Good Time Coming Page 28

  I said, ‘My Uncle Bo is fighting for the Union, Castile.’

  ‘I know, Amrie. Reckon I wouldn’t have told you, if’n he wasn’t.’ He looked over at me, and we shared a wry smile.

  Then a shout went up out in the street, followed by another and another, and the sound of running feet.

  We saw the widow Carlyle’s Tom dashing past, and Castile hollered at him, ‘What is it? What’s happening?’

  Tom swung around to look at us, eyes wide, a big grin I’ll never forget sliding across his face. It told me all I needed to know about where Tom’s sympathies lay in that long, dreadful war. ‘Vicksburg done surrendered!’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Three days ago. On the fourth of July!’

  We were still reeling from the news when, less than twenty-four hours later, word came of General Lee’s awful, massive defeat at someplace up in Pennsylvania called Gettysburg. The day after that, the starving garrison of Port Hudson surrendered.

  The Federals were now in complete control of the entire Mississippi River. The Confederacy had been split in two.

  It was at dusk that Monday when Mama looked up from tending her herb garden to see a barefoot skeleton of a man in butternut rags stumbling up the lane. The breeze was cool and sweet, and the setting sun had painted pink and purple streaks across the fading sky. He paused and wavered for a moment, his face gray, his eyes rolling back in his head.

  She ran to catch him as he fell. ‘Amrie!’ she called. ‘Mahalia! Come help me! Quick.’

  His name was Private Beni Toggard, and he’d somehow managed to walk the ten miles from Port Hudson before his strength gave out on him. He said he was only twenty-two, but he looked like an old man, his skin sunken and sagging against bones so prominent it hurt to look at him. I didn’t know a body could get that skinny and still live.

  ‘He won’t be alive much longer if we don’t get food into him,’ said Mama.

  She nursed the emaciated, half-dead soldier with turkey broth and teas brewed from the herbs in her garden. A couple of days later he was well enough to sit up in bed and talk. In a soft Mississippi drawl, he said the Federals had carried off the officers from Port Hudson to prison, but paroled most of the enlisted men. He’d been on his way home when he collapsed at our gate.

  ‘Where’s home?’ Mama asked, dipping another spoonful of turkey broth and holding it to his lips. He was still too weak to be of much use feeding himself.

  He swallowed and said, ‘Natchez.’

  ‘Ah.’ She dipped more broth from the bowl in her hand. ‘Do you know Corporal Eugene Price?’

  ‘I did, yes, ma’am.’

  Did.

  She froze, her gaze locking with mine.

  I said hoarsely, ‘Is he all right?’

  Private Toggard glanced over at me, then back at Mama, his young-old features even more pinched than they’d been before. ‘I’m sorry, ma’am; I reckon y’all don’t know?’

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘He was blown to smithereens down at Port Hudson almost a month ago. A Yankee shell hit his bunker.’

  I was sitting on a straight-backed chair near the bed, my hands curling around the wooden front edge of the seat to grip it hard. I said, ‘You’re sure?’

  He nodded slowly.

  ‘Amrie,’ said my mother as I jumped up so fast I sent the chair skittering backward across the floor. ‘Amrie!’

  I kept running, out the door and down the steps and across the yard. I was aware of Checkers barking as he tried to keep up, but I didn’t stop. I ran until the cool shadows of the trees closed in around me and the earth grew soft with leaf litter beneath my feet.

  I could not have said why the death of Corporal Eugene Price affected me so profoundly. True, I’d grown fond of him in the short time his life had crossed with ours, but I’d lost so many who were much dearer to me. Perhaps it was what struck me as the senselessness of it all. Why would any benevolent God save a man from a painful brush with death after the Battle of Baton Rouge, only to blow him to pieces in the defense of a bastion that was fated to fall anyway?

  I suppose that at some level and despite all that I had witnessed, I still clung to a child’s naïve belief that life should be fair, and that the events of our days should make sense.

  I was yet to learn just how wrong I could be.

  Forty

  The black-edged letter from Adelaide came a week later.

  Uncle Henley was dead, she wrote, felled not by a Federal bullet or cannon ball but by a typhoid epidemic that swept through his camp in Mississippi. Also dead was Chesney, the woman who had been with Adelaide from the day she was born; her heart had given out on her one rainy morning. She’d died in Adelaide’s arms. But all Adelaide said was, ‘I know it’s odd, but for some reason I always thought that, of the two of us, I’d go first.’

  The letter was tersely written, its words carefully parsed to betray not a hint of the emotion or grief its author was surely feeling. Only the shaky penmanship gave her away. Then she added a postscript: ‘The Federal raiding parties in the area grow more vicious every day. If Mandy had her way, she’d take Wills and refugee to Texas. I told her Dunbars are made of sterner stuff.’

  I found it hard to believe that Uncle Henley was dead – had been dead for weeks by the time we received the letter. Sometimes reports of deaths were wrong, so I held out hope for a while. But then word filtered through to us from a friend’s cousin who’d been with Uncle Henley when he died, so we knew it had to be true.

  For some reason, Uncle Henley’s death made Papa, Uncle Bo, Uncle Tate – everyone we knew who was away at war – seem that much more vulnerable. I tried to tell myself that kind of thinking was irrational, but it really wasn’t. As bad as this war had been before, it was now getting worse. For everyone.

  The first week in August, I went with my mother to Jackson, a college town nestled in the rich, rolling farmland to the east of St Francisville. Many of the sick and wounded paroled from Port Hudson had made their way to the military hospitals there and at Clinton. They’d always been short of medicines, but word had reached us that their situation was now desperate. So Mama decided to do what she could to help.

  I watched her agonize over the carefully hoarded glass vials of liquids and pills in the cupboard of what had once been Papa’s office, but that I now thought of as hers. Some, like the castor oil, balsam of wild cherry, and spirits of lavender, she could concoct herself from her own herb garden or the wild plants of the surrounding woods and marshlands. But stuff like the Peruvian bark, the Dove’s powders, and the basilicon salve would be irreplaceable.

  ‘If you give it all away, whatcha gonna do when folks around here get sick or hurt?’ I asked as she packed her selections into a basket.

  She looked up at me, her features solemn with the gravity of the choices she was being forced to make. ‘Men are dying, Amrie. I have to give what I can.’

  We left early the next morning, when the air was still heavy with mist and the sun no more than a pink glow on the murky horizon. The breeze was gentle and sweet, the oaks and magnolias that lined the lane heavily in leaf and pulsing with birdsong, and I found myself giving a little skip as I walked. Part of my unexpected lightheartedness came, I suppose, from the natural relief of moving away from the river and its ever-looming threat of Federal gunboats, of temporarily leaving behind all the pressures and endless fears that had come to constrict our days. But part of it came from the mist itself, which not only hid the untended fields and burned farmhouses from my sight, but also seemed to wrap us in a protective cocoon that was utterly illusory but comforting nonetheless.

  I said to my mother, ‘Remember the time Papa gave a guest lecture at the college in Jackson, and we all went with him?’ Simon had been alive then. Normally I didn’t like to talk about memories that included Simon. But for some reason I found the ache of it a little more bearable today.

  She glanced over at me. She held the handle of her basket looped over her arm, its weig
ht balanced against one hip. In the soft light of dawn, she looked relaxed, almost happy, and I wondered if she felt it, too – that feeling of brief escape from a brutal reality that had been grinding us down too long. ‘You mean the time you both ate so many cream puffs you got sick – and Checkers, too, because you fed some to him?’ She laughed, the sound ringing out lighthearted and clear. And I felt for a moment as if I were spinning back in time.

  When I was a little girl, my mother would take me for walks in the woods. She’d tell me the names of the yellow and purple wildflowers that splashed the meadows in autumn, and the jays, larks, and cardinals that flickered through the woods in flashes of blue and yellow and scarlet. Even as I grew older, we’d sometimes go for a stroll to the top of the bluff and watch the big, white, gingerbread-draped steamboats, the flatboats and cotton-laden barges spinning away down the river toward New Orleans.

  But I couldn’t remember when we’d last spent time alone together like this, just the two of us, walking and talking. I’d always blamed the war and my mother herself for the loss of such moments. But it occurred to me now to wonder if maybe I’d been the one pushing her away, if this was all just a part of growing up. And I felt a melancholy rush of yearning for a past that was forever lost to me.

  By the time we reached the outskirts of Jackson, the sun was well up, sucking the last of the coolness from the morning and drenching the gently rolling hills in a fierce light. Once, Jackson had been a prosperous town, its graceful streets shaded by leafy oaks, its venerable brick and frame buildings adorned with balconies and white-columned porches and slate roofs softened by gray-green lichen. The presence here of Centenary College and so many prestigious preparatory and finishing schools had led folks to call it the ‘Athens of the South’. But the college and the other schools were all closed now, students and faculty alike gone off to war. We walked down rutted, nearly deserted streets, where white paint peeled from cracked columns and weeds choked the pink and yellow roses running rampant over rusting iron fences. Jackson might lie beyond the reach of the Federal gunboats, but the hand of war lay heavy here, too.

  What had been one of the grandest colleges outside of New England was now a bedraggled military hospital. It stood on a hill on the northeastern edge of the town, with a magnificent domed and pillared academic building that soared four stories high and was flanked by long, red brick dormitories fronted with rows of fat white columns. When we’d come here before, with Papa, young men had been playing baseball on the green, their shouts and laughter drifting gently through the moss-draped oaks. Now, the long grass rippled forlornly in the breeze, the only sound the tap-tap of a ragged, one-legged soldier hobbling up the rutted, overgrown drive on a single crutch.

  He was hunched over and moving slow, like an old man. But when he turned at our approach, I saw that he wasn’t a man at all, but a boy not much older than Finn, only gaunt and sandy-haired, with a scattering of freckles that stood out stark against his pale skin.

  He listened while Mama explained the purpose of our errand, then said, ‘I reckon the one you ought to see is Dr Arnaud Seauvais. ’Cept, he’s over in Clinton right now. His assistant surgeon is here, though – Captain Lamar Crowley. Heard tell he was fixing to cut off the rest of Jeb Odom’s leg this morning, so he’s prob’ly up at the academic building. They use one of the debate rooms there for surgeries, you know. Here, I’ll show you.’

  ‘Please, I don’t want you to have to put yourself out for us.’

  ‘No trouble at all, ma’am.’ He swung the crutch carefully over the uneven ground. ‘I was heading up there anyway.’

  I found it hard not to stare at the pinned-up leg of his trousers. I should have been used to such sights by now – the empty sleeves and missing feet, the maimed faces and blind, milky eyes. But it still made my stomach hurt. I said, ‘You were wounded at Port Hudson?’

  He nodded. ‘Caught a Minié ball just below the knee. But Major Seauvais says things are looking good.’

  He didn’t look too good to me. But I kept the observation to myself and shifted my gaze to the soaring portico before us.

  They said this was the biggest academic building in the country. Finished just before the war started, it housed a three-thousand-book library, an observatory, a gymnasium, and a vast auditorium as well as classrooms, science laboratories, and offices. Now it was just a half-abandoned hospital.

  We entered one of the high arched doors to find a small, lithe man hurrying across the dusty, marble-tiled vestibule. He was younger than I’d expected, probably still in his mid-twenties, with a clean-shaven face and short, honey-colored hair and eyes of such an intense blue as to be startling.

  ‘Captain Crowley,’ called the one-legged soldier. ‘These here ladies was looking to talk to you.’

  The surgeon pivoted to face us, his open military frock coat flaring. It looked relatively new, of good English cloth and well tailored, although liberally splashed with bright red blood mingled with older, darker stains. His gaze shifted from the soldier to my mother, and an ill-disguised expression of impatience flitted across his even features. ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m Katherine St Pierre,’ she said. ‘My husband, Anton St Pierre, is a surgeon with the Army of Virginia.’

  ‘Yes?’

  I glanced at my mother to see a faint stain of color riding high on her cheekbones. She held the basket out to him. ‘We’d heard the hospitals here and in Clinton are dangerously short of medicines, so I brought a selection of supplies I thought you could use.’

  Crowley’s frown deepened as he took the basket. ‘Anton St Pierre, did you say? He’s the Creole abolitionist, isn’t he?’

  ‘He is.’

  The surgeon grunted, the glass vials clinking together as he sorted through the basket’s contents. ‘Mmmm. Yes; these will be most useful. Tell your husband thank you.’

  He started to turn away.

  My mother said, ‘I have considerable experience with …’ She paused, then changed what I knew she’d been about to say. ‘Nursing. If I could be of assist—’

  He swung to look at her again, his upper lip pursed and quivering as if he’d just smelled something foul. ‘In my opinion, females have no place in hospitals. Not only do they lack the strength and stamina to be of any real use, but they’re utterly deficient in the emotional fortitude one requires when dealing with the horrors of war wounds.’

  ‘Really?’ said my mother with a tight smile. ‘Yet I presume you have heard of Florence Nightingale? There are even places – such as Paris – where women are allowed to become physicians themselves.’

  ‘France,’ he said scornfully. ‘Not here, thankfully. I fear the rigorous demands of medical study are utterly beyond the limited mental and physical capabilities of the fair sex, while the thought of a woman – a lady – actually seeing and touching the male physique must be repugnant to any gentleman worthy of the name.’

  ‘Repugnant,’ said my mother, her smile never slipping. ‘An interesting word choice, given how succinctly it sums up my opinion of such primitive thinking. Good day to you, Captain Crowley.’

  Lifting her dusty homespun skirts with all the grace and dignity of a debutante maneuvering a silk ball gown, she left him standing there, his features puckering with confusion as he struggled to understand how someone of a sex he scorned could have just succeeded in making him feel so small.

  ‘Do you think it will ever change?’ I asked my mother later, as we dined on cornbread and thin mutton stew at an inn opposite the college.

  ‘Will what change, honey?’ she asked, looking up at me.

  I stared out the window at the sun-drenched brick walls and massive columns of the grand buildings across the street. I’d always known that only men were allowed to attend places like Centenary College. But for some reason, today’s reminder that I would never be allowed to study here just because I was a girl filled me with an outrage so profound and visceral that I was practically shaking with it. ‘The idea that women are too frail �
� and stupid – to go to a real college. To become doctors or lawyers or – or anything.’

  ‘It might change. If women are willing to push for it, hard. Otherwise … probably not.’

  ‘Push for it how?’

  ‘By refusing to believe that we really are weak and stupid, simply because we’ve always been told that we are. By loudly and repeatedly demanding that men treat us like adults rather than simple-minded children who never grow up. And by demanding that if we’re required to pay taxes, we should also have the right to vote and sit on juries and represent ourselves in government.’

  I was silent for a moment. The thought that women ought to be able to vote had never occurred to me. ‘I’d like to vote someday,’ I said quietly.

  ‘There’s talk in Washington of making Negro men citizens and giving them the right to vote. Why not women?’

  I threw a quick glance around to make sure I wouldn’t be overheard, then leaned forward and lowered my voice. ‘But there are white men out there fighting for the Negroes. I can’t see men ever fighting for women.’

  ‘Some might.’

  ‘You mean, really fight? With guns?’

  ‘No. But it’s not this war that is winning the Negroes their freedom and citizenship. It’s not even Lincoln – although I’ve no doubt he’ll get both the credit and the blame for it.’

  ‘So what is?’

  ‘It’s the black people themselves who are refusing to be slaves any longer, who are educating themselves and showing the world what they’re capable of. That and the realization by right-minded people that the force of history and justice demands it.’

  I sat back in my chair. One of the many painful lessons I’d absorbed from this war was that people’s ideas of what justice and history and God demand were usually self-serving and narrow.

  We’d been planning to leave for home that afternoon, once the westering sun took the worst of the heat from the day. But it was just a few hours later, when Mama was adjusting her hat before the long pier glass in the inn’s shadowy parlor, that we heard the sound of running feet and panicked shouts mingling with the thunder of scores of horses’ hooves, the rattle of caissons, the all-too-familiar tramp of marching soldiers.