by C. S. Harris
At least we still had chickens for eggs, and milk from Queen Bee, and Mama had been carefully hoarding the last of her rum. On Christmas Eve, she whipped up a batch of eggnog, and we sat around the fire in the parlor and exchanged our presents. Adelaide gave me a gold thimble nestled in the crown of a tiny, fairy-sized hat knit of fine blue thread and lined with cotton, with a flap closed tight by a pearl button.
‘I know you loath sewing even more than you dislike going to school or church,’ she said to me with a rare smile lighting her eyes. ‘But it belonged to my mother, and I wanted you to have it.’
I slipped the thimble over my finger, more touched than I could begin to explain. It had a delicate pattern of ivy incised around the rim, and I could see where the edges had been worn thin by the labors of generations of McDougal-Dunbar women.
It was a sign of our times that my first thought was, Where can I hide this so the Yankees won’t find it if they come?
Adelaide pretended to be pleased with the scarf I gave her, although it looked more pitifully uneven than I’d realized when she held it up. Mama gave me a pair of warm wool socks the exact shade of blue of her favorite shawl, and Mahalia had plaited me a new palmetto hat bleached white. ‘For when it gets hot again – if it ever does,’ she said, and we all laughed.
After a dinner of ham and sweet potatoes and squash, Finn came over. I gave him the arrows I’d made for him, and he grinned and gave me the arrows he had made for me. Then we all stood around the piano in the parlor while Adelaide played Christmas carols. We sang ‘O Come, All Yee Faithful’ and ‘Jingle Bells’. Then she started on ‘Silent Night’, and I felt my throat close up and tears prick the back of my nose.
I glanced over at Mama. She had her fingers curled around the carved back of Papa’s favorite reading chair, and I knew by the stricken look on her face that she was thinking the same thing I was: that somewhere far, far away, Papa was sitting beside a fire, missing us, just like we were missing him – and Uncle Tate, and Uncle Harley, and Uncle Bo. So many friends and loved ones, all alone this Christmas and far from home.
‘… all is calm, all is bright …’
I tried to swallow, tried to keep singing, but I couldn’t. A howling wind drove the snow against the windowpanes; the tallow candles dipped and wavered in a cold draft, and I felt a welling of such hopelessness and despair and fear that for a moment, it almost crushed me.
Then Adelaide looked up from her keys and sent me a fierce look that said more clearly than words ever could, You are my granddaughter, and McDougal-Dunbars do not crumble.
And so, somehow, I found my voice and managed to warble along with everyone else, ‘Sleep in heavenly peace. Sleep in heavenly peace.’
Two days later, Reverend Lewis sent for Mama. One of the wharfmen had just pulled Eloisa Peyton from the ice-rimmed bayou.
Twenty-Seven
Chesney and I were taking down the swags of holly and pine boughs in the wide central hall – with Adelaide directing and criticizing – when Mama walked in the front door and shut it behind her with a snap.
‘How’s Miss Eloisa?’ I asked, craning around to look at her.
She tugged so hard at the frayed ribbons of her bonnet that they broke. She stared at the tattered fragments almost stupidly a moment, then tore off the bonnet and threw it on a nearby chair. ‘She’s dead.’
She walked into her room.
My grandmother and I looked at each other.
‘Well, go on,’ she said, giving me a nudge.
I handed Chesney my armload of greenery and went to the bedroom’s open door. My mother was sitting in the chair by the fire, staring at the dancing flames.
I said, ‘Did she do it deliberately?’
‘I think I managed to convince Reverend Lewis she did not.’
‘So maybe she didn’t.’
Mama looked up at me, her face drawn with anguish. ‘Her pockets were loaded with brickbat.’
There didn’t seem to be anything to say to that. I went to sit cross-legged on the hearthrug beside her, my gaze, like hers, on the fire.
After a moment, my mother said, ‘I should have given her something.’
Giving a woman ‘something’ had been technically illegal in Louisiana for some six years now. But it was still done all the time, as long as it was before quickening.
I watched her bring up one splayed hand to rub her forehead. ‘If only she’d come to me sooner,’ she said. ‘Or if I’d have realized what she intended. I should have known. I should have listened to what she was saying and realized she’d rather die than have her husband and the entire town know what happened to her.’
‘How could you have known?’ I asked.
Her hand dropped to her lap, revealing features pulled tight by the intensity of her emotions. ‘It happens all the time, Amrie. When women are desperate and have no choice …’
We sat together in silence for a moment, listening to the crackle and hiss of the flames. I felt a heavy weight of sadness pressing down on me, along with a powerful sense of wrong, although I could not have articulated it at the time. All I knew was that none of it was my mother’s fault.
And it occurred to me that this was why my mother had taken me to see Sarah Knox Davis’s grave, because I was always thinking I should be able to control everything that happened around me, and blaming myself when I couldn’t. It was disconcerting to realize it was a trait I’d inherited from my mother.
I said, ‘If you had given her the herbs she wanted, and they’d killed her because she was too far along, how would you be feeling now?’
She looked over at me. ‘Responsible,’ she said.
Then she reached out to take my hand and squeeze it tight, and I saw a faint, ironic smile lighten her haunted eyes.
Grandmother Adelaide left just after the New Year, when a hard freeze turned the rutted, muddy roads to stone, and a thick fog lay heavy and oppressive upon the land. Goodbyes were sobering occasions these days, as all our uncertainties and fears about the future hung over us, unsaid. With Uncle Kashi gone, Avery volunteered to drive her. I can still see him sitting up on the carriage’s high seat, the reins in his hands, a big grin spreading across his face as she shouted up at him, ‘Now, don’t you drive too fast, you hear?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘And while I understand the roads are atrocious, you can at least try to avoid hitting every rut and bump between here and Misty Oaks.’
His grin widened. ‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘And I have my pistol with me, in case any Yankees try to mess with us.’
My mother said, ‘The Yankees are all up at Vicksburg, Mama. They’re saying Lincoln himself is now taken with the idea of moving the Mississippi away from the city’s bluffs. He’s set some new general named Grant to widening and deepening their old canal.’
‘Fools,’ said Adelaide.
‘As long as it keeps them busy and away from us.’
Adelaide turned her cheek for us to kiss. Chesney helped her up the steps into the carriage and tucked a warm lap robe around her, with a couple of hot bricks for her feet. Then she climbed up herself.
Mama said, ‘Give Mandy and Wills my love.’
Avery cracked his whip and the carriage jerked forward. We stood at the base of the gallery steps and watched them bowl away up the foggy drive. As he turned into the lane, Avery lifted his hat and waved it at us, a dark, misty figure in a blurry white landscape.
We never saw him again.
We didn’t start worrying about Avery until some weeks later. We figured lots of things could have happened on the journey to Livingston Parish and back. Our roads had always been awful. But with the war, they’d become even worse. Broken wheels and snapped axels were all too common, and these days they weren’t easy to get fixed. Even without any mishaps, they’d have needed to travel by easy stages, stopping often to rest the horses. And we all knew just how demanding and critical Adelaide could be.
But at the end of January came a chat
ty letter from my Uncle Harley’s wife, Mandy. She talked about Adelaide and Chesney’s return to Misty Oaks, and about how they’d insisted Avery rest up for a few days before they sent him off again on one of their mules.
‘Oh, Gawd,’ said Priebus when he heard. ‘Yankees done got him.’
‘Priebus, we don’t know that,’ said Mama calmly, although I’d noticed her hands weren’t quite steady when she refolded the letter.
Priebus thrust out his jaw. ‘They took twenty field hands off Belle View just last week – and a couple dozen from Pointe Coupee a few days before that. They be diggin’ that danged cut-off again. Grant’s Canal I hear they callin’ it now.’
‘Could’ve been paddyrollers,’ said Mahalia.
Mama shook her head. ‘He had his papers. He could easily prove he’s free.’
‘Maybe somebody stole his papers.’
‘He could have sent word to us somehow.’
‘If the paddyrollers nabbed him, yes. But not if the Yankees got him.’
We kept hoping. But as one day rolled into the next, and then the next, a sick certainty began to settle into our souls. Avery wasn’t coming back.
Along with our worry and grief for Avery came an understanding of the many ways in which his loss was going to affect us. Priebus was getting old and increasingly unwell. It was Avery who would have plowed our fields that spring, Avery who had filled our woodhouse for the winter, Avery who did a hundred and one different things around the place. In a sense, Avery had shielded us from the hardships faced by so many women whose men had gone off to war.
Now, all that was changed.
The winter dragged on without any sign of letting up. Old folks said they’d never seen such a hard winter in the Felicianas. Orange trees died. Gaunt-faced, sad-eyed women and children could be seen along the rutted, icy roads pushing baby carriages piled with pine cones and dead branches to take home and burn. Every Sunday, Reverend Lewis begged his parishioners to dig deep and give to the poor. The problem was, we were all poor, and real money had just about disappeared. Shop-owners needing to give change started handing out little promissory notes – ‘Good for fifty cents at Meyers Emporium’ – and folks used those amongst themselves as money. Barter had always been common amongst the plain folk; now, everybody did it.
One icy morning in mid-February, Finn and I loaded a couple bags of his mama’s potatoes onto their mule, Dander, and headed into town to trade them. The day was clear but frigid, with a cutting wind out of the north that froze my ears and made my cheeks hurt. Finn had wrapped rags around his ankles for warmth, but the soles of his feet were bare. I said, ‘Why didn’t you wrap them rags all the way around your feet, too?’
He looked at me like I was an idiot. ‘How long you think these rags’d last, if I was walkin’ on ’em?’
I guessed he had a point. Only, I didn’t know how he stood it. I had Simon’s boots, and although they were starting to fall apart, they were still boots. Yet I was still so cold I felt like I was dying.
‘What you lookin’ to trade these potatoes for?’ I asked as we walked along. The weak sun was only beginning to melt the frost off the fields, and in the cold air, every bird call, every rustle in the brown, dry grass seemed unnaturally loud.
‘Just about anything we can get,’ he said. ‘I’d be hard pressed to think of somethin’ we don’t need.’
In the end, he managed to swap the potatoes with Cyrus Pringle for a repaired spade they could use for the spring planting, and an old child’s coat Finn figured would fit one of his little sisters.
Finn was wriggling up onto Dander’s back when Mr Pringle said, ‘D’you hear one of them danged Yankee press gangs got Castile’s son, Leo?’
I felt my stomach seize up in a vicious twist so intense I could only stare at him.
I guess Mr Pringle took our stunned silence as evidence of ignorance, because he said, ‘Mmm. Yesterday. He was fishing off the levee when a longboat come ashore from the Brooklyn. Nabbed him and carried him off along with some of Serenity’s field hands.’
Finn and I looked at each other. Without a word, he leaned down to haul me up onto Dander’s broad back behind him, and we pounded around to Castile’s new livery stable.
‘Castile?’ we called, slipping off Dander’s back.
Silence.
We searched the paddocks and the stables, where horses and mules moved restlessly in the cold, steam rising from their backs. No Castile.
Finn’s feet were turning blue. I said, ‘Why don’t you go on home, Finn? I can keep looking.’
‘Nah.’ He bent down to readjust his rags. ‘I’ll be all right. Hear that?’
‘No.’
I followed Finn around the side of the stables and down the slope to where Leo and Castile were building a new shotgun-style house. I could see him now, his arms rising and falling as he chopped firewood with vicious concentration. I could feel the vapor of my own breath freezing on my eyelashes, hear Finn’s teeth chattering. But Castile had stripped down to his flannel shirt, his bald head and tense, set face glistening with sweat, his massive shoulders flexing savagely each time he drew back his heavy axe and then let it fall.
He didn’t miss a beat or even look up as we walked over to stand well back from the flying logs and chips. But after a moment, he said, ‘I reckon you heard about my boy, Leo?’
I could only nod. What was I supposed to say? I’m awful sorry, Castile? What had seemed appropriate when the Federals burned his old livery stable didn’t begin to fit this situation.
Finn said, ‘Maybe they’ll let him go once they realize he’s free.’
Castile glanced over at him, then let his axe fly again. ‘They didn’t take him because they thought he was a slave. They took him because his skin is black. White folks is white folks, whether they live in the North or the South or on the moon. To them, if a man’s skin is dark, it means they can use him as if he’s a mule or an old hound dog. Like he ain’t got no wants or feelings or dreams that they gotta respect. Like he ain’t nothing. Nothing.’
He’d stopped chopping wood now, his chest heaving, his eyes wide and bloodshot. He said, ‘My boy, Leo, he was always talkin’ about how he was gonna go North, like it’s the land of milk and honey. Me, I know better. I done been north. You know how they treated me? Like I was a freak – ’cept when they was treatin’ me like I was dirt or some kinda halfwit. I met this fine, fancy lady and her husband. She was an abolitionist, and she was right proud of it. Talked to me like I was a little bitty chile, like because I got black skin I ain’t got a brain in my head. And all the while she insultin’ me, she’s feeling so proud, because she congratulatin’ herself on being better than anybody livin’ south of the Mason-Dixon line. Reminded me of all them dumb white crackers in the piney woods here about, so ignorant and poor that all they owns is themselves. But they’s happy, long as they can convince themselves they better’n anybody with black skin.’
Finn and I exchanged glances. I said, ‘Reckon they’ll let Leo go once they finish their canal.’ It was meant as a reassurance, but I wished I hadn’t said it, because we all knew Leo. He was so fiercely proud, and headstrong to the point of being foolhardy. If he tried to escape or even mouthed off too much, they’d shoot him. I didn’t need to see the pinched look around Castile’s nostrils to know he feared that even more than he feared the hardship and exposure of the labor itself.
Then his gaze fell to Finn’s feet, and he slung his axe to bury the head deep into his chopping block. ‘Y’all come inside,’ he said and scooped up a load of kindling in his arms.
We followed him into an unfinished frame house still smelling of freshly hewn lumber and sparsely furnished with whatever Castile and Leo had been able to collect or build since the fire. The house was stone cold, colder even than it was outside, and I wondered when he’d last lit a fire in here. It was as if the walls had absorbed the brutal temperatures of the darkest hours of the night and now threw the cold back at us.
Casti
le thrust kindling and chunks of wood into the rusty old stove that stood on a platform of bricks in one corner, then set about starting a fire. We’d all run out of matches long ago, which is why most folks were careful to leave a fire banked, even on the hottest days. But Castile easily coaxed a spark from an old tinderbox, the flame licking and spreading rapidly as the wood caught and flared up.
Finn sat as close to the stove as he could and stuck out his hands and feet. Wordlessly, Castile sat down beside him and drew Finn’s frozen feet under his own shirt to hold them against his bare stomach.
The soles of those feet must have been like the blocks of ice they used to float down the river from the north in the days before the war. But Castile didn’t flinch. He just sat there, warming Finn’s feet with the heat of his own body. After a time, he said, ‘I gots me an old, worn-out saddle ain’t doin’ nobody no good. Reckon we could make a couple soles for shoes outa one of the flaps, and sew ’em to some sturdy canvas. Might last you till spring. You not careful, you gonna lose you some of these here toes, you.’
I stared at him, both humbled and oddly troubled by the way Castile had turned from his own anguish and worry over his son to concern for a boy who was no kin of his. It had never occurred to me to wonder why Castile had befriended Finn, Simon, and me; I had simply accepted his presence in our lives, the way children accept so many things without question or analysis. But as the old stove slowly banished the cold from the inside of that unfinished house, as my ears and cheeks stopped stinging and I watched Castile selflessly work to bring life back to Finn’s frozen feet, I realized to what extent I had taken his friendship, his patient tutorials and gentle mentoring, all for granted. And the more I studied on it, the more I realized just how inexplicable it was.
Then Finn said, ‘How’d you know the Federals got Leo?’
Castile rubbed his hands briskly over Finn’s feet, which were now red rather than blue. ‘He had Josephine and her little girl with him. That’s why they caught him. He told Josephine and Calliope to run, and then just stood there to give ’em time to get away.’