How to See the Elephant - Part II (2)

Thetis waits out her time at Miss Barclay's because for a time in the summer of 1862 it looks like the war will end with a quick Northern victory. Then her father will return and normal life will resume. However, the North fails to take Richmond and the war continues. In September Thetis receives a letter that her father has been wounded fighting in Kentucky. Worried that he might have been captured, she runs away, taking with her, at the last moment and against her own better judgment, Sheba.

I got up and began folding the supper -- biscuits, stringy pieces of chicken, green beans and all -- into the napkin.
"Get out of my way," I said to Sheba. "If you say anything to anyone I'll tie you up and lock you in the outhouse."
I had nothing grander to threaten Sheba with than the belt of Polly's dressing gown, but I brandished it. I had always understood that Negroes frightened easily.
She jumped up from the floor and I found her suddenly hanging on me and pulling on my dress.
"I want to go with you! Take me with you!"
I turned and began to pull my valise out from under the bed.
"Don't be silly, Sheba -- "
"Please!"
"You don't even know where I'm going. And why would you want to leave, anyway? You've got it made here!"
"Miss Veda wouldn't take me on the boat and they're all mean! I hate them!"
"No." This was an obstacle. I had never intended to tie her up; for one thing, I didn't have the time. "Sheba, please -- "
"I'll scream, Miss Wymore!"
"I can't! It's ridiculous!"
She edged dangerously close to the door. I thought of the train I might be missing.
"Have you got shoes on? Because I'm going now!"

We stopped together at the top of the stairs. The clink of plates came from below, and Simon's orotound voice: "Don't worry one minute more, Miss Veda." Reddish rectangles of light from the sunset shone on the hall floor.
Down the stairs, eyeing each other, trying not to make a thump at the bottom. I motioned Sheba toward the room with the broken window, but I waited at the door while she went in before me. Then I shut it quietly and went to the window.
"We'll have to take off the boards," I said, and then I, not Sheba, proceeded to pull at them, trying not to jerk too hard lest the wood squeak. I got a splinter in the process. When I was done there was a four-foot rectangle, picked clean of glass.
"You first," I said.
I saw her magenta slippers and the silk shawl bunched around her neck as she slipped through. It was hopeless. Also, it occurred to me now, I was technically stealing Miss Veda's property. There would be slave catchers after us, men with dogs. And I could have gotten away so easily by myself!
I flung my valise through to the ground and stepped out the window.
"Come on," I said, and headed around the side of the house.

A Cloudy Day

A week ago, it rained. There was a small flash of lightning and a single roll of thunder. I got up and looked out the window and saw that the street was wet. It lasted about 15 minutes altogether. As far as I know, it didn't rain anywhere else in Las Vegas or Henderson, and certainly not at the airport, so "officially" no rain fell that day. That happens a lot here.
Today is cloudy. Nice, dark clouds, and a calm atmosphere. Were it late July or August, a sky like this would almost certainly mean rain. But not today -- the air just feels too dry. Still, it's a nice respite, nice to be able to be outside for once. I look up at the clouds and I think, soon... In six weeks or so we'll start to get some thunderstorms. They'll start off small and scattered. Then, one day, there will be rain everywhere, even at the airport. And daily life in Las Vegas will, for a few minutes, at least, come to a stop.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez Glurge

Glurge are those inspirational emails that get forwarded to you by co-workers or family members -- you know, inspirational stories or "ten rules to live by," often accompanied by dire threats if you don't send them on. (I should have died three times over last week alone.) If you follow the link above on snopes.com you can find some of the back stories to these messages -- which ones are true, which ones exaggerate, etc. I've gotten a bunch of them, including some not mentioned on the site (I have some really bored co-workers.) But about a month ago I got the most surprising one I have ever seen. It claimed to be the last message of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who, it said, was dying of lymphoma and wanted to leave the world with some final thoughts. Against of rather nice slideshow, mostly of Paris at night, were the usual inspirational sayings -- tell your family you love them...live life to the fullest...don't waste your days...
I don't know -- it could have all been real, but somehow it just didn't have that touch of orginality that I would have associated with Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It was kind of ho-hum. And why Paris? I know that Garcia Marquz lived in Mexico during his political exile, but I'm not aware that he lived in Paris a great deal and he's always been a kind of "New World" writer.
On the other hand, if it is fake, why Gabriel Garcia Marquez? What does a highbrow name like his bring to the world of glurge, which is mostly drawn from Reader's Digest and the Chicken Soup series? Has anyone else seen this one circulating? What do you think?

How to See the Elephant - Part II

Miss Barclay's is run by Miss Veda, a vague and cheerful woman of open Confederate sympathy. She owns three slaves -- Simon, her personal servant, Dalpha, the cook, and Sheba, Simon's daughter, whom she treats as a pet. Although the slaves are different from what Thetis expects, she observes that their presence casts a tension throughout the school.

Simon was a man to stay away from. His eye never fell on a person without making trouble for that individual -- girl or slave. Perpetual suspicion shone in his look. He wore an elaborate brass watch on a chain and when Miss Veda was not around he would sit in the armchair by the front door and hold it in front of him, eyes directly on it, as if time itself would not advance unless he personally supervised it. When it got dark he would say, bring me a candle, girl, and Sheba would reappear with a wax candle stuck at an angle on a broken bit of dish and set it down in front of him. There he would sit all night, I believe, his shoulders squared and his head at attention, as if he were listening, in some supernatural way, to the activities of the entire house. He rarely, if ever, spoke to anyone other than Miss Veda, and to her he used a special voice, deep and jovial, as he had at the breakfast table that first day. He did not speak in the Negro dialect, but he did lard everything he said with "ain't that right," and "you know it," nodding towards Miss Veda for affirmation. And she, in her turn, brought every mealtime pronouncement to him for approval, even if only in the form of a solemn nod, as if anything produced by a table full of women needed confirmation by a man.
Sheba was Simon's daughter, but he took no notice of her except when Miss Veda was around. She had her two beautiful dresses, along with shoes, wraps and gloves; everything was stiff and spotless as a doll's, and she could not stand to get anything on them. On rainy days she would stand on the doorstep and wring her hands like a temperance woman in front of a saloon, crying look at the rain, Miss Veda! look at all those people getting dirty! It was hard to tell her age. She was as tall as any of us, but she had a simple, scatterbrained appearance and was generally treated as if she were less than ten.

Thetis brings fleas from the Pittsburgh boarding house with her to Miss Barclay's. Even after this episode is forgotten, she remains a target of the other girls, tagged as an abolitionist (even though she has little idea what this means) and a Yankee.

"Were you scared last night? I was."
I laughed. "Polly thought it was the Rebs attacking."
"I did not!" Polly said.
"You did," I said promptly, "You said, 'It's the Rebs, isn't it?' and 'I was dreaming.'" I laughed again.
I wasn't trying to be rude. I liked Polly. I had heard the other girls make teasing comments like this to each other and shriek with laughter, without anyone's feelings being hurt. I didn't see why my comment couldn't be taken the same way.
"I never. You were more scared than I was, Thetis."
I didn't want to argue with Polly. But if they misremembered last night, my moment of glory would be forgotten.
"That was a good idea," I said flatly, in a voice that sounded fake to my own ears, "Asking me to recite last night, Polly."
Polly laughed.
"You did -- you asked me -- you said -- "
"I thought you just started talking out like that. I was going to tell you to be quiet."
"You did not!"
"Oh, Thetis, you're so..."
"...jealous," Jenny said.
I looked at them in disbelief.
"Jealous of what?"
"You're always pulling the other girls down and telling them they're wrong."
"Me?"
"You think you're better than us," Sarah said, gazing vacantly up at the sky as she leaned on the porch post. "And you're always chasing after us, trying to make us like you. And you make squeaking noises on the plate when you cut your meat."
"Sarah!" Ellen said.
"Typical Yankee," was Jenny's contribution. She leaned over toward the vegetable patch and made a flinging motion and suddenly one of those big hornworms that eat tomato plants landed on my arm. I froze. It began rippling up my skin, as long and thick as my finger and striped white and green. The sticky feeling of it attaching itself to me turned my stomach. Still, I did not move or scream. I reached over with my left hand, pulled it off, and, with it dangling between two fingers, marched around the side of the garden. The hornworm twisted and wiggled in mid-air, trying to grab hold of something. I hated it more than ever. The girls followed, at a distance. Polly squealed. I dropped it on a bare tomato plant and watched it inch away.
"What are you scared of? It's just a caterpillar," I said loudly.
It took me years to realize that I had done the worst thing possible. If I had screamed and had hysterics there might have been -- though probably not until much later -- a smidgen of sympathy, an eventual admission that it was a dirty trick, perhaps even a grudging apology from Jenny. Now I was clearly too crazy to be worth bothering about. Even Ellen turned away, sadly.

Squash in bloom

I pollinated the squash this morning. Until I wanted to grow things I could eat (thanks, Michael Pollan), I never imagined sex to be such a integral part of gardening. You got some flowers and sooner or later fruit showed up...
I'm just hoping used a male blossom to pollinate the female and not the other way round.
Sheesh, how embarassingly reminiscent of high school.

How to See the Elephant - Prologue & Part I

"He was drawn in now. It had been like this during the war, in the hospitals. That was where I began to tell stories, and to recite, while I was nursing the sick and wounded. I told them about Katherine and stories from Mansfield, and being sent to Miss Barclay’s, and my escape, to find Pa, traveling across Pennsylvania and Ohio. They were easy stories, sometimes not quite true, the sadder parts skipped over, the funny parts played up. The men never tired of hearing them."

How to See the Elephant begins with Thetis Wymore telling her story in 1869. After her mother and brother die from cholera, her father takes a job as a travelling salesman and they follow a circuit through Pennsylvania and Ohio together.

"We were in somewhere in north-eastern Ohio in the rain and for miles it had been nothing but woods and fields and not a sign of human habitation. The rain was that steady rain of big drops with an even finer, steadier mist in between them; there were puddles in the ditches and the road and for hours on end we heard nothing but the constant whispering of the rain, along with the plop! plop! of big drops in the puddles. Inside or out, it was a day to drive you to suicide. I was sitting on my knees in the back of the wagon, right amongst all our stuff, so I could be under the tarpaulin and keep the rain off. My legs were cramped and my arms were tired from holding it up, but I was mostly dry."
Given a chance, in the spring of 1862, to join an Ohio regiment being raised by an old friend, her father takes it -- without consulting her.

“What’s going to happen to me?”
Pa was sitting in the parlor, in the armchair by the window. We were the only boarders in there at the moment. Pa tilted his head back and looked out the window at the jumble of trash and scrawny bushes around Mrs. Hammersmith’s double outhouse.
“Well, I’ve thought of two ideas. One is the Shakers. I could ride you down to Pleasant Hill in Kentucky. They’d take you in and you know ’em there. I think you’d be safe there, now that Donelson’s fallen, and it don’t look like Kentucky’s going to go out of the Union.”
“Yes,” I said vaguely.
I wasn’t thinking of any of the political stuff; I was thinking of how silent it was there and that the trees would go drip, drip all day long on rainy days and the nights would be pitch black.
“The other is to go to Miss Barclay’s in Wilmington.” He spoke slowly, as if this idea looked uncertain when exposed to daylight. “Amaryllis teaching there should swing us a discount on rates, and she’d look out for you. You’d get an education, too. Other stuff as well, I’m sure, but an education.”
We had been through Wilmington, Delaware last year on the way to Baltimore. I remembered a river and some factories.
I knew then what I wanted to say but I could not make my voice work. I knew that after Mama and Julius, after the cemetery, after the house in the days afterward, I had to accept my fate without asking questions."

How to See the Elephant - Intro

"I think I should tell you, Thetis, that I have already telegraphed Colonel McMillen. Such an opportunity won't come along twice. The 95th Ohio looks like an excellent regiment."

Thetis Wymore's father has given her a choice -- while he is fighting for the Union, she can go live with the Shakers or she can go to the finishing school where her half-sister Amaryllis teaches. Eager for city life, Thetis picks education at Miss Barclay’s, under the simpering Miss Veda, where she is teased for being an abolitionist and cold-shouldered after a flea jumps out of her luggage. Naturally enough, when Thetis learns that her father has been wounded and possibly captured, she plans to run away. But everything changes when she is forced to bring Sheba, the slave girl that Miss Veda has made a pet of. Together Sheba and Thetis flee from Delaware to Kentucky, across a drought-stricken countryside under threat of Confederate invasion, both of them in search of a new life.

"Men lay on chairs pushed together, and still more were on the floor, head to foot and foot to head, perpendicular, diagonal, arms and bodies tangled together. Some were shivering with fever. Some were dead. The smell was terrible."

When Thetis finds her father, and witnesses the carnage of the battle of Perryville, she discovers a calling to nurse the wounded that will take her from the fields of Perryville to a riverboat hospital on the Mississippi River to an army camp outside Chattanooga. Under the guidance of Mrs. Hancock, a veteran nurse, Thetis begins a career that will take her through four terrible battles, as Thetis learns the meaning of sacrifice and the unsought costs of winning a war.

"Seeing the Elephant" is Civil-War era slang for going out to see the world and coming back experienced and wiser. How to See the Elephant is the story of how Thetis Wymore does just that.
How to See the Elephant is divided into 8 parts (somewhat longer than chapters), with a prologue and an epilogue. Brief excerpts from each follow. The total word count is 139, 394.
I am currently seeking representation. If you wish to contact me, please do so at lauracanon@yahoo.com.