The Mapmaker's Children, page 28
They bound me and forced me to the floor, tying Ruth and Mother’s hands as well. So when they came at Alice, there was only faithful Gypsy to defend her. I heard the blast of the gun before her growl had settled to the floorboards. The soldier in command shot her straight through the muzzle. She dropped with teeth shattered like bloody kernels of corn. It was a demonic sight, a demonic act.
Alice gave a banshee cry and came forward—toward Gypsy, I am certain, but the Rebels mistook it as aggression. A young soldier hit Alice over the head with his musket. She fell with her skull open as wide and wet as Gypsy’s ruined mouth.
I try not to hate him—the ignorant boy, terrified by the dog and the fervor of Alice’s mourning. He should’ve been home helping with the harvest crop. We all should’ve been reaping our fields and preparing wood for winter hearths, but we aren’t. We are here, embroiled in this hell. I know I can speak openly with you, Sarah. I cannot with anyone else.
I failed to protect my family. I see the scenes in my mind like tintype images burned by light. Writing you is my soul’s only salvation. Please forgive me for this lack of decorum between married man and unmarried woman. Though we know each other’s secrets well enough. Our old ways are no more. This war has shown the underbelly of humanity. The scales of righteousness have yet to be balanced.
Raised in churches across the South, these Rebel men left us our “properties”—as they put it—realizing that they had gravely injured the simpleton daughter of a clergyman. Siby has not left Alice’s bedside. The head wound seems to have completely unraveled the tapestry of her mind. She speaks in vowels we cannot understand, moaning through the days like an infant. With no physician to give us counsel, we fear that every hour could be her last.
We continue to hide Hannah and Clyde. They tiptoe about the house like ghosts and spend countless hours in the cellar, playing make-believe with Alice’s neglected dolls. The dolls’ cropped hair reminds Hannah of her own. With their light skin and light eyes, Mother swears the two children could pass as white. Maybe in another place and time, but here, they are known for what they are and we don’t dare take the risk. The best we can safely continue to do is forward your map dolls to southern stations. Your painted templates were made with perfect timing, Sarah, and have since been copied to great success! I thought you ought to know of that small but mighty victory in the light of all this unhappy news and more…
In the roundup, Mr. and Mrs. Fisher were captured and sent south to the slave markets. The Confederates are now using their home as a makeshift storehouse. With no foods to be found in the garden, they slaughtered Tilda—too old to carry a soldier into battle or pull a load of weaponry. They roasted her flanks over a bonfire and feasted as if she were a fatted calf. The smell lingered for days.
We have not had word from Father since the capture of Harpers Ferry. If you hear news of his whereabouts, we would be eternally grateful.
I have been consigned to serve as a man of God to the Confederate soldiers in New Charlestown. I shirk at these duties. Ruth daily reminds me that in the end, all men face the heavenly host without uniforms. She is right. But my heart has turned cold as a river rock. It is a weight in my chest. No warmth or rhythm. Just there, until I can find a private hour to write to you. Only now do I feel a pulse. Only with you, Sarah. Forgive me for being bold, but it is written in Proverbs: “A man of many companions may come to ruin, but there is a friend that sticks closer than a brother.” Or sister, as the case may be.
Love,
Freddy
Fort Edward Institute, Saratoga, N.Y., November 1, 1862
Dear Annie,
Yesterday I received word of the Hills in Virginia. It is even more terrible than our worst fears. Oh, sister! I am bereft. I cry and curse the blasted Rebels. I could not hide my grief from Mary Lathbury, so I have shared all of this with her. She graciously reached out to her friends actively involved in bringing information safely across enemy lines. I pray they will provide a good report of Mr. Hill so I might, at the very least, provide the family a bit of solace.
Give my love to Mama and little Ellen. Keep vigil in North Elba. Those who despise our name will stop at nothing to see us and those we hold dear laid to the grave.
Your loving sister,
Sarah
North Elba, New York, November 20, 1862
Dear Sarah,
The poison of slavery has spread everywhere! I was offered a teaching position in Virginia, but within a week of my acceptance letter, threats came to our door—in North Elba. Even Father’s city on a hill has grown venomous with the spies and bounty hunters! If we are not safe here, how much more danger awaits a Brown in the South. So I’ve canceled my obligation, though I wonder if the school will receive either letter.
President Lincoln’s preliminary Emancipation Proclamation has proven to be little more than fancy speech. As the Holy Word proclaims, it is not enough to speak of good intentions. One must correspond in deeds. Lincoln is no Father. And we Browns are not guaranteed welfare as we await a deliverer.
Look to the Hills for example. Shall we sit in our kitchen, baking bread and burning wood, until a rogue guard rides up to steal and murder? No. We would be fools and deserving of a cruel fate. While I grieve for the Hills, I will not wait for a similar doom. We must learn from these friends and move to ensure that our family is protected.
Mother, brother Salmon, and I have discussed and feel it best if we go west together. She asked that I send this correspondence to you after she had written Mr. Stearns, Mr. Sanborn, and Ms. Lathbury, which she has. It is arranged. You will return to North Elba immediately, and we will set off to our people in Iowa.
I understand it will be difficult for you to accept this decision with charity. Be mindful that your artistic studies in Saratoga are of trifling substance if your life and the lives of your family members are the cost. Look to Father for example.
If you fight us, it will only delay our inevitable departure and put all in peril. The sin of vain selfishness will bring ruin, Sarah. I tell you this as a loving sister so that you might be spared heavenly judgment. Be obedient and come home. Remember, you are a Brown. Not a Hill.
Your faithful sister,
Annie
Eden
NEW CHARLESTOWN, WEST VIRGINIA
AUGUST 2014
“Hello?” Jack had answered, and the sound of his voice had broken Eden’s last defensive stronghold. She opened her mouth to reply, but nothing came out. Too much to say. Too much unsaid. Her heart ping-ponged from spleen to gullet like a pinball game.
“Jack.” She coughed.
He went straight in: “Eden, I promise you…”
“Jack, please.” She needed him just to listen. “I’ve been at Dr. Wyatt’s office. He’s the town veterinarian,” she explained, and the rest tumbled out hot and fast. “It’s Cricket. He’s not a puppy, like we thought. Dr. Wyatt says by his teeth, he’s probably four or five years old. And he’s sick, Jack. They took an X-ray and found a mass the size of a grapefruit in his belly. It’s monstrous! Lymphoma—cancer.” She stopped to catch her breath and sobbed instead. “He’s dying. Dr. Wyatt gave me a bottle of steroids to make him comfortable until the end. But I’ve been on steroids. They’re not comfortable!” And then her voice turned off like a blown flame, and she cried silently in the dark of the house.
She’d never allowed herself to cry like that. Ever. Not when they lost their unborn babies. Not when she was going through fertility procedures that made her sweat, grimace, and go white as a bedsheet. She’d held herself steady and occasionally allowed herself stifled sobs of regret or hormone-induced hysteria. Even when she saw Pauline’s text and cried into her pillow—they’d been angry, driven tears. Now she wept like she had as a child, raw and vulnerable, uncorked until she was emptied.
“I can be home in half an hour,” said Jack. “Do you want me to come?”
“Please,” she whimpered. “Come home. We need you.”
Exactly twenty-three minutes later, just before midnight, he arrived. She’d sat on the couch with Cricket asleep by her side, watching the neon numbers on the digital clock blink away each minute. Gone. Gone. Gone. Each moment lost.
The screen door opened and clapped at his back, and she had never been more grateful for the sound.
“Eden,” he called into the darkness.
Not seeing her, he started to call again, but she was up and straight into his arms, squeezing the “Ee” out of him. God, she’d missed him. In one night and at the risk of losing him entirely, she’d missed him so much more than he’d ever know.
She pulled back so that their faces aligned. The hollows of his eyes were eggplant dark. She knew hers were, too.
“I shouldn’t have thrown you out like that. You deserved to at least tell me your side. You deserve more…” The word seemed to catapult her into another racking round.
He held her close, her face leaving a watermark on his shirt like an image from the Shroud of Turin. He should’ve been furious with her. She’d thrown him out exposed and without listening to a single word; grown adults didn’t behave like that to each other. People who loved each other didn’t act with such disregard. But he only held her closer and let her be just as she was.
“Since the moment I met you, I’ve loved no one else. I couldn’t,” he said into the crown of her head. “I’ve never needed anyone but you. You are enough. More than enough, Eden. I’ll do whatever you need me to do for you to feel complete. Pauline is everything I never want you to be. Lonely, heartbroken, and desperately searching for happiness. I shouldn’t have met up with her for coffee. I shouldn’t have taken her and her daughter out for dessert. She was just an old friend who knew me when I still had a family.” He sighed. “A boy with parents, I mean…I was afraid you’d take it wrong if I mentioned it. I should have told you from the start.”
“I wouldn’t have listened. I haven’t been listening for years. I’ve had baby on the brain.” She had to take responsibility, too.
A tear wormed its way down her cheek, and he thumbed it away.
“If you want a baby, we’ll get a baby. By hook or by crook! If you want to return to the PR agency, I’m your biggest advocate. If you want to leave New Charlestown, we’ll go back to the city, too. Whatever you want.”
He was freely giving her everything she’d schemed for herself. Only now, a panic rose up.
“I don’t want to leave. I want us to stay here.” She pulled out of his embrace and looked at Cricket on the couch. “I want him to be buried in the backyard, close by, when it’s time. We won’t leave him.”
Jack pulled her back with a nod. When she spoke, her breath ricocheted off his throat and returned warm.
“I never looked into the faces of the babies we lost. I never made them dinner or sang them a good-night lullaby or held them when they were sick. I never heard their voices or saw their eyes light up at a sunny day. I never mothered them, truly, even if I carried them inside me. In his way, Cricket let me be his mother. Is that weird to say?”
He shook his head.
“We got this amazing little gift, and I don’t want to give him back.” At that, her body collapsed inward like a broken teacup.
He let her cry without offering trite condolences. She’d been the recipient of the gamut of them when her father died, each a hollow bell of no solace. From the pillow-embroidered reflections—Better to have loved and lost—to the biblical—You must be strong through the Valley of the Shadow of Death—they did little but force the sufferer into a position of gratitude: Thank you so, so much for your kindness. When all you felt was…loss. Deep, unrelenting loss. That kind of despair frightened people. Friends, neighbors, acquaintances feared it was catching like a virus, so they’d put on sterile gloves to hand out the Our thoughts are with you when really their thoughts were sprinting away as fast as possible. It was too painful to recognize: mortality.
Jack understood, though. He’d lived through the same when his mom and dad had died. Pauline had known his parents. How could Eden blame him for seeking out their memories? Even to the extent of cake balls. She had Denny, but Jack had no siblings to share a Remember when with.
She held him. “I don’t want to go back to how things were,” she whispered.
“We won’t,” he promised. “We’ll make a change.”
She buried her nose into his chest. Breathing in that only-Jack smell.
“I want to leave Aqua Systems,” he said suddenly.
She leaned back to face him, shocked but not angry. Before she could formulate a question, he answered.
“This isn’t the life for us. I want to be with you. Where you’re happy, so am I.”
She furrowed her brow, but a smile threatened her mouth.
“Only how will we afford the house and the fertility bills? Everything’s on credit cards. One of us has to have a stable income.”
“I believe you are on your way to illustrious fortune, Mrs. CricKet BisKet.”
Mrs. Yes, she thought, Mrs. works much better.
He went on to tell her that he’d been contemplating his resignation for months. He’d researched agricultural companies he admired in the D.C. metro area, particularly his father’s former employer, Cropland Geni-Corp. He’d e-mailed the vice president regarding his father’s old formulas, sitting patiently in a bank security box. It had gotten his foot in the door. The VP had replied that CGC’s president wanted Jack to come to the office to discuss the prospect of the formulas being reinstated and the research continued with an ultimate goal: unveiling a new line of products establishing their company as a leader in eco-friendly innovation. This, of course, was contingent on the right man spearheading the project. The right man holding the patents. Jack.
He’d thought it best to tell Eden after the meeting—wait until the ink was dry on the contract. He hadn’t wanted to get her hopes up only to disappoint her. However, he now realized that he wanted and needed her by his side for this journey—as a partner, not a passenger.
Eden was dazzled all over again by this man and his ambition. This was the Jack she’d met all those years ago at the agency. The confident man she believed in and admired. She’d been a weight to his life over the past many years, but no more. They’d be allies and help each other achieve more than they’d ever dreamed of. She saw their future clearly, bright and unblemished as a perigee moon.
The kitchen clock chimed, and Cricket awoke at the sound. Seeing them, he wigwagged his tail, his shaggy shadow mimicking the motion on the wall. It was Sunday, and the Anderson family was exactly where it ought to be. Together. And Eden slept.
NEW CHARLESTOWN POST
Decorah, Iowa, May 15, 1863
Dear Freddy,
I can’t tell you how regretful I am for my many months without communication. Regretful that I have kept you in worry; regretful of this war; and most regretful of this blasted Iowa! I mourned every line of your previous letter. Immediately upon receiving it, I was removed from Mr. Sanborn’s school and sent west with my family—to Decorah! We have been confined here all winter.
I learned there is a worse fate than death. Being buried alive. The snow piled higher than our windowpanes so that we couldn’t tell if it was day or night. Not that it mattered. Whatever the hour, the cold kept Annie, Mother, Ellen, and me bunched together in bed like a mass grave from the battlefront. Sometimes I’d wake and think little Ellen dead beside me, her body so small and chilled. It was a monstrous season that nearly turned us into beasts with it. The cramped quarters had us either bickering or mute.
Only Salmon ventured out, in bear fur and rawhide lacings. Though his family’s home was less than a mile from ours, it would take him half the day to traverse. We didn’t see my sister-in-law Abbie in all those months but were told she lost a child she hadn’t known she’d been carrying. The ground was too firm for burial, but they couldn’t put the dead out in the snow. Wolves would catch the scent. So they kept the thing in the cellar. Imagine! The only merciful act of this wretched Decorah is that it froze the lost baby and kept it from decomposing. Though when they unwrapped it for interment, the sight of its bodily shell removed of spirit distressed Abbie to a state of irreparable fragility. Salmon has worried himself into a whooping cough over her—and for good reason. This land would split a mountain if the rock dared open itself to a teardrop.
At home, I imagine our farm’s strawberry plants bursting with blossoms. My throat aches at the thought of their fruits. We’ve been eating canned applesauce for months. It was the main staple put to pantry by our kin, the Days, who greeted us upon arrival, then vanished into the drifts. I’ll retch if I’m forced to take one more spoonful. Blasted gruel. I yearn for the crisp snap of fresh garden harvest, but we are adrift in eternal winter.
My only gladness comes in knowing that the dolls accomplished what we hoped! Thank you for giving me that gift of knowledge, Freddy, and I’m grateful that our friends were able to bring your uncensored words safely to my doorstep. I pray these reach you in equal keeping.
Is there any happy report from New Charlestown? I’ve imagined it so often I’ve nearly convinced myself of hope’s reality: that Alice has awoken from her injury with a smile; that the Fishers have been returned to their homestead; that your father and mother are reunited; that the Hills gather round the table eating Siby’s wheel of corn bread heaped with fresh butter. That the warring has reached cessation during our dreadful hibernation and, therefore, some good has come from it. These thoughts bring me comfort, even if they are a fable of my own creation.
