Free Alice's Tulips: A Novel by Sandra Dallas

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 openedthe 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. Iknow 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