Leigh Ann's Civil War (10 page)

"That isn't nice," Louis admonished. "We don't wish bad on others. War does its own job, Leigh Ann."

I giggled. "His arm, then? Is that all right?"

"This afternoon, after Louis's swearing in, I want you to come to the mill with me," Teddy told me quietly.

"But you have to sleep," Carol protested. "How can you take her to the mill?"

"In the army, love, I went without sleep for forty-eight hours or more."

We all attended Louis's swearing in. There was a gala luncheon at the mayor's office. And later Teddy took me gently by the hand and we went to visit the mill. I did not have the faintest idea what was going on.

***

I had never really visited the innards of the mill, and the first thing that hit me was how hot it was. And the noise! The clacking and the screeching and the banging and the clicking! How could any human being abide the noise? I gripped my brother's hand as he drew me down an aisle through two rows of looms that groaned as they reached hungrily back and forth like rabid beasts who would devour the little girls attending them.

I stopped and froze in my tracks.
Little girls!
Why, that's just what they were! All over the place. Some younger than I was. I clutched my brother's big warm hand with my two small cold ones and refused to go on.

He looked down at me. "Well, come on." He fair had to shout because of the noise.

I shook my head no. I planted my feet firmly on the wooden floor.

He jerked me and pulled me forward so that my arm hurt if I resisted, so I went along. Soon I was coughing, for the air was filled with some noxious fumes and floating bits of white that made me sneeze and dust that made me choke when I breathed.

He stopped in front of one loom and pointed to the little girls working at it. "Look," he said.

He made me look. I didn't want to.

The girls seemed like they had come out of a Charles Dickens novel. Their hair was long and unkempt, their faces shallow and dirty, their arms thin, their necks scrawny, their skirts with ragged hems, showing skinny legs. And they had no shoes on their soiled bare feet. But their bodies and hands moved quickly and deftly as they oiled and cleaned the machinery, took off empty bobbins and put on full ones, and removed loose threads from inside dangerous moving parts.

Teddy leaned down so he wouldn't have to shout. "Last week a little girl wasn't fast enough. She lost a finger."

I thought I was going to throw up the vanilla cream pie I'd had at Louis's celebration lunch.

"Last month another little girl had her eye injured by a flying spindle. They always lose hair in the cogs and wheels. Sometimes at the end of the day when they are tired, they get caught up in the belting."

I looked into his face. "Please take me home, Teddy."

"Not yet. They work twelve to fourteen hours a day. Sometimes we have diseases take hold in the factory. Everyone gets the measles. Or dysentery. Have you seen enough?"

"Yes." I was crying. "I can't breathe."

He picked me up and carried me out sobbing on his shoulder.

Outside he set me down. We walked by the millrace, and he pointed out the wild roses that grew along its inclining sides. It was a beautiful place, but I still felt like throwing up.

"Why did you bring me here?" I demanded. "You punished me for something. I don't even know what I did."

He looked down at me, scowling. "You're getting mean," he said, "and vengeful. Wishing headaches on Lincoln. And that General Grant should break his neck. I don't like that in you."

"They're the
enemy.
They made it so Louis could never walk right again. They shot you in the arm!"

"In early August we burned the village of Hampton, Virginia, held by the Yankees, because they were going to use it to keep runaway slaves. It's the business of war, Leigh Ann, and it gets nasty on both sides."

I had no answer for that.

"It shouldn't make our women nasty. We have to have somebody kind and forgiving and loving to come home to or we all lose."

"What do those mill girls have to do with it?"

"I wanted you to see how fortunate you are. You can know that only by seeing those less fortunate. It's your duty, being wellborn, to feel sympathy for others, to try to help their plight, to maintain the sanity, not to contribute to the madness."

It was my
duty?
I had to be kind and forgiving and loving when they came home from the war or everybody lost?

"What about
your
duty?" I flung at him. "Why don't you do something about the poor mill girls? You could, you know."

He just glared at me for a moment and I expected a rebuke for being sassy. But none came. He looked sad, instead. "It's the system," he said. "The mill system. Perhaps someday soon, Leigh Ann, I will be able to do something about it. Now do you understand why I brought you here today, what I've been trying to teach you?"

"That I have to feel sympathy for others and maintain the sanity," I said.

He nodded yes.

He expects all that from me?
I felt, sometimes, as if I were insane myself.

"Do you think you can work on that for me?" he asked.

I nodded yes. And then I went over to some nearby bushes and threw up.

I didn't want to go back to school in the fall, but Teddy insisted on it. We had a contest for a new name for the girls' academy. I entered my selection, the Conners Brothers Academy. My brothers found out and wrote a note withdrawing my bid, embarrassed.

In the end it was called the Bulloch Academy for Young Ladies, after the town's leading family.

It was a bitter winter. The women in our house were "doing their part" for the war. Viola and Carol joined a group who were gathering and rolling linen to be sent to the hospitals for the wounded. Carol no longer taught the mill children. With the new demands for cloth, there was no time for their schooling.

In October I told Teddy that I wanted to do something for the mill children, that I wanted to collect winter clothes for them. He approved wholeheartedly. "Careen will accompany you," he said, "and Jon will drive you about to collect clothing when Pa takes his afternoon nap."

I told him no, I didn't want Jon. He asked me why, halfway suspicious.

"Has he bothered you at all?"

I could truthfully tell him no, although Jon had put his arm on my shoulder and called me "sweetie" a few times. I'd snapped at him and pulled away. "I'll have Careen put a hex on you," I'd told him.

He'd laughed. "She's nothing but a slave wench, and she'd better never forget it. Your pa doesn't like her. If she doesn't take care, he'll have her put in the fields."

It had frightened me.

"Has he given Viola trouble?"

"No," I lied. Viola didn't want Teddy to know. She could handle this herself, she said. So Jon drove me and Careen around town. We went house to house. As he was helping me out of the carriage at the second house, Jon put his hand on my bottom. I stomped on his foot.

"Ow! You little witch!"

"Don't you
dare
touch me! Ever!"

"Or you'll what? Tell your big brother? What will he do? Challenge me to a duel? Down where I come from I was the best in dueling. How do you think I got this bad arm? I got a shattered bone, yes, but the other fellow died. You want your brother to be the other fellow?"

Careen wanted to say something, but I hushed her. "Then I'll kill you myself," I told him. "I'll get some potion from Cannice and put it in your food."

He didn't answer. But he never put his hands on me again.

We went on, collecting clothes. The residents of Ros-well thought what I was doing was wonderful. We collected shoes, stockings, warm dresses, mittens, and capes, everything.

Times I took my own horse, Trojan, and visited Louis at the mayor's office. He was always busy but welcomed me if I sat in a chair and didn't interrupt his work. I liked watching him at his desk. Sometimes he had visitors and would send me out of his office to the waiting room.

Other days he had time to talk. He told me that the rolls of the army were thinning, that men were going home to "fix things" so they could come home in the spring and find all well.

"Will the war be over in the spring, then?" I asked hopefully.

He shook his head no. "They just worry about home," he said sadly. "Many of them have farms and no one to run them. There are food shortages everywhere now. We're all starting to feel the Yankee blockade of our ports. And the army demands a lot of our crops."

As mayor, Louis did not just marry people and do ribbon cuttings. He began to help the wives of mill workers who had died in the war with their applications for Confederate pensions. They soon began to come to him for everything.

But deep inside, my brother Louis was still hoping to return to the field.

We had Christmas. I went with Teddy to cut and bring home a tree, and Viola and I decorated the front parlor with holly and mistletoe and berries of scarlet. We dressed the dining room with red ribbons and garlands and small Confederate flags. We hung stockings on the fireplace, which were to be filled with fruit, and we made hoarhound candy and taffy to put in them. We decorated the tree with a hundred candles in little colored tin candlesticks. And some old and very cunning toys.

I had made, with the help of Viola, a shirt for both Louis and Teddy. Viola gave them each a package of the new Bull Durham cigarettes and a pair of soft leather gloves. Cannice prepared a true Christmas turkey, cranberry sauce, vegetables, candied sweet potatoes, puddings, cake, and such.

I gave Viola muslin handkerchiefs trimmed with lace I had made myself. She needed them. She was always crying over Johnnie, who had not been home since before Manassas.

Teddy gave me two new dresses, one pink and one blue. He and Louis must have put their heads together, because Louis gave me a pair of patent leather boots, two pair of ruffled pantalets, and two petticoats. I needed them. My brothers knew that women's boots were fifteen dollars a pair now, dresses thirty dollars each, and fabric eight dollars a yard.

In January a French national arrived in Roswell. His name was Theophile Roche. He went to work in the mill as a weaver. He had no wife, no family. He was in his late twenties and was well built and handsome. He boarded in a small single-story cottage at 51 Mill Street on the ridge known as Factory Hill. He preferred to live alone, he told Teddy. There was, at the onset, something mysterious about him. The whole town thought so, and his arrival started a series of gossip and imaginings.

The women of the town took turns bringing him cooked food. He never went hungry. A lot of people invited him for Sunday dinner. He always declined.

My schoolmates swooned over him and gathered around whichever girl claimed to have seen him on the street to conjecture over who he'd been back in France.

"A pirate in hiding," Angela Tarberry said.

"A runaway poet with a wife and ten children at home," from Mary Beth Codgell.

"A prince in exile," said Rosemary Brown.

A group of us left school together one February afternoon and, by previous agreement, headed right to 51 Mill Street on Factory Hill. Once we got there we didn't know what we wanted to do, or why we had come. Just to
see
the place where the pirate-in-hiding-runaway-poet-prince-in-exile lived.

Like all the others it was a small, plain cottage. We peeked in the windows. We walked around the back. We tried the back door, and to our surprise, it opened. And before we knew it we were inside the cottage, where we did not plan to be, standing on the bare plank floor in front of the hearth that held no fire. There was a single bed in front of the hearth.

"He must sleep here at night," Rosemary Brown said. "For warmth. Oh, picture a prince in exile in a place like this."

There was a small table with a single bowl of fruit on it. "Fruit in
winter,
" exclaimed Mary Beth Codgell. "Someone sent it to him from Italy."

We were busying ourselves looking around when the back door opened and a woman came in, wiping her hands on her apron. "I'm the next-door neighbor," she said. "What are you girls doing here?"

She said it sternly. No nonsense.

"We were just walking by," Angela Tarberry told her, "when we saw a rat scampering back here. And we came to chase it. The wind blew the door open and the rat came in and we came in to shoo it out. We don't even know who lives here."

Oh, she was a good liar. I wished I could lie as expertly as she.

The neighbor woman was not stupid. "You all are prying about Mr. Roche's place. You all aren't the first fancypants girls to do it. And you all know full well he lives here. It's called treading on private property. But you all have done worse. It's called breaking and entering, and it's against the law."

We looked at one another in dismay.

We'd broken the law!

She looked at me. "You there, in the blue cape. Aren't you the mayor's sister?"

"No," I lied, "you're mistaken. I'm not the mayor's sister."

"You certainly are. I saw you there in his office one day. Well, I'm going to report you all to the mayor's office. Come with me. I want you to write down your names."

There was nothing said by anyone when I got home that day. Supper went on in the usual pleasant way. And afterward I was not summoned by either Louis or Teddy but left to my own terrible imaginings. The next morning, however, a courier brought a summons, a
summons,
to Teddy at breakfast.

"It's from the mayor's office," Teddy said quietly, after reading it. He had no expression on his face. He did not look at me.

Louis wore no expression, either. He just quietly sipped his coffee and delicately wiped his face with his white linen napkin.

"You've apparently gotten into some trouble, sweetie." Now Teddy looked at me mildly. "And your brother Louis is summoning you and your other friends and their parents to his office this afternoon at three thirty. It seems you all have broken some law."