Beauty From Ashes (59 page)

Softly, Louisa said, “There’s more to your brother’s letter, Anne. Would you like me to read it to you?”

“Please.”

“I believe you read all of page one. Here is what he says next.”

“I seem to have lost my ability to think clearly. You know I allow a definite amount of time daily for making plans for the immediate future, but neither Caroline nor I can think ahead even for one day. We will have our son’s body brought back to S. Simons for burial in the family plot at Christ Church, and if it appears that this area of the coast will be attacked, I do plan to move us to Troupville in southwestern Georgia for a measure of safety. The last time I was on St. Simons, there were seven or eight guns on the battery by Mr. Gould’s lighthouse tower, two

at the nearby Couper’s Point battery, and five on neighboring Jekyll Island. It is estimated that there are about a thousand Confederate men on St. Simons and five hundred on Jekyll.

Our brother reports in a letter to me that he plans to move his family here to Hopeton soon, since there is now danger at your old home, Hamilton. Anne, I’m sure you’ll want to know the end of William Audley’s letter. He sends love and the promise of all their prayers for your safety there.”

“Oh, Anne,” Louisa said, “I can’t think of a thing to say to you, but I’m so relieved you’re here with me to learn this news. At least you can sense how much I care.”

Louisa Fletcher now spent most of her time in the cottage Henry Greene Cole had provided for his family after his new manager took over at the Marietta Hotel. With Georgia and her two-year-old child in the house,

too, Anne had very little time alone with 799 Louisa. She walked there to spend a few minutes with her friend only when her agitated mood warranted it.

In her diary on Tuesday morning, April 15, 1862, Anne tried valiantly to substitute writing for a longed-for visit with Louisa. A letter from dear old Miss Eliza Mackay, which Pete had brought yesterday, filled her turbulent thoughts and heightened her unyielding anxiety, because each day might bring tragic news about either John Couper or her grandson, Fraser Demere, or—almost equally dreaded—some word of death or injury to Fanny’s stubborn but oddly attentive Buster Matthews or Selina’s intended, Captain George Stubinger. All were fighting in Virginia. How she would endure Selina’s or Fanny’s grief, should George or Buster be lost, Anne had no idea.

The news in Miss Eliza Mackay’s letter, in the wavering handwriting of an ill old woman, was devastating. The letter was brief, because Miss Eliza was plainly not well, but each line stung like a whip’s lash. “I am not well enough for

length,” Miss Eliza wrote, “but my heart cries out for an understanding friend like you, Anne. Fort Pulaski, taken over some time ago by the Georgia Guards, has been bombarded with deadly new rifled cannon by the Union and recaptured. In the fighting, which deafened us all, two were killed. One was the sweet, cherished, only son of my best friend, Mark Browning. The boy was named Jonathan, and I am sending this posthaste to ask that you pray for Mark and for his wife, Caroline, both numb with grief and loss. Jonathan was married to a tender, sweet Cherokee girl named Mary, and they had a precious small son, Ben. I can write no more now except to beg your deeper understanding, since you also know the heartache of a war-torn, broken family. You see, Jonathan, like your son, John Couper, fought for the Confederate Cause, in which he believed wholly. So does his mother, Caroline, but his father, my longtime friend Mark, is a Unionist as are you and I.”

Anne’s own uneven, nervous scrawl in her diary blurred as her eyes filled with tears when she tried to pray for Mark Browning, for his wife, Caroline. For Mary, the little Indian girl

she’d come to love during visits 801 to Miss Eliza Mackay. No words formed, even in her heart, even though praying was less and less a trial since her own spirit had become almost helpless, or so it seemed, each time she tried to ask God to protect John Couper and her beloved grandson, Fraser Demere.

“I’m determined,” Anne wrote in finishing the diary entry for April 15, “not to fill these pages with gloom, and the only way I know not to do that these shadowy days is to hope for the best and try for a real visit with Louisa Fletcher. I know she often takes charge of Georgia’s little girl, Mary Warren, so maybe I’ll find her alone watching the child today. Two-year-olds don’t sleep nearly often enough, but maybe I’ll be lucky. I can hope to sit with Louisa while the pretty little girl takes her nap. It was so good back in the days when Louisa and I could always find time just to be together in any of a number of rooms at the Marietta Hotel. Alas, as with so much else of a happy, daily nature, those times are gone, too, and heaven knows how long it will take methodical Dix Fletcher to finish building their new home at Woodlawn, the small farm they

own in the country, since he insists on doing the work himself. Actually, I have a secret hope that once the house at Woodlawn is completed, Louisa, who much prefers to be in the city, can visit with me for a week or more at a time right here in my own treasured place.”

Having confided this hope to herself, Anne thought her heart felt a bit lighter. In spite of the sorrow shared by Miss Eliza Mackay over the useless death of Mark Browning’s fine son, Jonathan, there was a slight spring in Anne’s step as she headed toward the Cole cottage on Washington, within walking distance of her Marietta house.

“Anne, my dear,” Louisa said as she welcomed her at the Coles’ cottage door. “I can’t believe our good fortune! Mary Warren has been bathed, played with by her grandmother, fed, and tucked in bed to sleep—dare I hope—through a good long visit with you. I’ve so much to tell!”

“This is almost too good to be true,” Anne said, laying aside her hat and gloves. “How I needed to be with you today!” Seated in a rocker across from the one she knew was Louisa’s

favorite, Anne plunged into the 803 sorrowful news of Jonathan Browning’s death during the Northern taking of Fort Pulaski. Then, after just the right amount of sensitive commiseration, Louisa began her story of which, wonder of wonders, Anne had heard nothing.

“I predict what I’m about to tell you will become one of the most unusual episodes of the whole war. I wish I knew how it will all end. I don’t—no one does. The last I heard, the chase is still going on.”

On the edge of her chair, Anne asked, “What chase, Louisa? You’re so excited over whatever it is that’s happened, you haven’t even told me what it’s all about.”

“Twenty or so Northern soldiers, a group headed by a Secret Service man named James Andrews, appear to have actually stolen the South’s splendid locomotive called The General!”

Anne gasped. “Stolen a—locomotive, Louisa?”

“They did it right here in Marietta, too! At least, it seems they boarded the train here on the morning of April 12, three days ago, and pretending not even to know each other, rode as

ordinary passengers as far north as Big Shanty, where—now listen carefully, Anne—they uncoupled The General, its tender and two boxcars, while the Confederate train crew was off the train having breakfast. I won’t know any more details until my son-in-law comes home for his dinner in a little while, but I’m sure—I feel it in my bones—that those brave Yankee men were able to shake their pursurers. You see, Anne, the train’s conductor, a Mr. Fuller, and several other Rebels gave chase —would you believe on foot and in a railroad handcar?” Louisa laughed. “They’ll never succeed in stopping Northern men who have that kind of audacity!”

“Louisa, for goodness’ sake, tell me more about this amazing feat.”

“Well, as I said, after boarding the train here, the Unionists actually confiscated the locomotive and the cars at Big Shanty and were smart enough, Henry Greene Cole declared with his wise chuckle, to head north from there toward Chattanooga, Tennessee, the better to cut off Confederate supplies. And since there’s no telegraph office at Big Shanty, which is

some seven miles north of Marietta, 805 there was no way for word to travel with news of such a daring feat.” The smile left Louisa’s face. “Forgive me, please! I know the tragic news in Miss Eliza Mackay’s letter upset you, Anne, and that you’re in no mood to laugh at the futility of this wild Southern pursuit of a huge locomotive. But I know in my heart that you’re as strong in your belief in the Union as Dix and Henry Cole and I. It is good news for our side that these men performed such a feat, and I simply had to tell you about it.”

“Don’t worry that you told me, Louisa. It is indeed a marvelous story, and I’ll be eager to know how it all comes out. It’s just that my own contradictory thoughts go on plaguing me. Those Northern raiders, brave as they are, were making every effort to cut off supplies, some of which my son might have needed. May need now up in Virginia. My dear grandson, Fraser Demere, too. I know they have to cut off supplies to the Confederates, but as much as I believe in restoring the Union, my son and grandson are in the Rebel Army! You’ll undoubtedly have to put up with far more chaos in me in

the future, Louisa. Can you bear it? My heart fights my head. My head fights my heart. I keep myself torn in two.”

Anne was so distraught with worry over John Couper and Fraser that she finally asked Louisa to stop trying to keep her current on the dragged-out attempts to capture and punish the men led by the daring Andrews. His flamboyant plan to steal a train had failed near Ringgold, Georgia, just south of Chattanooga, when The General ran out of wood and stopped, forcing the Yankee raiders to flee into the nearby woods. Although Anne had no curiosity about the details, Louisa added that some had escaped, but most of the twenty-two raiders were captured within weeks and taken to prison in Chattanooga.

While the formerly quiet town of Marietta was chaotic with all manner of war work and with evidently little or nothing on anyone’s mind but the shock and surprise of the daring theft of The General, Anne received one of the hardest blows of all. For years, beneath any turmoil or trouble in her life had run the sure knowledge that her treasured longtime friend Miss Eliza Mackay was in Savannah—

always ready and waiting with welcoming love 807 and sound, solid advice. Then, early in July, a letter came from Anne’s sister-in-law Frances Anne Wylly Fraser, which left her painfully bereft. It was good to hear from Frances Anne because the two friends always allowed too much time to pass between letters. But Anne found it hard to believe the vast emptiness already settling inside her when she learned that Miss Eliza Mackay had died June 13.

“Now that I’m living in Savannah,” Frances Anne had written, “I of course attended the services for our beloved friend Miss Eliza. Anne, we must both pray for everyone —and the number is large—who will miss her touch on their lives no matter how seldom they saw her. Just last week as I was sitting by her bed in the Mackay house on East Broughton Street, she told me how often she prayed for everyone who had been driven from their homes all along the southern coast. Miss Eliza will go on praying for us all. We can be sure of that, and it is very sad, Anne, that because of the Yankee forays up and down the coast between St. Simons Island and Savannah, almost everyone has been driven out.”

A week or so into the month of September 1862, John Couper, now eager and waiting with his regiment for battle near Sharpsburg, Maryland, very near the Virginia border, surprised them all at his mother’s house in Marietta by predicting in a letter that the Confederacy would never risk the enemy’s freeing the intrepid Andrews and his fellow raiders at Chattanooga. He was right, because soon Henry Greene Cole, who had become friends with Anne mainly because he was impressed that she, a Southerner, had the courage to believe in the Union, informed her that the Union soldiers, by then known as the Andrews Raiders, were being held in quarters out of reach of their own people in Atlanta. Indeed, it was Mr. Cole who found out that the first Yankee raider to be hanged in Atlanta was James Andrews himself, the man Cole called “the bravest of us all, who had given his life in God’s own Cause on June 7.”

Fanny, packing to join the staff of a Confederate hospital opening at Ringgold, gave her mother an almost impudent look when she heard what Mr. Cole had said. “Excuse

me, Mama, it isn’t that I’m not 809 sorry when even a Northerner is hanged, but I can’t help being amused that every Unionist, including the ones in my own family, are so sure God is on the Union side.”

When Pete told Dr. Sam how her usually quiet sister Fanny had sassed their mother, she shouted, “I flared, Sam! I more than flared. Mother has enough worrying her. Fanny made me wish I dared shake the dickens out of her right then and there!”

Cicadas, Paul Demere thought irrelevantly, didn’t sing so steadily as a rule until after sundown. It wasn’t quite sundown now, but they were singing—rasping steadily— on this late September evening, almost making harmony behind the sturdy clump of his galloping horse. Paul, now forty-two, was heading as fast as he could go along the sand and clay road, through a stand of tall pines and low, scattered palmettos, toward his farm just outside the little town of Jasper, Florida. He was obeying the

last request he’d had from his only son by Annie Fraser the day in 1861 the boy boarded a train for Jacksonville, bound for Richmond. The day his cheerful, sensitive son, Fraser, left for war at not quite twenty, his cheeks rosy with health, his young, brave heart high with confidence that his revered South would “win this thing in just a matter of weeks.” And then, Fraser had made his urgent request, the request Paul was doing his best to fulfill now. “One thing you must promise me, Papa,” Fraser had urged. “I’m going to war with great faith in the rightness of our side. We will win because it is God’s Cause. God’s noble Cause. But it is war, and death does strike. Should you receive notice of my death, promise me on your honor not to read the notification until you’re with Miss Jessie. I don’t want the burden of thinking you might read it alone.”

Paul had promised, and in his shirt pocket he carried an official-looking letter from a Major Brown of the Confederate Army in Richmond, which he was certain held tragic news.