Good Time Coming

by C. S. Harris

  I glanced over at my mother, but she refused to meet my gaze.

  I told myself that Sean Gallagher was Papa’s friend, that she would never have betrayed him to what was most likely a firing squad. Only, why wasn’t she looking at me?

  Mr Marks said, ‘Threw the two of them in the brig, they did, and carried them off to Baton Rouge as prisoners.’ He leaned forward. ‘But here’s the thing: they filled their boats with so much sugar and stuff that they had to leave behind most of the coal and a bunch of other stores they’re claiming. So while they’ve sailed away for now, they’ll be back. I’m warning everyone who’s been caring for any wounded from the fighting at Baton Rouge to consider moving them away from the river, if at all possible.’

  My mother offered him another cup of coffee, but he politely refused, saying, ‘If you ask me, the death of General Williams is going to be a disaster for folks around here. He was one of the few Federal officers I’ve heard of who didn’t see this war as a wholesale plundering expedition. The reports coming out of Baton Rouge these days are troublesome. Most troublesome. Without Williams to stop them, the troops are breaking into houses, smashing furniture, shredding whatever women’s and children’s clothes they can find. Who’d have thought our own former countrymen could behave like the worst Vandal hordes?’

  ‘It’s as if that’s why they’re fighting – for the opportunity to steal.’

  ‘It does seem that way, does it not? And I’m afraid it’s only just begun.’ He set aside his teacup with a sigh and pushed to his feet. ‘There was a civilian aboard the Essex – a dapper chap in a top hat and white silk waistcoat. I heard tell he’s a factor for the Butler brothers. Before the Essex set sail, I saw him eyeing our wharfboat.’

  Two stories tall and with outside steps leading to a gingerbread-draped second floor gallery, Bayou Sara’s wharfboat was known as one of the grandest on the Mississippi. In the days before the war, the great paddle-wheelers plying up and down the river would land at the wharfboat rather than tying up directly at the pier. In addition to offices, a lounge, restaurant, bar, and vast freight storage area, it also contained dozens of small, elegant cabins where passengers awaiting a steamboat could spend the night.

  ‘Surely they can’t be planning to steal that?’ said my mother, rising with him.

  Mr Marks stood with his hat in his hands. ‘If you’ll steal a farmer’s harvest and a woman’s silver spoons and a little girl’s necklace, why not a wharfboat?’

  After he left, we stood in the yard. The light of day was fading rapidly from the sky, leaving it a shiny pewter backdrop to the dark shapes of the oaks shifting softly in the evening breeze. After a moment, my mother said, ‘Is that what happened to your cross, Amrie, the day the Katahdin came? Did one of the Federals steal it from you?’

  I couldn’t figure out how she knew Mr Marks was talking about my necklace. But it was a relief to finally admit the truth to her. ‘Yes,’ I said in a small, strained voice.

  She nodded, and rested her hand, ever so briefly on my shoulder as we turned back toward the house.

  It would be a long time before I realized that she’d known the truth before that – that someone must have told her of the incident soon after it happened. It had simply taken her a while to figure out how to gently let me know it.

  Twenty

  We saw Corporal Price off to Mississippi at dawn the next morning, when a soft mist drifted through the oaks and the air smelled of wet trees and grass and the cabbage roses tumbling over the brick foundation of our cistern.

  He paused with his weight leaning against the side of the buggy so that he could take my mother’s hands in his. ‘I don’t reckon there’s any way I can properly thank you, ma’am,’ he said in his slow drawl. ‘You saved my life.’

  ‘You can thank me by taking good care of yourself,’ she said.

  He gave a throaty laugh. ‘Reckon I’ll try.’

  Hunkering down awkwardly beside Checkers, he scratched behind the dog’s ears and laughed again as Checkers’s eyes closed with bliss. ‘And y’all take good care of this here old hound. Don’t let no Yankees at him, you hear?’

  I nodded, one hand dropping to Checkers’s head as we watched the corporal climb carefully up into the buggy’s seat. Mahalia tucked a hamper of cornbread and ham, along with a crock of buttermilk, by his feet. Then we stood back as Avery danced the reins on Magnolia’s rump and the buggy’s big yellow wheels rolled forward, the spokes spinning round and round until they were only a blur.

  Over the course of the coming weeks we were to become painfully familiar with the Federal fleet’s gunboats.

  On the thirteenth, the Essex returned, escorting a steam sloop, the Anglo-American. The Essex dropped anchor off Bayou Sara, her guns trained on the city, while the crew of the Anglo-American set about towing away our grand wharfboat.

  The wharfboat’s owner – a short, bandy-legged, red-headed old Scotsman named Alistair McDonald – tried to argue with them, citing Captain Porter’s own ‘guarantee’ to respect private property. When the Federals just laughed at him, he stomped off home to fetch the old flintlock his daddy used in the great rebellion of 1810 when, for ninety glorious days, St Francisville was the capital of the independent Republic of West Florida.

  By the time he made it back, the Anglo-American and the wharfboat were pulling away fast. He stood on the levee, his thinning red hair flowing in the breeze, and started taking pot shots at the men on the steam sloop’s deck.

  ‘Take that, you thievin’ varmints!’ he yelled, ramming a new round home and raising the gun to his shoulder again. ‘We mighta let yer dadburn President Monroe send his blue-backs in here fifty years ago and take down our Bonny Blue Flag. But we ain’t gonna let you conquer us without a fight this time!’

  He was too far away to hit anyone, the shots pinging off the sloop’s hull. But a puff of smoke bloomed from the Essex’s ugly iron side. A geyser of mud and water shot up from the river bank as the boom of her cannons echoed over the surrounding countryside.

  Alistair McDonald dove down behind the levee, losing his hat and ripping one trouser leg. By the time he dared raise his head again, the Anglo-American and his beautiful wharfboat were well out into the channel and steaming toward Baton Rouge. But he hauled himself back up to the top of the levee anyway and kept firing until the barrel of the old gun cracked and blew up, burning his face.

  Folks said it was a stupid thing to have done, besides being a terrible waste of scarce ammunition. McDonald gruffly refused everyone’s offers to put grease on his burns, and stomped off home to crack open the last of the whiskey he’d been saving since the start of the blockade. He made it halfway through the jug before he keeled over from a massive heart attack and died.

  Everybody else waited anxiously to see what would happen next.

  Commander Porter didn’t take kindly to having part of his fleet fired on, even if it was by the angry owner of the wharfboat his men were stealing. The next day, the steam sloop USS Sumter appeared off Bayou Sara and just lay there, riding at anchor and watching us.

  That’s when some folks started packing up a few prized possessions and leaving the vulnerable port area. The lucky ones were able to move up the hill to relatives in St Francisville or further inland. But most folks had nowhere to go – or, even if they did, they were reluctant to leave their homes and businesses unprotected and vulnerable.

  I walked into St Francisville a couple days later in a hunt for buttons for the new homespun dress Mama was sewing for me. I wasn’t having much luck when I spotted Finn sitting on the edge of the boardwalk on Ferdinand Street, his gaze fixed on some workmen unloading freight from a wagon.

  ‘Whatcha doin?’ I asked, plopping down beside him.

  Finn nodded across the street. ‘See that?’

  I stared at a workman on a ladder taking down a faded sign that read: J. RAFFERTY AND SONS, ATTORNEYS AT LAW. Once, these had been the law offices of Mr James Rafferty and his two sons, Joshua and Jeremy. But J
oshua died of typhoid not long after Manassas, and Jeremy fell at Shiloh. Old Mr Rafferty just kinda withered away and died not long after that. The building had been sitting empty all summer.

  Finn said, ‘Guess who the Widow Rafferty done sold the place to?’

  I shook my head in ignorance.

  ‘Hilda Meyers!’

  I could see her now, through the shop’s dusty front window. She had her broom in hand, her gravely voice booming as she shouted at two workmen maneuvering a counter into place, ‘Careful, you fools! Mein Gott.’

  Finn said, ‘Why you reckon she’s movin’ up here?’

  I said, ‘Folks is scared of staying too close to the river these days.’

  All up and down the Mississippi, people were in motion, abandoning homes and farms, plantations and villages near the river and the marauding bands of Federal soldiers and seamen it brought. ‘Refugeeing’ they called it. The same thing was happening across Tennessee, Virginia, Arkansas, and Missouri; hundreds of thousands of old men, women, and children were fleeing – or being driven – from their homes, some with nothing more than the clothes on their backs.

  Finn shook his head, ‘When’d you ever know Hilda Meyers to be scared? Smart, yes; but scared?’ He shook his head.

  ‘What the heck you sayin’, Finn?’

  ‘I’m saying, maybe she ain’t scared. Maybe she’s smart. Maybe she knows somethin’ about the Federal plans for Bayou Sara that the rest of us don’t know.’

  I kept quiet. I’d never told Finn about the drowned Federal they’d found down on Thompson’s Creek. He didn’t know I’d once suspected Hilda Meyers of being the intended recipient of the letter the dead man carried. For the last month or so, I’d swung to thinking maybe my own mother was the ‘Dear Madam’ to whom that letter was addressed. But now, as I watched the old German woman settle the diminished contents of her emporium into her new establishment, all my earlier doubts and suspicions came roaring back with palm-tingling intensity.

  Finn pushed to his feet, saying there weren’t no use in just watching Hilda Meyers, and we might as well go fishing down the bayou. But I told him I still needed to find those buttons for Mama and I’d catch up with him later.

  It was only partially a lie.

  The day was turning into one of those searing, breathlessly hot, energy-sucking furnaces that come to the Felicianas in late August. As I slipped and slid down the steep, dusty street that plunged down the face of the bluff to Bayou Sara, I could feel the hairs that had escaped from my untidy braids sticking to my face with sweat. The river was low now, the raging high flood waters of May and June just a memory. I could see the latest gunboat, the USS Sumter, riding silently in the water, its bare masts stark against a fierce blue sky.

  The town looked funny with its long, grand wharfboat gone; diminished in a way the mere physical absence did not entirely explain. Once, the waterfront would have been alive with the shouts of men and the clatter of wagon wheels and the shrill whistles of paddle-wheelers jostling flatboats. Once, the wharves would have been piled with freight, barrels of flour and cornmeal, towering mounds of sacks filled with coffee and oats, rolls of bagging, and kegs of whiskey and cider whose scents permeated the town. But as I turned up Commercial, an eerie silence hung over the place. I heard only the distant pounding of a single hammer and the forlorn howl of an abandoned dog. Even folks who weren’t leaving were obviously staying inside.

  A wagon rattled past me, the back jumbled high with everything from chairs and rolled mattresses to pots and pans and a single cheval mirror that rocked back and forth with each jolt. The two women on the high seat, one youngish, the other old enough to be her mother or grandmother, kept their gazes fixed straight ahead, their faces stony and solemn. But in the back, perched atop a trunk, a tow-headed little girl clutched a fluffy gray kitten in her arms, her cheeks streaked with tears as she gazed at a white frame cottage receding into the distance.

  The hammering grew louder as I walked up the street, and I realized it came from an elderly black man nailing boards across the empty windows of what was once Meyers Dry Goods Emporium and Grocery Store. I didn’t see how a few boards could do much good against either exploding shells or looting soldiers, but maybe she just didn’t feel right about going off and leaving it completely vulnerable.

  I was standing at the edge of the boardwalk, my gaze on the shuttered storefront, when Castile Boudreau’s son, Leo, came out of the livery stable and said, ‘Hey there, Missy Amrie; how you doin’ today?’

  He looked much as I imagined Castile must have looked in his prime, big and strong, with a wide, toothy grin and a broad, flat nose. Only, unlike Castile, his skin had the golden tint of café au lait, and his eyes were a soft gray. I’d never heard what happened to Leo’s mother, and I’d never felt compelled to ask. In my experience, when folks don’t talk about something, it’s because it’s either too embarrassing or too painful to remember.

  Leo had never been anything but cordial. Yet I always knew that at some fundamental level he really didn’t like us much. I just couldn’t figure out why.

  I said, ‘Hey, Leo. Castile around?’

  Leo shook his head. ‘We been movin’ the horses up the creek.’

  Castile possessed a small, weathered shack set high on the banks of the creek that fed into the bayou. Before the war, the town of Bayou Sara had been a big horse-trading center, with droves of horses brought down the river from Kentucky and Ohio. Men like Castile would buy the herds and then sell the stock to the various towns and plantations in the region. Once, Castile had pastured those herds up the creek. The knowledge that he was now moving all of his horses and mules out of town gave me a funny, panicky sensation.

  It was as if my world were dissolving around me, like the sandcastles I’d built one summer when Grand-mère took me to the beach on Grand Isle. I wanted to be able to fling out my hands and yell, Stop! Just, stop! and put everything back the way it was before. I wanted to hear Castile’s horses snorting and moving softly in their stalls, and see that heartbroken little girl and her kitten playing happily in the flower-spangled garden of their white frame cottage. I wanted to be able to walk home of an evening and see an oil lamp burning in the window of J. Rafferty and Sons, Attorneys at Law, and see the three Rafferty men, their dark heads bent over their law books as they worked together on a case. I wanted my papa home, alive and safe. I wanted shoes on my feet and something besides cornbread for breakfast. And I never, ever wanted to see a gunboat again.

  Leo said, ‘You want him for somethin’?’

  I shook my head. ‘No. I was just wonderin’ if he knew why Hilda Meyers is movin’ her stuff up the hill. But I guess more folks than I realized are gettin’ out of Bayou Sara.’

  ‘Them that can.’

  The realization that Castile, too, feared a new, more serious Federal attack and was taking steps to minimize his losses seemed to suggest that Hilda Meyers had no special advance notice of the fleet’s intentions.

  But I wasn’t sure if that made me feel better or worse.

  I never did find any buttons.

  In the end, Mama hauled out one of her old dresses and carefully snipped off the decorative row of buttons that ran down the front of the bodice. We were all used to this sort of thing, salvaging trims and ribbons from worn out dresses and hats; using rough homespun sheets on our beds and cutting up the linen of our old sheets for drawers and chemises. Some folks were even cutting up old saddles and leather chair seats for shoes.

  That evening after dinner, Mama took her work out on the gallery and kept sewing as long as the last of the daylight lingered in the sky. Even tallow candles were getting expensive and hard to find, and we tried to use them as little as possible.

  The night was hot and still, the horizon aflame with glorious streaks of orange and gold and blood red. Even as the purple shadows deepened beneath the oaks and a chorus of frogs started up from down along the creek, that glowing line of hellish orange continued to light up the night.<
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  My mother finally rolled her sewing and tucked it into her workbox. Then she went to stand at the end of the gallery, one hand resting on the post beside her.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked, watching her.

  ‘I was thinking the sunset is lasting an extraordinarily long time. But it can’t be the sunset. It’s more to the south than the west.’

  I went to stand beside her, my gaze, like hers, on that unnatural fiery glow. ‘So what is it?’

  ‘I think Baton Rouge is burning.’

  Twenty-One

  A new wave of refugees straggled into town, bringing with them hellish tales, of women running screaming through the streets of Baton Rouge, their clothes aflame. Of lost children crying by the side of the road. Of the old and sick, alone and too weak to move, consumed by flames in their beds.

  Even as the bloated, putrefying bodies of nearly a thousand dead men still lay unburied in the fields where they had fought over Baton Rouge, General Butler had decided that the city was indefensible and needed to be abandoned. But before the Federal forces moved out, they loaded their boats with the books from the state library and the paintings and statues from the capital and the governor’s mansion. The gates to the penitentiary were thrown open, and some three hundred and fifty murderers, thieves, and rapists were set loose upon the people of Louisiana. Soldiers roved from house to house, looting anything that hadn’t already been stolen or destroyed, piling their confiscated wagons high with rosewood armoires and mahogany desks and trunks of silken dresses.

  And then they brought out the torches.

  I watched my mother work tirelessly over the next several days, sewing up saber slashes and bandaging burns and holding the hand of a sobbing young girl with bruised wrists and a bloodstained dress, whose mother insisted she’d fallen and cut her leg – but not badly enough to require anyone to bandage it.

  My mother’s gaze met the older woman’s ferociously determined stare, then turned away to prepare a bag of dried herbs from her garden. ‘Use these to make an infusion and give it to her five times a day for the next three days. It will help her …’ She paused, as if seeking the right words. ‘Avoid any complications.’