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see you here—but it’s good to see you.” Emory put on a little grin and put up his hand, as if he would have pinched my cheek except he remembered now I’m sixteen and a young lady. “That’s my Susie,” he said. I had to go greet other guests then, though it was nearly an hour before Pa and Henriette returned and almost another hour after that, before Henriette came down from her room. Julia didn’t come down at all. I found Emory out in Henriette’s garden. It’s bare and cold now, and all the leaves gone, so we were alone.
    “It made my blood boil, to hear Yankee recruiters talk about ‘killing Rebels’ as if it was foxes and rats they spoke of, not men with wives and farms and homes,” he told me. He looked like he hadn’t slept in a week. “I believe in the Union, Susie. I truly believe, with all my heart, that it is the only way our country is to survive. Yet when it came down to it, it didn’t make one bit of difference. I can’t fight against my homeland. Can’t step back and watch other men invade it. Not even if I know the cause is good.”
    It’s only now, with fall of dark, and everyone leaving, that I’ve been able to read your letter he gave me.
    Cora, what can I do? How can I make what’s happened easier for you to bear?
    You’ll be on Deer Isle by now, with your family. Emory
has
to have told you that he didn’t go down to the nearest Union camp and sign up. I
pray
this isn’t the first news that you get about where he is! I pray so hard that your vision is true, about you and Emory with white hair, holding hands as the Twentieth Century dawns, surrounded by your grand-children, saying, “It was a horrible time but we got through it.”
    I pray for your little child, who’ll be there when Emory returns. What are you going to name her? Or him, but it’s really got to be a Her.
    I’m glad you described your parents’ house on Deer Isle for me—do they
really
pile pine-boughs all around the walls to trap the snow like you described, so the house will stay warmer? Enclosed is a sketch of you in your snug little bedroom behind the stairs, listeningto your family’s voices from the kitchen, like you said you did as a little girl.
    I’m going to try to have our stableman escort me up to the Holler tomorrow, to see if I can find Justin Poole, to give him this letter. Please, please write of how you are. My oldest brother Gaius is coming home on furlough a few weeks before Christmas, and I’m afraid they’re going to find some reason to keep me here until then. Then they’ll find a reason to keep me until Christmas, and then …
    I’ll find a way. And wherever I am, I’ll be with you in my heart.
    Love,
Susanna
    Emory Poole to Cora Poole, Boston
S UNDAY , O CTOBER 27, 1861
    My most beloved—
    Forgive me. That first, and above all else.
    Parting I quoted that trite, true Lovelace chestnut that every man trots out for his beloved, when he deserts her to hazard his life for the life of his homeland: “I could not love thee, Dear, so much, loved I not Honor more.” Its meaning is as true now as it was then: that the man you love is the whole man, good and bad together. That the man who loves you so desperately is also the man who with equal desperation loves the land of his birth. One man, not separable into husband and patriot.
    That much I told you.
    What I did not and could not tell you, my darling, was that it wasn’t a Massachusetts regiment that I was going to join. That I wasn’t going to be fighting shoulder to shoulder with your brother Brock. When I parted from you on the threshold of our home, it was not to walk to the recruiting office, but to the depot, to begin my journey back to Tennessee to join the Army of the Confederacy.
    I believe in the Union of the States. I believe that our nation is unique and holy, molded by God’s inspiring hand as no nation has been in the history of nations. Were any outside tyrant to assail it I would unhesitatingly pour out my blood