Alice's Tulips: A Novel (9 page)

He took out a handkerchief and wiped cherry juice off my face, then rubbed the back of his hand across my cheek, as light as a rose petal.

“Sir, you overstep,” I says, although I did like it. “I have a husband.”

“No matter to me,” he replies.

Lizzie, I hope you don’t think the worse of me when I tell you the rest. I took a step backward, because Mr. Smead had come altogether too close. He took a step forward, moving right along with me, and each time I stepped back, he followed, just like we were dancing. Then he gripped my arms with his hands and looked into my eyes. When I looked him right back, bold as the queen of France, he tried to kiss me, but I slapped him. I never did that to a man before—well, just that once with the awful Carter boy, who got off light because he deserved a horse whipping—and for a second, I wondered if Mr. Smead would slap me back.

His fingers pinched into my arms and his eyes got dark; then he laughed. “You got spirit, Miss Alice. Yes you do. I like a woman with spirit. But don’t you ever do that to me again.” He let go of me and started to walk off, then stopped. “I’ve been keeping watch for you.”

“We’ve seen tracks. Were they yours?”

“You better hope they are. You wouldn’t want guerrillas around, now would you?” He ran his tongue over his lips and smiled at me, and Lizzie, so help me, I got all warm inside, just the way I do when Charlie starts talking lovey. I’m not going to be a bad girl, because I love Charlie more than anything. But I don’t see that there’s anything wrong with flirting, do you? After all, I’m stuck on Bramble Farm and never have any fun, and I’m likely to be more than twenty when Charlie gets back. Besides, if I can hold off the Carter boy, I can handle Mr. Smead.

I was surprised to read in your last letter that you agreed to give up your house, but on contemplation, I believe it makes good sense. Who wants to keep up such a big place with the
war on, when you can’t get servants for love nor money, and you don’t have the money anyway? The nicest thing about this farm is that the house is small, so there is nothing to keeping it clean. And now that your place isn’t big enough to entertain, you won’t have to belong to that awful sewing group. They should be ashamed of themselves sewing beaded purses and crocheting tidies when they ought to be rolling bandages and knitting stockings for the soldiers.

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.