Good Time Coming Page 6

  In an effort to banish the memory, I let my gaze rove over my fellow parishioners. These days the pews were filled almost exclusively with drawn-faced, anxious-eyed women and fidgeting children, their homemade palmetto hats, threadbare ruffles and bows punctuated only here and there by a dark-suited, sweating man of middle age or older, with a scattering of soldiers wounded at Shiloh and home on medical furlough.

  Sometimes in the past when I grew bored in church, I’d occupy myself by covertly studying my fellow parishioners and wondering what each person was praying for. But I suspected we now all prayed for the same things: for the health and safety of the men away at war, for victory, for peace. I imagined I could actually feel the fervor of all those prayers, a mighty chorus of beseechment rising up not just from our church but from every church – Episcopal and Catholic, Baptist and Methodist – scattered across Louisiana. I thought of all the churches across the South; tens of thousands of them full of millions of women and children and aging men, heads bowed and hands clasped in desperate prayer for an army of beloved sons and grandsons, husbands and fathers, brothers and nephews, cousins and friends.

  How could any merciful God not heed such heartfelt pleas, I wondered? But then I thought about those millions of other women and children, to the North, who at this very moment were likewise kneeling to assail the heavens with prayers for the safety of their loved ones, for the victory of their armies.

  For our death and destruction.

  How did God choose whose prayers he answered, I wondered? Did He flip a coin? Weigh the strength of our respective voices? They were four times as plentiful; did that mean they could out-pray us as well as out-fight us? Or did He weigh the justice of our respective causes? I had no doubt that whoever won would think so, puffed up in the certitude of their righteousness as well as in the glory of their victory and the smug conviction that God had chosen them.

  I wished I could be that sure.

  People were always saying, ‘The South must win! Our cause is just, and God is on our side.’ I’d said as much to my father, the morning he rode off toward Camp Moore and the train that would carry his battalion away to join the Army of Virginia. But he just shook his head with a strange, sad smile and said, ‘Amrie … God isn’t on anyone’s side in this or any other war. Not the abolitionists screaming for our blood, not Abe Lincoln with his grim determination to preserve the Union even if it means a million dead, not the planter’s son with his high-flown ideals of honor and chivalry and a strange notion of freedom that somehow involves the right to keep the slaves down in his quarters.’

  ‘But we’re fighting to protect our homes!’ I argued.

  He’d opened his mouth, then closed it, but I knew what he’d wanted to say because I’d heard him say it to my mother late the night before, when they thought I was up in my bed asleep. ‘I keep remembering what this Federal government did to the Choctaw and the Cherokees,’ he’d said. ‘The officers leading their armies against us now are the same ones who burned all those Indian villages and killed and mutilated their women and children.’

  My mother had said, ‘I can’t believe they would massacre us. I can’t.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re right. We are white, after all. But then, so were the French settlers in Canada, and that didn’t save them.’

  When we were little, my father used to tell Simon and me bedtime stories – not the usual children’s fare of dancing princesses and magical beanstalks, but real tales, drawn from history. He told us of William Wallace, and his courage and death in the Wars of Scottish Independence, and about Acadians like Evangeline, driven by the British and the New Englanders from their homes in French Acadia and forced to wander for decades before finding a new home here on our own bayous. I’d often wondered how they coped when they realized all their fervent prayers had failed, that their God had deserted them.

  Now I found myself staring at old Mrs Foster. She knelt beside me, her eyes closed in fervent prayer. She had six sons, five already fighting for the Confederacy. How could she ever forgive God if none of those sons came home? How could anyone survive such a loss? How could God ask anyone to survive such a loss?

  ‘Amrie.’

  My mother touched my arm and frowned at me, and I obediently bowed my head and closed my eyes in a simulation of devout prayer.

  But my questions remained unanswered.

  Nine

  Midway through the following week, word reached us that Commodore Farragut had given up his attempt to take Vicksburg. They said the town was perched so high above the Mississippi that his gunboats couldn’t hit it properly with their canons. And with the river still in flood, he couldn’t put General Williams’s army ashore, either.

  Everyone in St Francisville cheered when we heard – until we discovered that Farragut had decided to sail back down the river and occupy Baton Rouge instead.

  For the next several days, Finn and I spent the hours after school perched in a big old oak whose branches stretched out over the rushing river. The tree’s thick green leaves hid us from sight, so that we could watch unobserved as the Federal gunboats and troop transports steamed past us again, headed south this time.

  But eventually, even the sight of the strange, low-riding, ominous-looking ironclads that had been added to the Federal fleet began to pall, and we decided to go fishing for bass in the bayou for which the town of Bayou Sara was named. The late afternoon sky was clear and blue, washed clean by a brief rain shower; the air smelled of cypress and wet willow trees and mud, with the sunlight flickering down through the heavy canopy to cast shifting shadows across the algae-skimmed water. Finn had just hooked a good two-pounder when he went suddenly still, his head lifting as he turned to stare toward the south.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ he asked. Finn had the keenest hearing of anybody I knew.

  ‘No. What?’

  ‘Listen.’

  I strained to hear, and this time, I caught it: a faint, rolling boom away to the south.

  ‘Maybe it’s thunder,’ I said.

  He shook his head. ‘That’s not thunder.’

  He’d let his line go slack, so that the fish slipped its hook and darted away. But Finn didn’t care. He was already gathering our gear. ‘Come on; let’s go!’

  We raced to the top of the bluff. As we reached the crest of the hill, the wind shifted, blowing hot and dry out of the south and bringing us a sound that would soon be all too familiar to us.

  Boom. Boom. Boom.

  There was no doubt in my mind now that I wasn’t hearing thunder. ‘Finn,’ I said, unable to put my thoughts into words.

  All around us, children stopped jumping rope or chasing hoops; folks came out of their houses, bareheaded women with their hands clenched in wet aprons, joined by stooped old men with watery eyes that narrowed as they stared solemnly to the south.

  Toward Baton Rouge.

  It was early the next morning that the Widow Carlyle’s Tom came pounding at our front door.

  ‘Mizz St Pierre! Mizz St Pierre!’ he hollered, gasping from his run. ‘Come quick! It’s the widow’s cousin from Baton Rouge! Them Yankees done shelled her house just as she was fixin’ to birth a babe!’

  My mother sent Avery to hitch our big white mare Magnolia to the buggy while she scrambled into her clothes and grabbed her bag.

  ‘Can I come?’ I asked.

  She paused halfway out the door to look back at me. Behind her, the sky was gray with the coming of day, the cool air alive with a sweet chorus of birdsong. She started to shake her head. Then she stopped, as if arrested by a thought the nature of which she kept to herself.

  To my surprise, she tightened her fist around the handles of my father’s medical bag and said, ‘Yes; come. I may need you.’

  Magnolia’s big hooves ate up the short distance to town. The fragrant dawn mist that lay in wispy drifts across the road half-obscured the thick dark trunks of the oaks that flashed past us, and I could smell the fecund odor of the dew-dampened fields and the distant
bayou. On the horizon the morning sky shimmered like a flat lake of orange fire streaked with pink.

  While Avery drove, my mother hugging her bag to her chest, her thoughts focused on some inner, private place. But as we swung onto Royal Street, still deserted in the early-morning light, she turned her head and looked at me.

  ‘You’re certain you’re up to this?’

  I stared back at her, wondering if she was already regretting allowing me to accompany her. I said, ‘Do you know why I asked to come?’

  She shook her head. ‘No. Why?’

  I wasn’t sure I could explain it. It was just that, somehow, catching tadpoles and drilling with a broomstick seemed to belong to a world I no longer lived in, a world where gunboats didn’t darken our river, where men didn’t steal children’s necklaces with impunity and the sound of thunder in the distance really was thunder.

  I said, ‘It seems to me we’re all gonna need to be learnin’ how to do things we’ve never had to know before.’

  Her gaze met mine, a strange light shining in the depths of her eyes as she reached out ever so briefly to touch my hand. ‘That’s why I wanted you to come.’

  We reached the widow’s house to find an unfamiliar bay horse and buggy drawn up on the verge. The bay was splashed with mud up to its withers, its head hanging in exhaustion. But what riveted my attention was the fresh blood that smeared the buggy’s seat, floorboards, bar – everywhere I looked. I didn’t see how anybody could’ve lost all that blood and still be alive.

  My mother cast one look at it and said to Avery, ‘Take care of that poor horse,’ before disappearing into the house.

  From inside came the thin, reedy wail of a newborn babe. I tore myself away from the sight of that gruesome-looking buggy and raced up the front steps. By the time I reached the wide, central hall, my mother was already yanking off her gloves and hat, and barking orders.

  ‘Mrs Carlyle, I’ll need brandy and strips of cloth – linen, if you’ve any left, but homespun will have to do if that’s all there is. Amrie, get me hot water and a clean basin, and tell the cook to rustle up a good strong chicken bullion.’

  She paused beside the man who stood in the doorway to the widow’s spare bedroom. He looked like a storekeeper or a clerk, his bony face ashen with exhaustion and fear, his thick sandy hair in disarray, the bare sleeves of his shirt and the front of his vest stained bright red with blood. In his arms he held a baby wrapped in his own dark coat, and my mother lifted the babe from him and unwrapped it.

  The baby looked a god-awful mess to me, all streaked with blood and something white and waxy. But my mother seemed satisfied with what she saw, because she just nodded and wrapped the babe up again to hand it back to its father, saying, ‘How long ago was he born?’

  ‘Late last night, in a farm house that offered us refuge after we fled the shelling.’ His voice was a shaky whisper. ‘She just keeps bleeding and bleeding, so I brought her into town to try and get help. I—’

  But he was talking to air. My mother had already pushed past him into the bedchamber, yelling over her shoulder, ‘Amrie! The water.’

  The next hour was a blur of helping Tom tote water and ripping up the Widow Carlyle’s last set of clean linen sheets and helping my mother cope with the blood that just kept coming and coming and coming.

  ‘Why’s this happening?’ I asked at one point.

  But my mother simply shook her head.

  I shifted my gaze to the woman in the bed. She was such a tiny thing, and so young. Grace, was her name. Small-boned and fragile-looking, she had a heart-shaped face and fine flaxen hair that looked dark where it was plastered by sweat to her face.

  ‘My baby,’ she kept saying, over and over again, her head moving restlessly against the pillow. ‘Is he all right?’

  ‘Your babe’s just fine,’ my mother would say.

  But I knew from the way she said it that while the babe might be fine, the mother was not.

  After another hour, the woman was too weak to say much of anything, her eyes drifting almost closed. Her breath came in peculiar little jerks, and her skin had taken on a gray, slack quality that scared me.

  ‘Amrie!’ my mother yelled as I stared at that pale, beautiful face. ‘Get me more hot water!’

  I fled the room, my bare feet slapping the floorboards of the Widow Carlyle’s long, wide hall. By the time I made it back, my mother was simply sitting in the low chair near the empty hearth, her bloodstained hands resting palm up in her lap. The Reverend Lewis from our Episcopal church was there, and I could hear his voice droning in prayer, the familiar cadences punctuated by the sandy-haired man’s gut-wracking sobs. ‘And the Lord said, my kingdom is not of this world. Look not—’

  I stared at the Baton Rouge woman’s pale, still face. We’d worked so hard, and she’d wanted so desperately to live. She couldn’t be …

  ‘Is she dead?’ I whispered.

  My mother nodded, her lips pressed into a tight line, her throat working hard as she swallowed. ‘They killed her. All of them, North and South. With their arrogance and their refusal to compromise, with their righteous demands and their blind hatred and their God damned gunboats, they killed her as surely as if their bullets and shells and bombs had ripped her apart.’

  She sat for a long moment, her shoulders slumped with exhaustion, her gaze staring at nothing. Then she pushed up from the chair and came to use the water I’d brought to wash the dead woman’s blood from her hands.

  Ten

  That evening I sat on the top rail of the pasture fence and watched Magnolia canter across the grass, mane flying, pounding hooves kicking up chevrons of turf, the setting sun warm and golden on her back.

  My mother’s hack, a big bay gelding named Hennessey, was so old that she seldom rode him these days. But Magnolia was young, and she circled the pasture, shying in mock terror when our milk cow, Queen Bee, raised her head. Then she trotted up to thrust her big white head against my chest and nuzzle my pockets for carrots. I wrapped my arms around her neck and pressed my face against her warm silky hide.

  My mother and Mahalia were taking down a load of washing from the lines strung near the laundry, and I could hear occasional snatches of their conversation carried on the soft evening breeze.

  ‘I shouldn’t have taken her with me,’ my mother said to Mahalia. ‘I’m afraid the experience was just too …’ She paused, as if searching for the right word. ‘… raw for her.’

  The words surprised me, for my mother rarely questioned her own judgment about anything. Mine, yes; her own, no.

  Then I heard Mahalia say, ‘She’s tougher than you give her credit for. And she’s gonna need to be a whole lot tougher soon enough. I reckon she’ll be seein’ a heap worse before this dreadful war is over.’

  The breeze gusted up, rustling the leaves of a nearly willow, so that my mother’s reply was lost to me. But it was Mahalia’s words that continued to haunt me. I’d noticed no one ever talked about ‘the war’ anymore. It was always ‘this dreadful war’ or ‘this cruel war’ or, with increasing frequency, ‘this damned war’ – used even by folks who up until six months ago had probably never said such a thing in their lives.

  We’d heard by now what had happened in Baton Rouge. It seems an officer from one of the Federal gunboats had bundled up his dirty laundry and ordered himself rowed ashore to the shacks along the riverfront inhabited by some colored laundresses. The problem was, four young hotheads who’d recently joined the guerrillas happened to be down there at the same time. They took some potshots at the boat, wounding the officer and a couple of the seamen at the oars. They’d then skedaddled, no doubt laughing uproariously and well-pleased with themselves for what they’d done.

  Commodore Farragut responded to the incident by ordering his gunboats to open fire on the city without warning.

  He pulverized the shacks along the river and, once those were in flames, he turned his guns on the upper streets of the city.

  Women and children fled scre
aming from their homes as shells whistled and bombs burst, drowning out the wails of small, terrified children separated from their mothers in the panic and the pitiful cries of those too old or sick to save themselves. Even after the shelling ceased, the terrified inhabitants spent the night in the surrounding woods and swamps, unsure of what might happen next.

  In the end, no one knew how many had died. At least two women had been killed along the riverfront, but it was probably more. Several children were said to have drowned, and some old folks’ hearts gave out in the panic. A babe born that night in the woods had died within hours, and some folks were so badly bit by snakes and mosquitoes it was doubtful they’d survive. I wondered if Grace’s name would be added to the list of the shelling’s innocent victims.

  That was before I realized that no one on either side was bothering to keep count of the dead.

  It was one afternoon a few days later when my mother asked me to go with her to Locust Grove plantation, where a couple of babies in the quarters were sick with what might be chickenpox.

  I tried to wiggle out of it, saying, ‘Finn and I were gonna make gigs so we could go gigging frogs.’

  But my mother said, ‘I’d like you come, honey. There’s something I want you to see.’