So Red the Rose by Stark Young

Author:Stark Young
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: J.S. Sanders books
Published: 1962-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

XXXVIII

FOR some days after Edward’s burial, Lucy did her part at Montrose. Her sister Annie did not return at once to Baton Rouge and the older sister, Mrs. Bowdoin, had come as soon as possible from New Orleans. All day long they sat talking; the memory of Edward and of years now gone was not hurried past; death had put on the house an air of quiet purification, like an old symbol. Of them all Mrs. Bowdoin, the most fluent, was tinged with the theatrical in her expressions, though her emotions were none the less genuine for being set in a certain imaginative nonsense. There was no one in the family who did not know how to listen to her flowery effects, and at the same time to listen for the sincerity at the bottom of it all.

Lucy was of the family, but she could not talk of these things as her sister and the others could together. This oneness of theirs was something where the soul is suddenly aged and must speak itself. Simple words were spoken that seemed to share among the others all that was in the person speaking. Whatever part there was of it that might be forgotten afterward, it remained as something in the family, in the blood, and constituted an inexplicable force among them which they never thought of explaining.

Except when she went about some small duty or other, Lucy sat with them, listening. In the midst of the conversation one day, her father, whose eyes she had seen more than once resting on her, said,

“Are you all right, daughter?”

“Now listen here, Papa,” she replied, “don’t worry about me. Of course. I’m tough as whit-leather. You know how ’tis with me.”

How ’twas with her—But meanwhile no news had come about Charles Taliaferro. She had lived all these years so close to Buddie that his death was enough to fill her thoughts—to break what heart she seemed to feel breaking. But as the days passed, she was thinking: where was Charlie, what had happened to Charlie?

Belle Bowdoin, the oldest daughter, a little faded, but with small red lips and very eloquent, kept on talking: Annie Randolph had slipped back into the family like a fish to water. Of the three women their mother said least; but she spoke at times of her journey to Corinth, of people’s kindness to her. They were details which everybody understood for what they implied. She gave Lucy some of the letters to read that she had written; leaving always room for a postscript.

Lucy took up first that to her uncle, Malcolm Bedford, in General Joseph E. Johnston’s army. She read,

“Dear Brother, I write to tell you—” and so on, and then: “I have been too earth prone. I have suffered the cares of life to eat the heart out of my enjoyment, never fulfilled the injunction to ‘cast my care on the Lord, who careth for me,’ ”——

How could her mother go on like that? She gave back the

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