Again, no one objected.
Nate Caudell hurried into the Nashville general store. Raeford Liles looked up at the tinkle of the doorbell. “Oh, mornin’, Nate. What can I do for you today?”
“You can sell me a hat, by God.” Caudell ran his hands through his hair and beard. Already wet, they came away wetter. Rain drummed on the roof, the door, the windows. “I lost my last one up in the Wilderness and I’ve been without ever since.”
“What d’you have in mind?” Liles pointed to a row of hats on hooks up near the ceiling. “A straw, maybe? Or a silk stovepipe, to get duded up in?”
“No thanks to both of those, Mr. Liles. All I want is a plain black felt, same as the one I lost. Say that one here, if it fits me, and you don’t want half my next year’s pay for it.”
They haggled amiably for a while. Caudell ended up buying the hat for thirteen dollars in banknotes. Confederate paper had gone up now that the South was no longer at war. He knew he could have had the hat for a silver dollar and a little change, but like most people he spent specie only when he had to.
He jammed the hat down low on his head, braced himself to brave the rain again. “Don’t go yet,” Liles said. “Almost forgot—I got a couple of letters for you here.” He reached under the counter, handed Caudell two envelopes. Then he cocked his head and grinned. “This here Mollie Bean up in Rivington, you courtin’ her? Pretty gal, I bet.”
“She’s a friend, Mr. Liles. How many times do I have to tell you?” Caudell’s cheeks heated. His flush must have been visible even in the dim store, for Raeford Liles laughed at him. That only made him blush harder. To give himself a moment in which to recover, he looked at the other envelope.
It was from Henry Pleasants, down in Wilmington. Caudell grinned when he saw the engineer’s name. Pleasants had indeed been snapped up by the Wilmington and Weldon Railroad, at a salary a good many times the one Caudell made for teaching school. He opened the letter, quickly read through it. Sure enough, everything was still going well for Henry: “I expect to escape my rented room here before long, and buy myself a proper house.” Caudell could not evade a pang of jealousy at that. He was living in a rented room on Joyner Street, and had no prospect of escaping it.
Pleasants went on: “I do wonder that you Carolinians ever built a railroad at all, or kept it running once built, with your dearth of men trained not only in the mechanic arts but also in any sort of skilled labor. I have written to several miners in Pennsylvania, some of whom I knew before the war, others who served in my regiment, urging them to come hither. I hope they take me up on this soon, while travel arrangements between U.S.A. and C.S.A. remain pleasantly informal.”
Caudell hoped so, too. As Pleasants said, the South needed every sort of skilled workman. The engineer’s last phrase brought him up short. Proud as he was of belonging to an independent nation, he kept encountering implications of that independence which hadn’t occurred to him. One of these days, and probably one day soon, he would need a passport if he wanted to visit Pennsylvania. The last time he’d gone into that state, his only passport had been a rifle.
He folded Pleasants’s letter, returned it to its envelope, and put that envelope and the one with Mollie Bean’s letter in a trouser pocket. Raeford Liles chuckled knowingly. “You ain’t gonna read that there one where anybody else’s eyes might light on it, is you? Must be from your sweetheart, I says.”
“Oh, shut up, Mr. Liles,” Caudell said, which only made the storekeeper laugh harder. Giving up, Caudell went out onto muddy Washington Street. He ran a block to Collins Street, almost fell as he turned right, ran two more blocks and turned left onto Virginia, then right onto Joyner. The widow Bissett’s house was the third one on the left.
Barbara Bissett’s husband, Jackson, had died in camp the winter before. Now she rented out a room to bring in some money. Her brother and his family shared the house with her and her boarder, so everything was perfectly proper and above reproach, but Caudell would have had no interest in her even had the two of them been alone there together. She was large and plump and inclined to burst into crying fits for any reason or none. He would have sympathized if he thought she was mourning her lost Jackson; but she’d been like that before the war, too.
Once inside his own upstairs room, he took both letters from his pocket. The rainwater had blurred Henry Pleasants’s fine round script on the envelope, but the paper inside remained dry. And Pleasants’s letter had shielded Mollie’s from the wet. Her hand was anything but fine and round, but this was the fifth or sixth letter she’d sent, and with each her writing grew more legible.
He opened the envelope and drew out the single sheet of the letter; Pleasants had gone on for three pages. “Dear Nate,” he read, “I hope you is wel sinse I last rote. Got this hear paper at the Notahilton, wich sels like it was a ginral stor. But Rivington is a cawshun al ways, as you seen for your ownself. I bin out to Benny Langs hous wich is one of the ones out in the woods like we saw when you was there. He dident reckonize me on a count of I was warin a dres in sted of my old youniform.”
Caudell clicked his tongue between his teeth and made a sour face. Mollie didn’t say why she’d gone out to Benny Lang’s place, but he could paint his own mental pictures. He didn’t care for them. Scowling still, he read on:
“The hous is poorly”—after a moment, he realized Mollie meant purely—”remarkabul. Benny Lang he dont us lanterns or even gas lights. He has a thing ware you pres a nob on the side of the wal and a light corns on up top. I ast him how do you do that and he laffs and tels me eleksity or som thing like that wat ever it may be. Wat ever it may be it is the best light for night time you cood think of ever in yor born dayes. Its more remarkabul than the AK47 if you ask me.”
Caudell whistled softly. After those repeaters, desiccated meals, and gold paid, dollar for dollar, for Confederate paper, he supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised by anything that came from Rivington, but a fine light that went on here if you pushed a knob there? He wondered how electricity—if that was what Mollie was trying to write—could do that; so far as he knew, it had no use past the telegraph.
Her letter continued: “May be on a count of this light making night into day wich sounds like Good Book tauk and giving him time to read Benny Lang he has hole cases ful of books. May be one of them tauks about eleksity. If I get the chans I wil try to find out on a count of it sounds like a thing worth noing. Yor true frend al ways, M. Bean, 47NC.”
A reliable light by which to read at night…The notion roused pure, sea-green envy in Caudell. Even on a gloomy, rainy day like today, reading in front of a window was Jess than comfortable. Reading at night, with one’s head jammed down close to both book and a dim, flickering, smoky candle, brought on eyestrain and headaches in short order. Though he had scant use for Abraham Lincoln, the stories of how the U.S. President studied law by firelight raised nothing but admiration in him. To sit down with a law book in front of a fire night after night after night, after a hard day’s work each day, took special dedication—and perhaps special eyes as well. He wondered how Lincoln could see at all these days.
He also wondered whether Lincoln could possibly be reelected after leading the United States into a losing war. With both Democrats and Republicans split, the North was growing more parties than it knew what to do with. Caudell read newspaper reports of their bickering with detached amusement, as if they were accounts of the unsavory doings of an ex-wife’s kin. Not for the first time, he thought the Confederacy well free of such chaos. Where the North had too many parties, the South had none. The war had been too all-consumingly important to let such organized factions develop. He hoped they would not emerge now that peace had taken the strain off his country.