by Frank Yerby
The doctor came out. His white gown was dirty and bloodstained, so that he looked like nothing on earth so much as a butcher from the slaughter pens. But neither of them fainted. The women of the South were past the fainting stage in the Spring of ‘sixty-three.
When they got ready to go back, they found that their boat had been caulked so that it no longer leaked. And as they reached the southern shore of Lake Pontchartrain, by nightfall of the next day, they found the Yankee sentries waiting for them.
“My son was in that hospital . . . dying,” Aurore lied with great dignity. “I had to go to him . . . pass or no pass.”
The young Yankee officer sighed, looking at her white hair. His mother was like this . . . only not half so beautiful.
“You may go, ladies,” he said wearily; “but please don’t try a trick like that again.”
XXXVI
IT WAS lost finally. And no man could say exactly the day or the hour, for there were dozens of days, thousands of hours. Of course there was Palm Sunday, April 9, 1865 at the McLean house on the edge of Appomattox village, ninety-five miles west of Richmond in Virginia. But that was merely the formal conclusion, the ceremonial burial of what had been a long time a-dying. It had been lost years ago at Shiloh Church and Donelson, at the Seven Days and Second Bull Run, at bloody Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsvile, Vicksburg, Gettysburg, Chickamauga, Missionary Ridge, in the March across Georgia, at Nashville, in South Carolina, and finally at Appomattox. It was lost, perhaps, when old Edmund Ruffin yanked the lanyard of the first gun at Charleston Harbor sending the roundshot screaming upon Sumter.
It was lost, too, in far and in obscure places: at Manchester and Leeds in England, when thousands of textile workers calmly accepted starvation as the alternative to supporting the naked hideousness of slavery; in Tennessee, forty miles above Memphis, on April 12, 1864, at tiny Fort Pillow at Washington, where Abe Lincoln sadly walked the night streets in a shawl. . . .
Lieutenant Colonel Etienne Fox, of the CSA, sat on the deck of a steamboat late in April of ‘sixty-five looking out over the Mississippi. In a little while now, he would pass the once-great plantation of Harrow, but he did not intend to stop. First, New Orleans, and a night of rest and thinking. Then in the morning he would go back to Harrow to face whatever he would find there.
Already the cane was high in the fields, and the cotton was up and greening. Nothing had changed—everything had changed. He had the curious feeling that he was an intruder-ghost here in the land of the living. A strange bewhiskered ghost with guts rotted by dysentery, a minie ball aching dully in his shoulder, another in his thigh, three fingers of his right hand left behind him at Chickamauga . . . all his life, in fact, left behind at various places, and at various times: Shiloh Church, Murfreesboro, Chickamauga, Nashville, and in nameless towns and villages. Because never again would there be any forward looking; nothing in the future could conceivably stand against the blood and flame of the past.
Now, until he was dead finally (not at Shiloh—where a ball had merely creased his tough skull and left him covered with the maimed and dying wounded), he would awaken in the night remembering. How it was at Murfreesboro—sleeping in the icy mudpools while the rain whipped down all night and his horse’s black coat steamed . . . the wheels of the cannon digging in, and the whipcrack above the straining horses that could not budge them . . . The men in ragged grey and butternut brown standing in the cottonfield and stuffing the boils into their ears against the drumshattering thunder of the artillery; the riderless horses flying in every direction (a gutshot horse screams like a woman in childbirth, but wounded men don’t cry); the curious silence in the midst of battle that comes when the uproar has lasted long enough so that the brain in self-defense seals off the passage from the ears . . . and the retreat . . . picking his way between the bodies, resting at last by the smoking mound of raw horse flesh that had been three horses and was now less than one, their riders too indistinguishably co-mingled (manblood and beastblood are the same color upon the earth and just as thick and steaming), then riding off again only to stop beside the bodies of two young lads, one of them fair and blond, the other dark, yet each of them with the other’s features mirror-imaged, and recognizing with no sense of shock, or regret, or any sort of feeling that these were the Le Blanc twins, Victor and Armand, lying there in each other’s arms, tenderly . . . He had turned to go then, but at the last Armand had moved, so he bent and disengaged the boy’s arms from around the frozen corpse of his brother, and tried to lift the lad. But he could not, for the bloodpool was now ice, and the frozen rags one with the stone-hard mud. He remembered that he had straightened up and that he had not said anything but stood there looking at the boy frozen to the ground, seeing his blue lips moving and his finger purplish black and trembling pointing to Etienne’s heavy Colt. He took it out, and passed it over, unable to do the job himself, watching as Armand got the icy muzzle into his mouth, but too far forward, so that the stiff thumb slipping from the hammer jerked the pistol, and when the smoke had cleared the boy no longer had a face.
At Shiloh it had rained. He remembered with painful distinctness how his guts had knotted with fear as he had ridden forward into the place where the whole ridge exploded into flame and the earth had risen up and smote him. Then, later, waking under the hot steaming mound of dead and near-dead, smelling the blood-stench and burnt cloth and urine and feces and powder and cold deathsweat, he had lain quietly and waited for death that did not come. The Yankees had dug him out at last and herded him aboard the steamboat and taken him to Camp Douglass in Chicago.
If he could have read that letter, regretting his supposed heroic death, he would have smiled wryly through his black beard. He would have known as Ceclie could not that it was the work of a division clerk, and that old Nat had merely scrawled his name to the bottom of it. Never on earth would that old war horse have been capable of such clean phrasing. But he did not know it as he came awake aboard the Union steamboat butting upriver toward Chicago and the prisoner-of-war camp. He did not learn of it until long after Forrest had exchanged a Union Brigadier for him (“Git me that Gawdamned Cun’l Fox back. He’s a uppity Frenchified sonofabitch but, Gawddamnit all, he fights!”)
He had despised General Nathan Bedford Forrest at first, with that cold and deadly loathing that Southern aristocracy has always reserved for the slave trader; but you just couldn’t hate old Nat long. The old war horse was completely honest and Etienne personally had seen fifteen horses shot from under him—at Shiloh, at Murfreesboro, at Chickamauga, at Nashville and in the campaign in Tennessee.
Now the packet was rounding the bend above Harrow. Etienne stood up painfully as the great white house came in sight. Then his pale blue eyes were widening, seeing the ruined and smoke-blackened North Wing. On the gallery three women stood and waved at the steamboat, and Etienne’s breath came out in a great sigh. They at least were all right. He would not alter his plans.
As the house drifted back out of sight, a Negro, clad in Union blue, shouldered past Etienne and went forward. And Etienne shuddered, remembering Fort Pillow.
That was a minor action, one of the least that he had been in, but he remembered it like a Brady photograph and he would remember it every time he saw a black—so that ever afterwards he would have to steel himself to endure the presence of Negroes. He remembered the day—April 12, 1864. He had moved up with General Forrest from Mississippi into Tennessee. They had caught General William Sooy Smith flatfooted and sent him reeling back upon Memphis. Then they had ridden like a prairie fire across Kentucky to the banks of the Ohio and had held Paducah for nine hours while Forrest mounted a command of raw Kentucky recruits with ‘borrowed’ horses.
Riding back into Tennessee, he remembered being puzzled at the tone of Ceclie’s letters which had at last caught up with him. She seems almost sorry I’m alive, he thought bitterly. The letters were stunned and mute. The children are well. Julie has a son. They are both doing as well as could be e
xpected under the circumstances. Your mother, too, is getting along splendidly. Never a note of gladness. (The breathgone “I love you, love you, love you, oh, my darling!” hot-whispered into his ear, of many nights, lost, lost, the fierce nails pressing into his bare back, piercing the flesh, bringing the blood as they had ground out their tiny share of ecstasy—of this, nothing, as though it had never been.)
Then Fort Pillow had come in sight, and he had forgotten. It was fatal to think of anything but the business at hand. It had been very easy—that fight. There were only six hundred men in the outworks and old Nat had driven them back into the fort within an hour. Then seeing that it was hopeless, the Union commander had hoisted the white flag. Etienne remembered it flying cleanly against the blue April sky. Beside it flew the Stars and Stripes.
Then the men were swarming forward over the works, the Columbiads in the woods thumped and thundered, the small branches splintering down before them and the whole place stinking of burnt powder. Then the Union soldiers were marching out in good order, their arms raised above their heads in surrender. Etienne heard the sharp intake of breath from the Georgian at his side.
“Gawdamighty! They’s niggers!”
Looking back again, Etienne saw that perhaps two hundred of the men in blue were blacks. At his side the Georgian was crying like a child.
“I hopes to die!” he wept, “if paw ever finds out I fit agin niggers! Why you Gawddamned black bastids—a-fittin’ ag’in’ white men! Take that!”
His rifle roared and a black boy crumpled grotesquely. Then another soldier shot and another until they were all firing into the close packed mass of black humanity.
Etienne jerked out his sword and began to lay among the men with the flat side. Blows that would have knocked a man unconscious under ordinary circumstances went unnoticed. Here and there in the ranks a man cried out against the slaughter.
“Hold it, fellows—this ain’t right. Them niggers done surrendered. . . .”
But his voice was lost in the crackle of musketry sweeping through the ranks of the Negroes like flames through a cane field. Etienne remembered that the sweatsmell was different, an acid lungstinging stench like a dogfox in rut. Then the men were surging forward and he was being swept along with them. They were stabbing with their bayonets and clubbing with their musket butts. A tall lanky mountain youth had knocked down a big brute of a black and was carefully, systematically, beating out his brains with his gun butt. Etienne remembered that he kept at it long after the Negro’s head was an unrecognizable bloody pulp. There was another boy, with the face of a girl and long lashes that swept his cheeks when his lids drooped. He was using his bayonet with the precision of a surgeon, his footwork as graceful as a ballet dancer. Step, side step, sweet curving arch of back and houndtooth-lean belly, the gutspike going in just above the navel ripping sidewise, so that the Negro’s guts tumbled out in pinkgray sausage rolls, then the withdrawal a full step backward, and the half whirl in search of another victim. He was very good and very precise. He was almost dainty. Etienne found himself swept along with the tide, hearing his voice yelling like the rest and his sabreblade crunch through black bone and sinew. Then, at the last, a little, emaciated yellowish Negro started to run away from the screaming, dying, unarmed mass. The girlish youth lifted his rifle like a javelin and hurled it through the air. It caught the little mulatto in the back and hurled him forward on his face. The bayonet went through his thin body and sank eight inches into the soft ground. Etienne stood and watched him struggling to get up, pressing down with his hands in a macabre sort of calisthenics, raising his body up, up . . . but the bayonet was fast in the earth, and all he could do was to slide his body up and down the blade, the blood bubbling up at the top, the whole blade reddened. Etienne felt very cold suddenly. He sat down upon the damp earth and threw up on the ground. For days thereafter he couldn’t get the smell of vomit out of his black beard.
There were some two hundred-odd Negro soldiers in Fort Pillow. Of these, six or eight escaped. All the rest were put to the sword and their white officers with them.
Life now would have to be lived out in memory. In dreams in the night, nightmare screaming. In forever backward-looking. In never forgetting. And not for him alone but for the whole South . . . all of it.
The first person Etienne saw when he stepped off the boat in New Orleans was Walter McGarth. He came rushing forward, putting out the one hand he had left and crying:
“ ‘Tienne! So I’m not the only one! Thank God for that!”
“The only one?” Etienne demanded.
“That came back. All the old crowd, Pierre Aucoin, Henri Lascals, Jean Sompayrac, Bob Norton, Jim Duckett . . . they all got it, ‘Tienne. I hear some of the Le Blancs survived—but then, there were so damned many of them. . . .”
Etienne’s face was lined and grave.
“What’s next, Walter? What do we do now?”
“Pick up the pieces, I reckon. You’ve come to get your father, ‘Tienne?”
“My father?” Etienne said harshly. “Where is he? I didn’t know. . . .”
“He’s in the hospital. That’s right, you couldn’t have known what with mail like it is. They moved him and some of the other sick prisoners up from Fort Jackson. They’re being released to relatives when they’re well enough to go home. You go to the Provost Marshal—no, I’m wrong. Now you go to the Commissioner of Police. His office is at the St. Louis. . . .”
Etienne was off at once, tossing a muttered thanks back over his shoulder. Everywhere in the streets of New Orleans were Union soldiers, swaggering, laughing, drunken. Many of them were Negroes. Etienne saw a black ride past in a fine carriage, at his side a pretty mulatto girl with diamonds gleaming at her ears and throat. The time is out of joint, or, cursed spite . . .”
He walked on very rapidly. Rounding a corner he ran head-on into a gigantic Negro in the uniform of a policeman.
“Gawddamnit, white man,” the black growled. “Why the hell don’t you look whar you’s gwine?”
Etienne’s eyes shot lightenings, but now was no time for delay. He stepped off quickly into the gutter and hurried on. Finally he was going up the steps of the Saint Louis and into the lobby.
Inside he was stopped by another Negro policeman who demanded his business. When Etienne told him, he disappeared behind the doors of an office. Etienne looked at the legend on the door. “Cyrus R. Inchcliff,” it read, “Commissioner of Police.” In an incredibly short time, he was back, holding a folded paper.
“Heah yo pass,” he grinned. “The Commissioner say you’s a ole fren of hissen. He tol’ me to tell you to come back by heah when you gits yo daddy. He wanta see you bof. An’ you better do hit, too, or else he jes mought change his mind ‘bout sottin’ yo daddy free.”
Etienne had gone before he had finished speaking, striding as fast as his stiff leg would let him. The pass, apparently was quite in order. For a few minutes after reaching the hospital he was conducted to a broad inner gallery on which many patients sat enjoying the sun. He edged his way between them, until at last on the end of the gallery he came to the tall man with white hair and snowy, neatly trimmed mustache and goatee, sitting very quietly in a chair.
“Father,” Etienne ventured, “Father . . .” But it was not until the man turned that he was sure. The great scar was there, and the fierce old falcon eyes.
“ ‘Tienne!” Stephen whispered, “ ‘Tienne!”
Etienne took a step forward, then with a strangled cry he swept the thin, frail old man into his arms.
Stephen pushed him back and looked at him, seeing the unabashed tears standing in his son’s eyes.
“Easy, lad,” he grinned, “I’m all right. The girls would have taken me home last week, but I wouldn’t go. I wanted to wait until ye came. The damyankees have been good to me here. All the women nurses are in love with me.”
“I don’t doubt it, Father,” Etienne said, relief flooding his voice. “But come on, let’s get out of here . . . I
haven’t even been home yet. . . .”
“Ye have my release? Everything is in order?”
“Yes, Father. We’ll go up to the superintendent now.”
“How are we going to get home? Ye haven’t any money have ye? If ye have . . . ye’re the first Confederate soldier I’ve seen with any.”
Etienne’s black brows flew together.
“I haven’t a cent,” he growled. He stood there a moment, frowning. “There’s one thing we might do,” he said thoughtfully. “This police commissioner claims to be an old friend of ours and he practically ordered us to return to his office. . .”
“Then we’d better go. Things have changed, ‘Tienne.”
“So I see. Well, let’s get the formalities over with.”
Half an hour later, they emerged into the brilliant Spring sunlight. They walked very slowly, for Etienne soon saw that his father was incapable of a faster pace. On the banquette outside the St. Louis, they paused until Stephen had got his breath back. Then they climbed the steps into the lobby.
Without hesitation, although there were half a dozen other people waiting, the black policeman ushered them into the office. Then both of them were standing there frozen, their eyes wide in their faces, for the man who was striding forward to greet them was coal black, and very familiar.
“Inch!” they both said at the same time, upon the same breath. “ ‘Tienne!” Inch said, “and Monsieur Stephen! How glad I am to see you!”
Etienne’s glance slashed over him briefly. The mustache was new, black even against that coal-black face. That and the dressing gown of finest silk and the faintest suggestion of heaviness about the man.
