Crescent City (37 page)

Paris. Squares like Jackson Square. Had he not said it resembled the Place des Vosges? André walking there—he had a rapid walk, almost a run—she could hear the sound of his hastening steps on the pavement. There would be great stone official buildings, parks, cafés, young women with sweet mouths, perfume, pearls .… A chill went through her and she stopped, closing her eyes.

“Are you all right?” asked Fanny.

She had been in Paris, she had forgotten Fanny, over whose vigilant face there now passed an expression in part concern, in greater part inquisitiveness. How much did Fanny know or guess? One could never tell about servants, so fearful, so sly, trained as they were never to reveal, but always to calculate, lest they offend.

Miriam blinked herself back to the moment, to the street and the morning.

“Yes, yes, I’m all right. A little tired.”

He had not written; of course, he feared to subject her to Eugene’s wrath; or perhaps he had written, but the mail was not getting through.

The ships were not getting through anymore. The blockade was choking the city; it was a rope around the city’s neck.

In the next block they were taking a church bell down from the steeple to be cast into cannon. Indeed, the war had made a difference! Strange to realize how one got caught up on the very crest of the wave of war when one had hoped to let it wash past. At the synagogue the women were giving a ball to raise money for poor families whose men were in the fight. The women were knitting socks and gloves for the soldiers; bags of gray wool stood in every parlor. One sent blankets to the army. One gave up drinking coffee and eating meat so that the army might have them. Strange, painful and strange, to be doing all these things, to be doing them with such a full heart, and at the same time to be hoping that the other side where David stood among the men in blue, would triumph!

Rosa de Rivera was crossing Jackson Square.

“I had a letter today from Gabriel. Shall I read it? Or perhaps you’d rather not?” she added, giving to the perfectly normal existence of the letter a significance which apparently she thought it must have for Miriam.

Why, she is enjoying this “situation”! Miriam thought instantly. Unrequited love for a married woman. Delicious, sad, and slightly scandalous.

“Of course I’d rather,” she said calmly. “Sit down and read it. You go on home without me, Fanny.”

“‘I have been in victories and defeats,’” Rosa read. “‘At Manassas Junction, where we won, and at Fort Donelson, where we lost. They were equal in horror.
For my first battle, I was enthusiastic. It seemed to be a sweeping thing, and, in spite of the evil that is war, a chance to show what individual courage, multiplied by thousands, can do. Perhaps, decisively, to bring the war to an end? At any rate, I went into it with no fear, to my great astonishment, and with a feeling of power. All of that ended very quickly.

“‘In the morning the truth hit me between the eyes. It was a summer morning; do not those two words convey enough meaning? Summer morning, and against the greenery the red earth of the breastworks made another wound to add to the sum of the human wounded, of whom there were so many. That fresh, blooming earth, and what we had done to it! All the young men and what we had done to each other! We had captured the Federal depot, but because there weren’t enough wagons and we couldn’t carry much away, we had set fire to it. It had been burning all night. Of this tremendous bonfire only a heap was left, a small hill of smoking ruins, with sparks like little red evil eyes popping out of hell.

“‘General Lee allowed the Federals to collect their own wounded. Theirs and ours were laid out as separately as possible, under the trees, as much out of the sun’s glare as we could. The wounds are terrible, far worse, they tell me, than in the Mexican War. That’s because of the minié bullet; it has a conical shape, a devilish invention, it rips the flesh to jagged pieces. Already flies and maggots were settling in these awful wounds. The men, lying in long columns, kept shifting in their agony, so that the columns rippled as if some gigantic serpent were sliding across the field.

“‘Perhaps I should not write these things to you. Yet it seems to me that people ought to know about such horrors, even though I see no way now to prevent them. Now that we are in this war, we have no other
course than to continue. At any rate, as I know I shall regret having written this, I remind myself that I shall not write again for a long while, for there is neither time nor place to do so.

“‘But let me finish. How shall I describe a battle? Should I even try? Yet, again, it seems that people ought to know. It is a din, a pandemonium. Even the trees are wounded, as Gatling-gun bullets tear them apart. One is caught in a rain of leaves and twigs. It was the Williams repeating cannon that we used or the twelve-pounder Napoleon. Our men’s faces are black with gunpowder. The noise of these things is indescribable. On a level below them one hears the racket of fleeing birds and the terrible screams of wounded horses. Poor, ignorant creatures whose once kind masters have led them into this!

“‘Often it is waiting for battle that is the hardest. The suspense is sometimes more trying and difficult than the real thing. Knowing what is to come and fearing it, one still wants to get it over with. We march in slashing rain, soaked through to the bone. Most of the men have no raincoats and often not enough tents. Many must sleep in the wet, without shelter. We are thick with lice; sometimes we cannot change clothing for weeks and the lice lodge in the seams, so that even washing the clothes doesn’t get rid of them. The men are so ashamed of being filthy. Illness attacks many more than are wounded. Most people don’t know that. Last summer it was typhoid that killed. Now in the cold, it is pneumonia. The cold and snow are very hard on southern boys. And all the time in heat or bold, there is scurvy to fear. Our diet is crackers, salt pork, coffee, and beans.

“‘I have seen a hospital camp abandoned to the enemy because we had to retreat and save ourselves.
We left our own to die as prisoners or, perhaps worse, to suffer without anesthesia.

“ Oh, God, why do I write all this? Maybe in the morning I will not send it to you after all. But now as I write by candlelight, I feel as if the ghosts of all I have seen are looking over my shoulder and telling me that I must put this down.

“‘I remember the look of these deaths, so unlike the white and quiet deaths of our grandparents. These deaths are red and raw. But hear what I dread: It is that I am becoming used to them. I glance at a dead boy lying twisted among his poor belongings, his tin cup, his pistol and frying pan, his knapsack with its scattered photographs and letters from home. I glance and pass on.

“‘What is to become of me? What kind of man will I be when this is over?’”

Rosa put the letter back into her reticule. There was a silence, neither woman speaking until Rosa took the letter out again.

“I almost forgot. There is a postscript. It says: ‘Remember me to Miriam. I hope she is well.’”

Erect as a general, Ferdinand stood in front of the map which had been pinned on the wall of the back parlor, reading dispatches aloud to Eugene. The two men, with Emma and her daughters and young Eugene, were all following the war. They had rejoiced and argued over Manassas, railing at Jeff Davis.

“We should have and could have walked into Washington,” declared Ferdinand. “They couldn’t have stopped us.”

The exhilaration which had revived Eugene’s spirits at the war’s beginning was gradually dissipating itself. “No, no,” he answered. “That victory came too early
to do any real good. It has made us think we’re unbeatable.”

Ferdinand, on the other hand, clung to cheer, and Miriam reflected on the contradiction. Papa had denied the very possibility of war, but accepting it now, he played it like a great, stimulating game, a complex exercise.

“I never thought,” Eugene observed gloomily, “that Grant would whip Johnston and Beauregard at Shiloh. The Mississippi is open now as far down as Vicksburg.”

Yesterday General Johnston’s funeral cortege had passed up St. Charles Street in visible proof of the terrible defeat. At the mouth of the river, one hundred fifty miles south of the city, lay the Union fleet, waiting for their cautious, deliberate push toward the forts. In command was Admiral Farragut, bitterly referred to as a son of New Orleans. Strange and stranger, Miriam thought, these interwoven, contradictory allegiances.

Pelagie’s Alexandre, a messenger on Lovell’s staff, brought daily news to the back-parlor strategists. His pink cheeks were moist with perspiration and the breathless importance of his tidings.

“The forts and the city are positively safe! You can’t believe what’s being done! We’ve got dismasted schooners, eight of them, loaded with logs, they’re fastened together with cable and laid in a row across the river. Absolutely impassable! And in the bayous we’ve driven piles, sunk live oak trees, still green, whole bands of them, forty-five feet wide. You couldn’t possibly get through them, either! And on the river we’ve got fifty fire rafts heaped with wood and tar oil and cotton; one wouldn’t want to come up against one of those when it’s burning, I can tell you! And on the
riverbanks below the fort, General Lovell’s setting troops of sharpshooters.”

A few days later he came rushing to report that the bombardment of the forts had begun. This time there shone through his description the beginnings of disbelief, as if what he had seen were something that neither he nor anyone else could possibly have conceived of.

“The air is so hot from all the firing that bees come swarming, trying to get away. And the river is full of dead fish. They say it’s the detonation of the guns that kills them, I don’t know. You can’t imagine …” His arms were spread on the table, where he leaned to rest, and his thoughtless young face was crossed for an instant by a shadow of thought. “You should have seen the smoke when the fire rafts came rolling down the river! From the turpentine and burning tar, you know. I had to watch very closely to bring reports back. Oh, it was like, like—the way one thinks of hell, the smoke so thick we could hardly see, and then the yellow flames when the ships exploded. They say dozens of men were drowned; first scorched, and scalded from the boilers, then drowned … Union men, mostly …” And he broke off, his eyes stretched wide, as if in just that moment he had understood that these were men, flesh like himself, scorched, scalded, and drowned.

“Rosa’s Herbert is out there on the river,” was all Miriam said.

The alarm bell sounded just after they had risen from the breakfast table on the morning of the twenty-fourth. Twelve bronze notes tolling from a church tower, and four times repeated, made a vibration that went through to the bones and caused everyone to stop in place, Sisyphus with a laden tray of dishes, Angelique halfway up the stairs, tilting her head with
an unspoken question, the dog running to whimper under a chair.

Emma quavered. “The alarm?” Her eyes begged for denial.

“The alarm. Send Maxim down to the newspaper office,” Eugene ordered with a spark of his old command. “He can read the bulletin.”

In half an hour Maxim was back, gay with the importance of carrying a report. “They have passed the forts. The forts have held, but the gunboats are coming up the river toward the city.”

“Then they will be here by tomorrow,” Eugene said.

Emma’s hand flew to her mouth, stifling what would undoubtedly have emerged as a wail. Young Eugene was exhilarated: Something different was about to happen!

And I, Miriam thought, what do I feel? Fear? Yes, of course. Hope that now, maybe, the war will end? But no, wars do not end so quickly. Then, her thoughts turning to the immediate: Shall we be occupied or will they destroy the city first?

Late in the afternoon Alexandre appeared. Having gone first to say good-bye to his mother, he had been asked by her to bear the latest news to the Mendes house.

“I’m going with General Lovell to Camp Moore. The general has decided to leave the city without defense so the enemy will have no reason to bombard it.”

The young man’s dash and vigor did wonders for Emma’s morale.

“He does us proud,” she cried as her grandson went swinging down the steps. “He does us all proud. With men like him, we can’t be beaten.”

Still, in spite of such sentiments, panic struck and hysteria ran through the streets. People walked up and down, back and forth, to the riverfront, to the evacúation
trains, everywhere, without aim. Serafina left the roast burning in the kitchen fireplace. Even Sisyphus, the most dependable of all, forgot to close the front door when he went out. Emma went to Pelagie’s house, from which there was a view of the river. Rosa came looking for assurance—and was given assurance—that no news of her sons was bound to be good news.

Ferdinand, unable to sit still, suggested taking young Eugene and Angelique downtown with Blaise to see what was going on.

“What are they wearing?” Eugene inquired.

The question puzzled Miriam. “Wearing?” she repeated.

“Yes, I want them to dress up. Show pride. Even if we do lose the city, it’s not the end for us. We mustn’t look beaten. Wear your best clothes. Blaise, too, if he’s going. Have you got a new uniform, Blaise?”

“Yes, sir.” A faint shadow crossed Blaise’s mouth and fled.

“Have you got it on?”

“No, sir.”

“Then put it on. Hurry.”

“He hates his new uniform,” Angelique said when Blaise had gone. “Fanny told me he thinks it makes him look like the organ grinder’s monkey.”

“Nonsense!” Ferdinand was indignant. “I saw to it myself, the finest quality broadcloth.”

“It’s the color he hates. Purple. And the brass buttons. I don’t blame him. I shouldn’t want to be made to wear something I don’t like,” Angelique protested,

“You are you, but Blaise is a servant. He can consider himself fortunate that he’s here at all,” her father retorted, “instead of complaining about his clothes.”

The child feels, however vaguely, what the father rejects, Miriam thought as she watched the little group
go down the street All was changing, all in motion toward the time when Blaise would throw his servile uniform away. Eugene didn’t, or couldn’t, see it coming. And she remembered the morning when she had pleaded with him not to sell Blaise out of the house.