Alice's Tulips: A Novel (8 page)

“Well, there’s nothing wrong with making it look pretty.”

Mother Bullock thought that over. “Regular stitch, I guess. It’ll have to come out when the skin grows together.”

“Then by rights, it ought to be a basting stitch, but that won’t hold.”

“Just get to it. You don’t want to wait till she wakes up. She’s liable to thrash about.”

“Yes’m.” I pulled the thread through the skin, leaving a long tail. Then I sewed that gash shut with a nice overlap stitch, and when I was done, I tied the two ends together in a knot and snipped the tails. The stitching wasn’t as nice as you’d do on a
quilt, but it was good enough for basting a person. I’ll tell you this, Lizzie: I’m real good about using my basting thread over again, but not this time!

Mother Bullock covered Joybell with a quilt. “Sleep’s good for her. We’ll give her cold well water when she wakes up to keep down the fever. When’s the last time you ate cooked food, Mrs. Tatum?”

Annie looked from Mother Bullock to me and shrugged. “We had right smart of apples for awhile, but we hain’t had none for a long time. I picked out corn from horse plop on the way here. But I washed it ’fore we ate it. Yesterday, we had green corn. It made us puke. So when you was in the field, we come up to the garden. We was afraid to last night, on account of the dog. We got dogs sicced on us, and Joybell, she fears ’em. We went in the barn to look around. We wouldn’t have stole nothing.”

“You haven’t eaten any eggs—or chicken. There wasn’t none took after we cooped up the chickens,” Mother Bullock says. “Alice, fetch the buttermilk.”

I went outside to get the pitcher from off the well, where it was keeping cool, while Mother Bullock took out corn dodgers and half a molasses pie from the pie safe. Annie watched us, her arms wrapped around her, as if to keep herself from snatching the edibles out of Mother Bullock’s hands. Mother Bullock piled food on a plate, then handed it to the girl, who didn’t wait for a fork, but ate with her hands. Halfway through, she stopped and looked over at Joybell, then at Mother Bullock, who says, “There’s enough left for her when she wakes up.”

When Annie finished, she wet a dirty finger and picked up the crumbs, popping them into her mouth. “That’s most tasty,” she says. “You got salt? We ain’t had salt since we left home.”

I took out the saltcellar and handed it to her, and Annie unscrewed the top and poured a spoonful into her hand and licked it, happy as a cat in spilt milk.

“How old is that girl?” Mother Bullock asks.

“Most nearly seven.”

“How come you’re stealing from us?” I asks.

“It’s not rightly stealing. We got nothing to eat.” She picked a crumb off the front of her dress, then stopped. “The nigger said—” She stopped.

“You can call him Lucky,” Mother Bullock says. “He knows you been stealing?”

“He says you got plenty. He says he won’t tell it if we takes what we needs. But he says don’t us’ns dare to steal. We been living nights in that nice house by the crick. We hide in the woods of a day.”

“You mean that shack?” I asks, but Mother Bullock shushed me. “Where’d you come from?”

“Kentuck. Misery has came down on us hard. The Seceders burnt us out and treated us common.”

“You got a husband?”

“Did. I swan Joybell’s no woods colt. No ma’am. She ain’t a bastard. The Rebs kilt her pappy.” Annie’s eyes got bright, but she didn’t cry. “We have walked a piece to get here, and we are plain wore out. We couldn’t go no farther.”

“That blind baby walked all the way from Kentucky, and barefoot? It’s a wonder she didn’t kill herself,” I says.

Annie held her head up high. “She’s real sure on her feet and most always knows where she’s going and hardly ever runs into nothing. That post ought not to have been there. Besides, we had to walk. You think some Secesh is gonna give us a mule? Where are we?”

“Iowa,” I tells her.

She frowned. “Iowa? I don’t know anything about Iowa. We went through a city half a day’s walk back. I never saw such a place. Was it New York?”

“Slatyfork, Iowa.” Mother Bullock thought a moment. “You got lice, do you?”

Annie’s eyes widened, and she sat up ramrod-straight and looked Mother Bullock in the eye. “No ma’am. We got no gray-backs. I keep myself clean. And Joybell, too. We ain’t trash, no we ain’t.” She slumped back in the chair and yawned, and Mother Bullock told her to lie down with Joybell.

“How long since you slept in a bed?” she asks.

“I ain’t never slept in a bed.”

“Never?” I asks.

“Aways wanted to.”

I turned to Mother Bullock. “Did you ever hear such a thing?”

“Leave be, Alice. You go lay down next to your girl, Mrs. Tatum.”

As she got up, I asks, “How old are you?”

“I don’t know for sure. I ain’t kept track. Maybe eighteen or thereabouts.”

“Me, too. Listen to that, Mother Bullock. She’s the same age as me. Would you have guessed it?”

“I’d have guessed she was older,” Mother Bullock says, which I misdoubt was a compliment to me.

Annie climbed into bed and giggled; then she frowned and asked how to keep from rolling off. I laughed, but Mother Bullock told her people hardly ever fall out of bed. Right now, Annie is curled up around her baby like a bitch around a pup, sleeping so hard, a dinner bell wouldn’t wake her.

Mother Bullock has gone to scold Lucky for not telling her about the trespassers. After all, it’s our place, not his, to give succor, if we want to. I’m to keep an eye on Mrs. Tatum, because we don’t know for sure that she won’t rob us blind.

I stopped just now because Annie had gotten up with no more noise than a snake and come up behind me and looked over my shoulder. She’s sneaky, and it’s no wonder we didn’t catch her before now. When she touched my arm, I jumped so high, I almost hit my head on the ceiling. Then I put my hand over the letter so’s she couldn’t read it. But she says, “I went to school, but what I learned, I didn’t take care of, and I lost it. I’m a poor hand to read writing. I can’t do it at all and wished I could.”

“Well, you said you wished you could sleep in a bed, too, and now you’ve done it. Maybe reading’s next,” I reply. Then I says, and I don’t know why, “I guess I’m the one to show you.”

That’s not the only fool thing I have done. I wrote to Billy and told him not to run off for a drummer boy, and Papa opened
the letter. He gave Billy a licking and said he’d cripple him if he joined up. Billy didn’t write me about it until last week because Papa’s kept a close watch on him. Besides, he didn’t have a stamp. But Silas took pity on him and bought his big brother a stamp with money he’d earned working for the McCauleys, then took the letter to the post office. Billy begged me not to write him anything I wouldn’t want Papa to read and to tell you the same. I think Papa is as mean a man as ever lived. Billy says he hasn’t given up on joining the army but will wait until he is fourteen.

Lizzie, you wrote me to behave—

well, don’t ask any impossibilities.

Alice Bullock

August 24, 1863

Dear Lizzie,

Annie’s been helping us hoe corn. She’s as tall as Mother Bullock, but she isn’t any bigger around than a cornstalk. She’s a worker, though. Joybell sits under a tree and plays with the cornsilk. If she can walk all the way from Tennessee being blind like she is, then I guess it’s not a matter of consequence her not seeing to do the work. When we take a rest, Annie stares at a primer of Charlie’s, which she keeps in the pocket of her dress—or I should say my dress, but there has been no mention of her giving it back to me. I don’t care to have it back, but she could have offered. Annie might as well be reading a Chinaman’s scratches, for all she understands about words. But she knows her letters. I teach her three of them every day, and she can recite almost the whole alphabet now. She copies her letters in the dirt with a stick. I told her at the rate she’s going, she’ll be able to write a letter by Christmas.

“Who’s gonna get that letter? Everybody at home’s a-sleepin’ under the sod, and if they wasn’t, they couldn’t read it anyway.”

“Then you can write a letter to my sister,” I says. She will. I
know she will, Lizzie, and you’ll write her back, won’t you? I bet nobody in the world would be so tickled to get a letter as Annie, and your reward will be knowing you did a kindness.

I guess if I’m talking about Annie writing a letter at Christmas, me and Mother Bullock expect her and Joybell to stay on, although the subject has not been brought up. The first day or three, it didn’t seem right to send them off with the little girl doing poorly. And now Annie is such a help on the farm, I don’t know what we’d do without her. She hasn’t asked for pay but seems glad to work for food and a place to stay. And guess what? She’s never used a cookstove and can make most anything in this old fireplace, so she does most of the cooking now. Mother Bullock asked her didn’t she want to move into the attic, but she says Joybell might fall out, so they keep on sleeping in the shack by the creek. It was once a henhouse, and Jo and Charlie hauled it out there when they were boys, sleeping in it for weeks at a time. Mother Bullock says Annie’s fierce and won’t be beholden. I think she’s a wild thing and doesn’t want to be under Mother Bullock’s thumb. Me, either, but I am more domestic than wild.

Here’s something else. Me and Annie being the same age, we understand each other, and I like somebody to talk to who isn’t peering down her nose at me. With the bushwhackers around, I don’t mind having someone here besides Mother Bullock and Lucky. I have wrote to Charlie asking him if it is all right if she stays till he gets home. I’m sure he’ll agree. That’s the only reason I asked him.

Charlie has the blues bad. He didn’t write hardly at all at first, because he was having such a good time in Keokuk. But now he’s got the misery, and he writes every week to complain. He’s seen the elephant, as the soldiers who’ve been in battle put it, so he’d just as soon come on home. Charlie drills and drills and drills some more, then goes through knapsack inspection, draws picket duty, and takes his turn with the mess. Harve Stout is one of Charlie’s five messmates, all of them from Iowa, and Harve’s the best there is for making boiled pudding out of hardtack. He
breaks up the hard crackers and mixes them with water or sometimes a little whiskey, and bacon grease, pours the mess into a sock, and boils it. I write, “Is the sock clean?”

“Shoot no,” Charlie writes back. “How do you think it gets the flavor?”

Charlie says they have the hard crackers three meals a day, and they have to be soaked in water or coffee before they can be chewed. Even then, hardtack isn’t any too choice, on account of things living in it. One of the Rangers bit into his cracker and says, “There’s something soft in here.”

“A worm?” Charlie asks him.

The fellow spits in his hand and looks at it. “Nope, a tenpenny nail.”

The food isn’t the only thing that has got Charlie down. The weather is as hot as Lucifer’s back pocket, but worse, there is nothing for the soldiers to do. Charlie says he’d rather fight Rebs than sit around all day; he is that bored with the lazy camp life. He’s not much for playing with spotted papers, as they call cards, and he won’t gamble. Now Charlie has always liked his good time, but even so, he can’t abide the foul talk and bad ways. Me and Mother Bullock send Charlie newspapers and books, but he gets them only half the time. I guess some general is sitting in his tent reading Charlie’s copy of Mrs. Stowes’s
Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands,
which I mailed him. Charlie is close with his money, like he always was, and sends us most of his pay, when he gets it. He even made himself some extra money by buying drawers from the soldiers who don’t wear them and selling them to those that do, but the army hasn’t issued any lately, so that little business is done with.

The worst thing for Charlie is he is down with the dysentery, which has pretty near put him in the hospital. He says more men die from camp sickness than wounds. Mother Bullock, who knows about such things, sent him dried raspberry leaves and told him to make himself a tea. The Rangers met up with a company of Rebs, but Charlie was so sick that he had to stay behind and listen to the gunshots and the shouts and the screams,
and he says that was worse than fighting. Now he fears the boys will call him a coward. Harve told him anybody who fought like Charlie did in that skirmish awhile back is as brave as there is. Charlie wishes he’d been shot instead of got diseased, but he says with his currently bad luck, he’d have got shot in the foot, and I wouldn’t want him back. “Now, Doll Baby, you never said nothing about dancing with a man inflicted with the Arkansas quickstep,” he writes. Well, who would have thought to say it?

I wasn’t sure I was going to tell you this, but since we confide in each other about everything, and I already mentioned dancing, and you know who the last person was I danced with, well, just guess who came along when I was picking chokecherries? The cherries grow wild all along the creek about a half mile from the house, and as I was tired of working in the corn, I decided to gather cherries one afternoon, then make conserve and jelly and pickle some because sugar costs us twenty-five cents the pound. I thought to make cherry bounce, too, since it would vex Mother Bullock more to waste the cherries than to ferment them. Besides, we can use the bounce for dosing ourselves when we get sick. I was having a grand time, eating the cherries and singing loud enough to scare crows. And I looked a fright, I can tell you, with cherry juice all over my face and my sleeves rolled up and my bodice unbuttoned on account of it being hot enough to roast corn in the stalk. Then I looked up, and there was Mr. Samuel Smead laughing at me.

“I heard something and thought it was a cow stuck in the mud,” he says.

I should have been embarrassed, but I just laughed, and I says, “Why, can’t you see? That’s what it is.”

“You might moo like a cow, but I recollect you dance like an angel,” he says, and took a handful of cherries out of the bushel basket and popped one or three into his mouth.

“Pick your own,” I says.

“They wouldn’t taste as sweet,” he replies. Why, Lizzie, the sweetest thing was the way he talked. Have you ever heard anything so pretty in your life? I almost near swooned.