“You didn’t write to let us know you were coming,” she said, a little sharply. Even when she’d been young and pretty and well—more than half a lifetime ago, Lee thought with some surprise, he could call up in his mind the picture of her then as easily as if it had been day before yesterday—her temper was uncertain. Years as an invalid had done nothing to soften her.
He said, “I was summoned down to confer with the President, and took the first train south. A letter could hardly have outrun me, so here I am, my own messenger. I am glad to see you—glad to see you all. Your hands, I note, dear Mary, are not too poorly for you to knit.” He pointed to the yarn, needles, and half-finished sock that lay in her lap.
“When I can no. longer knit, you may lay me in my grave, for I’ll be utterly useless then,” she answered. She’d loved to ply the needles since she was a girl. Now she went on, “Since you are here, you may take the next bundle back with you for the men. Between our daughters and me, we’ve finished nearly four dozen pairs since we last sent them. And with them in your hands, the count should be right when they reach camp.”
“Times are hard for everyone,” Lee said. “If a railroad man is needy enough to filch a pair of socks, I dare say he requires them as badly as any of my soldiers.”
His eldest daughter said, “Mrs. Chesnut visited not long ago and said we were so busy we reminded her of an industrial school.” Mary tossed her head to show what she thought of the blue-blooded South Carolina woman. At the same age, her mother would have done the same thing.
“I don’t care what Mary Boykin Chesnut thinks of us,” Mary Custis Lee declared. “It would be altogether improper for me to lead in any entertainments of the social sort when the men you lead are all half-starved, and when you yourself live like a monk in that tent of yours.”
“President Davis’s opinion of you is rather higher than Mrs. Chesnut’s.” Lee passed on Davis’s compliment. “Tell me, then, whose approbation would you sooner have?”
“Yours,” his wife said.
He stooped to kiss her cheek. However her body troubled her, she was loyal to him to the bone, and he to her. They were part of each other. After more than thirty-two years of marriage, he had trouble imagining things being otherwise.
“Julia, turn down the second bed in Mother’s room, please,” Agnes called. The black woman started up the stairs.
Lee said, “That’s thoughtful of you, but I don’t plan on turning in quite yet. I should like to sit up awhile and listen to the doings of the city from the lot of you. If you can stand to hear me, I may even go on a bit about affairs at camp.”
“I’m going to go hide Custis Morgan, so you don’t take him back to Orange Court House with the socks,” Mildred said. “What’s your daughter’s happiness, set against the prospect of squirrel stew for your men?”
Chuckling, Lee told her, “Your pet is safe from me, precious life. He would not go far enough, divided among hungry soldiers, to be worth absconding with. If the Scriptures spoke of the miracle of loaves and squirrels, though, instead of loaves and fishes—”
Everyone laughed at that, even Agnes, briefly. Mary Custis Lee said, “Let’s go back into the parlor, then, and talk.” The wheels of her chair squeaked as Mary turned her around.
“I don’t want to talk about squirrels anymore,” Mildred said.
“Then we shan’t,” Lee promised.
The women’s needles clicked busily as they resumed their interrupted knitting. The war touched them in Richmond almost as hard as it did him with the Army of Northern Virginia. One of the stories Lee’s eldest daughter told was of the mass escape of Federal officers from Libby Prison less than two weeks before. Over a hundred men had got loose, and fewer than half of them were rounded up again.
“Our own soldiers suffer in Northern prison camps,” Lee said, “though the North has more to spare for captives than do we. The North has more to spare for everyone.” He sighed. “I have said that, thought that, wrestled with that for too long. I wish this war had never come; it wastes both sides.”
“I said as much when it began,” his wife observed.
“I know you did, nor did I disagree with you. I wanted no flag but the Star-Spangled Banner, no song besides ‘Hail Columbia.’ But once here, the thing must be fought through.” He hesitated, then continued: “It may even—may, I say—have seen a turn in our favor.”
The knitting needles stopped. His wife and daughters all looked at him. He had always done his best to sound hopeful in his letters and to act so when he saw them, but he was not one to be falsely or blindly optimistic, and they knew it. His daughter Mary asked, “From where has this good news come?”
“From Rivington, North Carolina, as a matter of fact,” Lee said. The name of the place meant no more to his family than it had to him a month before. He quickly told the story of the new repeaters and the curiously accented men who supplied them, finishing, “We cannot outnumber the Federals; if we outshoot them, though, that may serve as well.”
His daughters seemed more interested in his account of the strangers and their gear than in details of the carbines. Mildred said, “I wonder if those are the same men as the ones who not long ago rented a whole floor in the building across from Mechanic’s Hall.”
“Why do you say that, precious life?” Lee asked.
“Any time anyone pays his bills in gold these days, word gets around, and by what you said, these—what did your lieutenant call them?—these all-over-spots fellows appear to have an unmatched supply of it. And if I were selling guns to the War Department instead of making socks, I should like my offices close by theirs.”
“None of which necessarily proves a thing,” he said. Mildred’s lively features started to cloud up, but he went on, “Still, I think you may well be right. It could do with some looking into, perhaps.”
“Why, Father?” Agnes scratched her head. Her hair, now tightly done up with pins, came closest of all his children’s to matching the rich yellow that had been her mother’s. “Why?” she asked again. “From all you’ve said, these men from Rivington mean us nothing but good.”
“The old homely saying is, look not a gift horse in the mouth. If you follow that saying, you will end up with a great many old, hard-mouthed horses in your barn,” Lee answered. “When the gift is of such magnitude as that which these men are giving us, I would examine it as closely as possible to learn if it is in fact as fine as it appears and to see if it comes attached to strings.”
“Even if it does, you will have to accept it, Father, won’t you?” Mary asked.
“You always did see clearly, my dear,” he said. “Yes, I think we must, if our Southern Confederacy is to survive, which God grant.”
“Amen,” Agnes said softly.
The slave woman brought in a tray with cups and a steaming pot. The spicy scent of sassafras tea filled the parlor. “Thank you, Julia,” Lee said as she poured for him. The tea made him think of the “instant coffee” Andries Rhoodie had brought up to the headquarters near Orange Court House.
“Coffee,” his wife said longingly when he spoke of it. “We’ve been some time without it here.”
“Surely it would come to Richmond more readily than to a small town like Rivington, North Carolina, especially if, as you say, Father, it was made in the United States,” Mary said.
“That’s true, and I should have thought of it for myself,” Lee said. “Still, with gold, a great many things become possible. Rivington is on the railroad up from Wilmington; maybe a blockade runner brought it in there, rather than something more truly useful to our cause. Maybe.” He found himself yawning.