1865

     Tallahassee

                        Early March

            Saturday evening. Smell of wood smoke from many houses. I am walking to the train depot. On the corner of 100 Foot Street, there is a gnarled old mulberry tree. In late spring the fruit will ripen, the first to do so around here, and I think fondly of Ma’s mulberry pie.

            I’d spent most the day wandering the countryside. I came across a little tumbledown school house out there, by a creek near a stand of oranges withered by cold long passed. It was one room, built of scantling pine, the thatch roof caved in and overgrown by grapevine and trumpet creeper. There was a doorway with no door, two open windows, one cut in the north side, one the south. It tilted badly. It was bare inside but for a homemade chalkboard, a piece of wood planed smooth and painted black. I put a finger to the board and wrote my name in the grime: 

Virgil Hill

             I made it as a token of some sort, tho’ I did not know of what it might portend.

            There was a fire in a barrel outside the depot, the old man who watched the place at night whittling a stick into a point nearby. Three men shooting craps by the light of a pine torch on the other side of the tracks. I’d hoped to meet up with a girl, but did not see her. So I was just standing around with my hands in my pockets. The next event of the evening might be to find a wall to lean against. But then I heard a rumble in the distance—the sound of a locomotive hammering along the rails. It is 9:00 o’clock. There are no night trains. Yet its whistle started up and kept on. This would turn out to be a special train. No freight or passengers. It was carrying news.

            Yankee troops had landed on the coast near St. Marks lighthouse, 21 miles distant. A raid was in progress. They were headed our way.