Louisiana Boys
Army of Northern Virginia
Via Richmond, Virginia
12th April 1862
My darling Kizzie,
Already I am missing you, your silken purse, your sheltered cove.
Here, I am one of the boys, a ‘Johnny Reb’.
The only fear is in being wounded. Death is not a fear – I will be dust to dust like the rest. But hospital and the Protestant doctors! They dislike to touch us Irish anyway! What of a perverted Papist like me?
But I should not talk like this when all my thoughts are of you … and your fond breasts and steaming nights in New Orleans. And you, sweet Kizzie, tossing and turning to the heat with no soothing hand or cooling lips.
Patrick asks me about ‘my Kizzie’ in the same way he talks about ‘his Emmeline’. He is forever writing to her, of the days of splendour … and the magnolias … and music … and the lips he has not yet kissed. I am polite, agree with him, without revealing too much of days of a thousand kisses … and lips – unspoken of. I think he would be shocked to learn how gloriously free I have been to taste whole joys in you. And now I lay to sleep and think on them.
Write and write and write.
Your darling Johnny Reb,
Oxy