In the morning we had traveled only a short distance when a soldier stepped from behind a tree and challenged us. I was not certain he was a soldier at that moment because of his dress and weapon. His ragged outfit did not resemble a uniform in the least, and he held a rusty shotgun across his breast. I identified myself and obeyed his order to follow him to the officer of the picket guards.
Pinhook is a small settlement, and the several hundred soldiers camped nearby more than doubled the usual population. The army tents and their breakfast campfires set in a grove of oaks gave the impression of a large, pleasant outing instead of a regiment at war. We stopped before the tent nearest the road, and my escort advised a sergeant that I was not a local girl but had traveled from beyond the Ouachita River. The sergeant was tall with skin like smoked leather. He wore a gray army shirt, buckskin pants, and his high boots were freshly blackened. Old Mexico was in his blood and words. He questioned me about my destination and raised a scarred eyebrow when I told him Vicksburg. Pulling my escort aside the sergeant whispered orders that sent him hurrying into the midst of the camp. The sergeant and I engaged in polite, idle talk until he returned, nodding eagerly. I was asked to follow them at once.
We walked toward the center of the sea of tents. The men lounged about in idleness, eating, playing mumbly-peg, and some sleeping still. This was my first view of an army, and I felt strangely disappointed.
A flagpole marked the commanding officers’ quarters, and beneath its banner a group of uniformed men gathered around the tailgate of a wagon. They turned to us as we approached, and a tall, bareheaded man in a gold-trimmed coat came forward.
“Good morning, mam. I am Major Lewis of General Walker’s Texas Division. Welcome to our temporary home, such as it is.” He spoke slowly.
I searched his eyes for sincerity. They were gray, baggy and unrevealing like his uniform. I stepped forward and took his hand.
“I am Abita Carter from Union Parish.”
“Pleased to meet you Miss Carter. I hope the name of your home parish doesn’t reflect the sentiments of its residents, especially you.” He said this and smiled as if to put me at ease.
“Without a doubt the southern cause has the majority there,” I said. I did not say that the margin was small and maintained by otherwise apathetic people who were angry about Yankee-forged deprivations. This was Minor’s opinion as he had told me a year earlier, and it seemed true enough. Most of the people I knew did not own slaves. Perhaps they would if they could have afforded them, but no matter, they did not, and they just wanted to be left alone. Until the blockade closed the cotton markets and dried up the source of staple goods, most people in Union Parish just did not care about the war.
“Morning beverages are scarce here abouts but I can offer you a cup of fine well water.”
“No, thank you.”
“May I ask your route of travel to this point?” His interest was genuine.
“I crossed the Ouachita at Alabama Landing. From Bastrop I walked east to Mer Rouge. The Old State Road brought me here. The roads are quite passable, though some crossings are troublesome.” I mentioned this because I thought he was seeking information about the country to assist his maneuvers. He was not.
“Miss Carter, I hope you don’t think me forward, but there is an urgent matter with which you may be able to assist us.”
I was puzzled by the attention of this powerful man and his subordinates.
“Please?” he asked and taking my arm led me to the wagon. At his signal a soldier dropped the tailgate and jerked away a blanket to reveal a sight that drove me back as sure and sudden as a hard shove. My first thought was that it was the body of a beheaded giant. Hair on top of the stump confounded the deranged image. The soldiers studied my reaction.
Major Lewis spoke after several moments: “I apologize for the shock, but it is very important for us to know if you have information regarding this man.”
By then I had sorted out the corpse. It was Lieutenant Rhymes, and he was not headless. The poison had swelled his neck and head to an equal, amazing girth. Features of his face—nose, ears and eyes—disappeared in the engorged tissue.
“We found him near the Boeuf River ferry in this condition. He may have been snakebit,” said the Major as he led me back to his tent. “Do you know him?”
“He is Lieutenant Rhymes from a cavalry unit,” and I began to tell them what I knew—up to a point. I could not bear to relive the details of the attack much less relate it to strange men. I told them he returned to my camp drunk and threatened me. I said the snake bit him under the buggy as he worked to repair it. I said he ran away then, and I was glad because he scared me. These small lies did not hurt as much as I expected.
Major Lewis was very attentive of my story. When I finished he asked me many questions that I could not answer about Mrs. Duckworth and her husband. Finally, he excused himself to meet with his officers.
When he returned he seemed relieved of a burden. “Miss Carter, you are indeed a fortunate woman. The information you have provided confirms our suspicions about the man you knew as Lieutenant Rhymes. Rhymes was not his real name, nor was he a lieutenant for our cause. He was a traitor, a spy, and a cold-blooded murderer to boot.”
A cur gyp, perhaps one that I had heard barking from the last night’s camp, reared up on the wagon to smell the ripening body under the blanket.
The Major continued, “It would be improper for me to speak of details, but I can say that we have met with difficulties in our efforts to surprise the enemy in recent weeks. Mr. Simpson, his real name, has been busy watching us from a distance and revealing our movements to Grant. He was a sham of the first degree. Nothing that you knew of him was real, even his manner of speech. Like you, most of his acquaintances were naïve as to their danger. Some lost their lives in such innocence. A man was killed and his wife ravaged by this devil in the past month. You passed their cabin on your journey. As for the Duckworths, they are far from being “hot seceshes,” and I strongly advise that you avoid any future contact with them at all costs. The situation should become obvious to you.”
My thoughts slowed and bogged in the mire of his words.
“I’ve heard of your mission and destination,” he continued. “It is as foolish as it is noble. The enemy controls all points between here and Vicksburg. From what I’ve seen, accommodating southern ladies is not a high priority of theirs. I would have you escorted home, but something tells me that once abandoned you would be back here in Carroll Parish before my soldiers.” He had begun to scold me like a wayward daughter. “You were obviously not deterred by your recent danger and will not likely change your mind now. Am I correct?”
“Sir, the bodily dangers that I face now are only heat gnats as to the demons I will encounter forever if I quit this calling.”
“As I suspected. This calling of yours resembles love.” He suddenly seemed tired. “I must detain you for a short while, but I won’t send you back. The sergeant will see to your needs. God bless you Miss Carter.”
Between them, Gertie and Walter Sawyer did not have one hair on their heads. Both were in their eighties and lived on the edge of Pinhook in a ramshackle log house fast returning to earth. The sergeant made arrangements for me to stay with them and gave specific instructions that I was not to depart for two days. I did not obey this order.
The Sawyers seemed happy to have me and put me up in a small room last used by an Irish field hand rumored to have since been killed at Shiloh. They showed me month-old bullet holes in the cabin and told of how Major Lewis’ men repelled a group of Yankee raiders here. Of this event Mrs. Sawyer was more concerned about her trampled chick roses than the death-bearing lead.
Before sunrise the next day I awoke with the strange feeling that I was in the presence of many people. A fife played outside and the smell of fresh dust seeped through cracks in the walls. The room had no window, so I lay still on the cornshuck mattress straining to hear. The fife passed and was followed by the footfall of horses for a long while. When I heard Mrs. Sawyer stirring to build a fire in the patent stove, I got up and she confirmed my suspicions. The soldiers were riding toward Lake Providence with mischief on their minds.
By mid-morning I could wait no longer. Mr. Carter would have said my patience well ran dry. The shawl of my blind faith had begun to unravel, and I needed to know basic things about Minor, the most fundamental of which was—is he alive or dead? Affairs of the heart unconsciously slipped behind these foremost thoughts. Waiting was not an option for me.
I left a dollar on my pillar for board and brought Chula around from the lot to load. The Sawyers did not protest my leaving and gave me two small yellow-meated melons, sole survivors of thieving soldiers. Our parting came after mutual questions.
I asked, “Have you seen a stranger driving a painted oxcart pass through lately? He may be a butcher by trade.”
“Passed through a couple days ago,” said Mr. Sawyer. “He ain’t a total stranger in these parts, the butcherman ain’t. Tried to do some work for the soldiers, but they done et up everthang with a hide on it ‘round here. Kep on goin’. Always heared he had kinfolks down in Tensas Parish. Can’t figure why they would claim him though.”
I did not have a ready answer for Mrs. Sawyer’s question, “You mostly injun, ain’t you girl? You shore don’t talk like one, but you got the marks. You mostly injun, ain’t ya?”
Bayou Macon was the last big stream between the Ouachita and the Mississippi. It bordered on the east edge of the Macon Ridge as did Boeuf River on the west and resembled it, steep banked and slow. The crossing just beyond Pinhook was known as Lane’s Ferry. The ferry was gone, and in its place the soldiers had laid connected wagon beds covered with planks. A sturdy bridge resulted that would last until the winter floods.
Chula and I crossed leaving behind the details on Mr. Carter’s map. He was unfamiliar with the country before us, having traveled overland to and from Vicksburg only along the railroad route from Monroe. Mr. Sawyer said it was nine miles from the ferry to the bank of Lake Providence. I expected to travel this distance easily before nightfall.
About five miles east of the bayou, the trail of the Texas soldiers abruptly turned south onto a dim track. Later the forest gave way to cotton fields larger than I could have imagined. In some directions they stretched to the horizon, broken only by the occasional mule tree. Most were unplanted and still bore skeleton stalks of previous years’ crops. I wondered then where the vast numbers of people required to till these fields were now. Within days I learned that hundreds awaited the rapture, not laboring with hoes and hope but in the halcyon rest of shallow and hurried graves nearby.
The toothache that I brought from Union Parish got worse. An eyetooth on the left side, it drawed my face. I searched in vain for a toothache tree and the deadening effects of its inner bark. A powder did not give relief, and I began to suffer. Only the drastic change in scenery kept me diverted.
The road ran to the edge of the lake where the great houses once stood and turned hard south to follow its shore. Lake Providence was a blue-green gem surrounded by moss-draped cypress sentinels. It was a mile wide and flowed out of sight in quarter moon curves to the northeast and southeast. I suspected that one or both of the horns had intercourse with the Mississippi. On this late afternoon, patches of sunlight jewels scurried across the surface on either side of passing clouds. Other people were enjoying the lake too. I saw them at a distance fishing from skiffs and along the bank. Most were black, but some were white and unmistakably dressed in blue uniforms.
The first three houses facing the lake were burned. Avenues lined with oaks and blooming magnolias led to chimneys standing watch over cold ashes. Those trees that were too close, the ones that were most loved for their shade and fragrance, died with the mansions though they remained upright and scorched. Many of the plantation outbuildings were not disturbed. Carriage houses, loom houses, barns, cribs and sheds escaped the brand as did rows of slave cabins in the back. The destruction was not fresh and seemed to be months old. Kitchen gardens were fallow, fruit trees untended, and most queerly, there was not a domestic animal to be seen—no mules for the score of plows, no chickens for the master’s Sunday dinner, not a bare-ribbed terrier to entertain a pickaninny. A wild turtledove did call softly from the boughs of a tall sweet pecan, and this irony did not pass me by.
The pain lugged my legs in the lengthening shadows. Smoke rose from the far side of the next field, one thick black column that perplexed me and many gray wisps that were surely Yankee campfires. In my condition I wanted to see no one and after watering in the lake sought refuge for the night in a cottonseed shed. It was a two-story of sorts. The bottom served as a drive-through wagon garage and the top stored seeds for the next year’s crop. It was nearly empty. From the looks of the destruction thereabouts I doubted that the owner had any kind of earthly future, much less a future crop. I let Chula graze until dark and penned him underneath with rails and a wagon tongue before climbing up to the seed room. I could not eat and slept only after taking a quarter gram of opium.
By the next forenoon the pain was almost unbearable again and my eye swelled shut. Still I decided to take no more of Minor’s medicines and trudged on down the lake road. The lazy black smoke of the previous evening rose from a small one-stacked steamer tied at the mouth of a wide ditch. Deck hands paid us no mind as we waded across on a corduroy road. In the fog of my misery I reckoned this to be part of Grant’s canal projects. If so, a pirogue would have trouble passing on this day.
The Union camp soon lay just ahead. I climbed down the bank to the lake to wash my face and make a plan. Turtles plunked from a log. Their heads soon reappeared above the surface to stare at the intruder. I reckon they never before saw as pitiful a sight as me.
The cool water on my head gave me relief, and I rested until a commotion began. A barrel hoop suddenly rolled over the bank and into the lake, passing no more than two steps from me. Behind it came a running, caterwauling boy waving a stick wildly. He too rolled into the lake. The water did not affect him. He splashed and probed and performed shallow dives and submerged handstands until at last the hoop was in his possession once more. Triumphant, he waded ashore only to discover a cyclops watching his every move. I cannot describe his expression when he saw me. After long moments of locked eyes I laughed. I laughed out loud and could not stop. The mood swept over the boy. He giggled, stoically at first, but quickly surrendered to peals of delight. Drowning in our glee we pointed at each other, stumbled about, and howled as actors in a hyena comedy. He slapped the water, and I leaned on Chula for support. Finally, we used up our breath and came to our senses.
“What’s your name?” I asked the boy.
“Jesse,” he said. He looked to be ten or eleven years old, and because of his haircut reminded me of a picture of a monk I once saw in a book. His eyes sparkled a blue brighter than the sky and the lake.
“Well, Jesse, you chased away my troubles for the moment. Do you live around here?”
“We’re stayin’ at the Richwood plantation house now. We’ll probly be movin’ on purty soon though. Mam, what happened to yer face?”
“I have a bad tooth, Jesse. If it does not come out soon it’s gonna wear me away.”
“Why don’t ya pull it?”
“I cannot. It’s an old one with roots grown deep down in the jawbone. I need help.”
The boy stared at me, and I saw when the idea came to him.
“There’s a doctor stayin’ with my ma. He can get that tooth out!”
He dripped up the bank to the road, and I followed him. I would have followed the devil himself right then if he would have promised to take this tooth he loaned me.