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band of about four hundred armed Lincolnites to seize Rogersville. It sounds so insane! Men from the Confederate Army camp outside town have ambushed and beat up men, only for
speaking
out for the Union, not even for taking up arms.
    It was Mrs. Johnson who told me, Justin Poole is leaving Tennessee. I will give him this letter tomorrow.
    I wanted to send you this to say,
please
keep writing to me, even if my answers to you get lost. Everyone around me—Pa, and Julia, and the Elliotts back at the Academy—talk as if Secession and theConfederacy and how terrible the Yankees are, are the
only
things that exist anymore: as if the world ends at the Mason-Dixon Line. I need you to keep reminding me that that isn’t true.
    Your friend,
Susanna
    * [N.B. Jefferson Davis ordered Southerners to boycott sales of cotton to Europe, as a demonstration of how much European nations needed the Confederacy—a policy which backfired rather severely.]
    Susanna Ashford, Nashville Female
Academy
Nashville, Tennessee
To
Cora Poole, Southeast Harbor
Deer Isle, Maine
T UESDAY , D ECEMBER 17, 1861
    Dear Cora,
    I wasn’t going to write again until I heard from you, but something has happened—or I
think
something has happened. You are the only person I would speak to of this; you are the only person who saw what happened at the depot, that day you and Emory left for Boston.
    Saturday I got Den to ride up to the Holler with me, to hand your letter to Justin Poole. I hadn’t seen him since that day at the depot. The whole house is in ruins now, not just the side he nailed up after his wife died. He and his dogs were waiting in the laurels, and because of what happened at the depot all those months ago, I didn’t know what to say. He asked me, “Are you happy, Susie? Barrin’ yourgrief.” And I said, Yes, I am, because in a strange way it’s true. Being at the Academy, and getting proper Art lessons, and being able to copy good paintings—knowing that I really am on the road that will take me to Philadelphia and beyond. It’s as if nothing—not even the War—really matters, not deep down where the Real Me lives.
    Mr. Poole said that he had a favor to ask of me, and we left Den at the Holler with the horses, and climbed part-way up the mountain to Skull Cave. (You remember, I took you there last March?) On the way he said he was sorry that he could do no more at Payne’s funeral than stand in the church door, but I knew if he’d done that, he must have seen your Emory. And yet he did not mention it.
    I asked him about what had happened to his wife. He told me that she’d run out of the cabin after they’d quarrelled, and when the storm came up he shut Emory (who was only three) into the cabin, and went looking for her. He found her broken body at the bottom of Spaniard’s Leap, but the storm was too fierce then to get down the mountain. “I was no fit husband for her or any girl,” he told me, and added with a little grin that’s very like Emory’s, “luckily for you, Miss. I know I was crazy, after. But I did all I was able, just then.” I remember Mrs. Johnson telling me that her husband tried to take little Emory away from his father and that Justin drove him off with a shotgun.
    There are all kinds of stories about Justin Poole’s treasure, because he was the worst miser in five counties while Emory was growing up, saving the money to send him to Yale. But you’ll never guess what’s in the cave! It’s even better than gold, Cora! Way down deep past where I took you, is the rest of his books. “I wanted somebody besides me to know where these were,” he told me. I peered into one of the trunks and saw the
Inferno
and
Jane Eyre
and Marcus Aurelius’s
Meditations
in Latin, and
all
Walter Scott’s the Waverly novels, which I
desperately
wanted to take back with me to Nashville except I knew stupid Nora Vandyke would cut the pages out of them for curl-papers. “You’d think, in forty-five years, I’d have more to