Mignon

Chapter 24

It was true, all right; we’d had the stuffing kicked out of us and skedasis was complete. We were on our way out and overnight, from being a quiet riverside town, with flowers perfuming the air, Alexandria was a hellhole on earth, with wounded men limping in, horses dying in the streets, splintered boats crashing down the falls, and in place of the perfume a smell of death, rot, and war. Hanging over it all was danger, because maybe we wanted out, but Taylor had different ideas and meant to bag us all. He surrounded the town and kept tightening the noose, his fires out in the woods creeping closer and closer, his skirmishers giving no peace. He cut the river below so no supplies could come up, and suddenly rations were short. Also water was short; with thirty thousand men and five thousand horses penned up in place built for four thousand, with no wells and cisterns not refilled since the rain Taylor arrived in, the supply ran out fast. That left Red River water, but it was so foul with corpses, swill, and filth that the boys got desperately sick, and their filth was added to the original filth.

Worst of all was the drought in Texas, which made the river low, so it didn’t take a rise as it generally did in spring. It fell, and the Navy got stuck in the mud, ten of its best boats, up above the falls. That’s what hung things, because instead of continuing its march the Army had to halt, dig in, and try to get them out. And what it decided to do was put in a dam of sticks and stones and trees just above the town, to bulge the water up for enough depth to float the boats. It was such a weird idea that I hadn’t the heart to look. The Red River current, which I’d already clocked with my eye by watching snags float by, was at least nine miles an hour, and trying to hold it with a makeshift pile of brush struck me as pathetic, like trying to hold an elephant by tying him with knitting yarn. Just the same, they started in to do it. Colored troops put in a pontoon bridge from a ramp in front of the courthouse to a spot on the left bank, which they finished in one day, and construction crews streamed over, so work could go forward from both sides of the river at once. Every day boats would go up through the swing draw out in the middle, with barges of stone and rubble, and axes would speak all the time, upriver from Alexandria and from the woods above Pineville.

And all during that we sat, she, Mr. Landry, and I, in their sitting room, for an even queerer three weeks than the other three weeks had been. He made it up with me, coming over after she left the same day as our brawl, to thank me “for the information, which Mignon has just mentioned to me, about Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I hadn’t known it before, but just verified it in the Britannica, and am truly grateful for it.” I said you couldn’t prove it by me, but I did hear it in college, and he repeated that such things to him were important and he counted himself in my debt. Then he asked me to supper, and I resumed taking my meals with them — a good thing, since the hotel ran out of food and otherwise I’d have been out of luck. We didn’t eat well but we ate, dried stuff from the store, prunes and apples and apricots, beans and peas and rice, stocked in barrels and sacks and kegs. He wouldn’t allow me below to help bring anything up, and once when I glimpsed the kegs I suspected they were the reason, and wondered what was in them. Every day he’d go out for a stroll, to pick up such news as he could, and I’d go down to the courthouse, which had been converted into a hospital and stank of wounded men, to pester for my pass. In between, the three of us would talk.

“You’ve no faith in the dam?” he asked me one day.

“Who wants to know?” I said. “A loyal Reb?”

“No, Mr. Cresap,” he assured me, very solemn, “a loyal Union man. And since you bring it up, I may say that things have changed since we had our last discussion. War was not over in Louisiana — for a few days, at least. Now, I’m sorry to say, it is — finally, and for keeps. I said it, didn’t I? That I was the fool, not Taylor, but they’ve drawn Taylor’s teeth and clipped his claws. He’s now a tiger made of paper, with just a token force of no more than five thousand men, banging away with artillery, lighting fires at night, and cutting off forage parties — ever since Kirby Smith, the military genius at Shreveport, took the bulk of his army away, to meet another ‘invasion,’ coming down from the north — if it’s coming, if. So instead of the bird in hand, this Union army in Alexandria, we’re chasing a will-o’-the-wisp, and my allegiance is settled, in heart as well as mouth. Taylor’s doing a wonderful job, but it still remains true there’s not one Reb soldier between this place and Shreveport.”

“What’s that got to do with the dam?”

“Mr. Cresap, suppose it fails?”

“... Well? We lose ten boats, I suppose.”

“You just walk off and leave them?”

“Not I — this army. What else can we do?”

“I may be crazy, but as a loyal Union man I say — and don’t contradict me — no Union army dare pull out of this place and leave ten boats sitting. It would not obey the order; the men would mutiny first! The one thing it can do is march on up to Shreveport — and that’ll cook Taylor, Kirby Smith, the will-o’-the-wisp chasers, and everything Reb in this section! Because what Richmond is to the East, Shreveport is to the West — a base, a source of food, of munitions, of what’s needed to fight. That’s what this army can do, and that’s what it’s going to do, once the river tears that dam apart.”

“What’s the rest of it, sir?”

“... In Springfield, everything’s marking time.”

“Springfield? I thought we were talking of Shreveport.”

“Both are important to us — to you, to me, to Mignon. Nothing can litigate until the Navy gets out of this river and brings its witnesses into court. So if you don’t get there right away, nothing’s lost, is there? You’ll still have time for Shreveport.”

“Yes. Shreveport?”

“The Army takes it, doesn’t it?”

“So you say, Mr. Landry. What then?”

“And the Navy doesn’t take it?”

“Well the Navy’s prevented, sort of.”

He said the Navy was prevented, not only by being stuck, but by being blocked off, from a hulk sunk in the river, the New Falls City, “at the mouth of Loggy Bayou, which is why they turned back in the first place, not from hearing the Army was whipped, as they’ve been giving out. They can’t get out of the mud, and even if they could, they can’t get past the hulk. That means Shreveport’s an Army thing — doesn’t it?”

“All right, what then?”

“These people have confidence in the Army.”

“What people, sir?”

“In Shreveport. No cotton’s going to be burned.”

“... More about cotton, and I’m going to upchuck.”

“For a million dollars you’d upchuck?”

“Did you upchuck with her?”

She’d been sitting with me on the sofa, he facing us in a chair, his eyes roving the river. Now she blazed her eyes at me, then got up and went over to him. In her red-checked gingham dress she kneeled beside him, took his hand in hers, and said: “Go on, lambie — explain us, how do we get the million dollars — oh my, that would be heaven on this earth.”

“So?” I said. “The cotton’s not burned, and—”

“I acquire it. I have friends in Shreveport.”

“You mean, you buy it?”

“I mean I take title, on shares. Once they know it’s the Army, once I assure them of that, those people will trust me, I know. But two things I have to have.”

“All right. What are they?”

“The first is time.”

“I thought we had plenty of time.”

“You have time — I haven’t. I have to know where I stand, so I can get on the spot and write papers — bills of sale, partnership articles with the different people involved, receipts for the Army to sign. With all the thousands of bales waiting for me up there, I can’t do it in an hour; I have to get there ahead of time, I must be there ready and waiting whenever the Army comes.”

“Quite a trudge you’ve picked out for yourself.”

“Trudge? I’ll go by boat.”

“Boat? What boat, Mr. Landry?”

“Reb boats are running again — Doubloon, Grand Duke, all kinds of different ones. When the Union pulled out, traffic resumed as usual. I can be in Shreveport tomorrow — call it day after.”

“... What else must you have?”

“Godpappy, Mr. Cresap.”

“I thought that was it. Meaning me?”

“You’ll have it all to yourself — a monopoly!”

He said that now the other traders had all been sent back to New Orleans I’d be the only one, “and they’ll have to deal with you.” Then he started in again on the mess being made of the dam. “The idea,” he said, “is to set out the trees in pairs — brackets they’re called, I believe — with boards nailed to the trunks. When they’re hauled into the stream, the current’s supposed to help, by pressing down on the boards and holding them tight to the bottom — and it did, so long as the work was close to the bank, where the water’s shallow. But now that they’re moving out where it’s deep, the current’s no help any more. It lifts those trees like Hallowe’en apples and sends them spinning downriver, past the bridge and out. The whole thing’s just pitiful.”

I said: “You know how you sound to me?”

“... All right, Mr. Cresap — tell me.”

“Like a man working three sides of the street — Reb side, Union side, and Cotton side, all at the same time.”

“I’m not running this war. What I propose is lawful.”

“And you realize I must report what you’ve said.”

She started, but he smiled, waited, and said: “I would expect you to; in fact I want you to, and realize that until you do you’ll not cooperate. So please — you go to your friend Captain Dorsey, tell him what I’ve told you — everything I’ve said, especially about Kirby Smith. When you come back, I think you’ll be ready to talk.”

She came over to me, not blazing her eyes any more, but mumbling her mouth to mine and whispering: “You’re going to, aren’t you? See Captain Dorsey? Hear what he has to say? And then line it up? So we make the million dollars? And have our house? And our carriage? And—”

“At any rate, I’ll see him.”

The Black Hawk, the headquarters Black Hawk that is, was tied up at Biossat’s again, all battered from shelling upriver, and the guard on her plank called Dan. I’d seen him since he got back, but only to say hello, and we spent a minute or two on the usual dumb questions, getting caught up with each other. Then he started to take me upstairs, but I suggested some place where we’d be alone, and he led on back to the fantail, where we had it with our elbows on the rail. He listened, and then filled me in on the fighting the Army had seen, and how it bore on what Mr. Landry had told me. “The thing to keep straight,” he said, “is that two battles were fought — one up in the woods, at what’s known as Sabine Crossroads, just this side of Mansfield. That battle we lost — I was there, and it was a shambles, with everything going wrong that possibly could go wrong. You’d think, after Caesar wrote up the folly of trying to fight with wagons up in your van, that we’d have heard about it, two thousand years later. But no — there the wagons were when the Rebs came piling at us, with the horses screaming and breaking, and the wagoners no great help. And there were the girls too, the colored ones that were brought by the boys to do their washing — whipping their mules to the rear and yelling: ‘Run! Run! Here come Old Massa — he gwine massacree everyone!’ Don’t let anyone tell you different, it was a rout! You know what they’re singing, don’t you?”

He leaned close, and buzzed into my ear:

“But,” he went on, “next day, at Pleasant Hill, when they tried to finish us up, we cut them to pieces, Bill. Don’t let anyone tell you different on that! And there’s the tragedy of it! This army’s not licked — how could it be when it won that Pleasant Hill fight? This headquarters is! Of backbiting, disloyalty, undercutting, and bickering you can take just so much. And that’s why we’re getting out. Not from defeat, from disunity! So, in regard to your friend Landry and what he thinks we’ll do next, he could be right. We could be going to Shreveport, in case this dam’s a bust, we could be doing just that — and we know all about it, Kirby Smith’s dispersal of Richard Taylor’s army. He sent Price with six thousand men to stop Steele, who’s supposed to be working with us, and that army is way the hell and gone up in Arkansas someplace, so it couldn’t be a factor. It’s quite true, I imagine, that there’s no effective force under the Reb command between this place and Shreveport.”

“All right, but what do I do?”

“Bill, I’ve told you: the goddam cotton is hooded. It’s the cause of all our trouble, the cause of the headquarters bickering, of the Navy’s being stuck. If they hadn’t gone upriver for this cotton Landry wants, they wouldn’t be where they are now. Stay out of it! Don’t touch it with a ten-foot pole.”

“I can’t stay out of it. I’m already in.”

I told him about Sandy, the Navy receipt, and the rest. He whistled. “Well!” he said. “You certainly are in, all the way, with both feet... Then — a little more can’t make much difference. In for a penny, in for a pound.”

“You mean let Mr. Landry go ahead?”

“What harm is it going to do?”

“That’s it! If we don’t go to Shreveport, Dan...?”

“Then we didn’t and he did. That’s all.”

“You’re sure I wouldn’t be disloyal, doing this?”

“Well? Lincoln wants it, doesn’t he?”