Leigh Ann's Civil War (14 page)

"March ninth, 1863. I want you to have a copy of it."

"As your brother? Or as mayor?" In spite of the gathering twilight I could see Louis's eyes twinkle.

"As my brother," Teddy said solemnly. "He's promised to stay in the mill to the last moment if the Yankees come. In case they're set on burning it like they burned the Trion cotton factory in Rome. He says that owning half the mill, he's going to demand that the rights of neutrals be respected. He plans on flying a French flag on the roof."

Theophile Roche! They have given Theophile Roche fifty percent interest in the mill! So that's why Teddy brought him here!

Louis nodded his head approvingly. "It's chancy, but it could work. There's just one drawback."

"What's that?"

"He's afraid of heights," Louis said. "He told me. He's terrified of heights. He'll never go on the roof of the mill to put a flag up."

"He'll get someone else to do it for him," Teddy concluded.

I was the only one left at the table, finishing my cake. I ate it very slowly, very quietly. I had learned, of late, how to become almost invisible around my brothers, ever since they had become grim and grumpy because the war news was bad.

Only now Cicero was sitting right next to me because I was feeding him bits of cake on the sly. But then I stopped feeding him and he whined for more.

Teddy looked up, saw me, and scowled. "How long have you been here?"

"I'm finishing my dessert."

"Good Lord, she's heard everything," he told Louis.

They looked at each other.

"Can you keep quiet about this?" Louis asked.

I nodded yes.

"Didn't I tell you not to feed Cicero at the table?" Teddy said. "Didn't I?"

"You do," I flung back at him.

This was not about feeding Cicero at the table and I knew it.

"Come over here," he said sternly.

I had sassed him. But this was not about my sass-ing him, either. He was afraid because I had heard the conversation.

I went and stood in front of him.

He took my hand. "Why do you want to sass me?" he asked sadly.

I shrugged and looked shamefaced.

Gently, he brushed some tendrils of hair back from my face. "This business we're discussing is of the utmost importance. To our family's welfare and to the survival of the mill. Pa built the mill. Bad times are coming. We're trying to save it. We must do everything we can to save it. Mr. Roche is going to help. You talk about anything you heard here tonight, and it's lost. Can I make it any plainer?"

"No, Teddy."

"All right." He kissed my forehead. "Now go. Get out of here."

Rumor was going around amidst the girls I knew about a Mrs. Kate Latimer Nichols, wife of Captain James H. Nichols of the Phillips Georgia Legion—Louis knew him from college.

Mrs. Nichols was in her sickbed when she was raped by two Yankee soldiers who came into her bedroom with guns.

"She went mad," Angela Tarberry told me. "Her husband had to put her into an insane asylum."

I felt horrified. And put out. "He's my brother Louis's friend," I told the girls.

"Well, then, you should have known it," Angela said.

How could I tell my friends? Louis would never talk about it. I asked Teddy. "Is it true?"

"I don't like you knowing about this." He wore his grim Teddy face. But he told me. "Yes, it's true." It was then that he confided in me that he was studying on sending his womenfolk north to Philadelphia, to Grandma's, if the Yankees came.

"I don't want to go north," I protested.

He did not even acknowledge my argument. It seemed it was not worth a reply.

As of the last of May, my James wrote to me from the Rappahannock River, where he was with Lee.

Though he'd first enlisted in the Roswell Battalion and they were still here in Roswell, James, by special approval of my brother Louis, had been detached to serve under Lee.

As of May everyone feared a possible attack on Atlanta. The South had won at Chancellorsville but things were not good otherwise.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Lincoln was having séances in the White House, trying to get in touch with her dead son Willie.

The Union troops were threatening our borders. Camille's father and mother were talking about leaving Ros-well. Her father, Archibald Smith, buried his important papers and possessions under a walnut tree in his backyard. Louis helped him. They had a young son, Robert, at the Georgia Military Institute on the hill outside Marietta, and they hated to leave him. But Mr. Smith wanted to get his wife and daughter to safety in Valdosta, a home they had in the southernmost part of Georgia.

Upon hearing this, Louis immediately proposed to Camille. They were married in our church by Reverend Pratt in late May. A small wedding. I stood up for Camille and Teddy was best man. Louis promised Mr. Smith he would look after Robert, and the Smiths left.

A few days later the Georgia Military Institute cadets boarded the trains for the frontlines.

Camille and Louis lived with us. He didn't want to leave her alone in that log farmhouse way outside of town all day, he said. It was nice to have another sister in the house, especially since this was one I liked.

In July we had Gettysburg. There is nothing that can be said about that except that the news reports that came to us were shattering. Louis and Teddy pored over them. They went to the telegraph office every day with all the other people to search the list of names posted of the wounded and the dead. Many of the dead were past acquaintances. People of the town had relatives who were killed there.

My brothers felt ashamed because they hadn't been at Gettysburg. Even Louis, who still could not walk without aid of a cane. Teddy's anger simmered slowly because he'd been cashiered out of the army.

My James was at Gettysburg, but his name was never on the list. He wrote to me afterward, saying his job had been to hold some of the lower works on Culp's Hill. He met North Carolina boys who didn't want to be there, he wrote, who were glad to be captured, who never wanted to be part of the war in the first place.

I let Teddy and Louis read the letter. Teddy nodded grimly. "North Carolina did not secede soon enough to please some of the other Southern states," he said. "I heard some of those boys were treated badly because of it."

At the end of the year, we started to hear a considerable lot about a Yankee fellow, a general by the name of William T. Sherman.

On the first of April, just as we were at supper, we had a visit from the vegetable lady, whom we hadn't seen in more than a year.

Careen came into the dining room. "Viola, that lady with the veggies, she be here agin."

Viola started to get up.

Teddy stopped her. "Just a minute. Who is here? Just who is important enough to interrupt our dinner?"

Viola explained.

"The telegraph wire's been cut," Louis reminded him.

"Tell her to come in here," Teddy ordered.

"She won't," Viola said. "She's very secretive about her business."

"Tell her to come in here, Careen," Teddy said again.

Careen left and came back in short order. "She say please, Massa Teddy. She say please, she gotta see Miss Viola. She got 'portant message."

Again Viola started to get up. Again Teddy tried to stop her, but Viola ran into the kitchen. Teddy flung down his napkin, pushed back his chair, and followed.

We all stopped eating, except Pa. In a minute, we heard a scream from Viola. And then she ran back to us with a letter in her hand. Tears were coming down her face.

"Oh," she cried, "oh, Johnnie's coming home. My Johnnie, oh, my Johnnie. Oh, at long last, he's coming home."

***

He came home on April eighth, a Friday. Johnnie Cummack, with the shot-up but healed arm and the old-man's look in his twenty-four-year-old eyes, was a lieutenant now. He had received a battlefield commission serving under General James Longstreet at Chickamauga the previous fall.

Viola could not wait to get him off alone. She was starry-eyed. She hung on his arm, and I saw Louis and Teddy exchange many a concerned look between them.

"Why don't you two get married?" Teddy said mildly when we were sitting in the parlor having coffee.

My heart leaped with gladness. Maybe now they would tell him and all would be well.

"We agreed to wait until the war is over, sir," Johnnie said. "And you don't have to worry. I respect Viola too much to dishonor her, or you all, in any way."

Teddy nodded, satisfied. I was not. Suppose Viola got pregnant. What kind of game were they playing? They had Teddy's permission to get married!

Somehow Viola and Johnnie managed to get their time alone. The Yankees had been threatening our borders since December. Louis, as mayor and as commander of the Roswell Battalion, had been getting letters from Colonel Marcus Wright, who was heading up troops in Atlanta, reminding him that Louis's battalion covered an important line of approach to that city.

Wright would give Louis no peace. Louis had to account to him about the doings of his four pieces of artillery, his fifty cavalrymen, and his one hundred armed infantrymen.

So Louis was busy, between that and meeting with citizens who planned to leave Roswell and wanted a safe escort out.

He had no time to oversee the honor of his sister Viola.

Neither did Teddy. He was seeing to the constant running of the mill. Mr. Eldridge had already left town with his children for far-off safety. And Teddy also had the mill books to worry about. He was getting ready to ship them, along with hundreds of bales of cotton, heaps and heaps of yarn, and thousands of yards of cloth to storage houses somewhere in the deeper South. He hadn't made up his mind where yet.

So, what with all this and Johnnie's mother having gone to Staunton, Virginia, to her sister's, and his father, the colonel, still being in the field, he had no one to report to. And so he was at our place quite a bit.

And he and Viola had their time alone.

"Why?" I asked my sister when Johnnie was out one day watching Louis post the Roswell Battalion at the bridge that crossed the Chattahoochee River. "Why won't you tell Teddy you are married? Are you that afraid of him?"

"No," she said. "Johnnie is that afraid of his parents."

"Why?"

"His mother always wanted him to marry his cousin Mary Berkeley of Staunton, Virginia. She's staying there now. And she's furious that Johnnie isn't visiting her there. The Berkeleys go way back in our history and have a magnificent plantation. But Johnnie doesn't love Mary. He loves me. So we can't let out that we're married."

"But you have to. Someday."

"After the war we will. After the war everything will be different. Johnnie says the territory of the Confederacy is dwindling. That many soldiers are uncertain as to the meaning of the war anymore. That Longstreet isn't that good a general, that he's slow to act on orders and, though he's fearless, can't take independent command."

She hesitated and looked down at the dress she was mending. Clothes were getting in short supply. We had to make do with what we had. I often wore some of Viola's hand-me-downs.

"Johnnie says our army has depleted numbers and inferior equipment. And that we're going to lose the war, Leigh Ann. When that happens, Johnnie's parents won't care who he married. That plantation in Virginia won't be worth a Confederate dollar. The slaves will own it."

"Stop!"

"It's the truth. Somebody has to tell you."

"Why doesn't Teddy? Or Louis?"

"Because they don't want to frighten you."

"What will happen to us?"

"We have money. Yankee money. If Teddy is smart he'll take Carol and Pa and you west. There's miles of land out there. And nobody cares if you're a Rebel or not. Everybody starts new out west."

"And Louis?"

"Louis is too much Indian not to know what to do next."

"But the mill! What about the mill?"

"If the Yankees come, they'll destroy it."

"No, Viola, no. Teddy says we have to do everything we can to save it. Pa made the mill."

"We have to do everything we can to save ourselves, Leigh Ann. That's what we have to do. Pa made
us.
You're no longer a little girl. You're fourteen. When I was fifteen they put me in charge of you. We're in the middle of a nasty war. Everything is changing. You have to grow up. Promise me you'll grow up."

I promised. But inside I knew I was still a little girl.

One morning, the third week in April, I was having a dream about Louis, about him taking me to the confectionery in town for ice cream and me wanting peaches on top of it. I was just about to put a spoonful of peaches into my mouth when that hooty owl of Louis's flew in the door and perched on his shoulder and Louis said, "Wait, we have to pray now. We have a lot to pray about."

It was a warm, pleasant dream. I find the dreams I have right before I wake always are. I opened my eyes. From my bed I could see out the front windows that it was all gray and misty outside, so it had to be very early. Still, I heard voices from below on the verandah. I got out of bed and knelt by my window. There, below, were Johnnie and Viola, saying goodbye. He was all spiffed up in his cleaned and ironed uniform. She was in her blue silk morning wrapper.

He was leaving us today. Ordered to help defend Richmond. Their words were muffled in the misty air. Then they kissed, a long and agonizing kiss. Johnnie took the reins of his horse from the groom, mounted, and swiftly rode off down the drive. Viola stood there, one hand to her mouth, watching him go.

I thought how cruel love is. I thought how Mother and Father hated each other. How Teddy and Carol could have conducted their marriage by telegraph, for all the love that lay between them. Oh, there was physical attraction. I could see the yearning between them for that. I was old enough to know that my brother Teddy, besides being attractive to women, had manly strengths and needs, and vigor. And Carol was as a kitten in his arms. I knew he loved
her.
I sensed that she had already broken his heart, because he could not make her love
him.
And Teddy did not like losing disputes.