Chapter 3: Enter Caroline

1865

Caroline French had just turned fifteen when Robert came home from the war and took up his position on the back porch. He always seemed to be sitting in the shade, whittling sticks or peeling apples for his mother, his feet raised on a piece of stove wood and his skinny ankles crossed, often barefoot. She had known Robert almost all her life and, as a child, had admired his quick wit and friendly nature. Both now seemed to have disappeared. He usually returned her cheerful greetings with a grunt or nod, concentrating on how long an apple peel he could create. He seldom smiled, and Caroline thought he smelled peculiar.

"How's your father," he answered her usual greeting as she skipped past today, wide skirt flapping. Caroline stopped, blinked and smiled.

"Oh fine, fine," the girl said, quickly pulling a rickety old chair up beside Robert's rocker and chasing a big cat from its seat. "He's hoping the fertilizer business will really improve soon."

"We need that railroad spur." Robert shaved a long curl from his rounded piece of wood, cocking his head and admiring its delicate form.

"I've heard him say that a hundred times." The girl noticed how thin the man's legs were, how the bones of his ankles jutted out. She tried to remember what he had looked like before the war. It seemed so long ago.

"Well, it's true. The B & O's slow as McClellan. And old Jefferson, how's he?" Robert asked, his lap full of shavings.

"Gone," the girl said, spreading her hands. "Thought you heard."

Robert shook his head. There would be a lot of coughing in the ranks if she walked past, thought he with an inward smile.

"Gone south to look for his wife and child, his daughter. Guess she's not a child any more. Been gone, oh, three or four months, since just after Mr. Lincoln was killed."

"I didn't know." He smoothed down his mustache and wondered how the girl maintained those silly curls at her ears, those corkscrews.

"Few did," said Caroline, who had enjoyed sharing an odd but durable relationship with the former slave as well the long-kept secret of both his literacy and his freedom. "What are you making?"

"A dancer, sort of a doll for Annie, a toy." He held up the tubular but still-headless body he had carved from a piece of kindling. "He has legs, but I haven't finished those, and arms too that flop around. He'll dance, sort of."

"How'd you learn to do that?" Caroline asked, looking at the young man's misshapen thumb. She repressed her curiosity.

"In camp. Feller traded them to the guards for tobacco."

"They let you have a knife?" The girl wrinkled her forehead trying to imagine the prison camp. Pictures and descriptions of Andersonville and some of the other camps had appeared in Harper's Weekly. The idea of spending month after month in such a place made her shudder.

"We flaked stones," Robert said. "You ever looked at the flint in that old rifle of your father's or Seth's collection of points, those arrow heads?" He sniffed. "It's called knapping."

She shook her head, tossing her ringlets, wondering why the man wanted to talk for a change. She tried to look interested and was determined not to fidget or pry. A part of her mind studied his face, deciding that he needed to shave while another part thought he would have been easy and interesting to draw, lots of planes and shadows, hollows and ridges. He certainly was an odd color.

Robert looked into her dark eyes and something stirred, something he had believed lay completely dormant if not dead. He started to smile and then thought better of it. His tongue counted the holes where teeth should have been, and through his mind passed the faded image of the silly Preston girl he had been sweet on before Sumpter and the call to arms. He exhaled sharply, unable to even recall her name and turned his attention back to the comely youngster beside him. Becky, Betsy, Betty. He could not think of it. Damnation.

"Feller showed me how," Robert told her, now acutely aware that she was a female, a nubile female, a pretty one too. "You press one stone on the side of another until a sharp-edged sliver comes off. Sometimes you have to strike them together. You can use the flakes as a knife, pretty sharp too, easy to cut yourself."

Caroline nodded, wondering if Robert ever trimmed his wispy beard of auburn hair or had tried to get the grimy dirt out of his knuckles. He seemed to have a lot of round places on his arms that never healed, crusty sores, and some on his legs. He was a mess. And he still smelled odd, sort of musty or moldy.

"You need the right kind of stones of course." He nodded, remembering the search.

"How did you hurt your thumb?" the girl asked, almost surprising herself when the question slipped out. She touched her fingers to her lips.