Alice's Tulips: A Novel (6 page)

When the meeting was over, the collection plate was passed, and Mother Bullock put in a dime. Outside, Mr. Frank Smead, who I think is as worthless as my old shoes, made a racket, cussing and hollering that God had cursed the whole Ethiopian race by making it black. He said the Confederates had it right when they drove their wagons over the bodies of Negro soldiers to see how many nigger heads they could crush. There was grumbling from folks leaving the church, as everyone disrepects Mr. Frank Smead. Someone began to sing, “We’ll hang Jeff Davis from a sour apple tree,” but before a fight could break out, Nealie and Mr. Samuel Smead quieted Mr. Frank and drove away. On the way home, I asked our Negro his name. It is Lucky. “Lucky what?” I asks. But he does not know.

I wrote to cheer you up, and I misdoubt I have done that. Instead, I told you as sad a story as you ever heard. I guess there is a lesson, and it is that others are worse off than me and you. Of course, it is human nature to put our problems first, no matter how bad others’ are.

So accept my love in place of any cheerful thoughts.
Alice

May 21, 1863

Darling Lizzie,

There never was a person so mean as Myrtle Lame. You had every reason to think you were included in the invitation she issued to the others at the tea. I do not understand why you take
the blame and make excuses for her. You have always been easier on everyone than you are on yourself. She shamed herself, not you, with her rudeness. I never heard of anybody telling a guest she was not wanted. And after all the trouble you had gone to look so presentable. You must cut her dead for a hundred or two years. You may be sure I won’t tell Mama. We have always kept each other’s secrets.

Please excuse this mean little apology for a letter. I will quit and call it a bad job. Mother Bullock is hitching the buggy to go to Aunt Darnell’s and has promised to leave my letter at the post office on her way.

With much love and in haste,

Alice

May 30, 1863

Dear Lizzie,

Charlie writes that things are bad. One of his messmates died. The man had stepped on a piece of iron that cut through his foot, and his leg swoll up and turned black, and he died of the gangrene. Another has gone to the surgery because he says he is coming down with the cancer, but Charlie thinks he is just a hospital bummer. They have not had any fighting yet, but when he was on picket duty, Charlie caught himself a Rebel. The man broke and ran, like Rebels generally do, but Charlie went after him and grabbed him up. The man said he was only a poor farmer, but Charlie didn’t trust him and went through his pockets, and sure enough, there was a map of the camp and a letter to his wife saying if she never heard from him again, he had died in a loyal cause—the traitor! Charlie wrote that the man thought so little of himself that he referred to himself with a little i instead of big
I
. Now Charlie is quite the hero for capturing a spy.

I have had a hard time of it, too, this spring and am feeling
plenty sorry for myself. At least we have had good rain, and you know what ’tis said: “Rains in May bring lots of corn and hay.” Well, that means I will have my work cut out for me at harvest time.

Then I must do the cooking, or else Mother Bullock does it, and we don’t eat so good as chickens. She loathes indoor chores and is so unhandy at cooking, we would not eat so well as soldiers, who dine on bacon, coffee, and hardtack (which Charlie says was made before the dawn of the Christian era). Her cooking would make a hog wish it’d never been born. I would not mind the work here so much if there was something to look forward to, such as a sociable gathering. If we could have parties or a ball, I would be much more pert, but all this work and no more fun than you can have with a bunch of farm women sits hard on me.

Well, this is as dull a letter as I ever wrote, for I have got the blues like an old maid. Lizzie, why would anyone think the worse of you for doing your own housework? No one would believe for one minute that James is failing. Rather, I think you are being patriotic to get rid of the servant, because with the war, economy is all the rage. You know how the newspapers criticize Mrs. Lincoln for throwing fancy parties in the White House. Of course, she is rumored to be Secesh in her sympathies. Besides, I would not like a servant living in my house, spying on me, although a servant problem is not likely to be one I’ll have on Bramble Farm. You always were a worker, Lizzie, and now that you don’t go about so much, you won’t need more than a hired girl coming in days. I am glad James is more cheerful. I haven’t been married so long, but I know as well as you how to improve a man’s disposition! Do you use the sheaths, or do you want another baby? There’s always withdrawing, but everybody knows that causes nervous prostration and paralysis—although that would be on James’s part, not yours. Now I close the poorest letter I ever wrote.

From little i, your sister,

Alice Bullock

June 3, 1863

Dear Lizzie,

Here is news that will cheer you. Well, pr’aps not, but it certainly cheers me. There is to be a Soldiers Relief Fair in Slatyfork this summer. We shall have farmers donate part of their harvest and livestock. Booths will sell pies and cakes, needle books, pincushions, pen wipers, and straw hats. Mrs. Van Duyne has donated a silver cake basket, and we will sell chances at ten cents. We are to give a quilt exhibition and prize for the best. (Since I am to be the judge, I won’t be allowed to compete.) There will be wire dancing, feats of strength, an oratory contest, and a mesmerist. But best of all, we’ll have evening entertainment—most likely a minstrel show, because they are the rage here—followed by a
ball!
Oh, Lizzie, I shall wear my blue silk and dance my feet off, even though the men will have to pay a nickel to the Soldiers Relief fund for each dance! I think I shall have my choice of one or two handsome men, but if not, any man with two legs will do.

In haste,

Alice

June 18, 1863

Dear Lizzie,

Charlie has got him a Johnny Reb—not just one but two! And they were all but handed to him on a platter. You see, he and about a dozen soldiers were on a patrol when they ran across a company of Rebels. Well, they weren’t really on patrol, but had gone after what Charlie calls “slow deer.” The soldiers aren’t supposed to shoot cattle on the Rebel farms, but they may take all the deer they can find. So they call cattle slow deer, and take them easily because they are so weak that it takes two men to hold up a cow for the third man to shoot it. Charlie and his pards weren’t even thinking about Rebels, when, of a sudden,
they caught sight of forty or fifty of them on up ahead. Because they were only a handful, Charlie and the others decided to hightail it out of there, but then they saw more Rebs right behind them. They were caught in the middle, so what could they do but take a stand?

Charlie saved the day! He told the boys to spread out and pretend they were a big company, and to shoot first, before the Rebs discovered them. So the Yanks lined up along a little draw, each one aiming at a Johnny, and they fired. Charlie’s Rebel jumped right up in the air, then fell down dead. Charlie loaded and drew a bead on another Secesh, and down he went, too. Our boys, all of them good Iowa shooters, slaughtered a goodly number of the Rebs, and the others didn’t stay around long enough to get off but one shot apiece before they ran like the cowards they are. After they were gone, Charlie turned to the soldier next to him and discovered the poor man staring at his arm—which had been shot off and was lying on the ground. Even that didn’t dampen Charlie’s spirits. He writes he had been afraid that when he got into battle, he would show the white feather and run off. Of course, I know that any man who stood up to Papa the way Charlie did when he asked for my hand is no coward. But Charlie was not so sure. Now he has met the challenge and turned into as true a soldier as ever was. Charlie carried the wounded bluecoat all the way back to camp, where he was turned over to a surgeon, and Charlie believes he will live. I think it is a pity that Charlie was not in a famous fight, like Vicksburg, so everybody could have heard of him. It is unlikely the Battle of the Slow Deer will get wrote up in the newspapers.

Lizzie, would you send me your white silk ruffle so that I can sew it onto my ball gown. When the story of Charlie gets out, every man at the fair will want to dance with the wife of a hero.

I am going to write Papa and tell him he was wrong all along about Charlie. I never wrote a letter to Papa before.

Your soon-to-be-famous sister,

Mrs. Charlie Bullock

July 26, 1863

Dear Lizzie,

I am sorry about the ruffle, which you probably have received, since I mailed it back the day after the fair, and I haven’t had time to write till now. That ruffle is spoilt for sure. I didn’t see it come loose until it got trampled and tore to pieces. Well, it couldn’t be helped. I would make you a new one, but there is no white satin to be found this side of Keokuk. The ruffle was a victim of the war, plain and simple. I feel bad, of course, but I think you won’t mind so much when I tell you that my dancing raised more than a dollar for the Soldiers Relief Fair.

On the morning of the fair, we got up in the dark to do the chores and left for town at sunup. By then, the pike was crowded with wagons and riders, and it took us two hours just to reach town. Lucky stayed behind and agreed to do the evening chores, so we did not have to hurry home. He is scared to stay on the farm because night riders have been about and it looks like things at Bramble Farm, such as a fat shoat, are getting took. Lucky’s just as scared to go to town. I says to Mother Bullock, “As long as he’s scared both ways, he might as well stay to home and be useful.” For once, she agreed with me.

As our donations to the fair, Mother Bullock and I took a pan of gingerbread, a basket of the prettiest peaches you ever saw, and an Iowa Four-Patch quilt that was worked up by the quilt group. All of it was sold, with the money going to the Soldiers Relief fund. The quilt brought more than twenty dollars at auction, and everyone said that was because it was the design I made up, which has become the symbol of the Soldiers Relief. Even Mother Bullock was impressed with the sum, and that is no small matter.

I did not spend my day with her, for which I am grateful, because as soon as we unloaded our wagon, she went off in one direction and me in the other. It was the best Soldiers Relief Fair I ever saw, or it would have been if I’d ever seen another. I worked in the sewing booth with Nealie, where we sold
handkerchiefs and needle cases and pen wipers. When our turn was done, me and her went to see the sights. I shared my dinner with Nealie, since she had not brought any, and she bought us the “hereafter,” as Mother Bullock calls it—a fruit pie and two doughnuts. Nealie does not flaunt her wealth, but I think she is fixed right smart.

A phrenologist had set up, and Nealie paid him two bits each to read our heads. He felt all over Nealie’s head and said she had a quick temper but also a love of “inhabitiveness,” which means she likes peace and quiet and her own fireside. I didn’t see that was any great shakes, because to tell the truth, that Nealie can be into devilment. I guess that’s why I like her. Then the man fingered the bumps on my head and said I was intelligent and refined and given to mirthfulness. But my brain is mostly back of my ears, he said, so I’m selfish, too. That surely wouldn’t surprise Mother Bullock, and doesn’t me, either. He sought to sell us a phrenology book, but as we already had got our heads read, I paid him a dime for a book on dreams instead. The night before, I had dreamt I went to picking apricots, but as it was winter in my dream, they were froze as hard as walnuts. So I looked up fruit dreams in the book and was sorry I did, because it said dreaming about apricots out of season means great misfortune is on the way. It didn’t say anything in the book about them being froze, but if they’re dried up, that means sorrow. Nealie says they just make that up to sell books and for me not to pay any attention. Dream reading is not a genuine science like phrenology and palmistry. Still, I’d rather have my dime back.

After we visited the booths, Nealie went looking for her husband, whilst I judged the quilts. There were seventeen of them entered in the contest, some real nice but others no better than practice work. I don’t know how a woman can have such a poor view of herself as to show off poor stitching. Three of the quilts were Iowa Four-Patch, which shows how popular the design has got to be. The winner was a Feathered Star, made of home-dyed homespun by a little girl who wasn’t more than ten years old. The piecing was first-rate, and stitches even and small, maybe
ten to the inch. She was so proud of winning that she donated the quilt to the auction, and it brought twenty-two dollars. Why, Lizzie, if we keep raising money like this, we’ll have enough to buy an ironclad, just like the Secesh ladies.

When the judging was done, Nealie came for me, and we went to Jennie Kate’s to change into our ball gowns. (Jennie Kate is now as fat as a pig at slaughter time, and me and Nealie dressed fast in case her labor pains came on and we would have to miss the dance to tend her. Myself, I would die before going about in society looking so ugly, but Jennie Kate waddled right along after us, happy as a hog in mud. If somebody had asked her, she would have danced. Now, there’s scandal.

Lizzie, don’t think I’m vain when I tell you I was the best-looking girl at the dance. I wore the blue gown I made last year, just before me and Charlie left Fort Madison. Nealie had pinned up my hair so it was high on the back of my head (over where my brain is). She said she never saw anybody so stylish, even in
Peterson’s Magazine,
and you know it has the latest fashions. Mother Bullock did not approve, because she sent me a stern look when she saw me all dressed up, but then she doesn’t much approve of anything I do. When it was first discussed at the Soldiers Relief meeting about women charging five cents a dance for the relief fund, Mother Bullock said it was the first step down a road to ruin, and once started along that path, a woman could never go back. Why, if a woman took money for dancing, what would she charge for next?