The River Between Us Page 9

  Chapter Eleven

  We made a bare beginning that first afternoon. The doctor watered the boys, and said that the measles cases could handle fried chicken. They were easy to locate because of the scabs.

  I’ll say this for Delphine. Once she turned back her sleeves, she went to work. She’d never worked that hard before, and I can witness that she never worked that hard again. But when she set her mind to something, or lapsed into French, you just as well get out of her road.

  She left Noah to me, and I wondered if it was modesty. I had to get him out of the underwear he had on. That suit of underwear could just about stand up by itself. Delphine gave Noah a wide berth and ministered to the others.

  When we had to leave, I turned away to give her a moment with him, if she wanted it. He wasn’t clean enough to kiss, not to mention the witnesses. But she didn’t tarry, so I couldn’t tell if she loved my brother or not. She drew down her veils, and we slogged out of the tent. I’d have thrown my boots away if I’d had another pair.

  On our way back to the summer kitchen, I wouldn’t have minded riding up beside Dr. Hutchings, for the pleasure of his company. But I made sure Delphine rode up there by him instead. He needed a little starch in his spine, and she was the one to put it there. Sure enough, she lectured him at length about the passes we’d need every day now. There was a nip in the evening air, so she spoke out about blankets for the boys. We didn’t have quilts enough for all.

  When the doctor said he lacked the authority to “requisition” blankets, Delphine told him to find the authority double quick and she didn’t want to have to mention it again. She’d been shook by what she’d seen of an army hospital, and instead of calling for her smelling salts, she got her dander up.

  I was just behind them in the trap, taking in every word. Seemed to me that when it came time to marry, Dr. Hutchings would need a wife with a lighter touch than Delphine’s. He looked pretty well whipsawed when he lifted us down at the back of Mrs. Hanrahan’s place.

  We lived in her summer kitchen throughout our time in Cairo. The widow Hanrahan wanted seven dollars a week from us, and she wanted it up front. She sent her handyman down to collect our rent that first evening. Seven dollars! There were houses all over Grand Tower you could buy outright for seven dollars, and they’d throw in the fencing and dig you a well. But then, Mrs. Hanrahan was a rich woman, and the rich didn’t get that way by giving you a bargain.

  As we kept being told, we were lucky to have a roof over us. I for one had never lived in such luxury, as the summer kitchen had all the city conveniences. The pump was just to one side of the porch, and the privy just to the rear. The big iron stove inside heated water for our laundry and washing ourselves. It took the chill off the evenings, and I was to fry up a deal of chicken through many a night, once we got Dr. Hutchings to requisition the chickens and the stovewood.

  The beds were draped with mosquito bars, and were comfortable enough if you were as tired every night as we were. And beneath them, a chamber pot apiece—china ones.

  I was more dead than alive when we got back that first night. But Delphine had to unpack all her dresses, shake them out, and hang them around the room. She had brought her gold hand mirror with the violets on the back. And the portrait of her papa in its gilt frame, the yellow-haired Monsieur Jules Duval. She hung him above her cot, for she went nowhere without him.

  Mrs. Hanrahan didn’t see fit to pay us a call in our early days there. She was a busy woman, according to Dr. Hutchings. Rich Cairo people in big houses took in sick officers to nurse them. So in addition to Dr. Hutchings, she had three or four ailing officers in her spare rooms. One of them was from U. S. Grant’s personal staff. These invalids lolled in starched sheets, seen to by servants, while the regular soldiers slept on the cold ground in their filth. But then if there was justice in this world, you wouldn’t look for it in Cairo.

  And if you ask me, some of them officers were none too poorly. They sat out on the gallery of an evening, smoking their El Sol seegars and drinking from small silver cups, and I doubt if it was medicine.

  Our days at Camp Defiance overlap in my mind. But each day Noah was stronger—tottering, then helping out, then growing restless. We wanted to get them all on their feet, at least well enough to carry their own slops and feed themselves.

  We only lost one, a boy from up around Belleville. And he was too far gone when we got there. He starved to death because he couldn’t keep anything down. Delphine spoiled two of her dresses, trying to feed him. You wouldn’t have known her. When he died in her arms, she closed his eyes, folded his hands on his poor shrunken chest, and looked away with her mouth pulled into a straight line. I can’t tell you more about it. I can’t bear to bring it back.

  Seeing her lovely face floating over them may have pulled several through, but you couldn’t call her an angel of mercy. When some of the boys lacked the spirit to eat or stir themselves, she was apt to say, “You will need all your strength when you come against the Confederates! They are a real army! They rarely sicken and never retreat!” So I suppose her greatest achievement was that she wasn’t shot as a traitor.

  As they improved, they wanted to know our names, especially hers. But I was popular too because I was Noah Pruitt’s sister. His Company C was made up mostly of Jackson County boys, and they told us of home, of sisters and sweethearts, and the tears flowed.

  We got our boys well enough and fed to where they could shovel out the tent down to dry ground. That was after we found out where the army hid its shovels. We made a bonfire of the straw they’d slept on, once we found fresh straw. I boiled their long-handled underwear over an open fire, and that underwear teemed and swarmed with living things that glistened and crawled. I itch to think of it now.

  No able-bodied loafer outside our tent was safe from us. We had jobs for each and all, sending them for kindling and straw and whatever they could find. We put them to work, and anybody not skinning could hold a leg, as the saying went.

  We got some loafer to find us a bunch of them big nail kegs. You could saw them in two and caulk them. Then the boys could take baths in them. Of course they wouldn’t strip nekkid until the sunset gun had seen Delphine and me off the post.

  We got our boys clean and stretched out on fresh, sweet straw. We dosed them with our cures and cooked their rations for them. We made a believer out of Dr. Hutchings, and no army doctor come around to put a stop to us. We sang some too because the boys liked it.

  Delphine could offer up a rendition of “My Old Kentucky Home,” flavored in her French, that brought a lump to many a Yankee throat, including mine. And we sang a song the whole country was singing that fall of 1861, though I thought it must have been written expressly for me.

  Brother, tell me of the battle,

  How the soldiers fought and fell,

  Tell me of the weary marches,

  She who loves will listen well.

  Brother, draw thee close beside me,

  Lay your head upon my breast

  While you’re telling of the battle,

  Let your fevered forehead rest.

  We slept fast and deep through the brief nights, and hardly had the time to look up from our days, or to notice that we weren’t girls anymore.

  All around us the camp girded for war on the river. Black Jack Logan, who commanded the Thirty-first, spoke of hewing their way to the Gulf with their swords. Colonel White come to our tent to see who was fit enough to train, and took Noah away.

  Back he hobbled in a pair of stiff new boots, carrying an ancient Belgian musket he said hadn’t been fired since Napoleon’s day. The sabers rattled around us.

  The Confederate general, Leonidas Polk, held the Mississippi not twenty miles south of Cairo. His rebs were dug in on both sides of the river, at Columbus, Kentucky, and at the steamboat landing of Belmont, Missouri. U. S. Grant was expected to move downriver and “make a demonstration” against the reb positions any minute now.

  Then one day they issued
Noah his full uniform. It was so shoddy that Delphine said it would melt in the first rain. And it was so big on him he looked like a little ear of corn in too many husks. But he was ready to fight now, and I braced myself for the attack.

  It come quicker than I thought, quicker than a striking snake when you least looked for it. And that attack come not at the camp nor on the river. It come to the summer kitchen.

  Chapter Twelve

  We’d been her tenants better than a week before Mrs. Hanrahan come down her garden path to see how we were doing.

  We’d settled in by then, Delphine and me. It was just evening, and we’d turned up the lamp. We had mending to do for the boys. The widow provided us wicks, but charged us extra for the lamp oil.

  We heard her before we seen her, coming along the path. It seemed she was with Dr. Hutchings. “Ah declare, Doctor,” sang out a Southern accent thick enough to plant cotton in, “Ah been remiss in my duties to them young ladies. But then nobody knows better than yourself how worked Ah am.”

  Delphine settled her skirts, took up her needle, and made quite a pretty picture of herself there by lamplight when I opened the door.

  On the porch Mrs. Hanrahan clung to Dr. Hutchings’s arm in an unseemly way, or so I thought. She was twice his age and gaunt under her shawls. But sharp-eyed.

  She’d have breezed straight in, but the doctor detained her on the threshold to introduce me. “May I present Miss Tilly Pruitt of Grand Tower,” he said in that formal way he had.

  “Ah declare, ain’t you pretty, honey,” she said, looking past me. She wore a noisy silk dress. A big cross of ebonized wood swung from a chain around her neck.

  Delphine glanced up from her work in the glowing room. Mrs. Hanrahan’s hard gaze fell on her and jarred something inside me. Her eyes scanned the place—the hanging dresses, the portrait of Delphine’s papa. Then she was looking at Delphine again.

  Drawing away from Dr. Hutchings, she propped a fist on her hip and said, “Well, well, what have we here?”

  Another silence fell while the doctor saw he was in a room with too many women. She turned to him, showing us her hawk’s profile. “Ah declare, Doctor, just see what you have brought me. A colored gal.”

  What had she said? I reached out for something to hold on to.

  Delphine put her mending aside. She didn’t rise. She settled back and sighed, as if this had been a long time coming.

  “I am of the gens de couleur, madame,” she said, calmly proud. “The free people of color, if you speak no French.”

  “I know what you are,” our landlady snapped. “I’ve lived down in New Orleans.”

  “You have been in New Orleans, madame,” Delphine said, “but you are not of it. Irish, are you, from the name?”

  “And no quadroon wench is going to talk me down like shanty Irish. I know New Orleans better than what you think. Enough to wonder what a picture strongly resemblin’ Jules Duval is doin’ on the wall of my summer kitchen.”

  “He is my papa.” Delphine struggled with herself now, holding on to the chair arms.

  Mrs. Hanrahan grinned, like Delphine had given herself away. “I thought so. Big planter, ain’t he, with holdin’s up along the False River? And a white family up there?”

  Delphine looked away from the light.

  “And you’re one of his colored family, ain’t you? Seems like I seen your mother, very high and mighty, in her carriage on Royal Street.”

  “She would hardly go on foot,” Delphine remarked.

  “And she’s sent you up here, ain’t she? Because if the South loses the war, you’ll be nothin’ better than a freed slave. You’re not much higher in the world than that right now. If the Yankees take New Orleans, that fancy life of yours’ll come crashin’ down. You’ll be no better than them they sell on the auction block. Up here you’re light enough to pass. But, gal, you don’t fool me. I’m no Yankee. I ain’t that dumb.”

  Another silence. Dr. Hutchings stood like a figure carved in stone.

  “Do you want me off your place?” Delphine said without a trace of accent. And ready to go.

  “Lands, no,” Mrs. Hanrahan said. “I want your rent money. And you’re in an outbuilding at the back of my property where you belong. Doctor, if you’ll be good enough to see me back to the house.”

  She waited, then turned to him, her eyes narrowing.

  “I think I won’t, Mrs. Hanrahan,” he said.

  We waited until she banged the door to behind her.

  I was as near to Delphine as I am to you, but I didn’t want to put out my hand if she didn’t want to take it. All I could think of was what a terrible place the world is. What a mean, ugly, hard place. I swore if I ever got back to Grand Tower, they’d have to bind and gag me and drag me behind a mule to get me out of town again.

  The quiet went on and on until Delphine said, “They hate us, you know. The Irish. They come hungry and work cheap. The yellow fever lays them low. And we were there before them. Our roots are in New Orleans mud. We people of color make the city work. It is like no other place because of us. We were there from the earliest times. They despise us for our ease, for our silken lives. They don’t understand how people of color can be free.” She looked away from us. “Almost free.”

  That explained something, though very little. I drew the doctor into the circle of light. Without thinking about it, I took his hand and pulled him nearer. And now I reached for Delphine and took them both in hand.

  “Delphine, tell us who you are,” I said, hoping she’d trust us enough. But she was Delphine, so she had to spin a romance tale out of it, or try her best to.

  “My grandmère, she was one of Les Sirènes. Legends are told of these beauties who flee the slaves’ uprising on the island of Saint-Domingue, years and years ago. She is carried by her maman to Cuba, then Nouvelle Orléans. And ev’ry white man is at her feet. She choose one and my maman is born, lovelier still.

  “My maman, she choose Monsieur Jules Duval, and I am born.”

  She opened her hands, presenting herself. I blundered into this silence. “But you said, ‘We never marry.’ You said that on the train.”

  The doctor made a move to still me.

  “We cannot marry white men,” she said, patient with my Yankee ignorance. “The Spanish make a law against such marriage. The French make a law. There is a law now. But New Orleans prefer its customs to the law. Our white fathers buy our mothers fine homes in all the best streets, in Chartres Street. And if there is a daughter, she is brought up by her mother to find a future with a white gentleman of her own. A man of substance. We have a name for this. It is plaçage. A respectable arrangement.”

  She looked at me then, her worldliest look yet. “If this war did not threaten ev’rything, I would have my own home now. My own protector. Perhaps . . .” She looked down at herself and fell silent.

  It was a gate swung open on yet another world I didn’t know. Was there no end to what I didn’t know?

  “That woman called you a name,” I said.

  “Quadroon? Our society is often called that. There are the quadroon balls, you know, each Wednesday night at the Salle d’Orleans where gentlemen—white gentlemen—come to pay us court.

  “Quadroon, octoroon. There are these names.” She shrugged grandly. “I am a femme de couleur libre, a free woman of color. French blood flow through me and Spanish blood and African blood. It is the African blood they despise. Is it not curious?”

  She saw me gazing at her arm resting there on the table in the lamplight. I’d always thought her skin was the color of a peach, warmed by the Southern sun.

  She drew back her sleeve. “I am nearly as white as you, chère. There are others like me paler than yourself, blue-eyed, yellow-haired. Yet as our saying goes, there is a tignon in the family.”

  My head whirled, at all this, and her bravery.

  “If all is lost for us, I go find another life. Maman, she would give me up to give me my chance. I am her treasure.” Tears beaded
her lavish lashes. “If it is my fate, I go among those who know nothing, who cannot speak to me as that woman does tonight.”

  “You were going to St. Louis,” I said, “when—”

  “Mais non, chère.” She shook her head, weary. “I have no aunt. We know no one beyond our world. We free people of color live on a kind of island, lapped by a sea of slavery. Beyond that sea is this territory up here.” She gazed around the room. “Like the mountains of the moon to us.

  “We would have gone ashore at Cairo because we hear the North begin here. But we take fright when the boat is boarded.”

  “And they robbed you of your pearl-handled pistol,” I said.

  “Yes, they do that. We dare not come ashore, even before we know what kind of place this Cairo is.”

  “And so—”

  “Your Grand Tower is the next stop of the boat. It is, perhaps, fate?”

  And that was something else I didn’t know.

  I felt my way along now, word by word, though it was too late to be careful. “Delphine, seems like your people need a lot of help, the way you live.”

  She nodded absently.

  “Do your people own slaves?”

  “It happens.”

  “Is Calinda your slave?”

  The great fringed violet eyes turned on me. “Ah ma chère, she is my sister.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  On the day Noah sailed away to fight the rebs for the river, we somehow got him to the photographer’s shop. The picture stands on the table by my bed.

  I remember the stench of the chemicals in the photographer’s shop, though it smelled no worse than the rest of Cairo. We had to stand stock-still for an eternity to get the picture made. Then the glass plate with our image slipped out of the photographer’s hand and exploded on the floor. Delphine took that as a bad omen, and of course we had it all to do over again.