by C. S. Harris
I could not have said why I’d come here. But I sat in the grass with my arms looped around my bent knees, the graves of the Confederate dead on one side, the Federals on the other, and watched the sun rise like a shimmering ball of fire over moss-draped limbs alive with the glorious song of larks.
Captain Lamar Crowley returned late the following morning, his oiled locks flowing, his mustache carefully trimmed, his vivid blue eyes snapping with indignation.
I knew my mother was reluctant to turn her patients over to his care, but she really had no choice. Maggie Dwyer had two mules and a cart that Jesse had managed to snag in the confusion after the battle, and she offered to have her boy drive us back to St Francisville. Mama was tired enough to accept.
We left shortly after midday, when the air was blistering hot and breathless, and dark clouds bunched on the horizon. The mules plodded along, dust rising from their heavy hooves to shimmer in the fierce sunlight. Every once and a while we’d hear the crackle of musketry somewhere in the distance. Colonel Logan had some of his men out scouring the countryside for Federal soldiers who’d become separated from their units in the fighting and were now trying to work their way through the woods back to Port Hudson. Some of the stragglers had attacked a couple of farmsteads outside of Jackson, which spurred the aging men who formed Jackson’s Home Guard to join the hunt. We’d heard the militia wasn’t too keen on taking prisoners, especially black prisoners. The idea had taken hold that any ex-slaves found under arms were traitors and spies and should be treated as such. But I tried not to think about that as the road wound through a stand of big old live oaks and magnolias, their spreading branches meeting overhead to form a cool, shadowy green tunnel.
‘I can’t believe we left home only three days ago,’ I said.
Mama brought up one hand to rub her tired eyes with a splayed thumb and forefinger. ‘Mahalia must be frantic with worry.’
‘Reckon she’ll have heard about the Federals?’
‘I hope not. It would only worry her more.’
I thought about Avery, who’d driven off to Livingston Parish and never returned. So many people had simply vanished in the last couple of years, victims not only of the marauding Federal armies, stragglers, and deserters, but of our own home-grown thieves and murderers – the kind of men who had always lived amongst us but were normally held in check by civilian forces of order that had now ceased to exist. And I wondered, How does a society ever come back from this kind of chaos and brutality? What happens when violence becomes an everyday way of life? When hatred festers and twists and distorts a people’s soul? When brutality and horror have become so commonplace that a young woman in a calico dress and flaxen braids can press a revolver against a dying man’s temple and calmly pull the trigger? I’d shot a man in the back, but I wasn’t sure I could do that.
I glanced at my mother. She had her head tipped back as she dozed beside me on the cart’s hard bench, the sunlight flickering down through the leafy canopy overhead to cast shifting patterns of shadow across her face. I wanted to say these things to her, to have her tell me I was wrong, that everything would be all right, someday. But I knew that was only childish wishful thinking on my part, that even if she mouthed comforting words they would fail to reassure me.
‘Oh, Gawd,’ whispered Jesse Dwyer, sawing back suddenly on the mules’ reins, his eyes widening with stark horror as he brought the cart to a shuddering halt.
Even before I turned to see what he was staring at, I heard the telltale buzzing of flies, smelled the stench of recent death.
Two bodies hung suspended from a stout branch of a big old magnolia that grew at the side of the road. The taut ropes had furrowed deep into the men’s necks, and in the deep shade of the grove their navy blue coats looked almost black. The violent compression of their deaths had swelled their faces, so that their eyes bulged hideously and their tongues thrust grotesquely from between curled lips.
The man on the left was unknown to me, a tall, ebony-skinned soldier of perhaps thirty or more. But even with the distortion of his features, I recognized his sergeant, recognized the smooth golden tone of his skin and the broad shoulders and strong chest that were so like those of his father, Castile.
It was Leo Boudreau.
Forty-Three
I wish I could forget the look on Castile’s face when he saw the body of his dead son, but I know I never will.
He was up on a ladder, patching a hole left in the side of his stables by the latest shelling from the Federal gunboats when we pulled up out front. He hollered and scrambled down to meet us, teeth flashing in a broad smile that slid away when he saw the still, covered form in the back of our cart. I didn’t understand at the time how he knew who it was even before he got close enough to see properly, but he did. Later I figured he must have seen the truth written on my face.
He stumbled to a halt, his body shuddering like a man who’s just taken a bullet in his chest, his face contorting with the savagery of his grief. ‘Oh Lordy, Lordy, Lordy,’ he wailed, his head swinging wildly back and forth in hopeless, desperate denial. ‘Tell me that’s not my boy. Leo? Oh, child; what they done to you?’
He clambered up into the back of the cart and gathered the stiffening, blue-clad body in his arms. He sobbed openly and without restraint, eyes squeezing shut, tears glistening on his dark, scarred cheeks. And I knew a deep and powerful shame, as if I were somehow personally responsible for what had happened.
For the truth was, my kind had done this. Those I’d considered good and noble and true had brutally murdered a vital young man for the sin of having been born with darker skin.
Two days after Leo’s burying, my grandmother, Adelaide Dunbar, came to stay with us.
She arrived without warning in a rattling old cane wagon drawn by two mules and driven by a one-armed boy about my age whose skin was so dark it had almost a purple sheen to it. Between the boy and my grandmother sat a fair-haired, sun-browned little girl in a ragged dress who looked maybe four or five.
Mama and I were shucking corn, and I heard her breath catch when she looked up and recognized the diminutive, straight-backed woman on the high seat. ‘Mother?’ she said, walking out to meet them.
Adelaide clambered down from her high perch without assistance. She wore a palmetto hat and a lilac silk gown that was charred along one side of the hem, and her skirts made a faint clinking sound when she brushed against the wagon’s massive front wheel. ‘Katherine,’ she said, turning her head so that first my mother, then I, could plant our perfunctory kisses on her dry cheek.
I accidentally knocked her hat brim askew, and when she reached to straighten it, I saw that her hands were bare. It was the first time I’d ever seen Adelaide out of doors without gloves in my life, and I felt my stomach twist. Adelaide would never have driven barehanded all the way from Livingston Parish to St Francisville in an open farm wagon unless something awful had happened.
She looked beyond us toward the front gallery, and I saw the faintest shadow of some emotion pass over her features. ‘I was hoping to find your sister and little Hannah here. I was told that worthless husband of hers has been trying to bribe their way out of Natchez.’
There was nothing really wrong with Aunt Em’s husband, Galen Middleton; in fact, I liked him. But my grandmother didn’t hold a high opinion of any of her offsprings’ spouses.
Mama said, ‘We’ve heard nothing from Emma. But … For God’s sake, Mother; what has happened?’
‘I’ll thank you not to take the Lord’s name in vain, Katherine. It’s the influence of that Catholic husband of yours, no doubt.’ She smoothed her rumpled, dusty skirts. ‘I am refugeeing, of course.’
I felt my insides give another ugly lurch. ‘Misty Oaks?’
‘Burned to the ground. The house, the sugar mill, the quarters, the barns and stables. Everything. All gone. Even the land, for some speculator from New York is claiming that.’
I started to cry, but Adelaide snapped at me, ‘Anne-Marie
; cease that blubbering this instant. You are allowed to weep – in private – for the loss of a person or a noble cause. But never for a mere possession.’ Without altering her voice, she continued, ‘There’s a basket of my things in the back of the wagon; you may get that while your mother tells the boy Dibbie where to go.’
Then she sailed toward the house, her head held high, the singed train of her gown trailing in the dust.
She never would tell us much about the day the Federals descended on Misty Oaks. All we learned was that afterward, she, Aunt Mandy, and Wills had taken refuge with a neighbor named Silas Babcock, who’d also sold her the wagon and mules. They’d saved nothing from Misty Oaks except the bag of clinking coins Adelaide had tied to the hoops under her skirt. Lots of Southern women had given up wearing crinolines with the coming of the war. But Adelaide always said they were too useful to be abandoned.
‘Mandy and Wills have gone to New Orleans to stay with some of her people there,’ Adelaide explained after she’d had something to eat and was drinking a cup of ersatz coffee on the gallery. ‘Had to take the Oath, of course. But she said she’d rather live under Yankee rule than risk having a third roof burned down on top of her.’
I was outraged at the thought that Uncle Harley’s widow had agreed to take the hated Oath of Allegiance to the government that had killed her own husband. It seemed a repudiation of everything for which he’d fought and died. But Adelaide said she wasn’t the least surprised. ‘Girl has no grit, I’m afraid.’
I said, ‘Was Dibbie hers?’ The one-armed boy confused me, for I didn’t recollect having seen him or the fair-haired little girl at Misty Oaks.
Adelaide shook her head and took another sip of her coffee. ‘He says he belonged to some Quaker up the river before his mother ran off with him last spring. But he doesn’t know what happened to her; one morning he simply woke up and she was gone. If you ask me, she ran off and left him, too. Silas Babcock was telling me one of his field hands ran off and abandoned a babe in her cradle.’
‘But … what are you doing with him?’ asked Mama.
Adelaide looked oddly flustered, almost embarrassed. ‘I needed someone to drive the wagon, didn’t I? He agreed to work for ten dollars a month, plus food.’
It was only later I discovered she’d taken in the children after finding them half-starved by the side of the road, and that the little girl was no relation to Dibbie at all. In fact, she was probably white, for where the sun hadn’t browned her skin, she was paler than me. Dibbie said he’d stumbled across her in a burned out homestead where he was rummaging for food. He’d backed out of there in a hurry when he came upon the flyblown corpses of a woman and another older girl who’d had ‘terrible things done to ’em.’ He called the little girl Althea because he’d found her under an althea bush, but he’d no notion of her real name. She was certainly old enough to tell us herself, but she hadn’t uttered a word in all the time since he’d found her.
‘Reckon she seen some things no child oughta ever see,’ said Mahalia that evening while giving the little girl a bath in a big round tub we’d hauled out so the sun could warm the water.
I watched her gently soap the child’s hair, and somehow I summoned up the courage to ask something that had always puzzled me. ‘How come you never had any children, Mahalia?’
She looked over at me. The hot August sun was bright on her face, her arms slippery with soapy water as she stilled momentarily at her task. ‘What makes you think I never did? I birthed two babes. Only, they both come at the same time and was too tiny to live.’
I stared at her, a strange sensation crawling over my skin, almost like gooseflesh. I could not believe I’d gone my whole life without knowing something so vital about one of the central people in my existence. True, I’d never actually asked. But how could she have kept something so important to herself?
I said, ‘You never tried to have more?’
She lifted a gourd full of water and let it run down over Althea’s soapy back. The child simply sat there, a disconcertingly blank expression on her serious, young-old face. ‘I reckon you’s old enough to know that a woman needs a man to be making babies.’
‘So what happened to him?’
She lifted Althea from the tub and wrapped her in one of our few remaining towels. ‘He was a free man of color. Fine lookin’ fella – an undertaker, from Springfield. Tall and lean, he was, with a neat little black moustache and flashing brown eyes and the prettiest straight white teeth you ever did see. Swept me off my feet, he did, and I fell real hard. Told me he loved me and that he was gonna buy me from your Grandma Adelaide and marry me, and I believed every word of it.’
‘He didn’t even try?’
She shook her head, her lips pressed into a flat line, her pretty turquoise eyes going out of focus, as if she were looking far into the past. ‘Come to find out he was courtin’ the high-yeller daughter of a woman owned a plantation up Cane River way. When I confronted him about it, he said, he had ambitions, and those ambitions didn’t include marrying someone who was born a slave.’
‘But you could’ve found someone else.’
‘I coulda. But why would I wanna let myself in for that again? Ask me, most men’s more trouble’n they worth.’ She scooped Althea up in her arms and turned toward her cabin.
I fell into step beside her. ‘You reckon Althea will ever talk again?’
‘She might. I ’spect the best we can do is give her lots of lovin’ and make her feel safe.’
But I didn’t see how anyone could ever feel safe in a world flying apart.
It quickly became apparent that Mahalia intended to take the orphans under her wing, and she set about mothering them with a passion that left me feeling a bit jealous, although I would never have admitted it.
We were all having to make some adjustments. Truth be told, I don’t think things were running all too smoothly between my mother and Adelaide, either. It was one thing for my grandmother to come for an extended visit that had a definite end in sight. But this was different. There was no knowing when she’d be able to go home again – if ever.
Adelaide allowed herself one day of rest, then she set off with Dibbie for town, where she sold the cane wagon and mules to Hilda Meyers.
When I found out, I was scandalized. ‘But … she’s just gonna turn around and use them to haul in stuff she buys from the Federals.’
My mother cast me a warning frown. ‘Amrie, you don’t know that.’
‘Don’t I? Why, I heard just last week that—’
Mama trod on my bare toes, hard, and said evenly, ‘Mother, why don’t you show us what you bought?’
Adelaide had come back from St Francisville with four bolts of muslin, a bolt of gray foulard, and a supply of scarce needles, pins, and thread. I’d no doubt Hilda Meyers had bought the lot from the speculators that were becoming more and more active in the area since the fall of Port Hudson, but Mama wouldn’t let me whisper a word of it. Adelaide was such an ardent patriot that she’d have thrown it all away and gone naked if she thought the goods came through the Federals.
She and Mama set to work at once with scissors and thread, and before the week was out Adelaide had a new set of underclothes, two nightdresses, and a new gown with an elegant gored skirt and a high, plain bodice embellished with rows of neat, narrow pleats from neck to waist. They also made me a new chemise, petticoat, and set of drawers, which I sorely needed, for I’d already grown out of the ones we’d made from the last of our linen sheets. I tried to tell myself I didn’t know for certain that the muslin had come through the speculators, but the suspicion was strong enough that it spoiled my pleasure in the new underthings.
Time was, I’d never have given a thought to stuff like chemises and drawers. But I’d long ago stopped taking even the simplest of things for granted.
As soon as she was outfitted respectably, Adelaide set out on a round of social calls in the neighborhood, becoming reacquainted with all the old residents and meeting
whatever friends and relatives were now refugeeing with them. Then she invited everyone who was anyone for what she called a ‘musical evening’.
I didn’t think they’d come. It had been less than a year since Adelaide’s last social, but so much had happened since then. There wasn’t a woman in town – except maybe Hilda Meyers – who hadn’t lost someone dear, and not just the husbands, fathers, sons, brothers, cousins, uncles, and friends who’d marched off to war. So many others had died, too. Aged parents. Sisters. Children. Seemed like every day brought word of someone dying. Lately we’d all taken to focusing on just surviving. I couldn’t see many folks wanting to come for a ‘musical evening’.
But the need for human companionship and comradeship was obviously stronger than I’d realized, and the lure of music irresistible. My grandmother was wiser than I knew.
Singly, in pairs, or in groups of three or more, the women came walking up our drive in the golden light of the long August evening, past salvias abloom in a last blaze of glory and mockingbirds singing sweetly from the branches of the live oaks. Most were barefoot, although some clutched precious shoes and a cloth they used to wipe the dust from their feet. Many wore homespun dresses that hung limply with nothing except a single ragged petticoat beneath. But a few had dragged out silk dresses in rich jewel tones that smelled strongly of camphor and often sagged on their owners’ now gaunt frames.
‘I figured, what am I saving it for?’ said Delia Stocking, smoothing one hand down over the folds of a magnificent Garibaldi striped silk with rows and rows of flounces. ‘So the Yankees will have something to steal next time they come a’calling? Time was, I figured I’d wear it to celebrate when the war ended, but …’