by C. S. Harris
I was in the yard drawing water for her when I heard the clatter of hoof beats coming fast. There’d been a steady stream of folks stopping by to pay their respects that morning, but they’d all arrived on foot. These days, the only horses around here belonged to either Federal raiders or Confederate cavalry patrols.
My breath catching, I dropped the bucket and pelted around the side of the house in time to see a single rider on a big, lathered bay rein in beside the steps, a bleating, hogtied goat held slung across his horse’s withers.
‘Finn!’
He leapt from the saddle, hauled down the goat, and turned toward the house, as if he were planning to run right up the steps with it.
‘Finn!’ I cried again.
He swung to face me, the goat gripped tightly in his arms, his face taut with determination and a coiled, wiry kind of desperation. ‘Tell me I’m not too late.’
I skidded to a halt. ‘My God, Finn; we’ve been so worried about you! What happened?’
‘Never mind that. Just tell me I’m not too late.’
I shook my head, tears stinging my eyes.
He sat down on the bottom step. The goat bleated and bucked against him, and he ducked his head to loose the bindings on the goat’s legs and let her go. She scampered some feet away, then stopped. He just sat there, watching the goat pull at the long, overgrown grass, his gaze fixed on it with an intensity that suggested the answers to life’s cruelest ironies and heartaches could somehow be found in that simple scene.
I went to catch his horse’s reins. It was a magnificent animal, at least sixteen hands high, its hide dark and shiny with sweat. I studied the black, high-backed dragoon saddle, the US stamped on the bridle bit, the dark red stain on the saddlecloth. Then I looked over at Finn.
His gaze met mine. And I saw the shifting shadows and ghostly echoes of the kind of events that twist souls and will forever bring their survivors shaking and screaming from sleep in the dark bowels of the night. Whatever had occurred on the long road to Clinton and back had changed him profoundly and irrevocably. This was not the same laughing, light-hearted boy with whom I’d once caught tadpoles and schemed to unmask Hilda Meyers as a witch. That boy was gone forever.
‘Finn,’ I said quietly. ‘What happened?’
His answer was terse and vague in details. All I ever knew was that he’d almost made it back to St Francisville with a goat when he ran into General Banks’s army. A troop of New Yorkers took him captive, tied him up, and promised to shoot him as a spy – once they’d killed and roasted the goat and finished the keg of whiskey they’d found in a farmer’s cellar.
His eyes slid sideways when he got to that part of his tale, and I knew that he was omitting something vital. All he’d tell me was that the New Yorkers got so drunk they passed out, so that Finn was able to free himself and steal one of their horses. Then he rode back to Skate Mooney in Clinton and talked him into giving Finn another goat.
It made a good story, but it didn’t explain all the missing days, or why he moved so stiffly, or where he got the good Wellington boots he wore.
‘When did the babe die?’ he asked.
‘Last night.’
‘So I almost made it.’
‘Yes.’
He pushed silently to his feet and walked into the house, one hand slapping his palmetto hat against his thigh as he went to stand for a long time looking down at the tiny, rose-draped coffin. As if oblivious to his presence, Miss Amelia rocked back and forth, humming what I realized with a chill was a lullaby. Finn pressed her hand and told her he was sorry, but she just stared at him as if she hadn’t understood a word he said. Then he turned and walked back out to the gallery, his new boots clattering on the floorboards.
I followed him, wondering when he’d grown taller than me. There was a new slimness to his body, a definition to his jaw line and the bridge of his nose that I suppose had been slowly evolving, but that I only now noticed. At the top of the steps he paused, still slapping his hat against his thigh. He stared up at the great, creamy-white cups of the magnolia blossoms shifted by a warm wind against the blue sky.
‘I’m joining the Partisan Rangers, Amrie. I’ll stop by to tell Ma and the children goodbye, then I’m off.’
He was fourteen now – had been for a couple of weeks. Time was, they’d have turned away a boy that young. Not any more.
I felt my mouth go dry, my heartbeat slow to a heavy, painful thump. I could think of nothing to say that wouldn’t shame us both.
He looked at me then, and I could see the new hardness in his face, feel the heat of fury and determination that thrummed through him. But there was something else there, too – something alien to me, something I suspected was uniquely male and a part of that masculine cult of honor that was all tied up with Southern concepts of worthiness and self-respect and the nobility of the soul.
I wanted to scream, No! Not you, too! Instead, I blinked back the tears that threatened to spill over and said, ‘You will write?’
He nodded, and I saw his jaw tense, his throat work as he swallowed. The breeze gusted up harder, lifting the moss on the oaks and dappling his face with shifting patterns of light and shadow. I smelled honeysuckle and the four o’clocks just beginning to open along the walkway; then the wind dropped and in the silence I could hear him breathing.
He looked directly into my face, and I felt a stirring of something I suppose had always been there, unrecognized and unacknowledged. I put my hands on his shoulders and reached up to kiss his cheek. His skin was cool and dry against my lips, and I felt him tremble slightly beneath my touch. Then I dropped my hands and took a step back.
It was one of those moments in life when something shifts, when you realize that your world – that you – will never be the same again. I’d had so many such moments over the past two years, I suppose I should have been used to them. But I wasn’t.
Once upon a time, we’d been the Three Musketeers: Simon, Finn, and me. We’d fought mock duels with wooden swords, turned our hay barn into the bastion of St Gervais, dreamt of noble causes and heroic deeds. Now those days seemed as unreal to me as the marvelous adventures we’d once read and hoped with passion and joy to emulate. Simon was long dead, Finn was going off to war, and the last remnants of our childhoods and lost innocence were like cold ashes scattered by a whirlwind.
I knew what was expected of me; every woman in the South knew it. Somehow, I kept a brave smile plastered on my face as Finn gathered his bay’s reins, swung into the saddle, and rode away. He almost caught me when, at the end of the drive, he wheeled suddenly, the bay cavorting beneath him with gracefully arched neck as Finn lifted one hand, palm outward, in a last farewell. Then he tightened his knees and the big horse whirled and leapt forward, carrying him away from us.
I waited until he was lost from my sight, until the last echo of his horse’s hooves had died away. Then I sat down on the step and cried until I wondered if I’d ever stop.
Word came that Papa had been lightly wounded at Chancellorville, but he was all right now.
May bled into June, and the nightly bombardment of Port Hudson continued, a nerve-wracking rumble of distant death that filled my dreams with images of bomb-cratered muddy fields and dead, bloated horses and the shattered, maggot-infested bodies of long dead men. A vast Federal army now encircled the fortified bluffs to the south of us, forming an impenetrable wall of troops and artillery that squeezed the starving garrison within while feeding itself on the surrounding countryside. It seemed as if every day a raiding party descended on some hapless farm or small hamlet in the area, stealing food, fodder, and cotton, ripping up fences and chopping up furniture to carry away for firewood and sleeping boards. We learned to chart their progress by the columns of dirty smoke smudging the sky.
And then a Federal gunboat, the USS Albatross, appeared to hover off St Francisville. A screw steamer rigged as a three-masted schooner, she was one of the two Union boats that’d managed to slip past Port Hudson’s defen
ses in that massive firefight last March, and had spent the past months ravaging the banks of the Mississippi between Port Hudson and Vicksburg. Silently tacking back and forth before the ruins of Bayou Sara, she kept the deadly mouths of her guns trained upon us, an ominous portent of things to come.
‘What I want to know is, why the Sam Hill are they here?’ Castile muttered one morning when I brought him some of the extra seeds Mama had saved for heat-tolerant vegetables like collards, sweet potatoes, and pumpkins. ‘Bayou Sara ain’t nothin’ more’n a heap of blackened rubble these days, and St Francisville is full of scared women and children. So why them Yankees send that boat up here to watch us?’
‘Maybe they’re planning to try to land more troops from across the river,’ I suggested.
‘More troops? What they need more troops for? They already squeezin’ Vicksburg and Port Hudson so tight there ain’t a rat left alive to squeak in either one. What they need more troops for?’
I knew he didn’t expect an answer, so I didn’t even try to come up with one. I wanted to ask him about Leo, but I figured if he’d heard anything, he’d have told me. So I said, ‘You hear anything about Finn?’
He shook his big, bald head. ‘Nope. But they say some guerrillas kilt three Federal raiders up by Woodville. Don’t know if Finn had anything to do with that or not. All I know is, the Federals dragged an old man and his twelve-year-old grandson outta a house near where it happened and hanged them both because of it. Then they burned the house to the ground, leaving that poor widow woman and her five younger children with nothin’.’
Such tales had become commonplace. One Federal general boasted he’d hanged five civilians for each stretch of telegraph wire he found cut; another ordered every building in a five-mile radius burned, every animal killed, in retaliation for the death of one of his aides. I stared at him. ‘What you sayin’? That what them guerrillas did was wrong? That we should just let the Federals burn our towns and steal anything they want from us, kill us, and not fight back?’
Castile blew out a harsh breath. ‘I don’t know what I’m sayin’. All I know is, that old man and his grandson is dead.’
Yet in spite of everything, I still somehow clung to a child’s notion that things happen for a reason, that God protects the good and punishes the bad, and that going to church and Sunday school should somehow protect me and others like me from the kind of evil that can come suddenly, irrevocably into one’s life without warning.
All that was about to change.
I arose early the next morning to go out looking for turkeys. Hunting was serious business these days, for what had begun as an adventure and a test I’d once failed miserably had now become a pressing necessity. Every time I brought down a buck or a bird, I still said a silent prayer of thanks to the spirit of the dead animal. But it was hard for me to remember the time I’d shrunk from killing. I wished I could see that as something good, but I didn’t. As far as I was concerned, my aversion to killing animals in the wild was just one more precious thing this war had ripped from me.
It was still only mid-morning when I headed for home again, but a gusty wind was kicking up, shifting the leafy branches overhead and scuttling puffs of white clouds across the sun. I followed a narrow trail deep in pine needles that led through the stand of shadowy cypress and oak in the gully behind our house, then broke suddenly out of the shade into a hot sun smelling of baked earth and the wood smoke that curled away from our kitchen chimney. Mahalia was in the yard chopping kindling, but when she saw me, she paused with one hand on her hip and called out, ‘Jist look at that gobbler! Mm-mm; we gonna have us a good supper tonight. You leave him on the bench there, and I’ll take care of him, honey.’
‘Where’s Mama?’ I asked, thankfully dumping the heavy fifteen-pounder beside the kitchen door.
‘Last I seen her, she was lookin’ for where Cassie done hid her eggs this time. Stupid bird. Anyone ever wonder where that saying “birdbrained” come from ain’t never met Cassie.’ Cassie was the only chicken to have survived the two Federal raids – a nasty-tempered black and white spotted hen that Mahalia kept threatening to dump in a stew pot if she didn’t mend her ways.
Smiling faintly to myself, I unstrung my bow as I climbed the steps to the back gallery. I propped the bow and my quiver of arrows in the corner just inside the door, even though I knew Mahalia would complain about it. She was always saying, ‘Anybody see this hall, they’d swear trash lives here. Just ’cause there be a war on, ain’t no excuse to forget who and what you is.’ But the war had given me a new understanding of the motivations for the behavior of those my class had always stigmatized as ‘trash’. I figured most of them were just too tired or downhearted to attach much importance to the effort required to keep up appearances.
I went back outside to draw a bucket of water from the cistern and hauled it up the steep stairs to my room to wash my hands and face. I was reaching for my threadbare towel when a clatter of hooves drew me to the dormer window.
Carefully parting the lace curtains, I saw two Federals cantering up the drive on a pair of magnificent dapple-grays doubtless stolen from some local planter. One of the men, a sergeant, was dark and stocky, with several days’ worth of beard shadowing his face. But it was his golden-haired companion who captured my attention. He cavorted his horse on the shell sweep before the front steps, the sun glinting on his rows of brass buttons, his head falling back as his blue gaze raked the roofline as if he somehow knew someone was watching him.
I stood perfectly still, my heart beating so hard it hurt. And it seemed in that moment as if I’d always known that someday he’d come back into my life, that our fates were entwined in a way that was no less real for being beyond my comprehension.
Then I saw his head turn, his gaze shifting as the thwunk-thwunk of Mahalia’s axe echoed through the stillness. The two men exchanged a silent glance, and spurred their horses into a trot toward the back yard.
I threw the towel toward the washstand and bolted for the stairs.
Thirty-Three
Softly humming to herself, Mahalia was halfway to the kitchen with an armload of kindling when the Federals came upon her. She drew up abruptly, the pale sticks of newly chopped firewood clutched to her chest, her face bland with the glaze-eyed starkness of one who knows she is staring into a dark and terrible future, yet sees no way to avoid it.
The two men pranced their horses around her, the sun-glossed hides of the animal’s powerful hindquarters bunching and shifting threateningly with each step, the smiles on the men’s faces showing the fixed, emotionless concentration of an alligator lying half-submerged in a murky bayou. There was a time I would have burst out of the house to confront them, full of righteousness and fury and heedless of the reality of my inability to do more than complicate an already desperate situation. But something – Wisdom? Fear? Experience? – checked my forward rush.
I drew up in the shadows just inside the open back door, my knees weak and trembling, one hand clutching the smooth painted wood of the jamb as if it might not only steady me but also help me to think.
‘Hey, you a good-lookin’gal,’ I heard the stocky, dark-haired sergeant say to her, his broad face flushed with heat and primitive arousal. ‘’Specially for a darkie. You got white in you, gal? I always did like a touch of cream in my coffee.’ His pig-like eyes squinted with merriment and he laughed at what he fancied was his own cleverness, his gaze cutting from Mahalia to his captain, as if desirous of sharing the mirth.
The Wisconsin captain sat tall in the saddle, his spine straight but limber, his broad shoulders squared, his blue eyes hooded with something I could not name but that made me squirm with revulsion. I could see the half moon-shaped scar on his cheek where Gussie Holt had bit him, white now against his sun-browned skin.
‘Get her,’ he said quietly.
Mahalia dropped the load of kindling with a clatter and took off toward the tree-lined gully at the base of the yard, her hands clenched in the skirts
of her worn homespun dress, the soles of her dusty bare feet flashing in the sun. With a laugh, the sergeant spurred his horse to cut her off, whirling the big gray first one way, then the other, as she tried to dart around him.
I wanted to close my eyes and cover my ears, wanted not to hear Mahalia’s terrified scream, wanted not to see the feral tautness in the man’s face as he leapt from his saddle.
She tried to duck around him, toward the house. But he caught her by the arm and pulled her back around. The raucous guffaws of his laughter carried to me on the warm, scented breeze. But the captain remained oddly grim-faced as he swung out of his saddle.
‘Ooh, I like a gal with spirit,’ said the sergeant, laughing again. ‘But the captain here, he gets riled when they fight. You best—’
‘Let her go.’
I’d been so intently focused on Mahalia and the two men that I hadn’t noticed my mother striding across the open stretch of grass from the corncrib, a clutch of Cassie’s eggs cradled in one corner of her apron.
They swung to face her with the fixed intent of a pair of vicious dogs scenting fresh prey. I could feel my mouth going dry, and it was as if all my past terrors had combined with the fresh horror of that moment to warp around my chest and stop my breath.
The wind gusted up stronger, blowing a strand of honey-colored hair across my mother’s face. She put up a hand to brush it back, the gesture unconsciously lifting her breasts and silhouetting her form against the sunlit pasture beyond. The war might have aged and worn my mother, but she was still an attractive woman, with high-boned cheeks and a generous mouth and fine gray eyes.
But if she noticed the taut hunger in the men’s faces or the coiled, aggressive purposefulness of their hard bodies, she gave no indication of it. She strode toward them with her head up, anger whitening the edges of her nostrils with each breath. ‘I said, let her go.’