Read Alice's Tulips: A Novel for Free Online

husband there is?
    But to go back to what you were saying, Lizzie, with so many men off to the war and getting killed each and every day, I misdoubt there is husband material enough for me to choose from. On the other hand, if I was the one that crossed over the river, Charlie would find lots of old maids looking for him when he came home.
    You inquire of my health. I get around right smart, and you would not know there ever was a thing wrong with me. I am glad, because we are in the midst of planting, and I do not believe Mother Bullock would allow me to lie abed under any circumstances.
    Charlie writes so little, he will get out of practice, but in theletter about the baby, he told us he is in Helena, Arkansas. There was shooting around him, but he wasn’t part of it. The only thing he has done is cultivate side-whiskers. “What would you think,” he wrote, “if there was a war, and I joined up, and I didn’t get a single Reb?” “All right by me,” I write back. He is still having himself a good time. He and some other soldier boys found a beehive and wrapped it in a blanket; then they put it in Harve’s tent and, real careful, took off the cover. Harve woke up and took off as if the Rebs were after him, and got a dozen stings for his trouble. I wished Jennie Kate had been in that tent with him.
    Even though we spend all day in the fields, I still go to quilting after supper. Mother Bullock said she might like to learn to piece, so I showed her, and she asks, “Is that all there is to it?” She has made a number of nine-patch blocks for our Soldiers Relief project and must be a fast learner, because I was never any shakes as a instructress. I couldn’t teach a dog to bark. She will never be a first-rate quilter, for she doesn’t put her heart into it, but she is better at her stitches than some. My group has finished almost twenty-five quilts now, and I am getting plenty tired of that Iowa Four-Patch. But at least, I have an excuse to sew of an evening instead of mending harness or reading the Testament Mother Bullock gave me. (I move the marker in it every day in case she checks to see my progress.) We heard that the surgeons claim any quilts that ladies send to them, so now we ship our work to the Sanitary Commission in Chicago to distribute. I had my likeness taken, me holding up a finished Iowa Four-Patch, and sent it to Charlie, who says it is first-rate. “Me or the quilt?” I asks.
    The Negro has moved into the hired man’s shack and has taken over the milking. He is afraid of marauders. Over the border in Missouri, they strung up a darky by his feet and left him hanging in a tree. The man got loose, but fell and broke his neck. Our Negro bought us a bushel of black walnuts that the hired man had kept hidden in the shack, and Mother Bullock cracked some and made up a batch of divinity. Since she is always talking about hard times coming, as the song says, I was surprised. The candy is as pretty as snow and tastes awful good.
    Jennie Kate Stout has said nothing about it, but she is living up to her name and getting stouter and stouter every day, until she is as big and soft as a pillow, so I think she is going to have a baby. There is a crop of babies coming, you bet—all due nine months less one day after the Wolverine Rangers left. Well, if I hadn’t already been pregnant, I would be having a baby, too.
Give my respects to all.
    Alice Keeler Bullock
     
    May 2, 1863
    Dear Lizzie,
    Here is the second part of the joke. Kittie Wales arrived at quilting yesterday looking like the sultana of Turkey in the prettiest Persian shawl I ever saw. It is a paisley, the old style, where the pieces are fitted together, instead of woven in one piece, and although it is not new, there is not a single hole or worn spot in it. Jennie Kate asked if she had recently acquired it.
    “It is a gift,” says Mrs. Kittie in a mysterious way, “from an admirer.”
    “Why, here you are, ready to take a fourth husband, and