Evangeline

The Civil War was a time of great difficulties for families in the north and south.  What would you do if confronted with with the following problem?

Evangeline

            I was no more than seven in eighteen sixty-three when I lived with my parents on an isolated mountain in the Adirondacks and my life was controlled by my mother’s sickness.  Her melancholy began when her lover, for that was what my father called him, went away in the spring when the lilacs bloomed.  My father left the same time and stayed away as my mother’s illness grew.  

My mother’s name was Evangeline.  We survived on what I could scratch out of the meager garden I had helped my father plant.  We ate mustard greens and the last of the salt pork for weeks after my father left.  I added eggs when I could find them until we ate the chickens, too.  The potatoes and turnips were no bigger than two-bit pieces when we ate them.  The beans and corn were long gone almost before they had time to grow big enough to eat.

I wondered how much hungrier I could be.

Indian summer warmed me during days when the leaves began to turn red and gold and orange.  I was almost happy.  If my mother could have been as she was before when she had held me and sang to me at night even being hungry would not have mattered.  But what little peace I had shattered the night my mother sent me down the mountain to fetch Mrs. Peal, the birthing lady.  When we returned I heard my mother’s screams before I saw the cabin.  We ran inside to help.  My mother was covered in sweat and thrashed about on her bed.  She shouted at me, called me wicked.  She screamed at me to keep away that I was vile and would mark her.  I tried to hide in the corner out of sight.  I pushed my corn shuck mattress up in front of me.  I kept to the shadows, away from the light of the oil lamp.  But her face sought me out.  A face distorted and twisted until I did not recognize it and as red as the blood on her bed.  There was no escape for me.  Her screams went on for hours.  She cursed me then she cursed my father.  Before it was done she cursed her lover.  She wished him dead.  Wished she had never wanted his foul bastard.  In the end there was no strength left in my mother to even lift her head.  And afterwards there was a baby laid out in a gray woolen blanket; a wrinkly white thing that never made a whimper.

            That was the morning my father came back to us.  He took the stiff body of the baby out to the black walnut tree on the little knoll behind our cabin, and buried it there.  Mrs. Peal laid witness.  I was to never speak of it again, he said.

           

Those first weeks after my father had come back he stayed by my mother’s side constantly.  But the days wore on and the business of life took us over as she lamented in bed writhed in fits of despair and crying or asleep.  Yet everything he did was for her; because she needed to be kept warm he cut firewood.  She needed to eat; he hunted and made soup from what he had shot, mixing the meat with wild herbs.  Sometimes when he came back with a rabbit or squirrel I tried to cook it in the fireplace like I had seen him do, but she would not eat it.

            When the leaves were gone from the trees and the cold wind blew from the north dark, storm clouds edged with slivers of iridescent orange swirled in the evening sky.  My mother found her way to under the black walnut tree as was her custom.  Bare branches of the tree reached heavenward.  Her nightdress clung to her body, wet from the un-mown hay.  I watched as she stretched her arms out and threw her head back.  Her long, dark hair blew loose in the wind.  From her mouth came a wail, low at first like the rumble of distant thunder before her voice exploded into the shrill, scream of a wild animal.

            In her sickness my mother cried for her lover who died in the war.  She stood with her arms stretched out as though she were crucified.  Slowly she turned in circles.  And she wept the tears of a thousand mourners for one dead solider.  She threw back her head and shook her fists at heaven.  She swore at God then begged him to take her as he had taken their stillborn son.

            From somewhere in the night my father came to her.  He cradled her in his arms and carried her back to our cabin.  He laid her on their bed in the corner and his huge, fry pan, hands pulled the cover up under her chin.  She cried that her lover must be dead for no one in his regiment survived the battle at Gettysburg.  And my father said it was all right, that she should go ahead and cry.  All the while he talked softly to her soothing her as he had me when I was but a child.  He poured the golden liquid fire he called her medicine into her blue cup and lifted it to her lips to drink.  Soon she slept again.

            That night, as so many before, I shivered from the cold with my nightdress soaked from the dew.  I stayed by the fireplace and let the heat cook into my body before I had the strength to shed the wet clothes.  Naked I stood in the warmth of the one room cabin.  I heard the death rattle of the winds blow leaves from trees that scraped skeletal branches across the roof.

            I stretched my nightdress in front of the fire on the back of a chair as I had done by myself so many nights since my mother took sick.  I had thought my father being there with us would have brought me company, but he spent all his time nursing my mother.  I was unimportant.  As unimportant as I had been when he had left us.

Through the autumn and into the winter my mother’s sickness continued.  She walked out at night even on the frozen ground and through the snow drifts.  In February when the winds howled late one night with deep blinding snow my mother heard her lover calling from outside.  Exhausted, my father slept in his chair beside their bed as he had since he had returned to us.  She rose in a desperate race to meet her lover.  She clung to each piece of furniture as she made her way unsteadily to the door.  I hid out of her way, secretly glad she would finally meet with him again.  I hoped she would leave with him and my father would be like he was before her lover came those many months ago.

            I sat crouched by the fire wrapped in my quilt even after she opened the door and stumbled out into the night calling his name.

            I let the cold fill the cabin, glad she was gone.  The flames in the fireplace died to embers.  The cabin grew cold and my head drooped.  But my father’s head jerked up.  He called out her name.  Fear shredded his voice as he rushed out the door.

            I do not know how he found her.  Perhaps it was because she always went to the same spot under the black walnut tree.

            I heard his cry over the howl of the wind.