Chapter Sixty-Two
SEPTEMBER 5, 1863
I see that my last entries were written in July of 1861. Has it been over two years since I have recorded my thoughts and feelings and the events of these heart-sickening, blood curdling times that have fallen on America. As a mother of a son, I cannot think of the land of my birth as two nations. The tragedies of war combine us as one.
The glaring blank space between years is no reflection of the lack of occurrences around here, simply the lack of heart and scarcity of paper and ink on which to record them for posterity. I laugh, though only in derision, when I remember Lorimer Davis’s boast that the Confederates would have the Yankees on the run by May Day of 1862, a little over a year after war was declared. Well, May first came, but there was no cause for ribbons and flowers and ring-around-the-flagpole. No one was in the mood for a festival.
My God, I should say not. By April of that year, the Confederates had suffered untold casualties at Shiloh in Tennessee, and New Orleans had fallen to the North. In July, the union fleet occupied Galveston, and in September, General Lee’s army lost a major battle to overwhelming federal forces at Antietam in Maryland. The wounded are trickling home, some minus limbs, hearing, sight. The butcher’s son had his nose shot off. Oh, the stories these young men tell returning from the battlefields, they who had departed to a send-off of bands playing and flags waving, their stomachs full of barbeque and fried chicken from picnics and parties, their makeshift uniforms un-bloodied—those who will speak of the killing grounds, that is. Most do not talk at all. Their silence is like a tomb that enshrouds them.
Newspaper accounts strike like a fist to the heart. Most of the soldiers on both sides are barely out of their adolescence with no experience of warfare, weaponry, or knowledge of why they’re fighting. Engagements with the enemy are fought Napoleonic style. The young men are lined up to march in ranks toward entrenched opponents. Those in the line still standing then engage those in the trenches in hand-to-hand combat. The bloody aftermath must be the most appalling, ungodly sight on earth, next only to the filthy army camps and the shocking conditions that breed disease of every contagious variety. One reporter wrote that if a bullet did not kill you, disease would. Walter Bates, the barber, lost his son in an epidemic of typhoid fever, and Billy Costner died from bowels destroyed by dysentery. Untreated measles, chickenpox, mumps, and whooping cough are just a few of the outbreaks that can threaten the lives of soldiers confined to camps littered with refuse, food wastes, heaps of manure and offal. Consumption of contaminated food and water are other hazards against the chance of survival.
I listen to the stories and read the newspaper articles without taking a breath, for of course I’m thinking of Thomas and the boys and the conditions under which they’re living, the dangers they face. He is in a specialized unit that makes daring strikes into Louisiana to cripple the enemy’s ability to cross the Sabine into Texas. By necessity, their camps are without shelter and most often near stagnant swamps teeming with snakes, crocodiles, and malaria-carrying mosquitoes. Our son has given us few details about the deadly nature of his missions on the few occasions he’s been home, but his father and I can guess from his hollow eyes and cheeks, his thinner frame, the state of his clothes. On his last visit, Thomas asked for my remaining ink and notepad, for he’d been assigned the task of writing the parents and spouses of the men in his unit who had died in a brush fire ignited during heavy fighting in a dry field.
“You need all my paper?” I asked him.
He replied with a grim mouth, “I need it all.”
I find it bitterly amusing that Henri, bless his Frenchman’s heart, insisted the boys be outfitted in custom-tailored uniforms, such as their specifications were in the Confederate army at the time. Those uniforms have long seen the dust of the road.
Henri supplied me with more ink and paper, and today I write with the blood of every one of us in the region running cold. Occupation of East Texas will come within weeks unless our troops—among them Thomas, Jeremy Jr., Armand, Jake, and Priscilla’s two brothers—can hold off the union forces at Sabine Pass, a waterway off the Gulf Coast leading into the Sabine River. It is there the Federals hope to push into the interior of the state with the primary intent of plundering everything they can get their hands on to fuel their war machines and confiscate cotton for northern textile mills. Terrifying news has arrived that gunboats and transport ships loaded with thousands of union soldiers have entered the pass, defended only by an undermanned fort to which the boys have been sent as reinforcements.
If my son should perish, this will be my last entry in my diary. Someone else—a DuMont or Warwick, even Priscilla if she’s still in the mood—will have to take up the chronicling of the founding families of Howbutker. There will be no following generation of Tolivers to read it.
At least it looks that way now. Each morning I rise under the weight of a mother’s worry for the happiness of her only child and for Priscilla’s, too. It was obvious from their first night together that things had not gone well in the bedroom, and after mornings of the children coming down to breakfast with drawn, disappointed faces, Silas and I suspect that Priscilla is afraid of marital intimacy. Never would Silas blame Thomas. “Look at him!” his father will storm. “Can you imagine any young woman not wanting our son. My God, every female he meets practically drops her drawers for him!”
Silas blames Priscilla’s mother—“that dried prune of a woman with as much sexuality about her as a wooden spoon!”—as responsible for putting ridiculous fears about men into her daughter’s head. But I, too, must shoulder some responsibility for Thomas’s befuddlement with Priscilla and therefore his ineptitude in understanding her. He grew up with no sisters and a mother who requires no coddling or celebrating, who does not need love expressed in words or pampering. It would never occur to him that such manifestations of devotion are what Priscilla craves.
But if Thomas loved the girl, understanding of her needs would come naturally. He would have the desire to please her. I do not point out to Silas that by now Priscilla may have realized Thomas only married her to beget an heir and that her disinclination for sex may have something to do with the girl’s wish not to be used. As much as she loves Thomas, she has her pride after all. At the very least, if the girl does suffer from an arousal disorder, knowledge of his lack of feelings for her would certainly not help.
I see them moving beyond the other’s reach, and I am sad. Distance allowed to grow too long between people can make it impossible to meet again. This I fear for Thomas and Priscilla.