Homeland by Barbara Hambly Page B

with the prospect of even-yet-earlier awakening tomorrow. Uncle Mordacai is taking Mother, Elinor, and myself to the mainland, to deliver the news to Ollie of the birth of his beautiful son Oliver Lincoln Smith, who is wailing fretfully in the next room. Mercy, very much set up in her own opinion of herself as
far
too adult to give way to bouts of babyish weeping, sleeps like a furled rose-bud in her basket, hung over with cheesecloth to keep the mosquitoes away.
    You need to see all the thousand tiny islets of Merchant Row in morning’s first light—tabletops of granite each with its little tuft of pine-trees—garlanded about with diamond waves breaking, wreathed in crying gulls. You need to see the lobster-boats going out of Green’s Landing when the
Lady Anne
sets forth, the air chill enough to require a shawl and the smell of the sea filling the whole of the world. You need to know what a deck feels like underfoot when the wind takes the sails and the sloop surges forward like a team of matched horses settling to gallop. I’d so love to see you sketching all this!
    Dearest friend, I read the news of gunboat battles near Vicksburg, and huge Confederate raids in Kentucky, and I pray that you are safe.
S UNDAY , A UGUST 3
V ISIT TO S IXTEENTH M AINE R EGIMENT, IN CAMP AT A UGUSTA , M AINE
    Uncle Mordacai took us across to the mainland in the
Gull:
Mother, Elinor, and myself. Recruits are still coming in, and the rows of little shelter-tents along the Kennebec look sloppy and half-finished, little more than strips of muslin draped in an inverted V over a pole about three feet from the ground, open to the elementsat both ends. The men of Company B—Ollie’s company—haven’t gotten their shelter-tents yet. They share a single marquee, sleeping on bare ground. The men crowded around us, clasped our hands, stammered greetings, even men from other parts of Maine, men we had never met before. Someone gave Mother half a barrel to sit on, and I was handed a visibly unwashed tin cup full of the sort of coffee the Devil must brew in Hell. Mother gave Ollie the molasses-cookies she’d baked and he promptly distributed them among his mess-mates. Looking at their faces, as Mother told him the news of Peggie’s safe delivery, I realized that Mother wasn’t just Ollie’s mother now, but the mother each of them left back in Kittery or Bangor or Portland. I was the sister each of them grew up with. The news of little Nollie’s birth was to each man tidings of the birth of his own son, the safety of his own wife.
    The men shouted congratulations and thumped Oliver on the back, but I wondered if he was ill, for he was curiously silent, and he looked so much thinner than when he’d left home three weeks ago. But only when he walked with us back to the train-station in the late afternoon, did he break the news to us: his Colonel had that day informed him that his enlistment was for three
years
, not three months as he had originally supposed when he joined!
    Elinor of course put her arms around my waist and Mother’s, and declared stoutly, “Three years or three months, Ollie, does that change your country’s need? You know Peggie will understand” But Peggie wept until she was sick, when she heard the news upon our return, and could not nurse poor tiny Nollie. Between doing double duty, and comforting her, I was not in bed until long past midnight.
T HURSDAY , A UGUST 7
    One of the lobstermen who’s been over to Belfast says, Word is that the Rebels have attacked Baton Rouge. To the best of our knowledge, the Thirteenth (Brock’s regiment), though in Louisiana,is not at Baton Rouge … or wasn’t, as of his last letter. But Elinor’s Nathan is in the Fourteenth, as is John Henderson, whose brother Alex—in the same company—died of fever in New Orleans only weeks ago. Papa is still not yet back from Northwest Harbor (it is nine now, and growing dark) where he walked to learn more, if he can.
F RIDAY , A UGUST 8 N