Crescent City (43 page)

All week the wind kept up its eerie howl and whistle, shaking the trees and blowing out the candles whenever a door was left ajar. One afternoon, long past its proper season, the ominous rumble of a midsummer thunderstorm was heard again.

“But that’s not thunder!” Ferdinand cried. “It’s cannonading. Listen.”

Eugene rushed outside.

“Blaise, go get him!” Miriam shrieked. “Where does he think he’s going?”

At once Blaise, followed by old, stumbling Sisyphus, went down the lane after Eugene. When they brought him back, it startled Miriam to see that the “little master” of the house, whom she had sent them to protect, was taller than either of them.

The discovery embarrassed her and she vented her irritation in a scolding.

“Do you want to get shot out there, foolish boy? Haven’t we had trouble enough?”

“We sure has.” Sisyphus sighed. “Trouble enough in this family. You listen to your mother now, hear?”

“I’ll just sneak to the road to see what’s happening,” Ferdinand said. “I know how to be careful. You all stay here.”

Rosa and Emma sat clasping the arms of their
chairs as if these objects could shield them, while the servants, frozen into silence, stood against the walls. And to Miriam came that old sensation which had first beset her in this house, an awareness of its total isolation among its lonely fields. Helpless they were, not only before marauders from outside, but so helpless before these people who cowered at the wall, who could turn at whim and will .… So they waited.

Presently the familiar dust puffs came floating in a golden haze above the trees. Hooves pounded and wheels rumbled, coming nearer. Ferdinand, skirting the lane behind concealing shrubbery, went down to the road and, returning a few minutes later, reported that the Union army was fleeing. Its great hooped canvas supply wagons, each drawn by four horses, were tearing down the road.

“What did I tell you? They’re in full retreat! Tossing their stuff away into the ditch, they’re in such a rush! Scattering canteens and overcoats, even rifles and small arms. I’d’ve picked up some, but then I thought I’d better not. You know what this means? Our own men can’t be far behind. Oh, I knew they’d be coming back!”

“Then we’d better hide the mules we saved from the Federals. Go tell Simeon,” Miriam instructed Eugene.

“What?” Rosa said. “Hide the mules from our own people?”

“Yes, of course,” Miriam answered somewhat shortly.

They came. With the rebel whoop and so much dust upon them that the black braid curlicued on their chests was as gray as the cloth and with their bare, bleeding feet, they came pouring through the gate.

An officer rode at the head of the detachment. At the foot of the verandah he dismounted and took off his cap to Ferdinand.

“Such gentlemen!” breathed Emma into Miriam’s ear. “God bless them, our southern gentlemen!”

Ferdinand rejoiced. His jubilation bubbled out of his throat.

“Can you give us any news? We’ve been starved for it all these months. God bless you,” he said, echoing Emma, “but I knew, I knew we’d be seeing you soon again!”

“Well, we routed them. Been fighting since yesterday morning about twelve miles east of here. Had no rations, either. The men are starved. Thirsty, too. The worse thing’s their bleeding feet. We’ve no boots,” the lieutenant said grimly.

“Tell the men to go around the back of the house and help themselves to whatever they need. The servants will show than. They won’t harm anything, I’m sure.” And smiling, Ferdinand added, “I trust our men, God knows, our brave men.” Miriam’s raised eyebrows went unnoticed. For the moment he was the expansive host of long ago. “Miriam, get brandy for the lieutenant. We’ve only one bottle, but you’re welcome to it,” he said as they went inside.

Miriam sat Dr. Zacharie’s bottle beside the lieutenant’s chair. His long blond mustache, which almost hid the lower half of his face, could conceal neither his extreme youth nor his exhaustion.

“Very good of you, sir, this is most welcome.” He sighed. “It’s been hard. More than half our horses were killed in this last skirmish. And desertions—”

“Desertions!” exclaimed Emma. Her innocent eyes were astonished.

“Oh, yes, ma’am. The death penalty doesn’t mean anything anymore, we have so many. So we flog them, we brand them or shave their heads, but still”—the young man suddenly seemed to remember that this was not the way a stalwart officer should be talking—“but
still, we have the good stuff of the South and enough of it to see us through. Yessir, enough to see us through. Of course, if the leadership were better in some places …”

“You surely don’t mean Lee?” asked Ferdinand.

“Not Lee. But take our secretary of state. Why, Davis stays so loyal to a descendant of the people who crucified the Lord has never made sense to me, sir. Nor to many others.”

Rosa had gone upstairs, for which Miriam was thankful, since Rosa would not have held her tongue. Ferdinand was too nonplussed to answer, and Miriam was too shocked, although when the moment had passed and it was too late, she was immediately ashamed of herself for not having spoken.

The lieutenant replaced the glass. “Thank you, ma’am,” he said gracefully. “That was a lift to my spirits. I needed it. I’ll be on my way. You people can rest more easily tonight, now that you’re back on the right side of the lines again.”

He saluted, swung onto his horse, and swept back down the lane. It seemed to Miriam as she watched him clatter away that there was something archaic about his gallantry, something out of an old book and another age, a manner that had endured past its time and would soon cease to exist.

She was still standing there not many minutes later when a new gray flood came pouring. This time there was no officer in command. Except for the color of the cloth, they were not any different from the men who had come once before to maraud. They were the same ragtag lot with their loose mouths whooping and grinning; the whiskey they had been given or had stolen had revived their spirits.

All that afternoon they kept coming, invading the house and the barns. Whatever had been taken out of
hiding since the Federals had looted was now seized by the men in gray. Only once, when one of them began to hack at a fence rail that had just this week been replaced by Simeon and his helpers, did Miriam run out to protest. The man went about his work.

“You can get your niggers to mend it again,” he taunted, “or go without, for all I care. You think we’re fighting this war for you, do you?”

No, you are not, she answered silently, I know your sort. You’re fighting in the hope that you’ll take my place, the place of what you call the “quality.”

By evening they had had their fill. A line of pack mules, chained one behind the other with a pair of baskets slung across their backs, bore away the last of the harvest which had been so laboriously coaxed out of the soil by every pair of hands on the place, including Miriam’s own. Helpless, shading her eyes from the glaring sunset, she could only watch them depart.

So, Papa, there are your southern gentlemen. “Help yourselves, I trust you!”

Wearily, Miriam sat down on the front steps. The sun made its final plunge, leaving an afterglow streaked in amber and russet, the soft hazy colors of the dying year. The autumn evening was mild; now that the equinoctial storms were over, the earth was ready for a winter’s rest.

Fanny came around from the barns.

“Come sit down,” Miriam said.

All the rest of the household, worn out by the day, had gone to bed, leaving her alone. She wanted now not so much to speak of significant things as not to speak, only to feel the support of a living presence, or perhaps to say whatever trivial thoughts might enter her head.

“My shoes,” she said after a while, glancing at her kid slippers. “They’re all worn out. My last pair, too.”

“Simeon’s brother makes shoes. Leather uppers on a wooden sole. He made some for me.”

“He must make some for all of us, then.”

“I’ll tell him. He’s down back of the stables. They’re burying the mule.”

“The mule! Oh, no!”

“Yes, those men today found one of them and shot it.”

This was the last blow, the last senseless blow.

“Now, in heaven’s name, why would they do that? Steal the poor creature if you must, but why kill it?”

“They were drunk.”

“As my father says, ‘Our own people!’”

Fanny did not comment on that. She said instead, “There’s a gang of the men who ran away when the Federals came. They’ve come back. Brought their women and children back.”

It was Miriam’s turn to have no comment. Any words she could have spoken would have been inappropriate before Fanny, unthinkable before her. They would have been too angry, too hot with resentment. Now that the “Secesh” have returned, she was thinking, and these people have no other place to go, they come back here to be fed and cared for. I wish to God they would all run away, the lot of them! We’ve not food enough for the ones who stayed, and now we have to share with these others.

“I’m going in to clean up,” Fanny said. “Those pigs spat tobacco all over the dining-room floor. Oh, someone’s coming!”

Oh, not more of them! Was this the crossroads of the world? Once it had seemed so remote, too remote, on those long days, those monotonous afternoons when only the occasional caw of a crow had broken into the stillness, when, almost frantic with need of a new voice or something new to see, she had walked to
the end of the lane and scanned the meandering empty road where weeds grew between the ruts.

“What can it be now?” she cried despairingly.

Fanny stood tall and shielded her eyes. “A rider with a wagon following.”

Miriam was too tired to get up. “Can you tell who?”

Fanny strained to see. “Miss Miriam! Miss Miriam—I do believe it’s that Mr. Perrin!”

A fearful drumming began in Miriam’s head. “It can’t be!”

He’s in Europe. He’s dead. He would never come back, because of Eugene. He—

“But it is Mr. Perrin! Yes, Miss Miriam, it is.”

She wore her joy and her desire like a cloak. It seemed to her as they sat after the evening meal in the sunny circle of wan firelight that surely it must be visible to all, this cloak of scarlet silk which had been laid upon her, so that she felt the glow of its color. Wearing it, she was content to sit quite still, just watching and listening.

The others had taken possession of André with their eager questions. Rosa wanted to know whether by any chance he had heard anything about her son Henry, from whom no letter had been had in months. No, he had not. Emma wanted to know the same about her grandsons. No, he had not.

“My brother, Gabriel de Rivera, is with the Tenth Louisiana. If you ever come in contact with them, please tell him that I, that we—” The words choked her. “You’ll not forget?”

“I’ll not forget.”

Then Emma asked how dear Marie Claire was doing, and how recently he had seen her. She was doing well, as far as André knew, but he had not been in France for months.

What could that mean? Surely if there had been any great change in his life, he would have gotten the news to her. A chill draft penetrated the scarlet cloak.

“Are you sure you’re not tired of all my tales?” André had asked a few minutes earlier.

“We here know almost nothing about what’s going on in the outside world,” Ferdinand had replied. “We’ve had no papers since the Federals came. Anything you tell us is bound to be news, especially about yourself.”

Now André threw up his hands, continuing, “Well, as you know, diplomacy failed. It was a sorry failure, although God knows we tried everything. I was with Slidell when he offered Louis Napoleon a present of cotton worth a hundred million francs in return for recognizing the Confederacy. The Frenchman was tempted, all right, but too afraid that the Union would win. So when I saw that diplomacy wasn’t going to work, I decided to make a practical contribution to the war. I’ve been doing blockade runs. Oh, I’m not a seaman, I just get the goods assembled and ride along for the adventure.”

“Dangerous adventures,” Ferdinand observed.

“Oh, not for the fainthearted, that’s true.”

Always there was that brightness about him! Some children have it, although not all of them; even some old people have it, for it has nothing to do with age, Miriam thought. It’s something inside that shines through, something bold, a delight and cheer to the listener and watcher. All were enthralled: the two women, Eugene, Angelique, and, most of all, Ferdinand, who was very likely recalling his youth, living again his bravest moments.

“You ought to see the waterfront at Nassau! Cotton higher than your head piled on the docks. Then in comes the blockade runner, an ugly dark beast of a
ship, but fast. They’re built mostly in England or Nova Scotia, and made with a convex deck to go through heavy seas. You can stand at your window in the Royal Victoria Hotel and see the harbor crowded with them. You don’t sleep much the night before you get on board, I can tell you that. But the trip over is a whole lot safer than the trip back, when you’re loaded with ammunition.”

“You must have had some narrow escapes,” Eugene said with awe.

And André, understanding the boy’s eagerness, smiled and went on, enjoying the telling.

“Oh, narrow, yes! We travel with great care, heading for Charleston or Wilmington on the return; they’re the only ports left to us. We try for the dark of the moon and high tide. Otherwise, when the tide’s low, you can’t get through the inlets to hide. And of course, no lights! It’s death, and I mean death, for anybody who shows a light. No talking, either.”

Eugene nodded wisely. “Because voices carry over the water.”

“Right. Oh, it’s pretty tense sneaking past the blockading fleet.”

“Have you ever been chased?” Ferdinand wanted to know.

“Certainly have. There was one time when a U.S. Navy steam frigate chased us all one afternoon. Believe me, we prayed hard. Raced to keep ahead until almost dark, when we put out a smokescreen, thick, black smoke, low to the water. We made it, too, by the skin of our teeth.”

Ferdinand gave a long sigh. “I admit I’m envious! Here I sit doing nothing.” Then he remembered something. “We had an interesting visitor, a Dr. Zacharie. Have you by any chance ever heard of him? He talks as if everybody ought to know him.”