Good Time Coming Page 15

  The woman silently took the bag and led her daughter away.

  It made no sense to me. Afterward, I said to my mother, ‘Why wouldn’t that woman admit what happened?’

  My mother was sitting on the gallery with her head tipped back against the slats of her rocker, her eyes half-closed. But at my question, she raised her head and looked at me. ‘Because she wants the girl to be able to marry some day, and if it becomes known she was raped by soldiers, that won’t happen. That woman and her daughter would both rather die than admit the truth.’

  ‘But it wasn’t her fault!’

  My mother stared up at a hawk circling lazily overhead, dark wings outstretched against a high, fluffy, white cloud. ‘The thing of it is, Amrie, Southern men pride themselves on taking care of their womenfolk and children, providing them with food and a home, and protecting them. So when those Federal soldiers forced that girl, they weren’t just shaming her. They were deliberately shaming her father and her brothers, too. It’s probably the main reason they did that to her. So you see, if that girl were to admit her rape, she wouldn’t simply be sacrificing her own honor, she’d become complicit in those Yankees’ degradation of her family, her town … the South itself. That’s why she’ll never tell.’

  ‘It don’t seem fair.’

  ‘Doesn’t seem fair,’ she corrected gently. ‘And it’s not. But what that girl is doing – hugging the secret of those soldiers’ violation to herself – is incredibly brave and noble. And it’s all the more admirable because no one will ever know of it.’

  I couldn’t quite wrap my head around it all, perhaps because I still clung to a child’s fierce convictions of what is fair and right. How could that girl be held guilty of something that those soldiers had done to her against her will?

  The concept that life is not fair still eluded me.

  That afternoon brought us a new letter from Papa. This one was written on 2 July, which was a huge relief, for we’d been frantic ever since learning that the Louisiana Tigers had been heavily involved in a deadly series of battles in Virginia that became known as the Seven Days Battles. General Lee had managed to stop McClellan’s attempt to capture Richmond, but at an awful cost. Papa said it was the worst fighting he’d ever seen, and that the Louisiana brigade had charged the Federals with ‘Remember Beast Butler and the women of New Orleans!’ as their battle cry.

  He sounded awfully worried about us, but I was worried about him. There was a funny tone to his letter that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, but that hadn’t been there before.

  And then, as if hearing from Papa hadn’t been wonderful enough, a few days later we received another letter, this one from my Uncle Tate. Now, some might think that hearing from her brother would cheer my mother. But Mama’s family was complicated.

  My grandmother Adelaide Dunbar had given birth to ten babies. Two died as infants, and two more succumbed as children to swamp fever or Yellow Jack. They all lay in the walled, shadowy family cemetery at Misty Oaks, their graves marked by heartbreakingly small rectangular slabs of limestone that reminded me of tabletops missing their legs.

  Sometimes when I went to visit my Grandmother Adelaide, I’d wander through the graveyard, trying to imagine all these dead Dunbars and McDougals that I’d never known. My Grandfather Dunbar was there beneath his own larger, cracked tabletop, as were Adelaide’s blueblooded, Bostonian parents, the McDougals, who’d come down the Mississippi and died long before I was born. There was an empty tomb, too, dedicated to my great-uncle Justin McDougal, which always kinda gave me the creepies-jeepies.

  But the grave that drew me with a powerful fascination was the monument that lay in a rare slice of sunshine just inside the cemetery gate, its tombstone half covered by a massive red rose that seemed perpetually in bloom. Heedless of the rose’s wicked thorns, I’d always run my hand across the name inscribed there: Hamish Dunbar.

  I’d never met Hamish, but I’d grown up hearing about him. Tall and handsome, with sparkling eyes full of mischief and good cheer, he was Adelaide’s first born and everyone’s favorite. I’d always thought of him as being an older version of Simon, although I’d seen his portrait hanging beside my grandmother’s bed so I knew he was fairer than Simon, with a wide smile that looked like he was struggling to hold back a laugh. When Hamish was fifteen, my grandmother reluctantly allowed him to accompany her brother, Justin McDougal, on a buying trip down the river to New Orleans on the paddle-wheeler Andrew Jackson. As the steamboat pulled away from the wharf, man and boy were on deck, waving their hats to the crowd that had assembled to see them off.

  My grandmother was just turning away, still faintly smiling at her son’s obvious pride and pleasure, when the boat’s boilers exploded in a concussion of steam and twisted, searing-hot metal.

  The body of Adelaide’s brother, Justin, was never recovered. But Adelaide’s firstborn lived long enough to be carried back up the hill to Misty Oaks, his body lacerated and burned nearly beyond recognition. My grandmother nursed Hamish day and night for a week as he clung desperately, uselessly to life. His was a hideous death of unimaginable, writhing agony that his mother could only watch, helpless to alleviate in any meaningful way.

  I asked Mahalia, once, if it was Hamish’s death that had made Grandmother Adelaide such a hard woman.

  ‘Mizz Adelaide always was a hard one. But there ain’t no denying that watching Mister Hamish go through hell before he ever left this world hit her in a bad way. She weren’t that way, before.’

  Afterward, it occurred to me that Mahalia’s statement could be read two ways. At the time, I thought she meant that Adelaide hadn’t been as hard before Hamish’s death as she was after it. But I eventually came to wonder if Mahalia meant something different, if she was saying that the horror of Hamish’s dying had burned up something vital inside Adelaide, something that had made her vulnerable in a way she never intended to be again.

  Hamish Dunbar’s death had left Adelaide with three living sons and two daughters. My mother’s younger sister, Aunt Em, married a merchant named Galen Middleton and moved up to Vicksburg. My Uncle Tate went to law school; Uncle Harley started a small plantation of his own near Donaldsonville; and Uncle Bo went off to West Point and shamed my Grandmother Adelaide for all eternity by refusing to resign his commission and return home to defend the land of his birth when war broke out.

  Last we heard, Uncle Bo was an artillery captain, fighting with McClellan’s Army of the Potomac in Virginia. It made my stomach hurt every time I thought about one of Uncle Bo’s cannons maybe lobbing a shell into Papa’s tent, so I tried not to think about it.

  Of all my mother’s brothers, Uncle Tate was my favorite, but Uncle Bo came a close second. His visits to us were rare but always precious. When I was little, he’d toss me high up onto his shoulders, or swing me round and round, his strong hands wrapped around my wrists, my feet flying through the air until I collapsed in dizzy delight. He taught Simon and me how to make moccasins and braid rawhide, and he’d regale us for hours with tales of buffalo-covered plains and Indian teepees and craggy, snow-covered peaks cut by clear, rocky streams bursting with trout and beaver.

  Because he spent so much time out West, his skin was always sunbrowned, and he had a way of smiling that started slow, tugging at his lips and sparkling in his eyes before it engulfed his face in a paroxysm of delight. We laughed often when Uncle Bo was around. Things that ordinarily didn’t seem funny at all suddenly became wildly hilarious. Papa said it was because Uncle Bo never made the mistake of taking anything too serious. I asked Papa once why all folks weren’t that way, since it made life so much more pleasant. Papa said it was a gift. I wondered where Uncle Bo got his gift, because it sure wasn’t from my Grandmother Adelaide.

  We hadn’t heard from Uncle Bo himself in over a year, but somehow news still managed to trickle through to us in ways I never quite understood, either from friends or from Uncle Bo’s own two brothers. This time our news came through Uncle Tate.

&nb
sp; Tate was my mother’s youngest brother, just twenty-one years old. He’d still been studying to be a lawyer when the war came. I knew he was as unhappy about secession as Papa, because I’d once heard them talking late into the night. But like Papa, he’d felt honor bound to fight. He’d spent the better part of the last year in Tennessee. This was the first letter we’d had from him in a long time, and was dated the sixth of June. He wrote:

  Dear Sis and Amrie,

  Your letter of 22 April came to me just yesterday, after having been on the road for more than a month. It was a relief to hear that all is well with you, although I can’t be entirely at ease because I know so much has happened in Louisiana since the letter was written. As for me, I’m writing to you from a pretty little village at the foot of a ridge of low hills. Yesterday was a day of hard marching, which hit the men sorely as they were already broken down and half-dead. We were dogged all night by the enemy’s cavalry, and I fear they picked off many of our stragglers.

  Some of the land we passed through had been brutally used by the enemy, with hardly a house left unburned, the desolate fields reeking with the putrefying carcasses of hogs, cattle, and sheep, while dead dogs, geese and chickens littered the farmyards. We paused at one place, a small farm near a stream, where they’d blown out the man’s brains in front of his wife and three small children, then drove the family from their door and set fire to the house. The woman tried to go back in to save some things, but they would not let her. When we came upon her, she was sifting through the ashes of what had once been her home, looking for her husband’s bones, with her little children sitting nearby, watching her. They are destitute, their house, corncrib, and barns burned, their livestock slaughtered. With no food or clothing or shelter, I wonder what will become of them, especially as I fear the woman’s sorrows have taken her senses.

  I would like to believe these horrors are the work of stragglers or deserters, but from what we are hearing it is not so. There is a general here named Sherman who is said to scorn the traditional rules of civilized warfare, who believes women and children should be made to feel what he calls the ‘hard hand of war.’ They say Lincoln is inclined to favor his approach – a war waged not against armies of men, but against the hapless, innocent populations of our cities and hamlets and countryside, and against every living creature of our fields. If that be true, I fear not only for our own fair land, but for the future these men will bequeath to our world and generations to come.

  I can’t tell you how hard it is for me to be here, fighting so far from home while knowing the enemy has come to Louisiana and could even now be marching against our own homes. Since the fall of New Orleans, I have received but one letter from Mother. She complains of disruptions of supplies and the need to set torch to $20,000 worth of cotton she was preparing to ship down the river. But otherwise she seems undaunted.

  Last I heard, Brother Harley was still plagued as are so many by that malady which haunts our military camps. But he was ever a hale fellow, so I doubt you need be made uneasy by that fact. Two weeks ago, we captured several dozen of the enemy, one of whom, when he heard my name, informed me he has a brother in the Army of the Potomac with Bo. I gather our brother is a favorite of both officers and men, for our prisoner spoke of him enthusiastically, and assured me he was well. I have not passed this tidbit of information on to Mother, as the last time I ventured to send her news of Bo, she threatened to throw my future letters unopened into the fire, should I ever again mention He Who is Dead to Her and Ought To Be Dead to Us All. So, be warned.

  I’ll restrain the impulse to add a bit here about how much I enjoy receiving letters. Scratch that and replace it with, I live for letters from home. I may covet the Yanks’ good shoes and plentiful food and tents and blankets. But what I envy them far more than anything is their reliable mail service. There is no denying this country is pretty (at least, those parts the Yanks have yet to burn). But my heart aches for home.

  Your loving brother and uncle,

  Tate

  After she finished reading Uncle Tate’s letter, Mama went out in her herb garden and spent a couple of hours pulling weeds. I was beginning to realize that was her way of dealing with the sorrows and strains of life. I sat on the top rail of the pasture fence and watched Magnolia grazing lazily, one hip cocked. The morning sun slanted golden through the willows along the stream and the clear blue sky promised another hot day. I could hear the chatter of squirrels; smell the gentle hint of wood smoke from the kitchen. I thought about going to find Finn and maybe trying our hand at fishing, but I couldn’t rustle up any enthusiasm for it.

  My mind kept skittering like a shy colt, touching on first one aspect, then another of Uncle Tate’s letter, as if afraid to alight anywhere too long. I tried to ponder how my Grandmother Adelaide could grieve so deeply for her dead firstborn and those other lost little ones, yet harden her heart against a living son because of a painful choice that had been thrust upon him.

  But that made me feel so jittery and oddly vulnerable that I jerked my thoughts away, only to have them land on the raw image Uncle Tate had conjured for us, of a half-mad, desperate woman sifting through the ruins of her house, her husband’s charred bones folded in her apron, while her small children – hungry, frightened, and surely doomed – watched. I thought of that general who had rated it a fine and just thing to wage war on helpless women and children, to send them naked and starving into the cold night, and I felt suddenly tired and sad and very much afraid.

  Although I couldn’t have articulated it at the time, I was nonetheless aware of a profound shift in this war we lived. Only, I’d no idea, then, just how bad it was about to get.

  Twenty-Two

  We awoke to a steamy wet morning of gray skies and a breeze that carried the stench of stale smoke and charred timbers. We thought at first that the smell came to us from the ruins of Baton Rouge.

  We were wrong. It came from the USS Sumter.

  Somehow, the Sumter had managed to run aground on a sand bar. Unable to free the sloop and feeling vulnerable to attack, the crew hastily abandoned the gunboat. What happened after that was never exactly clear.

  Some folks said the crew set fire to the Sumter themselves to keep her from falling into enemy hands – which was standard tactics, really. But when Commodore Porter heard what had happened, he was furious. So the crew insisted they hadn’t blown up their own ship; ‘guerrillas’ from Bayou Sara had done it. And then a couple of half-grown idiots from St Francisville named Ben Bradford and Taylor McGee went around town bragging about how they’d rowed out to the grounded ship and set her afire in the middle of the night. All we knew for certain was that someone also set fire to the coal and other stores the Federals were planning to come back for.

  ‘Dadburn fools,’ muttered Mahalia as she helped Finn and me clean a mess of catfish we’d caught. ‘They think they’re doin’ somethin’ grand? All they gonna do is get the lot of us kilt.’

  ‘So what are you saying?’ demanded Finn, green eyes snapping with indignation. ‘That we should just stand back and let them gunboats steal our coal, knowin’ they’re gonna use it to steam back up to Vicksburg and kill the women and children there? How is that right? How is that honorable? How’s that somethin’ to be proud of?’

  ‘Them Yankees is gonna go up to Vicksburg whether they gets our coal or not. Only difference now is, what’re they gonna stop and do to us, first?’

  I kept silent, for I could see both sides of their argument. In a perfect world, men would ride out to do battle like the knights in some Sir Walter Scott novel, fighting brave, noble, and true. But there was nothing noble about this war of ours. Oh, there was plenty of grand language about liberty and independence on one side, and about the sanctity of the Union on the other. But there was something about the South’s secession that reminded me of a bunch of spoiled, sulky boys angrily collecting their marbles and going home. While as for the righteous North, anytime you start killing women and children, burning thei
r homes, and stealing their mules and jewelry, whatever moral justification you might think you had in the beginning is gone.

  Yet while I knew it was cowardly of me, I still couldn’t help but wish that Ben Bradford hadn’t burned that danged coal.

  Like an avenging demon torn from our worst nightmares, the USS Essex returned to us on a hot August morning, when the sun was a searing white disk in a cloudless sky. It had rained the night before, so that the heat leached the dampness from the earth and turned it into a heavy vapor that hung in the air like the rank miasma of an old graveyard.

  We never knew for which of our sins we were to give penance, whether it was for the Sumter or the burned coal or maybe even Alistair McDonald’s potshots at the men stealing his wharfboat. All would eventually be used as justifications for what they did to us.

  Finn was down in Bayou Sara that day, trying to barter a bushel of his mama’s corn for some molasses and other supplies. He told me later how he heard the clatter of the Essex’s engines in the distance; saw the white haze of her smoke drifting against the hard blue sky. But we’d become so accustomed to the endless passing of Federal boats that he paid it little heed. He was walking down Commercial when the first shell whistled over his head to smash into the side of a small white frame house, showering the street with jagged bits of charred wood and hot metal.

  He was only dimly aware of the corn spilling across the dirt as the basket tumbled from his hands. This was no warning salvo, such as we’d suffered before. The Essex steamed in with all guns well aimed and blazing, a hail of shells and cannonballs screaming through the air to explode in thunderous geysers of dirt, shattered brick, and splintered wood.

  He dove beneath the porch of what was once a tailor’s shop but had been boarded up ever since Mr Bayer, the tailor, was drafted into the army. He found himself nose to nose with a wide-eyed, brown-skinned girl who looked maybe six or eight.