Alice's Tulips: A Novel (5 page)

April 15, 1863

Dear Lizzie,

You are mighty apt to be the smarter sister. Why, I never knew it was bad manners to talk about a baby that never was born. I guess that’s why Mother Bullock doesn’t mention the baby I lost, and nobody else has said a word, either, although maybe they don’t know. So I am glad you informed me, because I never heard of such a thing.

But on the other subject you brought up, I misdoubt I would want to marry again if Charlie got killed, at least not right off, so having a child wouldn’t hinder me in finding a husband. You are right, however, when you say I wouldn’t care to raise a baby without its father. Lord knows, Papa didn’t think much of girls, but at least we had a father. Charlie would make a fine papa. I know it from his letter. I wrote him about the baby being lost, and he said he cried when he read it. Then he sat right down and penned me a few lines to tell me he didn’t blame me leastways. I shouldn’t have been up on that roof, says Charlie, and if he hadn’t gone off to fight the Johnnies, which he hasn’t done yet, he’d be here to do the hard work. And he loves me and misses me and wishes he was here to put his arms around me. Now isn’t he the nicest husband there is?

But to go back to what you were saying, Lizzie, with so many men off to the war and getting killed each and every day, I misdoubt there is husband material enough for me to choose from. On the other hand, if I was the one that crossed over the river, Charlie would find lots of old maids looking for him when he came home.

You inquire of my health. I get around right smart, and you would not know there ever was a thing wrong with me. I am glad, because we are in the midst of planting, and I do not believe Mother Bullock would allow me to lie abed under any circumstances.

Charlie writes so little, he will get out of practice, but in the
letter about the baby, he told us he is in Helena, Arkansas. There was shooting around him, but he wasn’t part of it. The only thing he has done is cultivate side-whiskers. “What would you think,” he wrote, “if there was a war, and I joined up, and I didn’t get a single Reb?” “All right by me,” I write back. He is still having himself a good time. He and some other soldier boys found a beehive and wrapped it in a blanket; then they put it in Harve’s tent and, real careful, took off the cover. Harve woke up and took off as if the Rebs were after him, and got a dozen stings for his trouble. I wished Jennie Kate had been in that tent with him.

Even though we spend all day in the fields, I still go to quilting after supper. Mother Bullock said she might like to learn to piece, so I showed her, and she asks, “Is that all there is to it?” She has made a number of nine-patch blocks for our Soldiers Relief project and must be a fast learner, because I was never any shakes as a instructress. I couldn’t teach a dog to bark. She will never be a first-rate quilter, for she doesn’t put her heart into it, but she is better at her stitches than some. My group has finished almost twenty-five quilts now, and I am getting plenty tired of that Iowa Four-Patch. But at least, I have an excuse to sew of an evening instead of mending harness or reading the Testament Mother Bullock gave me. (I move the marker in it every day in case she checks to see my progress.) We heard that the surgeons claim any quilts that ladies send to them, so now we ship our work to the Sanitary Commission in Chicago to distribute. I had my likeness taken, me holding up a finished Iowa Four-Patch, and sent it to Charlie, who says it is first-rate. “Me or the quilt?” I asks.

The Negro has moved into the hired man’s shack and has taken over the milking. He is afraid of marauders. Over the border in Missouri, they strung up a darky by his feet and left him hanging in a tree. The man got loose, but fell and broke his neck. Our Negro bought us a bushel of black walnuts that the hired man had kept hidden in the shack, and Mother Bullock cracked some and made up a batch of divinity. Since she is always talking about hard times coming, as the song says, I was surprised. The candy is as pretty as snow and tastes awful good.

Jennie Kate Stout has said nothing about it, but she is living up to her name and getting stouter and stouter every day, until she is as big and soft as a pillow, so I think she is going to have a baby. There is a crop of babies coming, you bet—all due nine months less one day after the Wolverine Rangers left. Well, if I hadn’t already been pregnant, I would be having a baby, too.

Give my respects to all.

Alice Keeler Bullock

May 2, 1863

Dear Lizzie,

Here is the second part of the joke. Kittie Wales arrived at quilting yesterday looking like the sultana of Turkey in the prettiest Persian shawl I ever saw. It is a paisley, the old style, where the pieces are fitted together, instead of woven in one piece, and although it is not new, there is not a single hole or worn spot in it. Jennie Kate asked if she had recently acquired it.

“It is a gift,” says Mrs. Kittie in a mysterious way, “from an admirer.”

“Why, here you are, ready to take a fourth husband, and we have had only one apiece,” says Nealie. We were sewing at her house.

Jennie Kate screwed up her face, thinking, then asked if the admirer was Ezra Harper, a widower who boards with Mrs. Kittie.

“Certainly not!” Mrs. Kittie replies. “Do you think I would marry an old man when a young one will do? I’d as soon kiss a dried codfish as Mr. Harper.” She danced around the room, making the floorboards shake, and sang, “I am bound to be a soldier’s wife or die an old maid.” She dances like a thresher and sings like Pussy Willow when you step on her tail. “Kittie Wales marry a border? La!” she says.

“Then who?” Jennie Kate asks. She is not one to mind her own business. But then, we were all curious because we didn’t know any young men in the neighborhood, let alone one who
was simpleton enough to marry such a mountain of a woman, nice though she might be.

At last, Mrs. Kittie took a
carte de visite
from her pocket and passed it around. “He sent his picture with the shawl, the shawl being ‘jerked’ from a fine plantation for me.” Lizzie, it is the soldier boy who had received our first blanket. “He is of the opinion,” continues Mrs. Kittie, “that I have written him to say I have yellow curls and pale eyes and am of a marriageable age and want to correspond with a soldier.”

She put on such a silly, simpering air that Nealie and I burst out laughing. So it seems that Mrs. Kittie had turned the tables and played the joke on us. Now the question is, Will she reply to the letter and continue the ruse? Jennie Kate asked what she would do if he came calling when his enlistment was up. Mrs. Kittie frowned, then replies, “One of you will have to write and tell him I am drowned in the creek.”

Nealie’s farm is to the west of ours, about three miles. Her husband and his brother work it together with some neighbor boys, and it is a good one. They were about the house during our sewing, and Mrs. Kittie, who does not mind stirring up a hornet’s nest, asked why they were not in the army. Nealie replied for them that they do not want to join a war, as they do not care to die for the Union. Mr. Samuel Smead offered to see me home after quilting, and I was tempted to accept, because he is so charming. Besides, I knew it would vex Mother Bullock, who has got on my nerves more than usual lately, but I was prudent and went with Jennie Kate in her buggy.

I like Nealie as well as anybody I have met in this place, because she is merry and doesn’t put on airs. She has the brightest red hair you ever saw and green eyes. Nealie dresses as plain as anybody, but she has choice things, which I saw when I went into the bedroom to get my shawl. She has a shell cameo carved with a man’s face, a pair of garnet eardrops, and a ring with a pale yellow stone. But the nicest of all is a brooch, which is ivory, with a woman’s face painted on it. I wanted to ask Nealie if the woman was her mother, but since the jewelry was in the
bureau drawer, hidden under Nealie’s gloves, I kept the question to myself.

Our brother Billy wrote to complain Papa works him too much. “I have been a good horse, but he’s rode me too hard,” Billy says. That is the truth, for Papa’s rode all of us too hard, and that’s why me and you left. Billy says with the way Papa treated him, he knows what it is to be a slave and thinks he will join up as a drummer boy. But Billy is only thirteen, and Papa would never allow it. Bad as Papa treats him, Billy is his favorite, and he would send the other five boys to war before he’d let Billy go. Mama and Papa love us, I think, but they believe it would spoil us to let us know.

I received a letter from Mama, too. She is worse than Charlie for writing and takes up her pen only when there is bad news to be spread. This time, the bad news is about you. Lizzie, have you kept it from me for fear I would worry? Are things bad with James at work? You know how jealous people spread rumors, and I hope what Mama heard is just a tale. Nails are nails, so how could anyone accuse James of producing a shoddy product? Not that I’m saying he would do so. Dearest Lizzie, I have always poured out my heart to you, and you are my comfort. I expect you to return the favor.

With loving regards,

Alice

May 11, 1863

Darling Lizzie,

I am glad what Mama heard about James is wrong. Rumors have a thousand feet in this war, and you can’t stomp on every one. (I made that up. Do you like it?) Mrs. Grant had no call to write your friend with such inferences about James. I never liked her. That cast in her eye makes her look so stupid that I wouldn’t be surprised if you told me she was too dumb to slice bread. You do not have to answer to any of those women, Lizzie.

I think I don’t like this war much. It’s not fair that I am cooped up on this place with an old woman and made to do most of the work. Lordy, I miss Charlie. The parades and fine uniforms and jolly speeches were fine. But now we hear every week of someone who has been killed, and not always in battle. The measles and smallpox are sweeping the Wolverines, and many of the boys that marched off with Charlie now sleep with the dead. In town, I see men with empty sleeves and trouser legs pinned up. There are men on crutches, and I saw one man, who’d lost both legs at Shiloh, push himself along in a dogcart, fighting for space in a muddy road with a sow and her litter. Now where is the glory in that? I wish the war would end, even if Charlie doesn’t get him a Rebel. I am not going to grow away from Charlie whilst he’s gone. I am going to grow toward him. I hope.

Last evening, the Negro hitched up the wagon, and the three of us rode to Slatyfork to attend a lecture at the church. It was sponsored by our Soldiers Relief, and the oratory was given by a darky who had escaped from a plantation in Arkansas before the war began. Now he speaks to raise money for the cause and to inspire the Unionists. The contraband spoke as good as me or you, and his wife, who is a pretty nappy-headed girl with skin the color of a caramel, was just as tastefully dressed as anyone in the hall—and more fashionable than most, with bigger hoops. As her husband spoke, she sat and knitted stockings for the soldiers, just like me.

I don’t like slavery any more than the next person, but I never thought much about it. Charlie, neither. He joined up to preserve the Union, not to free darkies. But listening to that black man caused a hurting in my head, until I thought it would break open, and I felt sorrier for those two than for anybody in my life.

The man was beat scandalous. He told us the slavers whipped women naked and washed them down in brine, but they did the men even worse. Once, “Ole Massa” whipped him forty times, drawing blood every lick, and when he was done, he poured salt into the wounds. But that wasn’t all. He hog-tied the slave and set him near the fire so that the heat would blister the welts.
Then he threw a cat on the man’s back to scratch the blisters open. And what had the Negro done to deserve this? He was a house nigger, who had grown up almost as a brother to his master and later became his manservant at the plantation house. His offense: He had forgotten to black Ole Massa’s boots.

When the contraband had finished his story, there was not a dry eye in the house, except for Nealie’s husband, who was quite disagreeable. He muttered the man was a liar, that slave owners never stropped their niggers. At that, the Negro stood up and removed his shirt, then turned his back to us. It was a mass of ridges from neck to waist, and probably below, too. Why, Lizzie, if a man in Fort Madison beat a mule that bad, he would be turned out by his neighbors.

After the Negro fastened his shirt again, he beckoned to his wife, who continued the story. She went naked like the other slave children until she was twelve and had to beg for a dress because she had become a woman. After that, she got one dress a year, a shift made out of rough material, like a gunnysack. The slaves ate at a horse trough, she told us. The gruel was dumped into the trough, and they set to, using their hands or shells to scoop up the food. She worked in the kitchen of the plantation, and her life should have been better than the others in bondage, but it was a misery. Her mistress held her hand over a hot fire until it blistered, in punishment for burning the biscuits. One day, she was sent on an errand, and when she got back, her children had been taken to the slave auction and sold, and to this day, she does not know where they are. Lizzie, she cried, and I cried, and even Mother Bullock wiped her eyes. I know the Negroes are different from us, but still, I thought about your little Eloise and Mary and how you would feel if someone snatched them away from you.

The Ole Massa got tired of her crying for her lost children, so he tied her to a fence post and set the dogs on her. When she recovered from the wounds, the female contraband and her husband ran off. She told us she could stand any punishment they gave her, but she was pregnant, and she would rather die trying
for freedom than see them sell off another of her flesh and blood. Then she motioned to a little girl to stand up, and there was a murmuring, because the girl was not a sable hue, as you would think, but as white as you or me. Well, Lizzie, we didn’t have to ask how that girl came to be fathered. How do you suppose a master could sell his own child, even if it was begot from a slave?