The fields have been burnt to ash is what Riza notices first, stepping out onto the front porch of her father's once great estate. It was never the grandest of plantations, but it had once commanded a decent crop and had provided for them well enough, at least until the war came.
Riza's father had never believed in slavery, despite them subsisting on it for almost two decades. It had been grandfathered in by her mother who came from a rich plantation family of reputation with a name that meant something in more than two states. Riza's mother had grown up a southern belle and intended to stay that way, regardless of her husband's political leanings. He kept them to himself for the most part, anyhow. Berthold Hawkeye had grown up in the south, but he had grown up poor - a yeoman farmer on his future father-in-law's land - and he had learned to keep his opinions quiet as a means of survival. It did not matter that he despised slavery. He did not have the means to do anything about it.
Riza's parents met on her father's farm and then they fell in love, a white-trash farmer and his landowner's daughter, a match made in socio-economic hell. Elizabeth Grumman was far too pretty for her new beau, and far too rich anyhow. No one understood what she saw in him, least of all her father, and the whole world conspired against their unrealistic dreams of love without restrictions.
Berthold proposed, and Elizabeth's father declined on her behalf. That was just how it worked in those days.
Then Elizabeth got pregnant, and everything changed.
The two were swiftly married, ("Better married to a man below your status than the whore mother of a bastard child," Elizabeth's grandmother had spit vehemently at her granddaughter, alighting the steps to her carriage) and Berthold moved into the Grumman plantation with a little less fanfare than was deserving of the wedding of a powerful man's daughter. Berthold and Elizabeth lived quietly, but happily in that house for seven months, avoiding her family and falling blissfully more and more in love. Elizabeth's stomach grew with each passing day, and they waited anxiously for the day that their baby would be born. Berthold hoped for a boy. Elizabeth just hoped.
It was an unusually warm day in March when Riza was born, the sun shining through the tree's naked branches. She did not cry when she came into this world; neither did she cry when, two hours later, her mother was taken out of it, bleeding through her nightgown and writhing in pain. Her father had looked on the scene helpless and intensely alone, the child who had brought them together now ripping them apart. In his grief he named her Elizabeth after the mother she had killed, but forever regretful he would call her Riza. She was not Elizabeth. He would never love her as much as he had loved his wife. He would not even try.
This was how Riza grew up, in a home that didn't belong to her with relatives who did their best to love her while hiding their contempt for her father, the father who did not love her and barely managed to hide it. She grew up dressed in fine clothes that she wanted to escape and with manners to rival even the most well-bred of of her peers. She was a quick study and, possibly born out of her situation, she had swift survival instincts that helped her assimilate to almost any situation regardless of her own personal feelings. She was not beautiful, to be sure, although beauty has a funny way of capturing the imagination's heart and running away with it, morphing into something that smacks of young men's poetry and the simple way that curves can overwhelm a face. Riza overwhelmed many a suitor with her effortless grace and the way that she formed words on the front of her lips, pursing a cage around their carefully timed release, a once-feral animal escaped from the zoo. Words had power, and never more so than during these uncompromising times when men dreamed of treason as if it were the bosom from which they were reared. Her father had taught her when she was younger to be wary of her words. It was his primary means of survival and it would prove to be hers, though to what extent she had not quite realized yet.
Her beaus were frightened of her, though they dared not show it. A quiet, powerful woman who had come into this world in violence, killing one half of that which gave her life. In simpler times they might have attached strange epitaphs to her, like witch or devil, but in these modern times they merely stayed wary, if not of Riza then of her father, who haunted his father-in-law's fields like a ghost, tendrils of bony fingers and wane, sullen face. Riza took after her mother, which was a small miracle in an ever-darkening sky. Still, there was a part of her that was undeniably Berthold (he had raised her, after all). Little affection had been thrust upon her as a child and so she did not know how to release it back into the world and on others. She guarded it carefully inside herself where her beaus could not find it. Her heart was no place for them.
Riza grew up on a plantation - on it, in it and within it, her every breath surrounded by it's fields and forests, the stark white of the manor home, the humming of her grandfather's slaves. She had never picked cotton and would be foolish to try (she sympathized with the slaves, another trait from her father, but like him she was in the wrong place and time for such sentiments), but its white softness made up her insides, the land ingrained in her as if she had popped right out of it.
She grew up a farmer's daughter and a planter's granddaughter. She grew up privileged, she grew up rich, and now she stood on the dirtied porch of her childhood home destroyed by the marauding Yankees, the world around her undeniably changed as the landscape before her was now. Behind her she heard the soft gasp of her favorite maid, Missy, and the grunt of her father as he turned back into the house, muttering of fools and punishments he felt were justly deserved. She would deal with that later.
It was the winter of 1865. Riza felt the end of the war approaching in her bones, though she could scarcely imagine that in a few month's time Lee would surrender his army at Appomattox, setting off a chain reaction that would sound the death knell of their short-lived nation. That revelation would make the destruction of their home much more keenly felt; it had survived the entirety of the war only to be burned at the end. They would rebuild somehow, she knew in the back of her mind. She did not know how, only that their survival would come with the passing of time. She would not let this be the end.
The sounds of an army rumbled in the distance, though coming or going, Riza did not know. Fear gripped her chest. Clutching at her skirts, she thought the only thing that would come to her mind:
"Roy."