Good Time Coming

by C. S. Harris

  ‘That’s when I realized it ain’t enough to run, you gots to know where you running to. You gots to have a plan. Next time I lit out, I went to this old Choctaw feller traded along the river in the summertime and spent his winters up with what was left of his people.’

  I stared at him. I’d always known Castile had lived with the Indians. That was how he’d learned to make bird traps, and to fashion his own bows and arrows, and to imitate the call of a wild turkey well enough to fool an old tom. But I’d never put any of it together.

  ‘How many times did you run away, Castile?’

  ‘Half a dozen, maybe more. Made it as far as Ohio, once. Was there nearly nine months when a big Scotsman named McIntire came up from Livingston Parish to buy cattle. He seen me and hauled me back to Louisiana. I reckon that was the hardest. I thought I’d rather die than be a slave again.’ He paused. ‘That was in ’39.’

  I felt a chill corkscrew up my spine. That was the year Hamish Dunbar had been scalded to death in a steamboat explosion.

  Castile said, ‘All them times I’d run away, yor grandma never done nothin’ to me. She was always threatin’ to sell me down the river to New Orleans, but she never done it. I sure didn’t think she was really gonna brand me. But she did.’ He was silent for a moment, his gaze hazy, unfocused, as if looking into the past. ‘I hated her for a long time after that. But hate is like a poison. You nourish it within you like it’s something precious, like you punishin’ whoever done you wrong by hatin’ them, as if the power of yor hate can somehow hurt them and pay them back. But you just bein’ foolish, because the only person yor hate hurt is yor self.’

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t understand how you can be my friend, when my grandmother …’ My voice cracked, and I had to swallow hard. ‘When every time you look in the mirror, you’re reminded of what we did to you.’

  ‘Child,’ he said softly, ‘you ain’t never done me nothin’. And I don’t need no mirror to remind me of them days. But I’m free now, and that’s because of yor momma. I’ll forever be grateful to her for that.’

  Seemed to me, my parents had only done what was right, had simply given up what was not theirs to possess. My gaze shifted to the clutch of crimson roses I had laid on the bare earth between us. ‘That’s why Leo never liked us, wasn’t it? He never said anything, but I could always tell.’

  Castile was silent for a moment, and I knew the loss of his son lay grievously heavy on his heart. There was a slump to his shoulders, a heaviness to his movements lately that hadn’t been there before and that betrayed his age. ‘I reckon maybe it’s easier to forgive the wrongs done to us than the wrongs done to those we love.’

  ‘I’ll never forgive her.’

  Castile rested his wrists on his knees, his big, work-calloused hands hanging limp, his bullet-like head tilted to one side as if he were struggling to see his way forward. ‘Leo … He had a heap of anger in him, not just toward y’all, but toward me, too. The last couple times I run, I run away from him and his momma, Fiona, too. You never knowed Fiona, but she was a pretty little thing, with skin the color of the palest hickory and the prettiest smile God ever give a woman. She never forgave me for just up and leavin’ her like that, twice, with no warnin’. When yor momma set us all free, Fiona done left me and went up north.’

  ‘But Leo stayed?’

  ‘Fiona didn’t give him no choice. Said he would just remind her of me and of the past, and she didn’t want no reminders. Leo blamed me for that, too. And I reckon he was right.’

  For a moment, I could only stare at him, at his high ebony forehead and familiar scarred cheeks. And I found myself wondering how well we can actually know the people in our lives, even those who are the closest to us.

  I wasn’t ready, yet, to ponder too hard on how well we ever really know ourselves.

  Forty-Five

  ‘How long do you intend to keep treating your grandmother like this?’

  I tugged at the chickweed crowding a patch of comfrey. The day was overcast and sultry, and I was helping my mother weed the herb garden down by the front gate. ‘You can’t accuse me of being rude to her.’

  ‘No; you’re being painfully polite. Amrie—’ she began, then broke off, her grip tightening on her hoe, her gaze fixed on the tattered buggy drawn by a bangtailed bay coming down the lane.

  The driver was unknown to me, an extraordinarily big man, tall and fleshy, with a long, untrimmed gray beard and no mustache. As he drew nearer, I saw his collar and knew him for a preacher of some sort. A woman sat on the bench beside him, her arm around a small child who huddled against her. Both the woman and the child were painfully thin, their faces hollow and stark, their clothes grubby rags. But I felt my heart begin to thump with hope.

  ‘Whoa, thar,’ called the preacher, sawing back on the reins as he drew abreast of the gate. ‘This it?’ he asked the woman, then turned his head to shoot a glob of tobacco juice into the dirt.

  ‘Yes; thank you.’

  ‘Emma!’ said my mother, her hoe tumbling to the ground. ‘Oh, thank God.’

  The woman climbed stiffly down from the buggy’s seat, then reached up for the child. ‘Thank you,’ she said again to the man, although her voice was flat and perfunctory.

  He danced his reins on the bay’s rump and rattled off toward town without a backward glance.

  ‘Emma!’ cried my mother, laughing and crying at the same time as she hugged her younger sister to her. ‘Oh, Emma.’

  Emma Middleton was the youngest of Adelaide Dunbar’s surviving children. She was less than twelve years older than me, although she’d been married for five years. What Adelaide called her ‘worthless husband’, Galen, had managed to bribe his wife and daughter’s way out of Vicksburg, after all. But it was hard to recognize this skeletal, worn-down, shattered woman as the beautiful, gay, vibrant young aunt I’d always known.

  ‘I had a trunk full of clothes and things,’ she said as we turned up the drive, Mama carrying Hannah on her hip. ‘But the soldiers at the checkpoint stole it all – despite the fact I had a pass signed by General Grant himself.’

  Mama looked over at her, the breeze fluttering wisps of Hannah’s soft brown hair across her face. ‘You took the Oath?’

  ‘I had to. They wouldn’t let us out otherwise.’

  ‘Mother is here,’ said Mama. It wasn’t quite the non sequitur it seemed.

  Aunt Em nodded. ‘I know. Mandy wrote to me from New Orleans.’ She stared out over the empty pasture and overgrown fields, and I saw her throat work as she swallowed. ‘I still can’t bear to think of Misty Oaks … not there anymore.’

  ‘Grandma ain’t gonna like it, you taking the Oath of Allegiance,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t say “ain’t”,’ chorused my mother and Aunt Em together.

  I was wrong about my grandmother. It seemed Adelaide’s outrage was an elastic thing. An action deemed unforgivable when committed by a daughter-in-law was perfectly understandable in her own child.

  The truth was, Aunt Em had been so desperate to get away from Vicksburg that I think she’d have sold her soul if that’s what it took to escape. Her little girl, Hannah, was so ill that Aunt Em was afraid she might die.

  They tucked the child up in Adelaide’s bed, with a hot brick at her feet and the covers piled high. And still the child shivered, although the day was warm and sultry.

  ‘Do you think it’s intermittent fever?’ Aunt Em asked Mama as she tried to coax the child to drink a warm infusion of wormwood and willow bark.

  I stood in the doorway, a sick feeling laying heavy in my stomach. Some folks called it intermittent fever; to others, it was swamp fever, ague, marsh fever, or bilious fever. The Sicilians who before the war used to sell oysters and crabs up and down river called it mala aria: bad air. It was caused by a dangerous miasma that arose from damp earth – or so they said. Folks in Louisiana were always sickening from it, particularly in late summer and early fall. Sickening and dying.

  Mama held the cup to
Hannah’s lips again. ‘How long has she been sick?’

  ‘Weeks.’ Aunt Em sat perched on the other side of the bed, one of Hannah’s tiny hands between her own. ‘A Federal doctor kindly gave me some quinine before we left Vicksburg, but the soldiers at the checkpoint took it along with everything else.’

  ‘I have some left,’ said Mama. ‘And this should help with her chills and fever.’

  ‘What kind of monsters steal medicine and clothes from a woman and her sick child?’ said Adelaide. She had moved her things up to Simon’s old room and now sat in the low sewing rocker beside the empty hearth, her gaze fixed on Hannah’s wan, pinched face with a fierceness that was almost palpable. Of the ten children Adelaide had birthed, only four still lived – three if you didn’t count Uncle Bo. And three grandchildren.

  ‘The same kind who will starve and shell a city full of women and children, forcing them to eat rats and live like animals in holes grubbed into the sides of hills,’ said Aunt Em. ‘It’s a wonder any of us survived.’

  I still couldn’t wrap my head around the idea of pretty, delicate Aunt Em living in a cave with a dirt ceiling and walls while listening to the interminable whistle and shriek of shells. Knowing every time she ventured out for food or water that she risked a hideous, searing, agonizing death. But I guess people do what they have to do to survive.

  After Hannah fell asleep, Aunt Em talked to us about the caves that took direct hits from massive mortar shells and collapsed on their inhabitants, and about the stray red-hot pieces of shrapnel that could slice through a cave entrance to cut a child at play in half.

  ‘It’s no wonder Em’s nerves are shattered,’ I heard Adelaide say to Mama in the parlor later that night, her voice low so as not to awaken the mother and child now sleeping across the hall. Adelaide was already busy sewing new underthings for both Aunt Em and Hannah from the remnants of the bolts of muslin she’d bought, her needle flashing in and out of the cloth. She looked up, her face a tense mask as she stared at Mama. ‘Do you think the child will live?’

  Mama brushed a stray wisp of hair off her forehead. ‘I honestly don’t know. She’s so thin. All those weeks of not having enough to eat and living in a damp cave …’ She thrust up from her chair and went to stare out the window. It had come on to rain just before dark, and we could still see flickers of lightning flashing on the horizon. ‘Damn this war. Damn Abraham Lincoln and every hotheaded Southerner who pushed for secession and every sanctimonious Northern abolitionist who ever thought that one sin justifies another. Damn them, damn them, damn them.’

  I tensed, waiting for my grandmother to jump all over her for using a word like ‘damn’. Adelaide normally had no tolerance for swearing of any kind. But all she said was, ‘How much quinine is left?’

  ‘Enough to see her through this bout. But if it comes back …’

  She left the thought unfinished.

  Adelaide worked her needle in and out of the small nightdress she was making. Thunder rumbled in the distance, a long, low roll that sounded enough like cannon fire to make me shiver. ‘We must pray,’ she said.

  I wanted to scream at her, Praying doesn’t do any good! Folks were always praying, but their loved ones still died. The graveyards of the South were so full they kept having to open up new ones. Seemed to me, if God really cared, he wouldn’t have let this wretched war start in the first place.

  ‘Pray for quinine,’ said my mother.

  But God had other ideas.

  Aunt Em refused to leave her daughter’s side.

  She barely ate and only half-slept, curled up beside the alternately shivering and sweating child, watching anxiously for any sign of change, for better or worse.

  ‘She’s ill herself,’ said Adelaide the next afternoon as Aunt Em’s wracking cough carried down the hall to the parlor where both Adelaide and Mama were sewing.

  ‘I know.’ Mama looked up from pinning the hem in a tiny pair of drawers. ‘And she’s not taking care of herself.’

  Dibbie was off fishing, while Althea was just sitting at Mama’s feet, staring into space in that way she had. Because my own needle skills were still considered substandard, no one had asked for my help with the sewing. Instead, Mahalia and I were working our way around the house, hanging the heavy curtains that would block the cold drafts in the coming winter. It had long been a ritual in the South: in the spring, heavy damask and velvet drapes came down and wool carpets were rolled up, to be replaced by light linen or muslin curtains and rush matting. Our own carpets were long gone, of course. And this year, only the parlor and the bedrooms would get winter drapes, because Mama and Adelaide were going to cut up the cloth from the dining room’s dusky blue velvet drapes to make dresses for Hannah and Aunt Em.

  ‘Amrie,’ said Mahalia from the top of a stepladder beside the parlor’s French door. ‘Pass me the next panel.’

  She had the curtain half hung, her arms stretched high over her head, when we heard the beat of a dozen or more cantering horses and the yelps and coarse jeers of rowdy men.

  ‘Mother of God,’ Mahalia said softly, leaving the curtain half hung as she scrambled down the ladder to scoop Althea protectively into her arms. ‘Not again.’

  I stood with my back pressed against the wall, the next panel still clutched in my arms, as blue-coated men swarmed over the yard and pounded up the front steps.

  Mama rose to her feet as the first of the men – a big, dark-haired sergeant – burst through the parlor doorway. ‘What do you want?’

  I dropped the drapes and ran to where Checkers sleepily raised his head from beside the empty dining-room hearth to growl. Crouching beside him, I looped my arms around his neck, shielding his body with my own. ‘Shh, boy,’ I whispered frantically. ‘Shhh.’

  The sergeant sauntered up to Mama, his thumbs hooked in his belt, his smooth, startlingly young face alive with merriment mixed with something else – something hard and malicious. ‘What ya gonna give me?’ he asked, one cheek distended from a wad of tobacco that dribbled thin brown juice down the side of his chin.

  When she simply stared silently back at him, he pursed his lips and spit a stream of tobacco juice that landed with a splat on the polished floorboards at her feet.

  ‘Come on, boys,’ he shouted, clapping his hands as he turned away. ‘Let’s make ’em some Yankee stew!’

  A dozen howling, whooping men rampaged through the house, bringing with them the smell of sun-warmed horses and half-masticated tobacco and unwashed, sweaty bodies. ‘We can start with these,’ said one of them, seizing the pile of neatly ironed drapes and tossing them into the center of the room.

  ‘Here’s another one!’ The sergeant closed his fist around the curtain Mahalia had only half hung. His yank pulled the rod out of the wall and brought it crashing down. He threw the curtain on top of the others, then grabbed the rod like a club to sweep the ormolu clock, English porcelain vases, and brass candlesticks from the mantelpiece. ‘Aw,’ he said in mock contrition. ‘Look what I done.’

  A slim corporal with bad teeth and swelling red mosquito bites covering his face nodded to the oil portrait of Simon hanging over the sideboard. ‘That yer boy?’ he asked Mama.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Bet he’s a Johnny Reb, ain’t he?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Sure he is.’ His grin widened. ‘Watch this.’ Still grinning, he brought up his bayonet and thrust the point into the canvas. ‘See? Got him right through the heart.’

  ‘No!’ I cried as he jerked the bayonet down, ripping the canvas.

  ‘Amrie,’ said my mother softly.

  I tightened my hold on Checkers and buried my face in his black and white coat.

  My world narrowed down to an endless nightmare of pounding boots, ripping cloth, breaking glass. They brought in armloads of bedding from Mama’s room and threw them into the center of the room with the curtains and the precious, beloved books they swept from our glass-fronted cabinets; they tore engravings off the walls and smashed them over ch
air backs before tossing the pieces onto the growing pile. Someone seized the glass-based kerosene lamp, long since dry, from a side table and hurled it into the mirror over the parlor mantel; a delicate alabaster carving of a long-necked Egyptian goddess shattered into pieces against the fireplace grate beside me.

  ‘Oh, no,’ I heard Mahalia whisper beneath her breath as a big, red-headed Scotsman came charging into the room, the axe we used to chop wood in his hands. He swung it first at the piano, the blade sinking deep with a discordant jangle, before turning toward the long rosewood table that my great-grandmother McDougal had brought all the way from Boston.

  From the other side of the hall I heard Aunt Em scream, ‘Oh, please; no! There’s a sick child in here.’

  One of the men growled, ‘Get her outta that bed.’

  ‘For God’s sake; can’t you see she’s dangerously ill?’

  ‘Ya got money hid under the mattress, don’t ya? Well, ya can either get the brat outta that bed, or I’m gonna dump her out.’

  ‘No, don’t! I’ll get her.’

  A moment later, Aunt Em burst through the parlor door, Hannah’s frail body clutched in her arms. Mama went to take the child from her, but Aunt Em shook her head and hugged Hannah close.

  Through it all, Adelaide hadn’t moved. She sat stoically with her workbox on the cushion beside her, the half-sewn nightdress gripped tightly in her lap.

  Then a stocky, flaxen-haired soldier picked up the intricately lacquered workbox and yanked the nightdress from her hands. ‘Here, gimme that,’ he snarled as he threw them on the pile that now covered most of the floor between the parlor and the dining room.

  ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourselves,’ said Adelaide evenly. ‘All of you. You are behaving like heathens.’

  ‘You shut up, old woman,’ snarled the soldier, pressing the muzzle of his pistol against the side of her head. ‘Shut your jaw, or I swear, I’m gonna blow your damned brains out.’