4. What We Digested With the Coffee

Mama might have told me to start the coffee, but there wasn’t one coffee bean in the house. A mess of Union ships in the waters off Southern ports was making sure the Rebel states didn’t have the benefit of goods its citizens needed to live or fight, and that included coffee beans. So Mama and her friends invented the drink called coffee all over again by grinding roasted wheat and chicory into a gritty powder that they stuffed into little pouches of cheesecloth and steeped in a teapot. Sometimes Mama added fennel root, but the stuff still tasted the way burning leaves smelled. Not even a dose of molasses could ease the sense of conflagration, never mind convince us we were drinking coffee.

I often wondered if the Rebels running the war understood how they were making me and everybody else suffer. I lost count of the times I cursed them for trying to get their own way at our expense. Selfish, that’s what they were. Spoiled and selfish. I wished they all would die. That way, the war would end and Papa would come home. Life would go on as if there had never been a war.

I was setting the table when Mama came down. She had donned the faded blue calico she wore for doing chores, the one with the fraying hem. Her hair was clumped in a loose, gnarled knob at the base of her neck. Hearing that Anshel was still in his room, she called up to him through the ceiling. She had a lovely alto voice and had sung all the time before Papa left for the war. Though she had long forsaken that aspect of her fondness for music, she still had a certain strength of voice and could use it when she wished. She must have wished it a lot that morning, for before long my cousin appeared. “Yes, Tante Laurencia?”

“You were both very foolish to be with that man. He’s dangerous.”

“He’s worried about his horse, tante. We don’t have any hay. All we have is chicken feed.”

“It’s his fault that the horse is hungry. That’s what he gets for taking arms against his country. What are you doing?”

Anshel had poured a cup of coffee and was opening the back door. “He’s hungry too, tante. I’ll bring this to him now. It’s a mitzvah to feed the hungry.”

“It will be a mitzvah to get your throat cut,” Mama muttered as the storm closed upon her nephew and he was out of earshot. I reminded her that she had told the soldier he needed breakfast, and she began hacking slabs of bread off the loaf. I asked her if she thought the pieces were too thick to put in the toast pan.

“You can dunk them in your milk.”

“We’re having coffee, Mama, not milk.”

“Just eat it, Lodie.”

I didn’t wait for Anshel. I knew that, once he came in, he’d have to change into dry clothes, then wash his hands and mutter some prayers in Hebrew before he finally sat down and ate with us. I had less stomach for his religious spectacles than for the prospect of the enemy in our barn. I was on my third hunk of bread before he did indeed execute all I had expected. He sat across from me, bit into the bread, and began to talk.

“You know, tante, the soldier in the barn? I don’t think he’s dangerous. I had a good look at his uniform. He’s a private. An enlisted man. He has no pistol. He has no saddlebag. All he has is the horse.”

“He doesn’t need a pistol, not if he’s scouting for food.”

“But, tante, why would the army would send him out without a weapon? Wouldn’t he be ordered to shoot game to bring back to camp?”

“No. He’s not looking for game. He’s looking for healthy farm animals. He would be ordered to remember where he saw them. His officer would send out a foraging party to bring them back to camp. That reminds me, Anshel. Please count the chickens in the henhouse.” He put down his knife. “Not now. After breakfast.”

“Yes, tante. But may I ask you something? If you don’t trust the soldier in the barn, why not ask him into the house? You would at least know where he is and what he’s doing.”

Mama’s color up and ran out of her face. “Really, Anshel, there are two women in this house. Can you defend us against a man who might want to have his way with us?”

“Your uncle, my own father’s uncle, sent me here to help you when your husband went to war. Do you think he’d have sent me if I could not defend you?"

“That soldier is one, very big man.”

“And I’m a big boy, if not a very big boy. I’ve been protecting you. I will protect you in the worst way, if, God forbid, it should come to that. But I don’t think a man without a weapon and riding an underfed horse is looking for trouble. I think he’s running away from trouble. Think, tante!” Anshel urged as Mama started to argue. “He has no weapon and no extra clothing or provisions. What he does have is a hungry horse. Doesn’t that suggest he slipped away from his camp suddenly, on an urge and on the first horse he could find?”

“Why would he do such a thing? He’s a soldier.”

“Maybe he’s a soldier who no longer wants to be a soldier.”

“Maybe he’s a deserter,” I said, remembering our conversation with Mr. B.

Mama was doubtful. “Do you believe he’s a deserter, Lodie?”

I wanted to believe it. The soldier didn’t have to put me on that starving horse and bring me home. I sensed a certain kindness beneath the deed. “From what I hear, men are doing whatever they can to get away, even if it means being executed without a trial if they’re caught. I don’t think I want the man in our barn to get caught.”

Mama got that “nobody’s home” air about her eyes that suggested she was looking in at herself and not at us, and what she saw was not to her liking. “What do I do? What if I bring him in and he’s not a deserter but a criminal, and he turns on us? What if I keep him out in the barn and he really is a deserter, and he’s overcome by the cold or by hunger?”

Mama had a point, and I feared that contemplating the situation in depth would make me get that “nobody’s home” look about me, too.

Anshel, however, had no trouble with Mama’s dilemma. “All we have to do is ask the soldier into the house. If he refuses, then we know he’s a deserter. He probably means to leave as soon as the storm ends.”

“And if he accepts?”

“Then it’ll be good that you hid the pictures of Loydie’s father in his uniform.”

“If he accepts, we can’t keep him out.”

“Let’s see what he says before we worry.”

So the three of us bundled up against the storm and went back out to the barn. We brought bread and coffee, hoping that the food would encourage our visitor to stay where he was. He accepted the offering with thanks, and we returned to the house considerably more joyous than we had left it, for we were safe, and the deserter was safe.

Mama sat down at the piano and commenced to practice Schubert. I sat beside her, carding the wool. I thought she was making too much noise with the damper pedal. I looked up to see Anshel walking toward the piano. “A soldier is at the door,” he said.

“It’s not the man in the barn.”