Good Time Coming

by C. S. Harris

  ‘Nope.’

  He shook his head, but to my relief let the subject slide, saying, ‘You hear what happened to Old Aunt Sylvia?’

  Sylvia Chew was a gens de couleur libre who’d been putting flowers on her children’s graves when the LaFayette’s shells started falling. She’d taken refuge in the church, but when part of the roof came crashing down on her, she’d run outside screaming to duck inside the Polk family’s big mausoleum. A minute later, a whistling billy tore through the side of the tomb, burying her in bits of coffins, bones, and torn shrouds.

  ‘She says to me, “What’s the world comin’ to, when even the dead ain’t allowed to rest in peace?”’ Castile laughed and drained the last of the coffee.

  I said, ‘Who you reckon told them Federals about that deserter?’

  He lifted his shoulders in a shrug. ‘I dunno. Word gets around.’

  ‘I think it was Hilda Meyers.’

  Castile grunted. ‘Few years back, you and Finn was convinced she was a witch.’

  I squirmed with all the discomfort typical of anyone reminded of the foolishness of their younger self. ‘She ain’t never supported this war, and you know it.’

  ‘Yor momma and daddy ain’t never supported this war, neither.’

  ‘But they would never betray our friends and neighbors!’

  ‘And you think Hilda Meyers would?’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  He stared down at his empty mug for a moment, the scars showing grey against the darkness of his cheeks. ‘I reckon Hilda Meyers got more reason than most to hate war and the sufferin’ it brings on folks.’

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘She already been through one war before comin’ here. At a place called Cry-Mia.’

  ‘The Crimea? You mean, in Russia? I always thought she was German.’

  ‘Well, she is, but I hear tell her people settled in Russia long ago. I don’t know too much about that. All I know is they had them a big war a few years back. Lots of folks fought in it – the Russian Bazaar and the King of England, and even a bunch of them Mohammedans.’

  I nodded. I was vaguely familiar with the Crimean War, mainly because I’d grown up hearing my mother talk about Florence Nightingale.

  Castile said, ‘Part of the deal them Germans made when they settled in Cry-Mia was that they weren’t supposed to be forced to fight. But war has a way of making governments forget whatever promises they done made to people.’

  ‘Why? What happened?’

  ‘Hilda had five sons once. The reason she’s only got the one left is because the three oldest died fighting in that Cry-Mia War. Then they come after the fourth, only he refused to go. So they strung him up and hanged him dead, right there in front of her.’

  I swallowed hard. ‘What about the fifth?’

  ‘He was still too young for them to take. But he wasn’t gonna be for long. So after his brother was hanged, Hilda sold what she could and caught a ship with him for New Orleans.’ Castile reached over to throw more wood into the stove. ‘She lost most everybody she loved and everything she had to war before this war ever started. Ain’t no wonder she feels about it the way she does. But that don’t mean she’s passing information to the Yankees.’

  ‘Well, somebody is.’

  Castile looked troubled.

  ‘What?’ I prodded.

  But he only shook his head and refused to be drawn on the subject any further.

  A few days later, I was bringing him a crock of Mahalia’s soup when I was surprised to find Josephine’s little girl, Calliope, playing with a half-grown orange and white kitten on the stoop.

  ‘Hey, Calliope,’ I said. ‘Your mama here?’

  The little girl looked up and shook her head. ‘She done gone.’

  ‘Gone where?’

  The little girl shrugged her thin shoulders. ‘I dunno. She says I’m to stay with Paw-Paw till she come back.’

  I stared at her. Paw-Paw was an Acadian word for ‘grandpa’, although lots of other folks in south Louisiana used it.

  I looked up to find Castile standing in his open doorway. ‘I didn’t know she was—’

  ‘Here,’ said Castile, reaching for the crock; ‘let me take that soup from you.’

  ‘Josephine says Calliope is Leo’s,’ Castile told me some time later as we watched the little girl spoon chunks of Mahalia’s soup into her mouth. ‘I think I can see my boy’s mother in her – around the eyes, and in the way she holds her head when she’s studying on something. But maybe that’s just because I want to believe she’s his. I like thinkin’ something of my boy is livin’ still.’

  ‘Josephine’s run off from Bon Silence?’

  Castile nodded. ‘Last night. But so many of the little ones’ve been dying in them contraband camps that she didn’t want to take Calliope with her. Says it’s one thing to risk her own life, but she ain’t got no right to risk Calliope’s.’

  ‘Miss Rowena could just take Calliope away from you.’

  ‘She could. But I don’t reckon she will. Child that young ain’t no use to her. She’s just one more mouth to feed.’

  I lowered my voice. ‘You think Josephine will really come back for her?’

  ‘Maybe, when this danged war is over. Truth is, I’m kinda hoping she don’t.’

  I was silent for a moment, my gaze still on the child, who’d finished her soup and was playing with the kitten again. ‘I always heard Josephine was old Gilbert Vance’s daughter. Miss Rowena’s half-sister.’

  ‘So they say.’ He scrubbed a splayed hand down over his face. ‘There’s somethin’ you gotta know, Amrie. Somethin’ Josephine said before she left last night …’

  And so I listened, while a warm breeze chased away the lingering rain clouds, and Castile told me the tale Calliope’s mother had relayed to him.

  She’d come to him when the wind was thrashing the sweetgum and buckthorn trees in the coulee behind his house, and lightning forked across the black night sky. She’d brought away with her the child and the kitten, and nothing else.

  ‘Why now?’ he’d asked her, his voice practically drowned out by the endlessly rumbling thunder. ‘Why you runnin’ off on a night like this, girl? Ain’t no sense in it.’

  ‘I got my reasons,’ she said, cold rainwater dripping from her hair, her face showing stark and wet in the sizzling blue-white flashes of lightning.

  ‘What you done?’

  ‘Never you mind what I done. You better worry ’bout what your friends done. Mizz Rowena, she knows.’

  ‘Knows what?’

  Josephine gave a brittle laugh. ‘You sayin’ they ain’t told you?’

  ‘Told me what?’

  ‘You remember BobbyTi? Tall, skinny man run off from Mizz Rowena last June?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Most folks think BobbyTi run because he wanted to be free. But BobbyTi’s a coward. He run because he scared. He found out somethin’ about Mizz Rowena, somethin’ she don’t want nobody to know. He was afraid she was gonna have that crazy mulatto she got as an overseer kill him.’

  Castile just shook his head and smiled.

  ‘You laugh. That’s ’cause you don’t know Mizz Rowena. Folks think she’s as soft and sweet as vanilla pudding, but that’s just what she want them to think. Truth is, that lady’ll do anything for Bon Silence – and I do mean anything.’

  ‘What you sayin’, girl?’

  ‘I’m saying that when BobbyTi run off, he picked a night just like this. Figured the dogs’d have a hard time tracking him. He had an old skiff he’d found washed up on the levee after the spring flood, and he’d hid it down by Cat Island. He was sliding down the side of the bluff when he seen two women and a boy burying a couple dead men in a hollow where a big old oak got blown down in a storm. Now, BobbyTi, he figured it was an omen, a sign of what was gonna happen to him if he stuck around. He didn’t stop running till he reached the contraband camp down by New Orleans.’

  ‘What’s any of
this got to do with me?’

  ‘I’m gettin’ to that. See, after a while, BobbyTi heard about how the Federals was all afire to find some missing captain and his sergeant, and he knew then what he’d seen.’

  ‘How’d he know that?’

  ‘Because the men those women was burying had on blue uniforms, that’s how. Ain’t no other Yankees disappeared around here I heard about. Have you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Now, it took BobbyTi a while to sort out how he was gonna use what he knowed, but it finally come to him. You see, BobbyTi, he was missing his wife and children somethin’ fierce. So he comes back up here and he offers Mizz Rowena a deal: says if she’ll let his family go free, he’ll tell her something that’ll make the Yankees right grateful to her.’

  ‘I don’t understand. What’s Mizz Rowena got to do with the Yankees?’

  Josephine shoved the wet hair off her forehead in an exasperated gesture. ‘You just don’t get it, do you? That’s what BobbyTi found out abut Mizz Rowena last June – the reason he run off in the first place. I told you, that woman’ll do anything for Bon Silence. As soon as the Yankees moved into New Orleans and started confiscating plantations, she got it into her head they was gonna take Bon Silence. So she been sending them messages full of whatever they want to know. Don’t matter to her who she betrays or who gets killed, long as Bon Silence is safe.’

  ‘And did she let BobbyTi’s family go when he told her about them two dead Federals?’

  ‘She did. But here’s the thing: BobbyTi, he told Mizz Rowena it was too dark that night for him to see the faces of the women burying them Yankees. But that weren’t exactly the truth. He seen them clear enough when the lightning lit up the night. And that boy? He weren’t really a boy, but a girl dressed up in boys clothes.’

  Castile shook his head. ‘I still don’t understand what any of this has to do with me.’

  And so she told him.

  After Castile finished talking, I just stared out at the yard and watched the wind lift the moss hanging from the limbs of the live oaks and stir up little whirlwinds of dust.

  He said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me, Amrie? Why didn’t you let me help y’all?’

  ‘We didn’t tell anybody. We didn’t want anyone else to suffer for what we’d done.’ From here I could see a weed-choked cane field and the burned-out ruins of the old Sprague place. I said, ‘You think BobbyTi will tell anybody else on us?’

  Castile shook his head. ‘Your daddy saved BobbyTi’s life once, when he was real sick. He ain’t gonna tell on y’all.’

  ‘The Federals might make him tell.’

  ‘Josephine said he ain’t goin’ back to New Orleans. Said now he’s got his family, he’s headed up to Ohio. Ain’t no way them Yankees are gonna know it was you, Amrie. But y’all gotta be prepared for what’s gonna happen when they dig them two up, because you know they gonna do it.’

  My lungs felt oddly tight, and I sucked in a deep breath trying to ease them. ‘What you think they’ll do then?’

  He didn’t say anything, just crimped his lips into a tight line.

  But we both knew that whatever it was, it was gonna be bad.

  Fifty-One

  That night, after the others had all gone to bed, Mahalia, Mama, and I sat down to figure out how to deal with Josephine’s disclosures.

  Mahalia was all for digging up the dead men and dumping their bones in the river. But Mama decided that was too dangerous.

  ‘For all we know,’ she said, ‘the Federals could have already set a watch on the bayou. If we go anywhere near that tree, we’ll simply betray ourselves.’

  ‘So what are we gonna do?’ I asked.

  ‘There’s nothing we can do except wait and see what happens. If Josephine is telling the truth, BobbyTi didn’t betray us. And now he’s gone.’

  ‘But Josephine knows. She could tell someone.’

  ‘Yes.’

  A silence fell, filled only by the keening of the wind and the low, mournful howl of an abandoned dog somewhere in the distance.

  Mahalia shook her head. ‘I still can’t believe that Rowena Walford’s been secretly dealing with the Federals all this time. And her husband a colonel in the army.’

  ‘I doubt she’s been telling any of his secrets,’ said Mama. ‘We’re the ones she’s been betraying.’

  ‘Dear Madam,’ I said softly. It pricked my conscience that I’d been so sure the unknown correspondent was Hilda Meyers. I’d hated her bitterly for something she wasn’t doing. God help me, at one point I’d even started to doubt my own mother.

  Mahalia got up to throw another hunk of wood on the fire, then stood looking down at the crackling flames, the golden light dancing over her face. ‘What you reckon the Federals are gonna do, once they find them bodies?’

  ‘I suppose they’ll start looking for two women and a boy.’

  ‘Good thing I wore Simon’s clothes that night,’ I said. But then I started running through the families in the neighborhood, figuring up how many contained two women and a boy, and wondering if by our silence we’d be putting someone else at risk.

  I don’t think any of us slept that night.

  That Sunday dawned crisp and mostly clear, with scatterings of thin, rippled clouds that looked like the frozen waves of a celestial sea breaking on a shallow shore.

  Mama, Mahalia, Althea, and I were the only ones who walked into town that day for church. Rhoda Magruder was a holy-rolling Baptist and didn’t cotton much to the Reverend Dr Daniel Lewis’s sedate, cerebral style of preaching, while Adelaide announced she’d decided to just sit home and read her Bible. I saw the shadow of concern that passed over Mama’s face when she said it; Adelaide never missed Sunday services.

  Grace Church was uncommonly crowded that morning, despite the Federals having done their best to demolish it. The gallery was too unsafe to use, so the gens de couleur libres and what few slaves were left just sat in the back. Mahalia took Althea with her, the little girl’s white-blond hair gleaming in the sunlight that streamed in through the breaks in the roof.

  By now, folks were used to seeing the child with Mahalia and didn’t take no real notice. Truth was, I’d seen quadroons as fair as Althea. And it occurred to me watching the little girl contentedly take her place amongst her caramel, café au lait, and ebony-skinned neighbors, that race was a fluid thing whose arbitrary lines could be as divisive and deadly as the man-made borders drawn by politicians and generals on a map.

  Althea still didn’t speak, and Mama was beginning to worry that she never would. Mama had a theory, that seeing and experiencing awful things left an impression on people’s brains that could be permanent. It was a theory I didn’t like.

  I looked around that shattered church, at the women, children, and aging or crippled men huddled there, and I felt a swelling of despair within me. Our lives were never going to be the same again, no matter who won the war or when it finally ended. We were never going to be the same again.

  ‘Let us pray,’ said Reverend Lewis, recalling my wandering thoughts. I tried to focus on what he was saying, but I found I couldn’t believe any of it any more. I remembered how he’d told me once that what people really ought to pray for was simply inner peace and strength. I was trying to focus on that when the thunder of horses’ hooves and the rough voices of shouting men drowned out the reverend’s words.

  I saw him hesitate, felt the raw, skin-prickling fear that swept over the congregation as two blue-coated soldiers strode into the church, spurs and sabers jangling in the sudden, frightened silence. They clomped up the altar steps and swung around to face the congregation, their rifles cradled at the ready.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ protested Reverend Lewis. ‘This is a house of worship. I must ask you to respect—’

  ‘Shut up,’ snapped one of the men, a whipcord thin sergeant with blond whiskers, pale eyes, and a fiercely sunburned nose. ‘This church service is over. Everybody outside. The colonel’s ordered the whole town to assemble in fr
ont of the courthouse. Now.’

  There were a few whispers and murmurs, but nobody thought of disobeying. You don’t argue with loaded rifles in the hands of men accustomed to killing without hesitation or compunction.

  As we filed out the church into the cold sunshine, I reached out to tightly clasp my mother’s hand. Federal soldiers were everywhere, rounding up people at bayonet point and herding them toward the ruins of the courthouse that stood across the street from the churchyard. It had been completed only a few years before the war, a once grand affair of red brick with two soaring pedimented white porches and an elegant bronze-covered cupola. Now it was in even worse shape than Grace Church, its roof collapsed, its brick walls showing big holes.

  As we drew nearer we could see a wagon pulled up out front, two ominous forms lying beneath an oilcloth in its bed. At the top of the courthouse steps stood a Federal colonel, a portly man creeping into middle age, with thinning fair hair and a jowly, mustachioed face. His uniform was magnificent, a well-tailored, double-breasted, navy frock coat topped by a caped overcoat of sky blue wool that he wore open to display his sash and ceremonial sword.

  ‘I am Colonel Ogden O’Keefe, of the Fourth Wisconsin Volunteers,’ he said, his voice ringing out over the crowd.

  I glanced at my mother. We’d all heard of Colonel O’Keefe. A judge and local politician before the war, he’d been appointed colonel of the 4th Wisconsin Volunteers by the governor himself. He was known as much for his habit of appropriating other people’s fine paintings and expensive furniture as for his marked incompetence on the battlefield and a willingness to allow the troops under his command to plunder and pillage without check.

  ‘Seven months ago,’ he said, ‘two men under my command disappeared while in your area: Captain Gabriel Dupont and Sergeant Jules Boyle. They have now been found.’ He flung out one gauntleted hand toward the wagon, where a private stood waiting at the bed. The colonel’s face had darkened now to a deep, righteous crimson, his voice rising to a thundering roar as he intoned dramatically, ‘Behold your handiwork!’

  At his nod, the private flung back the oilcloth. The heavy, sour stench of decay wafted on the wind, a reek that mingled bayou mud with the unmistakable pinch of old death.