There were two of them today, one from her husband, Zebulon, and one from her youngest son, Reuben. They were both in Virginia, at Petersburg, protecting their nation’s capitol at Richmond from the Northern invaders. There was a time not too long ago when receiving a letter from each of her family members in the army on the same day was an odd and welcome happenstance, providing her occasionally with a long afternoon of reading material to savor and preen over, tempered only by the unspoken realization that she then had more letters to write and send. When the war was new, and volunteering was easy, and sacrifice was a word you only heard mentioned in Sunday sermons, Victoria Andrews had seen a husband and two sons off to war, pride choking back any tears she might have shed for fear or absence. In the years that followed, two more sons joined the fray, the realities of their struggle a bit more sobering but the need to commit oneself no less urgent. But now it was three and a half years later and Zebulon and Reuben were all she had left, her other three sons dying in strange and unheard of places at one time or another. If the three flags hanging in her front window wasn’t reminder enough, she always had the increasing frequency with which her remaining loved ones’s letters arrived on the same day to remind her of happier and more innocent times.
Zebulon, Jr., had been the first one lost, then Marcus, then Frederick -- the good Lord deciding in whatever wisdom He used to rule the universe that He would take them in the order she bore them.
Her oldest boy, Zebulon’s namesake, had just graduated from West Point two years before the start of the war, and entered the conflict as a captain, leading a company in one of the South Carolina regiments. He was killed in the first major battle of the war, a Confederate victory called Bull Run, after a meandering creek it was fought near, and First Bull Run, after a second battle took place on practically the same ground a year later. Tragically, he was killed not by the enemy but by fire from another company in his own regiment who, in the confusion that besieged that first major engagement, fired into Zebulon, Jr., and his men as they advanced obliquely to grapple with a company of Northern soldiers.
Marcus, who was in West Point when the war began, left that institution five months shy of his graduation when his state left the Union, and came home to receive a commission as a second lieutenant from the governor of South Carolina, and later one as first lieutenant by the president of the Confederate States of America. He fought in several major battles, including every one of the Seven Days in 1862, and had risen in rank to major by the time Gettysburg happened. He survived that awful battle, only to succumb to dysentery and pneumonia on the wet, muddy retreat from the battlefield, dying in a hospital tent somewhere in Maryland, delirious and uncertain of where he was.
Frederick, always the rebel, had not gone to West Point as his father had wished, and instead tried to break into the newspaper business by writing unsolicited reports of local events and submitting them to as many periodicals as possible. He had just been offered a copywriting position with the Charleston Mercury when the war came. Like so many young men across the South, he volunteered soon after, but not for the infantry. He asked to be and was sent to war by his new employer as a battlefield correspondent, and was paired up with a sketch artist named Flynn to send dispatches back from the front. This he did for two years, until the sights of his countrymen being slaughtered and his country’s need became so great that even he could not withhold his strength from the struggle and enlisted. He was sent to the front, back this time in Virginia, and was killed at a place Victoria had never heard of called Spotsylvania Court House, hit by a bullet through the neck as the Union troops shot, thrust, clawed, and bit at their Southern opponents for six hours in a failed attempt to take a little piece of land dubbed the Mule Shoe.
Victoria learned all this, learned of the death of three sons, from the letters. There were always two, one from whoever her son’s commanding officer had been and one from her husband who, although not always nearby when one of their sons met his fate, would also write to her the moment he received the news. As he had said in each of those earth-shattering and mournful letters, he had no dispute with the men who had led their sons into battle, but he fervently hoped his words, arriving before theirs, would soften the blow in some small way, enough, at least, to keep the grief from overwhelming Victoria as it so frequently threatened to overwhelm him. In each case, however, given the vagaries of battlefield reports, chains of command, and unreliable mail service, Zebulon’s letter had always arrived after the one from the commanding officer. Although the strangers who had known her sons in ways she hadn’t always wrote beautiful letters -- respectful and moving tributes to the bravery of her sons and the immense sacrifice she had been asked by the Almighty to lay on the altar of their country -- it had reached the point where the delivery of an envelope written in an unfamiliar hand was enough to send Victoria into convulsions of grief and loathing.
But not today. Today she had two letters and two letters only, one adorned with the graceful and loping script of her husband and the second with the practiced and deliberate one of her last remaining son. Victoria turned to this latter one first, anxious to hear any news of how Reuben was faring at the front. He had been only sixteen when the war began, an age at which most of his peers had not yet decided what to do with their lives. Volunteering had been easy then, when everyone thought the war would be short and full of glory for those quick enough to get in it, and Reuben had wanted to volunteer, too. But with a husband and two other sons in the service of their country and a third about to leave for Charleston, Victoria had impressed upon Reuben the need to stay home and keep the plantation running. Such impressions were made, and although it ran counter to his heart’s desire, Reuben had agreed to stay behind, understanding in a way his brothers never quite seemed to that his duty was first to his family and then to his nation.
It was safe to say, however, that things had not gone well for Reuben at home. He had tried to step into his father’s shoes on the plantation, but either the shoes were too big or his feet were not large enough to fill them, for things seemed to turn sour from the first morning he rode out from their house in town. The overseers did not respect him, still viewing him as the boy who had come there with his family four years ago rather than the man he was growing into. The overseers, led by a hired Dutchman named Gunther van Wijk, saw it as their opportunity to go back to running things, as they had prior to Zebulon’s retirement from the United States Army. With their employer donning a new military uniform and going off to war -- even if it was in battle against the nation he had served so well for twenty-five years -- from their perspective things quickly felt too much like the good old days, and they didn’t see why some youngster who hadn’t even been born when they had been whipping slaves should have any authority over them.
That left Reuben with little to do and lots of time on his hands. Too embarrassed to tell his mother the overseers would not accept him into their fold, he continued to go out to the plantation each morning and return each evening, having spent a large part of the day stretched out in the shade of a tree, sketching scenes of the countryside and slave life in charcoal and pencil in between naps. Victoria may not have ever found out about this subterfuge had the two junior overseers not run off to join the war effort and left van Wijk with too many slaves to oversee and not enough hands to whip them. Suddenly needing Reuben and his help in a way he would not have predicted, he went to Victoria one evening to enlist her help in getting her son motivated to work.
“He just sits there under that damn tree all day,” van Wijk had said, Victoria still remembering the mud he had dragged into her house and the yellow film that seemed to cover his teeth. “Doodling on that blasted pad. I need his help! I can’t keep all those slaves in line by myself. Mark my words, Missus Andrews, we’re going to start losing some if that boy doesn’t get off his ass and help.”
Victoria had not liked van Wijk’s use of profanity in her home any more than she had liked the plantation mud he had brought with him, but she understood what he was trying to tell her and the important role the slaves played in the future livelihood of her and her family. She spoke to Reuben about it the next morning over breakfast. He admitted the overseers had initially rebuffed him, and that he had been too embarrassed to tell her about it.
It was very much like Reuben to do something like that, to avoid a confrontation and to channel his energy into some creative project. There was a large part of Victoria’s heart that was glad circumstances had conspired to keep her youngest son at home. She was unsure how a boy of his sensitivities would fare in the face of battle. Worse, she was worried how such an experience might change him, her beautiful and innocent baby boy. Victoria had asked Reuben to show her some of the sketches he had made on the plantation and, as his creations often did, they took her breath away. The care he had shown in their development was evident in every sloping line and shaded area. In charcoal and pencil, Victoria knew he had captured not only the details of the landscape, but the essence of the land itself. The stoop-shouldered slaves he had drawn working in the fields were, to the detached eye, little more than black smudges against the white sky, but in the construction of Reuben’s landscape, those smudges seemed to encompass all the toil and hardship that was a South Carolina slave working in the field.
As much as it broke Victoria’s heart to see it, Reuben stopped his sketching that day and began helping van Wijk in the fields with the slaves. It was difficult work and Victoria made sure her son told her about it each evening in enough detail so she knew she was getting the straight story. Together, van Wijk and Reuben marched the slaves out to the fields each morning, kept an eye on them to make sure they worked, and marched them back to the slave cabins at night. But what had been a full time job for three experienced overseers proved to be too much to handle for van Wijk and Reuben. It was only the third day of their working together when the count of slaves coming out of the fields was one less than the count that went out that morning.
“Goddammit!” van Wijk had thundered when the truth became apparent, toning his expletives down only a little when he reported the news that evening to Victoria. “Dammit, Missus Andrews, I told you this was going to happen. Now that one is gone we’re in danger of losing them all. We have a very limited amount of time to get that black devil back and make an example of him. Trust me, Missus Andrews, the rest of your slaves are going to watch what we do very carefully. If we let a week go without getting him back, more are going to decide to run. And then where will we be?”
Again, Victoria had no trouble understanding the logic of van Wijk’s position. But she was very much at a loss as to what could be done about it, and her head overseer did not have many other suggestions. Had one of the slaves run off before the war, which would have been a much different proposition under the watchful eyes of three professional overseers, landowners from all across the county would have loaned men for the retrieval effort, with no one leaving his own slaves without enough oversight to keep them from running off, too. The extra manpower needed to organize and conduct such a search would have been spread over a large enough area and a high enough number of plantations to ensure no other slaves could take advantage of the disruption. But now, with so many men off fighting the war, it wasn’t just the Andrews plantation that was short staffed, and no such search party could be formed without providing openings all over the county for dissatisfied slaves to try and make a break for it. Their only hope was that the missing slave would be picked up by the authorities, civil or military, as he made his way across the hostile countryside, and returned to them. Van Wijk had to keep himself from spitting on Victoria’s parlor floor when she asked him his opinion on the chances of such a thing happening.
And so van Wijk and Reuben went back to the plantation and redoubled their efforts in keeping an eye on the slaves. It wasn’t long, however, before another man turned up missing as they came out of the fields, and then, two days after that, three more vanished. It was more than van Wijk could stand, who Victoria felt took the escapes as a personal affront to his authority and who, as he came to her to offer up his resignation, laid the blame entirely at the feet of her youngest son.
“Begging your pardon, Missus Andrews,” he had said, “but that boy is a complete incompetent and can’t keep an eye on his own shoes much less a hundred slaves working in the field. If just one of the overseers had stayed we could have kept things running for you. But having Reuben out there is like having nobody at all. It’s because of his laziness and timid nature that your slaves have started to run off, and there’s no stopping them now. Mark my words, before the next month is out, there won’t be anyone left on this plantation except those three old crones and the whelps they look after.”
Victoria had little trouble accepting van Wijk’s resignation after those comments. Managing the plantation without him -- now that was a different story. Regardless of what van Wijk had thought of Reuben’s abilities as an overseer, Victoria knew the task of managing a plantation of nearly two hundred slaves was too much for any one man to handle on his own. As much as she regretted doing it, there was really only one thing Victoria could do in such a circumstance, and that was sell as many of the slaves as she could as quickly as possible, before they all wandered off into the wilderness.
It was something she had arranged for the very next morning, sending Reuben downtown to secure the appropriate services of a slave trader. Their situation was desperate. With no one to watch the slaves there was no telling how many would be there each morning, so they were forced to work with someone who could take ownership of them immediately and who, subsequently, was not necessarily paying top dollar. But Victoria saw no way around it. As she had written to her husband shortly after the decision had been made, she thought she had better reap what benefit she could out of them before it was too late. If she could not make them work in the fields, they would only end up costing her money in the long run, and no one knew how long the war would last. It had already gone on much longer than anyone had predicted, and most thought the markets would get worse before they got better. Besides, she had told her husband, when the war was over, the market would return to stability, and they could begin the process of acquiring slaves again.
Looking at his handwriting on the envelope she had just received, Victoria remembered how Reuben had tried to help her over those terrible days. The slave trader, a fat and slovenly gentleman by the name of Phelps, had brought his own overseers two days later to help him inspect the slaves and his own wagons to cart them away after negotiating a price with Victoria. Here again, it was a situation in which Reuben actually had very little to do. His only real task was to watch the slaves each night prior to Phelps’s arrival, and even though Reuben forced himself to stay awake both nights, each sunrise saw the number of souls in the slave cabins less than the number that had been put there the night before. Several of the youngest and strongest men decided to take their chances on the lamb rather than with Mister Phelps, and had managed to slip away without exposing themselves to Reuben’s watchful if sleepy eye.
Victoria knew her youngest son was not cut out for this kind of work, knew he did not have the force of character his brothers had inherited from their father to stand in authority over others and, if necessary, compel them to tasks they were not otherwise willing to do. The events associated with the loss of their plantation slaves reinforced her perception of Reuben’s sensitive and non-confrontational nature. At the time, she consoled herself over the loss of so much property and future prosperity with the knowledge that her kind-hearted boy was home with her rather than off fighting the enemy and his own natural propensities in a place where the consequences of failure were a lot higher than the wealth associated with two hundred slaves.
In the end Phelps took only one hundred and thirty-six slaves off Victoria’s hands. Out of the original population of just over two hundred, that’s how many remained after those who had decided to flee had fled. It was no coincidence that those who had slipped away represented most of the healthiest and strongest males. There were some exceptions, but by and large the slaves who brought the highest prices were also those most willing to take their chances as a fugitive. Those who were older and more frail were less likely to risk the consequences of being caught and pulled back into slavery, regardless of the compelling allure that total and fabled freedom in the North offered them. As a result, Victoria realized an even lower than expected windfall for the slaves she had sold, only enough, by her calculation, to sustain her and her household in their current lifestyle for another eighteen months.
When Phelps left, the only slave who remained in Victoria’s possession was Sally -- Phelps even taking the old grandmothers and the children they watched. Sally was the girl they had brought to their house in Columbia a few years ago to tutor under their house slave, Bessie. Old Bessie herself had died shortly after the war broke out, passing quietly in the night after all her household chores had been completed and leaving then twelve-year-old Sally in sole charge of all future upkeep. From Victoria’s perspective, Sally, although a slave and a valuable one at that -- a trained house slave of such a young age could, after all, be expected to serve her master for a very long time indeed -- was truly a member of her family and, like Bessie before her, it was unthinkable to even consider selling her with the plantation slaves. The morning after the slaves were gone, Victoria, her son Reuben, her daughter Emily, and their last remaining slave Sally, woke to face what Victoria chose to call the next chapter in their lives.
It was a fairly short chapter from Reuben’s point of view. It was 1864, two of Victoria’s sons had already been killed, and that butcher Grant had started his southward push into Virginia after thrashing so many other Rebels in so many other places. Word of the first major battle of the spring reached them through the newspapers and one of Zebulon’s letters. It was the first time Grant met Robert E. Lee, and as all loyal Confederates expected, it was a defeat for the Union general. It had cost the Confederates dearly, however, men struggling and dying by the thousands in a tangled forest known locally as the Wilderness, and reinforcements were needed badly. Unlike the string of Union generals before him, this man Grant had not retreated upon being beaten. Instead he was pushing forward, trying to outflank Lee and his Confederate Army in an attempt to sack Richmond. This was a very different turn of events and the army was asking every last man who remained in the South’s civilian ranks to bring his weapons and help confront this new and familiar enemy.
Ultimately, it was a call Reuben could no longer ignore. With the dissolution of their plantation, there was truly nothing left for Reuben to do at home except drain his mother’s now finite monetary resources more quickly. Victoria was still adamantly against it, fearful for her youngest son in a way she had not been for the others that the war would definitely destroy him, if not through the outright ending of his life, then through the more devilish subversion of his sensibilities into something she would no longer recognize as kindness and charity. Victoria cried and pleaded with him not to go, and Reuben matched her tears with his own, but he was quite firm that his mind had been made up. He had already written to his father that he was coming to join him and lend his might -- feeble though it may be -- to the defense of their country.
Victoria remembered being both sad and proud the day he left. She showed Reuben the sadness mostly, but she suspected he knew how proud she was, too, proud she had raised so many courageous sons, and that he, like his brothers and his father before them, was willing to put his life on the line for what they all knew to be holy and right. She did not want him to go off to war, but she also did not want him to stay behind with her if his conscience was telling him to go. Victoria had heard someone say once the only place we truly touch God is through our conscience, and she believed it wholeheartedly. Once she was convinced it was Reuben’s inner voice that was compelling him to go and not the bravado and lust for glory that had seemed to seize so many of his generation, she reverently accepted the need for him to go and take his place in God’s great plan.
Her resolution did not even waver the day an official-looking letter arrived from a colonel whose name Victoria quickly forgot, heralding the news of another battle in a place called Spotsylvania and the death of her son Frederick. Having released her offspring into the keeping of the Almighty, allowing Him to use them as He saw fit in the fulfillment of His grand purpose, Victoria found her only solace in the ritual of prayer, asking for the wisdom to understand the sacrifices she and her family were making in the context of the greater good.
But those were thoughts for another day. Anxious to see how Reuben was faring since his last letter, Victoria tore open the envelope and unfolded the small pieces of paper it contained. With a late summer breeze blowing gently down Elmwood Avenue, she settled back into her favorite rocking chair and read the following words:
July 27, 1864
Petersburg, Virginia
Dear Mother,
Thank you for your letter of May 23, which I only just received yesterday. You wouldn’t think it would take a letter two months to cross North Carolina and arrive in Virginia, but with Grant’s army between me and you and so many of our once reliable communication channels disrupted, two months is about the quickest we can expect our letters to take in reaching each other. If my letter follows the same route in the same time your letter did, I expect you’ll be reading this sometime in late September or perhaps early October, making it more than a third of a year since you sent your initial correspondence. At such a rate of exchange I should worry if we had to rely on these letters to communicate some item of pressing importance, other than, of course, our mutual assurances that we are both doing well and miss one another a great deal.
I have no idea how many of my letters you receive and in what order you receive them, as it is clear the letters I receive from you are at times both out of chronological order and alluding to subjects that must have been first introduced in an earlier message I have not yet received. At the time you wrote your May 23rd letter, we were still on the move in Northern Virginia, trying to keep Mr. Grant from turning our right flank and descending on Richmond. As I have described before -- but which I must briefly describe again, in case you have not received any of the letters I have written from my present location -- we danced like that with our Northern opponents for a long and brutal month, eventually swooping down below Richmond and digging in deep at Petersburg, determined to keep Grant at bay, but at the same time left with really no other places to go. It’s been another long month now since that decision was made, and the transition from an army on the march to one in the trenches has been a difficult one for me and a lot of my fellow soldiers.
I believe I have now fully recovered from the stomach ailment I mentioned previously that had been dogging me since our arrival here in Petersburg. Father believes it was due to the change in rations we experienced when settling into camp. Now that we are stationary rather than constantly on the move, we are much more reliant on our preserved goods for our provisions. While we were out and about we regularly supplemented these rations with the bounty provided both by nature and those few Confederate farmers who are still in business. But now that we have remained in the same place for so long, we have exhausted such provender and consist solely on what has been packed and preserved by our commissaries. Father says it often takes a while for one to adjust to such a diet, and that my distressed condition was not at all unusual. Now that my system appears to have finally acclimatized itself to army rations, life here has become fractionally more tolerable.
I hope you are still feeling as well as you mentioned in your May 23rd letter. Father has told me in his military career you have accustomed yourself to his long absences from home. But even he worries about you now since he has been gone longer than any time before -- even during the war with Mexico -- and, of course, there now are others whose absences have never needed to be borne, and some who we’ll have to continue bearing until that great and final reunion with our Father in heaven. I pray fervently to that guiding spirit that this is not the letter that reveals to you the fact of Frederick’s death. Father wrote to you, I know, as well as Fred’s commanding officer, and either of those messages would contain more of the facts and express more of the appropriate sympathies than I can possibly cover here. His passing, happening so soon after my arrival at the front, has demoralized me in ways I still have not come to terms with. Even now I have a hard time believing he is gone, that they are all gone and that I am the only one left alive. It seems only a short time ago that we were all together in Columbia -- Zeb, Marcus, Frederick, and me -- together with you and father and Emily, ready to enjoy the wealth and comfort you have earned over your and Father’s life together. If we would have only known how brief that precious time was going to be, I feel we would have spent even more of it together and pursued less our own personal and selfish interests. And now such a time can never be again, not until we are all reunited in paradise. Oh, what a horrible folly all this business seems now, now that we know what the true cost of it really is.
Mother, forgive me. I don’t mean to trouble you or focus your mind obsessively on the sacrifices our family has made for our nation’s cause. They were my brothers, but they were your sons. I can only imagine the kind of pain you must feel at their loss. If I am in shock, then you must be, must be—
Forgive me, again. I said I did not want to cause you to dwell on it and then continued to describe it. I will purposely change the subject now.
Life here in camp continues with the same monotonous pace. Every day we are engaged in extending and refortifying our trenches, trying to strategically out-trench the enemy, to find a place where our trench can be built without the enemy matching it with an extension of their own trench less than fifty yards away. I don’t know if such a place will ever be found, but if it is, I’m not sure what Father and the other generals are going to do with it. Don’t tell him I said so, but from this soldier’s point of view, it would be nice to have a place one could stand up straight in without risking a bullet hole in the head. I fear, however, that if ever such a place is found, the generals will use it as the launching point for some great assault on the enemy, an attempt, in the old vernacular, to “roll up his line.” I doubt such a tactic would work. From what I’ve seen, the enemy far outnumbers us and the only chance we have is to hunker down and wait for them to attack. From behind our defenses, we can hold out against ten or even twenty times our number. We’ve done it before and if need be we’ll do it again.
You’ll be glad to know I’ve taken up sketching again. I hadn’t touched the sketchbook I brought with me until just a few days ago when I saw two soldiers carrying the wounded body of a third through the trenches and back to the medical station. Something about the scene possessed me and I immediately pulled out the sketchbook from the bottom of my pack and drew the scene directly from my memory. I showed it to Clark when it was finished and he seemed especially taken by it. He asked me if I would sketch a portrait of himself that he could send back to his wife and children. I happily agreed and quickly dashed off a black and white study of his countenance that I thought none too shabby and which he thought was outstanding. He liked it so much he showed it around to some of the boys before sealing it up and sending it home, and they all wanted me to do one of them. I’ve now sketched every man in the company, including Captain Bartz, and yesterday I started working on some boys from Company F. I’ll tell you, Mother, I never thought of myself as much of a portrait artist, but the enthusiasm the men have shown for my work has made me take a fresh look at the possibility. The first one I had done of Clark I did as kind of a laugh, but Clark took it seriously and so have all the other men. There’s no photographers here in camp and I think they all want something like a photograph to send back home, to help assure their loved ones they are alive and well and to convey to them something about this place and what’s happening here that they are unable to express in words. Their seriousness has affected me in a way I would not have predicted and has caused me to approach each new portrait with more gravity than the one before. I’m just beginning to understand there is something present in these men’s faces that touches the true meaning of why we are all here. I don’t know exactly what it is, but it’s there in every face I see, and my challenge is now to capture that something on paper if I can. I don’t believe I have succeeded yet, but I do believe I am getting closer.
I wish I had been more serious about this before the war began. I see now in a way I perhaps couldn’t before that being an artist is truly what I would like to pursue. I regret I had not made this decision sooner, but I wonder if it has not been the experience of war itself that has allowed me to make this decision now. I would like to have done the portraits of my father and my brothers that hang on the parlor wall. The artist you hired was competent enough, but none of them contain the kind of truth I see in the faces of the men all around me and that I know was present in their faces as well. But now so much has happened, they are gone, and I’ll never have that opportunity again. Maybe Father would have time to let me sketch him at least? With all the misery that has descended upon our family, I feel oddly compelled to capture what little of our divine fire still remains before cruel fate attempts to take the portion that remains to us. I will go to him tomorrow and see if he would be willing to sit for me. I very much would like you to see what I am talking about. Of all the people in the world, dear Mother, I feel you would have the best chance of seeing it, if I can just get some small shadow of it down on paper. It is there in Father’s face just as it surely is in mine and in the face of every other man and boy trapped in these trenches with us. If I can draw it, you’ll be able to see it, see it even in that face you know so well. And then perhaps you can explain it to me, you can help me understand what it is I am seeing and what it means.
Please continue to write as frequently as you can. I cannot describe the joy I feel upon receiving one of your letters. It helps me tremendously to know that you and Emily and Sally are all doing well and that the house there in Columbia is warm and ready for my return when this war is over.
Your most devoted son,
Reuben
Victoria sighed as she lowered her son’s letter into her lap. As they usually did, the letter had filled her with both happiness and fear, but she brought it back up to her eyes after only a moment’s reflection and read it straight through a second time, this time allowing her mind to linger on some of the key thoughts and phrases.
Two months.
It takes two months for her letters to reach him. Looking at the date on the top of Reuben’s letter, she saw this message took nearly that long to reach her. Reuben wrote about the communication delays associated with General Grant and his hundred thousand men entrenched between mother and son. She knew they were clamping down on every communication channel they could get their blue tentacles on. And it seemed that some of her letters hadn’t gotten through at all. How many had he missed? How many of his had she also not received? It hadn’t been like this with any of her other sons. From the very beginning of the war, both sides had respected the needs of the soldiers to send and receive personal correspondence from their loved ones back home. With Zebulon and Marcus and even with Frederick, it had taken only a week or two for their letters to reach each other. Now with that devil Grant in charge, the transit time had risen precipitously. Two months? Victoria didn’t like to speculate on all that could happen in two months when so many men sworn to eradicate the other had mauled at each other on a daily basis and now sat entrenched within fifty yards of each other.
I believe I have now fully recovered.
Victoria was certainly glad to hear that. Ever since she had lost Marcus to sickness after Gettysburg, she had been hypersensitive to any mention of illness or distress in her sons’ letters. She knew plenty of families in town who had also lost sons in the war, and she knew the chief killer was disease, not bullets or cannonballs. Mrs. Richardson, who lived a few blocks up Main Street, had also lost three sons in their nation’s service, but all three of them had been taken by disease, one before he had even seen any kind of combat. Victoria knew the conditions the boys faced in the field were unsanitary and mean, and she prayed every night for the continued good health of her husband and remaining son.
Long absences from home.
Yes, Victoria supposed she had, to a degree, gotten used to long absences from home. Zebulon’s service in the Mexican War had previously been the longest, although there had been countless other times when her husband had been called away on detached duty and she had been left at home to take care of their house and their growing brood of children. But Reuben was right. These latest absences were especially painful to her, not only because they had been longer than any which had come before, and not only because it was now her children in addition to her husband whom she missed, but also because three of the absences had taken on a permanency that Victoria had not really been willing to accept. She was not so far gone in her anger and grief that she did not recognize Reuben’s need for her to be stalwart and strong, for him to know that life, changed as it was, was still moving forward for those who had stayed behind in Columbia and that, in part, was why he was where he was, risking the precious gift his brothers had risked and lost. She could not let Reuben see it in her letters and, to a certain extent, she could not allow its full and true force to be felt in her letters to her husband, but there were times, more and more frequently now, when Victoria was so prostrated by her sadness and longing for her dead sons, she could not bear to have the shades lifted nor to drag herself out of bed. She could not think of them without weeping, seeing them in her mind’s eyes as both the strong young men they were and the happy little boys they had been, the tears such a constant companion she had stopped trying to soak them up with handkerchiefs. They pooled in her eyes and fell down her face with such regularity she hardly even noticed them anymore, consumed as she was by the dull and empty ache in her heart.
Great and final reunion with our Father in heaven.
Yes, Victoria thought, bless him for that, bless Reuben for remembering to mention that, for remembering all is not lost as it so often seems in the agonizing march of minutes that now makes up each day. She knew it was true, knew it with all her heart, but like so many others who had lost loved ones in this struggle, Victoria had come dangerously close to losing her faith all too often in recent weeks. The death of Frederick hit her especially hard, destined, as he seemed to be, for a life outside the military. His older brothers, Zebulon and Marcus, had been so much like their father, following him to West Point in the same way they had followed him in temperament and force of character. They were military men, and their loss, while no less difficult for a mother’s heart to bear, had in some ways not been entirely unexpected. It had at least been envisioned prior to their departures for war, as it surely must be for any woman who loves a military man, be he a brother, husband, or son. It’s part of the package that is accepted when he puts on the uniform, that he may be called upon to serve, and that he may be asked to give his life in that service. It is distant and abstract, to be sure, but it is there, there in a way it wasn’t for Frederick, her boy who first wanted to be a writer and then a newspaper man. When he put away his notebook and picked up a rifle and went to the front, Victoria had not had time to reorient her thinking on him, to acclimatize herself to the pressing possibility of death the way she had with Zebulon and Marcus. And when he died the thing inside her that had stretched and frayed at the deaths of her two older boys snapped completely. Whereas before she had had so much to live for and so much to enjoy, she now and irrevocably had seen things reduced to three basic necessities of purpose and belief. There was her son Reuben, the youngest and most beautiful of the bunch, the one who, like Frederick, was not a warrior but an artist, who could capture the truth and splendor of life in a few quick strokes in his sketchbook. There was her daughter Emily, who truly would not survive this ordeal or any other without Victoria’s constant protection and oversight, ill-equipped as she was for understanding the complexities of daily life. And there was her shaken but still foundational belief in the grace and goodness of Almighty God, who would see their broken family reunited in His heavenly kingdom at the end of this world’s trials and tribulations. As she read Reuben’s letter for the second time, she thanked that merciful God for acting through her youngest son to remind her of the promise He had made for them all through the sacrifice of His only son, Jesus Christ.
Same monotonous pace.
Victoria was not reluctant to admit it. Had, in fact, admitted it in several of her letters to Reuben. The more monotonous he found his life in the army the better. Monotony was good. Monotony was safe. It was when life stopped being monotonous that things became dangerous. After losing Frederick shortly after Reuben had left for the front, Victoria had been unable to sleep or keep her mind off the danger her last surviving son was facing as Grant made his blunt and bloody way down towards Richmond. General Lee had been able to deflect away every Union thrust, but the only tools he had to do it with were the bodies of young men like Reuben Andrews, and those tools were being used up at an alarming rate. When the campaign finally settled down into a siege outside Petersburg and Reuben was still numbered among the living, Victoria counted herself lucky. As disappointing as the strategic situation might be for the Confederate cause, the trenches of Petersburg were one of the safest places in the war for her son to be, and each day that passed with him complaining about being bored brought her one day closer, she hoped, to welcoming him and his father home safe and sound.
A bullet hole in the head.
Don’t count your blessings yet, Victoria. The trenches may be a comparatively safe place to be, but they’re trenches all the same and those boys need to keep their heads down or they’re likely to have them shot off. People were dying every day in Petersburg. Not in the numbers they were at the Wilderness or Spotsylvania, but they were dying all the same.
I’ve taken up sketching again.
Of all the ups and downs she experienced in reading this letter, it was this part that raised her spirits the most. Reuben was sketching again! She knew he had taken a sketchbook with him to war, but this was the first mention in any of his letters of him actually putting it to use. Amidst all the horror and bloodshed he had so cruelly been exposed to, a creative fire still burned within him, and he had found, in the faces of the men he served with, an outlet that would let it burn brightly. Even more than his death, Victoria had feared the squelching of his burgeoning talent, the darkening of the artistic vision with which Reuben saw the world, and now, here, for the first time since his departure months ago, was the sign Victoria had been praying for. Reuben was sketching again.
There is something present in these men’s faces.
Yes, Victoria was sure there was. Her husband had seen plenty of it in his time in the army, most poignantly during the war with Mexico, and he had described it to her on several occasions. And Victoria had seen the most rudimentary glimpses of it herself, on the faces of the men Zebulon had drilled over the years and on the faces of her sons as they had one by one left for the war. It was an expression mixing fear and determination in varying amounts, which was very rare outside the military, even though civilian life was filled with its own horrors and strength of purpose. It was rare because there was more to it than just fear and determination, there was also a smattering of things seldom seen outside the military, things like love of country and honor of service and willingness to die. These things were mixed up with the fear and determination and they gave the soldier facing combat an expression Zebulon had called the patriot’s stare. That’s what Reuben was seeing in the faces of the men around him, and Victoria would see it too, assuming her son would be able to capture it in his sketchbook the way he had previously captured the essence of being a slave working in the fields. As she lowered Reuben’s letter back into her lap, Victoria found herself thinking about the reply she would write him that evening, in which she would ask him to send her one of his sketches. He would likely do it, anyway. He had said as much in his letter, that he wanted Victoria to see his latest work, but she would make the request just the same. Reuben could sometimes be shy showing his art to others, and Victoria wanted to remove any doubts he might have -- assuming he ever received her reply -- about her sincere desire to view and appreciate his work. And when she saw it, Victoria knew, when she saw the sketch he would send her, she would not only see the face of patriotism in its most extreme relief, but she would also see that face through the eyes of her sensitive and not-yet-broken boy. His letter made it clear this face was affecting him in a way he could not describe, and also that he thought Victoria could help him make some kind of sense out of it. She longed to try, longed to make such an important and intimate connection with her last surviving son through his art, at a place where the passion of his heart met the brutality of the world around him.
Being an artist is truly what I would like to pursue.
And here he was, in the center of all he was facing, making the one decision Victoria had prayed for but for which she had been ever careful in pushing too hard. Victoria loved her husband, and his service to his country was so much a part of what he was, Victoria could not love him without loving that, too. She had stood in steadfast support as her first two sons made the same choice their father had, committing their lives to the military, and she loved them all the more for it. But deep in her heart Victoria had always and silently hoped her boys would choose something different, would find some other way to interact with the world around them and make it a better place for them having lived in it. There had been little else besides their father’s footsteps for Zebulon and Marcus from the time they were little boys, but Frederick and Reuben had been much more their mother’s sons -- Frederick with the stories he would write and Reuben with the pictures he would draw -- talents Victoria quietly nurtured in hopes they would someday define them as men. With Frederick it had, deciding, as he had as a very young man, to break away from the path his father had made and cut a new one of his own, with the writer’s pen rather than the officer’s sword as his weapon of choice. Victoria relished his courage and celebrated every success he had, but it would be fair to say in her heart of hearts, Victoria’s true sense of happiness and fulfillment rested on Reuben and his hoped-for decision to become an artist. The talent was there from the earliest age, and growth and development seemed only to sharpen and focus the force that dwelt inherent within him. Victoria had never dreamed of saying it aloud, but Reuben was clearly a better artist than Frederick had been a writer, and the thought of her youngest son pursuing a military career or some other vocation had caused Victoria a number of sleepless nights as his fascinations and interests vacillated over time. But here in the bold script of his own hand was the declaration Victoria had so patiently been waiting for. Reuben was going to be an artist.
Your most devoted son.
Holding the letter low in her lap, Victoria’s eyes lingered on that closing line and Reuben’s flourished signature for a moment before refolding the papers and slipping them back into their envelope. She would read it again. She would likely read it fifty or sixty times before Reuben’s next letter came, but for now she was content to sit in her rocking chair with her head back and her eyes closed, letting the reality of the present his letter had brought -- two months gone as it was -- slip happily into the envisioned future.
Wonderfully content, Victoria placed Reuben’s letter down on the small table beside her chair and picked up the second one she had received that day, the one from her husband.
“Sally!” she called out, thinking absently that the afternoon sun was beginning to make her thirsty.
“Yes, Miss Victoria?” Sally’s voice came floating back through the screens that faced out onto the veranda.
“Will you bring me some iced tea?” Victoria asked as she hooked a finger under the flap of the second envelope and tore it open.
“Yes, Miss Victoria.”
Removing the single sheet of paper from the envelope, her husband’s letter opened easily in her hands.
August 1, 1864
Petersburg, Virginia
My Darling Victoria,
It is with a burden of sorrow which has grown too great for me to bear that I am compelled to write and tell you of Reuben’s death.
Victoria read no more. The scream that escaped her before falling out of her chair in a faint must have been loud enough for Sally to hear as she was preparing the requested iced tea in the kitchen. Victoria was just regaining consciousness and beginning to pull herself up onto her hands and knees when Sally’s quick and worried steps brought her out onto the veranda.
“Miss Victoria!” Sally gasped, clearly alarmed at the position she had found her mistress in, and dropping down onto one knee at her side to help steady her. “What happened? Are you hurt?”
“Oh, Sally,” Victoria moaned, her voice flat and hollow as if the wind had been knocked out of her. “Oh, Sally, he’s gone. He’s gone and there’s nothing left. Nothing left at all.”
Sally did not know what Victoria was talking about, but it was clear from the sobs she could feel shuddering through the woman’s body that something very serious had occurred.
“Is it Mister Reuben?” Sally said quietly, closing her eyes and pressing her forehead against Victoria’s shoulder. “Has something happened to Mister Reuben?”
Victoria’s body stiffened and her heart skipped a beat at the thought of having to speak the words aloud, of having to give voice to the awful reality that had just come barging in on her dream.
“Emily,” Victoria said instead, gaining an odd measure of strength from this new thought while still on her hands and knees in front of her rocking chair. “Where is Emily?”
Sally did not understand the reason for Victoria’s question, but had been too well schooled to hesitate in answering a question from her mistress.
“She’s out back,” Sally said, almost choking on the words, as if squelching a desire to press Victoria on what had happened to Reuben. “She’s in the garden, picking carrots.”
The news somewhat reassured Victoria. Whatever else happened, it was essential Emily not discover the fate of her brothers. Victoria had kept the knowledge from her each time -- with Zebulon, with Marcus, and with Frederick -- and now she would do so again with Reuben, knowing she did not have the fortitude to explain and that Emily did not have the capacity to understand what had happened to them. As she had told herself at the time of the first loss, and as she had reminded herself each additional time, Victoria would wait for the war to end and for her husband to come home before even trying to broach the subject with Emily. Zebulon had a way with her, a way of making her understand complexities that sometimes escaped Victoria, and he would help her see their sacrifices in a way that would not disturb her or send her into one of her fits. It would be better for them all if they waited for Zebulon to return.
And if he doesn’t? If Zebulon perishes in the great calamity that had befallen us all the way his four sons have? Well, Victoria could not allow herself to think about that. If that were to happen then there truly would be nothing left for Victoria and she would inevitably begin considering taking her own life. Better not to think about that. Better to focus on the way her sons continued to live in their sister’s mind as long as she was not told of their deaths.
Victoria slowly began to pull herself up off the floor and back into her rocking chair. The tears were flowing again. Unchecked, unnoticed, they rushed down her face but washed none of her heartache away.
“Oh, Miss Victoria!” Sally cried, crouching down at Victoria’s feet and twisting the fabric of Victoria’s skirt in her hands. “It’s Mister Reuben, isn’t it? Tell me. What’s happened to Mister Reuben?”
Victoria was feeling numb inside and out, and in that state, she did not recognize the desperation in Sally’s voice for what it was.
“The letter,” she said distantly, pointing to the piece of paper that had fallen face down on the veranda. “It’s all in the letter, dear.”
Sally snatched up the letter and held it so she could see the soft and rolling script of her master, the man who had come out of the folklore of her childhood, moved her from one world she understood to another she did not, and abdicated his responsibility for her to his wife and an old dying slave named Bessie.
“Go ahead, Sally,” Victoria said, her voice as flat as Zebulon’s handwriting was round. “Read it. Read it aloud. I read no farther than the first sentence.”
Teaching a slave, any slave, to read was a crime in South Carolina, but for generations the plantation class had been ignoring the law and the authorities had been looking the other way when it came to house slaves. Everyone knew a good house slave needed some literacy if they were going to perform their necessary functions in managing the household, and Victoria had begun tutoring Sally shortly after she arrived at the house on Elmwood Avenue.
Victoria closed her eyes and did not see the look of anguish that passed over Sally’s face as she began to read.
“August first, eighteen sixty-four,” Sally said, her voice as unsteady as her nerves. “Petersburg, Virginia. My Darling Victoria. It is with a burden of sorrow that has grown too great for me to bear that I am compelled to write and tell you of Reuben’s death.”
Suspicious as she was, prepared as she was, the factual news confirming her fears seemed to overwhelm Sally and she choked off the last two words into a barely audible whisper. She stopped reading, her hand coming up involuntarily to cover her mouth and the tears welling up in her eyes. Appearing sick and nauseous, she pressed her hand tightly against her lips as if to keep herself from vomiting.
Victoria, her eyes still closed and oblivious to all but her own grief, waited for a few moments of silence to pass and then asked Sally to continue. Her misery ate at her like a hunger. She couldn’t bear it, but needed more, needed to hear all there was to say about her precious Reuben.
Sally lowered her hand and forced herself to continue. “He was killed early yesterday morning when the enemy exploded some kind of mine beneath one of our trenches. They must have been digging unobserved for weeks, creating a tunnel from their trench to just below ours and packing it with all sorts of explosives. Reuben was killed along with most of his company in the initial explosion. The enemy tried to exploit the hole in our line but we were able to marshal enough troops to beat them back and repair our defenses with a minimum of additional loss of life.”
Sally paused, reaching out to steady herself on the veranda railing as if overcome with dizziness. Victoria’s mind chewed on the words her slave had read, her ears hearing but her brain not understanding the words it was sent. Reuben was killed. No matter how many other details she tried to recall, her mind kept returning to those three simple and horrible words.
“Is that all?” Victoria asked calmly, her voice like that of an undertaker with a new client. “Is that all he wrote?”
“No,” Sally said, the tears now spilling down her face and her nose beginning to run. “No, there’s more.”
“Read it, please,” Victoria said. “Finish it and let’s put that letter away.”
Sally coughed and wiped her face on her sleeve. “I have recovered his body and will see that it is buried in the veterans’ cemetery they have established outside Richmond. General Lee has given me enough leave to see to those arrangements, and sends his regrets that he can spare me no more from the fight that still lays ahead for us. When the war is over, I will take you there and we can stand over his grave together and offer him an appropriate farewell.”
Sally paused again, trembling so badly the paper in her hand began to rattle. Looking down on her mistress, she saw a woman who seemed all but dead except for the fists clenched and shaking in her lap and the rivers of tears flowing from the corners of her closed eyes.
“Miss Victoria?” Sally asked, sounding uncertain if the woman would hear her.
“Finish it, Sally,” Victoria said, her voice no longer that of the undertaker but of the priest. “There’s not much more.”
Sally turned her eyes onto the last paragraph. It was by far the longest, but Sally pushed herself through it, sobbing openly all the while. “My treasured love,” she read, almost choking into silence at the very beginning. “I know what this news will do to you, and pray this letter reaches you before other tidings in the hopes that hearing it from the man who loves you above all else and shares your special grief will help keep you from going mad in your sorrow. Looking on his battered body it is difficult for me to envision how life can go on, but go on it must, both for the cause of our beleaguered country and for the future of our remaining child. I trust Emily is in good health and pledge to you now my unending love for her and the brave and beautiful woman who bore her and five other heavenly souls. They have returned to our Father in heaven, but Emily remains in our care and needs our love more than ever. Kiss her and hug her for me and reassure her that her Daddy is coming home soon.”
Sally took a deep breath but did not look up from the letter until she read the close. “Yours in life and for all eternity, Zebulon.”
The silence that followed Sally’s reading of the letter was bottomless, broken only at times by Sally’s sniffles and an angry dog barking far up the street.
“Miss Victoria,” Sally said quietly, letting the letter drop to her side and looking down on Victoria’s petrified form. “Oh, Miss Victoria. What happens now? What are we supposed to do now?”
“Sally, dear,” Victoria said plainly, her eyes still closed and her voice startling Sally, who had not expected so direct a response. “Go and wipe your eyes, my child. Go and get Emily out of the garden and put a kettle on for soup.”
“But, Miss Victoria,” Sally said desperately. “Reuben’s dead. Mister Reuben is dead.”
“I know he’s dead, Sally. All my boys are dead. But you and Emily are still alive and you must have your dinner tonight. Use the carrots Emily has picked in the soup. Let her peel them the way she likes to.”
“Are we not telling her about Reuben, Miss Victoria?” Sally asked, soft and trembling like a mouse crawling over the trap to get the cheese. “Are we to keep his death from her, too?”
“It will just frighten her,” Victoria answered, her eyes still closed but her hands coming up to grasp the arms of the rocking chair. “She won’t understand what it means and it will just frighten her. You’re not to mention it to her, Sally. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, Miss Victoria.”
“Good. No go along and do as I say.”
Victoria listened as Sally made her way off the veranda and back into the house. Only after she had heard the screen door snap shut, Sally’s footsteps shuffling off, and three full seconds of silence did she open her eyes.
Through her tears the world around her seemed little changed. Her flowering baskets still hung from the porch posts, the dusty street still cracked and split under the late afternoon sun, and the Langdons’s dog still whined and bellowed up the street to be let back in. The sunlight slanting through the clouds, the smell of petunias in the air, the sounds of clattering pots back in the kitchen, it all seemed very normal and ordinary, like any one of a thousand days she had spent doing the exact same thing.
But of course this day was different. Although he had now been dead two months -- two damned and disgusting months -- this was the day Victoria learned her boy had been killed, the boy who had been able to make her laugh when none of the others could, and who had had some small piece of the divine in him that he only showed through his art. Reuben was dead, and although the sun felt as hot and the flowers smelt as sweet, Victoria knew they and nothing else would ever be the same again. Zebulon, Marcus, Frederick, Reuben. One, two, three, four they had been born and one, two, three, four they had each been taken away, and every sun that rose and every flower that bloomed would forever remind Victoria of the cycle of life and death that had so brutally been visited on her family. With Sally and Emily safe in the back of the house and the street in front of her deserted in the afternoon sun, Victoria fell forward, cradled her face in her hands, and let the anguished sobs ripple through her body.
The rest of that painful day was like a dress inspection for Victoria, as if she had suddenly become one of the recruits her husband had spent a lifetime drilling. She felt like her six weeks of instruction had passed and it was time to polish her boots and shoulder her rifle and meet the regimental commanders. But unlike a soldier, Victoria was not aware of every trivial detail of her dress and appearance. Victoria moved through the rest of the day as if she was sleepwalking, aware of only one detail, that she must not let Emily sense anything was wrong, and that meant shutting down her emotions and acting like a wooden golem if necessary.
The inspection began quickly, just a few short minutes after Victoria had allowed her grief to crash over her and submerge her in its murky depths, when Victoria’s neighbor on the other side of Main Street -- her minister, an elderly man named Archibald Lynch with a horrible red scar on his face, the result of some childhood accident -- passed by on his way down to their church at the end of Elmwood Avenue, and saw Victoria bent over in her chair and shaking in silent sorrow.
“Blessed Father, Missus Andrews,” Lynch said softly after ascending the few steps to the floor of Victoria’s veranda. “What has happened?”
Victoria had not heard his footsteps and his words took her by surprise. Looking up in shock, she quickly tried to wipe her tears away, knowing with brutal certainty the inspection had begun and she was not ready for it.
“Oh, Reverend Lynch,” Victoria tried to say lightly, blinking her eyes at him as if they weren’t puffy and red with tears. “I didn’t hear you. How are you today?”
“How am I today?” Lynch said in surprise. “Missus Andrews, how are you? What on earth are you crying about? Have you received bad news from the front?”
Despite her attempt to restrain herself, the tears began flowing again. Lynch knew all about Victoria and her family and the sacrifices they had made so far in the war. She had sought his counsel and comfort several times during her ordeal, and he had always met her grief with the support and strength that befitted his office. There was no point in hiding the latest truth from him, and only a small part of Victoria wanted to.
“Oh, merciful God,” Lynch said, crouching down before her as he saw the anguish pass over Victoria’s face and her eyes begin to water anew. “It’s not Reuben, is it? Pray, tell me it’s not Reuben.”
Unable to speak, Victoria only nodded her head, and then dropped her face into Lynch’s shoulder to muffle the cries she could no longer contain.
Lynch instinctively wrapped a thin but still powerful arm around Victoria’s small shoulders and patted her head with his hand. “Oh, my poor child,” he said softly. “My poor, poor child. You have given more than anyone should be asked to give. Trust in the Lord’s grace, you must trust in the Lord’s grace.”
Victoria barely heard his words, not because he spoke too softly for her to hear, but because the sound of her own grief was roaring too much in her ears. She blindly sought solace in the blackness before her, the blackness of her closed eyes and the blackness of Lynch’s coat, but found none. What solace could there be after losing four sons to a menace she had never seen and could not rationally understand? After losing her youngest son and the brightest hope for what her own life could have been and was for? In her agony her brain could not wholly form the thoughts, but was there to be anything for her now besides the blackness surrounding her? Why did they have to die? Why did any of them have to die? What was it all for?
Lynch sat awkwardly on his haunches and gently rocked with Victoria as she drained whatever vehemence she had left into his vestments. He was only too glad to receive it, cooing reassuring scriptures to her and rubbing her back softly to encourage the release. In these troubled times, Lynch had often been the only thing left standing between members of his congregation and their total loss of faith, and Victoria Andrews was no exception. He experienced their misery as deeply as they did, but never complained about it, and did his very best to explain his and their on-going role in God’s great plan.
Lynch waited for Victoria’s sobs to subside to a point where she could hear him. “Pray with me,” he then said forcefully, breaking her out of his embrace so she could see his eyes. “Missus Andrews,” he said more softly, “will you pray with me?”
Victoria nodded her head, the tears feeling fresh and wet on her face for the first time in months and her arm coming up self-consciously to blot them away with her frilly cuff. The afternoon air felt warm and still around them, and all the sounds of the city had retreated into the background. They were already both on their knees, so Lynch simply grasped Victoria’s hand with both of his and bowed his head. As she listened to the minister speak, Victoria bowed her own head and draped the fingers of her free hand over the knotted cluster of age-spotted knuckles.
“Heavenly Father,” Lynch began softly, his voice no less rich with the resonance and weight he used to project it to the back pews on Sunday morning, “in the goodness and mercy of Your only son, Jesus Christ, we ask that You hear our prayer and cast Your loving and holy gaze on this blessed woman, who has lost four strong and righteous sons in the fight to defend their home and their way of life.”
Victoria squeezed her eyes tightly shut and held back a cry as Lynch gave voice to the awful fact of her life. She felt Lynch’s hands grip her captured one more firmly as she fought to steady herself in what had quickly grown into the stifling heat of the veranda.
“Father,” Lynch continued, “we ask that You receive Reuben as You have received Zebulon, Marcus, and Frederick before him into Your heavenly kingdom and raise him up with his brothers and your most treasured and holy angels. His life here was dedicated to the keeping of Your merciful commandments, and he was baptized and consecrated through the blessing of holy communion. He pledged himself to Your service and the service of his nation, and we ask that You, in Your infinite wisdom and mercy, keep and protect Reuben and his brothers in Your holy presence until such time as You see fit to reunite them with the parents that bore them.”
Victoria crumpled somewhat against Lynch’s shoulder and thought again there was nothing left for her, that God could take her to her reward whenever He was ready and it would not be soon enough.
With the leverage offered by their joined hands, Lynch pivoted his arms slightly forward and kept Victoria from toppling over. “And finally, Father, we ask that You bless and ease the burden of those You have decreed will remain behind -- Victoria Andrews, her husband Zebulon, and their daughter Emily. They are as much Your servants as the boys You have taken from them, and they will continue to worship and praise Your holy name in everything they do. We ask all this in Jesus’s name. Amen.”
“Amen,” Victoria said, her eyes still shut tightly against the harsh reality that had made her seek solace in prayer and her mind struggling to hold onto the hope that it would do any good.
“What are you doing, Mommy?”
It was Emily, who had appeared in the doorway leading out onto the veranda. She was wearing one of her favorite white dresses and the knees of her stockings were stained with mud from the back garden. In her hand she held one of the carrots she had been picking, its long, leafy stem flapping absently against her side.
“Emily,” Victoria said adoringly, turning towards her daughter and opening her eyes, but not rising from her knees. “How long have you been there, honey?”
“Not long,” Emily said easily, not understanding nor detecting the latent fear that prompted her mother’s question. “What are you doing?”
“We’re praying, Emmy,” Victoria said in the same sweet tone she always used with her daughter, a tone so thick with sugar it could hide any real emotion that lay underneath, like Victoria’s fear Emily might have just overheard them talking about Reuben’s death. “You remember Reverend Lynch, don’t you?”
“Yes!” Emily said happily, her broad face breaking open in a simple grin.
“Hello, Emily,” Lynch said, beginning to rise to his feet and helping Victoria regain hers.
“Hello,” Emily said politely, as she had been instructed, and then quickly to Victoria, “Mommy, why are you praying?”
Victoria stepped closer to Emily and put a gentle hand on the child’s shoulder. “We’re praying for Daddy and your brothers, Emmy,” she said. “We’re asking God to keep them safe and to send them back to us real soon.”
“Emmy wants to pray, too, Mommy!” Emily said, brightening as she had before when she had recognized Lynch. “Can Emmy pray, too?”
Victoria smiled at her daughter. “Of course you can, honey.”
“Because God listens,” Emily said hurriedly, “doesn’t He, Mommy? God listens when we pray.”
Victoria opened her mouth to respond but found herself choking on the sugarcoated words. They were there. The sweet and reassuring words Emily needed to hear, those that made the world understandable for Emily, they were there. There in the back of her throat and in the front of her mind. But they were suddenly blocked by thoughts that seemed alien and hostile to Victoria, thoughts that made it impossible for her to say what needed to be said and what she had always believed to be true. Raw and selfish, the thoughts paralyzed Victoria and made her hesitate.
Not to me, He doesn’t. God hasn’t heard my prayers in four years.
Fortunately for Emily, Lynch jumped in a second after he realized Victoria’s struggle. “Yes, He does, Emily. God listens to all our prayers.”
“Then Emmy wants to pray, too!” she cried triumphantly. “For Daddy and Zeb and Marcus and Fred and Reuben. Mommy, can Emmy pray for them all?”
“Yes,” Victoria said quickly, shoving the paralyzing thought out of the way and taking Emily by the hand. “Come on, kneel down and bow your head with me. We’ll pray to God together.”
It was all Victoria could do to keep the tears out of her eyes until Emily had assumed the requested position beside her on the veranda floor. Lynch joined them and took Emily’s other hand, removing the carrot in the process and holding it for her, and together they listened to Emily’s innocent prayer.
“Dear God,” Emily said, her eyes closed tightly and her arms involuntarily trying to pull together so that she could fold her hands. “Please keep Daddy safe while he is off fighting the war, and bless Zeb and Marcus and Fred and Reuben, too. Especially Reuben, please. Emmy loves them all but Emmy loves Reuben best. Please send him home soon. Thank you and amen.”
Thank you and amen. Later that night, while Victoria sat at her writing desk trying to compose some sort of response to her husband, those words and the simple and confident way in which they were expressed came back to her with special poignancy and understanding. Thank you and amen. As if that was all there was to it, as if there was no remaining question about whether the prayer that had preceded them had been heard. It hadn’t been “thank you for listening,” it had been “thank you for doing,” and the amen was only Emily’s addled way of shutting the book on that particular worry and moving onto the next thing -- playing with her dolls or picking more carrots or helping her Mommy set the table. Emily knew God heard her prayers because her Mommy had told her so. She told Emily every time she had come to her and knelt down beside her and asked Emily to pray with her, to pray for the continued safety of her Daddy and her four brothers. Her four living brothers, whose names she could rattle off in one way and one way only. And when her Mommy could no longer stomach the lie, could no longer believe for herself that God sat watching over them in heaven and was making sure their greatest fears did not befall them, then everything was still okay for Emily and her five-year-old mind, because there was Reverend Lynch, God’s own messenger on earth, ready to step in and lift up the pretty shell Victoria had built around her when Victoria herself no longer had the will to support it.
God listens to all our prayers, Emmy. Sure He does. And your brothers are all still alive.
Victoria did not finish the letter to her husband that night. Indeed, she had hardly begun it, writing little more than the date and the salutation before staring off into space for long periods of time, thinking about her dead sons and her idiot daughter. She loved Emily, loved her as much as any of the boys, but was always aware of the gulf that existed between them, the gulf of the girl’s retardation and the way it both kept Emily from understanding the truth of countless situations and Victoria from trying to explain them to her. And now, Emily was all Victoria had left. The connections she had felt with her sons, the connections of equals, especially the artistic sensibilities she had shared with Frederick and Reuben, now they were all gone, and all she had left was the perpetual disconnect that was her relationship with her daughter. Victoria loved her, and she would care for her and protect her for as long as she lived, but Victoria had known for years her relationship with Emily would never grow beyond that, would never become anything other than caregiver and she would never share with Emily the kind of kinship she had ever so briefly shared with Reuben. She didn’t hate Emily for that; it wasn’t truly her fault, after all. But Victoria was angry as well as sad about it, and in those moments when passion swelled her emotions into hate, there seemed like only one logical place to direct her venom.
Reverend Lynch had asked her to come to his evening service that night, had practically begged her, and Victoria had told him she would. But even as she had said it she had known it was a lie, a lie like the thousands of others she had told in her life -- soft, warm, comfortable, and utterly convincing. The appointed time came and the appointed time passed, and Victoria had made no effort to drag herself out of her domestic misery and walk the few blocks down the dusty street to the absolution offered by Reverend Lynch’s church. She was not going to church that night and probably would never go again. What would be the point? In the depths of her darkness and heartache Victoria was convinced God had betrayed her, ignoring her pleas for mercy and punishing her unjustly for some misunderstood wrong she had committed.
She spent the rest of that night reading Reuben’s and her husband’s letters over and over again into the wee hours of the morning. She marveled at the joy Reuben’s letter could still bring her, a crazy and delusional joy given the knowledge of what resided in the other envelope, and gave herself over to the misery and sadness evoked by Zebulon’s letter, falling each time from the highest to lowest possible emotions as if her world had been pulled out from under her feet. She didn’t know how God could be so cruel, what she had done to deserve such a wretched circumstance, and with the night seeming to crush in on her from all sides, the fire in her breast flickering like the candle she had placed on her writing desk, she cursed His holy name and pledged herself never to trust in His hollow words again.
Victoria awoke late the next morning, the sun well past her east-facing bedroom window and casting her chamber in an eerie noontime shadow. Sally had thought it best not to disturb her, knowing Victoria would call her if she truly needed something. There was no moment of reprieve for Victoria, no instant upon waking when the sorrows of the day before were temporarily forgotten and the morning seemed as bright as any other happy one she had experienced. From the moment Victoria opened her eyes and consciousness sank back into her she knew Reuben was dead. The knowledge was now so much a part of her she could not leave it behind, either in her dreams or in the drowsy netherworld between sleeping and waking.
She lay silently in bed for a good long while, listening to the sounds of Sally and Emily moving about in the house beneath her and wondering absently how well either of them would get along without her. Without attempting to, she curiously found herself speculating on the worst possible outcome for the two of them -- Sally being sold and put to work in the sugar fields of the far South and Emily being placed in an institution and forgotten about -- and neither seemed to make much of an impression on her. The ideas made her sad, to be sure, but that bit of sadness was like pouring a teacup of water into the ocean of sadness she already felt. Reuben and her boys were dead, and whether she went next or the worst possible thing happened to Emily or Sally, it did not seem to matter.
Victoria would not get out of bed today. Not if she could help it. She had had times like this after each of her boys had been killed, times in which she had been paralyzed by her grief, but this time it was different. Before it had always been a kind of numbness, a feeling as if all four of her limbs had fallen asleep at the same time and she had lost the ability to move them. Now, the numbness had returned, creeping out from her limbs to encompass her whole body, but now it was less like she was unable to move and more like she was unwilling to do so. She could move. Numbness and all she knew she could move. She could get up and get dressed and go downstairs and eat the breakfast Sally would surely prepare for her, the numbness never really leaving her and instead becoming part of the essence that was her new being. She could do all that, but as she had asked herself last night about going to church, what would be the point? She wanted to die and doing all those things would just keep her alive.
Dimly aware of a pressing need buried deep within her numbness, Victoria focused on it for a moment and realized without emotion that her bladder was full and needed to be emptied. With great effort she rolled herself across the bed until she was able to drop her feet onto the floor and position the chamber pot. It was a mechanical motion, something her muscles did not need the higher centers of her brain to help her coordinate, and as she made her water into the bowl she wondered imaginatively how long it would take to starve herself to death. How many more chamber pots would she need to fill with her waste if she simply did not let another bite of food or sip of water pass her lips? Would she suffer much? She would surely suffer more than Reuben did, who seemed from her husband’s letter to have been killed almost instantly. But what about her other sons? It seemed oddly logical to Victoria that if she was going to kill herself it was important she do it in a way that caused her to suffer more than her sons did. Could such a thing be measured?
Placing the chamber pot back on the nightstand, splashing some of her hot urine onto the doily in the process, Victoria rolled back into bed and pulled the blanket up over her body. Marcus had languished in his hospital tent for a week before he died, Victoria knew, dehydrated from dysentery and delirious from fever, and Victoria supposed that starving herself to death might in some ways match that kind of suffering. But Zebulon and Frederick had both been killed in battle, and Victoria had no real understanding of what each of them may have suffered as their lives had slowly drained out of them. Neither had been killed instantly as Reuben probably had, that much had seemed clear from the letters she had received. Zebulon had been hit by three balls, fired in the confusion of the early war by his own Southern comrades -- once in the right leg, a second in the belly, and a third in the left arm -- and had bled to death on the battlefield before any help could reach him. Frederick had died in similar circumstances, the fatal bullet originating from some unknown Union rifle and cutting through the soft tissues and cartilage of his neck and spinal column. This was all her husband’s letters had told her about their deaths, the subject of their suffering conspicuously absent from both his letters and the ones sent by their respective commanding officers. But Victoria had a mother’s instinct about these things, and whether it was driven by some kind of celestial bond she shared with them or her own paranoid fears, the subject of their suffering had weighed heavily enough on her mind to leave a few distinct impressions. As she had done countless times before she called these images back to her mind and saw Zebulon, her oldest and protector of all his siblings, crying out for her help as the blood shot up in spurts from the severed arteries in his leg and as he clutched desperately at the torn flesh, and Frederick, the writer and chronicler of the human condition, paralyzed from his wound but still very much alive, stepped on and trampled to a slow and agonizing death by the soldiers who continued to clash above him over the meaningless piece of ground on which he had fallen.
These images usually made her cry whenever she allowed them to occupy her attention, but not this time. This time she mulled over them and tried to sharpen their clarity, that weak and fearful thing inside her that normally made her cry, that mother’s heart, now dead just like her sons. When there were no more tears to shed over something, did that stop it from being sad? Or was it still sad, perpetually so, and the exhaustion of tears only made it tragic, too?
It was with these thoughts in her mind that Victoria became aware of the sharp and sickly sweet smell of the urine she had just deposited into her chamber pot. She hated that smell, had always hated it first thing in the morning, and had usually left the pot quickly behind her, wrapping herself in a housecoat and going down to see about breakfast while Sally came up, disposed of it for her, and prepared the room for her return and dressing. But today, as she had already decided, Victoria had no intention of leaving her bed. If she wanted someone to clean out her chamber pot, she was going to have to call Sally up here to do it.
Victoria sighed. “Sally,” she said, her voice no louder than her average speaking tone. There was no way Sally would have heard her, but it was about all her exhausted lungs could muster. Victoria lay there for a few moments, listening to the movements of people in the house below her.
“Sally!” Victoria called again, this time forcing enough air through her vocal cords to create a shout, and was surprised by the almost instant response of her bedroom door opening and Sally walking in.
“Yes, Miss Victoria?”
“Oh, Sally,” Victoria said, “wash out my chamber pot, will you?” The need to neutralize that awful smell getting the better of her curiosity as to why Sally had been waiting outside her door, as she surely must have been.
“Yes, Miss Victoria,” Sally said again, coming forward to cradle Victoria’s pot in her dark brown hands and retreating slowly so as not to spill the pot’s contents. By necessity, she left the door to the room open when she left.
Victoria allowed her head to roll to the side so she could look out through the door and into the hallway beyond. Sally would be back soon, she knew. After washing out the pot and dropping some lilac leaves into the bowl, Sally would return to place the vessel on the nightstand, and then she would leave and close the door again. She would probably leave of her own accord, being astute enough to recognize Victoria was in no mood for company, but even if it was not of her own accord, she would leave because Victoria would ask her to, because Sally always did what Victoria asked, because asking was not really asking at all, but commanding, as one traditionally did with slaves. She would have Sally leave and close the door because this day, this first full day with the knowledge that none of her sons survived, Victoria could not bear even that part of the outside world represented by the seven feet of the upstairs corridor now visible to her. Her own bedroom was difficult enough for her to deal with, cluttered as it was with all the memories and mementos of a life raising children, that she couldn’t stand to even think of things that existed outside these four walls. Rolling her head slowly in the other direction, Victoria closed her eyes and blindly sought comfort in the darkness that enveloped her.
When Sally returned, she surprised Victoria by speaking to her, rather than quietly placing the pot on the nightstand and slipping silently back into the outside world Victoria wanted no part of.
“Miss Victoria,” Sally said softly, after the few moments of silence which had followed her setting the chamber pot back into place. “May I bring you something to eat?”
Victoria did not turn to look at her, showing Sally nothing but the back of her head and the slope of her shoulders. She did not even speak to Sally, hoping silently to herself she could get the slave to leave without using her voice.
“Miss Victoria?” Sally said, louder and more persistently. “Are you hungry? Would you like me to bring you up some breakfast?”
“No,” Victoria said into her pillow. “No, I want to be left alone.”
“You’ve had several callers so far this morning,” Sally said, her voice clearly indicating she had heard Victoria but also moving forward as if she had been offered an invitation to conversation. “Reverend Lynch stopped by first thing, then Missus Langdon and several other ladies from church. They all want to know if you are well and if there is anything they can do to help.”
Victoria offered no response to this information. She couldn’t imagine what kind of response would be appropriate or expected of her. She was just giving up and deciding to offer no kind of response at all when Sally spoke again.
“I thanked them all for coming but told them you were not ready to receive visitors yet. Most said they would come back tomorrow.”
More information that seemed useless to Victoria. This time she did not even try to formulate a response. “Sally, I wish to be left alone.”
“All right, Miss Victoria,” Sally said. “Emily and I were going to start working on one of those jigsaw puzzles you brought home from France a few years ago. I know Emily would love it if you came down to help us.”
Emily. She had a daughter named Emily, a replacement child for a daughter she had once had named Elizabeth. She had also once had four sons but now all she had was a daughter named Emily who would never understand anything beyond the comprehension of a five-year-old. Shouldn’t she get up? Shouldn’t she go to her daughter in this terrible time and share some of her grief with her and help her understand the purpose their lives still had? Isn’t that what both her husband and Reverend Lynch had asked her to do, Zebulon in his letter to her and Lynch in his prayer to God? Forget Reuben, forget the others, they were in God’s hands now, focus on Emily, Emily was in hers and Emily still needed her? She should do that. She knew she should, but Victoria could not see how such a thing was possible. Not today. Not so soon after losing Reuben. And did she really need to? Eventually, yes, she would have to connect, but did she really need to do so today? Today of all days? Sure, she had a feebleminded daughter named Emily. But she also had a house slave named Sally.
“Sally, please,” Victoria said. “Go do the jigsaw puzzle with Emily. I need to be left alone now.”
“All right, Miss Victoria,” Sally said again, her voice this time carrying the conciliation it had not before. “I’ll go. The postman delivered another letter for you today. I’ll leave it here on the nightstand in case you want to read it.”
Victoria remained silent as she waited for Sally to fulfill her promise. She heard the slave step forward, evidently to place the letter on the nightstand, and then a slow and shuffling gait as Sally left the room and shut the door behind her.
Victoria’s first emotion after Sally’s departure was one of overwhelming relief that Sally was gone, the door was closed, and she was once again cloistered away in her solitary cocoon. Next and almost immediately she felt shame and guilt over what she had just thought about Emily. Then it was anger and frustration at the unseen forces that had made Emily the way she was, and then crushing sadness over all she had lost and all that would never be. She began to cry softly to herself, not because she was worried about anyone hearing her but because her strength was gone and all she had left were the tortures of the mind.
She let the crying run its course, curious in a detached way she hadn’t been after the deaths of her other three sons if it would, in fact, eventually run its course, if it would eventually come to an end and leave her in some other emotional place when it was over. Maybe she had been too afraid to ask herself that question before, too afraid to discover the crying never would end and the way she felt upon receiving the news that her son had died was the way she would feel for the rest of her life. She was not afraid of that question now. In an odd kind of way she now welcomed this and a dozen other morbid speculations. But what was more curious was even though she had been afraid to ask the question before, the answer three times before -- four times before, really, since Victoria had so recently reminded herself of losing the baby Elizabeth -- the answer each time was no, she was not going to feel the anguish at the same intensity for the rest of her life. It had lessened with each passing day and eventually her life returned to some semblance of normalcy. But now that she was no longer afraid of the question, the answer seemed incontrovertibly to be the opposite. Time would not heal this wound because there was no longer any wound within her that could be healed. Reuben’s death had not wounded her, it had killed her, killed something precious inside that enabled her to recover from injury, and every day she shambled through from now until the end of time would be accompanied by the same level of suffering that worked to suffocate her now.
Completely lost in her grief, Victoria rolled away from her saturated pillow and caught sight of the envelope Sally had left propped up against her chamber pot on the nightstand. The handwriting was unfamiliar to her, but even without reading the name in the upper left hand corner of the envelope and even in her demented and distracted state, Victoria knew exactly what it was when she laid her eyes upon it.
It’s from him, Victoria told herself. Whoever he is this time. It’s the letter from Reuben’s commanding officer, the next one up the chain who survived the explosion that took my son’s life, writing to inform me of his death and to thank me for my sacrifice.
It was almost enough to send Victoria over the edge again, almost enough to send her into another blind fit of sorrow and loathing. She had received three such letters already, letters from men who were total strangers to her and not much closer to her sons. They had all been thoughtful and heartfelt in the expressions of regret and sympathy, and there was some part of Victoria that accepted the declarations of bravery and fidelity they had made on behalf of her sons. But she hated the letters, too. Hated them for the news they brought and for the simple way they had tried to sum up the lives of her children, as if they had meant nothing more to her than what they had meant to these strange men, that she had borne them and raised them so that their lives could be used to purchase some small measure of the freedom sought by their new nation. Seeing the fourth such letter placed so directly before her it was all she could do to keep herself from rolling back and attempting to smother herself in her tear-soaked pillow.
But she didn’t. The morbid curiosity that seemed to possess her when she speculated on her own suffering seized her again and kept her from falling into that chasm. Suffering, the curiosity nagged her, you wanted to know how Reuben suffered. Well, that letter might tell you. It might contain some small nugget of Reuben’s suffering that your husband’s letter hadn’t. Something implied and horrible that you can hold close to your breast the way you used to hold Reuben. Something secret and private about his last few moments on earth that you don’t have to share with anyone, that you can keep here in this room with you as your own personal hell, to torture yourself with and to use as a curse against God.
Propping herself up on a few pillows, Victoria reached over and picked up the letter. She brought it closer so she could read the envelope, but even as she did so she was surprised by how thick and heavy the envelope was. The three other ones she had received like this had been slim affairs, single sheet missives with wide margins and lots of flourishes on the letters. Long on sympathy but short on paragraphs, they reminded Victoria of two primary facts -- how little the writer had actually known about her and her son, and how many letters just like hers the writer must have written during the war. But this one was massive by comparison, the envelope straining to contain the pages stuffed within, as if the author had sent her a novel rather than the traditional note of regret and thanks.
Victoria examined the front of the envelope. It was addressed to her, Mrs. Victoria Andrews, at their address on Elmwood Avenue in Columbia, South Carolina. The return address indicated it came from “Col. R. D. Elliot” of the 28th South Carolina Regiment, stationed in Petersburg, Virginia. The handwriting was large and elegant, with plenty of the swoops and flourishes Victoria herself had been taught in the finer schools. The envelope itself was yellowed and wrinkled, as if it had seen other service before being called on to deliver its current contents.
Victoria turned the envelope quickly over and broke the adhesive seal with the little finger of her left hand. She withdrew the folded packet of paper and dropped the envelope onto the bed covers. Although the packet was as thick as she had expected, it was obviously not a single letter written over numerous pieces of the same stationery. There was instead a single sheet of paper that had been folded over a collection of other sheets of different sizes. Unfolding the outer sheet, Victoria also let the inner ones fall onto her lap as she brought the script written on the outer one up to her face to read.
August 2, 1864
Petersburg, Virginia
Dear Mrs. Andrews,
It is my sad duty to inform you of the death of your son, Reuben Andrews, a private under my command in the 28th South Carolina Regiment in the great Army of Northern Virginia. Private Andrews was killed in the early morning hours of July 30th, when the enemy exploded an enormous mine directly under my regiment’s position in the fortifications we have built in defense of Petersburg. As near as can be determined, Private Andrews was killed almost instantly along with twelve other members of the regiment and more than thirty from the neighboring 22nd North Carolina. His remains have been recovered and identified by your husband, General Zebulon Andrews, who is currently seeing that they are laid to rest in the new veterans’ cemetery on the outskirts of Richmond. Allow me to offer my deepest regret and sympathy for your loss. We have lost a great number of our boys in this noble fight, and will likely lose many more before it is over. They are the true heroes, every last one of them, and your son is no exception. Your sacrifice is not unnoticed by your nation or by this soldier.
Your most humble servant,
Rutherford D. Elliot
Colonel, 28th South Carolina, commanding
The words made little impression on Victoria. Her senses were so deadened by the shock she had received it would take much more than these cold and formulaic words from a stranger to stir the emotions of sorrow and loss that had seemed to solidify around her heart in a thick, sticky paste. She reflected on the message almost clinically, realizing the letter contained not a single piece of information about her dead son she hadn’t already learned from Zebulon’s letter. And what about these other pieces of paper that had been enclosed in the envelope? Why was there no mention of them?
Victoria was in the process of tossing Colonel Elliot’s letter aside when the slanted morning light caught it at the right angle and revealed to Victoria’s red and swollen eyes that more was written on the other side. Turning the temporarily transparent parchment over, Victoria saw a second message scrawled on the bottom half of the paper, hidden from her before by the way the paper had been folded. It was in a hand different from the one that had composed the formal message, the penmanship small and somewhat crooked, almost as if whoever had wrote it had been forced to do it with their dumb hand.
Mrs. Andrews—
Please forgive the cold formality of this letter written by a member of my regimental staff. The fortunes of war have required me to pen so many of these unfortunate letters I no longer have the time nor the emotional capacity to write them all myself in the heartfelt and gracious tone they all deserve. A recent recruit to my regiment, I did not know your son well, but can tell from the enclosed documents which we found on his person after his death that he was a young man of great intellect and sensitivity who could have served his country in far greater ways if he had been given the chance. He clearly intended for you to see these documents and I saw no reason to keep them from you on account of his death. I hope you can find some solace in them and wish you all the possible hope and joy that this life has yet to offer.
Yours most respectfully,
R. D. Elliot
After reading these words, Victoria really did toss Elliot’s letter aside and turned her attention squarely on the two folded packets of paper that rested on her coverlet, whatever secrets they contained pressed against themselves in their creased and crumpled planes. One was obviously a few sheets of stationery, the same kind her son Reuben had been using to write her since his departure for the front; the other was just as clearly a single piece of sketchbook paper, folded and double folded so it would fit inside the envelope Colonel Elliot had used.
She knew exactly what they were. She should have known before, but it wasn’t until she saw Colonel Elliot’s handwritten remarks that her brain had been able to make the connection. The sketchbook paper was one of Reuben’s latest sketches, a portrait of one of the men he had shared his fated trench with, and the stationery was a letter he had been working on before he had been killed. A letter, no doubt, to Victoria herself. Who else had Reuben written to after he had left for the army?
Victoria’s hand hesitated for only a moment, hovering indecisively over the folded-up piece of sketchbook paper, before shifting to the side and scooping up the letter. Turning the stationery around and unfolding it so that her son’s delicate handwriting came into view, Victoria sobbed openly as she came to understand the meaning of the very first line.
July 29, 1864
July 29th. The day before he died. The day before the enemy exploded their mine and killed my son.
July 29, 1864
Petersburg, Virginia
Dear Mother,
I have only just sent you my last letter and here I am beginning another one. I know you will forgive the indulgence, but based on the events of the last two days, I feel compelled to record some of this activity for your benefit while it is still fresh in my mind. If I wait, I’m afraid too much will be lost, that I’ll fail to remember all the meaningful nuances that seem so vivid to me now and which, for at least this small moment in time, have allowed me to finally glimpse the raw and unsullied truth that lies beneath all that we do.
My God, what is he talking about? Victoria helplessly thought as she read these first few lines. What can he possibly be talking about?
Yesterday I went to visit Father. As I mentioned in my last letter I had decided I would like to sketch his portrait. By the time you read this I hope you have received my previous letter, as a lot of what I’m about to relay will have even less meaning if you don’t have the other one as background. But, our mail service being what it is, perhaps its delivery is not an assumption I should make. Suffice it to say I have started sketching portraits to help pass the time in these awful trenches, portraits in pencil and charcoal of the men here serving with me, and in the process of doing so I have discovered a landscape broader and deeper than any I have ever encountered before. As my previous letter specifically says, there is something present in these men’s faces, something that approaches the truth everyone seeks and most never find, something both large and small, both elusive and manifestly present, and I am struggling to capture its stark reality in my art, a struggle I have so far not been able to overcome. I had thought if I could succeed anywhere, with anyone, it would be with Father, with that face I know so well, and if anyone could see the change this war has brought over us all, it would be you, you who know him better than anyone.
That’s Zebulon, Victoria immediately thought to herself, looking down at the folded-up piece of sketchbook paper that still lay undisturbed on her counterpane. He’s sketched Zebulon, and now he’s sent it to me, sent me the sketch so I can see what has become of him, of them all. But no, Victoria oddly had to remind herself. Reuben hasn’t sent it. Reuben’s dead. He intended to, but he was taken before he could complete it.
Father was able to see me readily enough, although he did express some initial reservations about sitting for the portrait in the middle of a campaign. I anticipated this -- you know how serious Father is about war -- and brought along some of the other sketches I had made to show him. He won’t argue if I accuse him of not having the same eye for art that you do, Mother…
Mother, Victoria thought with instinctive happiness, he called me Mother. And then, almost subconsciously, below the current of that blissful thought, He’s addressing me directly from beyond the grave.
…but I thought the sketches would help me show him how deadly serious I was about my request and even give him some brief glimpse into the opaque mystery I was pursuing. Whatever the reason, after some cajoling I was able to get him to agree to sit for me if I could finish it quickly.
Mother, I made not one but three sketches of him that afternoon, protected as best we could be by the general’s bunker that had been built for him and his staff, all the while he was receiving reports and issuing orders to an endless parade of underlings and non-commissioned officers. They paid no attention to me trying to steal a prolonged look at his face while my pencil moved rapidly across the paper.
I can see him doing exactly that. In twenty-seven years of marriage that man has never sat still for a moment. Oh, Reuben, she thought as clearly as if she was speaking to him, you should have made him, you should have made him sit down and focus on nothing else. For five minutes, five minutes is all you would have needed.
The first sketch did not turn out at all to my liking. I did not see it while I was making it, but when I had finished I realized I had not sketched him as he stood before me then, I had instead sketched him as I remember him appearing in that portrait on our parlor wall. Regal, proud, defiant, and, forgive me, Mother, completely unrealistic. I don’t think Father ever really looked like that, not even when that portrait artist came into our home to capture him from life, and he certainly does not look like that now.
You’re wrong, Reuben, you’re wrong. Your father was always proud to wear his uniform, his blue one as well as his gray one, and he did look regal in either the gold buttons or the gold braids.
So I quickly flipped to a new page in my sketchbook and started over again. I don’t think Father even noticed, he was so engrossed in what he was doing. I did my best to rid my mind of that portrait on the parlor wall and I forced myself to keep my pencil from moving until I got a good look at that aspect of his face I was working on. With all his activity it took me longer to complete this second sketch, and in the end I was no more satisfied with it as I was the first. The likeness was a good one, but much like the first that looked too much like someone’s idealized version of my father, the honesty of this one was also clouded by someone’s emotional predisposition -- my own. The sketch was clearly that of my father, but it was not my father as he stood before me yesterday in his bunker attached to the trenches of Petersburg. Instead, it was my father as I remembered him as a boy, long before the war, when both he and I thought duty and honor were all a man ever needed to see himself through life’s struggles.
“Reuben, Reuben,” Victoria said, unconsciously speaking aloud, “you were always such a moody child. Your father taught you that lesson well. Don’t lose sight of it now.” And as quick as that, in the space of seven short paragraphs, Victoria’s mind had forgotten Reuben was dead and had allowed him to live again through the words of this posthumous letter.
There being a lull in Father’s activities at that moment, he came over and stood by my shoulder, looking down onto the sketchpad.
“That’s good,” I remember him saying. “Your mother will like that one. It looks more like the man she married than I do.”
“Oh, Zebulon,” Victoria said, blushing in spite of herself. “You devil.”
I’m sure you’ll recognize Father’s wry sense of humor in that remark, but in his own way he had hit the nail right on the head. Yes, I told him, it does look too much like the man Mother married, like the man I looked up to when I was a boy, but that was not why I had come there to sketch him. I didn’t want a remembrance; a wistful look back on the imagined glory we all thought would protect us like a shield. I didn’t want something Mother could add to her fanciful collection of portraits of people we all thought had existed but never really had. I wanted to sketch him as he really was -- the lines, the creases, the grime, all of it -- not because I wanted to insult him or take away whatever hope Mother had left of his safe return, but because I knew somewhere within the curves and contours of his face the truth which had brought us all together was just beginning to make itself known. I had seen it in the faces of my fellow soldiers, I told him, and I could see it in his face right now, and if he just gave me fifteen minutes of uninterrupted attention, I could tease that truth out with my pencils and charcoal and let the rest of the world see it, too. Please, Father, I begged him. Fifteen minutes. If I can’t capture it now, I’ll never be able to capture it again.
I said this all to him…
“No, you didn’t, Reuben,” Victoria said, real anger in her voice instead of the muted frustration that comes with transgressions far removed. “You couldn’t talk to your father that way.”
…even though I knew he wouldn’t know what I was talking about. It’s not that I blame him, since I don’t think I even said what I wanted to say, what I needed to say to make what I was feeling inside understood by others. That’s always been difficult for me, you know that, Mother, and maybe that’s why I started to draw at such an early age, to say the things I felt inside that I never could find the words to describe, and this felt like the biggest and most complicated unspoken thing I ever needed to say. But I was desperate. With Zeb and Marcus and Fred already dead and gone…
My boys, Victoria’s heart cried, deluded still into thinking only the three of them were gone, deluded by the duplicity of her conniving brain that could at the same time hide the truth of their deaths from her daughter as well as deny it to herself.
…I didn’t know how much longer either one of us would have and so I forced the tangled and unconnected thoughts together into a jumble of words and tried to make Father understand what I was feeling inside. I talked about my shadowy and obscured glimpse at the truth which lay beneath all our pageantry and ritual, this seamless and unadorned fabric that wove together all our lives, and how important it was to me that I shine the only light of possible comprehension I had, the light of my own artistic impulse, upon it and see once and for all its threads in each of their individual beauty and how they intertwined to form the world as we knew it.
Father had no idea what I was talking about, and you probably don’t either…
Oh, but I do, Reuben, Victoria thought, more with her heart than with her mind, an appreciation for the true tragedy of his death slowly building back into something her mind would have to acknowledge. I really do.
…or at least won’t until perhaps you see the sketch Father agreed to sit for after listening to my lamentations. He did not understand the source of my desire, but he saw how much in earnest I was to fulfill it, and he willingly kept his orderlies at bay for the requested fifteen minutes and sat still in quiet reflection while I went back to work with my pencil.
With nothing else to distract him, I asked Father to take a seat on his camp stool and stare off in the direction of the morning sun coming in through the eye-level window slits in his bomb shelter. Positioning myself so that I could see the light shine full on his face, I asked him not to move or say anything. Contrary to my expectations, he did exactly that, perhaps relishing the opportunity for some quiet reflection, the first, given his schedule, he might have seen in many days.
For the first several minutes his face was like a stone carving to me. It revealed none of the thoughts or doubts that must have lain below the surface, and I busied myself with sketching only the outline of his head, the slope of his shoulders, and the ribbons and braids that decorated his collar and lapels. But after some short time had passed, time in which the only sounds we heard came from outside the bunker -- the shouts of exhausted men, the scrapes of tireless shovels, and the whine of errant shells -- I saw the change come softly over his features, the change I had patiently waited for, the change that occurred when the outer veneer is rubbed off something to reveal the battered and cracked surface underneath.
Mother, if you have not yet looked at the portrait I’ve enclosed with this letter, then I ask you not to look at it for a few moments longer. I won’t bother trying to explain in words what I’ve labored so hard to capture in my art, except to say in the time I spent marking and darkening the lines on my sketchbook paper, Father was no longer my father and I was no longer his son. We had stopped being that to each other and had instead become something larger than either of us alone or both of us put together. Father’s face was no longer something that defined him as an individual. In the shadow and light of that unforeseeable dawn it had become a reflection of the great plight of all mankind, and the strange juxtaposition of its familial and universal familiarity affected me so deeply I had a hard time holding my pencil steady in my shaking hand. It was my father’s face, of course it was, but at the same time it was every father’s face, every father all the way back to old Adam himself, and it was asking the same questions that have always been asked and have never been answered since the beginning of time.
The letter ended there. No close, no signature, nothing. Just that strange and wonderful thought that had come from the mind of her living son who was now dead.
Dead, Victoria’s mind noted from an almost scientific distance. He is dead, isn’t he? He was alive when he wrote this, but he isn’t anymore.
With that same clinical perspective, Victoria knew Reuben had meant to write more, that he had simply broken off there for some perfectly understandable and mundane reason, with every intention of coming back at a more convenient time to continue or conclude the letter. But in her heart -- Her mother’s heart? Had it survived? Had it really survived, or was it in fact dead like her four sons? -- she also knew other forces were at work, forces that would keep Reuben from returning forever, that would keep whatever truths he meant to reveal next forever hidden from her view. For the sudden and incongruous end to which his letter had come reacquainted Victoria, who had allowed herself to be drawn into a vision of Reuben’s continuing life by the smooth and effortless flow of his words, with the brutal and cold reality of her son’s death. Reuben was gone and this letter would never be finished. All she had left to help her understand his mind and the way it saw the world around him in those last few hours before his death was the folded up piece of sketchbook paper that lay on the blanket before her.
Letting Reuben’s letter drop to her side, Victoria took a long and steady look at that piece of paper. There was a sketch on it all right. She couldn’t tell what it was but the dark strokes of Reuben’s pencil were clearly visible within the folds and through the semi-transparent vellum.
Do I look? Victoria asked, chiding herself immediately for the foolishness of the question but still somehow unable to bring herself to pick up the paper and open it. What if I don’t like what I see? What if it tells me something I’d rather not know? It’s sure to speak to me, Reuben’s art always has. What if it tells me something I don’t want to hear?
Like what? a voice not unlike her own seemed to toll within her head. That war is brutal and ugly and that it changes people -- those that live as well as those that die -- changes them in ways no one ever expects? You know that, Victoria. You’ve known that for years. Ever since your husband came back from Mexico you’ve known war is not something to entrust your loved ones to.
Yes, Victoria answered the voice, audibly or not she would never know. Yes, but this is Reuben. Reuben who has been closer to my heart than any other. My beautiful and courageous boy who said the things I always wanted to say but never had the opportunity or talent to do so. My heart stopped with each letter he wrote from the front, fearing the change that had happened to them all would happen to him, that the letters he wrote would reveal the change within him and he would stop being the lamp that lit my world. His letters never changed. Even in this one today he is still the boy I love, but that sketch isn’t any letter. It’s a piece of his art, and art, not words, is where Reuben truly lived, where the thing within him shined the brightest. If that’s been changed, I don’t know what I’m going to do. If this damned and awful war has killed his art the way it has killed him and all his brothers, then there really is no more point. Then I really am going to take my own life and flee from the darkness this war has left behind.
But you have to know. One way or the other you have to know. Reuben is dead. This is the last piece of art he will ever create. If his vision is still there, that will be enough, won’t it? Won’t that be enough to go on living?
But I’m afraid. All this talk about truth in the faces of the men he served with. Truth that transcends their individuality and connects them all together with everyone who has ever struggled for anything. I don’t understand it. I don’t know what he’s trying to say.
Don’t lie to yourself. You know exactly what Reuben is talking about. You’re just afraid he has found it, has found the coarse fabric from which we are all cut, and that it has changed him in the same way it has changed you.
Yes, Victoria admitted. I am afraid.
Against her own conscious will, it seemed, Victoria’s fingers found the folded-up piece of sketchbook paper and opened it slowly to reveal its prisoner. Her eyes did not recognize any part of it until it was completely revealed before her, and even then it took a few seconds to bring the blurry and smudged image into focus. As advertised, it was a portrait of her husband, the head and shoulders so familiar to her eyes and so sympathetic to her heart.
“God in heaven,” Victoria said aloud, as the eyes of her husband stared back at her as they must have stared back at her son.
In all the years she had known him Victoria had never seen her husband look this way before, look the way Reuben had captured him, look the way he must have been in the uncertain light of his bombproof behind the Petersburg line. The eyes, the lines around them, the depressions in the cheeks; Zebulon appeared as both a trapped animal who had been chased so long the fear of death had finally overwhelmed its instinct to fight and as a man whose patriotic willingness to die for his country had decayed into a pathetic and abject certainty that sacrifice was right around the corner. He was no longer the soldier whose portrait hung on the wall of her front parlor. In the eyes of his son who claimed to see truth in the faces of those who surrounded him, Zebulon Andrews had already become a casualty.
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