Evermore: A Saga of Slavery and Deliverance (The Plantation Series Book 3) (43 page)

André Cailloux, identified on the battlefield only by the
ring he wore, was taken home. His body lay in state for four days, the flag of
the United States of America draped over his sealed coffin. Candles and the
scented flowers of late summer perfumed the stifling, heavy air. On the fifth
day, the coffin was placed on a black, horse-drawn caisson adorned with drapery
and tassels befitting a great hero. A brass band paced alongside him playing
solemn music as the procession marched slowly through the city. Thousands of
mourners, former friends, former slaves, and Union sympathizers, lined the
streets.

Lucinda and Nicolette trudged home after André’s
funeral. They shared the yellow cottage, now, in a limbo of waiting for their
men, praying for an end to the war.

Across town, Deborah Ann did what all the other women did
whose husbands and sons might lay dying on some far-off battlefield. She too
waited.

She’d had a long convalescence after the incident on Elysian
Fields. She was still fragile, still brittle. But she was no longer confused.

Dr. Braun prescribed long walks twice a day. She spent hours
knitting socks and rolling bandages for the troops. She often thought of
writing to Marcel’s other woman, telling her how sorry she was to have
frightened her, promising her she would never bother her again. But she never
wrote the letter.

In late summer, Deborah Ann insisted on accompanying Father
to Evermore to see just how much damage the Yankees, and the slaves, had done.
Along with Mammy and Jebediah, they rode the steamer
Annabelle up river. As ever, there stood the massive oaks, furred with
resurrection fern, dripping with moss. The grass along the levee grew as lush
and green as ever.

But Evermore – the eastern half of the house gleamed white
under the bright sun. But the western half – black, skeletal, and open to the
sky. Deborah knotted her handkerchief, gazing on the ruins. Mr. Thompson had
written to tell them the news, but to actually see it was far more painful than
the letter had been.

Silently, Deborah walked up the path between the poplars,
worried at the slump of Father’s shoulders. They climbed the brick steps.
Father pressed the brass handle and shoved the door open.

The hallway was dim. The house smelled of smoke. Dust and
ash covered every surface. Their leaden footsteps echoed on the hard cypress
floor.

Old Clementine shuffled into the great hall from the back
rooms, the shotgun in her arms too heavy to hold steady.

“Dat you?” she called. “Lawd, Mr.
Presswood, I’s glad yo’s not dem
Yanks again. Dey done made off wit
all our stuff already.”

“Clementine, go get Mr. Thompson for me, that’s a good
girl.” Father still had his hat in his hands. Clementine had forgotten to take
it from him.

“Deborah Ann, dear, can you see what we have to offer Mr.
Thompson?”

Deborah found not a single bottle of wine nor brandy nor
port left in the house. She brought in a pitcher of well water, then sat down
in the third leather chair in Father’s study.

“I got six darkies left, Mr. Presswood,” Mr. Thompson
reported. “We’re working the garden to have enough stores to see us through the
year. There’ll be enough for you to take back to town with you when we get
through with the harvest. Course you know there’ll be no cane crop this year.”

“What’d the Yankees take?”

“Every horse, mule, cow, pig, and chicken on the place. The
silver, and anything that looked valuable and small enough to go in a
saddlebag. Same up and down this part of the river. They came through like
locusts, I swear, eating everything they could get. I showed them the letter
you sent on from General Butler. They read it. Kept them from burning the
place, I guess. But then, the darkies took care of that.”

Deborah Ann listened to the quiet, inside the house and out.
Anna and Rosa, Pearly and Maggie, so many others, gone. And now the place felt
like a land asleep with no clang of metal tools, no voices raised, no children
laughing. Evermore was finished, merely a ghost of what she’d been. There was
nothing to be done about it.

At supper, Clementine served boiled sweet potatoes, fried
squirrel, and huckleberries heavy with seeds. Deborah Ann and her father picked
at their food, silent and grieving.

After supper, Deborah Ann found a candle stub and retired to
her room. This part of the house was intact, but it was stuffy and hot
upstairs. No one had aired her room nor swept up the dead flies on the window
sills. The smell of smoke was strong. Dust lay thick on her writing table.

She sank on to her aqua silk slipper chair and pulled out
the letter she’d had from Marcel. She opened the paper and smoothed the
creases. It was a painful letter, but she had nothing else from him except the
ring on her finger.

When the letter had reached her at last, she’d been
thrilled. But her first flush of relief that he was alive, that he had thought
to write to her even as he escaped from Port Hudson, drained away as she read.

You have broken my
heart,
he wrote.
To tear my children
from their mother is a cruelty which I would not have believed of you. In order
for me to excuse such an act, I must imagine that you suffered a temporary
madness. I have sent documents to my attorney, to my father, and to yours
detailing my express wish that the children never leave their mother’s care. Do
not embarrass yourself by further attempts to interfere.

I hope and pray that
you reconcile yourself to reason and that I may one day call you Dearest Wife
once again. Be well. The war cannot last forever. Your most devoted husband,
Marcel.

She lay down on the bed where she had hoped to lie with her
husband. She did not weep nor brood. The pain of that brutal letter was an old
familiar by now, and she had interred the episode of madness, for that is what
it was, in a dark chamber of her mind.

Deborah Ann’s entire existence now was focused on enduring.
Holding on, with as little feeling as she could manage. She knew now how to
accept what she could not change. She could not undo what she had done in New
Orleans. She could not bring the darkies back to Evermore. She could not hasten
the war’s end. But it would end. And life would go on. Had he not signed his
letter “your devoted husband?” Had he not hoped to call her “Dearest Wife?” His
words whispered of a future, and that would have to sustain her.

Tomorrow, she and Mammy would sweep away the cobwebs. She
would keep a good house, here and in town, for when Marcel came home. She would
prove to him she was ready to be a good wife, and, someday, he would forgive
her. He might even love her.

She had been naïve. She had been trusting. Cruelly, he had violated
her faith in him. She still loved him. Someday, maybe, she would forgive him.

In April, 1865, General Lee surrendered to General Grant at
the Appomattox Courthouse.

Marcel was among the first Confederates to return to
Louisiana. He’d turned in his arms on the fields above Richmond, still in
uniform. So many others had died before the armistice, so many had, like
Alistair, been captured. He counted himself among the fortunate.

He stopped first at Cherleu where his father and Valentine
were rediscovering unused muscles. The plantation was in a shambles, but the
former slaves who chose to remain for wages worked alongside Bertrand Chamard
and Valentine to put in a subsistence crop.

In the cool of the evening, Marcel walked the fields with
his father, Biscuit following along, flushing doves out of the tall grass.
Marcel eyed the neighboring plantation through the row of sycamores. “How is
Toulouse?”

“Better than this,” Bertrand answered, mindful of which ear
Marcel could hear from. “Probably half her blacks stayed on the place. They
love their Madame Josie.”

“They stayed for wages, I presume.”

“Yes, for wages.” Bertrand eyed his son. “I’m thinking of
marrying her.”

“Josephine DeBlieux?” She was a handsome woman, but she had
to be close to fifty. “I suppose it makes sense, financially.”

Bertrand made a disgusted face. “Not for the money, Marcel.
I married for money before.” He seemed to remember he spoke of Marcel’s mother.
“Not that I regretted marrying your mother, son. She was a faithful wife and she
gave me you. But before Abigail, Josie and I . . . Well.”

Marcel grinned. “You old rascal.”

Bertrand, his home and his livelihood in ruins around him,
smiled contentedly.

Marcel worked the fields with his father, fished in the
creek, and tried to put the last years behind him. So good to be home. So good
to put the rifle away, to wake up every morning without having to kill some
other poor fool in a uniform.

He loved it here on the plantation, but he had to begin
anew. His livelihood, his children, and his women were in New Orleans.

He packed a set of old but respectable clothes from his
closet and sat with his father on the gallery waiting for the steam boat.

“Papa, how did you do it?”

Bertrand cast a glance at him, waiting.

“You had two women. I don’t know if I can.”

Bertrand flicked ash off his cigar. “Son, you give one up,
it has to be Lucinda. You married Deborah Ann in the church. You divorce her,
she’s ruined. The war’s changed things here in Louisiana, but it didn’t change
that.”

“Lucinda is my heart, Papa. There’s no record in the church
books, no piece of paper to prove it. But she is my wife.”

“I know, son.”

Marcel bowed his head. “I shouldn’t have married Deborah
Ann.”

“But you did, son. You did.”

They smoked their cigars until the steamboat whistle blew,
acknowledging the flag on the dock.

Biscuit followed him down to the river, his tail wagging.
Marcel gave him a scratch behind the ears and stepped aboard the boat. His
life, and his wives, awaited him.

Alistair Whiteaker, his proud gray uniform now tattered and
threadbare, walked out of the disease-ridden prison camp at Point Lookout.
Tired, sick, but determined, he trudged five days to Washington with a broken
band of Confederates.

At the biggest bank in town, he marched in, infested with
lice, barefoot and ragged, but with the bearing of a gentleman. He introduced
himself. The chief teller escorted him to the president’s office.

Alistair left the bank with a packet of money. He handed each
of his friends a U. S. hundred dollar bill. They hugged their good-byes and
resumed their journeys home.

On sore feet, Alistair hobbled across Pennsylvania avenue to
the best hotel in town and convinced them to rent him a suite by flashing a
peek at his wallet. In his rooms, he called the barber in and had a bath for
the first time in two years. Then he climbed into a bed free of vermin, free of
other men’s elbows and filth and sickness. The snowy sheets smelled of lavender
and sun-dried linen. They smelled like home. Alistair closed his eyes and slept
round the clock.

By the time his ship sailed up the Mississippi to dock at
the Bienville pier, Alistair had gained twenty pounds. His health was adequate
and his bank account was fat. The loss of the war had clarified his thinking as
well as his feelings. The rightness of freeing the slaves, now, not in two or
three generations, settled on him with a deep certainty. Nicolette had been
right in her impatience.

His plantation was ruined, the Union troops having
provisioned themselves from his stores and then burned the house down. But his
goal was not a re-creation of the old plantation. He built a modest house for
his mother’s use in the summers. Then he invited former slaves to return to the
old place, this time to work for money. He allotted ground for vegetable plots.
He built a dispensary and hired a doctor to attend it three days a week. And,
alone among his planter acquaintances, Alistair built a school for the Negro
children.

In town, Alistair let it be known that his sister, now
nineteen and dangerously close to spinsterhood, was inclined to accept the
attention of eligible bachelors. So many men had died, she wailed, there would
be no one to court her, but Alistair assured her that her charm, and his purse,
would bring many suitors to her door.

His business and family obligations underway, Alistair
sought out a man who did investigations for his friends in law. “I wish to make
inquiries of a lady, Mr. Dickens. Discreetly, if you please. This is her last
known address.”

The following day, Mr. Dickens returned. “A married woman,”
the investigator reported. “Married a damn Yank. Mrs. Finnian McKee, she is
now.”

Then finding her was pointless.

Alistair dismissed Mr. Dickens and closed his study door. He
poured himself a whiskey, a rare indulgence in the afternoon. He tried these
days to always be honest with himself. He wanted to know the truth of the man
he was. He was strong enough for that now.

Was there perhaps a whiff of relief in Dickens’ news? Alistair
would not have to grapple with the difficulties of following his heart. He
would not have to choose Nicolette over his mother’s disgrace, his sister’s
marriage hopes, his own standing amongst other Southern gentlemen if he should
marry a woman of color. The war had devastated the South, had ended the
plantation system, freed the slaves. But Alistair’s people had not relinquished
their notions of white and black.

And yet, the dream. Nicolette would never share his bed.
Bear his children. Smile at him over morning coffee.

Alistair tossed back his drink and poured another.

Deborah Ann waited for her husband to return from his day’s
work at the foundry. The Union had long ago confiscated it as rebel contraband,
and Marcel now managed it, not owned it. That did not concern Deborah Ann.
Father had plenty of money coming in from his City interests. Some even
whispered he had profited over-much from his association with the Occupiers.
Father ranted about that, but he would get over it. He would probably buy the
foundry from the government in a few months and give it to Marcel.