Chapter
12
Sam drives the lead wagon, keeping a tight hold on the reins. He already has in mind where he will take his band of refugees, but they have to get past the heavily armed men in their path first. He has arranged the wagons so his is the initial test of whether the white men will honor their word and let the women and children pass. He is closely followed by the second wagon, which Polly drives, and the third, driven by Green. Sam cautions quiet to his terrified load of children and holds the white flag of truce high as he approaches within rifle range of the men by Mirabeau Woods. He has his Enfield under the wagon seat, but it will do him no good against this much firepower if any of the men turn rogue.
“Let them pass,” one of the men on horseback says, and the men on foot clear enough room for the wagons to thread through. Some relax their weapons, but others keep them trained on the occupants of the wagon as if they are dangerous. Sam keeps the horse to a steady pace but turns around to make sure the men have let Polly and Green through as well.
Once safely beyond the wall of men, Sam runs the horses as hard as he dares on the rough terrain, heavy on the whip. Following in his wake, Green and Polly maneuver the other two wagons to keep up. The cease-fire allowing their exit is brief, and sporadic shooting starts again as soon as the wagons are out of sight of the courthouse clearing, but no one pursues them. The shots seem random and single, but it is impossible to tell which side fires or which side holds the advantage. Worse, the escapees hear the cannon fire, two times, but again there is an almost calm, isolated grimness to the sound, unlike the fever pitch of battle.
The wagons serve their purpose for the first two quick miles, but eventually, the thicket of pine trees becomes too dense and prevents further passage. Sam orders everyone to abandon the wagons. They loose the horses, panting and lathered, and hide the getaway buckboards in a small clearing at the edge of the woods, covered over with branches. They lead the horses forward by the reins, proceeding on foot by way of less traveled paths deeper into the woods and on toward the swamp. Everyone who is able carries something, blankets or foodstuffs, cooking pots or a small child too tired or bewildered to walk.
Within minutes, they are cloistered within a thick web of pine trees so close together they almost touch, trunk to trunk. In one area of the woods they pass through, the intertwined canopy of massive pine branches twenty feet above the ground blocks out the light completely. One of the youngest children begins to bawl. His mother picks him up and he fights her, twisting his body, shouting, “No, no, no.” She can’t calm him, but they never break stride, and after a while he wears himself out. Trees change from longleaf pine to moss-heavy cypress, and the ground beneath their feet softens. Sam keeps the group moving, faster than any of them think they are able, deeper into the spongy muck of the swamp. The nature of the air changes quickly, clammy and foul-smelling, as if it is a living thing.
Sam finally stops when they come to a small bog. The ground mixture of moss and peat is soggy and slick but mostly stable. There is a small flowing stream, and the water isn’t too brackish. Dead vegetation nearby is dry enough to provide fuel for a fire.
“Stay close and watch for snakes,” Sam instructs. The bayou is well known for its black moccasins. Sam does his best to disregard the gunfire in the background. “Gather long branches, leafier the better. This may be where we stay the night.”
He breaks them into work units, one group erecting a two-sided lean-to shelter to conceal a small campfire and provide some protection from the wind. Polly, Lucy, and several other women prepare the midday meal, remains of the morning’s breakfast which they hastily packed when evacuating the courthouse. Their movements are heavy and slow but full of purpose, although not many are hungry, even the children.
From far away, a single rifle shot triggers a brief, feverish volley before settling back down into quiet. Sam has no words of false cheer to give the group he led out of Colfax. Win or lose at the courthouse, the probability of a Negro hunt by renegade white men intensifies by the hour. Ten minutes pass without another shot, maybe more, but then the silence is broken by another short, sporadic round of artillery.
The distant on-again off-again sounds from the courthouse carry all the way to the far end of Boggy Bayou swamp. The tired, frightened group of thirty shiver against one another, mute, the piercing blasts tunneling deep into their souls, a tangible connection to those they left behind. For the moment, the strategy that makes the most sense to Sam is to stand pat in the uninviting but camouflaging swamp, to stay together as comfortably as they can rather than risk more travel. Here, amid the muck, they won’t be easy targets for the white men’s bloodlust.
By one o’clock, Sam is anxious to explore the woods around them, unable to stand the emptiness of doing nothing. Since he has the only rifle of the camp, he leaves it with Green and sets out to the north without a weapon. Less than two hundred yards away, he comes across another small group hiding in the swamp, two families huddled close together, shivering. They have already spent a night out in the damp, marshy area, with only two blankets among the eight of them.
“We seen it coming,” one of the men says after Sam relates the events at the courthouse that morning. “I told the missus we daren’t stay home or go to town. Just cut and run, grab up the children, leave the crops and come out here.”
Sam eyes the man’s double-barrel shotgun. “Our camp due south,” he says. “We got food. You welcome to join us. Your gun be useful.” With another weapon at camp, and two more men, he will be free to go farther afield in his scouting.
“Got no fondness for this patch of swamp,” says the man. “That shooting done scraped our nerves raw.” They pack what little they have and follow Sam back to the camp.
Sam turns the newcomers over to Polly to settle in and heads out in the opposite direction. He makes a broader loop, this time with the comforting weight of the Enfield at his side. The terrain changes again about a quarter mile south, at an outer edge of the swamp, more woods than bog, and the ground firms. He comes across a clearing and what looks like a blanket-town settlement of colored families, packed tight.
A man at the edge of the encampment levels his shotgun at Sam.
“Sam Tademy from The Bottom,” Sam announces, holding his rifle away from his body. “We come from the courthouse less than two hours ago, set camp north of here.”
They surround him, firing questions so fast he can’t sort them out. There are maybe fifty or so in this group, outnumbering his own, and as with his, there are more women and children than men. Most of the men’s makeshift weapons—a shovel, a scythe, a stout tree limb—are likely to be useless in real battle. The faces staring at him are covered with the grime of the woods and stretched tight with fear. The assemblage looks as though they have been camped out in the woods for some time, blankets or quilts draped over tree branches or rigged-up poles every four to six feet, and well-established cooking fires.
A middle-aged man in overalls separates himself from the rest. He is stooped, with a nervous eye that never stops watering. He holds up his hand for quiet. “They shooting since morning. How you get out?” he asks.
Sam repeats his tale of the morning’s events, up to the noontime confrontation between Sheriff Nash and Levi Allen. “Then the white men agree to let women and children out the courthouse,” Sam finishes.
“Maybe they got mercy in they hearts,” the watery-eyed man says.
Sam shakes his head. He has carried an unformed dread since noon, when they passed the tree line north of town without being fired upon or stopped. “Letting the women and children go ain’t no good sign,” he says. Words form for the first time in front of this new group. “Why they want women and children out the way?”
“What you saying?” the man asks.
“I don’t know,” replies Sam. “But can’t nobody stop White League if they get the lead.”
Another flurry of shooting breaks out from the direction of the courthouse.
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“We got use for another man here,” the man finally says.
Sam wants to be back in his own camp, closer to Polly and the boys. If it were just his own family, he would choose to stay totally separate, able to hide more easily, but he is responsible for almost forty people now. There is logic in getting as much firepower in one place as possible, but he can’t make himself commit to bring his own group back to these desperate, hopeless-looking people.
“We settled,” he says. “I got to get back.”
It isn’t a long walk between the two encampments, and Sam is surprised by how many small campsites of colored refugees he runs across. There are well over a hundred hiding in the swamp, maybe two hundred, singly and in groups. He repeats as much as he knows to each cluster he meets, and although his eyewitness reports are hours old and shed no light on the current situation, each person devours every scrap of what he has to share.
It takes over thirty minutes to get back to where he left his camp. The shooting drones on in the background. In just a couple of hours, it has settled into a repetitive backdrop, disconcerting and inconclusive. At this rate, thinks Sam, it could take days for any resolution. Precious days during which it is possible the Federals might finally appear. He worries that his group hasn’t left the men in the courthouse more of the food for a long siege. At least out here in the open, they have a chance to catch or forage to feed themselves.
It is two o’clock when Sam reaches the campsite. Women are tidying up from the meal, men and older children clearing out debris to create a larger living area. Two young boys play a game of marbles away from the bank of the bayou, where the ground is more firm. Already most of the younger children are bored, their ears grown accustomed to the distant gunfire.
Sam sees Polly in the distance with a group of women, close to the communal fire, her shape outlined by her old olive dress, grown too small this last year. Not far away are Green and Jackson, his pride, their arms full of kindling and moss for the flames. Such an overpowering feeling of relief floods through Sam that he has to stop to catch his breath. He starts toward them, gratitude at his good fortune pushing aside a small piece of the horror of the day.
An explosion punctures the air, and everyone stops dead in their tracks. There is no mistaking the finality of the sound of a cannon. This is the scene Sam carries in his mind for the rest of his days, burned into his consciousness in the middle of Boggy Bayou swamp, a frozen moment when the thankfulness of what he has and the comprehension of what is being taken away occupy the same space. Even from as far away as the swamp, the high-pitched, whistlelike noise produces a heaviness, an expectant pause that goes on and on until it turns unbearable. There is a sickening thud of impact, and then a series of smaller explosions, as of things ripping apart. At first there is stunned silence, and then the pop of shots again, not in unison but discordant and random. This pattern repeats two more times: the blast, the sounds of destruction, the impotent single shots in answer, with silences lengthening in between. The silences are the most unnerving of all. Several of the younger children in the camp begin to whimper.
Sam runs toward Polly. She has already gathered up the children, clutching them tightly against her body, one unit. In the past year, Green has grown to be slightly taller than Polly, but somehow she towers over her family, a fierce protector. She stands with her back to a giant cypress near the edge of the bayou, Green on one side, Jackson on the other. Her face, usually a mask of self-control, reflects naked terror. Sam reaches them just as the second wave of sound hits, a worse cacophony than the first, as if heavy chains drag across the length of the earth, crushing and pounding everything in their path. Sam doesn’t know what to make of the noises that come from over the hill. Maybe the troops from New Orleans have appeared after all, bringing down the wrath of the government on the men trying to recapture the courthouse. Or maybe the makeshift cannons they hastily crafted held up in the heat of battle to answer the firepower the white men have at their disposal.
“Gather everything,” Sam shouts to his group. “We got to move.”
Chapter
13
From his assigned post along the east barricade, Israel is relieved to see Sam Tademy head away from the courthouse in the direction of Mirabeau Woods, leading three overloaded wagons of women and children under a white flag, including Lucy and his boys, crossing the open field and passing through a line of armed men. Thankfully, not a single shot, but after the wagons have disappeared under the cover of trees in the woods, periodic gunfire breaks out again.
A group of colored men comes from inside the courthouse, deployed to the roof, McCully among them. Israel isn’t like McCully and Spenser, itching to use his gun. Last night McCully talked about his Enfield rifle as if it were a cherished child, calling it nine pounds of respect. This isn’t the kind of respect Israel craves. The long hours of senseless, tentative shooting have twisted Israel’s nerves. He feels as if he has been in the trench for days, not hours. There is a flurry of activity around the white men’s cannon, and then they wheel the weapon somewhere outside of Israel’s line of sight. Another hour passes, and then two. As long as the colored Colfax men can keep the cannon out of range, they are in standoff.
Along the narrow depression of the trench, colored men are spread out every few yards, protected behind the stacked barricades so they can stand at full height to put fresh powder and ball in their muzzle loaders. The close, sulfuric smell is oppressive, and the quiet is eerie, a drawn-out pause in the tiresome game they play.
Suddenly, the earth explodes in a deafening roar. Unlike the previous hollow pops of rifle fire, the pregnant, whistling sounds of objects on the fly shake the air. Israel recoils from the noise, wrenching his shoulder against the back side of the trench. The first blast of the cannon catches all of them completely by surprise. The explosion comes from the side, down by the river, not from the front as expected, taking out the men in the north barricade trenches like so many dominoes stacked on end and set in motion to fall, one after the other.
White men fire from the river’s embankment, their approach covered by foliage. Israel sees them moving now, four at least, darting behind cypress trees, shooting at the colored men on the ground, stripped of the cover of the barricades. About a dozen colored men lie flat, dead and wounded both, some still moving but unable to get up. Others run in different directions, as if blind.
“Break for the tree line,” McCully yells from up on the roof to the stunned men below. “Away from river side. Run.” There is a gap, a narrow possible getaway lane between the men waiting at the far end of Mirabeau Woods in the grove and the river where the cannon fire originates.
Men speed off on foot, cutting across the village roads and fields at breakneck speed. In confusion, a few head directly toward the advancing white men.
“To the woods,” McCully screams.
Israel stares dully at the carnage across from him in the adjacent barricade, but his trench line is still mostly intact. He doesn’t know whether to stay or run.
Two riderless horses appear from the blind lip of the hill separating the river from the courthouse, and then the squat brass cannon they pull comes into view. There is no longer a barricade to stop them from advancing on the river side.
The man next to Israel fires his rifle, but the distance is too great and the shot worthless. From atop the roof, McCully brings his Enfield up to his shoulder and levels it, taking careful aim at the men three hundred yards away trying to set the wick on fire again. McCully is one of the few with any chance of picking off the men loading and firing the cannon. There are six of them. The torch man is about Israel’s age, missing most of his top teeth, so he hands over the powder container for someone else to bite open. He talks to the others around him in an urgent, insistent way, giving orders. His slouch hat is pulled low to his head, his long blond-brown hair, stringy and limp, falling below his grizzled chin.
McCully squeezes back on the trigger, taking the full impact of
the recoil with his shoulder. The man with no teeth drops the fuse lighter he holds in one hand and jerks his head around to his right, as if looking over his shoulder. But it is a younger man farther back who falls, wounded but not dead. The long-haired man attends him briefly before turning back to the cannon’s fuse.
McCully reloads clumsily. Again he squeezes the trigger, quickly, taking less care with his aim, and the shot goes wide. There isn’t even a ripple in the ranks around the cannon, other than two men bearing away the writhing body of the young man. There is another moment of suspension before the second deafening explosion, and then the impact of metal at the edge of the courthouse. The barrel of the cannon has been stuffed with chains, nails, and metal bolts, objects meant to spread wide the destruction, to increase the chances of maiming and killing. A terrible vibration hovers over the barricades, and a scorched smell releases into the Easter afternoon air, like human flesh and hair burning. Several men are cut off from their desperate run to the courthouse. The luckiest have not been killed outright, and can drag themselves toward shelter.
McCully shoots and reloads, again and again, as quickly as he can, getting off a few shots toward the river, his cartridge pouch low. He can only slow the white men, not keep them away, and the mounted horsemen in the pecan grove are now on the move, bringing their horses to a trot and coming in closer from the east.
The white men target McCully. For every shot he manages to squeeze off now, two or three come directly at him, and with each firing, they drag the cannon farther forward up the low, sloping bank of the river. The east barricade still holds, but Israel knows he has to abandon it, like everyone else. The running has a focus now. There are two major streams of retreating men. One set sprints in a panicked, ragged line toward Mirabeau Woods, and the other runs to the courthouse.
Red River Page 13
