Celia Garth: A Novel (26 page)

“Right this minute,” said Celia, “I bet they’re having dinner at Bellwood. Beefsteaks, hot baked sweet potatoes with chunks of butter—”

“Oh Miss Celia!” Marietta sighed. “Don’t tease me with such talk.”

“I won’t,” Celia said laughing. “I can’t stand it either.” She heard a sound of thunder, heralding the afternoon rain. “I’ll bring in some water,” she said, “before the shower starts.”

She went out, a bucket in each hand. Standing by the well, she listened. The growling of the guns still came from the Neck, but when she saw Marietta go into the garden for vegetables, Celia called that they did not know when things would get rough so she’d better hurry. Marietta called back grimly that she certainly would.

Celia filled her buckets, lugged them into the kitchen, and came out again carrying two more. As she set the empty buckets beside the well she heard Marietta scream.

She wheeled around. Marietta was standing by the gate to Godfrey’s yard. Her basket had dropped from her arm, scattering radishes and onions around her. On the other side of the gate Godfrey’s cook was lamenting, patting Marietta’s shoulder, wiping her eyes on her apron, and calling upon heaven. Celia ran to them.

“What’s happened?” she cried.

Marietta, sobbing into her apron, spoke in gasps. “Oh Miss Celia—Annie says—that man Tarleton—”

“That devil-man Tarleton!” Annie stormed, and between her sobs Marietta said something else. Now they were both talking at once and Celia could not understand either of them. She shook Marietta’s arm.

“Stop crying, can’t you? What’s wrong?”

Half choking, Marietta tried to make her words plain. “Oh God help us—Annie says—that man Tarleton and his Tories—” Another sob broke her voice but she struggled on. “They’ve taken Moncks Corner, Miss Celia—they’ve killed nearly all the men with Colonel Washington—
they’ve got the Cooper River
!”

Celia felt little fires run along her nerves. She heard Annie exclaiming,

“It happened last Friday, Miss Celia, but Mr. Godfrey he just got the news—”

And Marietta cried out, “Miss Celia, if Amos and Mr. Jimmy went up the Cooper River Saturday night they’re sure dead now.”

She and Annie went on talking but Celia did not hear what they said. The guns went on firing but she did not hear that either. She seemed to be standing in a world where time was suspended and nothing happened at all. Then as things began to clear she found that her hands were holding the gate in such a grip that it was hard to move them. She heard the guns again, and the voices of Annie and Marietta, but nothing made sense.

Her swirling thoughts could toss up but one idea. Tarleton and his Tories—they held the Cooper River. And she had sent Jimmy straight into their hands so they could finish killing him. A Charleston supply boat, going up to get food for the rebels, would be a prime target for their guns.

Her knees gave way. She sat down on the ground among the fallen radishes, she put her head down on her knees and burst into tears. Sobs shook her and ripped through her till she felt as if she was being torn to pieces, and she could not stop. A shell screamed close overhead but she did not notice.

Another shell whizzed above her. She did not look up. But she felt a man’s hands on her shoulders, and heard Darren’s voice say, “Come with me, Celia.”

The words roused her. Darren helped her to her feet, and she leaned against him, still too shaken to stand alone.

“I was on my way over here,” said Darren. “I’m sorry you had to hear it like this.”

Celia wet her dry lips. “Darren—Jimmy?”

“I’ll tell you all I know. But let’s go in. These shells now are coming from the ships.”

He led her toward the house. She walked mechanically, stumbling over the soft earth.

“The boat may have gotten through to Bellwood,” he said. “Or maybe the men have tied it up behind some bushes, and are hiding.”

Celia blurted, “And maybe they’re all dead.”

Darren’s arm jerked her to a standstill. A fireball had fallen on the ground in front of them. When it had sputtered out, leaving a black ring in the weeds, he led her indoors to where the stairs went from the back hall down to the cellar. They sat on the steps, and he told her all he could.

A courier had slipped through with the news. Before daybreak last Friday—the same morning that Jimmy was wounded—Tarleton’s Legion had attacked the cavalry base at Moncks Corner. The cavalry had withstood many attacks, but this time Tarleton was too strong for them and they had scattered. The Tories had then crossed the river by a bridge and had routed another band of rebels camped at the church of St. John’s Berkeley.

“This means,” said Celia, “that since last Friday, there’s been no way out of Charleston at all.”

“No
sure
way,” said Darren. “But the boat might have made it. Moncks Corner is a long way above Bellwood.”

“And suppose Tarleton raids Bellwood?”

Darren sighed. His tired, handsome face was stern with warning. “Celia, if you turn your imagination loose you’ll go insane.”

She tried to speak calmly. “Do you know anything about Luke?”

Darren said no, but Annie’s tale that most of the rebels at Moncks Corners had been killed, was exaggerated. The official report was that a good many of them had escaped into the swamp.

He went on talking, to ease his own nerves as well as hers. He said the church of St. John’s Berkeley was near Colonel Marion’s plantation. He hoped Tarleton’s green jackets had not captured Marion, as they would certainly have liked to do.

Celia sat on the cellar steps twisting her hands in her lap, hearing the shells and not hearing them, telling herself to be brave and quaking with cowardice. Marietta came and sat on the stairs too, crying quietly. They heard a thunderclap, and the rain began.

At length Darren said he had to go. He promised that if he had any news of Jimmy or Amos he would bring it. But he had to say—for Darren was not sophisticated enough to make up pretty stories—that his chance of getting any such news was small.

In the cellar Celia and Marietta crouched in corners like two scared animals while the guns soared and the shells crackled around them. Hand in her pocket, Celia felt the rabbit’s foot. She thought of Jimmy as he had given it to her, tall and strong in his rebel blue uniform, his black eyes twinkling warmly.

She thought of Vivian’s fear at Luke’s going up to that post of danger. And Vivian now, hearing of this defeat, pacing the floor at Sea Garden as she wondered if Luke had gone like his father.

She thought that any knowledge, anything, would be easier than living like this, not knowing.

After Tarleton cut off the Cooper River, living in Charleston was like living in a jail. The city was enclosed in a double ring of guns, British guns pointing inward and rebel guns pointing out, and now they were firing all the time.

Time itself became a crazy uncertainty. Often Celia did not know whether it was morning or afternoon, or how long it had been since she had eaten or slept or changed her clothes. She and Marietta hunched in the cellar, while the earth trembled and shook, and shells screamed in the air, and smoke rolled through the sidewalk gratings. Sometimes she tried to remember what silence was like, but she could not.

At last, exhausted, in spite of the noise she would fall asleep on her mattress. She never knew how long she slept but it was never long enough. A shell would wake her; she and Marietta would sit up, their nostrils full of smoke, sure that this time the shell had fallen on this property, and they would run up the cellar stairs to look.

Sometimes they would be right—there was a new hole in the garden, or a fireball had struck and they had to beat out the fire. They would do what had to be done, and scurry back to the cellar. Like rats, thought Celia.

In the respites when the firing was mostly on the Neck, she went to the attic and looked through the spyglass. She could see ships coming in with fresh troops and supplies for Sir Henry Clinton. Darren told her these ships came from the Bahama Islands, or from Florida, where the British had a large force at St. Augustine. “Clinton must have lots more men than we have!” Celia exclaimed.

Darren said, “Oh yes, that’s no secret.”

But sometimes what she saw through the spyglass cheered her. She was not only cheered, she was amazed, to see how little damage had been done. In spite of weeks of bombardment and thousands of shells, Charleston was still almost intact—saved by the trees, and the gardens, and the rain.

Charleston was not, as the king’s men had promised, being pounded into a pile of trash. But another enemy was here, more menacing than Clinton and Cornwallis and all their guns. Hunger.

A few days after she had news of Tarleton—demoralized with fear, she did not know just how long—Celia was called again to greet soldiers at the front door.

This time their leader was not as polite as Lieutenant Boyce had been. He did not introduce himself and he did not say “please” or “thank you.” He gave her orders and told her to hurry up. The men went through the storeroom like wind. They took the cornmeal, the molasses, the grits, the coffee; they left her nothing but one barrel part-filled with rice.

Some days later more soldiers called. This group did not stay in the storeroom. They searched the house from cellar to attic. They made her unlock every door and they poked into every corner, lest she had hidden something to eat. They dumped the bureau drawers, emptied the linen shelves, pushed the books off the bookshelves to the floor. Marietta wept at the mess they made. They carried off a lot of Herbert’s liquor, but they found no food because there was none to find.

After this, Celia and Marietta sparingly ate rice. When they could come up to the kitchen they would boil a pot and bring it down to the cellar with plates and spoons. They ate it whenever they were hungry enough to get it down. Cold and unsalted, it was a clammy diet.

When she dared go out Celia searched the garden. The shells had torn up half the plants and the rest were almost lost in weeds, but creeping about on hands and knees she did here and there find carrots or a few radishes and onions, a parsley plant half blackened by a fireball, or a vine still bearing beans. She gathered whatever she could. The beans Marietta cooked with the rice, the others they gobbled raw, tops and all.

Celia dreamed about food—ham and hot buttered biscuits, frizzling fried chicken, the honey-rich creaminess of sweet potato pone. When she looked out of the attic windows she was less aware of the men-of-war than of all the fish in those waters. She thought of sea bass and shad roe, flounder stuffed with shrimp, fried oysters and hush-puppies. When she went down to eat scanty cold rice, she found that she was crying and her tears were dripping into the plate, and even her tears were not salty any more.

As often as they could—which was not often—Godfrey or Darren or Miles would come in to ask how she was. What little they could tell her was scary. So many reinforcements had come to Sir Henry Clinton that he had sent Cornwallis up the country with three thousand men to raid the plantations for food supplies. Had they raided Bellwood or Sea Garden? There was no way of knowing.

Godfrey told her this across the back fence. His face, unshaven, had a drawn look, and his eyes were dull. In spite of his gold doubloons Godfrey was not getting any more to eat than she was.

Celia walked back across her own yard. As she neared the kitchen-house she stopped short, looking down at the mangled remains of a dog. A spaniel with a glossy brown coat, he had run in here as he tried to get away from the guns. He had been a fine little fellow, well cared for, somebody’s pet. Celia thought of Rosco and wondered if the owner of this dog had been as fond of him as Jimmy was of Rosco.

Half sick, she brought a spade and buried the poor little body in the garden. She wondered if dogs went to heaven, and rather thought they did; certainly they deserved it more than some people. And Jimmy would hardly be happy in heaven without Rosco—she wiped her eyes on her sleeve, wondering if Jimmy was still alive.

She never remembered when she realized that the city could not hold out. It was just that one day she knew, and it seemed that she had known it for a long time.

They were starving. The British had captured Fort Moultrie; the troops on the Neck were moving closer to town; and inside the town the patriots were being driven to desperate risks. Celia did not know how desperate until the afternoon Miles and Darren came by, hot and dusty and streaked with sweat, asking for water.

They had almost nothing to say. They drank greedily, and hurried on.

Later she learned that they had hurried on because they had volunteered for a dangerous job that night. They were part of a detail who moved ten thousand pounds of gunpowder out of the magazine on Cumberland Street, because the king’s troops had moved so close that they might any day hit this magazine and blow up the whole neighborhood. Working in the dark while shells crashed around them, Miles and Darren and their companions trundled the powder along Cumberland Street to State Street, and down State Street to the Exchange, where they stored it in an underground vault out of reach of the guns. Celia learned about the moving of the powder because that night Darren and Miles were both wounded.

Darren got only a minor nip in the leg. But as they went down State Street a shell exploded near by and a splinter struck Miles’ right shoulder. When the powder was safely stored Godfrey had both Miles and Darren brought to his house, where the surgeon said Darren would be walking before long and had nothing to worry about. But Miles was not so lucky. His wound festered and sent him into a fever, and the next day he was out of his head. Godfrey sent one of the maids to ask Celia if she would help take care of him.

While Celia sat by his bed giving him sips of wine-and-water, Miles babbled deliriously about storing the gunpowder under the Exchange. Darren, who sat in the same room, his bad leg propped on a chair and a writing-board on his good knee so he could go on with his records for the quartermaster, heard what Miles was saying. He beckoned to Celia, and told her not to repeat it.