I didn't want to go back to school in the fall, but Teddy insisted on it. We had a contest for a new name for the girls' academy. I entered my selection, the Conners Brothers Academy. My brothers found out and wrote a note withdrawing my bid, embarrassed.
In the end it was called the Bulloch Academy for Young Ladies, after the town's leading family.
It was a bitter winter. The women in our house were "doing their part" for the war. Viola and Carol joined a group who were gathering and rolling linen to be sent to the hospitals for the wounded. Carol no longer taught the mill children. With the new demands for cloth, there was no time for their schooling.
In October I told Teddy that I wanted to do something for the mill children, that I wanted to collect winter clothes for them. He approved wholeheartedly. "Careen will accompany you," he said, "and Jon will drive you about to collect clothing when Pa takes his afternoon nap."
I told him no, I didn't want Jon. He asked me why, halfway suspicious.
"Has he bothered you at all?"
I could truthfully tell him no, although Jon had put his arm on my shoulder and called me "sweetie" a few times. I'd snapped at him and pulled away. "I'll have Careen put a hex on you," I'd told him.
He'd laughed. "She's nothing but a slave wench, and she'd better never forget it. Your pa doesn't like her. If she doesn't take care, he'll have her put in the fields."
It had frightened me.
"Has he given Viola trouble?"
"No," I lied. Viola didn't want Teddy to know. She could handle this herself, she said. So Jon drove me and Careen around town. We went house to house. As he was helping me out of the carriage at the second house, Jon put his hand on my bottom. I stomped on his foot.
"Ow! You little witch!"
"Don't you dare touch me! Ever!"
"Or you'll what? Tell your big brother? What will he do? Challenge me to a duel? Down where I come from I was the best in dueling. How do you think I got this bad arm? I got a shattered bone, yes, but the other fellow died. You want your brother to be the other fellow?"
Careen wanted to say something, but I hushed her. "Then I'll kill you myself," I told him. "I'll get some potion from Cannice and put it in your food."
He didn't answer. But he never put his hands on me again.
We went on, collecting clothes. The residents of Ros-well thought what I was doing was wonderful. We collected shoes, stockings, warm dresses, mittens, and capes, everything.
Times I took my own horse, Trojan, and visited Louis at the mayor's office. He was always busy but welcomed me if I sat in a chair and didn't interrupt his work. I liked watching him at his desk. Sometimes he had visitors and would send me out of his office to the waiting room.
Other days he had time to talk. He told me that the rolls of the army were thinning, that men were going home to "fix things" so they could come home in the spring and find all well.
"Will the war be over in the spring, then?" I asked hopefully.
He shook his head no. "They just worry about home," he said sadly. "Many of them have farms and no one to run them. There are food shortages everywhere now. We're all starting to feel the Yankee blockade of our ports. And the army demands a lot of our crops."
As mayor, Louis did not just marry people and do ribbon cuttings. He began to help the wives of mill workers who had died in the war with their applications for Confederate pensions. They soon began to come to him for everything.
But deep inside, my brother Louis was still hoping to return to the field.
We had Christmas. I went with Teddy to cut and bring home a tree, and Viola and I decorated the front parlor with holly and mistletoe and berries of scarlet. We dressed the dining room with red ribbons and garlands and small Confederate flags. We hung stockings on the fireplace, which were to be filled with fruit, and we made hoarhound candy and taffy to put in them. We decorated the tree with a hundred candles in little colored tin candlesticks. And some old and very cunning toys.
I had made, with the help of Viola, a shirt for both Louis and Teddy. Viola gave them each a package of the new Bull Durham cigarettes and a pair of soft leather gloves. Cannice prepared a true Christmas turkey, cranberry sauce, vegetables, candied sweet potatoes, puddings, cake, and such.
I gave Viola muslin handkerchiefs trimmed with lace I had made myself. She needed them. She was always crying over Johnnie, who had not been home since before Manassas.
Teddy gave me two new dresses, one pink and one blue. He and Louis must have put their heads together, because Louis gave me a pair of patent leather boots, two pair of ruffled pantalets, and two petticoats. I needed them. My brothers knew that women's boots were fifteen dollars a pair now, dresses thirty dollars each, and fabric eight dollars a yard.