Alice's Tulips: A Novel (4 page)

Remember me kindly to all and
pray for a little happiness for your sister,
Alice

February 3, 1863

Dearest Lizzie,

We have heard at last from darling Charlie, and he sends his respects to all in my family. That’s you. He enclosed a
carte de visite
of himself, for which he paid $1.25 to a photographer in camp, and he is handsomer than ever in his uniform. He is still clean-shaven, for I told him I couldn’t abide kissing a man with whiskers. I put his picture upside down to make sure he would think of me whilst away, but Mother Bullock rightened it.

It was the best letter you ever read, even if it was sent to Mother Bullock as well as me. Charlie is not much for letter writing, and expecting him to send one to each of us would be like asking water to run up the well to the bucket. Besides, it would not be fair to me if he wrote to his mother and not me,
and I suppose the old lady would feel the same if I got the letter. But he did try to sneak a few pretty thoughts past Mother Bullock, who read the letter aloud before I could read it to myself. I was glad she did not look up, because my face flushed when she read that Charlie would like to be home hoeing in the tater patch, and you can guess what that means. But Mother Bullock is so old, she did not catch the meaning. Charlie wrote he sleeps every night under the Friendship quilt and wishes I were there with him. Another soldier offered him ten dollars for it, but Charlie said he wouldn’t dare go home without it. Just to test him, the soldier said he’d give a hundred. But Charlie said he’d sell it the next day after never. Isn’t he swell?

Charlie is at Keokuk, just as we knew, but says by the time we get his letter, he will be on the tramp. They will be shipped out shortly, but he doesn’t say where. The boys have drawn no pay since they joined up, and Charlie guesses Uncle Sam has grown poor. But he doesn’t need money, because he lives high on the hog, in a splendid shebang, which is what the soldiers call a shack, with plenty to eat. Once they leave Keokuk, there will be little paper or stamps to be had, so he asks us to send them, but Charlie writes so little, I says to Mother Bullock, “What for? Is he going to sell them?” Charlie says nobody receives more letters than he does.

A bunch of the Wolverines had a jolly time of it when they got hold of a hogshead of molasses and commenced to douse one another from head to foot. They came back to camp covered with flies, and now they are known as the “Molasses Candy Rangers.” Charlie was the instigator. He says he is popular with the soldiers and is called “a bully boy,” but I don’t know if that is praise or because his name is Bullock. He says Harve has named him “Bull-head.” I laughed out loud at the molasses story, although Mother Bullock didn’t think it so funny, and I know she wondered if he has been true to the pledge he signed. There is a Good Templars’ Lodge in camp. I know because Jennie Kate says Harve attends regular. But Charlie did not mention it.

Then Mother Bullock came to the end of the letter, which
says, “I hope the two of you and Doll Baby’s ‘constant companion’ are enjoying good health,” and she looked at my belly, and I grinned like a fool. She didn’t seem so surprised, and I wondered if Charlie had told Harve, who had wrote it to Jennie Kate, who had told Mother Bullock.

Or maybe Mother Bullock heard me and Charlie fussing about it. I lied when I said I surprised Charlie with the news of the baby the night before he left. (You know what a liar I can be when it suits me.) I told him about my condition when he first talked of joining up. I says, “Charlie, you got three reasons to stay at home now. The Union has twenty thousand soldiers from Iowa already, and I have got only one of you. You should think of my comforts. It’s your duty to take care of me, not to go running around the country hunting Rebs.” But Charlie doesn’t know duty from his left foot.

Mother Bullock is not pleased about the baby. “Things will get hard before they get better again, and who’ll work Bramble Farm in the spring?” Well, why can’t she and the hired man? They did it before I came along. I do not believe the Negro will stay long, because copperheads have been riding around at night scaring darkies.

Oh, and the cleverest thing: Charlie says he gave three dollars for the fanciest pair of boots you ever saw so that he could protect his dancing feet.

Affectionately your sister,

Alice K. Bullock

Most patchwork is geometric and begins with squares—squares used alone, sliced into rectangles, or cut on the diagonal into triangles, called half-squares. The most common quilt patterns are simple groupings of squares, assembled into blocks of four or nine or sixteen. The blocks are often paired with solid squares of the same size, called sashing blocks. Or the blocks of squares are pieced into vertical strips, to alternate with solid strips of fabric. The variations of squares are infinite. So is their placement. Squares can be set straight or on point, also known as on the diamond.

February 27, 1863

Dear Lizzie,

I do not know if you can read this. Try your best. It is so gloomy out I can scarce see to write.

I have been uncommon anxious not hearing from you when I have wrote so many letters, and I hope you are not out of patience with me and still keep me in affectionate remembrance. I guess I should not have been so frank about James, and if you took offense, I give you my apology. It has nothing to do with
my regard for you. You know I have never thought quite as highly of James after the time he said someone ought to give me a whipping. Remember? It was after that business with the vile Carter boy, which wasn’t my fault. I was only fourteen. James damaged my reputation bad. But it’s past, and Charlie never heard about it, for which I am glad, and no harm done, I guess. So if I can forgive James, you can forgive me, for my offense is the lesser.

Besides, I am writing to give you a good laugh. Me and the others have finished and sent off ten quilts in Iowa Four-Patch, which is what I named our pattern. I’m not saying they’re good enough to win a prize, but they are satisfactory—warm, good quilts, and that’s what’s called for. A soldier doesn’t want fancy stitching. I heard about a mother sending a nightgown to her daughter, who was one of those Dorothea Dix nurses. The field hospital was in terrible need of supplies. So instead of wearing the nightdress, which the mother had embroidered in the most difficult designs, the nurse tore off the tails for bandages and gave the top to a soldier for a nightshirt. He refused to wear it at first, but he became so attached to it that when the proper nightshirts arrived, he refused to give up the embroidered blouse.

But that’s not the story I write to tell. Here it is. My stitching group did like we had planned and signed one name in permanent ink on a plain piece of fabric and stitched it to each quilt. We sent the first quilt to a hospital in Tennessee, and since Mrs. Kittie was the oldest of us, she signed it, writing, “Bless you, Soldier Boy, Kittie Wales, Soldiers Relief, Slatyfork, Iowa.” There came right back a letter from a soldier in the Ohio Volunteers, who was suffering from what is called “the Tennessee quickstep.” You can guess what that is. He writes, “Kittie Wales must be the name of an angel.” He spread it on real thick and said he believed Kittie was sixteen years at most, with golden curls and the blue eyes of a china baby, and if that was the case, and if she is not married, would she like to correspond with a soldier? He says being in the army entitles him to write to anyone.

Mrs. Kittie thought that the funniest thing she ever read, and
for his impertinence, she said, she was of half a mind to send him her picture. Well, that would be a treat for him, for Mrs. Kittie is by far the largest woman in the county, has warts on her chin, and her hair has come out, until it is very thin. When Mrs. Kittie was out of the room, Nealie, the copperhead, proposed that we answer the letter for her and see what transpires. Nealie is more fun than anybody I have met here, and I think that Mrs. Kittie has such a nice sense of humor that it would not vex her and would give us all a laugh, which we need. Nealie memorized the name and regiment, and the next day, me and her wrote a good letter. I think it will be a fine joke on Mrs. Kittie. Being members of the Soldiers Relief ought to entitle
us
to write to anyone we want to, too.

I don’t want to worry you, Lizzie, but if you never get another letter from me and hear that I have been murdered in my bed, you will know to blame the bushwhackers. They have not been in the vicinity of Slatyfork as of yet, but they are west of here, coming up from Missouri, I think. They run their bayonets through mattresses and clothes in a search for valuables, then burn what they cannot take. The raiders tied up a man in his barn and fired it. He was a Union war hero with just one leg, the other being left behind at the Second Battle of Bull Run. When his wife returned and found the barn burnt and her husband a cinder, she went off her feed and had to be taken away to the asylum. I would not go to an asylum if somebody burnt
this
farm.

Now I hope this will invoke a reply.

From your ever-loving sister,

Alice K. Bullock

April 1, 1863

Dear Lizzie,

I have not wrote for a long time, but I hope you will forgive me when I tell you all that has transpired. I do not know how
to say it, so I will start not at the order of importance but at the beginning.

The hired man cleared out. He gave no notice. One morning, he was not here. Mother Bullock went out to find him and discovered the shiftless fellow had packed up our blankets and a good feather pillow and taken a French furlough. I guess it was all right to take our money when he could sit by the fire through the winter, but when the work was about to commence, he did not want to stick.

So I will shoulder the hoe. The seeds don’t know the difference, but neither do the weeds. Mother Bullock works as hard as anybody I ever saw, but she is powerful disagreeable about it. She had planned to replace the barn roof, which had come off in a blow, but hurt her arm and couldn’t wield a hammer. The Negro is so frightened of high places that he shakes at the third rung of the ladder, so the job was mine. For a week, I worked from sunup to sunset building a roof. Mother Bullock, who was on the ground, telling me what to do, sent word to the Sanitary meeting that we could not attend on account of the work, and what do you think? The next day, Nealie sent her husband and his brother, who is the handsome fellow I wrote you about, to help. They arrived when I was straddling the ridge, my skirts tucked up as if I was a Bloomerite, and Mother Bullock quickly called to me to righten myself.

Since they are copperheads, Mother Bullock told them we would manage the roof ourselves, but as I was doing all the work, I said to come ahead. In one day, they accomplished more than we had done in seven. When they were finished, Mother Bullock made them take a dollar so that she would not be beholden. They offered to return anon to finish up, for which I was glad, but she replied I could do it.

She was wrong about that, because the next day, I was back up top in a cold rain, with the worst headache I ever had in my life. It hurt so much, it put me into a foul mood, and when I milked Lottie, I yanked too hard and she gave me a swift kick
in the belly. I thought I was all right, but I felt real bad in the night, and then I lost the baby.

Now, Lizzie, you mustn’t worry about me. That was a week ago, and I have been resting and am plenty healthy, as well as I ever was in my life. At first, I did not mind so much about the baby, but now that I have had time to think about it, I am sorry. I guess I had been counting on that baby, and already I had a motherly feeling for it. You’ll laugh when I tell you, but sometimes of an evening, as I quilted, I would think about us all sitting after supper, me sewing, the girl with her grammar, Charlie reading the newspaper—Mother Bullock not in the picture. It was such a homey scene that tears come to my eyes when I recall it. Only you and God know how much I love Charlie. If something happened to him, I would like to have a little boy or girl of his. Charlie was so proud when I told him I was expecting. Now, he will be real sorry I failed him.

Mother Bullock agreed I should keep to my bed. But for the way she acts, I might as well have the pleurisy. She has not said one word of sorrow about losing the baby. You’d think she’d be sad, the baby being a remembrance of Charlie if he doesn’t come back. But she’s not one to show her feelings, and sometimes Bramble Farm seems to be all she cares about. This morning, I got out of bed, and when I passed her room, the door was open, and she was crying. I entered and says, “Don’t you worry, Mother Bullock. Charlie will come home, and me and him will have more babies than you can count.”

But Mother Bullock only wiped her eyes on her sleeve and gave me a steely-eyed look and said, “That hired man stole my wedding ring.”

Pray that I will make it through this war
with the old lady is the earnest request of your sister,
Alice