Good Time Coming Page 37

  I’d seen Gabriel Dupont in my dreams many times since that fateful June day. Sometimes he came to me looking much as he had the morning I’d killed him, his cheeks flushed with heat, the wool of his uniform sticky and dark with his blood, his dead eyes glittering with an undying rage and a hellish thirst for revenge. At other times, the hands he raised to me were ghastly things, their swamp-stained bones held together more by skeins of algae and wisps of Spanish moss than by skin and sinew. But in my dreams his hair was always shining and gold, his face whole and firm and unmarred by mud or time or the creatures of the earth.

  I had never imagined him like this, a muddy wet brown lump of decaying flesh and rotting wool. Someone had obviously poured buckets of water over the corpses’ heads, trying to wash away the worst of the muck, because I could see clumps of Gabriel Dupont’s golden hair adhering to what few patches of scalp still clung to one of the brown-stained skulls.

  A chorus of horrified gasps arose from the assembled townspeople. Someone screamed, and several children began to cry, their mothers hurriedly pressing their little ones’ faces against their skirts.

  ‘You see before you the sad remains of two brave, loyal men,’ intoned Colonel O’Keefe as the crowd shifted restlessly, some surging forward to get a better look at the dead men, others trying to put distance between themselves and the grisly sight. The movement wrenched me away from my mother’s side. I looked frantically around and spotted Mahalia standing with some of the other gens de couleur libres near the street and clutching Althea to her. Her stark, frightened gaze met mine.

  ‘Brave, loyal men,’ the colonel was saying in stentorian tones, ‘laid low in the prime of life by the foul hand of murder. Two women did this. Two women and a boy. They were seen while vainly endeavoring to conceal the evidence of their foul deed in the swamps below your city. Seen, but unfortunately not identified.’ He let his gaze drift over his now silent audience. ‘Yet these men must and will be avenged.’

  He drew an ornately engraved gold watch from his pocket and held it up. ‘You have fifteen minutes to surrender these men’s murderers to me. If not, my men will destroy your town. By the time we are finished, there will be not a house unburned, not a tree standing, not a dog or blade of grass alive.’ He paused to let his words sink in. ‘Fifteen minutes.’

  No one doubted him. The Federals had wrecked this kind of vengeance on hapless civilian populations over and over again across the South. Someone began to cry, a quiet, helpless sobbing that sounded unnaturally loud in the awful silence. I felt my stomach seize up with a vicious ferocity that left me panting. I was trembling, the brilliant intensity of the sunlight hurting my eyes. I knew I had to say something, to own up to what I had done and stop what was about to happen. But I felt frozen, unable to speak, unable to move.

  Say something, I told myself. You have to say something!

  Colonel O’Keefe made a show of lifting his watch again to flick open the case.

  Then my mother’s voice rang out loud and clear. ‘I did it.’

  She pushed her way forward, the crowd falling aside to let her through. She didn’t even look at me as she passed. At the base of the steps she paused, her features stark and strained with emotion, her head held high, her chest visibly jerking with the agitation of her breathing. ‘I did it. I killed them, and my sister Emma and her child helped bury them. But you’ll need to wreck your vengeance on me alone, because they’re both dead now.’

  A loud murmur rose up from the crowd, a hum of disbelief and protest. But there was something else there too, something I recognized as relief tinged with guilt and embarrassment, that my mother had had the courage to sacrifice herself for them while they stood silent. I suspect no one actually believed she’d had anything to do with the death of those two men.

  And the truth was, she hadn’t killed them. Mahalia and I had, and I couldn’t let my mother take the blame for something I had done.

  ‘No!’ I cried, struggling to work my way forward through the crowd. ‘She’s only saying that to protect me. I killed them. She had nothing to do with it. Arrest me.’

  The colonel nodded to the officer beside him, and for the first time I realized that I knew him: it was Luke Beckham, the lieutenant who had sparred with my mother with a strange familiarity that both baffled and disturbed me.

  As Beckham hesitated, I heard Amelia Ferguson shout from somewhere near the street, ‘Don’t listen to them. It was me. I did it. My Micajah and I killed them when he was home on leave last year. There wasn’t anybody else but us.’

  A faint titter of disbelief swept through the ring of watching blue-coated soldiers.

  ‘Now, now,’ said Margaret Mason, stepping forward. ‘That’s very kind of y’all to be trying to protect me, but I can’t let you take responsibility for what I did. My old father-in-law and I killed them, not long before he died.’

  I felt the prick of tears sting my eyes and burn the bridge of my nose. I wanted to scream, No; don’t do this! You don’t understand; we’re not being noble. We’re just taking responsibility for what we actually did. Don’t put yourselves in danger to save us!

  ‘Nah,’ said Cyrus Pringle, moving to stand beside Miss Margaret. ‘Don’t believe any of them. It was me. Don’t know who told y’all it were a woman. Ain’t nobody ever mistook me for a woman before.’

  ‘Shut yer trap, Cyrus,’ shouted Maisie Sawyer. ‘I did it, and you know it.’

  My mother’s gaze met mine, her eyes glistening as, one by one, the women with whom we had starved and mourned, laughed and cried through all the dark years of this wretched war now stepped forward to take our guilt as their own.

  ‘I did it.’

  ‘No; I did it.’

  ‘It was me.’

  ‘Me!’

  I watched the colonel’s flush of satisfaction fade to chagrin and bafflement before shifting slowly to rage. And I thought, He’s going to burn the whole town anyway. With everyone taking responsibility, what other choice does he have?

  Then Hilda Meyers pushed her way forward, her iron-gray head towering over almost everyone else, her homely, uncompromising features set in scornful lines. ‘They all lie, of course,’ she said, her accent unusually thick and guttural.

  Everyone fell silent, the only sound the wail of a babe quickly hushed.

  ‘You dummkopf,’ she said, ‘what alternative have you left them? They can either lie, or vatch their town burn.’ She nodded to the rotting corpses in the wagon. ‘You describe these schmucks as brave and loyal. But they weren’t. The men whose deaths you seek to avenge were wystlings who brutalized the women of this parish for months. I almost said, vhile you turned a blind eye, but the truth is, you knew vhat they were doing all along. You knew, and you approved of it. For you, vomen are as much the traditional spoils of var as mules and pianos. “Bounty and Beauty” is your battle cry, yes? And yet because our vomen’s shame has traditionally kept us silent, you think your own mothers, vives, and daughters vill never come to know vhat you have done here. Vell, I promise you that if you burn this town, I vill not keep silent. I am too old to vorry about false notions of honor or to believe all the foolish myths ve use to convince ourselves that var is something grand rather than a simple act of collective madness. You burn this town, and I vill tell the vorld of your licentiousness. The Fourth Visconsin vill be as infamous as the Tribe of Benjamin after the outrage of Gibeah.’

  ‘Madam,’ blustered the colonel, ‘I will not stand here and listen to your lies and threats.’

  I saw Lieutenant Beckham lean forward to say to him quietly, ‘Excuse me, sir, but it seems to me that we do not know for certain that the information we received was entirely accurate. I mean, it’s more than a bit unlikely, wouldn’t you say, that a couple of women could murder two armed men and drag their bodies into a swamp? Perhaps the contraband who claims to have seen it all is actually the man we’re after.’

  ‘But he’s long gone,’ muttered the colonel in a furious aside to his aide. ‘What
do you suggest I tell the governor?’

  ‘Coulda been bushwhackers,’ shouted Castile from the back of the crowd. ‘They been plaguing us something fierce for a while now.’

  We all exchanged glances, but nobody said a word. The bushwhackers hadn’t really operated in our area until after the fall of Vicksburg and Port Hudson. But hopefully this pompous, puffed-up colonel didn’t know that.

  Colonel O’Keefe smoothed one splayed thumb and forefinger down over his carefully waxed blond mustache. ‘Bushwhackers, you say?’

  ‘Sounds reasonable, sir,’ said the lieutenant.

  The colonel nodded thoughtfully, obviously already plotting how he could present the corpses of some random bushwhackers as the murderers of his governor’s nephew.

  For one telling moment, I saw Lieutenant Beckham’s gaze shift to meet my mother’s. And I thought, He knows. He knows or at least suspects the truth about us. Then he looked away, and I told myself it was an illusion, a creation of my own guilty conscience.

  The colonel cleared his throat and raised his voice again. ‘Your cooperation in helping to solve this reprehensible affair has won your town a reprieve. But let this be a lesson to you: the vengeance of the United States is as swift and awful as that of the Lord. Suffer not the handmaidens of the devil to dwell amongst you, nor the temptations of sin to entice you into wickedness.’

  If that was from the Bible, I didn’t recognize it. Maybe it was just meant to sound biblical. All I knew was that I was sick of men quoting the Bible and using God to justify whatever loathsome actions their greed and hatred motivated.

  Someone shouted, ‘Mount up, men!’

  We watched in silence while the colonel and his men turned their horses and filed up Ferdinand Street. A breeze gusted up, bringing us the smell of the river and swelling the branches of the live oaks in the churchyard against the sky.

  The wagon was the last to pass, its big, iron-rimmed wheels bouncing and clattering over the ruts to rattle the swamp-stained bones of the men who lay within.

  Fifty-Two

  The incident was never discussed – at least not openly – by those of us who lived through it. The emotions it provoked were too raw and intense: fear and gratitude, heroism and cowardice, all wrapped up in a sense of unity and community so rare and beautiful that it sometimes takes my breath, still, to think of it. We simply tucked it away into our collective memory and went on with our lives.

  A couple of days later, I talked myself into walking down Ferdinand Street to Hilda Meyers’ emporium. She did most of her trade from under the counter these days, selling goods that came through speculators and were bought by those few amongst us who still had money to spend and who didn’t know – or pretended not to know – their origins.

  She was busy straightening some boxes on a shelf over her head when I walked in. But at the sound of my tread, she turned. ‘Vhat are you doing here?’ she demanded gruffly.

  My throat felt like I had a fishbone stuck in it, so that I had to work to push my words out. ‘I came to say I’m sorry.’

  A shadow of surprise mixed with something else wafted across her lumpy, unattractive features. ‘Sorry? Vhat for?’

  ‘For all those years of tormenting you. For thinking you were a witch and … and worse.’

  The flesh beside her small dark eyes crinkled with what might have been amusement. ‘I am a vitch. I have a broomstick, and I have been known to chase naughty children on Krampusnacht and whip them.’

  I huffed a soft laugh and turned to go.

  She stopped me, saying, ‘Vhat do you hear of the thatch gallows?’

  I swung to face her again. ‘You mean, Finn? They say he’s with Scott now.’

  She nodded. ‘I always like that boy. He has Tapferkeit.’

  I contemplated her words all the way home. It was just one more revelation to me of the extent to which the realities of our world and the people in it can differ from our own imperfect perceptions of them.

  I turned fourteen that summer, while the Federals burned and pillaged their way up and down the state of Louisiana.

  By that point, most folks knew the end was near; it was just a matter of when. Things had reached such a pass that the government in Richmond decided to free the South’s slaves and arm them to fight the Federals.

  But it was all too late.

  That fall, Trudi Easton announced she was going to teach school and she didn’t care if her husband approved of it or not. I volunteered to help her with the little ones and also taught French to some of the older girls. There weren’t any older boys. By that time, every able-bodied male between fifteen and fifty was off fighting. And dying.

  ‘You ought to consider becoming a teacher,’ Miss Trudi said to me one afternoon after we’d let the children go for the day. ‘You’ve a gift for it.’

  I looked up from straightening the crude benches – the Federals had burned our desks on one of their raids – and shook my head. ‘I want to be a doctor. A licensed doctor.’

  I thought she might be scandalized at the suggestion that women ought to be licensed to practice medicine, just like men. Instead, a wistfulness pulled at her features that made me wonder what dreams she’d once cherished that the prejudices and assumptions of our age had killed. Then she smiled and said, ‘If any woman can do it, Amrie, you can.’

  In November, the Federals overran and burned Camp Moore. They also pulled up the more than eight hundred wooden grave markers in the cemetery there and burned them, too. I thought it was just about the lowest thing I’d ever heard of an army doing.

  Then General Sherman started his march to the sea.

  Finn O’Reilly never came back to St Francisville. I saw him only once more, in the fall of 1864, when a strong force of Federal cavalry landed at Bayou Sara and skirmished with Colonel Scott’s First Louisiana Cavalry all the way up to Woodville and back.

  I was sitting beside Simon’s grave when the Confederates came galloping through town. I ran to the churchyard gate, reaching the street just in time to see a familiar figure mounted on a big, rangy roan charging down Ferdinand Street.

  ‘Finn!’

  He reined in hard, his horse jibing at the bit as he wheeled. For one intense moment, his gaze met mine. In the year or more since I’d seen him, he’d grown tall and lean, not a boy any longer but a man, with a piercing green gaze and the shadow of a beard darkening his hard jaw.

  He raised his hand to his hat in a jaunty salute, his lips curling in a bittersweet smile. Then someone shouted at him, and he touched his spurs to his horse’s flanks and was gone.

  The end came with a curiously mingled sense of disbelief and inevitability. Impossible not to feel relief that the moment we’d known was coming for so long had finally arrived. But it had been more than six months since we’d heard any news of Papa, and it was hard to exalt at the thought of his homecoming when we weren’t even sure if he was still alive.

  Rhoda Magruder and her children left us in mid-April and headed back up to Mississippi in anticipation of finding her husband there. Uncle Tate wrote that he’d be coming just as soon as he was well enough to travel. But as April turned to May, and more and more shattered, ruined men stumbled home, our fears about Papa became a dread that we refused to acknowledge even to ourselves, let alone to each other.

  That’s when I took to bargaining with God again. At night, I’d stand at my dormer window staring out over the empty, moonlit drive, and pray. Please, God; I promise I won’t question your wisdom or goodness ever again. I’ll try to simply find peace and strength in your divine existence. Only, let Papa come home.

  Please?

  He came to us in the gloaming of the day, when the jasmine splashed a riot of snowy blossoms across the crumbling brick foundation of the cistern, and the mockingbirds sang gloriously from the spreading limbs of the live oaks lining the drive.

  Mama and I were trying to put up a new rail fence around the vegetable garden when the sound of tired hoof beats brought our heads up. I s
aw her straighten slowly, one hand coming up to push the loose hair off her forehead as she turned toward the lane. The setting sun spilled its last golden light across the fields, and a breeze was blowing up warm and sweet from the river.

  Horses and mules had become more common in the area now that the armies were disbanding and men were making their way homeward, some to be welcomed with joy, others to find only blackened, weed-chocked walls and sunken graves. I told myself it could be anyone. But I couldn’t stop the leap of hope that thrummed through me.

  And then I saw him, a dusty, too-thin figure urging a familiar chestnut into a lope as he swung in through our gate.

  ‘Anton?’ whispered Mama, as if afraid to believe what she was seeing, afraid of the bitterness of disappointment if she were wrong.

  And then she was running, hands fisting up her rough homespun skirts, knees pumping high. ‘Anton!’

  He reined in sharply, his head turning toward the sound. I saw the wonder that spilled across his face, the joy that was almost palpable. He threw himself off his horse to catch my mother in his arms and lift her up, her momentum spinning them around and around. His laughter intermingled with hers, and she wrapped her arms around his neck and hugged him with a fierceness that caused my own step to falter. Theirs was an intensely intimate moment, and I was an intruder witnessing it.

  Then he looked over and saw me.

  ‘Good God,’ he said in wonder. ‘Amrie? Is that you?’

  I’d been ten when he left, a child in pinafores and pigtails. I was nearly fifteen now, my childhood left far behind me.

  ‘Papa.’ I felt shy, embarrassed, unsure of anything. He was different from the father I remembered. Not simply older, but harder, rougher, with a brittle edge that hadn’t been there before. I found myself wondering what he saw when he looked at us. Had he expected us to be the same?

  And I knew, then, that he would never grasp the true horror, desperation, or fear of the war we had lived, just as we would never fully understand the things he had seen or the things he had done. The last four years had changed us all, each according to our own nature, in some ways for the better and, inevitably, in other ways for the worse.