Yours in loving sisterhood,

  Alice Bullock

  September 19, 1863

  Dear Lizzie,

  When I received a letter back so soon, I hoped it had good news, so you know my distress to learn that things have not improved that way. I was so upset that I put down the letter and wept.

  Annie, who was nearby, looked at me curiously and asks, “You got troubles?”

  “Oh, no,” I says quickly. “Not me.” Then I got to thinking that she might know something that would help, so real crafty, I says, “My sister wrote me about a friend. She already has two babies, and now she is going to have another. I wish there was something she could do about it, but I don’t know how to get rid of a baby.”

  Annie sized me up and says, “I reckon there’s a way.”

  “Oh?”

  “You pick yourself a handful of tansy, then steep it a day in beer. Cider works, too. Then you drink it up.”

  “It sounds awful.”

  “How bad does your sister want to get rid of that baby?”

  “It’s not for my sister. I told you it’s her friend who has a ‘chronic disease,’ ” I correct her, but she only gave me a long look. “Do you know for sure it works?”

  Annie’s black eyes bored into me, and she says, “I hain’t got a good knack of asking.”

  Now, Lizzie, I don’t know if tansy is a good idea or not, but you asked me to pass on any advice I hear—and quick. So I’ll walk in to the post office this afternoon and mail the letter. James won’t even know I wrote, now that the post is delivered direct to your house. I should think it a fine thing for folks in Galena not to have to walk down that long hill in the rain for their mail.

  I’m glad you like the bonnet ribbons I tucked into the last letter. I had hoped they would cheer you, and they’re just a trifling thing. The five dollars sent was of no consequence. After all, it’s Charlie’s pay, and it belongs to me as much as Mother Bullock, even though she thinks she has the right to say how it’s spent. When she discovered I’d taken the coin, she moved the money to a new hiding place. When I find it, I’ll send the other five. But try the tansy first. I’d much rather you spent the money on new hoops than on the ladies’ doctor.

  Lizzie, isn’t it the oddest thing, you with two babies and another on the way, and me losing the only one I had a chance at? It makes no sense, but then, what does these days?

  With hope this does the trick, I remain your faithful sister, Alice Bullock

  September 28, 1863

  Dear Lizzie,

  I jumped up and down for joy when I read your letter, and Mother Bullock says, “What’s that? Must be your sister is having a baby.”

  “Must be she is not,” I says, real saucy, but she only frowned and called me a silly girl.

  What does it matter what the cause of the miscarriage was? It’s enough that the thing is done with. I don’t want the five dollars back. You deserve it. Spend it on skins for James, or better yet, make him buy his own and spend the money on piece goods so’s you can make a pretty quilt for the girls. Why don’t you make them a Basket quilt—an empty basket? That will be our little joke, and our secret.

  And here’s another: Nealie stopped and asked would I come to tea and help her set a quilt into a frame, for she could not get the hang of it. I was glad for the excuse of a sociable afternoon away. Nealie promised that her husband would bring me home, but Mother Bullock said I was to take our buggy so as not to put him out. I think both of us knew the real reason was that she was afraid Mr. Samuel Smead would accompany me instead. Lordy, what would she think if she knew about our meeting the day I picked chokecherries? It makes me tingle to remember it.

  Me and Nealie had the best time. She is not from here, having come from St. Joseph, Missouri, where she met her husband whilst he was trading horses to her father. She fell in love at first sight and in two weeks was married. She has not said so, but I think she did not know about her husband’s foul temper until too late. She seems to care for him well enough, so maybe he does not turn his meanness on her. Nealie showed me all through her house, since I had seen only part of it before, and I admired the wallpaper, which is choice. I said I wished we had paper in our house, but you cannot paste it onto log walls. Then Nealie laughed and said she thought the paper was ordinary and the prettiest thing she had seen in Slatyfork was the quilt I had hung on the rough walls. So we said weren’t we a foolish pair, neither satisfied and each jealous of the other. She said I ought to hang a Log Cabin quilt on the wall. Mother Bullock has an old faded-down Log Cabin one on her bed, but it’s odd, with black squares in the center instead of red.

  Nealie showed me how to make a cunning dinner coronet, of lace and loops of velvet ribbon, and I said I should wear it to dinner with Mother Bullock and Annie, which made us both giggle. Then we dyed chicken feathers to wear on our hats, because you can’t get plumes in twenty miles of Slatyfork. I even put a bunch together to make a fan, but if I can’t wear a coronet, where will I use such a fancy fan? Maybe to shoo the flies from the pigs. The time flew by, so it was almost dark when I left. Nealie asked her husband to see me home, but it was Mr. Samuel Smead who accompanied me. I said he might go along, but he had to ride his horse and could not sit beside me in the buggy. When we reached the edge of the farm, I stopped and told him I would continue alone. He dismounted and took hold of the reins so that I could not go on, and he climbed up into the buggy and took my hand. I snatched it away.

  “Oh, I almost forgot, you are a married woman,” says he.

  “I have not forgot.”

  “Then I shall make you do it,” he tells me, saucy as a jay. He laughed and adds
, “Not today, however. It will be something you can dream about. Yankee girls dream, don’t they?”

  “Not about copperheads.”

  “Don’t try me, Miss Alice.” He reached up and pulled a hair from my head and wound it around his finger, then rubbed the finger against his lips.

  Oh, Lizzie, do you wonder that I shivered? You will warn me, but I know how to handle a man, and Mr. Smead doesn’t worry me. Mother Bullock does. When I came in from the barn, she gave me the fish eye and says, “You’re late, ain’t you? You are not to go about in the dark again.”

  Lizzie, I have held my tongue for a year, but I had had enough! “Mother Bullock, I am Charlie’s wife, not your daughter. And Charlie’s the only one with the right to tell me what to do. If you don’t approve of me, I will go live with Lizzie till Charlie comes home, and you can have the farm to yourself. Now explain that to Charlie Bullock.”

  She turned away fast and said no more. I feel half-bad for what I said, but I won’t take it back. I am as much a woman as she is, and maybe more, because I have a husband and she does not. Oh, and I almost forgot to tell you. Nealie gave me the prettiest buttons, black and shiny like shoe buttons, but with yellow flowers on them.

  You being so worried about having a baby, I did not write you this before, for I did not think you wanted to hear about birth. But now I’ll tell you. Jennie Kate had her baby in August. Because the doctor in Slatyfork is not to be trusted, she sent for Mother Bullock to help, and I went along. Annie came, too, because, as you know now, she knows something about what ails women.

  Jennie Kate had been in labor a day before we arrived. I never saw such thrashing and crying in my life. You know I don’t care for her, but nobody deserves such pain, and I felt sorry for her. Mother Bullock boiled eggshells in water and gave it to her to drink, and I wrapped her in warm sheets and held a hot iron close to her spine. Annie went into the garden and picked a pea pod, pushed out the peas, and set the pod over the door. I asked Mother Bullock about putting an ax under the bed, but she said a knife would do just as well. Still, Jennie Kate being so big, I got the ax anyway. I said it couldn’t hurt. But nothing much seemed to help, not for another ten or eight hours anyway.

  But at last, she delivered—a girl as big and doughy as herself, but with Harve’s good disposition. Jennie Kate is not doing well, and a cousin has come to stay with her. Me and Mother Bullock go in every few days with broth or egg custard, and so do the other members of the Soldiers Relief. A man at the post office said we spend more time on Jennie Kate than we do on our work for the soldiers. “She’s a soldier’s wife, isn’t she?” I ask him. “I misdoubt Harvey Stout would want us to make a quilt for somebody we never met, instead of tending to his wife and baby.” He did not reply, just scowled and left.

  Now, I am making Jennie Kate a Ducks and Ducklings baby quilt in red and white. Maybe that will cheer her.

  Annie and Joybell went with me yesterday to call on Jennie Kate, who has not yet got out of her sickbed. When we left, Annie says, “That one ought to have drunk tansy beer.”

  Love from

  Alice K. Bullock

  October 1, 1863

  Dear Lizzie,

  Since it was a beautiful fall day, I tucked two apples into my pockets and walked into Slatyfork, as nice a walk as I ever had. I was thinking of the time not so long past when me and you spent fall days with our dollies under the oak tree, serving tea in acorn cups. And now you have two little girls soon to be as old as we were then. I am not yet twenty, but I feel that life has gone on without me. By the time Charlie returns, I shall be too old for fun.

  When I reached town, I went to the Journal office, as everyone does, to read the latest list of the war dead that’s always posted there, then turned away, relieved that Charlie’s name was not on it. And who do you think was standing right behind me? Sartis Rhodes! You remember how handsome he was and how we almost died when Chloe Solomon, the Israelite, snapped him up. He spoke my name, but I couldn’t think who he was, because his eyes were sunken, and he wore a beard thick enough to hide mice.

  “Sartis Rhodes,” he says. I would have hugged him if he hadn’t been so ragged. Instead, I held out my hand to take his, but, Lizzie, he hadn’t one. His arm was there, but the hand was shot off.

  “Oh,” I says. “Oh, Sartis. I’m so sorry.”

  He gave me a woeful look. “I thought about getting killed, but I never counted on this.”

  “It’s just a hand, Sartis. I know Chloe told you as much.”

  “She don’t know. It’s my writing hand, so I never wrote her. You think it won’t matter?”

  “Matter? Chloe is the luckiest woman I know, having her husband come home to her.”

  “Do you think so, Alice? I’ve been afraid she might not want me, maimed this way. That’s why I came here, with a friend who got discharged. I’m afraid to go home.”

  “Sartis, you start back to Fort Madison this minute, and if Chloe isn’t the happiest woman there is when you get off the boat, why, I’ll introduce you to a dozen others who would be happy to take her place.”

  You should have the seen the look on his face, Lizzie. He became the old Sartis, who was so lively and full of himself. He hugged me with his good arm and what was left of the other, then turned to his friend and said he was going home. Oh, but not before he told me some news: The Carter boy has got kilt.

  “He wasn’t more than five feet from me when he was hit. He was a brave soldier and got shot through the heart and died at once,” Sartis said.

  I did not feel much emotion at the news and says, “I’m sorry to hear it, Sartis, truly I am, but me and him had a falling-out, and I didn’t care a pin about him. Still, I didn’t wish him to die.”

  Sartis thought a minute. “I’d forgot about you and him. You had good cause to hate him. Well, then I’ll tell you the truth. He didn’t die right off. He got half his jaw shot away and was left on the battlefield for the night with the rest of the wounded, for we were too busy fighting to collect them. He was found the next day, bawling for water, but he didn’t have enough of a mouth left to drink it. I saw him myself.” Sartis looked at the end of his arm where his hand wasn’t, and said, “I shouldn’t have told you. Folks at home want to hear that their boys die easy, but soldiers know the truth of it. Carter was a poor soldier, but even a poor soldier shouldn’t have to die that way. Battle’s not noble, you know.”

  This war isn’t much fun, Lizzie, and Charlie seems a long way away. I wonder if he’ll ever come home. As I walked back to Bramble Farm, I thought I’d be so glad to see Charlie even if he was missing a hand like Sartis. Then I remembered what I told him the day he left—that he was not to come home if he lost his leg, for I wouldn’t be married to a man who couldn’t dance. And oh, Lizzie, I felt so ashamed. Do you think I’m a worthless girl?

  Please remember me kinder than I remember myself.

  Alice Keeler Bullock

  4

  Dominoes

  Sometimes quilters made up their own designs, but more often they borrowed patterns from one another. They traced them onto whatever paper was available—brown wrapping paper from the store, old letters, used envelopes. If a pattern was a single piece, such as Double Axe Head (Friendship Forever), the template might even be cut from tin. When they didn’t have patterns to borrow, quilters used the shapes that were available, such as bowls, leaves, playing cards, or dominoes.

  October 3, 1863

  Dear Lizzie,

  We have the best crop of apples ever you saw. We dried apples. We stirred up apple butter. We cooked applesauce, enough for the whole Union army, and put it into brown crocks, whose tin lids are held tight with red wax, for no tinner comes by to seal them. But we still had trees and trees of apples, and even more of them on the ground, so yesterday, we went to making cider. It was Annie’s idea, and more fun than I ever had with Mother Bullock.

  “Mother Bullock is an abstainer. She doesn’t take it. Doesn’t make it, either,” I told Annie when
she brought up cider making.

  “I’ll speak for myself, thank you, Alice,” Mother Bullock says. “I see nothing wrong with a little cider for fruitcake. Some can go to vinegar. And we’ll keep extra for those that wants a sip. I guess that’s you, Alice.”

  My mouth dropped opened, and I swear Mother Bullock winked at me, but I’ve never seen her do such before, so I’m sure I was mistaken. What put her into such a mood, I could not imagine.

  “I seen you got a cider press in the barn,” Annie says.

  “I don’t suppose there’s a thing in that barn you haven’t seen,” Mother Bullock replies. Not much gets past Annie, all right.

  When Annie and I went into the barn, I told her to work fast, before Mother Bullock could change her mind. We hauled the cider press outside, where Annie and Joybell took it apart and cleaned it. Annie says Joybell’s eyes are in her fingers. Me and Mother Bullock and Lucky gathered up the ripe apples that had fallen on the ground. Then Mother Bullock directed our making of the cider. She sure knew her onions about doing it, too. I guess she wasn’t always an abstainer, but I didn’t dare ask.

  When we had finished cooking and straining, we put the juice into stone jars for five days. Then we’ll add the sugar, and the cider will ferment. We drank such quantities of juice while we worked that we will be gassy till Christmas. When we had finished, Mother Bullock announced she would make us a cider cake, using apple juice, and went inside and mixed it up in a spider, which she put into the coals to bake—“spider-cider cake,” I call it. Mother Bullock can be a good cook when she wants to.