Mignon

by James M. Cain

  “You’ve no faith in the dam?” he asked me one day.

  “Who wants to know?” I said. “A loyal Reb?”

  “No, Mr. Cresap,” he assured me, very solemn, “a loyal Union man. And since you bring it up, I may say that things have changed since we had our last discussion. War was not over in Louisiana—for a few days, at least. Now, I’m sorry to say, it is—finally, and for keeps. I said it, didn’t I? That I was the fool, not Taylor, but they’ve drawn Taylor’s teeth and clipped his claws. He’s now a tiger made of paper, with just a token force of no more than five thousand men, banging away with artillery, lighting fires at night, and cutting off forage parties—ever since Kirby Smith, the military genius at Shreveport, took the bulk of his army away, to meet another ‘invasion,’ coming down from the north—if it’s coming, if. So instead of the bird in hand, this Union army in Alexandria, we’re chasing a will-o’-the-wisp, and my allegiance is settled, in heart as well as mouth. Taylor’s doing a wonderful job, but it still remains true there’s not one Reb soldier between this place and Shreveport.”

  “What’s that got to do with the dam?”

  “Mr. Cresap, suppose it fails?”

  “... Well? We lose ten boats, I suppose.”

  “You just walk off and leave them?”

  “Not I—this army. What else can we do?”

  “I may be crazy, but as a loyal Union man I say—and don’t contradict me—no Union army dare pull out of this place and leave ten boats sitting. It would not obey the order; the men would mutiny first! The one thing it can do is march on up to Shreveport—and that’ll cook Taylor, Kirby Smith, the will-o’-the-wisp chasers, and everything Reb in this section! Because what Richmond is to the East, Shreveport is to the West—a base, a source of food, of munitions, of what’s needed to fight. That’s what this army can do, and that’s what it’s going to do, once the river tears that dam apart.”

  “What’s the rest of it, sir?”

  “... In Springfield, everything’s marking time.”

  “Springfield? I thought we were talking of Shreveport.”

  “Both are important to us—to you, to me, to Mignon. Nothing can litigate until the Navy gets out of this river and brings its witnesses into court. So if you don’t get there right away, nothing’s lost, is there? You’ll still have time for Shreveport.”

  “Yes. Shreveport?”

  “The Army takes it, doesn’t it?”

  “So you say, Mr. Landry. What then?”

  “And the Navy doesn’t take it?”

  “Well the Navy’s prevented, sort of.”

  He said the Navy was prevented, not only by being stuck, but by being blocked off, from a hulk sunk in the river, the New Falls City, “at the mouth of Loggy Bayou, which is why they turned back in the first place, not from hearing the Army was whipped, as they’ve been giving out. They can’t get out of the mud, and even if they could, they can’t get past the hulk. That means Shreveport’s an Army thing—doesn’t it?”

  “All right, what then?”

  “These people have confidence in the Army.”

  “What people, sir?”

  “In Shreveport. No cotton’s going to be burned.”

  “... More about cotton, and I’m going to upchuck.”

  “For a million dollars you’d upchuck?”

  “Did you upchuck with her?”

  She’d been sitting with me on the sofa, he facing us in a chair, his eyes roving the river. Now she blazed her eyes at me, then got up and went over to him. In her red-checked gingham dress she kneeled beside him, took his hand in hers, and said: “Go on, lambie—explain us, how do we get the million dollars—oh my, that would be heaven on this earth.”

  “So?” I said. “The cotton’s not burned, and—”

  “I acquire it. I have friends in Shreveport.”

  “You mean, you buy it?”

  “I mean I take title, on shares. Once they know it’s the Army, once I assure them of that, those people will trust me, I know. But two things I have to have.”

  “All right. What are they?”

  “The first is time.”

  “I thought we had plenty of time.”

  “You have time—I haven’t. I have to know where I stand, so I can get on the spot and write papers—bills of sale, partnership articles with the different people involved, receipts for the Army to sign. With all the thousands of bales waiting for me up there, I can’t do it in an hour; I have to get there ahead of time, I must be there ready and waiting whenever the Army comes.”

  “Quite a trudge you’ve picked out for yourself.”

  “Trudge? I’ll go by boat.”

  “Boat? What boat, Mr. Landry?”

  “Reb boats are running again—Doubloon, Grand Duke, all kinds of different ones. When the Union pulled out, traffic resumed as usual. I can be in Shreveport tomorrow—call it day after.”

  “... What else must you have?”

  “Godpappy, Mr. Cresap.”

  “I thought that was it. Meaning me?”

  “You’ll have it all to yourself—a monopoly!”

  He said that now the other traders had all been sent back to New Orleans I’d be the only one, “and they’ll have to deal with you.” Then he started in again on the mess being made of the dam. “The idea,” he said, “is to set out the trees in pairs—brackets they’re called, I believe—with boards nailed to the trunks. When they’re hauled into the stream, the current’s supposed to help, by pressing down on the boards and holding them tight to the bottom—and it did, so long as the work was close to the bank, where the water’s shallow. But now that they’re moving out where it’s deep, the current’s no help any more. It lifts those trees like Hallowe’en apples and sends them spinning downriver, past the bridge and out. The whole thing’s just pitiful.”

  I said: “You know how you sound to me?”

  “... All right, Mr. Cresap—tell me.”

  “Like a man working three sides of the street—Reb side, Union side, and Cotton side, all at the same time.”

  “I’m not running this war. What I propose is lawful.”

  “And you realize I must report what you’ve said.”

  She started, but he smiled, waited, and said: “I would expect you to; in fact I want you to, and realize that until you do you’ll not cooperate. So please—you go to your friend Captain Dorsey, tell him what I’ve told you—everything I’ve said, especially about Kirby Smith. When you come back, I think you’ll be ready to talk.”

  She came over to me, not blazing her eyes any more, but mumbling her mouth to mine and whispering: “You’re going to, aren’t you? See Captain Dorsey? Hear what he has to say? And then line it up? So we make the million dollars? And have our house? And our carriage? And——”

  “At any rate, I’ll see him.”

  The Black Hawk, the headquarters Black Hawk that is, was tied up at Biossat’s again, all battered from shelling upriver, and the guard on her plank called Dan. I’d seen him since he got back, but only to say hello, and we spent a minute or two on the usual dumb questions, getting caught up with each other. Then he started to take me upstairs, but I suggested some place where we’d be alone, and he led on back to the fantail, where we had it with our elbows on the rail. He listened, and then filled me in on the fighting the Army had seen, and how it bore on what Mr. Landry had told me. “The thing to keep straight,” he said, “is that two battles were fought—one up in the woods, at what’s known as Sabine Crossroads, just this side of Mansfield. That battle we lost—I was there, and it was a shambles, with everything going wrong that possibly could go wrong. You’d think, after Caesar wrote up the folly of trying to fight with wagons up in your van, that we’d have heard about it, two thousand years later. But no—there the wagons were when the Rebs came piling at us, with the horses screaming and breaking, and the wagoners no great help. And there were the girls too, the colored ones that were brought by the boys to do their washing—whipping their mules to the r
ear and yelling: ‘Run! Run! Here come Old Massa—he gwine massacree everyone!’ Don’t let anyone tell you different, it was a rout! You know what they’re singing, don’t you?”

  He leaned close, and buzzed into my ear:

  “In eighteen hundred and sixty one,

  Hurrah, Hurrah! We all skedaddled to Washington,

  Hurrah, Hurrah!

  In eighteen hundred and sixty four,

  We all skedaddled to Grand Ecore—

  And all got stone blind,

  Johnny fill up the bowl!”

  “But,” he went on, “next day, at Pleasant Hill, when they tried to finish us up, we cut them to pieces, Bill. Don’t let anyone tell you different on that! And there’s the tragedy of it! This army’s not licked—how could it be when it won that Pleasant Hill fight? This headquarters is! Of backbiting, disloyalty, undercutting, and bickering you can take just so much. And that’s why we’re getting out. Not from defeat, from disunity! So, in regard to your friend Landry and what he thinks we’ll do next, he could be right. We could be going to Shreveport, in case this dam’s a bust, we could be doing just that—and we know all about it, Kirby Smith’s dispersal of Richard Taylor’s army. He sent Price with six thousand men to stop Steele, who’s supposed to be working with us, and that army is way the hell and gone up in Arkansas someplace, so it couldn’t be a factor. It’s quite true, I imagine, that there’s no effective force under the Reb command between this place and Shreveport.”

  “All right, but what do I do?”

  “Bill, I’ve told you: the goddam cotton is hooded. It’s the cause of all our trouble, the cause of the headquarters bickering, of the Navy’s being stuck. If they hadn’t gone upriver for this cotton Landry wants, they wouldn’t be where they are now. Stay out of it! Don’t touch it with a ten-foot pole.”

  “I can’t stay out of it. I’m already in.”

  I told him about Sandy, the Navy receipt, and the rest. He whistled. “Well!” he said. “You certainly are in, all the way, with both feet. ... Then—a little more can’t make much difference. In for a penny, in for a pound.”

  “You mean let Mr. Landry go ahead?”

  “What harm is it going to do?”

  “That’s it! If we don’t go to Shreveport, Dan ... ?”

  “Then we didn’t and he did. That’s all.”

  “You’re sure I wouldn’t be disloyal, doing this?”

  “Well? Lincoln wants it, doesn’t he?”

  Chapter 25

  BACK IN THE FLAT I DIDN’T QUITE say yes, but they smelled I was going to, and she made herself so sweet butter wouldn’t have melted in her mouth. Next morning she came early, snuggling close to me, and whispering little jokes in between the kisses. She got my promise at last, and I went on down to see Hager and cancel my pass application, since if I was going to Shreveport it would head off all kinds of mix-ups if I reapplied up there to the new Provost Marshal, without still another request dangling in Alexandria. But he waved as soon as he saw me, there in the courthouse door, and left his desk to come over, stepping past doctors, orderlies, and wounded lying on stretchers. “Surprise for you, Cresap!” he roared as soon as he’d shaken hands. “You’re on your way out, you’re leaving! The Warner’s going tomorrow, and I’ve arranged to get you on board. And the style you’ll be going in! Two gunboats are taking her down—you’ll be like Mason and Slidell!”

  “Fine!” I said. “Love to feel important!”

  Because of course this couldn’t be turned down, just at the drop of a hat, without my making sure how Mr. Landry felt. On his own favorite principle of grabbing the bird in hand, he might want me to go. And even if outvoted, I could decline the honor later in the day. So I talked along, got the various details, like the leaving time of the boat, which was eight o’clock in the morning, and the probable space I’d have, which was half a stateroom. “But,” he warned, “this is for Cresap alone. It does not include a lady, or the lady’s courtly father.”

  “That’s understood,” I told him.

  “You board tonight. Get there first.”

  “I’ll be there with bells, Captain.”

  “I think they’ll be stopping at Cairo, and you can go to Springfield from there. But if they take you to Cincinnati, that’s not so far either.”

  “Cincinnati’s perfect with me.”

  And it was perfect with Mr. Landry, as I learned when I came charging in with my news—and not only with him but with her. Shreveport was entirely forgotten as both of them got all excited over definite action at last. “It’s the difference,” she said, “between a million up in the sky and one-twenty thousand there in the bank—sixty thousand for Father and sixty thousand for us. Who wouldn’t take what’s sure?” He told her: “Nothing’s sure, Daughter, especially in this war—but short of having the money, this is as sure as anything can be.” We talked of getting married, of going to Dr. Dow, the Episcopal rector there, and having it done at once, that same day, before I left. But she didn’t want to be married in Alexandria. “I was once,” she said, “and it didn’t turn out very well.” And also, I think, she was shy of marrying a bluebelly here, where everyone knew her, and starting a lot of talk. We checked their end of it over, and he said: “Don’t worry about us, Mr. Cresap—if, as I assume, the Union goes through to Shreveport, that’ll end the war in the West, and we’ll stay right where we are until navigation resumes and then join you in Springfield, if you care to have us come. If, on the other hand, they’re captured or manage to cut their way out, this place will be under the Rebs—but we’ve nothing to fear from them. We’ll leave as soon as we can, and be seeing you before very long.” Communication would be a problem, but we left it that they would write me in care of General Delivery at Springfield, and I would write them whichever way I could, in the light of the news as it broke. I asked: “Isn’t somebody sorry I’m going?”

  “Of course,” she yipped. “We both are!”

  “I’d like to be missed, a little!”

  She kissed me, right in front of him, said: “You’re going to be missed a lot—morning, noon, and night, but specially in the morning. Now come on, I’ll help you pack.”

  I was sitting there with him, the packed bag beside me, my overcoat, oilskin, and hat piled on top, and she was in the kitchen putting me up some lunch, in case food was scarce on the boat, when a knock came on the door. He answered and then came back with Sandy, who was looking pretty glum, not to say seedy, and whom I hadn’t seen since that day on the falls. He shook hands, and seemed surprised when I asked if his boat was one of those stuck. “Why, yes,” he said, “in a way. She kind of got permanently stuck and we had to scuttle her.”

  “Oh? When did that happen?”

  “Last week.”

  “And what boat are you on now?”

  “We all got distributed around, pending reassignment, and I got taken on board the Neosho—monitor aground on the upper falls. I’m subject to duty as ordered, meaning at-large mud-turtle to this dam they’re trying to build.”

  “Which is not going well, I hear.”

  “It’s not going at all.”

  She came in about that time, with her packages wrapped in newspaper, and after shaking hands, excused herself while she stuffed them into my bag. He had been eyeing it, and now asked: “You going somewhere, Bill?”

  I told him about the Warner, and he said: “Well, in that case I’ll forget what I came about.” I pressed him, of course, and he said: “No, if you have a chance to get out, and especially to go to Springfield, I can’t stand in your way. That’s important—it’s the one way to get the money we’re going to need, so let’s forget the dam, which can’t be built anyhow. It’s a completely ridiculous idea.” It came out, little by little, that what he had wanted of me was to Walk across the bridge and pass out a couple of pointers to the boys on the left bank about how to do their work. “On this side,” he said, “it makes sense—not much, but a little. They’re building cribs out of logs, hauling them into the st
ream, and filling them with stone. How much water they hold I wouldn’t like to say, but at least they stay there, they don’t go floating off. But on the other side it’s a madhouse.” He explained about the brackets, corroborating what Mr. Landry had said, and went on: “They wash out, they break apart, and it’s not only the river. It’s the troops, a bunch of Maine woodsmen, who can cut trees down but can’t hook ’em together. I’ve tried to tell ’em, but they won’t listen to me, and besides I don’t really know. But you do, and to you I thought they might pay some attention—that’s all. But, you’d have to stay with ’em, of course, see it through to the end; so let’s forget it.”

  “How long is this thing going to take?”

  “It’s win or lose in a week.”

  “You mean, win or starve in a week?”

  “Yes, that’s just what I mean!”

  “There’s talk going around that in the event the dam doesn’t hold the march will be resumed up the river to Shreveport.”

  “Not by the Navy. It doesn’t have the water.”