Charleston (34 page)

Osprey
took a hit from
New Ironsides
. The cannonball hulled the stern and threw wood and iron skyward along with body parts. A moment later they were out of range, making for the Cooper River side of the peninsula.

Trembling, Alex saw another ironclad loom near Castle Pinckney. Jolly shouted, “It's
Chicora
. She's friendly. We're safe.”

Jolly greeted the captain of
Chicora
through a speaking horn. The vessels passed on their port sides,
Osprey
listing badly. The supercargo ran down to Alex. “Miss Bell, are you safe and sound?”

“Yes, but not that poor boy. Can you help him?” Her hair was sticky on her forehead, her shawl and dress soaked through. The supercargo bent over the lookout.

“Alfred's made his last run. He was a good lad. Not yet seventeen.”

Osprey
struggled through the river roadstead clogged with anchored ships, then swung toward Middle Wharf. Jolly went in too fast and reversed engines too late;
Osprey
's prow rammed the wharf, damaging pilings and swaying the pier head. The captain reversed, then warped in more slowly;
Osprey
tied up near a group of ragged blacks waiting to off-load the vessel.

Captain Jolly caught Alex as she went below. “I regret the inbound passage was harrowing.”

“No more so than you predicted, Captain. Thank you for bringing me home.”

He touched his forehead and turned away, no trace of jollity left on his ashen face.

 

On the pier she asked an elderly Negro about a cab. “Oh, no, ma'am, they's precious scarce, 'specially this time of morning. I can stow that trunk for you. Later maybe you can get some good soul to move it where you need it.”

“All right, thank you.”

“You from around here, ma'am? I seem to know your face.”

“Yes, I am. I've been away a long time.”

“I fear you won't hardly recognize Charleston no more. These are terrible times. Just terrible.”

She trudged across East Bay with her banjo on her shoulder. A familiar pain spread in her lower back. She scored herself for throwing her cane away in a moment of unwarranted confidence.

She walked west on Hasell Street. The morning was quiet until the sudden faraway
crump
of enemy artillery broke the silence. As she reached Meeting Street, a bell tolled six. She recognized the beautiful sonority of Great Michael, but where were the others? Usually all eight rang the hour. And why was the church steeple wearing a coat of black paint?

To the south along Meeting she saw a panorama of change and ruin so great, it hardly resembled the same scene remembered from childhood. First there was the fire damage, in what Charleston called the burnt district. This she knew about from Ham's letters, but the reality was profoundly shocking. Familiar buildings were gone, leaving empty lots with jagged sections of blackened walls standing like gravestones amid military tents.

The Great Fire of 1861 had started on the night of December 11, near the very intersection where she'd crossed East Bay. Fanned by gale winds, it had advanced to Meeting, and south, all the way to Tradd Street, where the late Mr. Petigru's house burned to the ground with others. The fire swept along Queen Street to the Ashley before it exhausted itself next morning, having consumed nearly six hundred homes and buildings. Ham said most of the burned properties hadn't been rebuilt. No one knew how the fire started.

Of course, as always,
her brother had written,
our good citizens blame arson perpetrated by slaves or resentful freedmen. We have feared the Negro for so long, when disaster strikes, the public mind can conceive of no other cause or culprit.

She walked down Meeting in a daze of disbelief. Rats
and wild dogs foraged in the gutters and alleys. Ragged children, white and black, appeared from nowhere, ran along beside her, tugging her arm, begging for rice. She gave them all the coins she had.

The beautiful old Circular Congregational Church had disappeared, and Institute Hall, where the secession ordinance was signed. The Mills House remained, and Hibernian Hall, and St. Michael's with its ugly black steeple. The randomness of the fire was everywhere evident. The fine hotel designed by Robert Mills was untouched—General Lee had watched the fire from its roof, Ham said—but directly across Meeting lay several burnt blocks where soldiers camped. She hadn't expected such a great military presence; the tents crowded every open space. Men crawled out in their underwear, scratching themselves, lighting cook fires. One pulled his crotch and shouted, “Hey, how much for a song and a hump?” His companions laughed. Alex glared.

She heard drumming and bugling from several directions. A moment later she darted back to avoid being run down by a horse-drawn artillery limber. At Broad Street she nearly collided with a dog-cart phaeton that turned the corner too sharply. The elderly driver reined his horse, brandished his whip. “Woman, you almost caused an accident.”

“Streetwalker,” sniffed the lady seated beside him. The couple looked familiar. DeSaussures? Mouzons? One of the elite families, anyway. People who might remember her. She cut the confrontation short by giving them an unmerited apology.

Once across Broad, she looked back. The phaeton still sat there, the white-haired lady turned on the seat, pointing and chattering at her husband. Alex had no desire to announce her return, but it appeared that she might have little say about it.

She walked beneath the stately trees of lower Meeting Street. Dust lay on the dry leaves; the city had a parched and airless feel. Weariness was clutching at her, slowing her steps. Sudden cannon fire reverberated across the harbor. The abruptness of it unnerved her. She could imagine what it did to the people of the city.

At South Battery great mounds of earth rose in what had been the public gardens. Soldiers and Negroes swarmed over the mounds with shovels and picks. Mules dragged a sledge carrying a great iron gun guarded by artillerymen. Toward East Bay, Alex saw similar batteries under construction.

She turned left to the familiar house. Its run-down appearance horrified her. Swathes of mildew discolored the exterior. The gate was scaly with rust. Inside the garden the flowers were gone; knee-high weeds had claimed the lawn. A section of the garden wall had collapsed, the bricks fallen in an untidy heap. Only the great live oak remained as she remembered it.

She knocked on the mildewed door on the piazza. The still air carried the curses and complaints of the workmen sweating in the hot sun. The door opened; there stood her brother, his finger marking the page of a law book. He'd come at last to the reality of old age, the look he'd carried since childhood. He was round-shouldered, his hair long, his striped trousers baggy, his vest dusted with ash. He would be forty-nine now, but he might have been seventy, so badly did his flesh sag on his sallow face.

“Oh, God. I so hoped you'd come, if not for Mother,
then for me. Oh, sister.” They fell into each other's arms, hugging fiercely.

He wiped his eyes. “Come in, come in. It's heaven to see you. Did you arrive by ship? Was it dangerous? You're beautiful as ever.” It made her laugh.

“Nonsense, I was never beautiful. How is Mother?”

“Weak, but stable.”

“Is Dr. Baltus still attending?”

“Yes, though he can barely totter. Every day I wish Xeno Hayward hadn't marched off to war and met his Maker. Baltus is old school, doctrinaire. He sweats Mother. He insists she take castor oil in molasses. It's futile. She's given up.”

“Can I see her?”

“She usually sleeps till late morning. Are you hungry? Come in the dining room.” She followed him, pausing briefly to look at Joanna's portrait. Someone had kept the canvas clean. The rest of the house was in appalling condition. Dust lay in the corners and gleamed like a coating of dark talc where sunlight struck the floor.

A small library of law books littered the stained dining table. Stubs of strong-smelling cigars lay in a Wedgwood saucer. “Do you still have house people?” she asked.

“No, I freed them, as you did Maudie.”

“Dear Maudie. Do you know where she is?”

“I don't. She might have left the city.”

“Who takes care of the place?”

“A man named Rolfe. He belongs to Judge Porcher's widowed daughter Letty. She hires him out by the day.”

“Does he cook?”

“Sometimes. I fry up some bread if he's away. Neighbor ladies bring an occasional dish for Mother. She has no appetite. I have to empty the dish before I return it.”

“So you and Mother are alone in this mausoleum with all those reb soldiers in town. Some of them look positively vicious.”

“The new Charleston mobocracy. Since they arrived to defend us, household robberies have increased tenfold, as have assaults on women.”

“What do you have to defend yourself?”

He blinked. “Why, nothing. I believe in the law, not weapons.”

“My trunk's at Middle Wharf. I still have Grandfather Edward's pistols.”

“Do you know how to shoot?”

“I can learn,” she said emphatically, thumping herself into a chair.

He removed an empty plate from the table. “Would you like coffee? It's mostly corn and okra seeds and chicory root, but it's better than none.”

He returned from the kitchen with a chipped mug and slices of a coarse, strange-looking bread. “Made from boiled pumpkin and a little corn meal. Rolfe forages grains of corn from the feeding troughs of the cavalry. As you can see, we are living like potentates in the glorious Confederacy. Marion Marburg has a German word for all the substitutes.
Ersatz
.”

For the next two hours questions and answers flew back and forth between them, long after the oddly flavored coffee was drunk and the peculiar bread eaten. At the end she said, “I'm afraid I was recognized by an elderly couple on my way here.”

“Then you must be careful. You're well remembered.”

“‘That damned woman'?”

“I'm afraid so.”

“Hardly a surprise. Tell me about the rest of the family.”

“I avoid cousin Ouida. She's unbalanced and everyone knows it. I do encounter Gibbes occasionally. He gets about reasonably well despite his wooden leg. He's married to Folsey Lark's sister. Gibbes's mother, Bethel, lives with them. She must be nearly seventy-five. Gibbes has become very successful bringing arms through the blockade for the government. He and Folsey own most of a firm called Palmetto Traders.” Her reaction startled him. “You know it?”

She described the mysterious hogsheads shipped from Philadelphia through Nassau; told him about the brine pouring from the broken cask and slabs of what she took to be salted pork. “I doubt its destination was the Confederate commissary department.”

Ham picked a bread crumb from his plate, savored it on his tongue. “Then I am disappointed in our family hero, although, with Folsey's involvement, not entirely surprised.”

She asked about the military situation. “Perilous,” he said. “Admiral Dahlgren's flotilla controls the offshore waters. General Quincy Gillmore marched up the coast with God knows how many thousands. A British journalist came through the lines the other day. He said Gillmore's building a platform in the marshes capable of bearing the weight of a monster gun that can throw shells into the city. I expect they let the man come over with the story in order to scare us. They've painted St. Michael's steeple—”

“I saw.”

“—supposedly to make it less of a target for artillery spotters. Ironic, your arriving on the eve of another calamity. Charleston besieged again. Grandfather Edward did the same thing. Is this family cursed?”

“Sometimes I can believe it.”

“I must be honest with you, Alex.” His pale hand fluttered over the law books. “I've been preparing for a legal defense that will likely bring down the wrath of the white citizenry.”

“How so?”

“The tower of the old city jail presently houses seventy-three soldiers from the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts. That's the colored regiment that failed to take Battery Wagner. In theory the soldiers are prisoners of war, entitled to be treated humanely and exchanged, but Governor Bonham demanded that Beauregard turn them over to the civil authorities and Beauregard caved in. South Carolina will try the soldiers as slaves in rebellion, which amounts to a death sentence. A courageous colleague named Nelson Mitchell stepped forward to defend them. I'll be seconding him when it goes to trial.”

“You feel it will harm your reputation?”

“What reputation? The Bell name may still be respectable, but after years of friendship with Jim Petigru I am barely tolerated. I'm not unhappy about it, mind. I only tell you because it adds a measure of risk for anyone living under this roof.”

Alex sat up straight despite the pain in her back. “Well,
brother dear, I'm damned if I'll leave after all the trouble it took to get here. Can Rolfe fetch my trunk? I want those pistols.”

 

At noon she ventured up to the second floor. It smelled of mold and some sickly odor that might have been liniment. It needed airing and cleaning. After she had a long sleep, she'd get to work.

Cassandra's room was black. Alex opened a shutter a few inches. Her mother lay under too many blankets. Alex drew off all but one. She stroked Cassandra's brow gently.

“Mama?”

Cassandra roused. “Who is it?”

“Alex, Mama.”

Spidery fingers explored her hand. Recognition came slowly. “Alex? My daughter, Alex?”

“Yes, Mama. Come home to see you. I've been so worried about you.”

A feeble smile. “Ah. Now I know it's Alex, Alex worries about everyone.” The tip of her tongue passed across her colorless lips. “Can you stay a few days?”

“As long as you want, Mama.”

“I am so glad you've come. So glad. Times are hard. Good people killing each other. So glad,” she said again, the sound faint as wind through pine boughs. She fell back to sleep. Alex was undone. She closed the door and bolted downstairs.

There she sank down by the wall, flung her arms over her head. Days of anxiety, of holding everything inside, erupted in great gulping sobs. She grew incoherent. “William, I need you. Henry, come back. I'm not strong. God, I'm so weak, please make me strong again. I hate this war. I hate the killing. I hate everything.”

Ham poked his head out the dining room door, a cigar clenched in his teeth. He thought of kneeling to comfort his sister but reconsidered. He closed the door and left Alex to purge her grief as best she could.