Beauty From Ashes (57 page)

Because she still worried about disobeying one or another of her own mother’s instructions, one early June morning Anne forced herself to catch up on her diary. So much was happening. Too much—too much of it filled with anxiety and worry and downright fear, but she dipped the new steel-nibbed pen into her old inkwell and began to write.

Today is Monday, June 24, 1861. So much has taken place, I’ll never get it all down here, but if after this dreadful war is ever over, someone has a mind to read these pages, I must try.

I’ve lost my way in calendar dates, but back in April, when the Confederacy attacked Union-held Fort Sumter, the new President, Abraham Lincoln, called for seventy-five thousand volunteers, which call

caused Virginia, North Carolina, 771 Tennessee, and Arkansas to secede, a sure sign that the tragedy grows larger. Other families, like ours, will surely be split apart. Then, toward the end of May, the capital of the Confederacy moved from Montgomery, Alabama, to Richmond, Virginia—to me, another frightening sign because the military installations are so heavy there. And also closer to home for me, reading a short letter yesterday from my beloved John Couper froze the blood in my veins! He is being moved from Savannah to Richmond in Captain John Read’s Company of Pulaski Guards. God in heaven, multiply this mother’s heartache, this grandmother’s heartache (I do expect any day to learn of the enlistment of my sweet grandson, Fraser Demere), by thousands upon thousands and in your great wisdom send us all healing. My lovesick daughter Selina waits daily to learn that her beloved George Stubinger has also been sent from Louisiana to the far more dangerous Virginia. Selina, wanting the romantic wedding she has always dreamed of, persuaded George to wait for the war’s end (he is a Confederate and so, like my own John Couper,

feels cocksure the end will come quickly!), but I tremble for the suffering that may lie ahead for Selina because she waited for the trouble to end.

I know well that my dear Fanny, led so far astray from her family by her unpleasant, pushy Corporal Buster, might chance to read these pages, but my concern over her is based on a mother’s fear that she might allow herself to be rushed into marrying that odd boy simply because other young couples are rushing into marriage. Is it possible that rather plain daughters sense their mother’s pain because their choice of a husband is sometimes limited, as is my Fanny’s?

I must stop writing since I hurt unbearably (the hurt never stops) because Fanny’s loyalty is with the rebellious South after a lifetime lived in the presence of one of the proudest Americans of them all—my father, John Couper, her grandpapa. How Fanny’s rebellion against all he believed about the Union must torture him, even though he is somehow free of earthly heartache! Does her life, so different from her family’s life, ever bother Fanny? What I wouldn’t give to know a little of what she confides to that stubborn, brash

Matthews boy! Fanny tells me 773 nothing, which, in a way, is worse than knowing too much.

Anne closed her diary and stretched out on her bed to think. Fanny, she was sure, was out at General Phillip’s Brigade encampment on the Atlanta Road right now, probably off somewhere with the fire-eating, bumbling Buster, if he had any free time from drilling and rifle practice. Selina was also planning to marry a Confederate soldier, George Stubinger, someday. Why didn’t that upset Anne as Fanny’s dreams of marrying Buster distressed her? Selina had acted, at least, as though she agreed with Pete and her mother on the Union’s worth, but did Selina take anything seriously that didn’t wear a uniform? And did she care that much which uniform? Fanny’s serious side—wider than a mere streak—always made a far deeper impression on her mother than Selina’s cheerful frivolity did. Anne couldn’t have explained why, but it was true. And why did she somehow never truly worry about Pete, so obviously in love with a man who drank too much—so much, in fact, that people

were talking now and marveling that he could carry on a successful medical practice as he surely did.

I don’t worry so much about Pete, she thought, because she’s too strong in her own right. I do worry, however, because such a strong woman can fall into the trap of believing she can truly help even a man who drinks too much. But Pete? Pete wasn’t only strong, she was also wise. Besides, Anne had only to remind herself how much she, Pete’s mother, also liked the charming, gentlemanly Dr. Sam. A man with real humor can always be brought to his senses, her John used to say. She would go on believing that about Sam because she had to.

She sat up on the side of her bed. “There’s no room left in me for worry over Pete. My dear, dear son is encamped near enough to the enemy lines to hear them shout roll call each morning—within easy gunshot of each other. Selina, as long as George Stubinger went on adoring her as he did, would find a way to turn any vicissitude into happiness, into romance. But John Couper’s very life was in danger! And probably young Fraser Demere’s too. And

Fanny, although she never neglected the 775 smallest particle of her household duties, busied herself steadily with sewing, baking, rolling bandages—doing any menial task that came to hand so long as it helped the rebellious South and the unsuitable Buster!

“I know Fanny tells him everything,” Anne said aloud, still sitting on her comfortable bed. “I’m getting more like my papa every day. Listen to me, talking out loud to myself in an empty room!”

“You stay busier than anyone your age I know of in the whole town of Marietta, Georgia,” Buster said as he walked with Fanny away from the usual afternoon crowd of townsfolk visiting the Atlanta Road encampment. “I don’t see why you’re complaining about what you do.”

“Because sometimes it bothers me,” she retorted in the half-teasing, half-bickering way she had been forced to learn in order to make Buster more comfortable when they talked. “It does seem that with my gifts as a nurse—and even if I sound conceited, I know I’m a good nurse—it seems as though I should be doing something far more worthwhile to help our Cause. You’ve been promoted

to corporal now in General Phillip’s Brigade. Isn’t there a string you could pull, something you could do to help me find more work?”

When Buster only cocked one sandy eyebrow and grinned at her, she added, “That’s no answer, sir! You know as well as I that once the real fighting begins, nurses will be needed everywhere, so don’t act as though I’m a silly, mindless woman just because I want you to use your influence to get me appointed soon to some hospital staff!”

“Fan, you know being a corporal is only one notch above being a private. What influence do I have? I ain’t got no way to help you or anyone else in this man’s Army.”

“Don’t call me Fan and don’t say ain’t. Your mother wouldn’t like hearing you speak in such a sloppy way any more than I like it.”

“What she don’t know don’t hurt her none.”

“What she doesn’t know doesn’t hurt her,” Fanny corrected again. It had taken timid Fanny more than three years to work up enough nerve to point out mistakes in Buster’s speech, but lately she thought she had finally caught on to the

reason he plunged, off and on, 777 into plain old cracker talk. Although Fanny defended Beaulah Matthews to her own mother and sisters, she believed she probably understood why Buster was rebelling at his mother’s domineering ways, and she certainly saw why her own family looked down on the woman. But to Fanny there was something rather dear and almost pathetic about Buster’s defiant manner. He could, when he felt like it, be funny and downright sweet, but more than once she had heard Beaulah Matthews bemoan the fact that poor Buster, before he joined the Army, worked with his hands splitting wood for barrels at Mr. Denmead’s flour mill. Inevitably, when his mother criticized him, Buster crumpled, piercing Fanny’s heart to its depth with love, flashes of understanding, even pity for the only young man who had ever singled out Fanny as “his girl,” the only one who had ever asked her outright to call him “her beau.”

Was it possible, she asked herself often these days, for a woman to love a man and look down on him at the same time? This minute as they sat together on an old fallen log, she knew it was possible. For most of the time today, he had been his difficult,

flippant self, but now his head was suddenly in her lap, his face pressed against her breasts, and as she smoothed one light brown curl off his forehead, she knew that part of her really loved him.

“You are sure one smart young lady to have picked me out of such a big brigade of soldiers,” he said. “Ma was so surprised, you could have scraped her eyes off her face when she found out I’d been promoted to corporal, but not you, Fan old girl. You’re smart.”

“Maybe so,” she said, touching his curly hair again, “but I don’t like being called old girl.”

Without warning, he pulled her face down to his and kissed her full on the mouth, so hard he hurt her lips. “Maybe you like it, maybe not,” he laughed, “but you’re my good old girl, and someday when the war is over and I’m home to stay, you’ll wake up some morning to find out you’re my good old wife.”

“What?”

“Any objections?”

“No, but I’m not particularly fond of the way you proposed! No woman likes just being informed about her marriage.”

“You’re not just any woman. You’re mine and I

guarantee you’ll have a high-up job as 779 chief nurse of some kind just as soon as Confederate hospitals are opened, because good old hot Southern blood has begun to flow!”

On impulse, she clasped his head in her arms and held him against her. “No, Buster! Your jokes aren’t very funny at best and that was a bad joke. I don’t want your blood to flow. Not ever. You’re the only man who ever loved me in my whole life!”

With one big open hand, he did what she hated most—he mussed her hair so she’d never get it back in place without a looking glass. “What you just did to my hair is not funny!”

“Oh, Fan, for pity’s sake, I was only playin’.was

“My mother and father played a lot, but there wasn’t any sharp edge to it. When they teased each other, it made all of us children laugh. If I did what I want to do right now, I’d cry! You’re—I guess you’re really a good man, Buster, but don’t you know what tenderness is? Do you even know what it means? I know I’m plain and tender, but sometimes plain women make the best wives. No one has to tell me that my plainness

is one of the main reasons your mother wants you to marry me. She knows a pretty woman with a hard heart, even though she’s married, doesn’t hesitate a minute to snatch a husband away from his wife.”

Buster stared at her, his eyes filling with quick tears. “Who told you another woman snatched my father away from Ma?”

“Never mind who told me, and stop pushing me into corners so I have to soothe your ruffled feathers! Everybody in Marietta knows your father walked out on your mother when you were a little boy and left you both to fend for yourselves. I hate it that they know, because I hate it that such a dreadful thing ever happened to either of you. And I beg you to forgive me for telling you I even know about it. Buster, Buster, we’ll have a good marriage. I’ll be true to you and you’ll be true to me, and anyway, we’ve got our devotion to the Cause in common. Don’t you realize that I’ve risked having my whole family turn against me—except John Couper —because Mama and Pete and Selina are Unionists?”

When she forced Buster to look at her, his face was flushed and angry. “Now, I suppose, if

your family puts you out of the house, 781 you’ll blame Ma and me for turning you into a Confederate!”

“We don’t have sharp edges in our family. We may not agree on everything, but my family would never, never, never put me out of our home.”

“No, but you don’t see the real reason your ma’s the way she is. She thinks the North will beat us into submission down here. Tell her I said to think again! Your ma’s gonna live to see the day she hates the North!”

“Buster, what day? What day will that be?”

“The day they spill the good hot Southern blood of your precious brother, John Couper Fraser! Your ma worships the ground he walks on, but pretty boy that he is, he’s shown himself to be a true Confederate patriot, and the Union would just as soon spill his blood as mine.”

“Buster, no! Don’t say such things.”

In response, he grabbed her face in both his big hands and kissed her again, hard, without a single look at who might be coming along the cleared path just behind the fallen log. And then he laughed.

“Don’t laugh, Buster!”

“We’re all gonna be laughing down here in

no time, little Fan. And anyway, you told me once that you thought I had a good laugh. I don’t forget things like that, and you mustn’t forget that within six months or less, them Northern privy rats will be tucking tail and running all the way to Canada. I hear courage is already running out up there. Once we get a chance at ‘em, they won’t know what’s hit ‘em. We’ll still own our niggers, too, but we’re gonna be free of the Union down here—you and Ma and me an’ all our kind. We got a fine future, Fanny, and it’s even gonna be all right with your ma, because she’ll hate Northerners the way we do once they kill off your handsome brother, John Couper!”

By the end of July 1861—halfway through Anne’s sixty-fourth year—she felt far older but tried to stay busy with needlework and hours spent at the keyboard of her pianoforte, practicing difficult pieces of music she had put aside in her younger, carefree days. She also spent two or three afternoons a week with

Louisa Fletcher. Louisa and Dix still 783 lived at the Marietta Hotel in quarters adjoining those of their daughter Georgia, married to the hotel’s owner—wealthy, influential Unionist Henry Greene Cole. Anne knew that balding, gentlemanly Cole was many years Georgia’s senior and, according to Louisa, was kind and generous not only to Georgia but to the entire Fletcher family. It was impossible for Anne to imagine what she might have done without Louisa to help her keep her own balance. The two women loved to discuss books, and although it was more and more difficult for Anne to keep her mind on any subject for long, she thanked God daily for the comforting stimulation of Louisa’s company and conversation.