Storytellersunplugged

Where Words Meet

Elegy for a Tennessee Stillbirth

This October I wanted to share a story that was published earlier this year in DOORWAYS, the wonderful magazine edited by our own Mort Castle. If you’re not a reader of it, you should be. There are many wonderful stories to be found in its pages. I hope you think this is one of them. –Janet

The sun rose over Bloody Pond, promising another hot and humid Tennessee day and heightening the odor of decay and death. Little moved in the stillness of that dreadful morning, little except the shoulders of the slim Union soldier who knelt at the edge of the pond, looking out across the bodies. Thinking how well the night breezes had masked the stench with the heavy smell of peach blossoms from the orchard that lay at the eastern end of what, two days before, had been dubbed the Hornet’s Nest.

Next to the soldier lay an open haversack which held a stack of papers inked with the smudged words of a lengthy war report. Working with deft hands, the soldier transformed the pages into miniature boats, the kind that children construct when they go to the park to feed the swans. They formed a flotilla, which one by one the soldier floated out into the water, watching each boat until it wedged between bodies on a sea of mud and caked blood.

When the last boat had been launched, the soldier dug into the knapsack and retrieved Peter Louis’ journal. A drizzle began, soft and gentle. Grateful for the slight relief from the heat, the soldier formed a makeshift umbrella over the pages and began to read.

On a march, Peter wrote, a battery can travel up to five miles an hour on a good road. He wrote of the fires they built in holes in the ground, of the Confederate belief that food traveled less heavily in the belly than the haversack so they ate their 3-day rations at once and went hungry for the rest of the way. He wrote in the rain and on mud-stained pages of hearing Yankee bugles, of rumors of coughing cured by the application of red-hot pokers, of diarrhea and of nightmares of dead men yelling retreat, retreat. The only pleasant occurrence, he wrote, was the day they came across Northerners eating a breakfast of hot meat, white bread, and sweet coffee. Stealing into their camp, he filled his belly with food and his haversack with letters and photos.

He wrote that General Johnston sanctioned the scavenging by acquiring for himself a Yankee tin cup. He would use it to direct battle, he said, index finger hooked through the handle.

According to the journal, Peter endured intermittent showers and steamy sunshine with a certain degree of stoicism. He strangely felt no real fear until he was shot at by fellow Confederates who saw the dress-blue uniforms of the Orleans Guard and, thinking them the enemy, fired upon them. At that, he and the others turned their dress-blues–”graveyard clothes” the Federals called them, when they found out what had happened–inside out and wore them with the white silk linings visible. This to prevent being killed by their own who naturally assumed that anyone wearing blue had to be a Union soldier.

On April 5, 1862, encamped within a short distance of the enemy army which was going about its normal business, Peter wrote in his journal, unconsciously echoing what Sherman had written to Grant that very day: “I don’t believe that anything much will happen today. Some picket firing maybe. Nothing more.”

I will walk toward the picket line, he wrote.  No attacks are made at night on the line. It is an unspoken rule. It is a time for the swapping of tobacco and coffee and tall tales, a time for the gathering of firewood and courage. I will be safe there.

The reading was slow going, for between the lines the soldier’s mind set passages which did not exist on the page.  Finally, eyes blurred by fatigue, the soldier reread the last words of that last entry.

I will be safe there.

Then the words on the page gave way to the pages of memory—

#

—The walls of her room at Mrs. Rice’s House of Ill Repute were like sugar cookies, stippled, cream-colored, wafer thin. Even though she had pulled her bed away from the wall, she could hear everything in the room next door. The conversation wasn’t a problem, but when the sounds of intimacy started, she covered her head with her pillow.

Most of the time.

Today was not one of those days. Today she heard familiar laughter and covered the sounds with quiet sobbing. When the springs ceased to squeak and the laughter stopped, she moved to the open window and watched the pathway until she saw him.

Peter.

She bit down upon her lip to stop herself from heaping curses upon his head.

As if he had heard her, he turned and stared upward. She moved quickly aside. When she returned to her post, he was nowhere to be seen. She looked sideways at the small form lying so still, so very still, in its cot in the corner of the room.

Behind her, Mrs. Rice tapped lightly on the doorframe. “He ain’t never made a sound, has he?”

Lucy jumped, turned around, swiped at her tears with her sleeve. “No, Ma’am, Mrs. Rice. Not a single cry since…. What year is this, Mrs. Rice?” she asked.

“Far as I know, it’s the Year of Our Lord, Eighteen Hundred and Sixty-two. Least it was this morning. Why you asking, Girl?”

“Just countin’ how long I been in Memphis. Wonderin’ if I’ll ever get used to it, is all.”

“There’s a man downstairs on his way to New Orleans  says he saw you in the garden yesterday, and again just now right here.” Mrs. Rice joined Lucy at the window. “Says you remind him of someone. Says he’ll be back here in a week and wants you. No one else.”

Lucy stared out of the open window, across the rooftops of the city that had given her refuge. A breeze drifted into her small room. It brought with it a heavy scent of magnolias, so different from the soft fragrance of that other spring–the trees heralding Peter’s arrival with a celebration of flowers, as if the Lord had planned for him to be there during peach blossom season and fall in love with her.

By virtue of her roots, Lucy was born the light-skinned daughter of a slave family on a farm in Southern Tennessee, in the rich lands southwest of Pittsburg Landing. By virtue of her nature, she was born free as the flies that pecked at the sweet syrup of the peaches that grew in the orchards of her childhood.

Her master was a good enough man who did not ask much of her and let her go when he could have stopped her from leaving. He liked having her around. Every now and again he had her lift her skirts for him and show him her ankles, but he was a God-loving man and didn’t touch where another master might have touched. Truth to tell, she wouldn’t have minded a night here, an afternoon there, pleasuring him, but her Mama put the fear of The Lord into her. Her Daddy, he didn’t speak much, but her Mama, she was a different matter.

“Don’t you go making no white babies, Lucinda,” she said.

“I’m not making babies, Mama,” Lucy said. “Not ever.”

Which was true then and might have stayed true, were it not that during that spring of her fifteenth year, she fell in love with her master’s second cousin, come to spend Easter of 1859 in the countryside.

What a time they’d had, rolling around in the fragrant reds of fallen blossoms in the ten-acre peach orchard, in full bloom at the west end of the pond. How they’d laughed, scratching their initials into the trunk of the tree beneath which they had consummated their passion.

Making a baby, just as her Mama had feared.

She said nothing about this to Peter, not even when the blossoms fell, the fruit ripened, and he returned to his home in Cairo, Illinois. By the time she figured out how to follow him there, throwing herself successfully upon the mercy of her unusual master, her slim and boyish frame was distorted and heavy with child.

How angry Peter had been when she presented herself to him, Lucy thought. How ashamed before his fashionable Cairo family.

“It’s your child, too,” she’d said. “You got to care for it, Peter.”

Too late, she learned that though the disposition of her lover’s birth in Cairo, Illinois, made him a Yankee, he was, by disposition of his heart, a Confederate.

“Listen to you, talking like you’re white folk,” he said. “Me care for a nigger child? You’re crazy.”

Believing he would get over his shock, she let him take her to the local hotel. There, he made love to her once or twice, then beat her roundly until she was sure the baby loosened.

“You’re murdering your own child,” she sobbed.

“I hope so,” Peter muttered. Looking relieved, he told her he was leaving home to board the Mississippi steamboat captained by his old acquaintance, twenty five-year old Samuel Clemens, and dispatched her back to the South.

Only she didn’t go back to the farm. She headed straight down the Mississippi river on a cotton barge to the only place where she’d been told she’d be given shelter. This place, here, in Memphis, where she and her unborn child and her newly born hatred could find protection.

“What about the young man?” Mrs. Rice said. “I’ve not asked this of you before, but times is rough and he’s willing to pay a lot of money.”

“I’ll do it,” Lucy said, because she owed this to Mrs. Rice. To herself. To–she glanced again into the corner. “In one of the other rooms.”

The days and nights passed, as they were wont to do, and the time came for Lucy to keep her promise to Mrs. Rice.

“There is only one Lucy,” Peter said, as if they had last seen each other in the orchard and not in Cairo. “Only one Lucy and as desirable as ever.” He loosened the top button of his uniform jacket, reached out to touch her long hair, and let his gaze linger upon her breasts, still swollen with mother’s milk. She thought about killing him there and then. He deserved no less.

“Let us talk, Lucy,” he said. “Let us laugh and make love, as we did before.”

Swallowing the bile that rose at the thought of coupling with him again, she offered him a glass of wine. He took it, and several more. Becoming loquacious, he talked of his broken dream of joining Samuel Clemens on the river. “By the time he had made up my mind it was too late,” he said. “Clemens had been elected 2^nd Lieutenant in an irregular unit of 15 men whose self-proclaimed duty it was to keep an eye on Grant’s forces.”

Clemens being something of a hero to him, Peter had deliberated joining the same unit. Again, he thought too long. Quickly bored by saddle sores, Clemens said the hell with it. Riding an old mule because he’d injured his foot jumping out of a hayloft, he hightailed it back to silver country to take up a career as a journalist.

Peter lay back on the pillows and motioned for Lucy to join him. “Does that not sound to you to be the perfect life,” he said. “How much better to be a reporter than a soldier.”

He’d tried to get a job with the local paper, he told her. When that didn’t immediately pan out, he took a civilian job in the local telegraph office, where he figured he could read and learn from the important papers that passed regularly through his hands.

Though Grant was, to his regret, a Yankee, he was worthy, Peter thought, of admiration and imitation. This led to an affect which he’d adopted, that of chewing incessantly on an unlit cigar.  It also led to a deep interest in the Yankee reports that passed through his hands, many of which came from the pens of Generals Sherman and Grant.

When the papers particularly fascinated him, he took them home to study at his leisure, so that when the war was done–”I figure that to be only a matter of a few months”–he could make a name for himself by writing about them. He became familiar with the reports, returns, and information that Grant sent to Washington, telling of the strength and position of his command, as demanded by Secretary of War Stanton, otherwise known as “Old Man Mars.”

Since Peter kept the reports, they never reached their destination. Furious, Secretary Stanton complained to General Halleck, who at once suspended Grant from command and ordered him to Ft. Henry.

Learning of this, Peter felt pleased with his contribution to the war effort. After all, he had caused it to happen by secreting away the documents.

“I thought about ceremoniously burning the valuable papers I had kept,” he said, “but I could not let go of so significant a trophy.” Unless they actually saw the orders, Washington Headquarters would never know whether the General had dispatched the messages or failed to do so while in some alcoholic haze. “It will forever remain a mystery to which only I, Peter Louis, and you Lucy, hold the answer.”

“And if I tell them what you have done?” Lucy asked, almost casually.

“You wouldn’t do that.  You love me,” he said, and went on talking.

Peter’s pleasure at having changed the course of the war was short-lived. Grant’s replacement had received a leg injury; Grant was returned to duty to await first Buell’s army, then the arrival of Halleck who would take command.

By the end of February of the year 1962, Peter was ready to make a new contribution to the war effort. While he did not want to join the regular army and risk being wounded or killed, he had become enchanted by the romance of war and wanted to learn more first hand.

“I went down the Mississippi, involved myself in what some refer to as the illicit cotton trade, then decided to proceed to New Orleans and become a recorder. In truth, I had no special need to experience The Elephant, combat, first hand, but when I set eyes on this uniform I could not stop myself.” He paraded before the tall mirror that stood atop the dresser. “Do you not think I look handsome decked out in the dress-blues of the Orleans Guards Battalion, Sweet Lucy?”

“Where are you headed now?” Lucy asked.

“Dead in the direction of the peach orchards,” he said. “Wouldn’t you know they’d send me to Shiloh.”

Lucy never said another word, not then, not while he had his way with her, not afterward. Fate, synchronicity, coincidence–whatever it was that had brought Peter here–turned her into a puppet obedient to visions and voices that filled her mind. What exactly they meant her to do she did not yet know. But she would, she told herself. Soon enough, she would.

As Peter left, he put a generous wad of money on the dresser. “We’ll see each other again when it’s over,” he said.

Oh yes, we’ll see each other again. The thought came unbidden to Lucy. And then it will be over.

She returned to her room and stood, as she so often did, before the open window. “I have to go away for a while,” she whispered, her voice softer than the Memphis breeze. “But I’ll come back.” She drifted toward the cot in the corner. Bending over, she blew softly on her son’s face and wiped the trickle of sweat from his brow. “I promise I’ll come back.”

“Come back from where?” Mrs. Rice asked, moving from the frame of the doorway toward the battered rocking chair near the child’s cot. She sat down heavily. “You’re not going back to that place are you?”

Lucy nodded. “I got to.”

“You’ll never make it through. Look at yourself in the mirror. At best you look like a defenseless young woman, at worst you look like what you are.”

“A runaway?”

“Target practice or worse for the first trigger happy Confederate soldier who crosses your path.”

Reaching into the top drawer of her dresser, Lucy removed a pair of scissors and cropped her hair close to her head. Then she tore her petticoat into strips and bound up her breasts. A couple of Henna rinses and the transformation would be complete, she thought.

“I been through worse dangers. I been waiting for this time, Mrs. Rice.” Lucy glanced back down at the crib, at the child who had never uttered a sound, never opened his eyes, never talked or walked or shed a nightmare tear. Were it not for his bodily functions, he might as well not be alive. “Take care of him for me while I’m gone,” she said. “Take care of my little boy.”—

#

— The rain stopped. The moon rose, lighting peach orchards in full blossom reminiscent of the spring of Lucy’s youth. On the march to the farm, it had seemed to her that she would never be dry again, that her feet in their over-sized Union army issue boots would never lose their blisters or her stomach its need to unburden itself of its contents. Her thoughts were mostly of her parents, to whom she had many times written in care of the master.  After a long silence, he had written back, telling her with what seemed like genuine sorrow that her mother had died.  He had buried her in the family cemetery.  After the funeral, he wrote, her father had simply disappeared.

She would see them both again, she thought, as Peter moved toward picket line.  If God forgave her for what she had to do.

“Are you not afraid, Soldier?” she asked, keeping her voice muffled.

“Yes,” Peter said, surprising her. “Grant is a clever man. He must be prepared for all eventualities.”

“One can never be prepared for all eventualities,” she said, her face half turned away and masked by the brim of a cap pulled low.

“I would like to forget about the war for this night,” Peter said.

“I have thought of nothing else since we buried fifteen of our dead at Fallen Timbers. Would you walk with me in the orchard, Soldier?” Lucy said. “Surely if we decorate ourselves with blossoms we will be protected from harm.”

She slouched, head averted and walking awkwardly in a uniform that was much too big. They continued for a while in silence. Then, stopping several feet before a tree that stood directly in the moonlight, she pointed at the trunk.

Using her normal voice this time, she said, “Look. It’s still there.”

“Lucy?”

“Took you long enough,” she said. “I thought perhaps you had forgotten me again.” She removed her hat and turned to face him.

“How could I place you in this context? How could you be a soldier?”

“Why not? After what you did to me, it was easy. Besides, do you think I told them that I was a woman? A nigger woman?” she said, though her voice held more sorrow than hatred.

“I buried it here. Our love. Here among the blossoms. It has been waiting a long time for your return to this place where it was born, only to be silenced by your own hand.”

“What are you talking about?”

She laughed, a hollow, humorless sound. “Our love has no voice. You stole it. Now it’s time for you to give it back.”

At 8 a.m. April 6^th–the following morning–Sherman heard picket firing in his front.

Lucy heard it, too.

And Johnston, who hoped to drive the disorganized Federals into the swamps of Snake and Owl Creeks and destroy them.

To the Country Boys of Shiloh, the shots were an overture. They were young and inexperienced volunteers, but what they lacked in experience they made up for in valor. Advancing upon the enemy, they broke silence and sang as they marched to the band playing Dixie.

The shelling began, every fifteen minutes, red streaks arcing against the sky. By the end of the day, the Federals had been driven back to Pittsburg Landing, but that night, while the Rebels looted from captured Yankee camps and did little to reorganize their scattered units, Grant reinforced his lines with the fresh troops of General Buell and Lew Wallace and at dawn on the 7^th launched a counter attack which, by early afternoon, had the Confederates in full retreat.—

#

—Present reality pushed away the press of memory.  The sun, now at its height, fulfilled its brutal promise, burning into the back of Lucy’s neck and charring the flesh of the bodies floating face down on Bloody Pond. Lucy did not have to look down into the pond for Peter. There was no need. The bayonet was planted too deep. He could not have moved from the tree where she had left him.

Next to Lucy lay Peter’s haversack, empty now of all but his journal. She retrieved it once more from the knapsack and held it in her hand like a prayer book.  I must pray for their souls, she thought, but unable to find words, she stared out at that world of bombs and blossoms and blood and just listened to the dead and the dying.

Then, in her mind, or maybe her heart, she heard a different sound–the piercing cry of life floating to her from a whorehouse in Memphis.

Able at last to cry for herself, she wept out loud and began to pray.

-30-

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