him it is his punishment for so free a killing that he should tangle his foot in the wagon spokes like he did, and be forced to sit around with the old ladies all through spring. Ha! I’ll bet that is the worst of it for him, even more than the pain.
The yellow thorny rose your mother taught me is nearly finished. Thank her for sending extra thread with me, even though I did not think I would need it. Some days the road to town has been too high in water to pass, and even when it is not, the store is always out of one color or another.
I had started sewing the rose in the wagon, coming here, on a piece of floursack I brought. But when Mrs. Davis saw it she said black, black, it must be black. She gave me a nice piece of velvet so I started over, to please her. It does set off the yellow and green well. I haven’t decided if I’ll keep it to frame, or make it a pillow, or just edge the bias and wear it for a shawl.
Can you see me in a black shawl, out haunting the spotted lilies, up to my shins in the wet sand? It would chill the blood of any worthwhile spirit, my face as sad as it has been.
Let me hear from you. Cheer me.
Yours,
Sarah
June 7, 1862
Louisa:
Goodness, I won’t bite you.
I hope the deathly tone of my last letter is not the reason I have not heard from you. Things are not so bad, really. It is just that the rain and the gray days seem to hold time still.
And it is time that I am counting on most, now, because there are so many beautiful things just the other side of this place and this year. I am like a child outside a closet, near Christmas, knowing what is in it and knowing it is just a matter of waiting for enough days to pass. I am waiting for the baby and waiting for the fighting to be finished and for Jerem to come home. You know me enough to believe how much I love him, and what I would give for him. But saying it in talk is not nearly as hard as passing these days here. It is difficult to know, from there, just how it is here. Forgive me from going on about it.
Oh, did I say something about Christmas? It doesn’t seem as if it could ever come, as hot as the weather has been these last few weeks. But at least the sun has been out more, and all the dampness has almost dried away.
There is a bird nest here, in the eave of my room! Can you imagine? A little wren has tucked straw and leaves into the crack where two logs meet, and she spends all day flying in and out, in and out, buzzing the air like a hummingbird, bringing bits of soft rag in her mouth.
She scared me near to death, the first day I saw her. I had just bathed and was getting out of the tub—it gets harder to do every day; you should see how I’m growing—slick wet and with soap in my eyes, and all of a sudden whirrrr, something flapping right past my ear.
We get along fine now, though. Mrs. Davis would faint if she saw me teetering on a chair, trying to peer down into the nest while the mother is gone out to get food. There are four eggs, pale blue with little flecks of brown.
Last night we had a strange entertainment that helped pass the time quite a bit. Mrs. Davis’s son (your mother didn’t tell me about him) rode in and surprised her, just after dark.
He is a little man, crippled some way, and he told me that he travels with some kind of show. He wears a bright scarf of polka dots and keeps a feather in his hatband, as if to draw your eyes away from his poor face. For dessert, he brought out of his coat a sack of plums that still had dew on them.
Afterward he danced for us and did scenes from a play, out in the yard with all our lamps lit and set in a row, like a circus or a real theater.
The one I like best of all he did was a pantomime of a clown going to call on a girl he loves but who doesn’t love him. He stands at her make-believe door and tries to talk so beautifully that she will love him, but she shuts the door by inches and all his pretty long-stemmed flowers fall down one by one onto the ground. I almost cried at the end of it, when he shuffled off into the dark with the flowers dropping behind him. He is so good. It is a shame that he is so deformed.
It was late when he left. He said he had to do a show somewhere for the soldiers, and that he would probably be riding all night and the next day too. Mrs. Davis must really be fond of him, because she stood and squeezed him and cried for the longest. (He barely comes above her shoulder.) I had never seen her feel that way about anybody before. Most of the time she acts like she is afraid of something she can’t name. Not just the war, either, but a bigger thing. It was good to see her feel that way about her son. She worries me, sometimes. But she tries to be good to me, and she is.
By the way, don’t hate to tell anyone where I am. Your mother was acting so secretive before I left, like we were all hurrying to hide some great mistake. I felt that way too, at first, but I see now there is no need to. Whatever we did was because we loved each other, and if that beginning was wrong, then it’s all over now except the beautiful things that will come from it.
I hardly had a chance to tell any of my friends about the wedding. It went so quickly, him having to leave and all. Please tell them for me, anyone you see. Even if your mother says not to. She doesn’t have to know. Please don’t let her see this.
Speaking of beautiful things, as I was a minute ago:
What do you hear from Jerem?
Love,
Sarah
July 25, 1862
Louisa:
The last thing Jerem said before leaving me was that he would write to me first through you, since we did not know yet just where I would be staying. Has he not written?
I know he has a lot to do, and that the woods during a war is not the best or safest place to write from; still I would think that in all these weeks a word would have got through. Just a jotting, if nothing else, to know he is safe.
The farm is busy for all of you just now, I know too, and doubly so with most of the workers gone off, and that it leaves you hard pressed for time to spend writing. It is only that here, during a gray lonesome day, my mind starts spinning strange stories, knitted from my fears, and sometimes they grow into awful things. Those times, I am afraid that something is wrong with Jerem, that he has been sick and nearly dead for days, and that no one anywhere knows it yet. One of my dreams is of him in a tent, suffering, and us here not knowing, going along like every day, tending to the milking and washing and such.
I woke up a few nights ago with those two pictures in my mind so strongly, of me here and him there, wherever, and I found that I had been sweating until I was chilled all through. Before I realized, I had screamed out like a little girl over nightmares. Surely it would have killed Mrs. Davis from fright, if her hearing was such that she could have known. It was one time I was glad she is so old. I don’t think it even woke her.
But it is those fearsome times that my mind runs away with itself, and I imagine that he is hurt and word has come to you of it and that you or your mother thinks it best I should not know. I pray you would not do that. Have you forgotten? I have his name. It is the same as yours. We are all in this.
I know it is hard for you to understand these fears I have. You have had parents all your life, and good ones. I would like to feel—I have felt—that I have been as close to them as I would to my own, if they had lived. That is why it hurts me to go this long without hearing. Is something wrong there? I know there has been hardness between us all, at times, but I thought we had forgotten it. I have.
Hardly a soul passes lately. Mrs. Davis stops who she can and pellets them with all the questions she has stored up during the long days. What of the fighting? What of the crops? What of the weather? And so on. More and more she hears the same, from whoever she asks: Oh, not much change, they say, taking everything into one answer. Oh, about the same.
I worry afterward about the way their eyes looked. I wish we had asked more. We are pretty much cut off here.
Last evening while I was lying down, Mrs. Davis brought a tiny gold watch on a chain and had me uncover my belly. She