Civil War Widow Born in 1840 Talks About the Letter She Never Finished Reading

Описание: Civil War Widow Born in 1840 Talks About the Letter She Never Finished Reading

Eliza Calhoun (1840–1922) was born in the hill country of western Virginia, the second child of a farming family that worked slope-land in the foothills for as long as anyone in the county could account for. She married Thomas Calhoun at nineteen and moved to the Calhoun land on the next ridge over — close enough to her parents' place that she could see their chimney smoke on clear mornings, close enough that news, when it came, came fast. In this account, given in her eightieth year, Mrs. Calhoun describes the farm and the marriage as they were before the spring of 1862: the mules and the kitchen garden and the fireplace that pulled badly from the northeast, the ordinary life of a young wife and mother in the Virginia hill country in the years the war was gathering. She describes Thomas Calhoun, the man she married — his temper, his habit of folding things lengthwise first, his opinions about corn rotation and card players and the south field, his way of being good company when he was in good humor and closed as a shutter when he was not. She describes the letter he sent from somewhere in Virginia in the late summer of 1863 — the paper, the folds, the handwriting she recognized before she broke the seal, the shift in tone that came partway through, the sentence that told her he had something left to say. And she describes the moment she stopped reading before the end, folded the letter back the way he had folded it, and put it in a tin that has sat in the bottom drawer of her bureau — behind the good handkerchiefs — for fifty-nine years. The letter, still unfinished, the voice of a man still mid-sentence after six decades of silence, and the cost and the shelter of the not-knowing are set down here together for the first time.

#1800s #19thcentury