Kincaid's Battery
Page 55
LV
IN DARKEST DIXIE AND OUT
Unhappy Callender House! Whether "oppressors" or "oppressed" hadearliest or oftenest in that first year of the captivity lifted againstit the accusing finger it would be hard to tell.
When the Ship Island transports bore their blue thousands up the river,and the streets roared a new drum-thunder, before the dark columns hadsettled down in the cotton-yards, public squares, Carrollton suburb andJackson Barracks, Callender House--you may guess by whoseindirection--had come to the notice of a once criminal lawyer, now theplumed and emblazoned general-in-chief, to whom, said his victims(possibly biased), no offense or offender was too small for hishectoring or chastisement.
The women in that house, that nest of sedition, he had been told, atsecond-hand, had in the very dawn of secession completely armed thefamous "Kincaid's Battery" which had early made it hot for him aboutYorktown. Later in that house they had raised a large war-fund--stillsomewhere hidden. The day the fleet came up they had sent theircarriage-horses to Beauregard, helped signal the Chalmettefortifications, locked ten slaves in the dwelling under shell fire andthreatened death to any who should stir to escape. So for these twelvemonths, with only Isaac, Ben, and their wives as protectors and thesplendid freedom to lock themselves in, they had suffered the duress ofa guard camped in the grove, their every townward step openly watchedand their front door draped with the stars and stripes, under which nofeminine acquaintance could be enticed except the dear, faithfulValcours.
But where were old friends and battery sisters? All estranged. Could notthe Callenders go to them and explain? Explain! A certain man of notone-fifth their public significance or "secesh" record, being lightlyasked on the street if he had not yet "taken the oath" and as lightlyexplaining that he "wasn't going to," had, fame said, for that alone,been sent to Ship Island--where Anna "already belonged," as thecommanding general told the three gentle refusers of the oath, while inblack letters on the whited wall above his judgment seat in thecustom-house they read, "No distinction made here between he and sheadders."
But could not the Valcours, those strangely immune, yet unquestionedtrue-lovers of poor Dixie, whose marvelous tact won priceless favors forso many distressed Dixie-ites, have explained for the Callenders? Florahad explained!--to both sides, in opposite ways, eagerly, tenderly, overand over, with moist eyes, yet ever with a cunning lameness that keptconvincement misled and without foothold. Had the Callenders dweltup-town the truth might have won out; but where they were, as they were,they might as well have been in unspeakable Boston. And so by her ownsweet excusings she kept alive against them beliefs or phantoms ofbeliefs, which would not have lived a day in saner times.
Calumny had taken two forms: the monstrous black smoke of a vulgarversion and the superior divinings of the socially elect; a fine, hiddenflame fed from the smoke. According to the vulgate the three ladies,incensed at a perfectly lawful effort to use their horses for theConfederate evacuation and actually defying it with cocked revolver, hadopenly abjured Dixie, renounced all purpose to fly to it and, denyingshelter to their own wounded, had with signal flags themselves guidedthe conquering fleet past the town's inmost defenses until compelled todesist by a Confederate shell in their roof. Unable to face an odium sowell earned they had clung to their hiding, glad of the blue camp intheir grove, living fatly on the bazaar's proceeds, and having hightimes with such noted staff-officers as Major Greenleaf, their kindnessto whom in the days of his modest lieutenancy and first flight and ofhis later parole and exchange, was not so hard now to see through.
Greenleaf had come back with General Banks when Banks had succeededButler. Oppressed with military cares, he had barely time to be, withoutscrutiny, a full believer in the Valcours' loyalty to the Union. Hadthey not avowed it to him when to breathe it was peril, on that earlyday when Irby's command became Kincaid's Battery, and in his days ofParish Prison and bazaar? How well those words fitly spoken had turnedout! "Like apples of gold," sang Flora to the timorous grandmother, "inwrappers of greenbacks."
All the more a believer was he because while other faithfuls were makingtheir loyalty earn big money off the government this genteel pairreminding him, that they might yet have to risk themselves inside thegray lines again to extricate Charlie, had kept their loyalty asgracefully hidden as of old except from a general or two. PreoccupiedGreenleaf, amiable generals, not to see that a loyalist in New Orleansstood socially at absolute zero, whereas to stand at the socialebullition point was more to the Valcours than fifty Unions, a hundredDixies and heaven beside. It was that fact, more than any other, saveone, which lent intrepidity to Flora's perpetual, ever quickening danceon the tight-rope of intrigue; a performance in which her bonny face hadbegun to betray her discovery that she could neither slow down nor dancebackward. However, every face had come to betray some cruel strain;Constance's, Anna's, even Victorine's almond eyes and Miranda's babywrinkles. Yes, the Valcours, too, had, nevertheless, their monetarygains, but these were quiet and exclusively from their ever dear,however guilty, "rebel" friends, who could not help making presents toMadame when brave Flora, spurning all rewards but their love, got forthem, by some spell they could not work, Federal indulgences; got themthrough those one or two generals, who--odd coincidence!--always knewthe "rebel" city's latest "rebel" news and often made stern use of it.
Full believer likewise, and true sorrower, was Greenleaf, in Hilary'sdeath, having its seeming proof from Constance and Miranda as well asfrom Flora. For in all that twelvemonth the Callenders had got no gladtidings, even from Mandeville. Battle, march and devastation, march,battle and devastation had made letters as scarce as good dreams, inbrightest Dixie. But darkest Dixie was New Orleans. There no three"damned secesh" might stop on a corner in broadest sunlight and pass thetime of day. There the "rebel" printing-presses stood cold in dust andrust. There churches were shut and bayonet-guarded because theirministers would not read the prayers ordered by the "oppressor," andthere, for being on the street after nine at night, ladies of society,diners-out, had been taken to the lock-up and the police-court. In NewOrleans all news but bad news was contraband to any "he or she adder,"but four-fold contraband to the Callenders, the fairest member of whosetrio, every time a blue-and-gold cavalier forced her conversation, stunghim to silence with some word as mild as a Cordelia's. And yet,(youdemur,) in the course of a whole year, by some kind luck, surely theblessed truth--Ah, the damsel on the tight-rope took care against that!It was part of her dance to drop from that perch as daintily as abee-martin way-laying a hive, devour each home-coming word as he devoursbees, and flit back and twitter and flutter as a part of all nature'sharmony, though in chills of dismay at her peril and yet burning to goto Hilary, from whom this task alone forever held her away.
So throughout that year Anna had been to Greenleaf the veiled widow ofhis lost friend, not often or long, and never blithely met; loved moreardently than ever, more reverently; his devotion holding itself in afancied concealment transparent to all; he defending and befriendingher, yet only as he could without her knowledge, and incurring-a certainstigma from his associates and superiors, if not an actual distrust. Awhole history of itself would be the daily, nightly, monthly war ofpassions between him, her, Flora, and those around them, but time flies.
One day Greenleaf, returning from a week-long circuit of outposts, foundawaiting him a letter bearing Northern imprints of mailing andforwarding, from Hilary Kincaid, written long before in prison andtelling another whole history, of a kind so common in war that we havealready gone by it; a story of being left for dead in the long stupor ofa brain hurt; of a hairbreadth escape from living burial; of weeks inhospital unidentified, all sense of identity lost; and of a daring featof surgery, with swift mental, not so swift bodily, recovery. Inside theletter was one to Anna. But Anna was gone. Two days earlier, withoutwarning, the Callenders--as much to Flora's affright as to theirrelief, and "as much for Fred's good as for anything," said his obdurategeneral when Flora in feigned pity pleaded fo
r their stay--had beendeported into the Confederacy.
"Let me carry it to her," cried Flora to Greenleaf, rapturously claspingthe letter and smiling heroically. "We can overtague them, me and mygran'mama! And then, thanks be to God! my brother we can bring him back!Maybe also--ah! maybee! I can obtain yo' generals some uzeful news!"
After some delay the pair were allowed to go. At the nearest grayoutpost, in a sudden shower of the first true news for a week--theMississippi crossed, Grant victorious at Port Gibson and joined bySherman at Grand Gulf--Flora learned, to her further joy, that theCallenders, misled by report that Brodnax's brigade was at Mobile, hadgone eastward, as straight away from Brodnax and the battery asGulf-shore roads could take them, across a hundred-mile stretch oftownless pine-barrens with neither railway nor telegraph.
Northward, therefore, with Madame on her arm, sprang Flora,staggeringly, by the decrepit Jackson Railroad, along the quiet easternbound of a region out of which, at every halt, came gloomy mention ofTallahala River and the Big Black; of Big Sandy, Five Mile and FourteenMile creeks; of Logan, Sherman and Grant; of Bowen, Gregg, Brodnax andHarper, and of daily battle rolling northward barely three hours' canteraway. So they reached Jackson, capital of the state and base of GeneralJoe Johnston's army. They found it in high ferment and full ofstragglers from a battle lost that day at Raymond scarcely twenty milesdown the Port Gibson road, and on the day following chanced uponMandeville returning at last from Richmond. With him they turned west,again by rail, and about sundown, at Big Black Bridge, ten miles east ofVicksburg, found themselves clasping hands in open air with GeneralBrodnax, Irby and Kincaid, close before the torn brigade and the wasted,cheering battery. Angels dropped down they seemed, tenderly begging offfrom all talk of the Callenders, who, Flora distressfully said, had been"grozzly exaggerated," while, nevertheless, she declared herself, withstarting tears, utterly unable to explain why on earth they had gone toMobile--"unlezz the bazaar." No doubt, however, they would soontelegraph by way of Jackson. But next day, while she, as mistress of afield hospital, was winning adoration on every side, Jackson, onlythirty miles off but with every wire cut, fell, clad in the flames ofits military factories, mills, foundries and supplies and of itseastern, Pearl River, bridge.