Good Time Coming Page 34

  But Captain Gabriel Dupont had not been forgotten. And I found myself obsessing over the other breadcrumb trails that could conceivably lead back to us, the gold coins we’d given to Reverend Lewis and a certain crystal, heart-shaped locket preserving an absent husband’s sandy-colored curl.

  It never occurred to me that the two dead men themselves could yet betray us.

  Forty-Seven

  The one-armed boy, Dibbie, left us soon after that, taking up with the itinerant preacher who’d given Aunt Em a ride from Vicksburg.

  As the last of the summer heat died and autumn settled over the Felicianas, the hair grew thick on the backs of the creatures of the woods and swamp, and thunder rolled often in the distance. Folks started muttering about the early migration of the geese and ducks, about the numerous, heavy fogs we’d had in August, about the frequent halos visible around the moon. All were signs of another harsh winter.

  Mama said, ‘It’s rank nonsense. Squirrels gather lots of nuts every year. And don’t get me started on the wisdom of woolly worms.’

  I hoped she was right. Last year’s winter had killed folks all over the South. And this year our situation was a whole lot worse. Nobody anywhere within reach of a Union army had any livestock left, and the salt needed to preserve even wild game was impossible to find. Rampaging soldiers had emptied our corncribs and raided our pantries; they’d broken our windows, stolen or destroyed our blankets and warm clothes. Even when folks had real money, there was nothing to buy. And Confederate script was practically worthless. ‘Confederate’ had become an adjective used to describe anything that was rough, crude, or improvised. Thus, Confederate silver was a tin cup; Confederate gas was a pine torch, and a Confederate carriage was an old wagon drawn by mules – although these days we saw precious few of those, too.

  So I was surprised when I took a slab of venison to Mrs O’Reilly one day in early October to see a mule grazing in the long grass near the cottage’s broken front stoop. The Federals had burned all her fence rails, so she had the mule tethered to a sycamore tree. As I drew nearer, I could see the US branded on its flank.

  ‘Finn give him to me,’ she said, bustling about to put a battered kettle on to boil.

  ‘How is he?’ I asked, settling on one of the benches drawn up to their trestle table. I knew Finn dropped in to see his mother from time to time when the Partisan Rangers were in the area, and it kinda hurt that he’d never once come to see me. But Mrs O’Reilly said it was because he didn’t want to put us in any danger. The Federals were known to wreck a special kind of vengeance on the homes of anyone related to or suspected of helping the Rangers.

  I saw the shadow of some emotion I couldn’t name pass over her sharp features. ‘He’s fit and healthy. And he’s grown so, I reckon he’s bigger’n his da ever was.’

  ‘He’s with Banyon now?’

  She nodded, her lips pressed into a tight line. Folks told troublesome stories about Colonel Banyon – the kind of tales repeated in whispers and likely to leave you feeling a bit queasy.

  I looked out the window to where Finn’s younger brother and sisters were engaged in a mock battle, with long sticks standing in for rifles and a big fat log pressed into duty as a cannon. As I watched, the younger sister, Annie, pantomimed a direct hit, clamping her hands to her thin chest and falling over in an artistic heap.

  ‘You’d think they’d get enough of this damned war without needin’ to play at it, too,’ said Mrs O’Reilly, following my gaze. ‘Now I’ve got my Benjamin mad to go off to war, and him only ten.’

  I didn’t know what to say. Christian LeBlanc had run off that spring to be a drummer boy at the age of twelve. His mother just heard he’d died of diphtheria in a hospital in Georgia.

  ‘How’s your aunt doing?’ asked Mrs O’Reilly, setting a chipped cup of blackberry tea in front of me.

  ‘She ain’t never been well since living all them weeks in that cave in Vicksburg. She keeps coughing something awful. And she’s grieving bad for Hannah.’

  ‘Poor woman,’ said Mrs O’Reilly, settling on the opposite bench. ‘She needs another baby to take her mind off the one she lost.’

  In the mock battle taking place outside, the older girl, Jessica, was the next to die, hands flung out dramatically. The boy, Benjamin, let out a victorious war whoop and beat his fists against his chest in triumph.

  ‘Ireland was bad, but this … this is worse,’ said Mrs O’Reilly, her gaze, again, on the children. ‘It alters a body, all this hardship and anger and death. Twists and stunts them, and turns ’em mean and hard. There must’ve been a better way – you ain’t never gonna convince me otherwise. But that’s men for you, ain’t it? Always so full of bluster, so eager to fight, so cocksure they can win the day. And there’s my Benjamin, wantin’ to have at it and worryin’ the war’ll be over before he gets a chance to fight.’

  ‘Maybe it will be,’ I said.

  But she just looked at me, her face pinched with worries and sorrows the nature of which I could only guess.

  Two days later, another letter was found thrust into our door at dawn. But this one wasn’t written by Uncle Bo.

  15 October 1863

  Dear Mrs St Pierre,

  It is with deepest sorrow and the most sincere condolences that I write to tell you of the death of your brother, Lieutenant Colonel Bo Dunbar. He died bravely and heroically, rallying the men at Auburn. I hope it brings you comfort to know that his death was quick, and that he died with Our Lord’s name on his lips.

  He spoke of you often, and I know you don’t need me to tell you what an extraordinary man he was: cheerful, honest, brave, always ready to sacrifice for a friend or comrade. He will be dreadfully missed by his regiment and all who knew him.

  He will be buried at the new cemetery at Arlington. Let us pray for a happier time when you will be able to visit him there.

  Sincerely,

  Colonel Harrison Henley

  Mama read the letter aloud to Aunt Em and me while standing at Aunt Em’s bedside. A hard autumn rain pounded on the roof and clattered on the trembling leaves of the live oaks barely visible out in the yard through the downpour. Her voice cracked at one point, but she kept going. At the end, she looked up to find Adelaide standing motionless in the hallway just outside the door.

  ‘Well,’ said my mother, her glittering gaze meeting Adelaide’s from across the room. ‘You always said he was dead to you. Now he truly is.’

  And with that she walked into her own room and closed the door behind her with a snap.

  That night I lay awake thinking about Uncle Bo and listening to Aunt Em’s wet cough echoing through the house.

  I knew Mama was dreadfully worried about her. She’d tried bleeding her and dosing her with lemon and honey. But what she really needed was the kind of medicines denied to us by the Federal blockade, things like Dover’s powder and sulfur.

  I’d never understood before how a body could die of grief. But I was afraid that was what was going to happen to Aunt Em now. Technically I supposed the inflammation in her lungs was killing her. But she’d lost the will to fight it off and live.

  How many more? I wanted to scream at the dark ceiling above me. How many more of the people I love are you going to take? What’d Aunt Em ever do to you? I was pretty sure she’d never screamed, I hate God! Yet I was still alive and healthy, and she was down there hacking her lungs out.

  And then I became aware of another sound, a sound so faint, so unexpected that I slipped from my bed to make sure I was hearing it right. I stepped carefully to avoid any betraying creaks, my toes curling away from the cold floorboards as I crept across the room, hardly daring to breathe when I paused beside the wall that separated my room from what was now my grandmother’s.

  Adelaide had always prided herself on her ability to fall asleep quickly and stay asleep. She considered habitual or even occasional bouts of wakefulness a self-indulgence and a weakness to which she claimed never to succumb. Yet in the dark silence of the n
ight, I could hear the quiet shifting of Simon’s old bed, and something more.

  I stood disbelieving in the frigid darkness, hot tears stinging my eyes, a nearly unbearable weight of sadness pressing my chest as I listened to the quiet, muffled sounds of an old woman’s sobbing, her voice choked and torn with the ferocity of a grief carefully kept hidden all day long.

  ‘Oh, Bo,’ whispered Adelaide. ‘My son, my son …’

  Forty-Eight

  The folks who’d said we were in for another hard winter were right.

  The first snows fell in October, sweeping down out of the north on a vicious, bitter wind. ‘Ain’t it enough that God sends all them blue-coated Yankees down here to torment us?’ grumbled Cyrus Pringle one day when I took in a scythe for him to mend. ‘Did he haveta send us their dadburned weather, too?’

  The problem was, our houses were built for hot weather, not cold, with high ceilings that sucked up the warmth from our fires and wide eaves that kept out any feeble sunshine that might have helped. Many of us also had to contend with what folks called ‘Yankee ventilation’; windows broken by the Federal raiding parties that seemed to swarm over us nearly every week. Glass was now even harder to come by than salt. All we could do was cover the empty panes with scraps of oil cloth, which made our houses dark and depressing.

  By late November, the ice froze so hard and thick on the bayou that those children who had shoes could go sliding down it, arms windmilling wildly, their shouts and laughter carrying on the cold, clear air. That’s when we started hearing tales of people freezing to death. Old folks or those too sick and infirm to go out and collect wood were found stiff as boards in their beds.

  And on top of it all, everybody was hungry. Not only had the Federals emptied our larders and corncribs, and driven off or killed our livestock; but fishing hooks were becoming as scarce as needles and hairpins, and no one had powder or even a gun anymore. Castile collected a group of ten-and twelve-year-old boys, taught them how to make bows and arrows, and took them out hunting. Game was scarce, for the animals were having as hard of a time as we were. But I don’t know how the town would’ve made it through that winter without Castile and the skills he’d learned hiding out as a fugitive slave with a now-vanished tribe of Choctaw.

  Still, folks kept dying. We lost Aunt Em three weeks before Christmas and buried her next to Hannah, although the ground was so hard that Castile, Cyrus Pringle, and Reverend Lewis himself had to take turns hacking at the frozen earth. I still remember standing at her graveside, listening to the reverend’s words washing over me, my nose and cheeks burning from the cold wind, my toes numb. My heart must’ve been numb by then, too, because I didn’t cry. Neither did Adelaide. There was a time I’d have faulted her for it, but now I understood. Of the ten babies she’d birthed, only two remained alive. I guess she was numb, too.

  But I still couldn’t find it within myself to forgive her for what she’d done to Castile. Truth was, I wasn’t trying. Seemed to me, some things were unforgivable, and that kind of cruelty – whether to a fellow human being or an animal – was one of them. I’d always seen her as a hard woman, although I’d loved her anyway. But I realized now that I’d never really known her, never known the woman that lived inside her.

  I refused to believe that all I had glimpsed was something that lived inside each of us.

  About a week after Aunt Em’s funeral, we received a letter from Uncle Tate telling us he’d been captured at Chattanooga and was now in a prison camp up in Chicago. He tried to make light of it, but the conditions sounded awful enough to make me think he was more in danger of dying now than he’d been in battle. And I started wondering if this was how the war was going to end – with all of us dead.

  It was not too long before Christmas, when the sky was frosty white and the air glittered with ice crystals, that Adelaide came back from town one day with a ragged woman and her two pinch-faced children in tow.

  The woman’s name was Rhoda Magruder, and she looked well over forty years old, although I later found out she wasn’t even thirty. She was a small, ferociously skinny thing with a riot of red hair and the ghost of freckles across her high cheekbones. Her husband was with the army in Tennessee, and as far as she knew he was still alive, although she hadn’t heard from him in nearly a year. They’d had a farm near Liberty, Mississippi, until a raiding party burned the farmhouse and all the outbuildings. And so she’d walked down to St Francisville, hoping to find a room or even just a shed to shelter her family through the winter. She didn’t have a cent to her name, and neither she nor the children had eaten any proper food for a week, so they were pretty near dead when Adelaide brought them home.

  I never could understand why she did it. Adelaide had never had much use for philanthropy. And what made her rare gesture of generosity all the more surprising was that Rhoda Magruder was exactly the kind of illiterate, unwashed, ignorant pineywoods plain folk that Adelaide normally abominated. Not only was Rhoda superstitious and quick-tempered, but her twangy accent was enough to make Checkers howl in agony, and her grasp of the complexities of English grammar was faulty to the point of nonexistence.

  That first frigid afternoon, she and her children huddled in front of our kitchen fire with their fists clenched crudely around spoons as they shoved corn mash into their mouths. They all had rags tied around their bare feet, and their eyes were like sunken purple smudges in their pale, bony faces.

  ‘We can put them in the room next to Anne-Marie,’ Adelaide told Mama. After Aunt Em died, Adelaide had moved back down to the first-floor bedroom. She would never have admitted it, but the truth was that climbing those steep steps had been hard on her.

  I saw the look on Mama’s face, although she quickly hid it. We were having a hard enough time finding food for ourselves. Now we had three more mouths to feed. But she never said anything. We’d all just need to eat a bit less.

  I hadn’t expected to like Rhoda Magruder – I guess I’d inherited more of my grandmother’s prejudices than I liked to admit. But it didn’t take me long to realize just how wrong I was. She was funny and warmhearted and honest, jaw-droppingly blunt and pragmatic, and fiercely brave. The only thing she owned besides the filthy rags on her back was an Allen and Wheelock revolver with four precious bullets she kept with her always. She said she’d taken it off a Federal soldier she’d found dead along the road between Liberty and St Francisville. But Mahalia reckoned that was a story.

  ‘What makes you think that?’ I asked her later that night, when Rhoda Magruder and her children were tucked up for the night in Simon’s old room. We were sitting in front of the fire in the parlor with Mama; Adelaide had already gone to bed. I’d noticed she went to bed real early these days.

  ‘Because if that woman really found a dead Yankee,’ said Mahalia, ‘she’d have stripped him of everything he had – clothes, boots, haversack, knapsack. Everything. So where’s the rest of his gear?’

  ‘Maybe she sold it,’ I said.

  Mahalia shook her head. ‘Your grandma was there when the three of ’em come limping into St Francisville. They didn’t have time to sell nothin’. And they didn’t sell it on the way, neither, because you can tell they ain’t been eatin’ nothin’ but bark and whatever old berries they could find. I reckon maybe she did take that pistol off a dead Yankee, but I’d say it’s been a while.’

  ‘Why would she lie?’

  Mama looked up from working at altering Hannah’s dress to fit Rhoda’s little girl, Lisette. Lisette was maybe five and had the same wild hair as her mama. The boy, Hatch, was a couple years older and dark. ‘I’ve no doubt she has her reasons,’ said Mama.

  At her words, the room suddenly got so quiet that I could hear the ash falling on the grate. I suspected we were all thinking the same thing, and I knew it when Mahalia said, ‘You reckon that Lieutenant Beckham will be back?’

  We’d never spoken of the lieutenant’s appearance on the morning of Hannah’s funeral or the implications of the disastrous return to
the area of Virgil Slaughter’s famous racehorse. In fact, we never talked about Gabriel Dupont and his sergeant at all.

  We didn’t talk about them now.

  ‘He’ll be back,’ said Mama, and that was that.

  Lately, a new menace had appeared in the area to threaten us.

  In addition to the Federal raiding parties, the countryside was becoming increasingly infested with all sorts of dangerous men. Deserters from both armies, men avoiding conscription, paroled prisoners, ex-slaves, and bushwhackers and jayhawkers from places like Missouri and Arkansas had joined up with the kind of rough local elements that in times of peace were usually locked up in our parish jail.

  They roved the countryside, as rapacious as the Federals at their worst and engaging in the same kinds of mindless cruelties and senseless destruction. Some claimed sympathy for one side or the other, but in practice they owed allegiance to nothing and no one. Mama said she thought most of them belonged in a lunatic asylum, but as far as Adelaide was concerned, the only thing you could do with men like that was shoot them.

  I tended to agree with Adelaide. The problem was, we lived in a no man’s land between two warring armies, and all civilian authority in the state of Louisiana had virtually ceased to function. With our menfolk off fighting, we were a vulnerable population of women, children, and aging or mutilated men. Most of what few guns we’d once possessed had been seized by the Federals, leaving us essentially defenseless.

  As the tales of theft, murder, torture, and rape grew increasingly frequent, I found more and more comfort in the existence of Rhoda Magruder’s revolver – however she’d happened to come by it.

  Two days before Christmas, it got so cold the mercury dropped below zero. I don’t think it’d ever got that cold in the Felicianas before. Birds fell frozen dead out of the live oaks, and everything from lemon trees to camellias and gardenias shriveled up and turned brown. It was as if God had forgotten us.