8

 

November 1, 1862

 

Dearest Henry,

 

The rowdy doings of Mischief Night have left their mark on our town once again. Maple syrup was smeared on door handles, and Mr. Cray’s gate was taken off its hinges so that all his cattle escaped. Our house was among those spared, with Granny setting out the broken buckets from the garden to let the children take for burning.

Amidst all the trouble, the Hinkle’s youngest boy, Charley, received a painful wound to his leg. He bears it bravely and says it must be nothing compared with the danger a soldier faces.

 

“Nell? Are you there, dear?”

The girl stopped writing at the sound of her grandmother calling. The rattle of saucers and spoons told her the older woman was preparing tea for the doctor’s guests. Hastily, she laid her pen on the desk, her plain skirt rustling as she moved towards the family’s kitchen.

Pine planks creaked beneath her boots, the knots in the wood creating a pattern that was almost ornamental. The Darrow farmhouse was a rustic one, fashioned by her grandfather when the family migrated from Scotland years before. His craftsmanship—though not exquisite by any means—was all that Nell could associate with the man, since he died while she was still in the cradle.

“You should have called for me earlier,” Nell scolded the figure that was stooped over the table. “I thought Mama was with you,” she added, wondering what new task had called Mrs. Darrow away.

“She went with your papa into town,” her grandmother explained, shaky hands arranging a pot and tea cups on a metal tray.

Though nearly blind, Clare Darrow was sharp in every other sense. Her memory of the house’s layout was enough to aid her in this daily task as she insisted on brewing tea from the well water Nell fetched each morning. She preferred it even to water fresh from the spring, and the rest of the family had grown used to drinking it.

“Be a good girl and carry this tray in for the Hinkles,” she said, patting Nell’s hand. “I may be fit to stew it, but I dare not trust myself with the serving.” This was said with a wink. Her voice was still infused with the native accent of her birthplace in the Scottish Highlands. A strange thing, considering Sylvan Spring had been her home for almost thirty years now. Strands of white hair were knotted at the back of her neck, hands gnarled with age and a life of labor on the Darrow’s homestead.

At times, Nell fancied something of her grandmother’s quiet strength in her features—though none of the woman’s famous girlhood beauty had carried over if the reflection in her mirror was anything to judge by. Limp yellow tresses framed eyes that were set close together, her complexion made tan from the sun in her father’s crop field.

She could see the same image distorted in the silverware balanced on the tray she carried now. Glancing quickly away, she formed a smile of welcome for the figures gathered in the family’s parlor. “Morning, Mrs. Hinkle,” she greeted the farm wife, whose homestead lay within walking distance of their own.

The Hinkles were better off when it came to farmhands than some of their neighbors, having so many helping hands in the form of their children. Though, of course, that meant having more mouths to feed, giving everyone reason enough to pity them.

“Nell has brought us some tea,” her grandmother told them, settling into the rocking chair beside the unlit fireplace. Her hand grasped the shawl she kept there for fending off the morning chill, wrapping it tightly around her thin shoulders.

Mrs. Hinkle merely nodded in reply, her attention demanded by the infant fussing in her arms. Gathered round her on the sofa were children in various stages of growth. They all had the same shade of straw-colored hair and a complexion as tan and uncared for as Nell’s.

The patient, a boy of roughly ten years, was seated on a wooden chair, a deep gash visible below his left knee. Beside him, the doctor knelt to gently clean the wound, squeezing the sides together to bind it with a needle and thread

“I hope it leaves a scar,” Charley announced, fingers gripping the chair as the needle pierced his flesh. Like his siblings, he was lanky and rail thin. He was paler, though, his eyes a shade of pastel gray that reminded Nell of storm clouds.

At the sound of his voice, a dog’s bark had echoed from the farmhouse porch. Nails scraped against the front door, followed by a low whining sound, as the faithful pet begged for entrance.

“Go home, Rufus,” Mrs. Hinkle ordered sternly from the sofa. She shifted the complaining baby in her arms. “There won’t be any scar for showing off. Will there, Miss Moore?”

“There will be a mark,” the doctor confessed, securing the bandage. “No doubt it shall fade in time. You must be more careful in the future, Charley,” she added. Her gaze softened as she studied the boy’s gaunt frame, smaller than that of even his younger siblings.

“Boys collect scars and scrapes the way girls collect butterfly wings,” Nell’s grandmother chuckled, cradling her tea cup between knotted fingers. “It is their nature. Your papa can attest to that,” she confided to Nell, who seated herself in a nearby chair. “Once he fell down a drinking well, poor lad.”

“Ah, but this one is always finding trouble,” Mrs. Hinkle insisted, casting a glare in her son’s direction. “Guess how he came by this scrape? I’ll tell you how,” she said, not giving them time to answer. “By climbing over the Roans’ gate, that’s how.”

Sneaking onto the Roan property was practically a rite of passage for the children of Sylvan Spring and had been since Nell was a child. Ellis Roan, the heir to the family property, was a hermit of sorts, never seen in the town shops, or the church. He preferred his privacy for whatever reason and survived off the hares and other wildlife he trapped in the woods around the spring.

“That old fence had sharp edges,” Charley boasted. “Rufus got his fur caught in it, great big tufts coming out.”

At the sound of its name, the dog began barking again, the woofs deep and insistent with its growing desperation. Wishing to spare the animal another scolding, Nell told them, “My brother once had a dog with that same devoted temperament. I remember it slept outside his window at night, and sometimes he would sneak it inside and let it sleep on his bed.”

“Don’t go filling his head with ideas,” Mrs. Hinkle said, as Charley’s eyes lit up with the story. “That dog’s so big and clumsy he’d soon break every bit of furniture in the cabin.”

“He’s not so big,” the dog’s owner protested. “Not compared with the dog Billy Cray saw t’other night. The size of a mare and all shaggy with black fur—”

Laughter greeted the wild statement, everyone but the doctor joining in the mirth.

Her expression was one of confusion and mild concern.

Charley’s mother demanded, “What nonsense are you talking now, child?”

“The plat-eye,” he insisted. “Billy and his pa saw it twice down by the Crooked Wood spring. It had eyes like fire.”

Plat-eyes were the spirits conjured by the dead in the form of menacing, oversized animals, according to old folk tales. Nell had heard plenty of tales of it, and shivered through them, as a girl.

“Oh, hush now,” his mother said, embarrassed by the smiles of amusement the story was drawing. “Billy Cray is not to be trusted anyhow. Were it not his fingers left such an ugly mark on our door the other night?” She spoke of a recent prank the children had played in the Mischief Night tradition, the scrawling of a mysterious symbol on various doors in the community.

Nell’s family had been spared this indignity, but the Hinkles, among several others, had woken the next day to find their homes marked with a blood-red dye, streaks of it trailing down the wood from the painted symbol above.

A death symbol some claimed, though Nell wasn’t sure why. When she went to borrow a volume from her former instructor’s shelves, Nell had seen the one left on the schoolhouse door. A half-moon with an arrow bent through it. The teacher, Miss Mitchell, had studied it with pursed lips and a cold eye, muttering something about “heathen youngins” under her breath.

“Mr. Roan’s door has the same mark,” Charley insisted, revealing his reason for braving the hermit’s fence. “That makes eight I’ve heard of, besides ours. Reckon I will have to see them all to be sure.”

“Not until your wound is healed,” the doctor cautioned. “You must take care not to loosen these stitches. I will be extremely disappointed if I hear otherwise.” She had begun to repack her bag, a battered leather one said to belong to her father in his early days of practice. She rarely mentioned her family, or anything of a personal nature, but Nell had seen text books on her shelves that bore the former physician’s name.

“Billy says the plat-eye’s the spirit of a convict,” a shy voice offered, the only Hinkle girl, her hair twisted in a long braid that she toyed with nervously. “Hung back in granddaddy’s day. That is why no one’s seen it outside the woods—’cause its spirit is trapped there.”

Nell squirmed to hear such talk. The story of the convict had inspired more than one nightmare for her as a child. Suspected of thieving from his neighbors, he was said to have hanged for his crimes on the big, twisted oak from which Crooked Wood took its name. No burial for the body, only a rope to slowly fray, and birds to pick the bones.

The doctor snapped her case shut, her expression unreadable. What must she think of their superstitious talk? A woman of science and education, her love for reason excluded even the possibility of a higher power, something Nell’s family had learned the first Sunday she refused their invitation to church.

“Could be that’s what marked up the doors,” Charley said, an idea coming to him. “Vengeance in blood for the hanging—”

“Enough of such talk,” his mother said, waving away the boy’s excitement. “You will be scaring the young ones,” she added, with a glance at the other Hinkle children. None of them looked remotely frightened as they sat forward, eager gazes trained on their brother for more of this wondrous knowledge.

Relief flooded through Nell as the subject changed to the crops and eventually to Henry’s last letter. She read part of it aloud, as their neighbor made tsking sounds at the regiment’s shortage on food and supplies.

“We expect to move camp at any moment,” she read, fumbling the words as she thought of delayed communication and her brother and the other soldiers trudging through the autumn weather. “Some of the fellows’ boots have been pulled apart in the mud along these banks we now occupy. Mine have held true, as have Arthur’s, though his feet swell so, he can hardly get them on…” She trailed off, her gaze drawn to where the doctor slipped from the parlor, her skirts rustling quietly down the hall. Guessing the reason for her withdrawal was not hard, though Nell couldn’t help feeling a pang of discomfort. Miss Moore’s letters from the battlefield were not ones to be read aloud, or so she suspected.

Envy flickered through her, a faint spark that threatened quickly to grow to a flame. Part of her longed to know what lay inside those envelopes which disappeared to the doctor’s desk and bedside table. The other part prayed to overcome this weakness that haunted her since childhood, an infatuation for a man who would never return her affection.

“There now,” Mrs. Hinkle said, pressing her hand with a look of sympathy. “How you must miss your brother, dear.”

“Yes, ma’am” she replied, a flush creeping over her face at the woman’s misunderstanding. For as much as she missed Henry, this other burden weighed on her heart with a force equally stunning and far more hopeless.

Tucking the letter away, she offered a grateful smile to the older woman. “Henry is in our prayers and thoughts at all times. He and—and all our friends who face this difficulty.”

Her grandmother murmured her assent, the atmosphere in the parlor growing somber and silent until the only sounds were the ticking of a clock and the Hinkle daughter sipping loudly from a teacup.

 



 

Young Charley’s story should cost you a blush, Henry, along with certain of our friends who know of what I write. For, do you not recall a different Mischief Night some ten years ago, when you helped to play a prank on that same unsuspecting neighbor?

You will no doubt say this event has escaped your memory, the same as that time you snipped off my braids during a spelling lesson. I shall gladly recount the whole event, as I am sure it would earn more than one laugh when shared by the campfire some quiet evening.

How innocent it began as we blackened our faces with the soot from the hearth. Granny Clare let us take the old broken stool and barrel for the bonfire, and you generously let me throw both into the blaze. I do believe your plan was to sneak away unnoticed and leave me there as you and the other boys carried out that dreadful scheme with the snuff pinched from Wray’s father.

Yes, if Wray Camden is sitting beside you, he will recall it was his idea to “smoke out” Mr. Roan from his hiding place. There were four of you eager to share in the guilt, clambering over that rusty old gate in the moonlight. I witnessed it all from the blackberry hedge where you made me hide out of the way. You did not want a girl to tattle on you, but it was not my voice that protested when Wray’s bold fingers struck the match.

 

Crouched in the bushes beside Roan’s shack, Nell had watched, breathless as her brother’s friends prepared to carry out their prank. No one had expected Arthur to show up since he already condemned the scheme when they hatched it over school recess. But it was his figure that came beside her in the hedge, placing a finger to her mouth before he slipped out to confront the mischief makers.

“We will be caught,” he reasoned, “and the punishment severe.” He spoke chiefly to Wray, whose match was snuffed before it could touch the line of powder.

The warning brought a scowl to the other youth’s handsome features, though his father’s anger was known to have blackened eyes and broken farm equipment in drunken rages. In hushed tones, they argued the danger with Wray ignoring his friend’s advice to light the trail before the hermit’s steps.

The powder crackled, smoke pouring out just as they hoped. It caught fast, Nell stifling a scream as the popping sound was accompanied by a bright flash. Flames shot high, licking at the porch banisters. A small fire, one that was easily put out, thought it left its scorch marks on the weathered timber.

Arthur had been lined up for punishment with the others despite having taken no part in the deed. To defend him was her first instinct, but he put his hand gentle on her arm. “Don’t tell. I have to cast my lot with the others. They would do it for me.”

Keeping his secret had been a privilege, making her feel as if they shared something deeper than the connection of schoolmates and neighbors. It wasn’t true, of course. Arthur, though kind, had never showed any partiality for his friend’s little sister. And now his heart belonged to another, their love carried out in the letters the doctor posted each week.

Seated before her dresser that night, Nell finished the communication she had begun that afternoon, before the Hinkles’ visit and other tasks demanded her attention. A candle’s flame illuminated the page before her, its glow reflecting in the mirror to show her tired, drab features.

 

I finish this letter by candlelight, in place of my usual diary entry. Although, what I record in that tiny leather volume is not so different than what I write here. You must know, brother, that I am consumed with thoughts of this war, and all who suffer from it daily.

If only I could be of more use, perhaps these fears would not plague me so. There’s work enough for me at home, helping our dear parents and Granny Clare, yet it seems trivial compared to what you and the others must sacrifice.

Perhaps I will try for a teaching certificate next year as Mama has often suggested. I believe she sees little else for me in this place we call home. Everyone says Miss Mitchell will give up the school house soon as her rheumatism grows worse (though she has not said as much herself).

Let me hear from you soon, Henry. I will hope that your regiment does not move camp before this reaches it, as I cannot bear to think of such a long delay in your response. Believe me when I write that the suspense of your reply is continuously in my thoughts as much as any of my daily chores or pleasures. There will be no rest for my heart until you and all our dear friends have safely returned home.

As ever, you are in my prayers.

Your Loving Sister

 



 

Jenna placed the letter aside with a wistful feeling, wishing to know more of the letter writer and her family, the fate of her brother and their friends.

There were no more letters from the unknown girl, though, or from anyone. All that remained from the scant collection was a series of Confederate Army regulation documents and a battered ledger stored in a plastic bag. Probably a local business’s records pictured in the tin type photos that emphasized the dry goods store and bank.

Disappointment crept over her, along with a sense of fatigue. If she was lucky, the Internet would yield some birth and marriage certificates from genealogy sites. She envisioned tracing family members via phone or e-mail, ones who might or might not be able to divulge the details of their ancestors’ lives. Often people were uninterested, even with the promise of an acknowledgment in a soon-to-be-published story.

Reluctant to begin, she reached instead for the ledger. Her gloved fingers rustled the pages gently, opening them to a random section. Hand-written entries filled a page faded to brown, dated for the year 1862. Paragraphs were written journal style, instead of the bullet type lists one usually found in a record of sales or inventory.

She glanced over one of these, catching its meaning as she read.

 

“Mrs. Morgan, one o’clock. Patient split her left foot open while chopping firewood, nearly severing one toe. Have cleaned and stitched the wounds and advised her to return as soon as Monday to see how it does.”

 

A physician’s daybook, not business inventory. One from 1862, the same year as the letter she just read. Which meant…yes, it had to be. This item belonged to the doctor, the one mentioned in the girl’s letter.

Jenna had to stop herself from turning the fragile pages too hastily as she made her way back to the front of the ledger. There, inscribed on the leaf insert, was the name Mariah Moore, MD.

Moore—wasn’t that name among the stones at the abandoned cemetery?

Yanking her notebook free, she flipped its pages until she found the one she wanted. The one with the moon engraving that was mysteriously placed beneath the sycamore, two marble headstones beside it.

A woman doctor? Jenna raised her brows at this unexpected development. A female doctor in the Civil War era rural South was not something she would have imagined.

Already trembling a little from excitement, she jumped when someone laid a hand on her shoulder.

“Ma’am?” the voice was apologetic, belonging to the male volunteer. He gestured to the clock that hung above the stained glass window. “It’s uh…almost time to close.”

Unconsciously, Jenna tightened her grip on the artifact, remembering the manager’s warning about no scanned copies. “Could I have this put on reserve at the desk? I’ll need to see it a few more times,” she explained, thinking how valuable it might prove for providing background on the town as well as the cemetery. The little details were what her readers looked for and what she desperately needed to make this feature come to life for them.

The boy looked uncertain, his fellow volunteer, Paige, reappearing from one of the aisles with a rolling cart. “No problem,” she told Jenna. “You’ll need to fill out a card for it. That’s all.” Rummaging among her supplies, she located one and handed it over. “Write the serial number from the tag on this bottom line,” she added.

“Thanks.” Jenna filled out the necessary information. “Any chance there’s a genealogist in the area? I’m looking for someone who might have copies of those papers that burned in the fire.”

The students exchanged a meaningful glance. With a smirk, the boy told her, “Old Lady Maudell. She has everything from the last hundred years—which is about as long as she’s lived.”

“This…Maudell,” Jenna said, uncertainly. “Is she a local historian?”

He snorted. “Hardly. She has all this rare stuff she’s bought up from auctions that no one’s allowed to see. It makes her feel important or something.“

“She used to work here,” Paige supplied, “but that was years ago. Everyone says she’s the town’s oldest citizen, but I think she’s only ninety or so.”

“I had to interview her for an essay last year,” the boy said, tossing a can of furniture polish between his hands. “You would have thought I was asking her to reveal nuclear codes or something. Got me a ‘B’ on the paper, actually.”

This all sounded a little daunting, but Jenna was willing to do some wheedling if it meant learning the secrets to the town’s past. And if anyone knew them, why not the oldest citizen? Especially one locked away with a collection of priceless relics.

Placing the pen against her notebook, she asked them, “What’s her address?”