Free Homeland by Barbara Hambly Page A

reaches you, you and I may both be living in, as you say, “another world”—if they have not altered beyond recognition by the time
your
letter reaches
me
.
    My mind pictures you and Julia clinging to your metaphorical plank in the ocean, and I marvel at your matter-of-fact courage. I marvel, too, at the fact that in retrospect, you can laugh. Marvel, and hope that by your example I’ll one day be able to do the same.
    I cannot help comparing this approach to life with the Gothic heroines whose lurid adventures I have lately begun to explore. For Emily St. Aubert and her spiritual sisters, terrible events have the character of falling over a bottomless precipice in the dark. But in truth—and in Miss Austen’s tales—the cliff is not bottomless, however deep the chasm may be. One does not fall, but is only obliged to climb down, one painful but possible hand-hold at a time, until one reaches the bottom. One gropes one’s way across the bottom, and climbs—one painful but possible hand-hold at a time—up the other side. Which is another way of saying, I suppose, Where there’s Life, there’s Hope.
    I feel as if I am slightly less than half-way down, my friend. When I call out in the darkness, it is your voice that calls back to me. Though I cannot see you, I know we are both carefully descending the same cliff, and will meet on the other side.
    I pray for your safety.
    Elinor is the only one of the Reading Circle—the Daughters of the Union—who visits me now. Last week word came that Charles Grey—my friend Deborah’s fiancé—was killed in battle at New Bern, North Carolina. At church Sunday Pastor Wainwright spoke of it as a “crime,” as if men had broken into Charles’s house and shot him.After services I heard many denounce his “murderers.” No one did so to my face. Even Mother’s friends turned from me.
    Charles and I played together as children. I feel that I
should
be angry at the men who killed him. When I realize that he
is
dead—and this realization returns to me many times a day, as fresh as if I had not heard it before—I am ill with anger. But I do not feel their personal rage. Is this because Emory is fighting on the Rebel side, not because he believes in slavery or States’ Rights, but out of duty to his homeland? The same duty that moved Charles to fight? Or is it only because no lover, no husband, no brother of mine has been killed
… That I know of? Yet?
Whatever the reason, coming down the church steps, Charles’s mother, and sisters, and Deborah looked at me as if they suspected I had myself loaded Emory’s gun, to personally shoot the young man we all so loved.
L ATER . E VENING
    After bringing in wood, helping Mother take down the stiff-frozen laundry, and as you see by my writing I have burnt my finger in the stove again. Oliver, Isaiah, and Uncle Mordacai’s hired man are tapping the maples tomorrow—we begin to boil the sap for sugar. I do little enough these days, being slow and clumsy now, and it irks me, to tire so easily. The world is a sodden morass of muddy snow that freezes hard each night, weakens to slush only for an hour mid-day. I dreamed last night about egg-custard, which I have not tasted in six months.
T HURSDAY , A PRIL 3
    Sugared all day yesterday, and again this morning. Icicles as long as my arm bar the eaves. Snow patches only in the woods, invitingOliver most reprehensibly to smack me with a snowball! I responded in kind—
far
beneath the dignity of people who shall both be parents one day soon!
    Elinor visited this afternoon, to help sugar off. Elinor has borne two children, has walked the path on which my feet are irrevocably set, and has passed through that gate of pain that I myself face in less than ninety days. Peggie, looking to her own confinement only weeks beyond my own, will talk of nothing, as she and I sew in the evenings, but of how two of her aunts died in childbed, one of them in lingering agony which she does not hesitate to