Good Time Coming Read online

  ‘Don’t,’ said the sergeant, knocking up the barrel of the pistol.

  The charge exploded, filling the room with smoke and the stench of burned powder. A shower of pulverized ceiling plaster crashed down around them, and the young sergeant laughed uproariously, as if he were drunk. Or mad.

  ‘Look what I found,’ shouted one of the men, staggering into the room beneath a barrel of molasses.

  ‘Now we can make us some real Yankee stew!’ howled the sergeant.

  I’d vaguely assumed that they were making the pile of clothes and bedcovers and books to set them alight and burn the house down around us. Perhaps that had been their intent, if they hadn’t found the molasses. Instead, they poured the thick, dark, sticky syrup over the pile, then splashed it liberally over the walls and furniture.

  ‘Here; let me stir it up for you,’ said the mosquito-bit corporal, raking his bayonet through the molasses-drenched heap of clothes, bedding, broken china, shredded paintings and torn books.

  ‘Yankee stew!’ shouted another, attacking the pile with his sword.

  I sat back on my rump, my arms still locked around Checkers’ neck, angry tears blurring my eyes. I felt like I had a Yankee bullet lodged in my throat, so that it hurt to swallow.

  ‘There; that oughta do it,’ said the sergeant. He leaned in close enough to my mother that his breath disturbed the fine wisps of honey-colored hair that lay against her cheek. ‘You like our cookin’, you be sure to send the recipe to Ole Jeff Davis. You hear?’

  She stood as still as someone posing for a daguerreotype, her gaze fixed straight ahead.

  After a moment, he gave an unnaturally loud laugh and turned away. ‘All right then, boys. Mount up!’

  Elbowing and backslapping each other like unruly schoolboys, they tramped out the house and down the steps, leaving a sticky trail of molasses behind them. We heard the creak of saddle leather, more shouts; then the clatter of hooves receded into the distance.

  None of us moved.

  ‘Are they all gone?’ asked Aunt Em, clutching Hannah’s trembling body to her so tightly the little girl murmured in protest.

  Mama walked to the broken front window, one hand coming up to touch the shredded linen curtain that hung beside it. ‘Yes.’

  Mahalia stared out over the molasses-drenched shambles of our house. ‘The saints preserve us. Where do we even start?’

  The four of us exchanged silent glances.

  Then Mama let out a muffled exclamation and took off at a run toward the back of the house.

  Confused, I pelted after her, Checkers barking at my heels. At the doorway to the spare bedroom, I drew up.

  The mattress had been overturned and slit open, scattering feathers everywhere. The graceful round table that had stood at the bedside lay upside down; the mosquito bar was a torn tangle mixed with fragments from the shattered cheval mirror and the white ironstone pitcher and basin that had been swept from the washstand.

  I was aware of Aunt Em and my grandmother coming up behind me. Hannah had begun to cry softly, her arms clinging to her mother’s neck.

  ‘What are you looking for?’ Adelaide asked as Mama picked up the ripped coverlet and threw it aside.

  ‘The quinine bottle.’

  ‘There,’ said Aunt Em in a strained, hollow voice.

  Mama straightened slowly, her gaze following her sister’s.

  The bottle lay shattered on the hearth, the label still clinging to the broken, amber colored fragments, the bricks beneath stained dark where the precious, life-giving tincture had seeped away.

  Forty-Six

  There’d been a time when the senseless, deliberate destruction of so much that I held dear would have filled me with a heartsick rage. But I felt deadened inside, my world focused on one little girl who alternately shivered and sweated beneath a hastily mended coverlet on a patched mattress, the sickness within her raging beyond my mother’s ability to control it.

  Mahalia and I spent days sweeping and scrubbing and separating what was salvageable from what was hopelessly ruined. Sometimes Adelaide or Mama would come help. But they mostly took turns sitting with Aunt Em at Hannah’s bedside. No one said anything, but it didn’t take me long to figure out they wanted someone to be with Aunt Em when Hannah died.

  I kept thinking about what Adelaide had said when I cried about Misty Oaks, that you’re allowed to weep for the loss of a person or a noble cause, but never for a possession that can be replaced, maybe, someday, somehow. And I found myself making a silent bargain with the Lord: Just let those I love live through this war, God, and I promise I won’t doubt you ever again.

  But I was about to learn that bargains don’t work any better than prayers.

  Hannah died early on a Saturday evening, when the trees were throbbing with joyous birdsong, and the sky was a soft pastel pink the color of the last roses of summer that tumbled over the gallery railing.

  I’d been fishing in the bayou and was walking back toward the house, lost for one brief, stolen interlude in the joy of the moment. The cool, sweetly scented breeze felt good on my face, and I was proud of the string of bass I was bringing home for supper. I’d almost reached the kitchen when I heard a low, keening wail that made my stomach twist and my step falter.

  I looked over to see Mahalia standing in the kitchen doorway, her hands fisted in her apron, her eyes swollen and red-rimmed. ‘Here; let me take them fish, child,’ she said, reaching for them.

  I shook my head back and forth in hopeless denial. ‘Tell me she’s not dead,’ I said, as if I still believed, even then, that I could somehow make reality bend to my will, just by wishing it.

  ‘She went easy, when the time come. That poor baby is with the Lord now.’

  ‘She doesn’t belong with the Lord,’ I screamed, practically throwing the fish at Mahalia. ‘She belongs here, with her mother, with us. She was supposed to grow up and go to school, and learn to ride a horse and play the piano and dance and … and a thousand different things she’ll never get a chance to do. Never.’

  ‘Amrie—’

  ‘I hate this damned war! I hate Abraham Lincoln, and General Sherman, and every damned Yankee who ever set foot down here where he don’t belong. But you know who I hate more’n anything? God. I hate God.’

  ‘Don’t say that, child.’ She reached for me, but I jerked away.

  ‘Why? You think he’s listening? Haven’t you figured it out yet? He never listens to anybody! He doesn’t punish the wicked or reward the good. He just flat out doesn’t care.’

  ‘Amrie!’

  I hurled my fishing pole away from me, the cane bouncing on the hard, sunbaked ground. I could hear the distant hoot of an unseen owl, smell the bite of wood smoke on the cooling air as the last of the day’s sunlight bled away. Once, I might have run off to sob out my fear and anger and pain alone in the barn or within the sheltering branches of my favorite live oak. The urge to do so was still strong.

  Instead, I swiped one crooked elbow across my wet face and walked into the house to wrap my arms around my sobbing aunt’s trembling shoulders and whisper, ‘I’m sorry, Aunt Em. I’m so, so sorry.’

  Castile fashioned a small coffin of boards salvaged from our ruined rosewood dining table. We rested the coffin, as was the custom, on two straight-backed chairs we positioned in front of the parlor windows. The curtains hung in tatters, and the room still smelled of molasses, although we’d scrubbed and scrubbed. Mahalia said she reckoned some of it had seeped down between the floorboards where we couldn’t get at it. But everyone who came to pay their respects already knew what had happened to us.

  That night, long after the last of our friends and neighbors had come and gone, Aunt Em still sat on a stool pulled up beside the coffin. She’d been sitting there forever, just gazing at her dead child’s face as if desperate to etch every line, every beloved feature in her memory for all time.

  Finally, Mama came to rest her hand on her younger sister’s shoulder. ‘Emma … I know it feels unbea
rable, now. I know …’ Her voice cracked, and she had to hesitate and start over again. ‘I know you feel like you can’t go on, like you don’t want to go on. But in time it will get better. It won’t ever go away. But it will get better, I promise.’

  ‘How did you live through it, Kate? Twice? And Mama … she lost so many. Hannah was my joy; she lit up my life. And now she’s gone, I … I just want to die.’

  ‘Oh, honey … no.’

  I stood in the shadows, holding myself very still, feeling like I was intruding on something I wasn’t supposed to hear.

  Aunt Em said, ‘One night in Vicksburg, during the siege, a mortar shell hit a cave just a few hundred feet from ours. A little girl was killed. One minute she was just sleeping in her bed, and the next instant, she was dead. She was only three or four – Hannah’s age. It could so easily have been Hannah. I remember sitting in the moonlight in front of our cave and listening to that poor bereaved mother. She cried all night, sometimes wailing and screaming, sometimes sobbing, sometimes moaning so softly I could only just hear her. And I kept thinking, How can she stand it? How could I stand it, if …’ A ragged sob stole her breath, her face crumpling, and she put up a hand to cover her grief-contorted mouth.

  Mama knelt beside her to take Emma’s other hand between hers.

  ‘You need to sleep, Em. You’ll make yourself deathly ill.’

  ‘What do I have to live for, now?’

  ‘You need to live for yourself, Em. For yourself, and for Galen, and all the future children you will have together. At least you still have a husband.’

  Emma shook her head. ‘I just can’t care anymore. I don’t think there’s anything that compares to the love a mother feels for her own child. It’s … it’s all-consuming and selfless and … and …’ She paused, her body wracked by a wet, tearing cough. ‘I just don’t know how I can go on without her.’

  ‘But you will, Em. I know you can’t see it, now. But you will. We go on because we must. We take one breath after another, live one day after another, and eventually that unbearably painful pressure of sadness in our hearts eases. It never entirely goes away, but it eases.’

  ‘I just miss her so much,’ Emma cried, her body convulsing with her sobs. ‘I think about never seeing her again and I feel like I’m being torn in two.’

  Mama put her arms around her sister’s shaking shoulders and held her close. But she didn’t say anything, I suppose because in the end there was really nothing to say. How do you comfort the mother of a dead child?

  The truth is, you can’t.

  The next morning dawned overcast and unseasonably cold, with a biting wind that scuttled dried leaves down the weed-choked drive.

  Cyrus Pringle came out from St Francisville with a handcart, and Castile brought a hammer and a handful of precious nails he’d salvaged from a burned-out building down in Bayou Sara. But Aunt Em couldn’t bear to let them close the tiny coffin’s lid or load it on Mr Pringle’s cart.

  ‘Em, it’s time,’ said Mama softly.

  ‘I know. Just one more minute …’

  The faint clip-clop of horses’ hooves carried above the thrashing of the limbs of the live oaks and pecans in the yard.

  ‘Who’s that?’ asked Adelaide sharply. These days, horses almost always meant trouble.

  Cyrus went to peer out the ruined curtains. ‘Two Yankees; a lieutenant and his sergeant. I seen him before. It’s that Lieutenant Beckham what was around early in the summer, asking after them two Wisconsin fellers who disappeared.’

  For one brief instant, my mother’s warning gaze met mine. I was careful not to even glance toward Mahalia. But I could feel my heart racing in my chest so hard and fast that my fingers were tingling.

  Adelaide – who knew nothing of what the three of us had done – said, ‘What now? Haven’t they done enough?’

  ‘Maybe I’ll jist go ask them that,’ said Castile, walking out onto the porch. ‘There’s a dead child in here,’ we heard him say, his voice carrying clearly. ‘Can’t y’all leave these poor womenfolk to mourn in peace?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said the lieutenant, the shells of the drive crunching under his boot heels as he swung out of the saddle. ‘But I have my orders.’

  He left his sergeant with the horses and came into the house with his hat in his hands, which I suppose was an improvement over the last lot of his compatriots we’d had. He drew up just inside the entrance to the parlor, his gaze fixed on Hannah’s tiny coffin, and I knew from the expression on his face that he hadn’t actually expected to find a dead child, that he’d assumed it was just another Southern strategy to avoid the ravages folks tended to associate with visits from anyone wearing a blue uniform.

  His gaze shifted to the torn curtains, to the axe-chopped piano, to the bayonet-slashed portrait of Simon that still hung over the sideboard. ‘Who did this?’ he asked.

  ‘Unfortunately, they failed to leave a proper calling card,’ said Adelaide tartly. ‘But they obviously learned their manners from your General Sherman.’

  He brought his gaze back to Hannah’s pale, waxen face. ‘And the child? Did they kill the child?’

  It was my mother who answered. ‘Did they bayonet her, the way they did the cushions of the sofa or our bonnets? No. But they broke the bottle of quinine that was keeping her alive. So I’d say, yes; they killed her.’ Her features contorted with a raw upswelling of the anger and hatred she normally managed to suppress. ‘He’s a fine man, your President Abraham Lincoln, is he not? Making war on women and children in the hopes that their suffering and death will draw their menfolk away from the battlefields, thus achieving what your mighty armies cannot.’

  The lieutenant’s gaze drifted again around the ruined room, lingering on the empty bookshelves, his eyebrows twitching together in a troubled frown. ‘He is a great president. That’s not to say he hasn’t listened to some bad advisors.’

  ‘Great presidents don’t listen to bad advisers.’

  ‘There are those who say that desperate times call for desperate measures.’

  ‘So I’ve heard. Is that not the argument always used to justify the worst kinds of evil? I’d say the genuine measure of a man – of a nation – is to be found in how true they remain to their principles in times of duress. Under that test, I’d say your president – and your nation – have failed miserably. Although I’ve no doubt that, should you prove victorious, these barbarities will be justified by future generations. That is, if they are acknowledged and remembered at all.’

  I looked from my mother to the young lieutenant, and back again. And I knew the same odd sensation I’d experienced the first time this man rode into our lives – the sense that he and my mother might have been the only two people in the room, for they spoke solely to each other.

  He looked again at the coffin that rested before the front windows. A muscle worked along his tightly held jaw. ‘I am sincerely sorry for your loss. But I’m afraid I must ask you some questions. Last June, two men from the 4th Wisconsin disappeared while in this area: a Captain Gabriel Dupont and a Sergeant Boyle.’

  He paused, but when no one said anything, he continued, ‘Captain Dupont and his sergeant were riding two rather conspicuous racehorses taken from the stables of Virgil Slaughter: Dance Away and Rainstorm. One of the horses – Dance Away – recently turned up near Pointe Coupee in the possession of a man named Cato Quincy.’

  I saw my mother suck in a quick breath, her eyes widening almost imperceptibly with shock and fear. It was subtle enough that I hoped the lieutenant didn’t notice. I was glad he wasn’t looking at me because my own horror and guilt were surely written all over my face.

  ‘Quincy claims he bought the horse in Texas, from one Peyton Underwood, who refugeed there early last summer. He says Underwood told him he was given the horses by a woman from St Francisville.’

  ‘And did he tell you the identity of this woman?’ asked my mother, her voice so clear and strong – even vaguely scornful – that I was in awe.


  ‘No.’

  I risked throwing a quick glance at Mahalia, but she’d assumed the look of bland innocence perfected early by anyone who’d ever been enslaved. Aunt Em was quietly weeping on Adelaide’s shoulder, while Cyrus Pringle and Castile stood with their hands loose at their sides, their faces set in angry helplessness.

  ‘So you’re … what?’ asked my mother. ‘Visiting every woman in St Francisville to ask if she gave away two racehorses? This is why you’ve interrupted my niece’s funeral?’

  A faint tinge of color darkened the lieutenant’s face. ‘I have my orders, ma’am.’

  ‘Then you may tell your superiors that I haven’t seen Dance Away since he ran in the Governor’s Cup in 1861.’

  For a long, breathless moment, the Federal lieutenant stared at my mother. I had the uncomfortable sensation that beneath his careful manners and seeming nobility of spirit, this man was no fool, and he knew my mother was perfectly capable of lying with calm composure.

  But he simply shifted his grip on his hat’s brim and sketched a short bow. ‘My apologies, again, and my condolences.’

  Then he swept from the room.

  No one moved or spoke. We listened to the hollow clatter of his boot tread descending the wooden front steps, to his curt orders to his sergeant, and the rhythm of their horses trotting back toward the gate.

  Cyrus Pringle blew out a long, quavering breath and said, ‘This ain’t good. This ain’t good at all.’

  Adelaide looked up from comforting Aunt Em. ‘Since when is the Union Army so interested in the fates of two men?’

  ‘Since one of them is the nephew of the Governor of Wisconsin,’ said Mama.

  For one brief, stolen moment, Mahalia, Mama, and I exchanged glances. Somehow in the course of all that had happened over the past few months, I’d almost convinced myself that Captain Dupont and Sergeant Boyle had been forgotten by the Federals. I could sometimes go nearly a whole day at a time without thinking of them myself – until, maybe, the wind blew hot and sour out of the bayou, or the rain teemed down in hard, blinding sheets that would forever bring back that night in shivering, vivid detail.