Leigh Ann's Civil War (27 page)

Pa was wraithlike. He had lost weight, the skin on his face was colorless, his hands scarce had any flesh on them, and his nightshirt looked as if it had been made for a man twice his size. I wanted to cry when I saw him.

Especially because he did not know me.

Teddy had warned me of this, but still it was horrifying to me. Teddy stood with me when I visited him. "I've brought Leigh Ann to see you, Pa," he said.

"Told you," Pa scolded, "no strangers. What do I want with strangers?"

Tears came down my face, and I tried to talk him into knowing me, but Teddy made me leave. I was only making him excited, he said. I felt slapped. Like I was being punished for all my sins. So I left, and I did not go to see him again before he died.

I returned to my couch in the back parlor.

I stayed there, obediently, for two days. Then I began to wonder why there were no letters lying about the house for me from James.

Teddy was seldom around the house. He was always out and about the plantation on his horse, inspecting things, giving orders, arranging things, sometimes getting down from his horse and pitching in to help the negroes with an especially knotty situation.

Without saying anything to anyone I sneaked out to the barn, took my horse, and without asking went to see Mrs. Stapleton, but she was not there. Her house was boarded up, empty. I felt terror seize me and rode swiftly home.

I found my brother out in the cornfields. The jackdaws had done their mischief here the night before, and had I known he was in a rage I would have turned my horse around and gone back to the barn.

He turned, saw me. "What the hell are you doing here? You're supposed to be on the couch. You heard the doctor."

"Where is Mrs. Stapleton? Why is her house boarded up? Why are there no letters for me from James?"

He cursed, using the Lord's name in vain.

"Not now. Can't you see I have trouble here? Primus, I thought I told you to stuff old coats and hats on sticks like they do up north to scare the crows. Why wasn't it done?"

"Ole Beetle who was 'posed to do it run off yesterday, boss," Primus said.

Teddy said nothing. I was just deciding that this was not the kind of news he needed, that I'd best go back to the house, when he spoke to me without looking, while separating the ruined stalks of corn from the other.

"James was killed," he said. "At Hagerstown, Maryland, on July sixth." He went on with his business with the corn, still not looking at me. He pulled some more ruined stalks and threw them aside. "I'm sorry," he said.

It was quiet for a moment. James! My own James.
Killed.
I just sat there on my horse for a few moments, looking across the cornfield and the wheat field beyond and trying to reason it out.

Why James? What did it matter to anyone if he came home or not? Why did he have to die to prove anything? I closed my eyes, feeling a dizziness overtake me. I saw his face in front of me, remembered the evening I'd kissed his cheek.

Then something else came to me. "Why didn't you tell me?" I asked my brother.

Now he looked at me. "Damn, Leigh Ann, I haven't even had time to talk to you yet!"

"It would have been better." I started to cry. I could scarce talk. "It would have been better if you had told me. It was your job to tell me."

He took off his hat. He scratched his head and watched me as I turned my horse and went back to the house.

He came to me later, when I was on the couch again, and stood over me.

"Don't ever tell me again," he said severely, "in front of the servants, what is or what isn't my job. You hear me?"

I said, "Yes, Teddy, I hear you."

Then he said, "I'm sorry I didn't tell you right off about James. I didn't know how in hell to do it. I had to find the right moment. It just didn't come."

Then he said, "Are you going to be all right?"

"I have to be," I said. "What else is there to be?"

He leaned down and kissed my forehead. His hand lingered on the top of my head. "You're my sweet girl," he said. Then he left the room.

***

When Louis came home two weeks later, I hugged him and told him thank you for letting his owl take care of me in Marietta. He said, "I don't know what you're talking about."

Yet he knew. I could tell by the twinkle in his eyes that he knew. But this was a part of him that Louis would not let himself talk about.

After all,
I reminded myself,
remember. He knows nothing whatsoever about my even being sent to Marietta. Carol and I spent hours telling him and Camille tales about it.

So how,
I pondered,
did he know enough to have his owl help me?

Something in him, I decided, just knew I was in trouble.

I also decided I would never fully understand my brother Louis. And that I should just be grateful I had him.

In Roswell they made him continue his term as mayor. Lord knows, with the destruction, the organization needed to raise money to restore the churches and houses, the families of the mill workers already wanting to know what happened to their women, and those wanting to salvage iron from the mill having to be kept out of town, Louis had his hands full.

I healed from my concussion.

I wish I could say I healed from my heartbreak over James. Nobody knew where Mrs. Stapleton went, and her house stayed boarded up for a long time.

Pa died right after Louis and Camille came home. It was as if he were waiting for Louis to come. Because he knew Louis. He recognized him, spoke with him, while he never knew me.

We had services for him in our churchyard and buried him there. I never go to his grave.

Teddy said I could write to Major McCoy, and so I did. I told him the why and the how of our return to Roswell. I sent the letter on to Ohio, as he suggested. He wrote back, saying how happy he was for me, and proud.

He wrote another letter to Teddy, asking permission to correspond with me.

"Do you want to?" Teddy asked me.

"I don't know."

"He likes you. But he's twenty-three years old."

I remained silent, then said, "We can be friends, can't we?"

"There's no such thing, sweetie. Not between a man and a woman. Not the way he looked at you. You should know that from the get-go."

"I'm too young to marry."

"Damned right, sweetie. I'll be waiting on the verandah for him with a rifle, if that's what he wants."

"Why don't you write to him and tell him I'm too young, but we can still write. That would work, wouldn't it?"

He smiled. "Sure. I can do that. Big brother says give it time. You need a few years yet. But he can write. Even visit if he fancies. But the war will keep him busy, don't worry."

So Major McCoy and I wrote back and forth for the rest of the war. And he was kind and respectful and dear. And even when he got leave at Christmas and came to visit, he was respectful and dear, though everyone was talking already about negotiations between the North and the South. Being a Yankee, he did not lord it over us.

Viola had her baby in January, and in March she and the doctor-captain came to visit. It was a darling boy and they stayed two weeks.

The end of the war was coming and everybody knew it, and the only question was how and when. On the fourth of March, Abraham Lincoln had been inaugurated for a second term. There were still skirmishes all around, of course, but the South did not have much left. Just spirit, Teddy said.

Teddy and Carol had a baby boy in February and again it was, between them, as if they had just met. Teddy had moments with that baby when he was as I'd never seen him before, and I thought,
That is why God gives us children. They are our second chance.

In April the war ended and we wondered why we had done it at all.

Teddy freed his people. Many left, but not all. The rest he paid, and they stayed on with us.

Cannice and Careen and Primus stayed, and the other house servants and most of the field servants.

Something they called Reconstruction came to Georgia, and to Roswell, and it was as terrible as it sounded. For one thing, Louis could not be mayor anymore, because he had been a Confederate and now he and Teddy could not vote. There were all kinds of new rules, and we were under military occupation.

In July, Teddy and Louis and some other men who wanted to put in money had a meeting because they wanted to rebuild the mill. Then Teddy and Louis said there was certainly enough cotton on hand, and they had enough money to build the mill themselves, without asking for a dollar from others.

They mulled the matter over for a while. They were having other thoughts, too.

The idea had come to them from something Major McCoy had written to me in one of his letters.

So they telegrammed the doctor and Viola, and asked them to come from where they were at the moment, at the doctor's home in Washington City.

When all were present and accounted for, we had a family dinner, for it was a year now since Carol and I and Viola had been shipped off to Marietta.

In that year, Major McCoy had gotten a leave and gone west, he had written. As far as Kansas, and he was thinking of staying in the army and fighting the Indian wars. Unless he had any reason to establish a cattle ranch.

Louis, of course, did not like the idea of Indian wars, but there were lively discussions, plans, talk of selling the plantation and the mill site at that dinner.

Nothing was decided. They would think on it, my brothers agreed.

"But we all must go together," Teddy told us. "It has to be a family decision."

Then he was silent for a moment. "If we go west, we won't build a ranch," he said. "We'll build a homestead."

The burning of the mill in Roswell, Georgia, in 1864, and the arrest and forced relocation of hundreds of women and children who worked in the mill is a true story.

These women and children had committed no crime, other than working hard in the mill on a daily basis or being connected with it in some way. But the order came down from the Union general William T. Sherman to burn the mill and transport the workers far away to places north, as he and his army made their way across the South, looking for a way to cut the South in two.

Roswell, Georgia, was in the way of that maelstrom of pillaging, unnecessary destruction, heart-rending ruination, and unremitting desolation that became known as Sherman's March to the Sea.

The women and children were charged with treason simply for making cloth for the Southern army. No one was excused. Not even those who were "with child."

Likewise, the same sentence was pronounced on women and men at the New Manchester Cotton Mill in Sweet-water Creek, a village some thirty miles away. Along with the Roswell workers, they were taken to Marietta, the county seat, where they were detained until they could be put on trains and taken north.

Theophile Roche and Olney Eldredge were freed in Nashville. In mid-July, trains carrying the women and children began arriving in Louisville, Kentucky, which was, by nineteenth-century standards, considered a metropolis, but by our standards was a crowded, filthy river town.

Sherman had ordered them sent north of the Ohio River.

The women possessed nothing. In Louisville they were confined to a refugee house without food or water, and many were in need of medical attention. Some were hired out as servants, taking the places of freed slaves. Finally they were sent farther north to places such as Evansville and New Albany, Indiana, towns where they were not welcome because those towns were already overrun with refugees, runaways, and the like, and because there was no place for them to live or work.

Newspapers, North and South, protested the arrests and deportation of these women and children. From Richmond, Virginia, to Cincinnati, Ohio, and beyond, there were stories and editorials holding similar views of the harsh treatment and hopeless futures allotted to these unfortunate creatures.

While many of the leading families of Roswell eventually returned to the town, only a handful of the mill workers did, some years later, by foot. Some returned with children. Others married and settled in Indiana or Ohio, where they worked in cotton mills.

***

Although the story of the Roswell, Georgia, cotton mill being burned is true, my book is a fictionalized account. In July 1864, General William T. Sherman, in his March to the Sea, did order the arrest and deportation of anyone who had to do with the Roswell cotton mill.

The Conners family did not own the mill. It was owned by the King family. Its patriarch, Roswell, founded the village and had the vision to see the possibilities of the land that lay on the north side of the Chattahoochee River.

In researching this story, what led me to write it was that this same land, before King came along, once belonged to the Cherokee Indians, the most intellectually advanced tribe at the time, who had an alphabet, a newspaper, established schools, and written laws. Indeed, this was the place where the famous and tragic Trail of Tears began, when the white men, motivated by the discovery of gold on this very land, drove the Cherokee out of their six-thousand-acre area.

This was too good a story not to write. Here I could have my family be descended from a Cherokee, own the mill, have sons in the Civil War, and a mother who was a Yankee. I was halfway through the book when my protagonist decided she would be the one to plant the French flag of neutrality on the roof of the mill and get herself arrested when the Yankees came, and sent off with the mill women. A pivotal point in the novel, but it only came halfway through the book.

My characters took over and I followed them. Of course the research was endless and difficult. I found myself making mistake after mistake in the writing and had to go back and rewrite many times. I ran into roadblocks and mental blocks as I always do when writing fiction. I wrote the prologue sixteen times, then when the book was finished found the prologue all wrong and wrote it again.

My characters eluded me and did things that at first I did not understand. There is Louis suddenly, for instance, with an owl on his shoulder. Then I find that same owl coming back in the last part of the book in a fanciful way to help Leigh Ann when she is in dire straits. I did not plan that. There is the "doctor-captain" coming around a corner of the women's quarters in Marietta and bumping into Leigh Ann and knocking her over. I never intended him to be a character in the book. But not only is he instrumental in giving Carol and Viola jobs as nurses, thus saving them from the terrible plight of the women who get shipped north, but he
marries
Viola!