More Love Notes Anthology
by
Lydia
Nyx
Scarlett Parrish
Viki Lyn
Jenny Urban
An Imprint of
Musa Publishing
More Love Notes Anthology
By Lydia Nyx, Scarlett Parrish, Viki Lyn, Jenny Urban
Copyright © Lydia Nyx, Scarlett Parrish, Viki Lyn, Jenny Urban, 2012
Smashwords edition
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All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without prior written permission of the publisher.
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This e-Book is a work of fiction. While references may be made to actual places or events, the names, characters, incidents, and locations within are from the author’s imagination and are not a resemblance to actual living or dead persons, businesses, or events. Any similarity is coincidental.
Musa Publishing
633 Edgewood
Ave
Lancaster, OH 43130
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Published by Musa Publishing, January 2012
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This e-Book is licensed to the original purchaser only. Duplication or distribution via any means is illegal and a violation of International Copyright Law, subject to criminal prosecution and upon conviction, fines and/or imprisonment. No part of this ebook can be reproduced or sold by any person or business without the express permission of the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-61937-871-1
Published in the United States of America
Editor: Elizabeth Silver
Cover Design: Kelly Shorten
Interior Book Design: Coreen Montagna
Warning
This e-book contains adult language and scenes. This story is meant only for adults as defined by the laws of the country where you made your purchase. Store your e-books carefully where they cannot be accessed by younger readers.
Table of Contents
The Heart is a Stringed Instrument by Jenny Urban
By Lydia Nyx
Dedication:
For Jamie Edford, my fellow Civil War buff.
Blue-Gray Lines
* * * *
Three weeks of silence, ponderous as the summer heat and monotonous as the hum of mosquitoes in the river bottom, had wound Wendell Davis’s stomach up tighter than a rusty spring.
Then finally, one afternoon in early August, the silence broke.
“Someone’s in the lane, Wendell!” his mother called from the parlor.
Wendell hung over the basin, washing off sweat and grime from the field. Like a soldier snapping to attention, he jerked upright and reached for his rifle propped against the wall. Still dripping and shirtsleeves rolled up, he rushed to the foyer and positioned himself next to one of the windows on either side of the door. Sure enough, he heard the clatter of hooves.
He leaned over and peeked out.
“It’s just the post!” he called back, and breathed a sigh of relief. He propped the gun next to the door and started undoing the latches.
“It’s about damn time.” He heard his mother get up from her rocking chair. “Sweet mercy, that post boy is lazier than a hog wallowing in mud. I’ve had all these letters to go for days.”
She tottered into the foyer. Mary Davis had become half the woman she once was, stooped and gray and beaten down by the cares of life, but her disposition remained keen and cruel and her age-twisted hands could still grip like iron. Wendell thought of her like a coiled-up snake, ready to strike at the merest provocation.
She shoved a stack of letters into his hands. “Take them out to him. Go on.”
Wendell opened the door and stepped out, squinting into the blistering sun. Beneath a brilliant blue sky the land stretched out green in all directions. He didn’t understand how the seasons kept coming, how the world stayed unchanged despite the violence raging across the surface. He didn’t know how every day wasn’t as gray as the world behind his vision.
The post rider guided his horse up to the porch, overfull bag behind him. The sight of him didn’t lift Wendell’s spirits like it once had, as Wendell had long given up hoping. A carrier only came when they had letters to be delivered, but his mother wrote his cousins, his sister, and her relatives up north on the regular. For nearly a month, when the post came, every letter had been for her.
“Hey there, Wendell,” the boy said. He couldn’t have been more than sixteen and if he weren’t riding for the postal service he would have been on the field with a gun in his hand. “How’s your mother?”
“She’s all right.” Wendell thrust her letters at him.
“How’s the farm doing?” He took Wendell’s letters and handed him a bunch in return.
“As well as ever,” Wendell said. “Profits are low as the spirits.”
“You ought to go into Platte City and ask about a job at the post office. They need a couple sorters, they was telling me. The mail’s getting overwhelming, what with all these soldiers sending letters home.”
“No, I gotta stay here. Not much help these days.”
“I’m just saying, in case the conscription tries to get you. No telling how much longer this damn war is on for and they don’t take men with the postal service.”
“It ain’t got me yet. Somebody has to keep food in the mouths around here.”
The boy grinned widely, showing yellowed teeth and a wad of tobacco in the corner of his mouth. “You could always take up with the bushwhackers. Keep you from getting raided, too.” He spat a thick wad of tobacco juice off to the side.
Wendell snorted. “Don’t have as much to fear from the bushwhackers as the Federals, I suppose.” He turned to go back in. “Thank you.”
“Pleasant day to you.”
Wendell stepped into the house and closed the door. He flipped through the letters, blinking spots from his eyes. “Auntie wrote you. Jeb, too.”
“Bring them in here.”
Wendell walked into the parlor, but stopped short just inside the doorway, heart pounding. One of the envelopes bore the emblem of the 10th Missouri Volunteer Calvary, next to neat, familiar handwriting.
“Wendell!” his mother snapped. “I said give them here.”
He took the letters to her, tucking the one obviously meant for him into his shirt pocket. She snatched the rest from him.
“Who’s that from?” she asked.
“Declan. Been a bit, was starting to get worried.”
She huffed. “Talked to his mother the other day. Said his father’s taken a bad turn, can barely walk. Don’t know if he’ll be around to see his son come home. That’s saying he does come home, seeing as how his brother didn’t.”
Wendell clenched his jaw.
She looked up and her wizened face softened, something almost like kindness in her eyes. “At least I was sensible enough to keep my son at home. Don’t have to worry they’ll be sending you back in a box.”
Wendell hated such talk, for more than one reason.
She looked back down and tore one of the envelopes open. “Find that little imp Lucy and tell her to get supper started.”
The “imp” in question had barely reached the age of ten, skinny as a railroad slat, sun burnt, blue-eyed, and timid. She was small for her age, probably stunted by lack of food these past few years of war, and could have passed for a child of seven or eight. They’d found her hiding in the garden chewing on radishes in the spring and she said her family had been killed in one of the Kansas border raids, but they knew little else about her. He would put her to work making supper before his mother had to ask again, but he intended to read his letter first.
He stole up the back stairs to his room. Sitting on his bed, his hands shook as he pulled out the envelope and tore the top open. The whoosh and thump of his heart filled his ears.
He unfolded the single sheet of paper and read slowly, trying to savor every word.
July 20, 1864
My dearest Wendell,
I am sorry this letter is so long in coming to you, and I hope you and your family are in good health. We have been marching and fighting Rebels in skirmishes acrost Mississippi all a long month and my days have been hard. It’s hard to find time to rite at night, specially when we are only getting a few hours sleep and I have to snatch what I can before we move on. My horse has a limp and I worry I may have to put him down and buy another. If so I can’t send home my pay to the Family, but I hope they will understand. I can’t be Calvary without a horse. This is just some of my worries but I don’t want to spend this letter telling you my worries. I will save that for my letters to my Daddy, who lives his life to advise me.
I am missing you as surely as any soldier misses his wife and I hope you don’t mind me saying that. This is lonely hard going and if I had you by my side it wouldn’t be so bad, I think. There is much debachery as I have said before. There are whores in the camp and public women in every city, and even men who I could lay with, as men don’t care sometimes in these bitter conditions and just long for a touch. But I don’t want none but you and you must not worry, I have not touched another, though it’s been years since I seed your face. I might get mocking for choosing to abstain, but I laugh and say “God is always watching me.”
As I laid out on my blanket the other night with the heat and the skeeters eating at me, I thought on you. Remember when we were young, we’d go down to the river to fish? And we’d climb up trees and we’d dig holes and we’d give my damn girl cousins all the trouble we could because they were always chasing us? I thought on them days and I thought how it was funny I didn’t know then how things might change and I’d come to love you and you me. I always thought I’d come to have a little wife and a mess of kids like my Daddy and Momma, but I don’t expect I might do that now.
Then I thought on how you finally kissed me that day out behind the barn. And then on through the years, the things we done up in that hayloft, where we made up the bed with blankets. And when I thought on it too much, and I think on it now, I get a burning inside me I can’t do nothing about nohow and it makes me want to chew and spit nails.
Some of the boys asked me if I had a love back home and I told them yes I did, and I made things up and called you Winnie, and said you was waiting for me back near the Platte River and I hope you don’t mind. Not everyone mite take kindly to the idea, no matter what they get up to some nights. I think of you now as my Winnie if that’s all right.
It’s good your Ma made you abstain from this war and no matter what anyone says about men who don’t enlist you got the better end of things. Ain’t anything about being a man out here so much anymore unless bleeding and sickness and filth and starvashun is what makes a man, and I don’t expect it does. Wish I was home and wish I could kiss you on your mouth and be in that bed in the barn with you again. I don’t know if that makes me a man, but lonely is what it makes me these days.
I will try not to take so long in riting you again and please rite me soon.
With great love,
Declan Kelly
P.S. - I am enclosing this gift for you, an image I had taken of me in Tupelo. I hope it will give you some comfort at night to hold since you can’t hold me, though I wish you could.
Inside the envelope, Wendell found something even more precious than the words on the page: a tintype. He hadn’t seen Declan going on two years and he thought he remembered him well enough, but memory didn’t do the man justice.
Declan looked thinner, but bold and proud in his uniform, holding a rifle and a saber on his hip. The buttons of his coat were done up to the neck. His dark hair, straight and thick, hung to his collar and he had a handsome beard and mustache. Wendell had always been the opposite of Declan, beardless and tan with a lot of tight, sun-faded blond curls. Declan used to tell him they were like night and day with their opposite looks, Declan dark and stocky and mysterious like the star-washed sky and Wendell lean and wiry and bright as the live-long day.
In the picture, Declan stared down the camera, hard and serious, and though the dull tones of the photograph didn’t show, Wendell knew Declan’s eyes were as blue as a summer sky. He had a new scar over his left brow.
Wendell closed his eyes and pressed the picture to his lips. He imagined he could smell the acrid scent of gunpowder, the woody smoke of campfires, and the hay-and-sunlight scent of Declan’s hair. For a moment, he left the farm behind him and found himself on a bedroll in a soldier’s camp in Mississippi, with Declan’s head resting on his shoulder.
* * * *
Wendell helped Lucy do the washing after supper, though his mother didn’t like when he helped her out. She said coddling the little girl made her lazy and stupid but he didn’t particularly care this evening, he had achieved such a fine mood. He sung a washing-up song and he’d finally gotten her giggling when they were interrupted by the sound of hooves in the lane. The song died on his lips and he looked toward the door.
“Lucy,” he said. “Go on up to the attic and lock yourself in.”
Her eyes got wide. Without a word, she took her hands from the wash water and streaked from the room.
Wendell dried his hands quickly and grabbed up his rifle. “Momma!” he called out. “There’s someone in the lane, stay put.”
He hoped for a late visit from a neighbor or a drifter looking for work. Instead, exactly who he didn’t want it to be was exactly who it was: two men, dressed in the blue uniforms of the Federals, brass buttons shining in the light from the lanterns they carried. Wendell stepped out on the porch and lowered his rifle, but didn’t relinquish the weapon.
“You there!” one of them said, perched high and haughty on top his horse like a king. He had a gray beard down to his chest. “Whose land is this?”
“My family’s,” Wendell said. “Our name’s Davis. What do you want here?”
“We’re on official business,” the other man said. He was younger and had no facial hair, and looked less pompous, too, though these traits didn’t make Wendell like him more. “We’re looking for a band of bushwhackers been seen through here.”
“Bushwhackers don’t generally come up this far north,” Wendell said. “Haven’t seen anything.”
“What’s your loyalty?” the bearded man asked him.
“With the Union,” Wendell replied automatically. “Of course.”
“Of course.” He narrowed his eyes at Wendell. “Why aren’t you enlisted? How old are you?”
“Twenty, but I’m the only man on this farm.” He had answered the question more times than he was old. “My mother isn’t well and my father’s dead. Don’t have any brothers.”
The young man grunted, a clear sound of derision. Wendell was used to that, too. A man could avoid conscription if he could prove himself the only son of a widow, and he’d had to prove his status several times already.
“You got any slaves?” the bearded man asked Wendell.
“No. We employ a lot of orphans and drifters. Can’t pay much, some not at all, but we give them food and a place to sleep. They come and go.”
“Mind if we have a look around?” he asked, in a tone implying Wendell should say yes.
“Suit yourself. You find anything off, give me a holler. I’ll help you shoot.”
Wendell went back inside, trying to act like he wasn’t afraid. He took his mother upstairs to her room, checked on Lucy, and went out to the bunk house. He saw the two men in the south field, their lanterns bobbing.
He roused the workers. “Keep an eye out,” he told them. “You see them setting fire to anything, get out of here. Run to the neighbors’ farms.”
A farm being raided on account of the owners supposedly helping rebels had become no uncommon story in Missouri—good people were stripped of lands and homes, based on nothing but hunches or false information. The glorious Union wasn’t always so glorious, and Wendell couldn’t really take a side no matter how he had to lie. Both sides, as far as he could tell, had no sense of mercy and wouldn’t answer to anyone but God Himself coming down to judge them.
The Federals apparently found nothing and left within the hour. Wendell watched them ride down the road from his perch in the barn hayloft and breathed a heavy sigh of relief.
He gave the workers the all clear and secured the outbuildings and house for the night. After coaxing Lucy out of the attic, he allowed her to sleep on the floor in front of the kitchen hearth, though his mother didn’t like workers sleeping in the house. He reasoned he’d get up before his mother and get the little girl out of there.
“They’re gone,” Wendell told his mother when he got upstairs. She sat in a chair by the window in her room, in the dark. “You want me to light your candles now?”
“Yes. I don’t like sitting in the dark Wendell, not one bit.”
“You want them to take notice of you, then?”
She huffed. “The dark puts me in fear of the ghosts and demons my father used to tell me about as a child. Every night at bed, he’d come in and tell us those awful stories. Put a terrible fright in me and my sisters. And he loved it so.”
Wendell fetched the tinderbox and lit the candles in her room. The glow chased back the shadows, though he supposed ghosts and demons might still be hiding in the closet or under the bed. He sort of hoped they were.
“If your father was still alive,” she said, “I expect he’d have left us to go fight in the war. He’d be fighting for the Rebels, though, and those Federals would have burned the place down to the ground by now.”
Wendell looked at himself in the window, made a mirror by the light. His eyes looked dark and his cheeks hollow. Maybe he was the ghost.
“Why would he be fighting for the Rebels?” Wendell asked.
“He always had Confederate sympathies. He wanted slaves to work on the farm, but he couldn’t afford them. We come up from Kentucky when your sister was only a few months old and he thought there was money to be made here. When the arguing broke out about this being a free or slave state I told him not to get messed up in it.”
Wendell’s father had died shortly after Wendell’s thirteenth birthday. Wendell had automatically become the man of the house, though he hadn’t been ready at all. He had an older sister and he’d once had a younger sister, but she’d died. Likewise, he’d had a younger brother who died as a baby the year before his father passed.
He tried to remember life when his father had been alive. He’d taught Wendell how to shoot and ride and about farming, though Wendell’s knowledge seemed paltry when he had to take over. He spent time around Declan’s father, who had gotten crippled fighting in the militia, but ran his farm with the kind of skill and command Wendell tried to emulate as he got older.
“I don’t remember him being in favor of slavery or Rebel ideals,” Wendell said.
“He was, trust me boy. I was his wife. I knew him.”
“I’m not saying you didn’t.”
“I guess if he was still around, you could have gone off to the war yourself. Expect you’d feel more like a man. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
“No. I’m best suited here looking after you.”
“And you shouldn’t forget it. Better than death on a battlefield.” She looked away from him. “Bring me up my writing.”
Wendell fetched her paper and pens from downstairs, then went to his room.
He lit the lantern and set up at his table in the corner with paper, pen, and envelopes. He needed to go to Platte City and get more stamps. This, at least, was one thing she didn’t forbid him to do—their one shared obsession.
He propped Declan’s picture up against the lantern, and began to write.
August 11, 1864
My dearest Declan,
I felt great joy when I rec’ your letter today and thanked God above after nearly a month of silence. I have great faith in your skill and ability but it doesn’t stop my blood running cold every night as I lie in bed, thinking you’ve taken a shot or fallen to sickness. I know you’ve only had a few wounds and mild bouts with fever, but I can’t help worrying. Thank God you are well. I know you are marching hard and long and been run through the mill but please don’t scare me again. Make time for even one word to me. I am surely glad I was sent to that fancy school my mother liked, and you had a few years of schooling yourself, as I would go mad if we couldn’t write to each other while you are away.
Your gift is much appreciated and even more precious to me than your letter. I have it before me now and I had nearly forgotten how beautiful you are. You look a bit thin but not unwell. How did you get the scar over your eye? I am most curious. Though I would love you eternally if you were covered head to foot in war’s scars.