I did like the Shiffleys’ musical performance—or I would have, if not for all the accompanying bells.
“I suppose the bells are essential,” Michael said, echoing my thoughts. “No possibility we could sell them on the concept of stealth Morris dancing.”
“I like that idea,” I said. “Let’s work on it tomorrow. After we’ve done the boxes.”
“Right.” Michael looked back and forth between the door and the stack of boxes, as if trying to decide which was worse, beginning Morris dancers or rummaging through the boxes.
“Let’s get started,” he said, grabbing a box. “What do you want to bet that if we find anything at all interesting, it will be in box twenty-three?”
Chapter Twenty-three
It wasn’t quite that bad. We hit pay dirt in box nineteen. Not that we didn’t find a great many strange and interesting things in the first eighteen boxes. Hundreds of old photos, the kind where everyone begins to look alike because they’re all frowning from the effort of sitting still long enough. Hundreds of old letters that we didn’t read—half of them were cross-written, to save paper, and most were in fading ink on fragile paper. Newspapers we didn’t dare open for fear they’d crumble. We weren’t looking for contents yet, just dates. Anything from during or shortly after the Civil War we studied carefully and put aside in a special stack—a small stack. Most of the stuff was from the late 1800s through the 1920s.
“Hey, that’s still pretty old,” Michael said when I complained about this. “Probably a great research project here. I recognize most of the last names—old Caerphilly families. And all the newspapers and documents are local.”
“Fodder for a real history of Caerphilly,” I said. “Something a lot more accurate than Mrs. Pruitt’s version.”
“You thinking of writing it?” he asked.
“Not on your life. “That’s a job for a real historian. But I have changed my mind about giving them to someone from UVa or Caerphilly. Caerphilly didn’t care, and UVa sicced Lindsay on me, though I suppose that’s Helen Carmichael’s fault, not UVa’s.”
“Then what are you going to do with it all?” Michael asked, eyeing the stack of boxes.
“Give it to Joss, if she wants it,” I said. “If she’s serious about studying American history, well, here’s a motherlode of original source material she can cut her teeth on.”
“Keep it in the family,” Michael said, nodding. “Good plan.”
I’d hit a dull patch in box nineteen—a bunch of documents from the mid 1950s and early 1960s, which made them about a century too new to be useful at the moment. Still, I kept on methodically. After all, I’d made no effort to arrange things by date, only to gather all the papers of possible historical interest in the boxes.
At the bottom of the box I’d begun to call the “Eisenhower archive,” I found it—a nondescript manila file folder, but when I opened it, I discovered the original photograph of Col. Jedidiah Pruitt and his wife and daughter.
I opened my mouth, but before I could tell Michael, I became transfixed by the photo. Not so much by the contents—though it was easier, in the original, to get some idea of their personalities. The colonel looked smug and self-satisfied, less interested in his wife or the new addition to his family than in preening for the photographer. At first glance, his wife looked demure, with her lace bonnet and downcast eyes. Demure, and surprisingly young for someone who’d had fourteen children. Doubtless she’d started having them at an age when modern girls aren’t even allowed to baby-sit. After studying her for a few minutes, I decided her eyes weren’t downcast after all. She was glaring sideways at the colonel’s hand, which lay on her shoulder with such a casual, proprietary air, and I didn’t think her gaze looked particularly affectionate.
“So I’m voting for her as most likely to become a self-made widow,” Michael said, looking over my shoulder.
“Do you blame her? That’s baby number fourteen she’s holding.”
“Justifiable homicide, then,” he said. “I take it that’s the heroic Colonel Pruitt?”
“Or not. The jury’s still out on whether the battle was much of a victory.”
“Still—fascinating.”
I agreed. Michael perused the folder’s contents—the rest of the photos, the fragile clipping from the 1862 Clarion, and the equally fragile letter that mentioned the burning of the Shiffley distillery. I lapsed back into my fascination with the photo of the colonel and his wife. I realized I didn’t know anything else of their history. I didn’t know if the colonel had survived the Civil War, though odds were he had, since she went on to have three more children. Had his wife lived to a ripe old age or died in childbirth with the seventeenth child? What was her name, anyway? It bothered me, not having anything to call her but Mrs. Pruitt. The more I looked at her, the more annoyed I became with how little I knew about her. Mrs. Pruitt, wife of the colonel, who gave birth to seventeen children—surely there was more to her life than that?