Good Time Coming Page 8

  Unlike her husband, who’d been born and raised in Cambridge, England, Madeline Henshaw hailed from Gulf Port, Mississippi. As big and robust as her husband was small and fussy, she was one of fifty-odd ladies and young girls who’d gathered together that Friday afternoon to sew for the Soldiers’ Aid Society. With the outbreak of the war, hundreds of these societies had sprung up across the South as women got together to knit socks, sew shirts, scrape lint, and roll bandages ripped from their own donated linen sheets and tablecloths. St Francisville’s society hadn’t met much lately, mainly because they’d used up their own supplies, and things like material, wool, needles, and thread had become pretty near impossible to find. But General Ruggles had somehow managed to get his hands on ten bolts of soft flannel, along with a supply of needles and thread, and a bunch of the city’s women had volunteered to sew shirts for the new recruits training at Camp Moore.

  I myself sat perched on the edge of a lyre-backed, satin-covered chair next to a gilded console with swan-shaped legs. A half-sewn sleeve lay neglected in my lap, and I was feeling nearly as out of place as a buffalo at a barn dance. As far as I was concerned, Soldiers’ Aid Society meetings fell into the same category as spelling bees and Sunday school, and were to be avoided. It wasn’t that I begrudged doing my bit for the war effort, because I didn’t. Finn and I had rolled bandages and scraped lint, and gone door-to-door collecting scrap iron and brass in a wheelbarrow. But concentrated gatherings of ladies inevitably made me feel like I was coming down with the hives. Fortunately, since my seams were so uneven and crooked that any soldier unlucky enough to receive a shirt sewn by me was truly to be pitied, my lack of attendance in the past had never been mourned.

  But for some reason, my mother had insisted that I accompany her here today. When I’d asked why the blazes I needed to spend the afternoon with a bunch of ladies sitting around yakking when Finn and I had planned to work on the new hickory bows Castile was going to help us make, she’d gotten a funny, pained look on her face and said, ‘That’s why.’

  I made a mental note to try to drop ‘blazes’ from my vocabulary.

  I knew I was in trouble when I found out the sewing meeting was being held at the home of Rowena Walford. The Walfords owned three plantations, but they spent most of their time here at Bon Silence, a dazzling white Greek Revival house just up the road from us. Fronted by massive Doric columns, it had fourteen-foot-high ceilings, a grand, sweeping central staircase, and so many rooms you could get lost in there if you weren’t careful. Up until recently the Walfords had employed a private tutor to teach their three children. But the tutor had enlisted practically before the smoke cleared from the firing on Fort Sumter, and when the Walfords weren’t able to secure a suitable replacement, they sent their children to our school. The eldest, Laura, was my age, and it hadn’t been more than a month since I’d dipped one of her pigtails in my inkbottle.

  I was pretty sure her mother hadn’t forgotten the incident.

  Yet Rowena Walford was all smiles when she met us in her elegant, elliptically-shaped entry. While I might not care much for Laura, I’d always liked Rowena Walford. She was charming and open and funny in a way my mother never could be. As elegant as her house, she was still slim and small-waisted, with big blue eyes and golden curls and a cute little nose that combined with dimples to make her look like a girl, even though she was only a few years younger than my mother.

  ‘Kate,’ she said, stopping my mother to give her a kiss on the cheek as the Walfords’ stately, white-haired butler showed us toward the parlors. ‘Thank you so much for coming. And I see you brought Anne-Marie with you.’ One delicate eyebrow arched higher as she turned to me. ‘Bless your heart. Laura is here. Perhaps you two can sit together. I’ll just tell Aunt Babs to hide the ink bottles.’ And with that she sailed away, leaving my mother looking pained and me to slink off to the opposite end of the room from where I could see Laura, her own golden curls clustered short around a face as pretty as her mother’s.

  Miss Rowena had had to cut her hair after the inkbottle incident.

  ‘Old Mr Mason got hold of a recent edition of the Vicksburg Whig,’ I heard Old Mr Mason’s stout, sandy-haired daughter-in-law, Margaret Mason say. ‘They’re saying the town sustained little material damage from the Yankee shelling, although one shot went clean through the Methodist church—’

  My feet were hurting. My shoes had grown so small over the past year that they pinched something awful, but I didn’t dare take them off. I picked up my assigned sleeve again, only instead of setting a stitch, I found my gaze wandering over the ceiling’s detailed cornice work and the four crystal chandeliers that hung from ornate medallions carved with pineapples, grapes, and what I realized were human faces. I’d spent enough time in my Grandmother Adelaide’s house and the various St Pierre plantations that the magnificence of Bon Silence didn’t overwhelm me, but it was still impressive. The twin parlors’ two matching mantelpieces were of marble, surmounted by massive gilded and beveled French mirrors that soared all the way to the high ceilings. Yet only simple mats covered the gleaming hardwood floors.

  It was the custom in the South to take up all wool carpets in the spring and replace them with mats for the hot summer months. But I suspected that the Walfords’ carpets – like our own – had been cut up into squares last winter and sent off to Virginia and Tennessee for the soldiers to use as blankets.

  ‘Do you find you’re having trouble with your house servants?’ I heard Mrs Irvinel ask of anyone seated nearby who cared to reply. ‘Ours have been dreadfully lazy and disobedient lately. If they don’t settle down, we’re going to need to send a few down to the fields and replace them with new ones from the quarters.’

  ‘I think the problem is all the excitement in the air,’ said Rowena Walford, her voice as sweet and pleasant as if she were discussing blackspot on her roses. ‘It infects them.’

  I glanced over at the young woman serving the ladies small glasses of sherry from a silver tray. She kept her gaze downcast, her expression inscrutable. But I found myself watching her as she moved gracefully around the room. Her name was Josephine, and she had skin the color of polished oak and an elegantly arched nose that gave mute testimony to the mixed nature of her ancestry. Rowena Walford’s own husband, Major Morgan Walford, now off with the First Louisiana in Tennessee, was said to be hopelessly devoted and rigidly faithful to his beautiful wife. But Bon Silence had originally belonged to Miss Rowena’s family, and everyone knew that her father, old Mr Gilbert Vance, had spent more nights down in the quarters than he had in his own wife’s bed. I did the calculations and figured this silent, gazelle-like house servant might well be Laura Walford’s aunt.

  Just the thought of it made my stomach feel queasy.

  ‘I find I want to believe that all the encouraging rumors are true, and all the discouraging ones are false,’ I heard Delia Stocking say with a soft laugh. ‘If only it were so.’

  I glanced over at her. The wife of a dentist now off with the army in Virginia, she was wearing a pretty, tuck-fronted yellow homespun gown trimmed with lace that was probably salvaged from an older dress. Time was, the women here would have been wearing elegant gowns of organdy, muslin, or foulard, their hats stylish confections from New Orleans’ or at least Bayou Sara’s milliners. But there wasn’t a woman here today who wasn’t wearing homespun, and most of their hats were of bleached palmetto they’d woven and trimmed themselves.

  Many of these women probably still had silk gowns hanging in their cupboards at home, for they were seldom used these days and so hadn’t worn out. But everyday dresses soon fell victim to the harsh soaps we were reduced to using since the blockade. And the bolts of linen and cotton, cashmere and silk that normally lined the shelves of places like Meyers Emporium had all come from the mills of England and the North, and had long ago disappeared.

  And so, as the blockade took hold, women of all walks of life had dragged dusty old spinning wheels down out of their attics. Grandmothers
who’d been girls at the time of the Revolution were pressed to teach this lost art to their daughters and granddaughters, while plans were circulated for the construction of homemade looms. Soon almost everyone was weaving their own cloth and exchanging formulas for dyes with the same enthusiasm they’d once exchanged recipes for peach cobbler. Wearing homespun became a matter of pride, a way for women to show their patriotic fervor.

  My own mother was wearing a gown of soft blue homespun she’d sewn herself. But the cloth had come not from her own loom but from Maisie Sparrow. After Mama set little Roy Sparrow’s broken arm, Maisie had given her the cloth in payment. Unlike me, Mama had always been handy with a needle. But it was a good thing she could get our homespun in exchange for her doctoring, because she was hopeless at it.

  ‘Amrie,’ my mother said softly.

  I picked up my half-sewn sleeve and set to work undoing a nasty snarl in my thread.

  Someone said, ‘The latest word out of New Orleans is that General Butler was furious with Farragut for breaking off the attempt at Vicksburg. They’re saying the Federals are gathering their forces to try it again.’

  I glanced over at the speaker. It was Mrs Gantry, the telegraph operator’s young wife.

  The ladies had mostly fallen silent, listening to her.

  ‘This time they’re going to try using mortar boats with canons fixed in such a way that their shells will reach the city,’ Sophie Gantry continued. ‘They’re saying they intend to wipe Vicksburg off the face of the earth.’

  ‘But that’s barbaric!’ said someone. ‘Has Lincoln decided to become the new Genghis Khan?’

  A chorus of disbelief and outrage swelled around the room.

  I felt the muscles of my neck and shoulders suddenly bunch and constrict as I glanced around the assembly of women. I was remembering the crudely lettered banner hung at dawn beside our gate. And I had the uncomfortable realization that one of the gaily chatting, smiling women here today might well be the ‘Dear Madam’ someone had accused my mother of being.

  I looked at Sophie Gantry, with her soft blue eyes and flaxen hair drawn neatly back into a bun, and I heard the echo of my mother’s voice saying, You can’t start suspecting anyone and everyone you don’t happen to like.

  But I wondered if Sophie Gantry realized she’d just revealed that she must be in contact with one of the confidential agents at work in New Orleans – agents General Butler was frantic to root out. Or at least she knew someone who was. Had one of these diligently sewing ladies quietly picked up on the slip and filed that bit of dangerous information away for a future report?

  This war is destructive enough without us allowing it to pitch neighbor against neighbor, my mother had said. But wasn’t that what rebellions and civil wars did? Set brother against brother, father against son, neighbor against neighbor?

  It hadn’t occurred to me yet that war could also set mother against daughter.

  Thirteen

  We watched the river.

  For those of us who lived along its banks, the Mississippi had always been a lifeline. Louisiana’s low-lying, soggy ground and frequent teeming rains made a muddy mess of the roads. So freight, supplies, people, and the mail all typically moved up and down the river.

  Now, the river had now become something to fear.

  Finn and I arrived at Castile’s livery stable early that Saturday morning to get to work on our bows. The lengths of hickory he’d dried were about four and a half feet long and an inch and a half around. He patiently showed us how to locate the center and allow for a six-inch grip in the middle. After that, it was just a matter of carefully thinning and tapering the upper and lower limbs. Castile made sure our knives were as sharp as they could be.

  ‘A dull knife is more dangerous than a sharp one,’ he said, ‘because you need to apply more pressure to a dull knife, and you never know what it’s gonna do.’

  Finn and I were sitting in the cool breezeway of the stables, the horses nickering softly in their stalls, the thin shavings of hickory wood curling away from our knives to settle in fragrant drifts around us, when Finn suddenly stilled.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked, watching him.

  ‘Listen.’

  ‘I don’t hear nothing,’ I said. The town had gone oddly still around us.

  ‘That’s the point.’

  We dropped our bows and knives and bolted for the door.

  ‘Look!’ said Finn, pointing toward the river. The tall masts of a steam sloop stood out dark against the blue sky.

  The air filled with the roll of a drum, the ominous tramp of marching feet, and a man’s guttural shout. I felt my breath back up in my throat. ‘Not again.’

  Castile came to stand behind us. ‘Where they headed?’ he shouted to a boy dashing up the street, one elbow crooked skyward as he held his hat clapped to his head.

  ‘The telegraph office!’

  We could see them now, a detachment of seamen trotting at double time up the street in tight formation, their breach-loading carbines dull in the sun. At their lead strode a craggy-faced officer wearing a long, double-breasted navy frock coat and brandishing a saber bayonet over his head as if leading his landing party into battle. ‘This way, men!’

  ‘How’d they know where to go?’ Finn asked, watching them.

  ‘Reckon somebody musta told ’em,’ said Castile.

  An unnaturally silent crowd streamed along at a safe distance behind the Federal landing party, although whether drawn by curiosity or fear or the age-old desire to witness a spectacle, I couldn’t have said.

  The Federals marched straight to the telegraph office. It had rained that morning; I could see lighting still trembling in the dark bank of clouds that hung over the river, and the air smelled of mud and wet wood and fear. Nodding to his sergeant, the officer leapt up onto the boardwalk and strode to the office door.

  It was locked.

  Finn and I exchanged glances. If Devon Gantry was in there, he was a brave man.

  The Federal officer pounded on the doorframe with one gloved fist. ‘Open up! Open up, I say!’

  When no one appeared, he tightened his jaw and turned to his sergeant, ‘Have the men break it down.’

  A couple of burly seamen rammed their shoulders against the door, wood splintering and hinges snapping beneath their weight. The officer and his party of men disappeared inside. He reemerged only a moment later, his bony, homely face set in harsh lines. Drawing up at the edge of the boardwalk, he scanned the crowd of anxious townspeople.

  ‘Where is it?’ he demanded.

  When no one answered, he grabbed a nearby Negro in patched trousers and a ripped shirt, and shook him hard enough to make his head flop back and forth on his neck like a dead duck on a string. ‘Damn you! Where’s the telegraph apparatus?’

  The man’s eyes went wide, his tongue poking out to lick his lips as he looked wildly about for help that wasn’t coming. ‘Some fellers done took it away!’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Last night.’

  ‘How the devil did they know we were coming? How?’ He shook the hapless man again, but he only stared back at the officer with a baleful look of assumed ignorance that he’d been practicing his entire life.

  With a foul oath, the lieutenant shoved the man away from him and turned to the big, redheaded sergeant who’d emerged from the office behind him. ‘The vitriol and batteries are still here. Destroy them.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And send some of the men out to cut the wires. I want to take away at least a quarter mile of it.’

  We could hear the clatter of heavy boots as the Federals rampaged through the telegraph office, laughing as they tore the lists of Confederate dead, wounded, and captured off the walls and splashed them with vitriol.

  ‘Careful, men,’ I heard the lieutenant warn. ‘That’s acid you’re dealing with.’

  A chair came crashing through the front window, the splintered frame and shards of glass flying across the boardwalk and into the
rutted street. A table followed, the seamen inside the telegraph office whooping and cheering. Someone shouted, ‘Here, let me clean up your office for you, Mr Jeff Davis!’ An oil lamp sailed through the shattered window to smash against a post, followed by a waste bin and an umbrella.

  With a whoop, the men inside fell to chucking the office’s contents out the window, everything from ink bottles and ledgers to a big brass spittoon that landed with a splat in the mud.

  ‘Why are they doing this?’ I said.

  It was Castile who answered me, his bald head shiny with sweat in the sun. ‘Because they can.’

  When there was nothing left to destroy, the seamen fell into formation again. This time, one of the men pulled out a fife.

  ‘Now what?’ muttered Finn.

  The lieutenant took his place before the men, his saber bayonet held like a drum major’s baton. And away they marched, the pipe and drum striking up a tune I suddenly realized was ‘Yankee Doodle’.

  Only, they didn’t march straight back to their ship. Up and down the streets of Bayou Sara they paraded, the familiar strains of what had once been a beloved song washing over the silent townspeople drawn up to watch them.

  ‘Golly, look!’ shouted a man’s gleeful voice. ‘A parade!’

  Craning around, I spotted Nathan, the Widow Rove’s simple-minded son, his bony, freckled face split into a wide, delighted grin. Gleefully slapping the thighs of his tattered trousers, he fell into step behind the seamen, long, spindly arms pumping, knees raised high as he stepped in time to the music.

  ‘Yankee Doodle went to town, a ridin’ on a pony,’ he sang, his head tipped back, eyes shining with pride. ‘Stuck a feather in his h—’