Crescent City (53 page)

She watched them as in their clumsy, wood-soled shoes they walked toward the chicken house, and saw them disappear inside. When they reappeared, Eugene was carrying the tub of grain. It pleased her that he took the heavy work for himself without being told. There was something protective in his manner toward Angelique now that they were fairly past the age of childish squabbles, something that reminded Miriam of herself and David.

Oh, be fair! There’s much of their father in them, too! David’s scowls don’t cross young Eugene’s forehead. Quite possibly the scowl is just not natural to him, but if it were, his father would not have allowed it. Disciplined according to their place and their social class, these two are dutiful and compliant. Eugene is affable and Angelique, in her dawning vanity, is charming. She wants some proper clothes, and I wish she had some. But if she had them, where would she wear them, the way things are now?

The hens made a circular cluster at their feet, cackling under the dusty shower of grain. A wry little smile crossed Miriam’s lips. What would their father have said of such a rural vignette? Of his son, his daughter, the Mendes’ heir and heiress, in a chicken yard? No matter, she told herself. Work won’t hurt them. They’re lucky to have it, to have anything in these times, to be alive at all.

And staring across dry, sallow fields on which the
morning’s heat had already begun to quiver, she saw through the white dazzle long rows of bloodied men lying on the floor in Richmond, saw again the woman whose begging hands had reached out for milk—

“What now, Mama?” asked Angelique.

“Find out from Maxim whether he needs you for something. He’s overworked, and he never asks for any help.”

“Sisyphus, too,” Eugene said. “He was down at the barn yesterday helping to lift a wagon while they fixed a wheel. He’s too old. I made him stop and took his place.”

“Tell me,” Miriam said suddenly, “what changed you, Eugene? When did you change sides in this war? It’s still not clear to me.”

He answered, “I don’t think I did quite that. I’ve not been a traitor.”

“I don’t mean you are. I mean your thoughts.”

“About the system? I don’t know exactly. It just came to me, when I had to work to keep things going here, and I saw more of the way life was, how hard. It just came to me.”

A basic kindness, she thought gladly. A basic decency, that’s all it was. But she wondered whether he could have changed direction if his father had lived to keep the old, strong hold upon him. Had that gruesome death perhaps released the son to become what he was?

She said only, “Here’s Maxim. Maxim, these helpers want to know whether you need them for anything.”

“No, ma’am, I’m doing fine. Shouldn’t they be at their books this morning?”

“It wouldn’t hurt. Why don’t you get to your German grammar, both of you? I’ll test you on it later.”

A pity she hadn’t had more of an education herself
with which to help them through these lost years! German was about all she knew enough of to teach. Still, it was better than nothing.

Maxim reflected, as they walked away, “Seems like last week they were born in this house.”

Last week, and a hundred years ago! So sweetly they had lain in their baskets .… David had come home to stay .… The river boat had whistled, landing guests and gifts … fruit and flowers, music and wine .… Gabriel had come home .…

“They’re a real credit to you,” Maxim was saying. “Kind young folks. Quality. Real quality.”

“A credit to you, too, and to Blaise and Fanny and Sisyphus, remember. You all helped raise them.”

A field hand, hearing Miriam’s voice, came around the corner of the barn.

“Morning, missis. You’re out early.”

“I’m always out early. There’s work to be done.”

“I was thinking, missis, maybe we should shoot that old Pepper there. That used to be one feisty mule, but there’s sure no pepper left in him now.”

The old mule’s tail swished casually, as with head hung over the fence, he crunched a sheaf of grass between his long yellow teeth. His wary, melancholy eyes regarded Miriam.

All of life’s pathos was concentrated in the mule.

“Leave him alone. There’ll be no more shooting,” she said, and tearing another handful of grass, she thrust it into the soft, snuffling mouth.

“And listen,” she commanded, “I want pine straw in the cattle barn this morning. Cows get sick lying in the wet.”

“Yes, missis. Right away, missis.”

No one had ever taught her how to care for cattle, but most things were only a matter of common sense, anyway.

She went back to the house to polish what was left of the silver. Only the week before she had gone with Rosa to retrieve the silver they had once so carefully hidden, and found half of it missing. The service that Eugene had given Miriam when they were married was safe in its place, but Emma’s, buried with equal discretion, or so they had thought, was gone. Someone must have been watching them that night. Too bad it was Emma’s! Miriam wouldn’t have minded the loss of her own as much as the loss of Papa’s; things meant so much to him.

In the dining room the coffee service waited on the table. Miriam sat down to work with the polishing rag. There was a certain satisfaction in making things clean, in bringing order with one’s own hands, even though Sisyphus was still horrified to see the lady of the house at such labor.

Ferdinand came in to watch her. For a few minutes he waited without speaking. Then suddenly he interrupted the regular tick of the clock.

“You’re getting to look like your mother.”

“I never thought I did.”

He had startled her. She couldn’t even remember when he had last spoken of her mother.

“I’ve been seeing her lately. I hadn’t in years,” Ferdinand said. He mused. “She wore a plaid shawl the first time I laid eyes on her.”

But that’s the way I always see her! Miriam cried silently. Why do I always see her in a plaid shawl? I’m sure he never told me this before. Did anyone else ever tell me? She could not remember.

“She was lovely. She had an oval face, quiet and grave.”

As he rocked, his chair creaked, blending with his even voice in a dreamy rhythm.

“Curious, the way a life unwinds. If it hadn’t been
for a stone thrown by a hate-crazed lout, we’d all perhaps still be in the German village. Angelique and Eugene wouldn’t have been born. Yes, you remind me of her, but David has her eyes. Exactly her eyes. I wish I could see David again. He made me so angry, but he’s a good man, I know he is. I’d like to see him,”

“Now that the war is over, he’ll surely come to see you, Papa. I know he will.”

She looked over at her father. He had started a beard, since it was the fashion again, but his beard made him look not fashionable, only like a patriarchal Jew, the Opa whom she could still see in her mind, rocking, rocking and creaking. The hair that had once been a crown of chestnut waves had turned quite gray. Oh, she thought, was it just today or was it last week that I saw he was old? Age comes like that; suddenly one day a person is old.

Ferdinand was staring out of the window.

“There goes Eulalie. She’s got a bucket of water for the chicken yard. I can’t get over the change in her.”

“Maybe she feels important for the first time in her life.”

“What? Tending chickens? From a family like hers?”

“That and all the rest she does. I never realized she knew so much. It’s true she’s sour, but we’d have managed here a lot less well without her. None of us knew how to preserve or sew or do anything properly until she showed us how.” Something drove Miriam to talk, not so much in defense of Eulalie as out of a sense of fairness and personal indignation. “All her life she’s been a failure because she wasn’t good at the one thing you men expect us to be good at: being ornamental. I don’t know how it is, but a man can be fat, bald, or buck-toothed, and it doesn’t matter, but let a woman be even mildly plain and she goes into the discard.
Heaven help her, if she’s not married, she can only cringe in shame. I don’t want my daughter to be like that!” she finished sharply.

“Don’t worry about Angelique.” Ferdinand chuckled. “She’s a beauty already.”

Miriam started to say:
That’s not what I meant at all
but stopped. What was the use? He would never understand.

Gabriel would. It flashed across her mind that Gabriel had always understood, but she was kept from further thought by her father’s next remark.

“I would like to see you married again, Miriam.”

And I want it .… I have never been married, don’t you know that? Married, with that comfort, that unity so warm, so trusting. How thrilling to belong, to have no secrets, to hold back nothing of body or heart! To know another so completely .… I try to see André, to hear his voice, and cannot anymore. Cannot.

“There’s someone coming,” Ferdinand said suddenly. He stood up to get a better view. “A man’s riding up the lane.”

She did not have to ask. She knew—she knew without asking or looking that it was André.

“This is a real celebration!” Ferdinand cried. “God help us, the war’s over at last. And though our hearts ache for the sons who died”—glancing out of eyes gleaming wet with emotion at Rosa and Pelagie—“we give thanks that so many have survived and will come back. Now for the savior of my son”—Ferdinand raised his glass toward André—“for him a special thanks today, a toast drunk from the good wine he has brought us. Ahhh, excellent—nothing like a fine French wine, nothing!” he concluded, and sat down, quite overcome with sentiment and the heat of the wine. But he was not yet finished.

“Here’s Sisyphus, good Sisyphus! We’ve not had a dinner like this in I don’t know when, have we, Sisyphus? You mustn’t think we’ve been living in such luxury, André. No, far from it,” he declared, as Sisyphus brought the roast turkey on one of the rescued silver platters.

On the sideboard stood jellies which had been discovered in a forgotten cellar, and a floating custard, made under Eulalie’s supervision, which had used up, Miriam thought with some concern, the last of the scarce eggs.

“Yes,” André said, “the fall of Richmond was something to behold. Davis was in church, you know, when they came to tell him that the city was to be abandoned. People were absolutely shocked; they’d had no idea of the situation because the War Department had been keeping the truth out of the newspapers during the last few weeks. Instead, they’d been printing a lot of optimistic nonsense. So there was chaos in the streets. Church bells were still ringing for Sunday services while in government offices they were loading the archives into wagons to take them to the railroad. People were rushing to get on a train, but you couldn’t get on without a pass from the secretary of war. And most people don’t have access to the secretary of war, do they?”

André told the tale well. His rapid, resonant voice contained just enough dramatic emphasis. Miriam’s avid, questioning eyes, which had not left him, attracted no notice, since every other eye in the room was on him, too.

His handsome features were unchanged. The war had left its mark on everyone else, laying its weight of gloom on some, agitating the brittle nerves of others, making voices shrill and tempers short; it had marked
Miriam with dark stains of fatigue under her eyes. But André glowed. He might have been at a ball.

“The city council ordered all liquor to be destroyed. You could see whiskey running in the gutters. What a waste!” André exclaimed, making a comic face. “But a lot of folks drank it up instead, and drunkards went lurching through the streets among the broken bottles with no idea of what was happening. Then the military ordered the burning of the flour mills. Stupid! The fire spread—well, it spread like wildfire! What did they expect? Or what can one expect of politicians and soldiers but stupidity?”

Something came into Miriam’s head, a chance recollection: Once in her father’s house an old man, a world traveler returned from India, had entranced his audience with his descriptions of the burning vats, the moonlight streaming on the filthy Ganges, and the morning sunlight uncovering the bodies of the poor who had died on the street during the night. It had seemed to her, child that she was then, that the man had been telling of these awful things with a thrill of excitement; he had been a spectator of the exotic, without any feeling of human kinship.

She blinked and the memory slid away.

“Naturally, the fire spread to the arsenals, so the munitions exploded. It was pandemonium, I tell you! People threw furniture from their burning houses, they made bonfires out of Confederate money, they crammed themselves into wagons and fled.

“I got on my horse and followed the railroad tracks out of the city. The last I saw of Richmond was cinders and smoke.”

The story ended. André lit a cigar. Shocked into a mournful silence, all watched him tear off the band, bite the end, apply the match, and finally lean back to savor the first aromatic draw.

Lambert Labouisse broke the silence.

“Well, I always said Jeff Davis was never wholeheartedly with us. He tipped toward the Union, always had. And this is the result. By God, this is the result.” And he looked accusingly about the room, at faces and furniture, at ceiling and walls, as if one of these might have some other explanation for the disaster.

André observed cheerfully, “No use in recriminations. You have to look at it this way: All’s well that ends well.”

“Ends well?” Miriam repeated somberly. “Without even counting the wounded and dead, one has only to stand at the foot of our lane and watch the men go past; they’ve been coming by for weeks now, carrying their paroles and nothing more, not a penny, and no work in sight. They’re wiped out. The poverty is beyond belief. That’s how well it’s ended.”

“Oh, I understand.” André’s tone was sympathetic. “But that’s not the case everywhere, you know that. Some, even in the South, have made fortunes they could never have dreamed of before. Why, up in Memphis and in Vicksburg—why, I assure you, as many bales of cotton went north on Union gunboats as went downriver to southern ports and overseas.”

That was certainly true. Miriam was careful not to look at Lambert Labouisse except out of the corner of her eye, with which she could see him in his aging, but still correct, white summer suit, smoking one of André’s enormous Havana cigars.