Good Time Coming Page 7

  And so I went.

  Locust Grove lay a few miles to the east of St Francisville. We drove through sun-warmed, gently rolling hills cut by shady hollows thick with old growth pine, oak, and persimmons. The sky overhead was a deep, heart-rending blue arching over the vast fields of cotton, sugar cane, and corn that stretched out on either side of the road. My mother handled the reins herself, her gaze fixed straight ahead, her attention already focused on the sick she was going to see. The air was hot and dry, the dust raised by Magnolia’s hooves and the rattling wheels of our buggy drifting behind us to catch the sunlight that filtered down through the branches of the oaks lining the road.

  Locust Grove was the home of Mrs Anna Davis Smith, a formidable old widow who’d managed the plantation since the death of her husband some thirty years before. But we didn’t drive up to the big house, a red-brick, federal-style structure that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the hills of Vermont or New Hampshire. Instead, my mother skirted the rambling gardens of camellias and azaleas, sweet olives and gardenias, and headed straight to the neat rows of whitewashed houses that faced each other across a wide swath of Bermuda grass, each with its own garden, its own hogs and chickens, and an occasional goat or two.

  Some of the hands were already coming in from the fields, their voices and laughter and the spicy aroma of simmering gumbo and etouffée spilling from the houses’ open doors. Once, when I was younger, after a visit to my Grandmother Adelaide’s plantation in Livingston Parish, I’d remarked to my mother that the house servants and field hands I’d seen there seemed happy enough. She’d looked at me with that withering scorn I’d learned to dread and said, ‘What do you expect them to do, Amrie? Sit around all day and weep and wail about their condition? They’re people, just trying to live their lives as best they can, like anybody else. The fact that they can laugh and sing and dance and smile doesn’t mean they’re contented not being free; it just means they’re people.’

  The big building that served as the quarter’s nursery stood at the end of one of the rows, its long windows thrown open to catch the breeze. Here babies slept in cradles and the youngest children of the quarters played beneath the watchful eyes of two, aged woman. As we pulled up before the nursery’s wide gallery, I could see one of the mammies, her ebony skin spotted with age, sitting in a rocker with a squalling infant in her arms.

  ‘Thank the Lord,’ she said, pushing to her feet. She was a big woman, her arms flabby with fat, her hips swelling wide beneath the calico of her dress. ‘I done give this poor babe snakeroot and saffron tea, but there ain’t nothin’ that’ll quiet her. Burnin’ up, she is.’

  I watched my mother go to take the sick, feverish child in her arms and disappear into the nursery’s large, open room.

  I followed her, wondering why my mother had been so anxious for me to accompany her here. I’d had the chickenpox years before, right after I started school, so I was in no danger myself. But I didn’t see how I could be of much use to her, and she didn’t ask for my help, but simply moved through the children with an air of gentle tenderness that always surprised me, for she was not a particularly tender woman.

  She checked each child in turn, measuring out packets of dried herbs and speaking to the mothers as they came to collect their offspring, their calico dresses dark with sweat across their backs, their hair wrapped up in vibrant tignons secured with gold and coral pins. I was watching one pretty young woman, her teeth flashing white in a wide smile as she swung her squealing toddler high in the air, when my mother came up behind me and said, ‘We can go now.’

  I waited until we were descending the wooden front steps before asking, ‘Are they gonna be all right?’

  ‘I think so.’ She nodded toward a grove of spreading oaks in the distance. ‘What I want to show you is over there.’

  We followed a shell lane that curved around the edge of the big house’s gardens toward a white picket fence I now realized enclosed Locust Grove’s graveyard. As plantation cemeteries went, this one was surprisingly large and filled with an assortment of moss-covered headstones, low, flat tombs, and box-like crypts. By the time we let ourselves in the latch gate, the shadows were deepening beneath the trees, the last lingering rays of the sun slanting golden across the grassy sunken graves and aging monuments.

  ‘You know someone buried here?’ I asked, annoyed now by her continuing silence.

  ‘Several people, actually. But that’s not what I want you to see.’

  We cut across the long grass, the branches of the oaks making a soft shifting sound as they lifted against the sky with the evening breeze. Our destination was a waist-high crypt, plain except for the pilasters at each corner. Built of white limestone now grayed and covered with lichen, it had a flat top with a timeworn inscription. Peering at it, I could just make out the faded letters.

  ‘“Sarah Knox Davis”,’ I read aloud. ‘“Beloved wife of Jefferson Davis. Died 15 September 1835, aged 21 years”.’

  Puzzled, I looked over at my mother. I knew that Mrs Anna Davis Smith was an older sister of the Confederacy’s president. But Jefferson Davis’s wife was very much alive and the mother of a passel of children. I said, ‘I don’t understand. Who was she?’

  ‘She was the daughter of Zachary Taylor.’

  ‘You mean the Zachary Taylor?’

  ‘The very one.’

  Every schoolchild in Louisiana knew about Zachary Taylor, for his plantation lay just outside of Baton Rouge, and he had the distinction of being the only man Louisiana ever sent to the White House. A lot of Southerners had supported his election as president because they figured that, as a slaveowner himself, he’d favor their drive to extend slavery into the Western territories. Instead, he’d opposed it. More than that, he’d been an outspoken critic of secession, saying he’d already seen enough people die in war in his lifetime, and that anyone who advocated rebellion against the Union ought to be shot.

  ‘Of course,’ said my mother, brushing off the scattering of dried leaves that covered the worn surface of the crypt as carefully as if the grave belonged to someone she’d loved, ‘in the 1830s, Taylor wasn’t president. He was just a colonel, stationed at Fort Crawford in Wisconsin. Knox – that’s what they called her; not Sarah – was eighteen and vivacious and mischievous. She was also very beautiful.’

  My mother paused for a moment, and I could hear the chatter of the squirrels in the oaks overhead and the caw of a distant crow. ‘Jeff Davis was a young West Point graduate assigned to the fort, a lieutenant. Knox fell in love with him, much to Zachary Taylor’s dismay.’

  ‘Why? What was wrong with him?’

  ‘Nothing except his profession. You see, Colonel Taylor knew only too well how hard army life can be for a woman. His older daughter, Ann, had almost died giving birth on a frontier post, and he didn’t want to expose a second daughter to all the risks that a young army wife faces in the wilderness.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘The colonel refused to give his consent to the marriage. So rather than give up the woman he loved, the young lieutenant resigned his commission in the army. He and Knox were married, and they sailed down the river to Vicksburg, where Davis intended to establish a new plantation to be known as Brierfield.’

  ‘When was this?’ I asked, my gaze on that faded inscription.

  ‘The summer of 1835. Before they settled at Brierfield, Jefferson brought his bride here, to St Francisville, to meet his sister. While they were here, Knox fell ill with fever; they both did, actually. Jefferson Davis eventually recovered.’

  ‘But Knox died.’ I traced the letters of her name with one fingertip, imagining the woman she’d once been, laughing and in love.

  ‘He eventually remarried,’ said my mother, ‘but not for another ten years.’

  ‘And now he’s President of the Confederacy, while Knox is just … dead.’

  ‘Long dead.’

  I looked up at my mother. ‘Why did you bring me here?’

  S
he gazed toward the big house, where a snowy white ibis stalked elegantly across the clearing, its long legs lifting soundlessly, its head turning from side to side as it searched the grass for lizards and hoppers. She said, ‘Zachary Taylor insisted that his future son-in-law leave the army because he didn’t want his daughter to die young on some lonely frontier post. So she died instead of fever on a Louisiana plantation, while her older sister – the army surgeon’s wife – is still alive …’ She hesitated. ‘I suppose the point is, life is capricious. We can never know the outcome of our actions or decisions, and the idea that we can control our lives is more often than not an illusion. All we can do is what we think is right, and acknowledge that sometimes things will turn out horribly wrong anyway.’

  I thought about my mother’s words as we drove home through the gloaming of the day. But her reasons for choosing that moment to impress such a lesson upon me continued for a time to elude me.

  Eleven

  A few weeks later, a family came through town, driving a tired horse hitched to a broken-down old buggy. The man was a once-wealthy hotelier from New Orleans who’d been expelled after having his home and business confiscated by the Federal occupation authorities. His name was Pascal Rochon, and he stopped by to see us because he had smuggled a precious letter from my Grand-mère St Pierre out of the city.

  rue St Anne

  29 May 1862

  Mes Enfants,

  I pray to our Seigneur this letter finds you well and safe. I write quickly, as Monsieur Rochon has graciously offered to carry a message to you on his way to his sister in Pointe Coupee. He will doubtless tell you of the treatment he himself has received at the hands of our city’s new masters. For a people supposedly enamored of their constitution, they do have a most cavalier attitude toward the sanctity of law.

  My health remains essentially as before, although I find myself consumed always by fear for you, your father, and Claire and her family. I have received news from no one since the Federals’ arrival. Our parish priest, Father Paul, was a great a comfort to me, but he has recently been arrested for refusing to lead us in prayers for the victory of President Lincoln and the United States. They say he will be sent to prison in New York. Who does such things?

  But please, do not worry about me. Perhaps because I am old and seldom venture out, I myself have not suffered as have so many others here. Every day brings word of more arrests, more businesses seized and sold, more homes ‘searched for guns’ and stripped of all valuables. This Federal general has well earned his nickname, ‘Spoons’, although some have taken to calling him ‘Beast’ since the proclamation of this new Woman Order. He has declared that any woman of New Orleans who dares show her contempt for the Federals, whether by word, gesture, or movement, is now subject to being treated as ‘a woman of the streets plying her avocation’. I thank Our Seigneur every day that you are not here to be exposed to this barbarism, and pray that He will keep these demons far from you and your home.

  I miss you and think of you always, and pray that Our Seigneur keeps me alive until this cruel war’s end, so that I may see you again.

  Le Seigneur vous bénisse et vous garde.

  Grand-mère

  We fed the poor, wretched family of refugees well, and put them up for the night before seeing them off on their journey again the next morning.

  It was the last news we would receive from rue St Anne until the war’s end.

  Twelve

  June came, and Finn and I were finally free of school for the summer.

  In the past, the summer holiday had always stretched before me as a season of unalloyed bliss, a time of fish fries and barbecues and tramps through the woods with Checkers, of long lazy days spent fishing and riding Magnolia, or just reading curled up in the crook of my favorite oak.

  But this year, an air of tension and uneasy expectation hung over us all. Everyone’s focus turned anxiously to the south, where the Federals had set about occupying Baton Rouge with the same authoritarian brutality they’d demonstrated in New Orleans. The difference was, Baton Rouge was only thirty miles away from us.

  The damage to the city itself from that brief spurt of retaliatory shelling was reported as minimal, which I suppose it was – unless you were a washerwoman whose riverfront shack had been burned, or a loved one left alive to mourn someone who’d been killed. The unspoken question on everyone’s mind was: what were the Federals going to do next?

  I was awakened early one Saturday morning by a low murmur of voices from beneath my dormer window. Curious, I threw on my clothes and scrambled down the steep stairs to the hall. No one was in sight, although both the front and back doors stood open to encourage a cool, sweet crossbreeze that brought with it the smell of dew-dampened grass and the clear, heartbreaking song of a mockingbird.

  Across the front of the house, the gallery still lay in deep shadow. But beyond that, the golden morning light was already soaking the spreading branches of the oaks and the thick green Bermuda grass that stretched toward the lane. I could hear my mother’s low voice interspersed with a vibrant baritone I now recognized as belonging to Castile Boudreau, the free man of color who owned a livery stable in Bayou Sara.

  ‘I saw it hangin’ by the gate at dawn,’ he was saying to my mother, ‘when I drove past on my way out to talk to Hitch about gettin’ another load of hay. I stopped right then and there and ripped it down, so I don’t think you gotta worry. As early as it was, I don’t reckon nobody but me noticed it.’

  I could see my mother now. She stood near the top of the front steps, her arms crossed at her waist, a scrunched up length of red and white striped cloth held clenched against her. ‘I don’t know how to thank you, Castile,’ she said. ‘Won’t you stay and have some breakfast?’

  He shook his head, his soft white palmetto hat twisted in his hands, the branded scars on his cheeks pulling with his smile. ‘Thank you kindly, Mizz Kate, but I oughta be gettin’ back.’ He glanced over to where I stood just inside the open door and nodded as if he’d only just noticed me, although I knew him well enough to be certain he’d heard my bare feet creeping down the hall. ‘Mornin’, Missy Amrie. You and Finn like to go huntin’ wild turkey with me sometime?’

  ‘Oh, yes, please!’ I said, coming out from behind the door.

  He laughed out loud. ‘We’ll do it, then. You still got your bow?’

  I shook my head. ‘It broke.’

  ‘Ah. I reckon that’s ’cause we didn’t season the wood proper-like. I got me some hickory I laid by last winter; you and Finn come see me later this week, and we’ll make a couple new ones.’

  My mother and I stood side by side at the top of the steps and watched as Castile climbed up onto his high wagon seat, the big wheels clattering as he urged his mules out the gate and turned toward town.

  I nodded to the bundle in my mother’s arms. ‘What’s that?’

  Wordlessly, she unfurled the cloth. It looked like a length of red- and white-striped bunting, of the kind we’d once used to decorate St Francisville’s courthouse and bandstand back in the days when we still celebrated the Fourth of July. The wind caught the length of fabric, billowing it out, and I saw that someone had scrawled across it in heavy black letters: TRAITORS LIVE HERE.

  I felt my stomach give a funny lurch. Somehow in all the excitement of the past month, I’d forgotten this other danger that threatened us. ‘It’s because of that drowned man they found in Thompson’s Creek, isn’t it? Whoever hung this thinks the message he carried was for us.’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘So who done it?’

  ‘Did it,’ she corrected. I sometimes thought the world could be coming to an end, and my mother would still be correcting my grammar. ‘I don’t know who did it.’

  I stared out across the garden to the pasture where I could see Magnolia and a couple of the mules grazing lazily in the morning sunshine. But I wasn’t really looking at them; I was remembering a mahogany-bearded man in homespun talking to another man with a b
ushy black mustache and eyes that reminded me of something dead.

  ‘I bet it was Hiram Tucker,’ I said before I could stop myself.

  ‘Hiram Tucker joined the Partisan Rangers. I heard he’s over at Camp Moore.’

  ‘He might be a ranger, but I saw him just the other day in Bayou Sara. And he was talking to that fellow who knows Papa.’

  ‘Sean Gallagher?’ She paused in the act of wadding up the bunting, her head coming up. She stared at me a moment, then shook her head. ‘No. I can’t believe he’d tell someone like Hiram Tucker.’

  ‘Maybe he didn’t need to tell him. Maybe Tucker was one of the men who found that dead Federal.’

  She finished winding the cloth into a tight ball. ‘Amrie, you can’t do this.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘This war is destructive enough without our allowing it to pitch neighbor against neighbor. We need to work together – all of us. You can’t start suspecting anyone and everyone you don’t happen to like. It’s that kind of thinking that led someone to hang this –’ she shook the wad of cloth at me – ‘by our gate.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘No buts. I won’t have any more of it. Is that understood?’

  I swallowed the retort that burned within me and said, ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  But, childlike, I clung to the consolation that she hadn’t made me promise.

  I’d never been able to figure out how a group of women could all talk at the same time and yet still manage to follow every conversation in the room.

  ‘What did you use to dye that dress? It’s a lovely shade of—’

  ‘—Beast Butler sent her to prison for giving her child a birthday party on the same day as some Federal’s funeral. And her the mother of seven! They say she’s not well—’

  ‘Sophie Wright was telling me she heard that both France and Spain have recognized the Confederate States of America. I want to believe it, but—’

  The grand double parlors of the big house known as Bon Silence were so crowded with ladies that I had to crane my neck around to identify the right speaker. It was Mrs Henshaw, and she sat on one of the brocade-covered settees grouped near the front parlor’s elegant oriel window, barely glancing at her work as she simultaneously talked non-stop and laid down a row of neat stitches in the hem of a white flannel shirt.