Good Time Coming Page 5

  He laughed out loud, his amusement crinkling the skin beside his eyes into fan-like creases. But all he said was: ‘She’s had more than her fair share of sorrows.’

  ‘Huh. She don’t strike me as sorrowful; she’s just mean.’ I watched a heavy freight wagon labor up the street, its massive high wheels plowing deep ruts in the mud. ‘What’s a thatch-gallows?’

  ‘A low-down no-account.’ He nodded toward the emporium. ‘She call you that?’

  I shook my head. ‘Finn.’

  He laughed again. ‘Well, she don’t like Finn much, that’s fer sure.’

  Then his eyes went out of focus, and I realized he was looking behind me. Turning, I saw two men coming out of the door of Miss Nell’s eatery. The man in the lead was tall and lean, his long beard unkempt, his clothes of simple homespun. Across the width of the rutted street, his gaze met mine.

  Then he looked away.

  I said to Castile, my voice low, ‘See that man – the one with the mahogany-colored beard? You know who he is?’

  ‘Reckon I do, seein’ as how he keeps his horse wit me. Name’s Gallagher; Sean Gallagher. He come down the river a few weeks back. Stayin’ over Mr Gantry’s, he is.’

  Devon Gantry ran Bayou Sara’s post office, stage station, and telegraph office. Several years ago he had moved with his new wife and baby girl into a neat white house with green ventilated shutters up in St Francisville, and let out the rooms over his offices. The significance of the association between the two men would not occur to me until later, although I suspect Castile had already figured it out.

  The other man with Gallagher moved forward now to stand beside him, a man wearing a short gray Confederate jacket, kepi cap, and sturdy trousers. Built thick through the chest and shoulders, he had a broad face with a thick black mustache and small, widely set eyes the translucent gray color of fish scales.

  I didn’t need to ask Castile about the second man, for I recognized him the instant I got a good look at him. His name was Hiram Tucker, and he and his brother Rufus ran a sawmill and brick factory on the south side of town. Once, late last summer, he’d called my mother out to the mill to attend an injured worker. Hiram claimed the man had fallen onto a pile of logs. But my mother didn’t believe him. She was convinced somebody had taken a board to the man and beat him half to death with it. She told Hiram to his face that there was a special place in hell for anyone who abused those under his power.

  Hiram looked at her through slitted eyes, his jaw tight, and said, ‘You think I’d risk killin’ a man I paid twelve hundred dollars fer? If I got somethin’ really dangerous needs doin’, I hire me some Irishman fer a dollar a day. If he gets kilt, there’s always more where he come from, and if he gets his back broke, it ain’t none of my affair. I tell you, that stupid nigger fell.’

  ‘I’ve seen the way you treat your dogs and your horses,’ said my mother, climbing into her buggy. ‘That tells me all I need to know.’ And then she’d given her horse the office to start, the buggy jerking forward to leave the sawmill owner standing in the middle of the road, his hands clenched into fists at his sides, his hat pulled low as he watched her drive away.

  The injured workman survived, although he always held his left arm kinda funny. He never would talk about how he got hurt.

  But there was something about the look in Hiram Tucker’s eyes now, as he stared at me from across the street, that told me he still hadn’t forgiven my mother for her unvarnished expression of contempt. Instead, he’d hugged his indignation and sense of grievance to himself, nurturing and feeding it until it had grown into something vile and dangerous.

  And I realized now with a chill that the man’s burning malevolence also extended to me.

  Seven

  Leaving Castile’s livery, I turned toward the steep street that ran up the face of the bluff.

  Since yesterday’s appearance of the Federal fleet, a palpable air of foreboding had descended on both Bayou Sara and St Francisville, an eerie kind of tension that reminded me of the breathless hours that can come just before the fierce winds and deadly rains of a hurricane.

  As I walked, I kept having to detour around huddled bunches of women and aging men. They gathered together outside the telegraph station, on street corners, at garden gates, some arguing heatedly, others simply standing with shoulders hunched, eyes darting this way and that as they waited desperately for word of what was happening just up the river at Vicksburg.

  Like St Francisville, the city of Vicksburg sat high on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi. But Vicksburg lay at a strategic hairpin bend of the river and was well fortified. If the Federals wanted control of the Mississippi, they were going to have to take Vicksburg. So the question on everyone’s mind was: would the city resist? Or would Vicksburg simply surrender, the way New Orleans had?

  ‘The situation is entirely different,’ I heard Mr Marks insisting. ‘Vicksburg is defensible; New Orleans was not. Why, when New Orleans fell, the river was so high the Federal gunboats were actually looking down on the city. To have refused to surrender would have been an act of suicide!’

  Jane Gastrell, the bony, pinch-faced woman who ran the hardware store now that her husband Jack had gone off to war, twitched and sputtered with a corrosive combination of outrage and stung nationalistic pride. ‘Did the three hundred Spartans surrender at Thermopylae? No, they did not! They fought to the death. Would you suggest that Southerners are made of lesser stuff? Well, let me tell you right now, Mr Marks, we are not! The people of New Orleans should have burned their city themselves, the same way the Russians fired Moscow rather than let it fall to Napoleon. That’s what proper Southerners would have done. If you ask me, the problem is all those Irish and Germans in the city these days.’

  I had to force myself to keep walking, because what I really wanted to do was stop and kick Jane Gastrell in the shins. I’d heard that kind of talk before and I could never understand it. My grand-mère lived in New Orleans. Just the thought of her high-ceilinged, pastel-colored house with its dark green slatted shutters and honeysuckle-draped iron balconies going up in flames was enough to make my chest hurt. Why would anyone want to see such a beautiful city destroyed? Whether the Federals had moved into a bustling city or a smoking ruin, they’d still be there. So what would’ve been the point? The only difference would’ve been a hundred thousand or so people without homes – and probably a good many of them dead, too. No one ever seemed to think about what happened to those residents of Moscow who were too old or sick or young to run away from the flames. I figured they’d died; that’s what happened to them, along with a heap of their cats and dogs and other hapless creatures. And now our fireside braves were advocating the same fiery end for Vicksburg.

  My Aunt Em and Cousin Hannah lived in Vicksburg.

  Feeling suddenly tired and oddly alone, I climbed the bluff and went home.

  I spent what was left of the day helping Mahalia weed the vegetable garden. The morning’s light rain had left the earth soft and crumbly, the sky an opaque white with high clouds, the breeze warm and smelling of freshly turned soil and the animals grazing in the nearby pasture.

  I did not tell my mother about seeing the mahogany-bearded man with Hiram Tucker, just as I had kept silent about the infantry captain who stole my necklace. As I pulled out pokeweed and chopped at the chickweed that threatened to choke our rows of corn and beans, melons and potatoes, I found myself wondering at my new, uncharacteristic reluctance to share the worrisome details of my life with the people I loved. I hadn’t even told Finn about the drowned Federal found in Thompson’s Creek and the dangerous speculation that the intended recipient of his message was my own mother.

  Why?

  I had a feeling the answer was not one I cared to name.

  Despite the cloud cover, the afternoon was hot, and I had to keep stopping to wipe the sweat out of my eyes with one crooked arm. We’d always had a vegetable garden to supply our own needs. But when talk of secession heated up after the ele
ction, my mother decided to triple our garden’s size, ordering seeds for all sorts of stuff we didn’t normally bother growing for ourselves. And at the end of the season, she’d carefully saved seeds from our harvest, because seeds, like so much else in the South, came from the North and disappeared when the Federal blockade slammed down on us.

  At the same time she expanded the vegetable garden, my mother also widened the patch of medicinal herbs she grew behind a picket fence near the front gate, everything from pennyroyal and feverfew to wormwood and angelica and peppermint. This was a garden she always tended herself, and when Simon and I were little, we were under strict, don’t-even-think-about-disobeying-me instructions never to touch anything that grew there.

  Simon was never interested anyway. But I was. I found the scraggly, wild-looking, yet mysteriously powerful plants endlessly fascinating, and I listened with rare attention as my mother patiently taught me their names and histories and reputed properties. I knew that pennyroyal could keep away ants and kill a baby growing inside a woman – or the woman herself, if she ingested too much of it. I knew that mint helped a bad stomach, and that a salve made of arnica soothed aching muscles. But none of my mother’s plants intrigued me more than the long-stemmed, brightly hued poppies.

  I could see them swaying gracefully in the breeze that evening when I left the vegetable garden and cut toward the front gate with Checkers trotting happily at my heels. The sun was sinking low in the west, throwing long shadows that stretched before us across the grass. The poppies were a recent addition to the herb patch. My mother had planted them with the first talk of war and she tended them with a careful vigilance that underlined in a way nothing else could how valuable they were. For from the unripe seed heads formed by these exuberant, carefree-looking flowers came opium, with its magical ability to take away pain and melancholia – and life itself.

  When I reached the picket fence around the garden, I could see her moving along the rows of poppies, methodically scoring the big, unripe seedpods. With each slice, a milky white resin oozed out like thick tears that would dry overnight into golden-brown globs of opium.

  For the past year, she had been sending her balls of raw opium to New Orleans, where it was turned into the morphine needed so badly by the sick, maimed, and dying soldiers who overflowed our military hospitals. But with the fall of the city, who would take it now?

  I paused with one elbow looped over the picket gate, quiet for a time as I watched her move on to the next fat seed head. Then I said, ‘What’s the point of collecting the opium when you can’t send it to New Orleans anymore?’

  She glanced over at me before refocusing her attention on the poppy head, slicing it carefully so as not to go too deep. ‘Morphine works better than raw opium at deadening pain. But even raw opium is better than nothing, and they need it to help control the dysentery over at Camp Moore.’

  I’d heard that folks up North had the idea that when New Orleans fell, Louisiana fell. But the truth was, the Federal presence in our state was limited only to New Orleans and to the gunboats on the river. They’d stopped briefly at our capital, Baton Rouge. But they’d only stayed long enough to tear down the Confederate flag and run up their own. Then they’d continued on up the river to Vicksburg without leaving even a squadron of troops.

  ‘Although this isn’t just for Camp Moore,’ she said, moving on to the next plant. ‘We’re going to need it, too.’

  ‘Us?’ I echoed, not understanding. ‘We’re not sick.’

  ‘I meant “we” as in the people of St Francisville and Bayou Sara. Too many of my medicines are running low already, and I don’t see this war ending any time soon.’

  With the firing on Fort Sumter, Lincoln had placed an embargo on all medical supplies, along with the myriad of other things we normally imported. Lots of folks claimed the Federal blockade was the first real act of war between our two nations. But that was a nicety that didn’t concern my mother overly much. What riled her was its effects. As I watched her lips tighten with anger, I knew exactly what was coming.

  She said, ‘Isn’t it enough to stop the importation of food and necessary supplies? What kind of inhuman monsters deny medicines to sick women and children, to the old and the dying? What kind of twisted moral contortions could ever justify that? How do they sleep at night? By blaming us? Do they really think God believes the comfortable lies they tell themselves?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I might have been only eleven, but I’d already figured out that one.

  She looked up again, and I knew by the faint widening of her eyes that she had been speaking as much to herself as to me. Then her gaze narrowed and she said, ‘What happened to your cross, Amrie?’

  I felt my cheeks flame for reasons I couldn’t even begin to explain. ‘I lost it when I was playin’ with Finn.’

  I thought she might scold me for my carelessness, but she only said, ‘I’m sorry, honey. I know how much it meant to you.’

  I glanced away, my vision of the dark, spreading branches of the oaks and their streamers of gray, wind-ruffled moss suddenly blurred by an unexpected uprush of tears that I struggled to keep back. The heat had gone out of the day, the air sweetening with the smell of the coming dew and the night-blooming flowers just beginning to open as the horizon turned pink.

  And I found myself wondering, again, why I felt the need to hug the truth to myself, as if I had somehow invited the theft by running to the levee to watch the dark presence of the Federal fleet steaming into our quiet world.

  Eight

  Within a few days, the news came singing over the telegraph wires: Vicksburg hadn’t surrendered. Its mayor had answered Commodore Farragut’s threatening demands with a tersely worded message of defiance.

  But the Federal fleet didn’t take no for an answer. They immediately opened fire on the crowded city, indiscriminately hurling bombs and shells toward homes and churches, schools and hospitals, screaming women and frightened children. So the new question became: how long could Vicksburg hold out? We understood only too well that if the Mississippi fell under Federal control, no town along the river would be safe.

  What we did not yet realize was that the vestiges of safety to which we still clutched were only an illusion.

  That Sunday, the long rows of pews in Grace Episcopal Church were crowded.

  The big, red-brick church was far grander than the earlier wooden structure it had recently replaced, with rows of narrow, high-pointed windows and a massive organ that took up nearly all of one transept. It was so new it still smelled faintly of paint and plaster and linseed oil, and folks in town were enormously proud of it.

  I’d noticed the war was having an uneven effect on people’s churchgoing habits. There were some, like old Mr Sprague, who lost his faith when his twin sons, Adrian and Daniel, fell together on the battlefield of Manassas just a week before their eighteenth birthday. But most folks clung to their religion the way a half-drowned raccoon hangs onto a log in the swirling waters of a raging flood. It was the one thing keeping them afloat, and they wondered aloud how Sprague got through his days.

  My own faith in God was something I’d never questioned. It was taught to us in Sunday school the same way spelling and the times tables were hammered into us by Horst Fischer during the week: by rote, and with the steely expectation that we would accept what we were told.

  Like my father and all the St Pierres, much of New Orleans and south Louisiana was still French and Catholic – or, at least, Irish and German and Catholic. But St Francisville and the rest of West Feliciana Parish had been heavily settled by Anglo-Americans, many of them from New England, which was why the biggest church in town was Episcopal. We didn’t even have a Catholic priest in the area; he came over from Clinton and Jackson every few weeks to say mass in the big room over the market building.

  I’d never been to one of those masses. But whenever I visited Grand-mère on the rue Sainte-Anne not far from St Louis Cathedral in New Orleans, she’d take me with her to mass.
I accepted the differences between the two churches with no sense of incongruity, for both had always been a part of my life. No one had ever asked me to choose between my parents’ religions. To my Grandmother Adelaide’s disgust, my mother and father had long ago agreed to expose their children to both Catholicism and the Episcopal Church, and let us decide when we came of age.

  I sometimes wondered how that affected my brother, Simon, who had died before he’d had a chance to make his selection. I asked my mother, once, if she thought God held Simon’s indecision against him, or if his early death had actually worked in his favor, since he might have chosen wrong if he had lived long enough. She’d given me a funny look, then said she didn’t think God cared overly much about what tenets people claimed to believe; what mattered was the way they behaved and what was in their hearts. I thought at the time she hadn’t answered my question, but I later realized that she had.

  For reasons she’d never particularized, Mama was usually careful to choose a pew at the back of the church, unlike Grand-mère, who liked to sit as close to the altar as she could, her head tilted back in rapt attention to the mass, the jet black beads of her rosary moving silently through her gnarled, boney fingers.

  I found myself thinking about Grand-mère as Mama and I took our usual seat near the door, and I missed her with a sudden fierceness that was part selfish need and part nagging worry. She was a tiny woman, Grand-mère, about my height and wispy thin, with a thick head of white hair and sharp black eyes and an elegant bone structure she had bequeathed to her son but not, alas, to me. She’d always been a wonder to me. My other grandmother, Adelaide Dunbar, and, to a lesser extent, my mother herself, were both undemonstrative and endlessly critical. But Grand-mère was effusive and unabashedly emotional, a refuge of lavender-scented hugs and kisses and exuberant laughter.

  In the weeks that had now passed since the fall of New Orleans, we’d heard no word from Grand-mère, for the coming of the Federals had utterly severed our normal mail services. We didn’t know if she was well, or if she was even still alive. It was as if an iron cordon had slammed down around New Orleans, separating parents from children, husbands from wives, and imposing a silence that weighed heavily on anyone with loved ones in the occupied city. Soon, the heat of the summer would be upon us, when those who could normally fled the city to escape the yellow fever epidemics that all too often raged as the temperature climbed. Usually Grand-mère would spend the summer months with the family of her daughter, my Aunt Claire, in Ascension Parish. But this year, Grand-mère was trapped; a seventy-five-year-old widow living alone with only a couple of aged servants, at the mercy of men like the golden-haired infantry captain whose image floated before me unbidden as I opened my prayer book.