Writing in bad light was no easier than reading, but he sat down on his bed to compose replies to Pleasants and to Mollie Bean. He knew no better way to spend a Saturday afternoon, and also knew that if he did not answer now, he probably would not get another chance until next Saturday. He would be at church tomorrow and teaching school from sunup to sundown the rest of the week.
“I hope you are well,” he wrote to Mollie. “I hope you are happy in Rivington with all its wonders.” In his mind’s eye, he saw her on a bed with Benny Lang, maybe under the sunlike glare of one of the lights she’d described. He shook his head; even imagining anything so shameless embarrassed him… and left him wishing he were there instead of the Rivington man.
Thinking about the light helped him pull his pen back toward the impersonaclass="underline" “If you learn more about eleksity and how it burns in the lamps there, let me know. If the Rivington men will sell it outside their town, it sounds better than whale oil or even gas. And tell me more about these books you mentioned. Are they just print on paper like our own, or are they filled with colored plates to go along with the words?” If even the lights in a Rivington man’s house were something special, what would his books be like? Caudell chose the fanciest thing he could think of, and smiled at the power of his own imagination.
He went on, “Your letters keep getting longer and more interesting. I hope to have many more of them, and hope that you now and then remember the wide world outside Rivington.” He hesitated, then added, “I also hope to see you again one day. Your friend always, Nathaniel N. Caudell.” He looked down at that last line, wondering whether he ought to strike it out. Mollie might think he meant only that he wanted to have her again. Or she might show up on the doorstep of the widow Bissett’s house, either in tart’s finery or in her old Confederate uniform. He wondered which would stir up the greater scandal.
But in the end, he decided to leave the sentence alone. It was true, and Mollie had sense enough not to read too much or too little into it. He waited until the ink dried, then folded the letter and put it in an envelope. He thought about going back to Raeford Liles’s store to post that letter and the one to Henry Pleasants, but only for a moment. Monday would do well enough, if the rain had let up by then.
Lightning cracked. While it lasted, it lit his room with a hot, purple glare and turned every shadow black as pitch. He blinked, afterimages dancing inside his eyes, and wondered if the eleksity lights were that bright. He hoped not. Too much light could be as bad as too little. Thunder boomed overhead.
He Set the letters on top of the chest of drawers by the wall opposite the bed, then went back and lay down. The rain kept coming. Another bolt of lightning lit up everything in harsh relief, then died. Thunder growled again. Children—not a few grown men and women, too—were afraid of it. He’d had his own anxieties, until Gettysburg and the wilderness and the ring of forts around Washington. After a few cannonadings, thunder was nothing to worry about.
He pulled his new hat down over his eyes so the lightning would not bother him anymore. Inside of five minutes, he was snoring.
Boys and a few girls, their ages ranging from five up toward full adulthood, crowded the benches of the Nashville, North Carolina schoolhouse. The building, on Alston Street several blocks south of Washington, was near the edge of town and hardly deserved to be called a schoolhouse at all—schoolshed would have been a better word for it. The walls were timber, the roof leaked—though the rain was done, wet, muddy spots remained on the floor as reminders of its recent appearance. “Get away from there, Rufus!” Caudell shouted at a small boy who was about to jump in one of the wet places.
Rufus sulkily sat back on his bench. Sighing, Caudell stood between two of his older students, who had a geometry problem chalked on their slates. “If these two angles are equal, the triangles have to be congruent,” one said.
“Are the angles equal?” Caudell asked. The youth nodded. “How do you know?”
“Because they’re—what’s the name for them? Vertical angles, that’s what they are.”
“That’s right,” Caudell said approvingly. “So you see that—”
Before he could point out what the budding Euclid was supposed to see, a girl gave a piercing shriek. Bored with sitting on his bench, Rufus had yanked her braids. Caudell hurried over. He habitually carried a long, thin stick; he’d been using it to point to the figures in the geometry lesson. Now he whacked Rufus on the wrist with it. Rufus howled. He probably made more noise than the girl whose hair he’d pulled, but it was noise of a sort the students were used to ignoring.
Without breaking stride, Caudell went back and finished the interrupted lesson: Then he walked over to three or four nine-year-olds. “You have your spelling words all written down?” he asked. “Take out your Old Blue Backs and we’ll find out how you did.” The children opened their Webster’s Elementary Spellers, checked the scrawls on their slates against the right answers. “Write the proper spelling of each word you missed ten times,” Caudell said; that would keep the nine-year-olds busy while he taught arithmetic to their older brothers and sisters. He also thought fleetingly that Mollie Bean could have done with some more work in the Elementary Speller.
From arithmetic, he went on to geography and history, both of which came from the North Carolina Reader of Calvin H. Wiley, a former state school superintendent. Had everyone in the state been as heroic and virtuous as Wiley made its people out to be, North Carolina would have been the earthly paradise. The discrepancy between text and real world did not bother Caudell; school books were supposed to inculcate virtue in their readers.
He went over to his youngest students, said, “Let me hear the alphabet again.”
The familiar chant rang out: “A, B, C, D, E, F, G,—”
“Mr. Caudell, I got to pee,” Rufus interrupted.
“Go on outside,” Caudell said, sighing again. “You come back quick now, mind, or I’ll give you another taste of the switch.” Rufus left hastily. Caudell knew the odds of his return were less than even money. And by tomorrow morning, he would have forgotten all about being told to come back. Well, that was what the switch was for: to exercise his memory until it could carry the load for itself.
For a wonder, Rufus did return. For a bigger wonder, he recited the whole alphabet without a miss. Knowing he wasn’t likely to get a bigger surprise that day, Caudell announced a dinner break. Some children ate where they sat; others—though not as many as in spring—went out to sit on the grass. The youths to whom he’d taught geometry came up to him while he was eating his sowbelly and hoecakes. “Tell us more about how you all got into Washington City, Mr. Caudell,” one of them said.
The down was beginning to darken on their cheeks and upper lips. They wondered what they’d missed by staying home from the war. Had it gone on another year or two, they would have found out. Having seen the elephant, Caudell would willingly have traded what he knew for ignorance.
“Jesse, William, it was dark and it was dirty and everybody was firing as fast as he could, us and the Yankees both,” he said. “Finally we fought our way through their works and then into the city. I tell you, pieces of it I don’t remember to this day. You’re just doing things in a fight; you don’t have time to think about them.”