Good Time Coming Read online

  ‘Amrie,’ whispered Finn, bumping his elbow against mine. ‘Maybe we oughta go.’

  I shook my head and took a step closer, drawn by something I couldn’t begin to understand.

  Sometimes I wonder how my life would have turned out if I’d listened to Finn, or if he and I had simply stayed catching tadpoles rather than running with everyone else to see the Federal fleet. What if the Katahdin had steamed on toward Vicksburg without turning into Bayou Sara? Would things have turned out differently? Or were we fated, this golden-haired man and I, to meet and play such a pivotal, tragic role in each other’s lives?

  The infantry captain looked to be somewhere in his late twenties or early thirties, his cheeks reddened by sun and wind, his lips so thin they seemed to disappear as he pressed them into a tight, determined line. I stared at him, and I knew the strangest sensation, as if this moment had happened before, as if I had seen him before, although I knew that I had not. And somehow I also knew, with that clear certainty that sometimes comes to us, that this was one of those moments I would always vividly recall long after an untold multitude of my life’s moments had slipped irrevocably from my memory.

  I watched him step ashore, one hand resting on the hilt of his sword, his head lifting as his gaze took in Bayou Sara’s rows of sunbaked brick storerooms, the neat streets now quiet and eerily deserted. The pungent reek of burning cotton drifted to us on the breeze as another planter upriver set fire to his stores.

  Mr Marks cleared his throat, his hat held in his hands. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, his voice shaky, ‘this is a trading town, full of women, children, and old men. Not a military instillation.’

  The boy-faced lieutenant glanced at him, then turned pointedly to address the diminished crowd on the riverbank. ‘We are here under orders from President Abraham Lincoln, Flag Officer David Farragut, and Major General Benjamin Butler.’ He spoke loudly and clearly in formal, flowing periods he must have repeated dozens of times coming up the river. ‘Know you that we are on this river for the purpose of enforcing the laws of our common country and protecting its loyal citizens. But understand this, as well: if any hostile demonstrations are made upon our vessels or transports as they pass before your town, you will be held responsible for such actions, and a terrible vengeance will be visited upon you all.’

  The mayor’s face hardened and took on a deep, angry hue. ‘You would make war against innocent women and children? For the impulsive act of some hothead?’

  ‘We do not make war on innocent persons, but on those in open rebellion against our mutual country. If there are any hotheads amongst you, I suggest you curb their zeal. The fate of your town is in your hands. Good day to you, sir.’ The lieutenant started to turn away.

  Mr Mark’s fingers tightened on the brim of his hat. ‘No country of mine would ever collectively punish the innocent for the actions of a few.’

  The lieutenant paused to look back at him, his upper lip twitching in a way that crinkled his nose, although whether it was in suppressed revulsion at the pronouncement he’d just been ordered to make, or in disdain for us, I couldn’t tell. ‘You have been warned,’ he said, and strode toward the boat.

  The infantry captain lingered a moment longer, a strange, almost bemused light in his eyes as he looked out over the scattered townspeople. ‘God’s retribution is a terrible thing,’ he said, his voice as deep and melodious as a preacher’s. ‘Fear it.’

  He was close enough now that I could read the CO. M, 4TH REG, WISC. VOL. on his unit badge. Company M, Fourth Regiment, Wisconsin Volunteers.

  Then I realized his gaze had landed on me, and I found my fingers creeping up to touch the small gold cross that hung around my neck on a fine chain. It was a gift to me from my father’s mother on the occasion of my christening, and I had worn it always for as long as I could remember.

  He walked up to me, his gaze still locked with mine, and I saw that his eyes were blue and clear, and that sweat sheened his high-boned cheeks. ‘Pretty necklace,’ he said. My hand dropped to my side, but it was too late. Reaching out, he closed his fist around the cross and jerked. I felt his rough knuckles brush the skin of my throat, felt the clasp give way. ‘My little girl will like it.’

  ‘But you can’t—’

  ‘Amrie! Don’t,’ warned Reverend Sweeney, catching my arm when I would have thrown myself after the blue-coated man now sauntering back to his waiting boat.

  ‘But it ain’t right! He can’t just—’

  ‘Hush, child. Let it go.’

  I was never very good at listening when people told me what to do, especially when I was riled up and convinced of the justice of my cause. But something in the reverend’s tone stopped me cold. I stood at his side, quivering with rage and hot tears and a sense of violation I couldn’t begin to explain.

  The reverend kept his hand on my arm, just in case, as we watched the seamen lean into their oars and the boat pull away from the bank. With his free hand he fumbled a tattered handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face. ‘Please God we’ll never see them again.’

  ‘They’ll be back,’ said Finn.

  It was the first time I’d looked at Finn since the Federal longboat knocked against the ferry landing. He stood rigid, his fists clenched white at his sides, his face held so taut it was as if the skin had somehow been stretched tighter across the bones.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ he demanded. ‘Did you hear what they said? What kind of men talk about murdering women and children and are proud of it?’

  ‘Those without the wisdom to know that the Lord God watches us always,’ said the reverend.

  I heard the bookseller, Bernard Henshaw, give a harsh, ringing laugh, and craned my neck around to see him, surprised to find him still here.

  ‘On the contrary, my dear reverend,’ said Henshaw. ‘Those men are utterly convinced that God marches at their side. As far as they’re concerned, they’ve embarked on a holy crusade against evil personified, with you and I cast into the role of Satan. And in a war against the devil, anything is permissible. Anything.’

  I waited for someone to tell him he was wrong.

  Only, nobody did.

  Three

  I took off running as soon as the reverend removed his restraining hand.

  Finn shouted, ‘Amrie!’ But I just kept running, up the long, steep slope to St Francisville.

  My name wasn’t really Amrie. I’d been christened Anne-Marie St Pierre, a good Catholic name my grandmother Adelaide loathed. A Boston-born Episcopalian, Adelaide Dunbar could never find her way to forgiving her daughter for marrying a French Creole doctor from New Orleans. Yet she was one of the few people who insisted on always calling me Anne-Marie. To everyone else, I was Amrie.

  When we were little, my older brother, Simon, had a hard time wrapping his tongue around my name. It came out sounding like ‘A’m’rie.’ And so I became Amrie, even after he grew old enough to say it right.

  Even after he died of yellow fever in his twelfth year.

  Simon had been gone nearly two years. But it was to him that I ran, racing to the top of the bluff where the new Episcopal church stood, its tall brick bell tower thrusting proudly above the oak trees that dotted its vast churchyard.

  The church might be new, but the graveyard was not. In fact, St Francisville had been a graveyard even before it was a town. Back in the days when Louisiana was Spanish territory, some monks had established a monastery across the river at Pointe Coupee. Once they learned what the Mississippi’s rampaging floodwaters could do to a grave, they started rowing their dead across the river to bury them on high ground beside a small wooden chapel they dedicated to St Francis.

  The monks were all long gone now. Only their dead remained, mingled with ours.

  Simon lay beneath the spreading limbs of a young oak not far from the church’s eastern transept. I knelt in the grass beside him, my hands shaking as I brushed a scattering of dried leaves from his stone and yanked at the weeds that had grown up since my last vis
it. Another girl in my position might have run to her mother.

  Not me.

  Finn knew me well enough to know where to find me, once the last of the Federal fleet had disappeared around the bend toward Vicksburg. He came to sit on the other side of Simon’s grave, his legs bent and his elbows resting on his spread knees. After a minute, he said, ‘Reckon maybe I oughta join up.’

  I glanced over at him. That pinched look was still there around his face. ‘You’re twelve years old, Finn.’

  ‘I’ll be thirteen soon enough. I could go as a drummer boy.’

  He could. I’d heard of drummer boys as young as nine or ten.

  I said, ‘Your mama needs you here.’

  Finn’s daddy, Patrick O’Reilly, had joined up that March, even though his Irish brogue was so thick most folks couldn’t understand more’n one word out of ten he said. The O’Reillys had a small farm not far from our place. They were too poor to own slaves and Finn was the eldest of their four children. I asked my mother once why Mr O’Reilly would volunteer to go off and die in a war that wasn’t any of his making.

  She said, ‘I doubt he thinks he’s going to die. Most men don’t.’

  ‘But why does he want to fight at all?’

  ‘Why do you think Nico Valentino sighed up? He came here from Italy less than eighteen months ago. Or Archie Finley? He’s from London.’

  ‘I don’t know why,’ I answered, exasperated. ‘That’s why I’m asking.’

  But all she’d said was: ‘Maybe your father can explain it, because I certainly can’t.’

  The problem was, since Papa was off with the Louisiana Tiger Battalion in Virginia, we both knew it’d be a spell before I’d be able to ask him anything.

  Finn picked up a stick and poked at an ant battling its way through the grass. ‘I’m sorry about your cross, Amrie. I know how much it meant to you.’

  I nodded, not quite trusting myself to answer. That cross had been my most prized possession. Yet its theft seemed somehow inevitable, a symbol of all that I’d cherished yet now perceived ever so dimly was slipping away forever.

  Four

  The St Francisville of my earliest childhood memories is a place of soft morning mists sweetly scented by jasmine and honeysuckle, its winding lanes edged with tumbled hedgerows of Cherokee roses that burst into glorious bloom every spring. Bayou Sara, sprawling along the base of the bluff, was mostly all bustle and business. But on the narrow ridge above, stately homes with white-columned porches and sunken brick walkways lined quiet, shady streets. In my recollections of the years before the war, the sky is always a clear crystal blue, the watermelons always juicy to the rind, the harsh sunlight filtered by a leafy canopy of moss-draped live oaks. Yet every Eden hides its own serpent. Ours was not native to this land, but an evil brought by forefathers too ambitious and self-righteous to recognize their own original sin.

  I’ve often pondered what Grandmother Adelaide disliked most about my father: his Catholicism, his French ancestry, or his unabashed hostility to slavery.

  I suspect it was the latter.

  My father, Anton St Pierre, was the son of French planters who traced their lineage back to some of the first settlers in Ascension and Plaquemines Parishes. By all accounts those earlier St Pierres were a rowdy, disreputable lot, running slaves with Jean Lafitte, dueling beneath oaks at sunrise, and carrying on in ways that adults talked about only in hushed whispers that ended as soon as I walked into the room. When my Grand-père died, Louisiana’s French-derived inheritance laws meant that half of his vast plantations went to my Grand-mère St Pierre, with the other half divided equally between my father and his younger sister, Claire. Papa ended up with 920 acres, part of which he sold, and thirty-eight slaves, all of whom he immediately set free.

  At that point, my parents had been married only a year. His magnanimous gesture scandalized Adelaide – but not nearly as much as what happened less than two years later when Grandfather Dunbar died. My mother freed every one of the twenty-three slaves she inherited.

  Adelaide never forgave her for it. Any time they were around each other for long, at some point Adelaide inevitably ended up saying, ‘I can’t believe he made you do that.’

  My mother would cross her arms at her chest and throw back her head in that way she had. ‘Anton didn’t make me do it. It was my choice.’

  But I knew that was only partly true. The gratuitous forfeiture of so much wealth had severely tried my mother’s thrifty Scots’ soul. Her opinions of slavery pretty much ran even with Papa’s, but if she’d had her way, she would have required her slaves to earn their freedom.

  Papa would have none of it. ‘How in God’s name can we ask a man to pay us for what is not rightfully ours to possess?’

  And so all twenty-three were freely manumitted. To Adelaide’s way of thinking, my parents had jointly cast forty to fifty thousand dollars to the four winds, impoverishing themselves in the process.

  This happened before I was born, but the tale was a part of my heritage, often told, for my parents’ actions were not popular with their neighbors, either.

  There was a time, particularly back in the days of the French and Spanish, when manumission had been common in Louisiana. As a result, tens of thousands of gens de couleur libres, or free people of color, lived and worked amongst us as tradesmen and landowners, shopkeepers and laborers. There were nearly as many free blacks as slaves in the city of New Orleans, while one of the biggest slaveowners in our parish was a black woman named Rose Lacroix whose vast plantation lay to the north of Bayou Sara, near the river. But something changed around the time I was born. Folks started getting more defensive in their postures, more angry, more afraid. When my parents freed their slaves, their neighbors took it not just as a moral indictment of the peculiar institution itself, but as a criticism of anyone who practiced it – which I suppose it was. Most folks don’t like to be criticized, especially about something they know deep down in their secret heart of hearts is as wrong as wrong can be.

  When the abolitionists up North began talking about arming the slaves and setting them to slit the throat of every man, woman, and child in the South, folks around town started getting downright unfriendly, treating us like they treated the Black Irish or the old Choctaw woman who ran a tavern near the wharves in Bayou Sara. It got even worse when the war started, with lots of sullen mutterings about ‘traitors in our midst’. Fortunately, that pretty much ended when Papa volunteered as a surgeon.

  I thought that might’ve been why Papa joined up, because I knew what he thought of the war. But when I asked him, he said no.

  He’d been gone nearly a year now. Yet sometimes I still caught myself listening for his ready laugh, his quick footstep in our house’s wide central hall. Sometimes I’d see a flicker of shadow in the yard and, for one joyous instant, I’d think it was him. Then I’d remember, the truth rushing back with a burning vengeance. It was in those moments that I missed him with a fierceness that was like a physical ache.

  But it was at night, when thunder rumbled in the distance and a thick darkness lay heavy and oppressive over the land, that I’d be seized by the unshakable terror that this war he hated so much was going to claim him. That he might at that very moment be bleeding to death alone on some distant battlefield, and I wouldn’t know it. I wasn’t sure how I could bear it if I never saw him again, never again heard his deep, melodious voice or pressed my face against his vest to breathe in the tobaccoy, horsey scent that had meant safety and comfort to me for as long as I could recall.

  I often wondered if my mother shared my silent torments. But whatever her hopes and fears, however frequent her quiet moments of despair, she kept them to herself. With each passing day, she grew a little more aloof, a little more withdrawn into herself in a way that reminded me of the months after Simon died. Consequently, along with missing Papa, I found myself missing my mother, too.

  I brooded on these thoughts as I followed the winding, rutted lane that led home. The sky was
growing pale, the air cool and hushed, the shadows beneath the oaks and willows a deep violet alive with insects.

  We lived in a modest Creole-style raised cottage on the northeastern outskirts of town. Built of cypress boards painted white, it had two dormered rooms built into a high gabled roof and tall, French-style windows that opened onto deep galleries stretching across both front and back. There were nearly four hundred acres of cleared land attached to the house, and another fifty or so that were still a wild tangle of woods, swamp, and cane breaks. My father leased most of the cleared land to his neighbors, leaving us with enough space for an orchard, a truck garden, and pasturage for our horses and mules, a few sheep, a cow named Queen Bee, and one ornery goat named Flower. The house itself sat in a park-like clearing scattered with live oak and pecan trees and an assortment of smaller structures that had been erected haphazardly with no regard to symmetry or aesthetics: kitchen and laundry, smokehouse, corncrib, woodhouse, stables, and barns. The two-room building Papa used as his doctor’s office stood near the front gate.

  I thought I might find Mama there, because now that Papa was gone, she did what she could for folks in the area. But as I drew closer to home, I saw her standing in the yard talking to someone I didn’t recognize.

  Her gaze shifted to me, and in that moment I saw myself through my mother’s eyes. The bottom six inches of my skirts, which had trailed in the lagoon, were now brown and grubby with ground-in dirt; a rent I had no recollection getting showed the dark green of my dress through a triangular rip in my pinafore. To top it off, I’d lost one of the leather thongs I used to bind my braids, so that half my hair had come unplaited and was now hanging in a tangled brown mess down my back.

  My mother had probably spent the day doing all manner of tasks she never would have needed to set her hand to before the war. Yet the thick, honey-toned chignon at the nape of her neck was still neatly coiled, her white apron clean and starched, her air one of calm serenity. She was well into her thirties now, but she was as slim and beautiful and elegant as in the days when she’d been Miss Katherine Dunbar of Misty Oaks, one of the grandest plantations in Livingston Parish. Once, I used to wonder how a woman as cool and exquisite as my mother could possibly have produced a daughter like me. I eventually decided I must take after one of those disreputable St Pierres no one ever wanted to talk about.