The March (11 page)

She heard below the music the sound of the soldiers’ footsteps all in rhythm, a soft sound, and after the band had gone down the street and the bluecoat companies kept coming all she heard now was the soft-shoe whisper of their footsteps marching, it was almost a hush, and if not for the cries of the sergeants at the side, and their pennants in the air to remind her, she would think it was so sad, these men with their rifles on their shoulders making a show of their victory but looking to her eyes like they was indentured as she once was, though maybe not born into it.

CROWDS HAD GATHERED
on both sides of the thoroughfare to watch the parade. Across the street, Wilma pulled Coalhouse Walker by the hand back through a wrought-iron gate and into the front yard of a house with a mansard roof and stood with him behind the hedges.

What is it, Miss Wilma, he said in his deep voice.

She could not answer but stood with her eyes closed, shaking her head and holding her fist to her mouth.

Tell me, he said.

It’s Miz Emily, she said finally. Judge Thompson’s who I was bound to. Look, but don’t let her see. She’s in a carriage driven by army men, and with another white girl. You see her?

He peered over the top of the hedge. No, ma’m. Parade’s over, he said, everyone’s moving on. He turned and smiled at her. ’Sides which, he said, you free, you disremember that?

Wilma burst into tears. He took her in his arms. Now, now. We come this far. You a fine strong woman that marched in the rain and cold and nothing to eat some days, and I never seen a tear in your eye. An here, with the worst behind us, in this free city with the sun shinin, ain’t you jes like a ordinary woman cries at the leastmost thing. He laughed.

I’m sorry, Wilma said, and she laughed, though the tears were still brimming.

At this moment a woman with a hound on the leash came out on the porch and stared at them.

They left, closing the gate behind them, and walked on hand in hand.

He was right, of course, this good man. He had lifted her out of the river and taken her for his responsibility. She had never seen a man as strong as this. He was enlisted as a pioneer, as the army moved forward he cut down trees and laid the logs across the road when it rained. She had seen him pry railroad track up from its ties, she had seen the fine, beautiful skin of his chest glistening with his effort under the sun, the muscle moving in his arms and shoulders—and then his back was turned and she saw the thick scars there and gasped, though it was as nothing to him. He was a beautiful man, his blackness of a rich purpled hue in the sunlight.

By the grace of God they had met and all through the march he had managed to acquit himself at his duties and see after her as well, finding dry clothes for her and an army coat against the cold, sharing his rations when he had them, keeping her with him when that was possible and, if not, seeing that she was safe among the black folks. They were the same age, twenty-two, but he was inclined to make the best of things and with all sorts of grand ideas for their future together, and so she felt older by comparison but instructed by him, too, in the ways of hope.

Yet the city that made him so cheerful filled her with misgiving. They were still black in a white world. Coalhouse had drawn his few dollars of army pay, but the merchants in the stores put out prices as if it was Confederate tender. He wanted to buy some sweet potatoes. Don’t buy, she urged him, I’d rather go without. And another thing was she knew Coalhouse’s company was camped outside the city in a rice plantation, but here he was roaming the streets with her like a man free of everything, including the army, and without the pass he was supposed to have from the officers. So there was something reckless about him too, and all that good cheer had a wild edge to it that caused her to look behind them where they walked and up ahead to see where the danger might lay.

And now what was he up to as he took up an empty bushel basket from an alley behind a shop and led her to the river? Miss Wilma, he said, we are going to have a fine lunch. But what was he doing, getting out of his shoes and jacket and rolling up his trousers to his knees and walking onto the flat rocks and hunkering down there? And then before she knew it he had eased himself into that cold river water.

And so this was how Wilma Jones, who grew up in the hills, learned about oysters. Coalhouse Walker came back with almost a bushel of them. He was sopping wet, and shivering and smiling broadly. They sat there in the sun on a flat rock and he shucked the oysters with his knife and swallowed them down raw, with his head thrown back. But she had no taste for any of that, and so they moved on in the lanes between the houses and the stables and found a kitchen with some black folks there, where she was welcome to use the stove.

Wilma was now in a role that was familiar to her. She pan-fried the oysters with a bit of cornmeal and in their own juices, and it turned from a day full of worry for her to a good time with people she wouldn’t have known but for the holiday season and the freeing of Savannah. Everyone ate what she cooked, and there was real bread to go with it.

Coalhouse surprised her, picking up a banjo and strumming it and singing some old song in his deep voice. She hadn’t known he could do that. People clapped in time, and a boy stood up and danced. She was among these new friends whose names she barely knew and would probably never see again, some still working where they’d been slaves, but they had a way about them now, and she supposed she was getting to it too, of celebrating off to the side just beyond the ken of the white folks. And somehow in her mind it all came from the spirit of Coalhouse Walker, like he had this way of making the people around him glad to be alive.

Say, Miz Mary, what that on the pillow where my head orter be

For sakes, it jes a mush melon, can’t you plainly see

A mush melon on de pillow, oh yes I do agree

But why it got a mustache an two eyes a-lookin at me

There were young girls there from the kitchen and she could see what they were thinking, so she didn’t let him from her sight. And maybe from her serious mien, and her upbringing in the Judge’s house that taught her how to do most anything that needed to be done, Wilma knew that she was good-looking enough but that what made Coalhouse Walker take to her was just that soundness of her—that and because she knew how to read and write and would not lie down with him until they were properly wed. He honored that, and in her heart she knew she had nothing to worry about because she was the one he’d been looking for.

They slept in a hayloft that night after some kisses and hugs that were not entirely pious, and in the morning she told him her idea. He went down to the river and by noon, in one of the town squares, with the troops everywhere and the sky bright with sun, she stood behind a makeshift stand and pan-fried oysters over a fire Coalhouse had built in a steel drum. Coalhouse made newspaper sheets into cones, and kept up a smart patter. Miz Wilma’s very best fresh roasted oysters! he called, and they sold the catch to folks by the paper cone—soldiers and even officers, and finally some of the secesh townspeople themselves, who couldn’t abide the fate of their city but found the oysters as she roasted them too good not to partake of. And in this way she and Coalhouse sold off three bushels and found themselves at the end of the afternoon with thirteen real Union dollars.

I will hold these, Wilma said, and turning her back, she lifted the hem of her skirt and tucked the folded bills under the waistband of her pantaloons.

ARLY AND WILL
had no trouble getting their new shoes—they just stood a while on a line, and when they got to the quartermaster they had only to show their feet. But drawing pay was different, it was done by name and regiment. You were checked off against the paymaster’s book.

Well, what does God say to do now? Will said, looking down at his stiff shoes. They felt tight against his toes and the backs were already rubbing up into his ankles.

He’s telling me to be patient and it will come to me, Arly said.

They had leave from Colonel Sartorius only to get themselves outfitted, but they were in no hurry to return to the Savannah military hospital where his surgery was. The city having fallen without a fight, there was not much call for ambulance driving now, so they had been made over into nurses there in the army sick ward, emptying bedpans and doing other lovely chores.

Clumping along in their unaccustomed footwear they had reason to feel sorry for themselves. Every bluecoat but them, it seemed like, had a day pass and money in his pocket. And then there was that great to-do about the mail. Tons of it came off the ships, and for one whole day everyone sat around reading letters from home. Arly said it was a pathetic sight to see grown men carrying on so. But Will thought he wouldn’t mind a letter from someone. That he and Arly had no letters was because who they were, or where they were, was now a matter of total indifference to the universe.

They were almost swept off the sidewalk by a throng of grizzled troops, some of them happily drunk, chattering away and half running, half walking, in a great hurry to get where they were going. Hey! Will shouted. But Arly was curious. He motioned to Will and they tagged along. They followed the soldiers to the waterfront, where, on Charleston Street, in a row of connected two-story redbrick houses, a woman stood smiling in each window.

Armed soldiers stood guard at the doors. But the men ignored them and they had the good sense to stand aside as the troops poured through the several doors. Looking at one another, and then carefully up and down the street, the guards themselves stepped inside and the doors closed behind them.

As Arly and Will watched, the women, one by one, disappeared from the windows. This is cruelty beyond name, Arly said. A particularly fair maid in a second-floor window looked down into his eyes and motioned invitingly with her head before she, too, disappeared. And, sadly for that poor girl, she’s fallen in love with me, Arly said.

The two men stood in the empty street as the sounds of revelry rose in volume through the brickwork.

Will was secretly relieved to have no money. Seeing the women in the windows he had felt uneasy, as if just standing there and thinking what he was thinking was to sully the shining image in his mind of Nurse Thompson. It didn’t matter that she had no idea who he was, let alone what his feelings were, he felt that just looking at those whores was to betray her. Well, that’s that, he said. Let’s go.

Arly took a stogy out of his pocket and lit it. God gave me something else beside my natural abilities, Will my boy. He gave me spirit. He gave me the juices of a man. He made me someone who rises to a challenge, be it a firing squad or a army that divests me of my natural rights of personal expression.

They walked back through the city. I am a champion of survival, Arly said. It won’t take but a drop of my talent for surviving an entire war to come up with a Federal dollar or two.

It’s just a damn whore, Will said.

No, sir, you are wrong. When I was in the field with the grapeshot whizzing past my head I thought of nothing but staying alive. I was consumed, I had a survival compunction and it brought me through. And now I am consumed with this. You put me in a trench, that’s one thing, you put me in a city with women everywhere you look and that’s another. But the powerful need to satisfy a life instinct is the same. They are both a matter of survival.

With a whore it’s less likely, Will said. I seen in the ward just today some of what a whore can do. You seen it, too, where the mercury has ate away half that poor man’s face.

You ain’t never been with a woman, have you?

Will was silent.

Come on, it ain’t no shame—you’re but a boy yet, though I have to admit I was not thirteen years when a kind lady took me out to the barn. And how old are you now? But that’s all right, I don’t need to ask where you was raised or how you live. It is clear enough you was overprotected and pro’ly some preacher messed with your mind and it’s because you been held back and ain’t been with a woman that you speak in ignorance of the soft, sacred vessel they carry ’tween their legs. My God, just thinking of it—let us sit down on this bench a moment.

Will watched the setting sun glimmer through the moss hanging off an oak tree. Arly said: If there is any good reason for war, it ain’t to save Unions, and it certainly ain’t to free niggers, it ain’t to do anything but to have you a woman of your own, or even of another’s, in a bed with you at your behest. You are talking the highest kind of survival, young Will, the survival you achieve after you are gone to your God that by the issue of your loins has created them that look like you and sound like you and think like you and are you through the generations of descendants. And you know how He fixed it: so that we turn our swords into plowshares and at the end of a day go into our houses and after a good, hot dinner we take them upstairs, these blessed creatures of God who are given to us, and pull off their dresses and their shifts and their corsets and whatever damn else they use to cover themselves till just the legs and breasts and bellies and behinds of them are in presentation to our wonderment . . . oh Lord. And when we go inside them, plum into their beings, and they cry out in our ear and we feel there is nothing softer, warmer, or more honeyed up in God’s world than what embraces our stiff tool, and we are made by God to shiver into them the issue of our loins, well, boy, don’t talk to me about what you don’t know. And if the bordello ladies you slander are not half of what I am telling you, please to remember they are as much our glorious Southern womanhood as whatever you been dreaming about that Miz Nurse Thompson, who, I can promise you, would taste no sweeter when put to the test than the uglymost whore in those houses by the waterfront.

AS HE SAT
there in contemplation of his slander of Southern womanhood, Will became aware of the unmistakable sound of hymn singing. Arly heard it, too. He leapt up: God said it would come to me. It has!