Free Homeland by Barbara Hambly

husband of yours deserves,” snapped Aunt Sally. “But I pay my debts, Eliza. And I owe you this, for getting my nieces out of Bayberry when that cretin brother of mine lets militia white-trash camp in the house because they haven’t the red bloodin them to join the real Army and actually do some good against the Yankees.” She’d talked to Pa in Richmond and didn’t have a good word to say about him or President Davis or anybody on either side. “I’ll send my coachman over on Thursday,” she told Mrs. J, “and he’ll escort you up to your daughter’s place in the mountains. That part of the state is crawling with Tories like an old dog with fleas. You should be safe enough there.”
    I asked, What about us? and she looked down her nose at me, even though I’m seven inches taller than she is, and Julia who’d crept in very quietly, with tiny Baby Tommy in her arms. “Pa didn’t say we have to go back to Bayberry, did he?”
    “He did,” Aunt Sally replied. “And I told him not to be stupid. You girls are coming with me to Vicksburg.”
    So that’s where we’ll be, Cora. It’s far down the river enough to be out of the way of the Yankees, and so heavily fortified that even the Confederate High Command (Aunt Sally says) can’t be idiots enough to let the Yankees take it.
W EDNESDAY M ARCH 19
    We leave in the morning. For days we’ve been smuggling things from the house to be stored all over Greeneville with other Unionists. Of course Julia thinks we should go back to Bayberry. I packed up my sketchbooks and pencils (which are all down to stubs), and all the remaining paper in Senator J’s desk, and the precious pen nibs Mrs. E gave me for Christmas only three months ago. The Academy seems years in my past now. I just re-read your letter, the one that you wrote when Emory left: about pretending that it’s years and years in the future. I pretend that I’m a little old white-haired lady, writing to you (from where? to where?) and saying, “Remember how scared I was, when there were bush-whackers and militia fighting all over Greene County, and Julia and I had to go live with dreadful Aunt Sally in Vicksburg?” And you’ll write back, “And yousee, honey, it all turned out all right.” I want to reach into the future tonight and hold that letter from you in my hand.
    I’ll say special prayers for you the whole month of June, when Baby-Cora is going to be born. It’s nearly midnight, and I’m downstairs in the parlor, where you and I first met, and the house is freezing. I feel like I’m sitting on a stage after the play is done, waiting for the stage-hands to come and strike the scenery. All the things that took place here—you and Mrs. J coaching me so I could go to the Academy; Mrs. J teaching Emory back when he was a boy—all those things are going to vanish when we walk out of this house tomorrow. After that, they’ll only exist in our hearts.
    Enclosed is a sketch of the room.
    Love,
S
    P.S. Write me care of Mrs. J care of her daughter Mary Stover in Elizabethton, Carter County, Tennessee. I guess the mountain folks have a regular service across the lines to Kentucky, which drives the Confederates just about crazy.
    Cora Poole, Southeast Harbor
Deer Isle, Maine
To
Susanna Ashford, c/o Eliza Johnson
Greeneville, Tennessee
T UESDAY , A PRIL I , 1862
    Dearest Susanna,
    Thank God you are safe!
    The stories I read of conditions in Nashville during the evacuation were dreadful, and I had great fear for Julia, knowing how faradvanced her condition must be. The
Portland Transcript
speaks of a Federal Army of over fifty thousand men encamped in and around Nashville, and of more approaching it; of Rebel sympathizers jailed and sent to prison camps on the Michigan border for “aiding” an “enemy” which consists of their brothers and sons.
    I received your letter with a sensation of reprieve as well as delight. At the same time I try to push from my mind the knowledge that by the time this