Libbie

by Judy Alter

  "Oh, I am, Lane, I truly am. I'm on the greatest adventure of my life."

  Autie came up just then, having turned over to Eliza the supervision of the unloading of our belongings. "General Custer," he said brusquely, holding out his hand.

  "Yes, General, I know who you are."

  "Autie, this is Lane Murphy, who used to visit in Monroe," I said enthusiastically. "Surely you remember!"

  "I'm afraid not," Autie said, his voice still not cordial.

  Sensing his tone, Lane said quickly, "The house is not far. Libbie? You don't mind a walk?"

  "Of course not. I should be glad of it." Actually, the day was warm and muggy, and I was already uncomfortable, but I saw no need of mentioning it.

  "Miss Libbie, you wait just one minute!" Eliza's voice rang through the air, and I turned to see her running toward us, waving a parasol. "You don't know this southern sun," she said scoldingly as she came up close. "Got to keep it off your face at all times." She opened the parasol and handed it to me.

  "Yes, Eliza, I will."

  "Do you want to order my troops around, too, 'Liza?" Autie asked, but at least this time there was a hint of amusement in his voice. Then, the amusement gone, he turned back to Lane. "Let's be off."

  After half a block I was more than grateful for the parasol. The sun seemed much hotter here than at home, and the air was heavy. We left the river and followed a dilapidated white board fence about half a mile before turning into what once was an impressive gate. Now the white-painted bricks were awry, the wrought-iron sign that said "Glen Ellen" dangling.

  "Ellen was my mother's name," Lane said when he saw me stare at the sign, "and the Glen... well, Father was Celtic, like most southerners. He named the place for Mother when he bought it."

  "Charming," I murmured, but I could not help gazing at the disrepair of the gate.

  Lane saw me. "No time, no money, no help for upkeep," he said, shrugging.

  I noticed that he limped. "You were in the war yourself?" I asked.

  "Wasn't everybody?" he countered, and for just a second he and Autie exchanged looks of comradeship.

  Autie softened a bit. "Where were you hurt?"

  "Vicksburg. Doubt I ever faced you in battle, General. I fought in the southern tier of states, not with the Army of Virginia."

  "No, it was almost two different wars," Autie acknowledged.

  Before us loomed the plantation home of my dreams, only it was not gleaming white with fresh paint, as I'd imagined, and no southern belles sipped lemonade on the lawn while white-turbaned nannies stood and fanned them. The house, raised above the soft river-bottom ground on piles, had turned gray with old paint. Faded green shutters hung at strange angles, and unkempt bushes nearly grew across the front door. Lane explained that the house had been used as headquarters by a Union general for part of the war—like most of Louisiana, it had been spared the devastation of outright war but had suffered from neglect.

  "The general's people took fair care of the inside," he said, "but they weren't much on looking after the outside. I haven't been able to get to it yet." His words conveyed a determination that he would soon get to it.

  I reached for Autie's arm, awash with sympathy for this man and afraid to ask what had happened to his family. Yet even as I stood there, I was entranced by the song of the mockingbirds. A thick hedge of crape myrtle grew in a semicircle on the lawn before the house, and it seemed crowded with these song-filled birds. Later I would know that they sang late into the night, as though twilight had made the day too short for them to give voice to all that needed to be sung to their mates.

  The house had a wide central hall, upstairs and downstairs, and easily divided itself into two separate wings. We would live in the northern half—"Appropriate," Autie muttered—since it was in better condition. Eliza would have a sleeping room in the small, detached structure that held the kitchen. Lane explained that it was built separate to spare the main house in case of fire, but I moaned over the thought of carrying food back and forth.

  "Slaves did it," Lane shrugged.

  He saw us settled, urged us to call on him for any slight thing we might need, and took his departure.

  "He's in love with you," Autie said, his face stern.

  "Nonsense, Autie. That poor man has too much grief and sadness in his life to be in love with anyone, let alone me."

  "You're wrong," Autie said coldly. "I want you to stay away from him while we're here."

  "Autie, I will not be rude," I answered, and I wasn't at all sure that I would avoid Lane Murphy to appease Autie.

  The Murphy house was a strange contradiction in luxury and primitive living. The sole water supply for the big house and the servants' quarters was contained in two cisterns at the rear of the house—the water level in these was low, and the tops uncovered so that bugs and flies, dust and leaves, were blown in. Nightly the wild cats that roamed the plantation strolled along the rim of these uncovered cisterns, singing their plaintive nightly songs. Our drinking water was so full of gallinippers and pollywogs that a glass stood by the plate untouched until the sediment and natural history united at the bottom. Heaven only knows what a microscope would have revealed.

  Animals, of course, are not so fussy, and there was one wily old cow who knew how to pull the plug out of the cistern—the thing didn't even have a Yankee spout!—to get herself a drink. Of course, gallons of our precious water supply were wasted. We learned to be alert at the first sound of rushing water. Once I woke Autie in the night to tell him the cow had gotten the plug again, and I think his muttered threats about shooting her were sincere for the moment.

  In earlier and better days the place had been carefully fenced, so that animals could not get near the main house, but the fences were in disrepair now. And Lane told me that the open space beneath the house had been protected by latticework, now long gone. That left the underside of the house unprotected, as it were—and it was there that pigs and even calves sought shelter from the sun, making an unholy racket for those of us in the house above.

  The bayous about the house were marshy, filled with decaying vegetation, and the frequent rise and fall of the river left mud banks everywhere—all perfect places for the breeding of mosquitoes. I could not exaggerate the size or the ferocity of these insects—Eliza called them gallinippers, which I thought poetically perfect. She took counsel from the other Negroes as to the best method of extermination, and one night we found ourselves asleep in a room with smudge pots. Eliza had filled old kettles with raw cotton and lit the cotton. A northern mosquito would have wilted in an instant!

  "My God," cried Autie, "what is that awful odor?"

  "Smudge pots gonna keep the gallinippers from Miss Libbie," Eliza explained calmly.

  "I'll not sleep like a piece of dried meat hanging in a smokehouse," he declared. "Get rid of them now!"

  Eliza declined and told him in no uncertain tones that he could sleep elsewhere, but I was to be protected from the gallinippers. She removed the smudge pots only when it appeared they had no effect on the insects.

  Finally I took refuge, often even in the daytime, behind a netting that enveloped our broad, high bed. I could write or sew, and the nasty things could not get near me—I could watch them batting futilely against the material. Autie, of course, scorned such softness.

  "Miss Libbie, I want you to come with me," Eliza said one day when the sun was not quite so bright and the wind not quite high enough to bring in a cloud of mosquitoes.

  "Where?" I was willing to go, from boredom, no matter where it was.

  "The slave cabins," she replied. "There's nobody left 'cept a few old people, too old to be any use to anybody, even themselves. They're starvin' down there."

  "Oh, Eliza, of course we must go."

  One old woman was bedridden—Granny Goshen, Eliza called her—and though she appeared ancient, she could not tell me her age. She remembered being in New Orleans with her mistress and other events that finally led me to believe that sh
e was near a hundred. No one had told her, until I did, that she was free, and she raised her eyes to heaven, saying "Praise the Lord!" What, I wondered, could freedom mean to her except that there was no one to take care of her now?

  Autie always fussed at Eliza's handouts. "Feeding half the county, I am, anywhere I set up my headquarters," he grumbled. But he had no word of reprimand after I told him about these helpless ex-slaves. Eliza fed them bountifully from our kitchen, the whole six weeks we were in Alexandria, and Autie looked the other way.

  He also did a strange thing. One day I heard men laughing and talking outside, and when I went to investigate, I found some of Autie's soldiers busily preparing to trim away the huge bushes and paint the house.

  "Autie? Did you do that for Lane?"

  "No. I did it because it's a damn shame to see a house like this fall in from rot."

  I didn't even reprimand him for swearing, as was my usual custom. Lane had the good sense not to exaggerate his gratefulness. Instead, with southern politeness, he said, "I'm beholden to you. If ever I can repay you, be sure that I will."

  "I understand," Autie said, taking the offered hand.

  That night, as we lay in the big bed that once had belonged to Lane's parents, Autie said, "Make no mistake. I've not changed my mind about Murphy."

  The best thing about our stay in Alexandria was our evening rides. We had brought Custis Lee and Don Juan with us—Autie would never have left them behind—and each evening a great crowd of us rode in what I soon called a "land of enchantment." The vegetation was lush beyond belief, at least to my northern eyes, and the sunsets boasted richer, deeper reds and golds than any that Michigan could offer. Sometimes we rode along lanes hedged with Osage orange and double white roses, and the fragrance nearly took my breath away.

  Once, though, Autie proposed a new route, off the public highway. We were accompanied by Tom, Jacob, and several others from Autie's staff, all laughing, joking, and singing—and not paying attention to our surroundings, until we found ourselves at the edge of a wide bayou that emptied into the Red River. We could have followed the bayou upward until we came to a narrower and firmer spot, but we were young, foolish, and ignorant of the ground in these parts. Autie, being the bravest among us, dashed across first, and though the crust of mud over the water swayed and sunk under the horse's flying hooves, it held firm. It was a safe crossing, he declared, ignorant of the significance of the seams and fissures that oozed moist mud all around us.

  I held back, in spite of Autie's assurances. One by one the others made the crossing and then rode impatiently up and down on the other side, urging me not to be timid.

  "You know how Custis Lee follows me, Libbie. Why, he'll just follow me across the patch of mud. Come on, now! I'll come back and lead you across." But Custis Lee and I had once sunk into quicksand in Virginia—an indescribable fear comes over you as the mud sucks your horse's legs down—and we had no wish to repeat the performance. Both of us balked at the crossing. Autie laughed and called us cowards, perfectly suited to each other.

  Tom rode boldly back to the side where I waited, and then, crying, "Look how easily I go," headed his horse once more across the infirm terrain. But when Cavalier, his surefooted bay, sprang upon that mud crust, it shattered with a crack like a pistol shot, and that well-dressed, ever-so-confident young brother-in-law of mine found himself waist-deep in thick, black muck.

  Cries of "Get some sticks" and "Hold on! We're coming" were intermingled with Tom's desperate pleas for help, for he could feel himself sinking farther and farther. His struggling horse at last put his front hooves on solid ground and began to pull his weight out, and the others thrust tree branches at Tom. I held my breath, quivering to think how close I had come and fearful that they might not be able to save Autie's brother. I may have christened him "the scamp," but there was no better-hearted junior officer among us, and I was truly fond of him.

  All was quiet while the men worked, but the minute they got him out, a great cry went up. "Look how easily I go," they taunted, laughing and mimicking him. Tom stood, plastered from head to toe in mud, and took the teasing in good nature. But I could not stop shivering from my narrow escape. Had it been I who'd gone through the mud, they'd have never gotten me out with my long, heavy riding habit—loaded with lead to keep it from blowing.

  Needless to say, we proceeded until a safer and narrower place was found for me to cross.

  Autie was bent on alligator hunting. "Their scales are as thick as a china plate," he told me. "So far, the balls I've shot bounce off the hide as though they'd hit an ironclad vessel." He insisted that I go on these hunts, sitting in a flimsy row-boat, which seemed hardly any protection to me. The men would yelp and bark like dogs to flush the beast out of its hiding place—apparently, to my disgust, dog meat is an alligator treat—and it would come slowly down the bayou, magnificent in its ugliness and the danger it posed.

  Autie dispatched four of the beasts, and I was a little sorry each time, for the carcasses were just left to rot. When I mentioned this to him, he said, "It's the sport, Libbie, the challenge. You don't understand."

  Chapter 7

  "Autie," I asked, "will we ever have children?" We lay in the big poster bed in Lane's parents' bedroom, my head still thick from lovemaking. We had been married now well over a year and a half, and my monthly female troubles had been regular as always. Each month I waited, half in hope for the sign of a baby to come and half in dread of having to tell Autie that, again, there was no sign. It was Autie I worried about more than myself.

  "Of course we will, Libbie," he murmured, gently stroking my hair with the bare arm that held me pressed close to him. "You just mustn't think about it. It's all a question of relaxation."

  I smiled wickedly. "And how can I relax with your hands all over me, driving me wild all the time?"

  "And if I didn't do that," he hooted, "there'd be no babies ever. Trust me, Libbie, the Lord knew about making babies when he created us the way we are."

  "You mean the Lord sanctions... ah, our love...?"

  "Are you asking if the Lord sanctions the things we do together in bed? You bet he does, Libbie. It's just your father who wouldn't sanction them."

  I stiffened and pulled away. "How do you know what Papa and Mama do?" I asked, burned as always by any criticism of Papa and yet entertaining my own doubts. Surely Papa never thought of some of the things Autie did... and I enjoyed to the point of nearly screaming aloud.

  "I don't know," he said, "but I can guess, can't you? At least, I can guess what they don't do." His hand left my shoulder to travel delicately across my stomach, then on down to my thigh, causing me to shiver involuntarily. "Want to try again?" he muttered, breathing into my ear.

  Lost to all sensible thought, I pulled myself over on top of him and let my mouth explore his chest and stomach, while he stroked me in ever-tightening circles. My last sensible thought was that if passion produced babies, we should surely have a dozen children.

  Eliza worried about my lack of childbearing almost as much as I did. "Miss Libbie, we got to dose you. I know some remedies, like the folks used to use back in Mississippi. Now, course, if it's the ginnel..."

  I smothered a giggle. "Eliza, I'm sure it's not the general. He'd be horrified if you even suggested such a thing. The fault is mine, I know."

  She was polishing silver—Lane had left his family's belongings intact in the house, and the occupying soldiers had fortunately not carried away the silver and china for souvenirs. Eliza declared it a sin to let silver sit and blacken. So she polished, and we ate from shining sterling and fine bone china. But now she looked up from her work and gave me a sidelong look of amusement. "Still wouldn't hurt none to give him some of this Louisiana red pepper with his eggs... and make them eggs near raw when he eats them."

  "You want to hear the general roar at the breakfast table?" I asked. "Just try feeding him raw eggs with red pepper on them." I could just see Autie, sitting at the table in his immaculate bl
ue uniform, staring at eggs that ran all over the plate—and would ran down his chin should he dare attempt eating them.

  "It'd be for a good cause, Miss Libbie," she said defensively, hands on her hips.

  "Best not," I said, "tell him what that good cause is. He'd stand no aspersions cast on his manhood... and none are merited."

  "Miss Libbie, what do all them words you just said mean?"

  "They mean leave the general alone, Eliza."

  "Yes, ma'am. But now if I can just remember what my mammy used to give Miss Juliette after she married... she was just like you, Miss Libbie, wantin' a baby so bad, she could taste it. And after my mammy doctored her, don't you know she had four babies, one right after the other. Like to kill her."

  "Maybe," I murmured, "we should forget the cure and let nature take its course."

  "Nature," she said knowingly, "sometimes needs a little help." And with that she picked up a tray that met her satisfaction—her face gleamed back at her when she looked in it—and headed for the kitchen, effectively finishing our conversation.

  Fortunately, Eliza was never sure what medicine her mammy had used, and so I was spared, though I lived with the fearful vision of a concoction of pollywog tails and frog's blood and who knows what else.

  "Figs," she said one day. "Eat a lot of figs, and them's plentiful around here."

  Indeed they were. Fresh figs, which I'd never seen before in my life, grew in abundance around Glen Ellen, and to my mind there was no sweeter breakfast than a bowl of figs with heavy cream from the cow that Eliza milked each morning. But my diligent devotion to this breakfast dish did nothing to increase my fertility.

  "Eliza thinks she knows what it would take to make me conceive," I told Autie. "Some medicine her mother used to make."

  "Horsefeathers," he said, wrapping me in his arms. "I'm all you need."

  * * *

  Autie was not having a glorious time in Louisiana. The general who had once exclaimed, "Oh, glorious war!" and who had led troops so loyal that they imitated his dress and cried genuine tears when he was parted from them, found himself leading rebellious troops who felt that since the war was over, they should be home. They were men who were stationed on the western front during the war, where they'd seen little but scattered guerrilla fighting—never an organized battle like those that had brought Autie glory and had welded fighting men into unified troops. But even though the war was over, the enlistment time for these men was not up, and they were not to be discharged. So there they were—mutinous in Louisiana. And there was Autie, no longer restless but certainly not enjoying command in the way he had assured me he would.