Good Time Coming Page 10

  He looked up at me. ‘Mahalia done gone off wit yor momma to Hidden Hills.’

  Hidden Hills was a vast plantation to the north of St Francisville owned by Rose Lacroix, a free woman of color. Tall, proud, and beautiful even in her fourth decade, she owned more than seventy slaves and was known to rule them with an iron hand. It was no secret that my mother didn’t like Rose Lacroix much.

  I came to rub the whirl of short, stiff hairs between Queen Bee’s soft brown eyes. ‘Why? What’s the matter?’ I’d never known Mahalia to go with Mama before.

  Priebus sat back on his stool, his hands resting on his thighs. He was only a few years older than Castile, but he seemed much older, his thin body racked with rheumatism, his short, tightly-wound hair grizzled, the majority of his teeth long gone. Like Mahalia, he had come to us from the Dunbar plantation in Livingston Parish and chosen to stay. ‘Reckon maybe you oughta ask yor momma ’bout that,’ he said.

  I looked over at him and laughed. ‘What? Why?’

  He straightened slowly to his feet, then stooped to grasp the pail’s handle. ‘Yankees done been there, impressin’ men to dig their canal up by Vicksburg. But that ain’t all they done.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ I asked.

  But he simply shook his head and refused to be drawn any further.

  My mother and Mahalia returned late in the afternoon, when the sky swirled with clouds as black as smoke, and veins of lightning trembled in the distance.

  Mahalia went off to start dinner, but my mother simply walked into her bedroom, tore off her hat, then stood beside the front windows looking out at the gathering storm.

  ‘Priebus says the Yankees have been to Hidden Hills,’ I said from the doorway.

  She turned her head to look at me over her shoulder. ‘What else did he tell you?’

  ‘Nothin’. He said to ask you. Why? What happened?’

  The rain swept in with a clatter, shuddering the leaves of the trees in the yard and drumming hard on the roof.

  ‘A press gang came ashore from a Federal gunboat,’ she said. ‘Early this morning. They’d rounded up a dozen men before Rose Lacroix heard what was happening and came down from the big house …’ My mother paused, as if choosing her words carefully. ‘You know what she’s like. She was furious, and not the least bit hesitant to let it show. She started screaming at the soldiers, saying they were stealing her property and demanding compensation.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘The officer in charge – a captain – just laughed at her. He refused to believe the plantation was hers and accused her of being the planter’s slave mistress, putting on airs while her master was away fighting for the Confederacy. He treated her … abominably.’

  ‘What did he do to her?’ I asked, my voice so quiet it was nearly drowned out by the thundering of the rain.

  Instead of answering me, she walked over to her washstand, poured water in the bowl, and carefully washed her hands and face.

  ‘What did he do?’ I asked again, my heart pounding, although I suspected I already knew the answer.

  She paused with her wrists resting on the edge of the bowl, her head bowed. ‘He had his soldiers strip her fine clothes from her and hold her down while he forced himself on her. He wasn’t the only one – although most of the men were more interested in the young girls from the quarters they caught.’

  I felt a strange vibration in my body, a humming in my ears, so that my voice sounded as if it were coming from far away when I said, ‘Didn’t anyone do anything to stop it?’

  ‘The grandfather of one of the girls tried. The soldiers bayoneted him.’

  ‘Is everybody gonna be all right?’

  ‘I don’t know about Rose Lacroix. She wouldn’t let me help her – she’s refusing to admit it even happened and threatening to whip any slave who says it did. One of the girls … She was only thirteen. If she survives, I don’t think she’ll ever be the same again. Her grandfather is dead.’

  I watched my mother dry her hands on her towel and then fold and hang it on its ring with studied care. ‘I never liked Rose Lacroix. Not only is she a harsh mistress, but I could never understand how a black woman could possibly own slaves.’

  I’d never understood it, either, although Papa always said that greed and cruelty are both color blind. Ironically, some gens de couleur libres were amongst the loudest opponents of abolition, selfishly guarding the freedom that separated them from the field hands and house servants, as if the liberation of millions of their black brethren would swamp them and destroy their own tenuous position in society.

  ‘I never liked her,’ my mother said again. ‘But no one deserves what happened to her. No one.’ She smoothed the folds of the towel, then went outside to stand at the top of the steps.

  The air filled with wind-swirled eddies of rain, the thrashing of the oaks, and the roar of water sluicing off the eaves. In the distance I could hear Mahalia shouting at Checkers, saying, ‘You get out of my kitchen, you. You so much as think of lookin’ at that chicken again, and I swear, I’ll crack your big ugly black head with this here rolling pin. You hear?’

  My mother kept her gaze on the teeming rain.

  I walked up to stand beside her. ‘I don’t understand why they did that. Those soldiers, I mean.’

  I’d thought soldiers were supposed to be disciplined. Wasn’t that why they spent all that time drilling and learning to obey orders? The idea that they could behave like the worst kinds of thieves and murderers from the Point was new to me. But I understood, for the first time, some of the whispers I’d heard, a part of the fears inspired by those armies of angry men marching against us that I hadn’t grasped before.

  She slipped her arm around my waist and drew me close, a gesture of affection that surprised me. When I was little, my mother was always holding me and hugging and kissing me. But somewhere along the line she’d quit, so that these days her demonstrations of affection were generally limited to an occasional awkward peck on my cheek.

  Now she rested her head against the top of mine, her voice oddly strained as she said, ‘I don’t understand it either, honey. But part of it, I think, is an ugly expression of anger toward the rich man they thought owned that big house and all those slaves. It’s as if they didn’t see Rose Lacroix and those poor young girls as human beings, at all – as people with feelings and hopes and dreams and needs – but simply as tools to be used for revenge.’

  ‘Revenge for what?’

  ‘For rebelling against the Union. For being rich. I don’t know.’ She brought up one hand to smooth my hair, which was a tangle from my afternoon’s rambling. ‘You need to be careful, Amrie. We all need to be careful.’

  I was afraid she was going to tell me she wanted me to start sticking closer to home, but she didn’t. It was only later it occurred to me that her failure to do so was an acknowledgment of a grim reality: I was probably more vulnerable here, in our house and yard, than I was roaming the swamps and bayous with Finn.

  Sixteen

  A week or so later, Mama and I were in St Francisville, picking up a plow that Avery had brought in earlier to Cyrus Pringle’s blacksmith’s shop to be fixed, when we heard the pounding of running feet punctuated with shouts of excitement and laughter.

  Stepping to the front of the shop, my mother snagged a boy dashing past. ‘What has happened?’

  ‘The Yankees done give up tryin’ to take Vicksburg again!’ said the boy, his face split by a wide grin, his thin chest jerking as he sought to catch his breath. ‘And they’re evacuating Natchez, too. We’re winnin’ the war!’

  The boy wiggled out of her hold and darted off. She turned to look at me.

  ‘You think it’s true?’ I asked.

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’

  Cyrus Pringle came to stand behind us. He was a big man in his late forties, sweat staining his worn, homespun shirt and gleaming on his thick bare forearms. He was one of those who had quietly opposed succe
ssion. Now his only son, Isham, was off fighting with Beauregard. A deeply religious man, he could often be seen sitting on his porch of an evening, his worn Bible open on his knee, as if he could somehow pray Isham home safe.

  ‘Maybe they’re finally admittin’ they can’t win this war, and they’re gonna sit down and talk peace,’ he said, although he didn’t sound as if he really believed it.

  The day was hot and overcast, the sky a flat gray, the atmosphere so humid that breathing was like trying to suck air through a thick wad of wet cotton. For a moment I felt as if I couldn’t catch my breath. I was remembering what happened the last time the Federals left Vicksburg and came down the river. Except that we’d heard General Williams’s army had now joined up with another force from the north, so this time there would be even more of them.

  ‘Could be just a rumor,’ said my mother. There were so many rumors flying around these days, some wishful thinking, some telling of disasters that were simply the figment of someone’s frightened imagination.

  Only, we soon found out this one was true; the Federals really had decided to break off their attack on Vicksburg. The remaining question was: why?

  Some said it was because the big iron Confederate ram, the Arkansas, had sailed down the Yazoo River and scattered the Federal fleet, destroying dozens of their boats. Others claimed it was because General Butler had heard the Confederates were planning a move to retake Baton Rouge and he wanted to concentrate his forces back down the river. And then there were those who said it was because the Federal troops camped in the marshes below Vicksburg were sickening and dying at a fearful rate. About the only thing we knew for certain was that they’d also given up their plan to shift the channel of the Mississippi into a canal.

  In so doing, they abandoned the twelve hundred slaves they’d impressed to dig it.

  Left far from their homes and families, without food or protection, their dreams of freedom shattered, the forsaken men waded out into the river behind the departing Federal boats, arms raised in beseechment, crying out in anguish as they begged to be taken, too. But the decks of the troop transports were already crowded with sick and dying soldiers.

  It was a day or so later that Finn and I found the first of those soldiers washed up, dead, on the bank below Bayou Sara.

  The river was falling rapidly, leaving the levee strewn with driftwood and pieces of raft all tangled up with a variety of weird and wonderful things carried away by the floodwaters from settlements up river: everything from barrels and pirogues to broken chairs and old boots. We were scavenging the piles of wreckage, Finn a ways ahead of me as we poked around for anything useful, when I saw him go suddenly still.

  ‘What’d ya find?’ I called.

  ‘Looks like a dead Yankee,’ said Finn in a queer, tight voice.

  Leaving the birdcage I’d been trying to free from a tangle of rope, I scrambled down the bank to where the body of a man lay face down in the silt-heavy water, his arms flung out at his sides in a way that reminded me uncomfortably of the crucified Christ. ‘How’d he get here?’ I asked, my own voice thick in my throat.

  Finn grabbed a handful of the soldier’s sodden blue uniform and dragged him over, one arm splashing in the water.

  ‘Ew!’ I said, my hand coming up to cover my mouth as the sweet scent of decay rose up strong and a big black water beetle skittered across the dead man’s blue, slack face. ‘What’d you want to go and do that for?’

  ‘’Cause I wanted to see how he died.’ Finn hunkered down beside the pale, stiffening corpse. ‘I don’t think he’s been shot, Amrie. He looks like somebody who was sick for a long time.’

  ‘Maybe he fell overboard.’

  Finn pushed to his feet, his gaze narrowing against the glint off the water as he stared down the riverbank. ‘Look; there’s another one!’

  At first I didn’t believe him. But I’ve never known anyone with eyes like Finn. Stepping gingerly over the mounds of tangled branches and logs, I followed him to where another dead Union soldier floated, this one face up in a gentle eddy.

  ‘Reckon we oughta tell somebody?’ I said.

  Finn glanced over at me, his face screwed up as he squinted into the westering sun. ‘What for?’

  ‘Why you think? So they can bury them!’

  ‘Why the heck should we bury them when their own officers didn’t bother? They just tossed ’em overboard like they was dead hogs or somethin’.’ He jerked his chin toward the dead man at our feet. ‘He come down here aimin’ to kill us; I say, let him rot in the sun.’

  I stared down at the dead soldier’s pale face. I wanted to hate him. I kept thinking about the soldiers ravaging New Orleans and what that raiding party had done up at Hidden Hills, and wondering if he’d been a part of it. But what if he hadn’t? What if he was just some poor farmer who thought he was doing the right thing, fighting for his country, the way Papa was fighting for his? What if he had a little girl somewhere, just like me? A little girl whose daddy was never coming home.

  I said, ‘Everybody deserves a proper burial.’

  Finn just let out a disgusted snort and turned away to go back to picking through the flood’s leavings.

  And so I left him there, and went and told Dr Daniel Lewis, our reverend at Grace Episcopal Church. Not only was he a good Christian man, but he was also originally from Schenectady, New York; I figured I could trust him to do what was right by the dead Northerners.

  He borrowed a cart and mule from Cyrus Pringle, and then he and Mr Pringle went out to collect the bodies. They found another one, too, further down the river, and brought all three back to bury them behind the church. He asked me if I wanted to attend the brief graveside services.

  I said no. My charity toward dead Yankees only extended so far.

  It took the Federal fleet three days to steam past us. And all that time, dead soldiers and seamen kept washing up on our riverbanks. We heard later that so many men were dying, the commanders didn’t want to take the time to stop and bury them along the levees. But that didn’t explain why they didn’t order them sewn into blankets and weighted down before being thrown overboard, as was the custom. Some folks reckoned the Federals were hoping the rotting corpses would infect the settlements along the river with whatever sickness had struck their men so savagely in the marshes before Vicksburg. But from the sound of things, their troops had succumbed to swamp fever, which was something we battled all the time. If anyone sickened and died from those rotting Federal corpses, I never heard of it.

  I thought it was a nasty thing to do, nevertheless – to us and to the Northern women and children whose loved ones were left to putrefy in our hot sun, or else coldly laid to rest by the resentful hands of those who wished them only a speedy trip to hell.

  Church was crowded that Sunday, both because the sight of all those rotting corpses had folks thinking uncomfortably about the state of their own souls, and because a famous visiting preacher named Garette Hale was in town, and everyone was anxious to hear his sermon. After more than a year of war, our sources of entertainment had narrowed down something pitiful.

  I scooted in behind Mama as we took our usual places in the last pew nearest the door. The day had dawned clear and brutally hot, so that the air in the church quickly grew stifling and close as more bodies pressed into the confined space. A ceaseless, hummingbird-like beating of scores of handheld fans joined the usual stray coughs, rustling skirts, and murmuring voices.

  I leaned in closer to my mother and whispered, ‘How come this preacher is so famous?’

  ‘You’ll see,’ she said.

  That’s when I noticed the martial light in her eyes, and I knew a heavy, sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  My mother was a curious mixture of contradictory inclinations, her instinctive Scots reticence combined with a fiery temper that could be instantly roused to unbridled, caustic condemnation by the sight of someone kicking a dog or beating a tired horse. But nothing riled her more than slavery and war.

/>   Slewing around in my seat, I eyed the unfamiliar, rotund man I could see talking to a woman in the pool of golden morning sunshine just outside the church’s wide open doors. I’d always been quick to judge people; it was one of my many grievous faults, constantly catalogued in painstaking detail for me by my Grandmother Adelaide. So as I studied the visiting preacher, I tried to practice the charity in which I’d been told I should view each new acquaintance.

  I’d heard the Reverend Garette Hale came to us from Georgia. Only, I could catch snippets of his conversation with Mrs Fox, and he reminded me more of Bernard Henshaw than somebody from Macon or Atlanta.

  I said to my mother, ‘He don’t sound like nobody from Georgia I ever met.’

  ‘He doesn’t sound like anyone from Georgia,’ she corrected me. ‘That’s because he’s originally from Oxford.’ Then she added, ‘England’ in case I was confused, since the nearest Oxford to us was in Mississippi.

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  I eyed him more intently. He had a pink, puffy face sheened with sweat by the sun. But his smile was cherubic, a glow of amiability that crinkled the flesh beside his small blue eyes and suffused his face with good cheer tinged with a touch of amused indulgence that for some reason set up my back.

  I realized I was doing it again – judging – and redoubled my efforts to be charitable. He had a blobby nose, which I sorta liked, and the heaviest eyebrows I’d ever seen, of the same silken silver as the ring of hair that circled the sides and back of his head but left the top bald and shiny. The effect was somewhat like that of a tonsured monk, so that he reminded me of a holy picture Grand-mère had of St Francis of Assisi. Only, the Reverend Hale was better fed.

  Much better fed.

  The rustling and coughing inside the church reached a crescendo, then fell abruptly silent as we all rose. Mr Garette Hale swept into the church, followed by our own Reverend Daniel Lewis. I liked Dr Lewis. A small, sparse, scholarly man, he was beaming with pride at the honor of having such a famous orator visiting his church. But there was something else in his face that confused me; something that looked almost like nervousness as the two men took their places.