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knot. After a minute, she folded the sewing, although she did not put it into her pocket. Then taking a long breath, which was more of a sigh, she began. “Back then, I wasn’t Hennie Comfort. In those days, I was called by the name of Ila Mae Stubbs.”
     

     
    In the golden days before the start of the War Between the States, Ila Mae was the precious only child of Obadiah Stubbs, a successful miller, and his wife. They lived in White Pigeon, Tennessee. The girl was raised with advantages, attending a school for young ladies where she was taught to cipher and write a fine hand, sew a seam with stitches as tiny as specks of salt. Her framed sampler, with its embroidered house and willow trees and a verse about serving the Lord, hung in the place of honor over the mantel in the parlor.
    Ila Mae was not a pampered child. Although the Stubbses had servants—paid servants, because Obadiah Stubbs opposed slavery and owned neither man nor woman—Ila Mae helped at the cook stove and the laundry tubs. She loved the days spent in the barn and the garden, and truth be told, she was happier at the flour mill where the men argued about whether to join the North or the South if Mr. Lincoln wereelected president than she was dressed in satin over corset and hoopskirt, gossiping at the tea table with her mother’s friends. Like her father, Ila Mae did not hold with human bondage, and as a girl of strong opinions, she sometimes joined the men’s conversations. Even at that age, she was one to speak her mind.
    “Teach her to curb her tongue, and she’ll make a good match,” said Barton Fletcher, foreman of the Stubbs Mill.
    “Some like a woman that speaks her mind,” Obadiah replied.
    “None I know. A husband could teach her.”
    “A husband that harms a hair on her head will be the worse for it,” Obadiah thundered.
    Both men were aware that Barton’s son, Abram, had a fondness for Ila Mae, but they knew, too, that she would have none of him. Abram Fletcher was a handsome-made man, but he was randy and ill-tempered as a hornet and had too high an opinion of himself. He’d been spoiled by his mother and never made to work by his father. “Rather than marry with him, I’ll betroth myself to a hog,” Ila Mae told her father when he asked her view of the young man. Obadiah was not upset by his daughter’s answer, for he considered Abram to be a fortune hunter.
    While Obadiah did not hold with the war, he thought nonetheless that when the fighting broke out, it was his duty to enlist for the South. He was killed at Shiloh. Had Ila Mae been older, she might have been trained to run the mill, for she had a clear head, and her father had no quarrel with a woman who was ambitious. But she was a girl yet, so the mill was entrusted to Barton Fletcher. The mother left businessaffairs to him, while, dressed in widow’s weeds, she sat long days in the parlor, the curtains drawn against the light. Death, when it came only a year after her husband’s, was welcome to her.
    By then, Barton Fletcher was running the mill with a free hand. Because her father had trusted him and he had eaten at their table, Ila Mae looked to him for guidance. She did not know a man would cheat a girl out of her inheritance, and when he told her to sign a paper, Ila Mae did so. Barton smirked at her then, handed her forty dollars, and claimed that she’d just sold him the mill and the house where she’d lived all her life, and every other thing that had belonged to her mother and father.
    She could stay on in the house, Barton told her, if she would marry his son. But Ila Mae would not allow Abram Fletcher to court her. Besides, she thought the world and all of Billy Lloyd and had promised herself to him. Billy wasn’t pretty like Abram. He was short and square-built, and at times, when riled, he had a temper. But he was a better man than Abram, kind and quiet-spoken, almost always showing a sunny disposition. Some thought those qualities made him soft