Sarah's Ground (9781439115855) by Ann Rinaldi Page B

at a picket point, I noticed her fluttering her eyelashes at the sentries. Oh well, this is an adventure for her. She has led a sheltered life.
    The heat of the summer has abated somewhat with the onset of September. Mary likes her room, but I fear she does not like Upton. “Does he have to be here all the time?” she asked me. “Even when we eat?”
    â€œHe lives here,” I told her.
    â€œWith you?” And she giggled.
    â€œMary, it isn’t like that,” I told her. “He is the dearest man. I could not do this without him.”
    â€œAre you in love with him, then?”
    â€œBut of course not.”
    â€œThen, you shouldn’t call him dearest.”
    â€œWell, I don’t say it to his face, of course!”
    It is as if we are back at Troy Female Seminary again, where Mary was my roommate. Back then we told each other everything. But that was a hundred years ago. Only Mary,with her pert little-girl ways, is still back there, and I am not.
    â€œDo you remember?” she will say. “Alice Charles? And the time we picked the apples in the orchard when we were forbidden to? The farmer stormed right into the school building and told Miss Semple to keep her hussies off his land. Do you remember?”
    And she goes on and on.
    She chats constantly. While all this is going on, of course, Upton is at the table too, trying to read his paper. Usually he will read it of a morning at breakfast and tell me the news. Now he just reads it solemnly.
    They do not get on. Right from the minute they met, there was animosity. And after just two days they were fighting openly.
    â€œI think you are rude to read the paper while we are talking,” Mary told him the second morning at breakfast.
    Upton had never been called rude in his life. He was taken aback. “I thought you two were having a private conversation,” he said.
    â€œWe want to include you,” Mary told him.
    â€œIt’s rude to speak of things in front of a third person of which that person knows nothing,” he chided.
    â€œOh, excuse me, the Southern gentleman is holding forth!” Mary said with exaggerated politeness.
    â€œStop it, you two. This will never do. We have to live here together!”
    But Mary would not stop it. And polite and imbued withSouthern grace as he is, Upton took exception to her sniping, for which I did not blame him.
    I don’t know what I shall do with the both of them. It is as if the war between the North and the South has come into our kitchen.
    Mary is small and fair and very pretty and fragile looking, but that look is deceiving. She is iron willed. As the only daughter of an indulgent father, she has been taught to stand on her own, yes, to speak out, yes, but the trouble is that the part of her that will always be a girl sometimes wins over the part of her that learned to be a woman.
    She has terrible vanity, and everything must always be about her. I thought, being a Southern man, Upton would recognize those qualities. But I think he does not like them.
    Still, I think he could try harder. And I am getting annoyed with both of them already.
    A good thing and a bad thing happened on this beautiful September day. Upton’s brothers, Arthur and William, came by in their Confederate uniforms to say good-bye before they went off to war.
    Upton was repairing the roof with the workmen. I get so frightened when he gets up there on the roof. I hear thehammering inside the house, and it seems to shake everything, including me. And then I think as long as we have hammering, it means he hasn’t fallen off.
    I dread his falling off. We are nowhere near any help if anything happened to him or one of the workmen.
    He got down immediately when his brothers came, of course, and I was surprised to see them hug. Upton called a stop to the work, and the workmen had lemonade while he brought his brothers into the house.
    â€œWe’ve been here before,” Arthur said.