Alias Dragonfly (2 page)

Here, then, is the story of the lonely kid I was; roaming in the forest at all hours of the night—and after an accident, how I became a homebound misfit with a fired-up brain that rattled and sped like a runaway engine, and why I am, I think, becoming a woman.

I write in secret, of course.

May 1861

Portsmouth, New Hampshire

The day Papa and I went to Washington City, I felt like a cook pot that was about to boil over: A bone-cracking heat was rising in me. Angry, I was. Scared.

“You’ve enlisted for three years, Papa? No!”

He was all I had, and I loved him mightily.

“I thought it was only going to be for three months?”
And how dare you wait until the day we leave to tell me. Did you think I’d run away again? Well I just might.

“Mr. Lincoln has called us up for much longer, Maddie. I’m in until we win this war,” he said, closing the door of the snug little cabin he’d crafted with his own hands for Mama and me. It was perched high and isolated, up a rutted, rock-strewn path that ended on the banks of the twisty, whirling Piscataqua River.

My father’s clear-cut, thin face, even thinner since Mama died, looked really scary-gaunt. He tried to stroke my hair, but his fingers caught in my mess of pop-out frizzy curls as I turned away. I didn’t labor to brush my hair that often. I didn’t give a tinker’s damn how I looked. Especially since Mama had died six months and three days before. I was dressed in a black, bombazine, mourning gown that was left in a paper wrapper at our door
by two townswomen who scurried away when I appeared at the window.
The ‘village peculiar,’ I was to them. Odd as a five-legged goose.

A ruffle of cold wind sweeping up from the river made me shiver. I put on my traveling cape with the tattered blue silk lining. I pulled the oversized hood over my head, just to my eyes, making me look like a gypsy-spirit.

As I turned away from the cabin, a shimmer of sunlight on the front window made me think I saw a bright-cheeked, glowing face, a tumble of red hair, and the greenest of green eyes; the way Mama was before the wasting sickness took her. But when a feathery cloud drifted over the sun, she was gone. Gone to shadow.

Goodbye Mama.

Papa hefted our travel trunk on his back and handed me his haversack. “Don’t look back,” he said, rubbing his eyes.

I ran ahead of him down the rocky walk to the end of the road to wait for the wagons that would carry my father’s regiment to the train depot: the grocers, doctors, fishermen like my dad, the plowmen, and their sons—not much older than I was.

I’m just as strong as any of them. Why in Hades do I have to stay in Washington City with an aunt I’ve never met?

“I’m keeping with you, Papa. I’ll fight too.”

“You’ll do nothing of the kind. It’s a man’s war, Maddie.”

“Bosh! I’m tall as a man already,” I said, straightening my sharp-edged, bony knees and jamming a black derby hat down on my head. Fact is, over that year I’d grown so much I figured if I kept going, my head would shoot straight through the roof of the cabin and I’d be fit for a zoo.

My father’s uniform, a red fox tail jacket and blue trousers looked new and stiff. He looked stiff too. At that moment, I truly hated everything about the Second New Hampshire Regiment right down to the buttons on my father’s coat that glittered like fool’s gold.

“Well, Private Summoner Bradford,” I said, with a whole lot of sass, “You think you can shoot some Rebels in your fine, starched uniform? You look like a statue.”

My father stood straight as a larch tree and tried to look down at me, even though we were nearly eye-to-eye.

“Madeline Eve Bradford, do not ever speak to me that way again. Mind me, and mind my sister, do you understand?”

No. I don’t understand.

“I’m all tangled up, Papa.”
Like knotted seaweed battered by a thousand ocean waves.
I turned away and picked up a smooth river rock. I held its coolness to my burning cheek.

“Is it the leaving? We’ll come back here, someday, I promise.”

“No! I don’t care if we ever do, and neither do you, Papa, and that is the truth, isn’t it?”

“Just to visit their graves, now and again, that’s all.” He said softly. “Now and again.”

“I don’t need to look at a patch of rocky ground with headstones jutting up to think of Mama and Nancy.”

Hurt, like a shadow crossed my father’s face. They’d lost a daughter when she was about three and I was two. Just before my accident I’d found a death record in Mama’s trunk with a name on it I didn’t recognize.

“Who was Nancy?” I asked. “What did she look like?”

And because I was a little kid and Mama looked like she was about to wash away in a flood of tears, like they’d been stored in a full-up rain barrel, I figured her upset was my fault.

“Like you,” she finally said. “She looked just like you. Beautiful, she was.”

Beautiful? I’m plain, like an unpainted fence.

“Papa? What happened to Nancy?” He bit down on his knuckles and closed his eyes.

“She came out right at first, then when she was around two she stopped crying and her body froze up. Doctors couldn’t do anything. When she was three, she died.”

And that’s why after the accident you wouldn’t let me out of your sight? Or was it always that way?

“Did she play with me? With anyone?”

“At first.”

Maybe I remembered her. Eyes like starbursts, rosy skin, a freckle or two.

But she was a big fat secret, this sister of mine. How could they have kept her from me? They wouldn’t, I decided. I made up a life for her, as if she’d not died at all. It was though I’d woven her on Mama’s loom, spun and shaped her into a reckless, free-roaming, saucy girl.

Nancy, Nancy, tickling Nancy, you’d face down she-wolves in the forest, sashay around the village in a red frock with all the boys following you, asking you to kiss them. Sometimes you would.

Puffs of imaginings like pollen clusters swirled in my head as Papa and I waited for the wagons.

It seemed like they were taking forever to come. The road was empty. A strong wind from the river, marsh-musky and chilled, rattled through the birches.

“Where in
Hades
are the wagons, Papa?”

“Mind your mouth, Madeline.”

“I’ll cook for you in camp, clean your rifle, shine your boots, anything!”

“No! That would be too dangerous. You are all I have, do you understand?”

“What if something happens to you?” I was shouting. “I won’t be there. You need me!”

“Enough. You will stay with my sister, in her boardinghouse. There’s an end on it.”

My father’s mouth was set tight like a freshly caught clam. There was no sense arguing with him anymore.

“Fine. Great. Right.” I kicked at a rock until my toe was throbbing, sending flashes of pain straight to my heart.

Finally, out of a spray of pebbles and dust came the wagons pulled by lumbering dray horses; teeming with new soldiers bright as penny whistles, readying for Mr. Lincoln’s War. They were waving flags, whistling and cheering. Hands, white gloved, ready hands; eager hands pulled us up onto a flat board seat. I clutched Papa’s haversack to my chest, the way I wanted to clutch him, hard, never letting go. The wagon pitched and rolled like it was borne by an ocean wave carrying us away, and nothing could stop it until we washed up, a pile of bleached bones on the shore.

We got to the Portsmouth train depot to ride the iron monster, the train that would take us through Boston and Baltimore to Washington City. There were masses of people spreading like a cloud of mosquitoes along the tracks. I ducked down just as a man hurled a flaming torch over my head. It landed a bull’s eye square in the middle of a ragged Confederate flag. The flag caught fire, sending red sparks into a crowd of whooping and yelling soldiers, bawling women and scared little kids clinging to their mama’s skirts.

“Dear God,” my father said, putting his arm tightly around me. It didn’t happen often. It felt good. I leaned against him.

“Don’t leave go of me, Maddie.”

I won’t
,
not ever. Not if I can help it.

“Hooo-ee, kill all those Rebels!” Someone screeched. Another torch thudded into a hay bale making the whole thing go up in flames.

“Oh my darling will I ever see you again?” A woman cried, clinging to a soldier.

“Don’t you die now, Daddy,” a tiny girl sobbed. Strands of her hair were caught up in the buttons of her father’s coat as he hoisted her in the air.

My head was buzzing, and pictures of all I was seeing were clicking past my eyes.

It was my first ever ride on a train—actually, it was my first real trip to anywhere. Once I saw the locomotive engines on rickety tracks, pulling a row of carriages into Portsmouth village, and many times I’d heard train whistles screaming high over the Piscataqua River back in New Hampshire, but I had never boarded one.

My father steered me along. The train car heaved and shuddered as people piled in.

We bumped and wove along through the narrow aisles into high-backed worn, plush seats. As the engine rumbled, spitting ashes and coal smoke through the windows, I started shaking.

“Are you all right, Maddie?”

He really wanted to know if I was having one of the spells I’d had for a few years after I fell out of a tree when I was six years old. The fall, smack down on a river rock, left me with a mark in the shape of a half-moon on my forehead.

What were you doing, Maddie, up there so high in the tree?
Maybe
I was trying to fly away, Papa, away from Mama’s fevered face, her groans at night that froze me in my bed. And the way you stopped smiling, and scolded me for no good reason.

Bosh! That wasn’t it. I didn’t tell him the truth, and I never will. Fact is, I thought I heard Nancy calling to me that night, taunting me, telling me to crawl out on that tree limb, high above the forest floor
.

After my fall, I healed up okay, but the spells I had were the kind that sent me to my knees when faraway sounds were as loud as thunder and made a ruckus in my brain. Because they were so worried about me, Mama and Papa never left me alone, and I couldn’t go to Mrs. Margery Middleton’s Day School like the rest of the village kids. So I was taught at home. Homebound.
A barnacle-girl stuck fast to a rock, waves crashing over her with no way to break free.

Don’t get me wrong. I loved learning. We devoured books, savored them like maple-sugared porridge, clustered around our hearth reading to each other night after night. Papa’s calloused hands carefully turning the pages of Mr. Shakespeare’s sonnets. Mama reciting them by heart, looking moon-eyed at Papa, and cuddling me.

I teared up, remembering, as the train rattled along.

“I’m okay, I guess.”

I kept breathing deeply. The spells had pretty much stopped when I was about eleven. But often I felt my fired-up brain working way too hard. It was like colors, and shapes and images swarmed together. And whether I wanted to or not, by day’s end I remembered the smallest details of nearly every hour that had passed. It was overwhelming.

As I got older, I’d learned a few tricks to calm myself down. Instead of crouching low and covering my ears when things were spinning and whirling around me, I’d count . . . everything: The dots on the top of a strawberry, dust motes, fallen leaves; you get the idea. Then I’d file away all I’d seen and heard for whenever I wanted to recall it. And I sure tried like the dickens to act normal.

Just so you see what I mean, here is what I saw on the train. There were three-hundred and seventy-two brass buttons on the soldiers’ jackets as they pushed past us to their seats. Each soldier had a different smile or glower, or even teary eyes. Five had moustaches that twirled up like crescent moons; six had the kind that curved down the sides of their mouths. Ten had whiskers that crisscrossed their chins.