After Alice Fell(27)

“Would you look at this?” she says. “All a-ruin.”

A saw bites into wood; the sound zigs through the trees. Elias must be in the front, and a part of the hedge must be down.

The cicadas are quiet. A bird warbles and is answered by another.

Alice’s clothes are folded neat and tidy.

Two dresses, one striped, one plaid. Three petticoats. Three bloomers. A pair of black garters. Two corsets. Her plum bonnet and her peach.

Tomorrow I will go to town and order two headstones from Darius Meek and he will tell me there will be a delay. Too many stones to carve of late, the bodies of townsmen home like clockwork, and the church bells worn down in grief. I will ask for a flat rectangle granite for Benjamin; his name on the left and the right half blank, awaiting mine.

One silver-plated brush of boar bristles to take the tangles out. A wide-toothed bone comb. The hat pin I gave her on her sixteenth birthday—a songbird of green glass and pearl perched on its end.

I will ask Darius for a quartz marker, so it catches the sun and scatters the moonlight: Alice Snow, beloved sister.

Three books, wrapped and knotted in twine. A Treatise on Astronomy. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The Last of the Mohicans.

The wheelbarrow squeals as Cathy lifts it, pushes it past the shreds of iris leaves and down to the bare roses. She drops the handles and gestures for Toby.

Two pairs of boots: ivory white with black buttons and summer soles. Her scuffed, flat-heeled lace-ups. Five rolled stockings. Two black, two blue, one gray wool with a mend to the toe.

I rest my hand to the paper, spread my fingers over the black ink, then pick at the corner with my thumb.

Alice had been so desperate to go with me, those years ago.

“I have been accepted, Alice. As a nurse. You will return to Turee, just until Christmas. The war can’t go on much longer, can it? And think, you can help Lydia with little Toby, and I will retrieve you by Christmas, and Benjamin will be back and . . .” But she’d stomped the stairs to her little room and left me alone in the cottage hall. She would not have it. Note after note written and pushed to my fisted hands, under the bedroom door, taken to the post so I would find it with the mail. How can you leave me? How can you forsake me? A postcard with peonies: Selfish. Salt put in my tea. Letters from Benjamin, speckled with mud from Fort Magruder, Spotsylvania, Poplar Hill all torn to bits and offered as a puzzle to fill my time.

“I will not have our Union fail,” I said. “If I can do one thing—the army needs nurses.”

Her pencil ripped into her notebook. She tore the page out. Not a nurse.

“I will learn. I took care of Mother.”

Take me with you.

“No.”

Alice flailed her hands, and her voice came out then in a ragged grunt. She knocked over a porcelain angel that cracked but did not shatter. She kicked it across the front room. It spun and skidded under a bookcase heavy with Benjamin’s textbooks and atlases.

Her next note was ripped into the paper and shoved at my chest.

You didn’t take care of Mother.

“Go pack your trunk.”

This same trunk. I said it was all agreed: she would live with Lionel and Lydia and help with the child. Lionel came for the night and drove her away in the morning. I did not watch them leave. I had my own valise to pack and my own stage to catch.

So full I was of righteousness. So tired I was of her.

I look back to the yard. Toby’s wandered away to the boathouse. He grabs the metal lock and drops it so it thuds against the wood. The door quivers. He does it again but grows bored, and Cathy calls him back.

The locket isn’t listed in her inventory, not drawn in the diagram, wasn’t on her body when I cleaned her. The locket I see in my sleep. The one she never removed. Mother’s once. Alice had purloined it. Snatched it from Mother’s jewelry drawer and refused to give it up. And why should she? It was the last she had of her.

Five cloth notebooks, blank. Seven pencils tied with string.

Lionel’s gone down now to Cathy, wipes the dirt from her cheek and kisses her. He swings his hat and Toby grasps for it, catching the brim.

I turn the paper over: This is the property of Alice Louise Snow. June 1864. If found, please return to Marion Abbott specifically. Turee, NH. Otherwise destroy.

My ears fill and roar. I crumple the words in my fist. But the words slip through the paper and between the list of corsets and boar’s-bristle brushes. Each letter chained to the other and wrapping up my wrist and elbow. I lurch from the chair, throw the note on top of the clothing she never needed.

Today is Thursday. Cathy takes callers in the afternoon; she’ll sit in the parlor, perched on the edge of the settee and wait and hope this week someone will come. No one has in the weeks I’ve been here. Lionel will ride into town this morning, sit at his broad owner’s desk, and mull what the hell to do now there isn’t a war and the orders for bullets have dwindled away.

Cathy rests her hand on the rake handle and looks up. “I could do with help.”

I grab up my straw bonnet and wave it out the open window. “Coming.” My voice rasps rough and odd. I turn away, tie the knot of the hat tight to my throat. I close the trunk lid and click the lock. “Coming.”





Chapter Eleven


Turee Jun 6. 64

Marion—

I have chosen Brawders House for Alice. It is close enough we can visit on occasion and is assuredly more congenial than the public asylum in Concord. The doctors are confident the environment and facilities will improve her mental unease.