3. What Transpired with the Soldier

I refused to let that man take what belonged to somebody else. The eggs were covered by towels and a loaf of snow, but they were still raw eggs. I had no doubt they would break, either while colliding with each other or while spilling onto the ground. I let go of the basket. Out poured the eggs.

The soldier dismounted, pulled the reins over the horse’s head and onto his arm, and approached us, touching his cap. “Don’t mean to frighten you, miss, but you’d better be more scared of what your ma will say about those eggs! Hold these, son.”

Anshel took the reins the soldier shoved into him. Finally, he dropped his side of the basket.

I fear I squealed as the soldier lifted me up and sat me sideways on the horse, which had stepped up beside us. He then held the stirrup out to Anshel. “Get up there.”

“What?”

“Get on the horse.”

“Where?”

“Behind your sister. She is your sister, isn’t she?”

Anshel stayed put, not at all cowed by the same nerves that made it seem I lacked the ability to breathe. “I can’t sit like that with a girl. It’s wrong.”

The soldier peered into Anshel’s face, which was almost hidden by the massive brim of a furry round hat, and then turned to me. Snow clotted his beard, turning him into a modern likeness of St. Nicholas. But the warm sentiments associated with that benign figure were blasted away by his eyes--hard, white-blue plaques that promised to make any attempt at neighborliness bounce off their owner like Minié balls hitting rocks. I wished Anshel for once would be less pig-headed and stay as close to me as possible, if only for safety’s sake. "Did you just tell me it's wrong to ride a horse with a girl?"

“He's not from around here. He’s from far away, from a little town in Germany.” I spoke with haste. For all I knew, Anshel was the first Chassid ever to visit western Virginia. He was certainly the first the locals had ever seen. I had no desire for the man to suspect he had come from the North to cause trouble.

The soldier took back the reins. “There’s no time for muleheads, boy. You don’t want to ride? Then walk. Lead the way.”

Anshel blinked. “Where are we going?”

“You tell me! It had better be close by. I’m not in the vein to stay here and act out a scene from the last lucid moments of the Donner party.”

“Donner …” Anshel’s mouth formed the name without a sound. Where he came from, “Donner” meant thunder. He had yet to learn about the people who started eating each other after getting stranded in a snowstorm out West.

The soldier stood at the horse’s left shoulder, closed his right hand around the reins below the horse’s chin and held the rest of the reins in his left hand. “Which way, miss?”

“The way you were heading, sir. That’s the way to our home.”

I grabbed the horse’s mane, ready for the lurch of a horse stepping off.

Anshel trotted ahead, blowing on his hands to keep them warm. With the road snowed out of sight, he relied on the trees to guide us back. Our house and the outbuildings stood amid the snow undisturbed. Not one shutter was closed. Clearly, I would have to close them myself. Mama was impervious to the storm.

Anshel accompanied the soldier into the barn so the man could dry and rest his horse. I went to the house. I heard the Schubert the instant I opened the back door. I figured the best way to get Mama’s attention was by closing the lid over the keyboard. “Mama, we have a visitor.”

She turned with the angry start of somebody rudely awakened. Already the snow that had caked my cape was sloughing off in icy gobs. A fistful plopped on the piano. Mama ran her hands along my arms, as if feeling me to confirm what she saw. “Elodie! What have you done? Where have you been?”

I told her about our visitor as quickly as I could. “He could use some towels. And something hot to drink.” I backed away, pulling at the ribbons that attached my bonnet to my head. Snow was plummeting off the brim and into my face. I had to see what I was doing.

“A soldier is in the barn?”

“Yes, Mama. I told you, he brought me—“

“The neighbors’ milk is in the barn! He’ll leave here and tell his friends. They’ll come and take it.”

Mama leaped up from the piano chair. Her hair hung loose; she still wore her dressing gown and thin house slippers. Her state of undress did not prevent her from pulling her cape from the hook near the door.

I begged her to stay indoors. Anshel was with the man.

“No, Lodie, Anshel is with a soldier who has doubtless been pillaging Mr. B’s milk. God knows what the man will do to the boy before he makes off with whatever he can.”

“But the milk is in heavy cans, Mama! And it’s storming. He can’t go far.”

I ran after her, ignoring the bonnet that flapped against my back, half-choked by a soggy ribbon whose knot I was unfit to loose.

When we arrived at the barn, the horse was untacked and in the crossties in the aisle. Its neck stretched low as the soldier groomed it with Daddy’s old brushes. Its eyes were closed. Anshel stood at its head, rubbing its nose.

The soldier had tossed his greatcoat over the side of a stall, so it was plain to see he wore the simple gray uniform of a private. He must have been a private for a long time. The jacket was ripped in some places and patched in others. There was a slightly darker material at the seat of the pants and around the knees.

Mama first accosted Anshel, who, I confess, was as comfortable with the soldier’s horse as if it were his own pet. “Go into the house.” My cousin complied without a word.

Next Mama turned on the soldier. Rather, she attempted to turn on him Enter the barn in the middle of the night without benefit of a lamp, and you always knew by smell, if not sound, what was there: hay, sheep, cows, and chickens that cackled and flitted around the henhouse at the far end of the fieldstone structure. That morning, the everyday fragrance was enhanced by the smell of wet leather, a wet horse and a wet man whose rough woolen uniform oozed the scent of black powder and pipe smoke. Mama came to a halt as if she had slammed into a tree. She later said she realized her cape was a poor excuse for a day dress. She felt like the only full-blown rose in the hothouse. The top of her cheekbones flamed. She lowered her eyes.

“’Morning, ma’am.”

The soldier nodded to Mama and straightened, fidgeting with the brush in both his hands. He glanced at the floor, then raised his eyes and settled on Mama’s face. He was a tall man, hewn like a carved bear and, doubtless, hardened by service for his cause. But his manner was shy. I could see the color bleeding from beneath his shrubby brown beard up through the scalp beneath his receding hairline.

“Sir, you’ll be wanting breakfast,” Mama said.

She left without waiting for a reply.

I followed her up the back staircase to her room. She closed the door and sat on the side of her bed, her head in her hands. Her arms shook. I thought she was weeping. After a moment she whispered, “Oh dear God,” and pressed her hands to her mouth. Her eyes were dry and her cheeks were now the color of dry dough. “The enemy has come to our home, Elodie.”

The news was no source of alarm for me. “Mama, this is Virginia. We’ve lived here among enemy since the war started two years ago. We socialize with the enemy. We buy goods from the enemy. But you know what? The enemy hasn’t harmed us. The soldiers may have taken milk from Mr. B, but they didn’t harm him. Nobody here would think of hurting anybody.”

Alas, I knew this was not entirely true, not when General Jackson was executing men for desertion.

Mama clasped her hands in her lap, thinking. A surge of wind and snow shook the window. She stood, set her cape on the back of the side chair she had brought up from the dining room to use as a bedside table for books and magazines.

“Please start the coffee, Lodie.”

I asked her if she would have some herself.

She promised to join us as soon as she was dressed––and she had hidden all the pictures of Daddy in his Federal captain's uniform.

2. What the Eggs Hatched

Mama was in the parlor, practicing a sad-sounding Schubert piece on the Chickering square piano. At least I thought it was Schubert. The piano needed a tuning so badly, it made me think of a drunkard trying to sing opera.

We stepped with care around pillars of books that teetered on the floor. More columns sprouted against the walls, between furniture, beside the piano.

“Leave those, please,” Mama said as Anshel gathered a few books from the top of the nearest tower. “I won’t be able to find them if you move them.”

“Tante Laurencia, won’t it be easier for you to find them if they’re where they belong?” He glanced at the cedar bookcases that Papa had built into the walls. One or two lone volumes languished on their side. Aside from that, the shelves were empty.

Mama played several measures over and over again. “There’s nothing wrong with where they are.”

Anshel shrugged, placed the books back atop their monolith. He asked Mama if she wanted him to do anything. She said no. He asked us to excuse him; he was retiring to his room to study.

A carding comb waited on the piano lid, next to the music stand, a clump of wool impaled on its skinny nails. The comb had been there ever since Mama said she was bored of carding and she sat down at the piano. That was a month ago. Should I card the wool myself? The last time I did that, she got angry. She never said why.

With the drapes pulled tight and the room lit only by the lamp atop the piano, the place had the attitude of the first day of winter. It was the second week in April. I guessed Mama would feel better if she saw the velvety lawn, the trees with their knots of delicate green buds. I opened the drapes as far as they could go. The storm clouds might have sucked out the sunshine, but there was enough natural light to revive me like a slap of fresh air. Mama paid no mind. She continued to play the same pages. The raw light faded her farther than the easy chair she had left on the porch all summer.

My stomach mewed. I needed breakfast. I failed to recall Mama eating anything that morning too.

“I’ll fry some eggs, Mama? Does that sound good?”

“I’ll do it, babe. Give me a few moments. I’ve almost got this.”

“It doesn’t need to be perfect, Mama. We like it no matter how you play it.”

“It’s got to be perfect for the recital.”

“Which recital?”

“For the soldiers.”

I remembered the visit from Mrs. Hollingshead, who lived near Moss Neck, a few miles away.

“Mama, that recital’s for the Confederate boys. Daddy’s fighting for the Union.”

“They’re daddies too, Lodie. And sons … brothers … cousins … uncles …”

“Yes, Mama. I’ll fry some eggs for you.”

She seemed not to hear me. I closed the door, leaving her alone with her music. At least, with the drapes open, the room looked less funereal.

The ruckus on the stairs was Anshel. He flew through the door with a bang and accosted me as I labored to turn the runny offering in the frying pan. His sidecurls jiggled against his cheekbones. “The eggs!”

Ah yes, leave it to food to lure him away from those books: fat, leather-bound things with exotic printing stamped in gold on the covers. “I’ll do yours as soon as I finish these for Mama.” I was delighted to make him wait, especially after the peremptory manner in which he had demanded to be fed.

“Nonononono, I don’t want to eat eggs. I want to bring them to Mr. B.”

"Fried eggs?" I confess to not being able to understand what the dairyman had to do with our breakfast.

"Nono, the eggs. Your mother pays him with eggs from the henhouse."

We had forgotent the eggs in our haste to avoid the storm.

"He'll be back tomorrow morning. We can give him the eggs then."

“We’ve got to do it now. If we don’t, we’ll forget again.”

"Now? Before breakfast?"

"Finish the eggs for your mother. Then we can go."

“It’s a long walk. We really should have something first.”

“Eat now, and you'll make yourself sick rushing. Breakfast will taste better if you can eat knowing you’ve done the right thing.”

The right thing would have been to go to the dairy in an ironclad carriage with an armed guard. Cavalry coursed around the distant copse of trees that separated the neighboring farm from Mr. B’s. If they saw us gripping the basket between us, the eggs would be as good as broken.

I grabbed my skirts in my free hand and lurched ahead, leaving Anshel a few paces behind. He skipped to my side. The eggs jiggled beneath the protective towels. “Wait! What are you doing?”

“Soldiers ... in the trees,” I said, not daring to point.

“Did they see us?”

“I don’t know. If they did, I hope they think we’ve got nothing but laundry in here.”

“Don’t hope, Loydie. Trust. Hope, and you want everything to happen as you want. Trust, and you know that what happens, happens because HaShem meant it to happen.”

He used the old Hebrew name for God. I think he knew it annoyed me.

We had gone out without umbrellas, confident the storm was several hours away. Now a thick, lazy rain poked our eyes. Anshel wiped his face on his sodden sleeve. “This is good, Loydie. If we can’t see, the soldiers can’t see. Maybe they’ll wait somewhere for the rain to stop, yes?”

“Yes. Under the trees,” I said as lightning licked the landscape.

In an instant, April had the sort of fit that turns it from the promise of summer to the spoiled runt-child of winter. Icy air smacked our faces. The wind slathered us in snow so thick we could have been bricks beneath mortar. The road, the grass along the sides of the roads, and the fields lost their character and natural divisions; all were obliterated, and in their stead lay a smooth white plane that seemed to swell, sneaky as a river rising into a flood.

The snow that covered the eggs could have been a pile of rocks. The weight forced me to grip the basket handle with two hands. I had worn woolen mitts, not fully formed gloves. My fingers stung. They were bright pink in some spots and dusty blue in others.

I lowered my side of the basket as Anshel lowered his. The ground beneath the basket must have been uneven. The laden thing tilted like a colander atop a pan of soaking dishes.

“What are you doing?”

I confess, it was more of a shout than a civil question. We were lashed to a storm, and Anshel was pulling off his gloves.

A steady pattern of soft thuds suggested we were not alone on the road. “We had better step aside before we’re trampled,” I said as Anshel gave me the gloves.

But step aside where? We could barely see each other, let alone three, six or ten feet away in any direction around us.

Anshel closed his eyes. He made the same sound a person makes when starting to speak but then thinks better.

I challenged the performance. “Well?”

”There’s one horse, only one horse. It’s slowing down, yes. This is good. Horses know, Loydie. They won’t run a person down, if they can help it. Didn’t you ever notice how people stop runaways? They stand in front of them with their arms spread out like scarecrows. The horse stops. The horse always stops.”

The noise itself had stopped.

“We should move aside, anyway.”

We lifted the basket. Anshel’s gloves were a little large for me. I grabbed more wool than basket handle. Again, I was compelled to use both hands. We edged aside.

Without warning, the thuds reappeared. They were behind us. So was the voice.

“What are you doing, children?”

It was not an idle question, and the tone suggested the speaker would not take kindly to being ignored.

Together, Anshel and I looked over our shoulders. The soldier on horseback waited no more than an arm’s length away.

We were about to lose our eggs after all.

1. What Should Have Been Farbay

Western Virginia
April, 1863

The way my cousin Anshel leaped onto the cart before Mr. B stopped the horses, I thought he would fall off and get run over. Black clouds were bursting around the sky like ink drops hitting water, and a catastrophe would have fit the mood of the moment.

“You need to get home, Mr. B," he was telling the old dairyman. "But if you don’t, if it rains, you come here, you stay with us–yes, Loydie?” He looked at me, adding a “y” after the “o” in my name, which was short for Elodie.

Mr. B took the milk can from Anshel and set it at my feet, squashing a smile. “You don’t worry about me and the weather, young man. There in’t a storm created that can kill me or scare me or otherwise stop me from gettin’ my cows’ good work to the folks that need it. What scares me is them soldiers catchin’ me and bringin’ me to town to feed their friends again. It in’t right. Not when they got their gen’ral with them, and people treatin’ him like he were God on earth.”

It must have been the dozenth time my cousin heard the story of how Mr. B’s milk was abducted by some of the less gallant members of our Confederate army. He nodded anyway, all patience. “Maybe they won’t steal from you again.”

Mr. B took a deep breath, dug his fists into his hips, and looked past his boots to the turf, which had frozen while it was still turning green. “No … no,” he said with weary determination. “They won’t take nothin’ from me again. They didn’t take from me the first time. They took from folks who needed somethin’ morer than they did.”

All at once, Mr. B jumped back on the cart and started handing down the three remaining cans to Anshel and me. “Here … We’ll keep these here, with you. I’ll drive around to the other customers and tell them to get their deliveries here. You think your ma will mind?”

“That’s smart … good … clever …” Anshel said without waiting to hear what I thought my mother would say.

Mr. B put the cans inside the barn, near the door. I thought he would be relieved at not having to worry over the fate of the milk, but as he sat on the cart and took up the reins, his mood was bleak.

“I shouldn’t tell you this, with your dad away fightin’ and all, Lodie, but I’m sick of this war business. That Gen’ral Jackson down at the Moss Neck plantation with his troops? Dammim, he’s a hero to the South, but he’s huntin’ down starvin’ men and boys who sneak away for a bite to eat and then shootin’ ‘em without a trial. He’s a desecration of the notion of a Christian man, he is. He don’t deserve our respect. And he sure as hell don’t deserve my cows’ milk.”

"I thought he was executing deserters--men running away from the army," I said.

"Don't matter the reason, Lodie. He's killin’ his own men. And if he's killin’ his own men, you know he's gonna start killin’ civilians–if he's not doin' it already. You know how to shoot, son?"

Anshel's eyes went the size of horseshoes. "Me?" The word was as good as "No."

"Then you come see me, and I'll teach you. You too, Lodie. You got to protect yourselves."

"Our own troops would really harm us?" I said, believing deep in my heart that nobody would murder people who had no part in the fighting.

Mr. B clucked, the horses stepped forward, and the milk cart began to lumber down the drive. "Either you ignore somethin’ or you're ignorant about somethin’. You can't do both," he called over his shoulder. "Now, I just told yas what's out there. You're not ignorant about it, so you'd better not ignore it!"

"But what do we do?" I shouted. The reply was an arm lifted in a wave of farewell.

"Never mind, Loydie,” Anshel said. “It's farbay–over. Gone. Done with. Let's get on with the day."

His deep gray eyes were raised to the clouds and glinted not with fear, but casual curiosity, as though he were glancing at a clock to check the time. He was almost eighteen; he sometimes acted twenty years older. "Aren't you worried?" I asked.

"We can always use a little rain."

"Not about the rain. The danger."

"Life is dangerous. That's good, yes? We'd be too comfortable. We'd forget why we're here."

"Well, you'd better hope the Confederate Army forgets we're here."

I hastened to the house. Anshel, I knew, was about to lecture me on how nothing in this world happens without a reason, and it was the best way I could tell him I had no interest without actually saying so and hurting his feelings.