Good Time Coming Page 3

  As I turned in through the front gateway, our big old black and white hound, Checkers, came bounding joyously to meet me, tongue lolling, rear end wiggling his welcome. He was nearly as old as I was, and I loved him with a fierceness that sometimes scared me, for reasons I was never quite willing to put into words. As he barreled into me, I let him bowl me over, laughing with delight as he shoved his big head up under my chin. For one eye-squeezing moment, I hugged him to me with all my might.

  It wasn’t until I stood up, with Checkers running in circles around me, that I realized I did recognize the man Mama was talking to – sort of. It was the mahogany-bearded stranger in homespun I’d seen down by the river. At my approach, he touched a hand to his hat with a nod and strode away into the gathering gloom.

  ‘Who was that?’ I asked, staring after him.

  ‘A friend of your father’s.’

  Her answer surprised me. He didn’t look like anyone I could imagine Papa being friends with.

  I expected her to give me what-for over being late and tearing my pinafore. But she just pressed her fingertips to her lips, her eyebrows drawing together in a frown, her thoughts focused on some inner, troubled place.

  ‘He told you about the Federal fleet?’ I said, relieved that someone else had already carried the tale to her. I didn’t want to talk about it.

  She nodded. ‘Although he mainly came to tell me about a man found drowned this morning in Thompson’s Creek. They think he was one of General Butler’s men.’

  ‘Here?’ Thompson’s Creek ran just to the south of us, between St Francisville and Port Hudson, and was currently flooded by water backing up from the Mississippi. As much of a shock as it’d been to watch the Federal fleet steaming boldly up the river, I found it even more disturbing to realize that the enemy could be creeping through our woods right now and I wouldn’t know it. ‘Do they think he could’ve come from the gunboats?’

  She shook her head. ‘No; he wasn’t wearing a uniform.’

  ‘So what makes them think he was a Federal?’

  ‘He was carrying a message intended for a woman in St Francisville.’

  I stared at her. ‘What woman?’

  ‘There’s no way to tell; it was simply addressed “Dear Madam”. But from the contents it was obvious this woman has undertaken to supply General Butler with details of Confederate troop movements in the area, and other such things.’

  By now the sun had disappeared behind the treetops, the last of the light leaching fast from the sky. A faint mist drifted through the trees, the cicadas starting up a hellish rhythm that suddenly sounded unnaturally, almost maddeningly loud.

  I said, ‘Why did that man come to tell you this?’

  ‘Because he considers your father a friend. He wanted to warn us.’

  ‘Warn us? About what?’

  ‘At the moment, only the men who found the body know about the message. But amongst those who do, there’s obviously been some speculation as to the identity of this woman.’

  I took an involuntary step back, my head shaking in silent denial as I finally understood what she was saying. ‘They can’t think … Oh, surely they don’t think that message was intended for you!’

  A strange smile touched the corners of her mouth. ‘I was born in Boston.’

  ‘But lots of folks come from up North! You’ve lived here your whole life!’

  ‘I have a brother fighting for the Union.’

  ‘And Papa and your two other brothers are all fighting for the South!’

  Yet even as I said it, I knew none of that mattered. Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of the Federal president himself, had three brothers fighting for the South. This was a war that had divided brother from brother and son from father. Surely it had also divided husband from wife?

  Back in the early, heady days of secession, when patriotic fervor was running red hot and most everybody was convinced that if war came the North could be defeated quickly and easily, Papa had argued vehemently with anyone who’d listen to him and more than a few who wouldn’t. But once the war actually started, he and Mama had gone for a long walk along the stream. When they came back, Mama went off to work in her garden, her face set hard, her cheeks wet. She didn’t even look up when Papa saddled his horse and rode away to sign up.

  I still remember standing in the doorway to his room a few nights later while he packed his knapsack, haversack, and blanket roll. The oil lamp on the round, lace-covered table beside the bed cast his shadow long and distorted across the far wall. I felt the same way I’d felt as I watched them shovel the dirt onto the top of Simon’s casket – as if this couldn’t be happening. As if I should be able to wake up and the nightmare would all go away. I was desperate to do something – anything – to keep him from leaving.

  I said, ‘I don’t understand why you’re doing this. You didn’t want this war.’

  He folded his extra shirt and carefully nestled it in the soft leather case. ‘No. But whether I wanted it or not, war has come, and I must do what I can to protect our new country, our home, and those I love.’

  ‘But you’ve always hated slavery!’

  He hesitated, then left his packing and came to stand before me, his hands resting on my shoulders. ‘Make no mistake about this, Amrie: slavery caused this war. If there’d been no slavery, these dark days would never have come to pass. But it’s not the passion fueling the fight. Oh, it’s obviously what’s driving the more war-like amongst the Northern abolitionists to sign up. But while they’re certainly vocal, they’re not all that numerous. Most folks up North will tell you they’re fighting to preserve the Union, while folks down here will say they’re fighting for the same reasons their grandfathers fought the Revolution against England – to resist oppression and unjust tariffs, and to safeguard their liberty.’ His hands slid from my shoulders as he turned back to his packing, his voice so soft that I barely heard it when he added, ‘The ironic contradiction between all their stirring verbiage and the persistence of chattel slavery doesn’t occur to them any more than it occurred to their slave-owning forebears.’

  ‘Mr Mumford says that if the Federals win, they’re going to outlaw slavery.’

  ‘It’s possible. It’s not one of their stated war aims, but it is the one sure way to preserve the new western states for free white men – which is what started all of this in the first place.’

  ‘So in a sense, you are fighting for slavery.’

  He paused in the act of buckling his knapsack, his head bent, his shoulders stiff. Then he thrust the last strap home and straightened slowly. ‘No. I’m fighting to keep you and your mother safe, and to keep our house from being looted and burned, and to keep us from being overrun by the kind of ruthless speculators and profiteers who always follow in the train of a victorious army.’

  I stared at him. ‘But none of that’s going to happen, is it? Folks are saying all it’s gonna take is for us to win one big battle, and then Lincoln’ll give up and let us go our own way.’

  Whatever he saw in my face must have made my father regret what he’d already said, because he came to wrap his strong arms around me and hug me close to his chest. ‘I hope so, sweetheart,’ he said, turning his head to press his cheek against the top of my head. ‘I really hope so.’

  But that was a year ago, and I realized now that Mr Mumford and the others like him were wrong, and my papa had known what he was talking about.

  Now, to my mother, I said, ‘Who do you think that message was intended for?’

  My mother shook her head. ‘I don’t know. Nor do I have any intention of speculating about it – and don’t you either, Anne-Marie.’

  My mother only called me Anne-Marie when she was seriously peeved at me. At first I couldn’t figure out what I’d done to provoke her – muddy hems and torn pinafores not normally being seen as dire enough to warrant it. Then I realized her irritation was both accumulative and preemptive. She was remembering all the times I hadn’t listened to her, and anticipating that I’d do
it again.

  She said, ‘I mean it, Amrie. What’s at stake here is too serious – and the consequences of a false accusation too dire – for you and Finn to turn it into a game.’

  ‘We wouldn’t—’

  ‘I still remember how you tormented poor Hilda Meyers, trying to prove she was a witch.’

  I kept quiet. Hilda Meyers was a dour, German-born shopkeeper with a broad, plain face, iron-gray hair, and a body like a lumpy sack of potatoes. Unabashedly avaricious and mean-spirited, she had been locked in perpetual warfare with the children of Bayou Sara and St Francisville since the day she opened her dry goods emporium some seven years before. She’d been known to chase boys out of her store with a broom; she rapped their knuckles with the ramrod from an old musket when they tried to sneak candy out of her jars. Once, she even threatened to turn Finn into a mouse and feed him to her big black cat, which is what made us start thinking that she might be a witch.

  We knew better now, of course; she was just a malevolent old woman who hated everyone. But it occurred to me …

  ‘Amrie,’ my mother snapped, as if aware my attention had wandered. ‘Don’t make me regret having told you.’

  I wondered why she had told me, since I knew by the familiar tightening of the skin beside her mouth that she had little expectation of being heeded. Then the furtive rustling of a small, unseen creature in the tangled stretch of gardenias and azaleas bordering the lane made her head jerk around, her hands fisting in her apron, the rest of her body held breathlessly still as she sought in vain to probe the impenetrable darkness that had by now engulfed us.

  The night air smelled of sour mud and damp vegetation and distant, stale smoke. I sucked in a deep breath, and it came to me that she’d told me because she feared our lives were about to become exponentially more difficult, and she wanted me to be prepared for it.

  We turned to walk together toward the house, with Checkers frisking ahead of us. The faint, sickly glow of a single tallow candle flickered in the parlor window, the marshy, willow-lined stream at the base of a nearby gully alive now with a chorus of croaking bullfrogs. The familiar white house, the myriad of stars, the dark shapes of the mules grazing lazily in the distant pasture, all looked the same as they always had; sounded the same, smelled the same. But that comforting, illusory sense of safety and certainty that I’d known all my life had vanished. I felt small and vulnerable and isolated, and I found myself wondering how many of our friends and neighbors knew about the drowned Federal agent in Thompson’s Creek, and how many of them suspected us of being the intended recipient of his message.

  Yet as disconcerting as that thought was, I recognized an even more bone-chilling realization: someone I knew and trusted was at that very moment working to destroy everyone I loved.

  Five

  I awoke the next morning to gray skies and an unseasonably cool wind that shook the fragile leaves of the willows down by the creek and filled the air with the smell of damp earth and coming rain.

  My room was one of two nestled beneath the eaves and reached by a steep staircase that led up from an arched alcove off the wide central hall. Downstairs, the parlor and dining room lay on one side of the hall, my parents’ room and a guest bedroom on the other. But as I stared out the dormer window at the churning clouds, I became aware of an unnatural stillness that hung over the house.

  I knew I should be getting up for school. Instead, I lay with one arm crooked over my eyes, the fingers of my other hand touching the hollow at the base of my throat where my cross should have been. And I felt it again – that swelling of outrage and anger and a tumultuous host of other emotions for which I had as yet no name. I felt as if my world were flying apart. In times like these, how could anyone expect me to go to school and sit quietly listening to Mr Fischer droning on about the agricultural production of the steppes of Russia or the difference between subjunctive and subordinate clauses?

  I’d never liked school, which I considered a pitiful waste of precious hours I could fill far more productively and pleasantly on my own. I’d gone through a stage a few years before the war came when I’d advocated endlessly for a private tutor, like the children of the big planters in the area. A tutor would not only free me from such torturous tediums as having to sit through the halting attempts of my fellow classmates to read aloud, but also eliminate the need for me to endure the proximity of the likes of Christian LeBlanc and Meredith McKinney and Isaac Underwood, all of whom I loathed.

  Papa put up with my pestering for a time, before finally telling me quite frankly that while he heartily sympathized with my boredom and frustration, private tutors were beyond the means of simple doctors. Then he’d looked at me over the rims of the glasses he always wore when reading the New Orleans papers, and added, ‘Besides, it wouldn’t hurt you to learn to get along better with other children.’

  The statement left me beyond indignant, for it implied that the fault was mine, which it most certainly wasn’t.

  Or at least, I thought it wasn’t.

  Yet as bad as things had been, before, my troubles at school took a severe turn for the worse in the fall of 1860, when the election ratcheted up folks’ emotions to the snapping point, and my parents’ well-known abolitionist sympathies and open opposition to secession brought me more than my usual quota of sideways glances and whispered taunts.

  I’d responded to those insults with all of a ten-year-old’s ferocious righteousness and a few dirty tricks I’d learned from Finn. But it didn’t take me long to realize that while grinding Spencer Caine’s face into the mud of the schoolyard or pulling one of Sarah Henley’s braids until she hollered, ‘’Nough!’ might get my classmates to shut up and leave me alone, it was worse than useless when it came to changing their minds.

  I was still pondering the uses and limitations of violence when I heard Mahalia holler up the stairs, ‘Amrie! You gonna drag your lazy bones outa that bed? Don’t make me come up there and git you!’

  I got up.

  Mahalia had been with us for as long as I could remember. A full-bosomed, shapely woman in her early thirties, she had golden skin and the startling, turquoise eyes one sometimes saw in those of mixed race. She’d been born down on the Bayou Teche and lived her early years amongst the French-speaking Acadian settlers there, which left her with their distinctive accent and syntax. She was one of the twenty-three slaves my mother inherited from my grandfather and freed. I asked Mahalia once why she’d decided to stay with us when most of the others had gone their separate ways, but all she said was, ‘I like yor momma, and I like it here. Why should I go off and live amongst strangers, hmmm? I wouldn’t be any more free.’

  I always thought there was more to the story than that, but I’d never managed to ferret it out.

  ‘There you is,’ she said when I wandered onto the back gallery, still rubbing my eyes and with Checkers padding at my heels. In those days, food was still relatively plentiful – at least for us – and she plunked a breakfast of buttermilk, eggs, and corn muffins down on the round rattan table we used for our meals when the weather was fair. ‘Miss Lavinia Carter’s baby done decided in the middle of the night that it was ready to be born. Yor momma drove off with Avery hours ago, and I ain’t heard nothin’ since.’

  Avery was the younger of the two men my parents employed, thin and gangly, with long arms and legs and a big, wide smile. When my mother was called off to help someone in the middle of the night, Avery usually drove her.

  Only men could be licensed as doctors in Louisiana, as in most other parts of what had been the United States. But anyone, male or female, with the money to pay the fees could attend lectures at the medical schools in New Orleans, and my mother had attended every lecture they offered.

  Her long-standing fascination with medicine both scandalized and shamed my Grandmother Adelaide. But my grandfather had been more open-minded – or maybe he was just more indulgent. He made arrangements for her to live with his sister, whose banker-husband had just built a big
house on St Charles Avenue. While other young women her age were attending balls and dinner parties and moving through all the formal rituals that were a traditional part of finding a husband in her world, my mother attended lectures on anatomy and physiology. She met my father over the dissection of a cadaver pulled from the river. Papa always said her tiny hands and manual dexterity would have made her a better surgeon than he could ever hope to be. But he had the license from the state, and she didn’t.

  Sometimes in the evening when the wind was blowing wild, when thunder rumbled in the distance and a hum of tense expectation charged the air, I’d see her standing at the end of the gallery, her arms wrapped around her waist, her gaze fixed on something in the distance I could never see, her features drawn with a bleak combination of longing and frustration.

  I’d learned early to leave her alone on such occasions.

  Now, with my father and most of the other doctors in the parish off to war, folks had started coming to my mother for help, license or no license. I thought at first it might make them like her better, but it didn’t. I could never figure out why they still held the freeing of those twenty-three slaves against her, but shrugged away my father’s freeing of his thirty-eight. I figured it had something to do with her being a woman, but I couldn’t untangle the details.

  ‘Why you just playin’ with that food, you?’ Mahalia demanded, her delicately arched eyebrows puckering together in a frown. She was a beautiful woman, her face and figure such as to turn the heads of most men – and women – who saw her. I asked her once why she had no children of her own, but she just got a funny look on her face and told me to finish my grits before I was late for school.