Much of the letter was chatter about her day-to-day life: a dress she’d made, a cake one of her friends had baked, a complaint about the high price of shoes. Smiling, he thought she and Raeford Liles could have commiserated together. As usual, she said little about the way she spent her nights. She knew he knew what she did, and doubtless did not care to remind him of it unnecessarily.
Living as she did in Rivington, though, even her day-to-day life was out of the ordinary. One passage leaped from the page at Caudelclass="underline" “Last weak I come down with dyareaer worsen I ever get it in the army. Benny Lang he comes to see me and wen he sees how sick I am he gos off and wen he comes back he gives me sum pils to take and I takem and next day I am rite as rain. I wish we wood of nowed a bout it wen we was to gether on a count of a lot of good men who dyareared them selvs to deth could of been saved.”
Caudell nodded, just as if Mollie were there to see him. Diarrhea had killed as many men, North and South, as bullets. With soldiers packed tightly together, eating food and water that were often bad—and the water frequently made worse by their own sinks nearby, or by men ignoring the sinks and doing their business straight into a stream—how could it be otherwise? Doctors could sometimes slow the illness, but they boasted no magical pills to cure it overnight—not outside of Rivington, they didn’t. Even the mention of Benny Lang, whose name showed up fairly often in Mollie’s letters, failed to annoy Caudell as it usually did: wonder overcame what he still refused to admit to himself was jealousy.
And wonder and jealousy both surged in him when, toward the end of her letter, Mollie wrote, “One thing I may not have tole you a bout is that wen I went to a Rivington mans hous I mean one of the ones out in the woods last week I went in side and it was as cool as spring in ther you may be leev me or not just as you like. And it was not cool atall out side likely it weren’t in Nashvil too. That if you ast me is as big a thing as the lites that burn elextristy or what ever the Rivington men cal it. The thing the cool air comes out of is a box on the wall with a nob on it like the ones that makes the elextristy lites burn. I wish for it al the time on a count of hear in my room it aint cool atall. Dont you wish you was in Rivington to? Yor true frend al ways, M. Bean, 47NC.”
Caudell wished with all his heart and sweaty soul he were in Rivington, or at least in that house. If any of Mollie’s letters had given him the slightest hint the town held enough children to support a school, he would have moved without a second thought. Rivington had to be the boomingest town in the state, the place where everything happened first, even ahead of Wilmington and Raleigh.
The railroad, the telegraph, and the camera had all come to North Carolina since his own boyhood. Now Rivington boasted these wonderful electricity-burning lights and cool air in summer. Both those things sounded as interesting as the camera any, day. He wondered when they would appear outside of Rivington and why he hadn’t heard about them in the newspapers. The railroad had been ballyhooed for years before it finally arrived.
Just then, he got a bite. He tossed aside Mollie’s letter and his speculations, and pulled a bullhead out of the creek. The fish flopped on the bank; he had to grab it to keep it from wriggling back into the muddy water. It had swallowed the worm. He dug up another one, impaled it on the hook, and tossed in the line again to see what else he could catch.
He waited with an angler’s patience for a fish or fat turtle to go for the bait. By the sun, he had an hour or so of daylight left. Maybe, he thought, he would make a little fire right here, cook his supper, and sleep out on the grass. The mosquitoes would eat him alive, but that might be better than tossing and turning in his hot bed. He plucked at his beard as he tried to make up his mind. If he didn’t hook anything more than one little bullhead, it wouldn’t matter anyhow. That wasn’t much of a supper.
Something stirred in the clump of jasmine on the far side of the creek. He looked up, got a glimpse of brown hide through the leaves. Deer, he thought, and then, with a tinge of alarm, or maybe cougar. He sat very still. The big cats rarely attacked man unless provoked. With his sole weapon a clasp knife, he had no intention of doing anything provoking.
The leaves parted. His breath went out in a startled grunt, as if he’d been kicked in the belly. Peering out at him, her lovely face frightened as any hunted wild thing’s, was the mulatto wench Josephine.
Before either of them could say anything, before the girl could turn and bolt into the woods, hounds belled back in the direction of town. Josephine’s eyes, already wide and staring, showed white all around the iris. Her lips skinned back from her teeth. “Hide me!” she hissed at Caudell. “I do anything you wants, massuh, anything, long as I don’t gots to go back to that feller bought me. He a devil, he is. Hide me!”
Caudell had seen her up on the auction block, naked as the day she was born and ever so much more tempting. The thought of her doing anything he wanted raised a dark excitement in him. But hiding a runaway slave was against every law in the Confederacy—and where could he hide her, anyway? More daunting than mere lawbreaking, too, was imagining the revenge Piet Hardie would take on him if he tried and failed.
The hounds cried again, louder and closer. Josephine moaned. She plunged away through the bushes, leaving Caudell just as well pleased he had not had to tell her yes or no. He quickly got up, pulled in his line, picked up the bullhead he’d caught, and started back to town. That way he would not have to tell the Rivington man yes or no, either. He wondered what the fellow had done to Josephine to make her run so, then shook his head. Better not to know.
When the hounds chorused again, they were only a few hundred yards away, and plainly on the scent. Caudell heard Piet Hardie shout, too, at the men who ran with the dogs: “Keep them on the leash. If they mark her, by God, I’ll pay you in paper instead of gold!”
Barbara Bissett fried the bullhead crisp and golden brown on the outside and firm and flaky and white in the center. It was as fine a fish as Caudell could have wanted and, with hot corn bread, turned into a pretty fair supper after all. Even so, he hardly tasted it.
The Georgia Railroad engine wheezed to a halt. The conductor came into the car in which Lee was riding. “Augusta!” he bawled. He hurried along, left the car, went into the next one. Faintly, through two doors, Lee heard him announce the stop again.
He got to his feet. “Major, you may send me to a lunatic asylum if, having once returned to Richmond, I voluntarily board a train again at any time within the next ten years,” he said to Charles Marshall. “I am heartily sick of traveling from hither to yon inside a box”—he waved to show he meant the passenger coach—”as if I were a parcel to be delivered by the postman.”
“For the good of the country, sir, I may find myself constrained to act as if I have not heard you,” his aide answered. “I beg you, however, not to take this as implying I fail to sympathize with your point of view.”
Lee looked around as he got off the train. “The city is larger than I had thought it to be.”
“About fifteen thousand inhabitants, I am given to understand,” Marshall said. He looked about, too. “Seems a pleasant enough place.”
Among the gaggle of people greeting new arrivals and wishing Godspeed to departing loved ones was a rather corpulent middle-aged man who wore Confederate gray and a colonel’s three stars on his collar. He pushed his way through the crowd Lee always seemed to draw, as if he were a lodestone attracting iron filings. With a salute, the fellow said, “George W. Rains, sir, at your service.”