Good Time Coming Read online

  No one could say exactly when the attack was expected to come. But one sticky, foggy morning, I awoke to a distant rumbling that went on and on and on. It could have been thunder. But I knew it wasn’t.

  Putting aside my mosquito bar, I crept from my bed to the open window. The blackness of the receding night still gripped the oaks and cedars below. But I could see the first rays of light creeping across the sky, streaks of gold and vermillion that spread like molten fingers across an aquamarine sky.

  I wished I could see through the darkness, through the miles of swamp and woodland that separated us from Baton Rouge. A part of me felt a rush of excitement; Finally we were fighting back. But then I thought about all the women and children of Baton Rouge, awakened by the scream of shells and the whump of cannonballs, and I found myself trembling.

  Finn and I had planned to spend the day scouting the woods for turkey roosts. But we had a hard time settling down to do much of anything. Sometimes the wind would drop, and we’d become aware of a stillness filled only with the chorus of birds in the treetops and the lowing of Queen Bee out in the pasture. But then the wind would shift and we’d hear it again: boom, boom, boom.

  Finn was all for taking his mama’s mule, Dander, and riding down to watch the battle himself. But she planted her fists on her hips and reared back her head and said, ‘Sure then, you will not. Them Federals would as soon shoot you and steal your mule as look at you. And how’m I supposed to plow the fields with no mule?’

  ‘Jimminy Cricket!’ He slapped his hat against his thigh, eyes snapping in a red face. ‘To hear you, a body’d think you care more about that mule than you do about me.’

  She cuffed him on the side of his head and told him not to be a bleedin’ fool. But frankly, I wondered. Mrs O’Reilly had three other children but only the one mule. And without a mule, how could she keep her family fed and alive?

  Finally, along about midday, the cannons fell silent. Finn was ebullient, convinced we’d won. ‘I reckon the Arkansas done for the Federal fleet, jist like she did up at Vicksburg. I bet the Yankees’ve run halfway to New Orleans by now.’

  I wasn’t so sure.

  It was late in the evening, when the shadows were lengthening and a golden light spilled over the emerald rows of corn in the fields, that a tired, dust-covered rider appeared in St Francisville with the news that General Breckenridge had pulled his men back to the Comite River. Anyone with a wagon or carriage was asked to come help carry away the Confederate wounded, of which there were hundreds.

  My mother set off at once with Avery in our farm wagon, the back loaded with everything from blankets and bandages to baskets of fruit and crocks of milk. Finn and I ran into town in search of more news.

  We found a crowd gathered around a lean scarecrow of a man, his homespun butternut uniform hanging in tatters, so that the flesh of his scrawny torso showed through the rents. Red-rimmed eyes and swollen lips stood out stark against a face stained black from ripping open powder cartridges with his teeth. He sat perched on the edge of the boardwalk in front of the bank and was eating a plateful of red beans and rice that he shoveled into his mouth with a fist wrapped around the handle of a big pewter spoon. People kept saying, ‘Let him eat! Let him eat!’ But then somebody else would pipe up with a question, and the soldier would set down his spoon and answer them.

  ‘I reckon we could’ve whooped ’em,’ he was saying as we joined the back of the crowd, ‘if the Arkansas had made it. But the Yanks had nearly twice the artillery we did. And without the Arkansas to occupy the fleet’s guns, there weren’t no hope.’

  ‘What happened to the Arkansas?’ Finn whispered to Mrs O’Sullivan, who was standing next to us.

  ‘Engines failed,’ she said grimly. ‘It was shot up pretty bad in the battle for Vicksburg, and they’re saying they didn’t have time to fix it properly.’

  I looked out over that sea of grim-faced women, children, and aging men. We all knew what the failure to retake Baton Rouge meant – not just for the nation and the war, but for us.

  ‘How many men did we lose?’ shouted Cyrus Pringle from the far side of the crowd.

  ‘A couple hundred dead, maybe more,’ said the exhausted soldier. ‘There ain’t no way to know for sure. General Breckenridge tried to negotiate a truce so’s we could collect and bury our dead, but the Yanks wouldn’t agree to it.’

  A rumble of disgust spread through the crowd. Such arrangements were one of the accepted customs of civilized warfare. But lately, those customs seemed to be observed more in the breach, with wounded dying untended on battlefields and the dead left to putrefy unburied.

  ‘One of the big problems,’ said the soldier, ‘is that General Williams was kilt. Shot by his own men, he was. Some of our boys seen it.’

  Another murmur wafted through the crowd. It was no secret that the Union General Thomas Williams was powerfully unpopular with his men. Not only did he force them to drill in the heat, but he’d posted guards to prevent the troops from plundering the houses of Baton Rouge. Since far too many soldiers had come to view anything owned by a ‘Secesh’ as theirs, this denial of their right to steal without check had seriously enraged them. I had an uneasy feeling the death of General Williams was going to be a disaster for the people of Baton Rouge.

  ‘Any chance Breckenridge might regroup and try again?’ shouted someone.

  The soldier shook his head. ‘I reckon we’re gonna fall back to Port Hudson and fortify that. It’s more defensible than Baton Rouge, and the way the river turns there, any boat trying to steam up the Mississippi has to come within reach of its guns. If we can hold Vicksburg and Port Hudson, we can at least keep the Red River open, and stop the Federals from controlling the whole dang Mississippi.’

  I thought about old Mr Pierce Becnel, anxiously awaiting his sons’ return from a rocking chair on the front porch of his tidy, whitewashed house on Port Hudson’s main street. And I wondered if he knew that his small, sleepy town was about to become the focus of two nations’ warring ambitions.

  It was dark before my mother arrived back home. She brought with her three wounded men. One, a sergeant from Tennessee, had had his face shot off and died somewhere on the road. Another, a soldier from Kentucky, was gutshot and died the next morning. Mama kept him dosed up with her raw opium, so at least he didn’t die screaming in agony. The third man, Corporal Eugene Price from Natchez, Mississippi, had a gunshot wound to his thigh. Mama was hopeful he might survive, if the wound didn’t turn sepsis. I figured he had a better chance of living under my mother’s care than in one of the crowded, makeshift army hospitals, where surgeons hacked off limbs while standing ankle deep in manure and muck, and sharpened their knives on the soles of their boots.

  We put him in the guest bedroom on the ground floor, and Mahalia made him chicken soup and lemonade, and I sacrificed my last linen top sheet for his bandages. By afternoon he was running a fever so high he thought he was back in the fight for Baton Rouge. He kept thrashing about in his bed and yelling, ‘They’re over there!’ and ‘Look out!’ along with a string of cuss words that made my ears turn pink. Then Mama gave him an infusion of yarrow, elderberry, and goldenseal, and he settled down.

  Later that night, before I went to bed, I crept into the room to see how he was doing. Mama was sitting in a chair by the open window, her lap desk on her knee, an ink well and a candle on the table at her elbow. The only sounds in the room were the gentle stirring of the curtains in the breeze, the scratch of her pen across the paper, and the faint, slightly uneven breathing of the gaunt-faced man in the bed.

  ‘How’s he doin’?’ I asked quietly.

  She looked up. ‘Better, I think.’

  ‘You want me to sit with him? You look tired.’

  She smiled but shook her head. ‘Priebus is going to come stay with him in a little while.’

  I stepped closer to the bed. The single tallow candle filled the room with only a dim yellow glow. In the flickering light, he reminded me a bit of Simon;
the same wavy dark hair, the same slightly cleft chin.

  I said, ‘He doesn’t look very old.’

  ‘Most of them aren’t.’

  I glanced over at her. I’d assumed she was writing to Papa. But now I saw the unfamiliar tintype of a man and woman resting on the table beside her, and realized I was wrong.

  I said, ‘You’re writing to the families of them two dead men?’

  ‘Those two dead men,’ she said. ‘Yes.’

  ‘What do you say? You don’t know nothin’ about either of them, ’cept that they’re dead.’

  ‘I tell them their loved one fought bravely, that he died easily with Christ’s name on his lips, and that we wept when we laid him gently in his grave.’

  ‘But that ain’t – isn’t true.’ Both soldiers were still unburied. We had no idea if either man had fought bravely or not. The sergeant from Tennessee had slipped away in the back of the wagon before anyone even realized it, while the soldier from Kentucky had died in an opium-induced haze.

  ‘There are times when what’s true isn’t what’s important, Amrie. If I can say anything to help make these poor people’s grief any easier, I will.’

  I picked up the tintype. ‘Which one’d this belong to?’

  ‘The man from Tennessee.’

  The photograph was of an older man and woman. The man was seated on a ladder-backed chair in the swept yard of a small, rustic log cabin; the woman stood beside him, one hand resting on his shoulder. The man had a bushy, salt-and-pepper mustache and what looked like a glass eye; the woman’s cheeks were sunken, as if she didn’t have many teeth left. Their clothes were worn and shabby; the woman’s knit gloves were noticeably darned. They stared into the camera with an unsmiling intensity that answered none of the questions I wanted to ask them.

  Had they thirsted for this war, I wondered, and proudly sent their son off to fight, cheering his patriotism and valor? Or had they listened to the talk of secession and war with growing dread, and choked back tears as they painstakingly gathered their son’s uniform and filled his haversack? Was this an only child, or were there other children to help cushion the grief of having a son’s face shot off in the fields outside Baton Rouge? Were there more sons still fighting in this cruel war, their lives also at risk?

  I didn’t know the answers to any of these questions, didn’t know this earnest, hardworking, aging couple. But I found myself desperately hoping their other children were daughters.

  All daughters.

  Eighteen

  Corporal Price’s fever broke sometime during the night.

  I came downstairs the next morning to find him sitting up in bed with our big black and white dog stretched out asleep beside him on my mother’s best counterpane.

  ‘Checkers!’ I said in panic, although I had enough sense to keep my voice low. ‘Bad dog! Get down! You know—’

  ‘Hold on there,’ said the corporal in a slow-as-molasses Mississippi drawl, one hand resting reassuringly on the dog’s shoulders as Checkers raised his head and looked at me. ‘I cain’t rightly let you fuss at this here ole hound dog, seein’ as how I’m the one coaxed him up here. Thing is, I got me a black and white pup named … well, named Dangit back home, and I miss him somethin’ fierce.’

  ‘Dangit?’ I said with a laugh. ‘You named your dog Dangit?’

  ‘Well, to be perfectly honest, his name is somethin’ a might more colorful, but after all your momma done for me, I wouldn’t want to sully your ears with a word like that.’ The corporal’s smile widened. ‘I was fixin’ to give him a proper name, at first. But I was always yellin’ at him, “Dang it, stop that infernal barkin’,” and “Dang it, you done messed on the floor agin?” So in the end, I just give up and called him Dangit. That’s what he answers to, and it seemed like what the Good Lord intended.’

  Somehow, I doubted the Good Lord had anything to do with Eugene Price naming his dog what I suspected was actually ‘Damnit’. But I was too polite to say so.

  The Mississippian was a revelation to me. Folks around town thought Finn O’Reilly was a bad influence on me. But Corporal Price had Finn beat all to flinders. He tried hard to keep from peppering his talk with colorful language. But when he got excited – like when he challenged me to a game of checkers, to which my mother reluctantly consented – he sometimes got carried away.

  I carefully stored away each and every gem to share with Finn, later.

  But it was more than just Corporal Price’s language. He was so raw and uneducated, so ignorant he could take my breath away with the things he didn’t know – or the crazy things he believed. He was also utterly lacking in all the refined niceties my mother worked so hard to impress upon me; he laughed when he busted wind, and his table manners were atrocious. Yet I liked him in spite of it all, because of his geniality and his unfailing good humor and his unblinking acceptance of the kind of vagaries and injustices of life that so often overset me.

  I’d never met anyone like him. And it occurred to me, as I watched him laughingly protect Checkers from my mother’s wrath when she found the dog up on the bed again, that the war was like some giant paddle stirring up the quiet, predictable rhythms and patterns of our lives. The result was mostly dislocation, trauma, hardship, disease, and death. But Corporal Price helped me realize that, sometimes, in some ways, stirring the pot can be a good thing.

  ‘What you gots to remember about turkeys,’ said Castile quietly, ‘is that gobblers is interested in two things: food, and lady turkeys.’

  Finn gave a soft chuckle, quickly stifled.

  We were creeping through the woods toward a roost Finn had found that morning. The sun was hovering low over the tops of the oaks and pines, the air balmy and sweet with the scent of ripening muscadines, the light golden and mellow.

  ‘This time of day,’ said Castile, ‘gobblers’ve mostly eat their fill of bugs and seeds and such, and they’re startin’ to get kinda lonesome, lookin’ for company for the night. So what we gotta do is make a few hen yelps, and fool that ole tom into thinkin’ he’s gonna get somethin’ very different from what we got waitin’ for him.’

  It seemed mean and unfair to me, to trick some poor lonesome turkey into thinking he was going to find a nice fat hen to snuggle with for the night, when he was really headed for our cookpot. But I kept those thoughts to myself as I hid behind the tall brush at the edge of the clearing, my bow and a couple of arrows in my sweaty hand.

  Shooting at bales of hay had been fun, like pitching horseshoes or landing a fish or setting Magnolia to jump a log. But this was different. My throat felt dry, and I had to keep swallowing.

  Castile positioned himself with his back to the thick trunk of a big old oak. Turkeys were smart birds, with keen eyesight and hearing, so it was important to stay still and quiet while we waited. From his pocket, he carefully eased a concave piece of slate and a reed. By scraping the reed over the stone, he produced a sound that was amazingly like that funny grating cluck of a wild turkey hen. Finn and I had both tried it, earlier, with godawful results. Sounding like a turkey takes more practice than you might think.

  From behind his own bush, Finn whacked a tied bundle of turkey feathers through the air. It was meant to imitate the rush of a hen taking flight, and Finn had something of a knack for it. We did that for a time, alternating the hen yelps with the whirl of feathers, leaving plenty of minutes between each. Then I saw Castile nod ever so gently, his gaze on the far side of the clearing.

  A big old tom strutted into view. He paused for a moment to scratch at the leaf litter, then came on. In the golden light of the fading day the black feathers on his back looked iridescent, a breathtaking shimmer of red and green, gold and bronze. As I watched, he fanned his tail in a proud flourish, puffing out the feathers on his back and dragging his wings so that he now looked twice his size.

  Then, decked out in all his glory, he sailed toward us with the stately grace of a ballet dancer or a full-rigged ship gliding across the waters of an ocean. As he str
utted, he ducked his head in time to his own secret music, his long beard swinging as he advanced with preening confidence toward what he thought was a willing lady turkey.

  He was beautiful and grand and absurdly proud of his magnificence, and I had the impulse to leap from behind my bush, wave my arms, and holler, ‘Run!’

  But of course, I didn’t.

  Finn looked at me questioningly, as if to say, You wanna shoot him?

  I shook my head.

  He rose up with infinite slowness, an arrow already nocked in his bowstring. I watched him take aim, the turkey suddenly stilling, head lifting, eyes alert as if somehow sensing his own doom. I held my breath and heard the whoosh of Finn’s arrow flying across the clearing.

  The point struck the gobbler smack in the breast. He flopped over with a strange, almost human cry, then lay still.

  ‘I hit it!’ shrieked Finn with an exultant war whoop.

  ‘You done good,’ said Castile with a big grin, clapping him on the back hard enough to send Finn staggering. ‘You done real good.’

  Reluctantly, I followed my two fellow hunters across the meadow to where the gobbler lay tumbled and still in the dusty grass, its eyes already filming, the evening breeze faintly ruffling his feathers.

  ‘I reckon he’s a good twenty-pounder,’ said Castile, easing his knife from its sheath. We didn’t have far to go, but in this heat, it was always a good idea to field dress your bird.

  ‘Look at them spurs!’ said Finn. ‘They must be nearly two inches long.’

  ‘At least.’

  I tried to say something, but couldn’t.