Evermore: A Saga of Slavery and Deliverance (The Plantation Series Book 3) (29 page)

BOOK: Evermore: A Saga of Slavery and Deliverance (The Plantation Series Book 3)
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Chapter Twenty-Four

“Mail call!”

Marcel’s men dropped whatever they were doing and came on
the run. Sergeant French passed out envelopes, some months old, all of them
travel-worn and tattered. The men settled down on rain-soaked tree stumps and
saddles to read their long-awaited letters.

Marcel retreated to his dank tent to open his envelope from
Mr. Presswood, a bit puzzled and disappointed it was not from Deborah Ann.
She’d been on his mind. During long lonely nights in his narrow cot, he
contemplated the family they would raise, and how much he’d enjoy making that
family in the four poster bed on Rue Royale. He cherished Lucinda and the boys,
always would. Always. But Deborah Ann was still new to him. He yearned to unpin
that golden hair and undress that lovely body.

He unfolded the letter.
Chamard,
I write this hastily, without ceremony, for the courier is about to leave with
dispatches for the general, which must not be delayed. Deborah Ann is
suffering, the cause being somewhat mysterious.

Mr. Presswood described Deborah Ann’s recent trip home to
Evermore and her pale reserve after a precipitous return. Then there was the
fainting incident on Elysian Fields, a street where Deborah Ann had no reason
to be. She was now in the grip of a mysterious case of doldrums.

I do not understand my
daughter’s melancholy
, Mr. Presswood wrote,
and I fear for her. Surely the vicissitudes of war occupy you, Chamard,
but a husband’s embrace would no doubt put Deborah Ann to rights. If at all
possible to leave your duties for a time, I pray you will do so.

Marcel sat with his elbows on his knees, the letter clutched
in his fist. The clue to Deborah Ann’s melancholy lay where she suffered her
collapse. She’d been on Elysian Fields. Lucinda’s street.

Regard for his wife’s state of mind mingled with
outright anger. Had she intended to confront Lucinda? Upset Charles Armand?
What the devil did she think she was about? She might be an American, brought
up in the newer sectors of town, but she’d been reared elbow to elbow with New
Orleans Creoles. Her husband having a plaçée should not concern her.

With clenched jaw, Marcel folded the letter and put it back
in the envelope. Whether Deborah Ann needed her husband’s embrace or not, he
could not leave the Lafourche now. At long last, Butler had his men on the
move. With October’s relief from sweltering nights and blazing days, Butler’s
man, General Weitzel, was now poised to seize the riches up and down the bayou.
Deborah Ann would have to pull herself together without him.

Marcel did not discount the pain of a troubled mind. In the
days after Lt. Smythe had hanged Dix Weber, Marcel had suffered a deep
melancholy himself. As the men tiptoed around him, he had left the running of
the camp to Sgt. French and devoted himself to getting Val well. The boy lost a
tooth, but the swelling over his eyes and jaw receded. He was young. He healed.

Marcel’s spirits were less resilient than Val’s body. Grief
over Dix still gripped him hard when, six days after the hanging, Alistair
Whiteaker reported they’d found Lt. Smythe’s bloated
and fly-crusted body.

“Dug a grave on the edge of a cane patch,” Alistair said.
“Rolled him in.”

“Nelson shoot him?”

“No bullet holes. No knife wounds. No snake bite.”

Then Smythe died of the beating Marcel gave him. He rubbed
his bruised knuckles. “Guess that makes me a murderer.”

“The man needed killing.”

“That he did.” Yet Marcel felt the blight on his soul. God
would not excuse him so readily as his friend did.

He’d roused himself over the next weeks to re-establish his
authority among the men. Some of his cavalry had resented Marcel’s loss of
control, beating a man to death like that. What kind of leadership was that?
Marcel did not apologize nor explain himself, but with even-handedness and
even-temper, he’d gradually won them back. Smythe had not been popular, and
even the ones who distrusted Marcel’s fitness came round.

He shook his head slightly, trying to dispel the picture of
his wife venturing onto Elysian Fields. Had she accosted Lucinda, right there
on Lucinda’s own street? He would pull Deborah Ann up short if she’d been so
brazen. She was his wife, by God, and she would respect the limits he imposed
on her.

Marcel pushed his wife, his other family, everything in New
Orleans from his mind. The war did not halt for his problems.

“Val,” he called. “I want my horse.”

It began to drizzle again, weather the swamp creatures
appreciated. October rains had ushered in what passed for fall in semi-tropical
Louisiana. Mold and mildew coated the tents, cots, shoes, clothes, everything
that didn’t move on its own. Horses mired in the muddy lanes, mosquitoes rejoiced
and bred in stagnant puddles. At first revived by the heat’s easing off, the
men had grown cross in the unrelenting humidity, restless in the unpunctuated
waiting.

Action, that’s what Marcel and all the men craved after
weeks of mind-numbing tedium. And now action was upon them.

General Butler had acquired a new label these past months.
Not only did they call him “Spoons” Butler for confiscating even the ladies’
silver, Confederates and Federals alike had taken to calling him “shy Butler”
for lingering in the safety of a conquered city.

The lingering was over. Weitzel had marched his men down the
Bayou this morning as far as Napoleonville. The only reason there was no
engagement was because General Mouton, weighing the fact that the Federals
numbered three thousand to the Confederates’ thirteen hundred, had ordered his
force to slip further down the waterway to a more advantageous position.

Tomorrow, the battle would commence. Perhaps it would not
rank as a great event in the prosecution of the larger war, but for the men and
women on the Lafourche, waiting and watching in the muggy air, no moment could
have greater import. Blood would flow. Men would die.

Before sunset, just as the mosquitoes claimed the night,
Marcel and his troops rolled out their oil cloths. To be in position at first
light, they were bedding down on wet ground in a crop lane deep in the cane.

Marcel called his young valet to him. Val, surely half a
head taller than when they’d left home in the summertime, fell into step with
him, his loping gait as gawky as a colt’s.

“I can read your mind, you know,” Marcel told him, hiding a
smile.

Val looked spooked for a moment. Marcel laughed, figuring
all those superstitions from Val’s childhood afternoons in the quarters had
left their mark.

Val recovered with a grin. “Yes, sir?”

“You think you’re going to ride in behind the unit, see some
action, shoot that musket you’ve been oiling up.” Marcel stopped and put a hand
on Val’s shoulder. “You are to stay right here tomorrow, Val. Right here behind
this plantation.”

Val interrupted. “I could --”

“No, you could not. If the Yanks come down the lane, I want
you in the cane. Hear me? In the cane.”

Val slid his eyes down and to the side. What was the boy
thinking now?

Marcel had seen Val watching the darkies along the bayou
slipping off by threes and fours these last few weeks. “Val? You thinking of
running off now the Federals are here? Plenty of your people doing that.”

Val raised his head and looked him in the eye. “No, sir. I
don’t aim to run off. But that cane is full of snakes.”

Marcel clapped him on the shoulder. “They’ll hear you coming
and scoot out of your way.”

Fireflies lit up the twilight like tiny stars come down to
hover above the cane. Marcel slapped at a mosquito and turned to walk back to
the makeshift camp on the lane. They’d all be a mess of red bites before
morning.

“Monsieur?”

Marcel waited.

“I’ll be here when you get back. I swear it.”

Marcel touched the boy’s face. Val carried a lot of hearts
on his thin shoulders. If anything should happen to him, Marcel didn’t know how
any of them would bear it.

“Stay safe, Val. That’s what we all want.”

At dawn, the world pearled and gray, Marcel quietly roused
his men, settling this one with a pat on the shoulder, trading jibes with
another. By first light they were primed, their pitch pine torches ready for
the match, their rifles and pistols loaded. They had only to wait for the enemy
to descend the bayou, and the killing would begin.

The pink and gold streaked sky turned blue. The sun
yellowed. The cane greened, and a breeze rustled through the stalks.

Every man, intensely aware of this morning, perhaps the last
he would see on this earth, quietly savored the puffed white clouds, the
gracefully curving cane leaves, the cardinals flitting across the lane. The
morning air was fresh, the dew cool on their faces. Breathing in, breathing
out, the blood thrumming in their veins, even the gurgle of empty bellies spoke
of the wonders of being alive.

The hours dragged on. Sgt. French labored over a letter with
a nub of pencil. A couple of men nearby played mumblety-peg, ruining the edge
on their blades as they aimed at a circle drawn in the dirt. None of the men
had much to say, their thoughts turned inward, thinking of home, of
sweethearts, of making their peace with God.

Marcel contemplated a green beetle as it fumbled with a
tattered dead moth. He’d said his rosary the night before as he lay in his
bedroll, watching the clouds drift across a half moon. Not a week since, he’d
made confession to Father Fortier. He figured he’d done what he could to
prepare to meet his maker. He tried to empty his mind of everything but white
moths and green beetles, but Lucinda’s luminous black eyes, the curve of her
neck, even the taste of her skin seemed more present to him than the green
beetle.

He had imagined this day, the battle, the killing. He’d seen
himself slashing through a horde of enemy soldiers, filled with blood lust and
righteousness. Now he felt merely resigned to the blood. It was a job he had to
do.

A faint jingling of harness floated over the tops of the
cane. Marcel raised his head. The men held their knives suspended.

A cloud of sounds rode the breeze, the low murmuring of
thousands of men and horses, boots and hooves, weaponry and wheels, all moving.

“They’re here, boys.” Marcel checked his watch. Eleven
o’clock.

Marcel’s scout, a bayou boy, slipped back from the river
road through the cane fields to report. Another half mile, the Yanks would be
in range of the waiting Confederates.

Marcel grabbed Val and hugged him tight. “Stay here!” he
reminded him, then mounted Hercule. As quietly as possible, he led his men
behind the shield of the cane fields, riding north as the Federals marched
south a hundred yards away on the bayou road.

A single rifle crack split the silence. Then artillery.

Marcel spurred Hercule into a trot, threading through one
plantation’s crop lane to another. Behind the Petrie’s grand mansion, he raced
past Mrs. Petrie, blond hair atumble, huddling at the
edge of the cane with her four children and an old mammy, hiding from the
invaders.

Marcel’s mission was to attack the straggling Union support
train: the wagons of hay, of flour and beans, of ammunition and tents. Emerging
at the river, Marcel led his men in an all-out gallop, unnerving the enemy with
the blood-curdling Rebel yell, shooting from the saddle.

“Fire the wagons!” Marcel yelled. His lads lit their torches
and touched them to the hay. Almost at once, half a dozen wagons burst into
glorious smoky flames. A reserve unit of Union cavalry raced to counter the
attack. Marcel and his men wheeled to meet them head on.

The smell of gunpowder, the clash of sabers, the roar of the
distant artillery overwhelmed his senses, narrowed his focus to the Yankee arm
slashing a saber down across his horse’s neck. Marcel’s blade intercepted the
blow, the scraping metal shrieking and sparking. He rushed the next enemy and
cleft his blade down into the Yank’s collar bone. The moment seemed to hold,
perfect clarity only in this one timeless bubble: the enemy was no more than a
boy, his blue eyes full of fear and fury. He spurred Hercule on and saw no more
of the Yank with the bright blue eyes.

On the water, more Yanks. Even with his blood up and a
terrifying yell in his throat, Marcel knew his Confederates were doomed. They
were out-provisioned, out-gunned, and out-manned.

Union artillery peppered the woods and fields, forcing
Marcel’s men to shelter under the levee and behind the ten foot trunks of
ancient oaks. They retreated along the bottoms of drainage ditches, hopeless
and scared, some of them dropping mid-stride, their wounds blooming sudden red.

Marcel lost his sword and fought on foot, Hercule having
caught a burst of shrapnel in his noble chest. Oblivious to the smoke, to the
shouts and screams of wounded men and horses, he coolly sighted his pistol on
the charging enemy.

In an instant of mind-numbing noise, a blast lifted him and
slammed him to the ground. A wave of pressure shot up his spine, drove into his
skull, pushed against the back of his eyes. With a sharp blade of pain, his
eardrum ruptured.

Stunned, deafened, Marcel stretched out his hands, searching
for his pistol, but black smoke hung over everything. A man trod on his back in
a mad dash to escape the fusillade of the Union artillery.

Strong arms pulled him, half blind and deaf, to his feet.
Alistair threw Marcel’s arm over his shoulder and together the two of them
staggered after their comrades, melting into the cane.

Searing pain from his ruined ear befogged his senses, yet
Marcel insisted he could walk unaided. Striking off alone, he drove himself
through the cane, the ditches, and the lingering smoke to the place they’d
camped the night before.

“Val!” he called. “Valentine!”

BOOK: Evermore: A Saga of Slavery and Deliverance (The Plantation Series Book 3)
10.28Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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