by Frank Yerby
“Likely filly, ain’t you?” he said. “Tend to you later when I ain’t so busy with the damyankees. Now git!” He whirled her around and slapped her smartly across the behind. Julie was speechless.
“Why, you . . .” she gasped, but the tall man was already past her and running up the stairs.
Julie turned toward the river. There, just opposite the landing, a gunboat drifted lazily. From its masthead the stars and stripes flapped listlessly. Julie could see the crew working feverishly, elevating the muzzle of the squat black mortar. She turned wide-eyed to Aurore, but at that instant the whole North Wing of Harrow blazed with musketfire. They could hear the shrill whistle of the minie balls whining toward the gunboat.
Then the mortar aboard the Cayuga spoke bass thunder, shaking the sky and the river. The two women stood there frozen, and watched the great black ball climb swiftly to the top of its arc, hang there lazily for agonizing seconds, then hurl down to smash into the central floor of the North Wing. The walls of the second floor bulged out slowly, then with terrifying deliberation they crumbled and the flames leaped skyward, past the roof. Afterwards all the guns were silent.
“Oh, my God!” Julie whispered, “Oh, my God!”
But now the Cayuga was butting in to the landing, and a detachment of marines were springing ashore, coming forward on the double. The young lieutenant at their head came to a stop before Julie and Aurore and saluted smartly.
“Buckets,” he said. “Where’ve you got them!”
“The Nigras will show you,” Aurore said with great dignity. Then she disappeared into the smoke-filled interior. The marines raced around to the stables. In ten minutes a long line of marines and Negroes were passing buckets hand over hand and the fire was being checked at a dozen points. It took them four hours to put it entirely out, during which the water and the bayonets, which the marines used to rip down curtains and draperies in the path of the flames, ruined almost half of Harrow. Julie stood at her mother’s side all the time, her face tear-wet. And Ceclie held her two youngest children under her arms, and stared at the fire with an expression of rage on her face that was terrible to see.
When at last it was out, the young lieutenant turned to the women, his smoke-blackened face lined and grave. He drew out a small notebook and a pencil.
“I’m afraid I’ll have to place you all under arrest,” he said. “Your names, please?”
“Madame Stephen Fox,” Aurore said, “and this is my daughter, Madame Thomas Meredith.”
“Meredith?” the lieutenant said. “That’s odd. We’ve got a Lieutenant Tom Meredith aboard the Pinola—no relation, of course?”
Julie was clinging to Aurore, her face ablaze with joy.
“Oh, Mother!” she wept. “Mother!”
The young lieutenant’s eyebrows rose.
“Her husband,” Aurore said drily. “You’ll let him know?”
“But of course! No wonder Tom was moving earth and heaven to go on this trip! Married to a Reb!”
“Thank you,” Aurore said. “Now, if you’ll excuse us. . . .”
“You’re not to leave the grounds,” the lieutenant said. “I’ll station a couple of sentries—as much for your protection as for any other reason. And if Madam will permit me, I’d like to say that Lieutenant Meredith is a very lucky man.”
He saluted them and took his leave. They stood on the gallery and watched the marines moving off, bearing on improvised stretchers the blanket-wrapped bundles that had been men and fighters. Julie and Aurore wept, but Ceclie’s face was clear and still.
“God damn them,” she said; “God damn them to hell!”
The next day young Tom Meredith rode up to Harrow. He dismounted at the foot of the stairs and flew up them three steps at the time calling, “Julie! Julie!”
But when the great doors swung open, it was Ceclie who stood there, staring at him, not a muscle in her face moving.
“Please,” he began, “is Julie . . .”
And Ceclie went up on tiptoe and spat full into his face. Then she turned and marched back into the house. He stood there, blinking foolishly, wiping his cheek, when Aurore crossed the vast hall and came up to him.
“I’ll send Julie to you,” she said calmly; “if she wishes to come. But I cannot invite you in—not in that uniform. Now, if you’ll wait outside. . . .”
Slowly Tom turned and went back through the door. He started down the stairs, his head sunk upon his chest, Then behind him was the clatter of small slippers and Julie’s voice came down to him breathlessly:
“Tom! Oh, Tom!”
He turned and stretched out his arms.
In the Summer the sky above the prisoner-of-war camp at Fort Jackson was naked and cloudless. The river was bronze. Inside the fort the heat simmered and danced. Bending over the sand-piles, shoveling the sand into the canvas bags to be used as bulwarks if ever the Confederate forces swept southward was killing work, even for a young man. And Stephen Fox was sixty-two years old. The goatee was a shaggy red beard now, silver-streaked and unkempt. And the muscles of his arms and back were trained down to corded sinew, every fiber of which ached. The sweat dripped down from his beard. Where it struck the sand it sizzled. Sweat-stink caught in the nostrils and lodged there until it was so usual a thing that the senses no longer registered it. And the belly caved in against the ribs with the eternal hunger.
Step by step the gigantic Negro guards marched the sentry tours, blacksweat glistening on their foreheads and bared arms. Now and again some young blade of the city, gazing ruefully at cracked and blistered palms which had once been as white and soft as a woman’s, would inch over to one of the guards (braving the blacksmell and niggerstench) and whisper: “I say, Uncle, how about letting up a bit?” The answer was almost always the same—the rich, midnight Negro-bass rumbling:
“Who’s brother is Ah? Yo maw’s or your paw’s?” Or:
“You ain’t no kin of mines! Git your lazy ass on back to wuk!” Now and again Aurore would come out to the fort bearing a pass wangled from General Butler. But they talked little. Steel herself as she would, the sight of her Stephen, dirty, half-starved, the raw sunsores visible under his long hair (white now, with only a scarlet thread or two running through it), scratching absently at his armpits where the vermin feasted was too much. And, indeed, there was nothing to be said.
No, we haven’t heard from ‘Tienne. Yes, the children are well. Julie—as well as could be expected under the circumstances. The heat is terrible for her in her condition. And the diet isn’t any too good. Ceclie—nothing about her—no, never tell him about Ceclie! (Ceclie riding into town in a new riding dress—new when all the other women were in rags. Ceclie leaving the children entirely in the care of Julie and herself and disappearing for days. Silk stockings, too—silk! And the officers riding up to Harrow—Yankee officers! She who had spat into Tom’s face, and who had sworn venomously to her hatred of them. And ‘Tienne dead perhaps or maimed or blind . . . or mad. . . .)
There were other things she did not tell him either as the days dragged into years. (We’ll be in Washington in three weeks—remember.) How it was at Harrow, she and Julie, with the help of the few Negroes who had not fled to the riotous camps below the city, digging up the floors of the smokehouses and washing the dirt to obtain the precious salt. Burning corn cobs, putting the ashes in a jar, covering them with water, allowing the water to stand until it is clear. This, Stephen, makes an acceptable cooking soda when used one part to two parts sour milk. And the coffee that you drink here, my darling, bad as it is, is at least coffee, not sweet potato squares, dried in the sun and afterward parched, ground up and boiled. And tea of sassafras leaves, or blackberry leaves, or cassena or youpon. But of milk we have plenty—even at four Yankee dollars a quart—thanks to Ceclie. Julie weeps when she has to drink it, knowing its source. But Ceclie doesn’t care, Stephen . . . she, I fear, hasn’t any heart.
But I cannot tell you these things, my poor old darling. Not these nor how it feels t
o watch you dying by inches and jesting about your rags and your vermin. When this cruel war is over if you survive, you’ll know nothing but happiness then, Stephen . . . I’ll make it up to you then, Stephen . . . then.
Riding back to Harrow to find Julie in tears (she was often in tears now) over the loss of a needle, which, truly, in view of the fact that they were now quite impossible to replace, was a catastrophe. Going into the kitchen to cook the evening meal (the cook had long since fled in the company of a handsome black lad from a colored Yankee regiment) and finding that the only available skillet on three plantations was now out at La Place in the hands of Amelia Le Blanc. Looking up at the smoke-ruined walls and ceilings of Harrow, streaked by the oily smoke from the rags set as wicks in pans of grease. At first she had had candles, made of sweet myrtle berries, boiled and refined into a translucent, aromatic wax. But after the Negroes had fled, there was no one to gather the berries. Julie could not—she, herself, had no time, and Ceclie . . . Even pineknots could no longer be obtained; so grease tapers provided the only illumination at night.
This was her day: First in the morning she made breakfast, cornbread and clabber for the children, the meal for the bread being ground by her own hands. She and Julie had some of the imitation sweet potato coffee, and the thick hunks of cornbread—nothing more. (Ceclie took no breakfast, preferring to sleep ‘til past noon, after which she dressed and went out.) Then she trimmed the dried thorns which she used as pins and pinned the ragged clothing together while she mended and altered them. Buttons made of persimmon seeds were sewn on or, if she wished to be especially elegant, she made them of gourd, cut into moulds and covered with gaily colored cloth. After that she and Julie wove bonnets of corn shucks, palmetto or even of grass. Then the re-dying of dresses as the colors never held after a washing. Then carding, spinning, knitting, tearing up old linen sheets and underwear for bandages and lint. The floors of Harrow were quite bare now—the magnificent Persian carpets having gone into the mills and looms of the starving Confederacy.
And at last supper—of any green and growing thing they could find, and then bed and fitful, exhausted sleep that was the only release from the torments of existence, from the gutdeep, gnawing hunger pangs and the endless, eternal worry.
By the time that Julie’s son was born, a thin, listless infant of less than six pounds, New Orleans had won its battle with General Butler. Apart from his famous—or infamous, depending upon the point of view taken—Women’s Order (“. . . hereafter, when any female shall, by word, or gesture, or movement, insult or show contempt for any officer or soldier of the United States, she shall be regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her vocation”) and the hanging of Mumford before the Mint whose flag he had destroyed, General Butler was the best administrator that New Orleans ever had. During his rule, there was no yellow fever, for he had had the streets cleaned and the gutters flushed, instead of talking about it as New Orleans had done for so many years; and the quarantine laws were rigidly enforced. The poor of the city were fed, for the first time and almost for the last time, in the city’s history—though his method of raising funds for this purpose brought anguished howls. And under him, the city prospered. Though the people upon the great plantations like Harrow suffered, the city dwellers were almost unaware there was a war. It is certain Butler prospered, and his brother even more so; but it is equally certain that his prosperity hurt New Orleans not one iota. At Fort Jackson, Stephen, listening to the reports, developed a wholehearted admiration for the hornyhanded old Massachusetts pirate.
“New Orleans is a filly,” Stephen grinned. “A touch of the whip and the spurs won’t hurt her any!”
In the end, the North, bowing to the furor that the Woman’s Order, Number 28, had caused even in the capitals of Europe, recalled him.
At Harrow, things grew steadily worse. Julie, due to her diet, had no milk in her breasts, and the baby was dying slowly of starvation. Then, one day, Ceclie strode into the room with a Yankee haversack slung across her shoulders. In it were jugs of milk and rich foodstuffs that Harrow had not seen in years. Mutely, Julie shook her head.
“You’re a fool,” Ceclie said calmly. “You’ll let your baby die because of your silly pride? Here, take these things. There are more where they came from.” Then she was gone, her new, expensive boots making a rich clatter on the stair.
And Aurore came into Julie’s bedchamber to find her daughter feeding the infant rich whole milk, which the little fellow was sucking lustily through a clean rag stuffed into the neck of a bottle. But Julie was crying like a whipped child, her whole body shaken with sobs.
“I can’t let him die, Mother,” she sobbed. “Tom hasn’t even seen him! But you know how Ceclie gets these things . . . and ‘Tienne away at the front . . . Oh, Mother, Mother! I could just die!”
“Hush, child,” Aurore whispered; then, her hazel eyes very cold and clear, she stood up. “It’s time I had a talk with Ceclie,” she said. “This can’t be permitted any longer. . . .”
She opened the door to Ceclie’s room without even knocking. Ceclie was seated before the mirror, combing out her long black hair. Even in the dim light, Aurore could see the lip salve, scarlet upon her mouth and the blaze of rouge showing through the rice powder. She looks hard, Aurore thought, hard.
“Well?” Ceclie said harshly.
“Ceclie,” Aurore said firmly. “You can say that what you do is none of my business . . . but it is. Everything that happens at Harrow is my business now that Stephen and Etienne are gone. These men . . . officers . . . Yankee officers. . . .”
Without answering her, Ceclie got up and opened a drawer in her bureau. She drew from it a letter whose creases were worn deep in the thick, yellowish paper from much opening and refolding. As she took it, Aurore could see that it was tearspotted, the ink lines blotted and fading. It was dated Pittsburg Landing, April 9, 1862.
“Dear Madame Fox,” she read. “It is with a heavy heart that I communicate the following melancholy intelligence to you. Your husband, Lieutenant Colonel Etienne Fox, is missing in the action at Shiloh Church and must be presumed dead. He was last seen leading his cavalrymen in a charge upon the Union lines in a pouring rain on the seventh instant. I have been informed that the entire group was cut down by a concentration of musketfire and grapeshot. Colonel Fox was one of my bravest and most able officers, and I bitterly regret his loss, which shall be avenged. With deepest sympathy for you and yours in your hour of sorrow, I remain, your most obedient servant, Brigadier General N. Bedford Forrest, Commanding.”
Aurore raised her eyes to her daughter-in-law.
“And you kept this from me all these months?”
“Yes. You and Julie had enough to bear. So what does it matter what I do?”
“You dishonor his memory,” Aurore said. “You shame his children. Consorting with Yankee officers. . . .”
“Yankee medical officers, my dear mother-in-law. Don’t tell me you hadn’t noticed that?”
“No. And I don’t see what difference . . .”
Again Ceclie turned to the bureau. From the bottom drawer she dragged forth a wooden box. The muscles of her forearms strained, lifting it. She put it upon her bed and unlocked it, throwing back the lid. It was filled to the brim with little white vials, dozens of them, all packed with a white, saltlike powder.
Aurore looked at her wonderingly.
“Quinine,” Ceclie said. “I was hoping to get more of it much more. But now there is no time. I am going across Lake Pontchartrain with it tonight. I’ve got a boat . . . old and leaky as the devil. So . . . if I don’t come back. . . .”
Aurore’s eyes softened. She looked at the girl, a long slow look.
“Yes, yes I did everything you think to get them. But there are boys in the hospitals dying of the fever for lack of medicines. Boys Julie played with. Friends of ‘Tienne. You’ll take care of the children for me? Teach them what a man their father was. Say nothing of me . . . they’ll
forget quickly enough.”
Aurore stretched out her hand and put it upon Ceclie’s shoulder.
“I’m going with you,” she said.
“No. I can’t let you. What would Julie and the children do if . . .”
“They’ll have to take the chance. I’m going, and we’re both coming back. I can’t judge your actions any longer. I’m not wise enough. But this thing must be done. I’ll be ready in ten minutes.”
She went back into Julie’s room. The girl was sleeping, the baby held gently in her arms. Aurore bent and kissed them both. Then she went into the room where the children were. They were sleeping like cherubs. She kissed them all, then, straightening, she went down the stairs where Ceclie waited.
It was pitchblack and the rains cried against the earth. They saddled their own horses and rode out, Ceclie riding cross saddle like a man. When they reached the lake, hours later, the wind had freshened the water into white caps. Ceclie uncovered the boat from among the reeds near the shore. She picked up a tin pail and handed it to Aurore.
“Get in,” she snapped, “and start bailing.”
It was morning before they reached the other side of the lake. During the night the gale had died, and the water was calm. But they were skinsoaked and bruised and aching in every muscle. When at last the prow of the piroque crunched into the weeds Aurore was so weak she could hardly stand. Ceclie took the heavy chest under one arm and slipped the other around her mother-in-law’s waist. Then, half dragging, half supporting her, she stumbled up the sandy beach.
The surgeon general of the Confederate Armies himself welcomed them when the sentries brought them in. He snatched at the chest as though it were gold-filled, and when he saw the contents, the tears ran down into his beard.
“God bless you, ladies,” he croaked. “God in His mercy bless you!”
Afterwards they walked down the long rows of the bare frame hospital. The stench of gangrene was everywhere, thick and heavy on the air. As they turned to enter one room, the surgeon general stopped them, but not before they had heard the last grating scrape of the bonesaw. They stood there, frozen for an instant, then they heard the sizzle of the hot iron searing the torn flesh. The smell of the burning came through the door, and with it the last mortal shriek of the poor wretch within.
