Evermore: A Saga of Slavery and Deliverance (The Plantation Series Book 3) (38 page)

Adam strained to hear her. “The cigar store man? I saw him.
He’s dead.”

Nicolette sank onto the chair, Adam still holding on to her.

“You want a glass of water?”

Her gaze on the floor, Nicolette focused on a vision of
André Cailloux, his boy perched on his broad shoulders, a grin on his handsome
black face.

“William was with him,” she muttered.

“Who?”

“William.”

“I don’t know him. Listen, Nicolette.” He shook her
shoulder. “Nicolette, you hear me?”

She looked at him, wondering why he didn’t wipe the blood
off his cheek. Was it his blood?

Lucinda appeared at the doorway, carrying both her boys.
“What’s happened?” she yelled over a cannon blast.

“I found her at the barricade about to get her head shot
off. Keep her here.”

Lucinda sank to the floor next to the chair and freed her
hand from around Charles Armand to take hold of Nicolette’s.

“I’ll keep her here, Captain.”

“Stay here,” Adam shouted. “You understand?”

Nicolette felt the floorboards vibrate as Adam ran from the
house back to the battle.

“You just lost yourself for a few minutes, honey,” Lucinda
said, her voice distant. “You’re going to be fine.”

Gradually, Nicolette regained a sense of where she was, of
what she’d done. She felt no regret for having rushed into the whizzing
bullets. She didn’t even feel grief for André and William. That was a deep pool
waiting to drown her, but not now. Not yet.

Nicolette drank the glass of water Lucinda handed her,
Charles Armand watching her with big frightened eyes, the special pillow case
draped over his head. He clung to Lucinda’s skirt, his thumb in his mouth.

Nicolette opened her arms to him and he climbed into her
lap. She adjusted the pillowcase so it covered his face and rocked him back and
forth on the rawhide chair for a while. She held his bare foot in her hand, the
weight of him against her heart anchoring her. If she couldn’t feel fear, or
grief, she could feel this. She loved this child, and he needed her.

Charles Armand’s body slowly softened and he slept, bombs
bursting not a quarter of a mile away.

“Thank God,” Lucinda said. “He didn’t sleep the whole night
through, nor yesterday.”

“I’m going back.” Nicolette shifted Charles Armand’s weight
so she could stand.

“You are not going anywhere near those barricades!”

“No. To the surgeons’ tent.”

She carried Charles Armand into the bedroom and lay him
down. Gently, she surrounded him with pillows and made sure the pillow case
covered his head. In the still room amid the tumult and din, Nicolette recited
the
memorare
. Remember O Most Gracious Virgin Mary
,
she prayed, and asked her protection for this house and its inhabitants.

In the hospital tent, Nicolette stood at the head of the
operating table. With steady hands, she took the chloroform cone from the
doctor’s hands.

As night fell, Finn peered through the drifting smoke and
fog. He couldn’t bring himself to leave while soldiers were still stranded in
the killing fields.

The gloaming deepened. A Yankee crawled from under a fallen
tree, cautious and quiet. A dirty youth, parched and sunburned, climbed out of
a gully.

Nearby a man heaved off his comrade’s dead body. He’d lain
in the line of fire since morning, the sun pounding down on him. Finn imagined
the stink and thirst must have driven him nearly mad, too scared even to brush
away the ants that stung him. But he hadn’t given the Rebs any reason to shoot
at him, and he’d lived through the day.

The survivors crept through the field, keeping low and
making for the pontoon spanning Little Sandy Creek. Once across, they broke into
a run through the Union defenses, shreds of cotton gleaming on the ground from
the blasted cotton bales used as bulwarks. Finn climbed down and followed them
through the dark.

Safely in camp, he leaned his back against a pine tree,
hoping if he were still the pain in his head would stop throbbing. Earlier,
he’d drunk a canteen full of bad water and paid the price. Now, feeling limp
and empty, he simply sat, watching his signal lads gathered around a fire.

Finn had seen men die. He’d been with General Weitzel since
September, near nine months now. They’d mopped up the Lafourche, then moved
over to the Teche, up to Alexandria, and back over to
the Mississippi. He’d twice been swept into the action as Rebels advanced on
his observation post. He’d shot men and been shot at. He’d seen men’s throats
torn out by minié ball, seen them holding their guts
with their own hands, seen them take a bullet in the eye.

But he’d seen nothing on this scale. Seen nothing as
wrong-headed and pointless as sending all those good men into the enemy’s maw.
Had the generals no idea what they asked, sending soldiers across swamp and abatis and gullies and open ground? Had they not scouted
the terrain? Finn burned at the waste of all those men. How could they excuse
such a blunder?

André Cailloux’s body still lay out there in the dark. Under
a white flag, the Union had removed some of their dead for burial, but not all
of them. The one’s who’d braved the fire the longest and got closest to the
ramparts were the men left on the field. Finn wiped a hand over his stubbled
jaw, unable to fight the thought of rodents out there in the night, among the
dead.

Hursh Farrow lowered himself next to Finn and shared the
tree trunk.

For a while, they watched the fire together, too exhausted
to talk.

Hursh pulled out a twist of tobacco and offered a chaw.

Finn shook his head. “Anything I put in my mouth is coming
right back up.”

When Hursh had his chaw under control, he tucked it in his
cheek.

“Over at headquarters, they’re saying it’s going to be a
siege, we don’t take ’em in the next few days.”

“Guess it’ll be a siege, then.”

After a time, Hursh hauled himself up. “Think I’ll add to my
letter before I go to sleep.”

“Good night, Hursh.”

The men sat around their campfires, exhausted, but too nerved
up to sleep. Dudley and Dunston played checkers. Charley Beam whittled. Sandy
White played his jew’s harp. No one said anything
about Pete Poteet whose body lay in a line of other casualties waiting for
morning burial.

Finn pulled out his packet of letters. The ones that would
be sent home if he were killed as well as the ones he’d received in the last
year. He opened Da’s letter and read it again. There
was barely firelight enough to see the elegant script, but he knew the core of
it by heart.

I admit your avowal to
marry this young woman, whether you have my and Mother’s blessing or not,
disconcerted me, son. A Father likes to believe he is the absolute authority in
his little kingdom. However, now that I am recovered, I wonder at your rather
wild proclamation – did you think you were spawned by savages? have I not
subscribed to the abolitionist journals for years? – I have to acknowledge that
I would think less of a man who did not choose the woman he loves over the
approval of a cantankerous father. The issue, however, is moot, Finnian. Mother
and I have discussed this at length, as you can imagine, for as you know, your
mother will discuss the price of laundry starch -- at length. Our hearts and
heads are as one in this matter. If your mademoiselle is black or brown or
white, if she comes home on your arm, she is welcome in our family. If she
chooses to “pass,” as they call it, we will honor her wish. If she chooses to
proclaim her mixed heritage, we will abide by that decision. A few friends may
decide to cut us, but as Mother says, who needs “snippy” friends? There. Who
could be more reasonable than your wise and loving parents, Finnian? As I have
told you before, you are a lucky son of a gun. Bring your girl home, and
yourself. Your loving Da.

Even now, after all these months, Finn flushed, tormented by
shame that he’d walked away from Nicolette. He’d been too proud to see the
truth of it at first. Once he kicked his pride aside, though, he’d found a
trace of the devil buried deep in his heart. There had been a tiny ember within
himself that flared at thought her veins ran with tainted blood. He, an
abolitionist, and he’d harbored a seed of racism. He’d burned that ugliness out
of himself. Now, filled with remorse and self-recrimination, he would crawl on
his knees to ask her to have him.

Back in New Orleans, Nicolette would read the casualty lists
coming in to headquarters. If Finn fell tomorrow or the next day, she might
read his name. He wondered if she’d care.

In relentless sun or drenching rain, through the onslaught
of random artillery fire and ravenous mosquitoes, the men kept to the
barricades. After the onslaught of May 27th, however, the furious pace of
cutting and stitching slowed in the surgeons’ tents. Inevitably, those who survived
the knife developed raging fevers. Nicolette held a tin cup to her patients’
lips, urging them to drink the bitter tea she made from Indian sage. Some would
survive, some would not.

Two weeks had passed since André was snapped like a brittle
cog in the great war machine, as if he were not a man who sang with gusto over
a pint of beer, who rocked his babes to sleep, loved his wife and his friends.
Once Nicolette would have said her rosary when she woke, praying for André’s
soul, beseeching Mother Mary to protect Bertie and Charles Armand. But now she
stared unblinking at the ceiling, unable to pray.

Was William still out there, alive, or did his body rot next
to André’s?

The hospital tent filled with men dehydrated from diarrhea,
delirious with sun stroke, or trembling with malarial ague. Nicolette became a
ministering angel, that’s what some of the boys called her, in spite of the
menacing pistol she wore on her hip. She no longer gagged at the sight of
maggots and pus. The stench of putrefaction and unwashed bodies, the hot heavy
air under the tents, the constant droning of flies – all of it achieved a state
of normalcy.

The constant gunfire nevertheless took its toll. Lucinda
wore great circles under her eyes. Bertie turned from a placid easy-going sweetheart
into a tense, fussy baby. Charles Armand never took the pillow case off his
head. He slept little and seldom spoke, growing quieter with every day’s
tension. Lucinda fed him the sweet potato pone Mrs. Brickell made, and the
concoction of boiled rice and molasses the whole camp ate, but neither she nor
Nicolette would countenance the blue-scummed beef the
quartermaster doled out.

Through the scorching summer days, Nicolette functioned like
an automaton, her mind distanced from the work of her hands. Somewhere in this
camp, perhaps only half a mile from her, Murphy and Franks lay on their hard
pallets or took their turns at the barricades. During the day, she watched for
them, but the fortifications ran several miles around. At night, sleepless in
the heat, edgy from the blasts of cannon and musket, she planned how she would
kill them when she had the chance. No man would ever again take her strength,
take control of her body or her will, and live. She kept the pistol on her hip
loaded.

Nicolette tolerated Adam Johnston as an annoyance of little
account. He habitually appeared at the porch door late in the evenings,
assuming a mantle of protection. “Do you have everything you need?” he’d ask.
“Did you get enough to eat? And the babies?”

Generally she responded with a curt yes and turned back into
the house without summoning a kind word. At last, however, after a day of
infernal heat and plaguing mosquitoes, she turned on him with the force of an
icy gale.

“Mr. Johnston. We are not friends. I do not require your
solicitude. Please do not again trouble yourself on my account.”

Adam blanched as if she’d spat at him, but he held his
ground. “That man Franks.” He looked to be sure she knew who he meant. She
knew. “He lit out last night. Gone. Two other fellows from Mississippi went
with him.”

Nicolette ground her teeth. The damnable coward.

“And Murphy?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

Nicolette turned on her heel and walked straight-backed into
the house.

Adam did not appear again, though she often saw him watching
her from across the village if there were no skirmish to keep him away.

June the tenth, rain poured down as if to provide the flood
that would float Noah’s ark off the mountain. Surely for this day the war would
cease, Nicolette thought. But the storm did not dissuade General Banks from
launching his second major assault. In spite of the deluge, howitzers, parrots,
and mortar tore through the downpour with deadly effect. Men shivered and fired
their weapons blindly, unable to see through the heavy rain.

In the hospital tent, Nicolette stood in a running puddle,
dripping chloroform or winding gauze around stumps, answering this doctor’s
call or that surgeon’s demands. The next victim was heaved onto the operating
table in front of her to await the surgeon’s rotation, the man’s neck opened by
an errant fragment of shell.

Nicolette’s hands stilled. Her spine turned to ice. Murphy.
Kidnapper. Tormentor. He had not raped her, but in every other way he had
violated her. He had bound her limbs with rope, bound her will with fear for
the children. And now he was helpless. She touched the gun at her waist.

“Just fainted, miss,” the orderly said. “This one’s got a
chance yet.”

She stared at Murphy’s tangled filthy red beard. Franks had
said they were married men. Murphy might have a houseful of children at home. A
mother who waited for him. But he was about to die on this table.

As if in a dream, Nicolette slowly pulled at the lint
stuffed into the wound. Under the flap of raw flesh, a red vein pulsed. She
touched her fingertip to it. She pressed a little harder, felt the blood
coursing beneath her finger.