I soon discovered that the hotels were all full of Yankees. A stingy woman offered me a bed in a cave for more gold than it was worth, and I took it. Many people had lived in caves dug from the yellow clay hills during the siege. They were bomb-proof and fixed up nicely. A merchant’s wife who had moved with her children back into their proper house earlier in the day owned the cave where I stayed. Rugs covered the walls and floor, and a sheet was pinned to the ceiling. No earth was exposed, but I still felt like I was under the ground. A wash stand with a china basin and pitcher provided some relief. A tallow candle lit my supper of jerked beef and a pear. When I climbed into the rusty bed, I did not think of the menacing worry that should have been on my mind. Instead I argued with myself about whether my lips had actually touched Minor’s skin.
Fleas bit me in the night, and I woke itching and scratching in the morning. Fatigue and the darkness of the cave had caused me to sleep later than I had planned. Already soldiers were marching on the street to the tapping cadence of a Yankee drummer boy. This northern army looked disciplined and well under control of its officers. I even saw a Yankee soldier under guard on Washington Street, standing on a barrel with a “thief” sign around his neck. I did not see them boiling babies for breakfast as some southerners claimed.
My first task of the day was to find a horse or mule with a buggy to carry Minor down to the landing. It did not take me long to figure out that stock could not be hired at any price in this town. The starving Confederate soldiers had eaten it all. Only a few milking cows survived, and they were guarded and cherished along with the black wet nurses to keep the babies of Vicksburg alive. Of course there were plenty of horses and mules belonging to the Yankee army, but they were hard at work doing the business of General Grant. I was scared to ask for their help for fear that it might draw unnecessary attention to Minor. I wanted to slip him away without fuss or commotion.
A street ran along the bluffs. Here southern batteries had guarded the fortress and broken the back of the river to Yankee navigation for many months. I figure Admiral Porter had cursed these guns regularly unless he was a religious man. They fired the iron of the city into his fleet at every chance. Now companies of Yankee artillerymen swarmed over the batteries and prepared to carry the cannons away. I walked south through this tumult and began to feel desperate again for a plan.
Those prayers of mine that are short and simple are the ones God answers most often. I think it is because He does not have time to listen to the long, drawn-out pleadings of so many people. Besides, He already knows the story and just wants us to ask for his blessings instead of being proud. The answer to my first prayer of this day was leaning on end against a walnut stump beside the road. It was a fine wheelbarrow, the kind without sides used to haul bricks. No one was around to claim it, so I borrowed it without permission or guilt.
By this time it was approaching mid-morning and I was more than two miles from the hospital. The axle on the wheelbarrow was worn, making its hurried path look like the trail of a frantic snake in the dust. Weaving through the traffic I reached the warehouse just as the church bells struck ten o’clock.
Sister Chloe was sweeping at the front doors when I arrived. She looked up and seemed a bit surprised to see me.
“Well cher, who do you come after now?” she asked.
“I come for Minor—my brother—as you told me yesterday. It is ten o’clock.”
She looked at me curiously. “Yes, it is ten o’clock for sure, but your sister-in-law left with her husband an hour ago.”
The shock of these words drove me back a step. “No!” was all that I could cry.
“When I asked of you, she acted angry. She said you were lazy and waiting for them at the boat. Did you confuse the arrangement?”
I ran past her through the hospital to Minor’s bed. It was empty just as she had said.
Sister Chloe caught up with me. “What is the matter, cher? Something is not right.” She was becoming as distressed as me. “They put him on an army horse. I told them he could not ride that way, but she did not listen. She would not even take his belongings and threw this against the wall when she saw it.” Sister Chloe reached down and picked up a flour sack in the corner. She handed it to me slowly as though afraid that I might hurl it at her too. I opened it to behold the painting of me from Bayou de l’Outre.
I cannot describe the state of my emotions in these moments. My senses blurred to freeze me in place, totally incapable of thought or action. My vision was reduced to a tunnel of smudged shadows directly in front of my eyes. I did not feel the heat, smell the lingering death in this place, nor taste my own tears. Only my ears were acute to the world. From the edge of the tunnel they heard these words crisp and clear:
“Whom do you seek?”
“Minor Barrett,” I whispered desperately.
“I am Minor Barrett,” came the reply.
Then from the other side of the tunnel, “Minor Barrett—that will be me. I will go with you.”
I whirled around to face this new assertion only to hear another behind me claim, “No, Minor Barrett is my name. Take me with you.” A fourth man near the front door made the same appeal through wheezing coughs. For the second time I ran from this place.
An empty livery stable backed up to the bluff just down the street from the hospital. Below it a single mimosa tree held tight on the steep slope. Here I used Mr. Carter’s hunting knife to cut off my hair. The locks whose touch once made Minor quiver with anticipation piled into my lap and spilled into the dust. I sat under the tree for most of the day and watched hummingbirds fly to and from the tree’s pink flowers. My thoughts raced away and returned with the birds all afternoon, but they alone found nourishment.
When the heat of the day had passed, for no good reason I climbed back up to the road and walked by the Prentiss House Hotel down toward the river. The hurry was gone from the landing. So too were some of the warships, though a long row of boats still nosed up to the mud bank with gangplanks stuck out like so many skinny tongues. Willow trees leaning toward the water shaded scattered knots of Confederate soldiers. Tension that for months nearly sucked away the breath of Vicksburg had moved on to another waiting battlefield. The town was no longer in-between.
I stopped and inquired of one group of the paroled soldiers. They were from Claiborne Parish. Their captain, who still wore his gilded sword, said no boats were allowed to cross the river today because of rumors that regiments of Texas cavalry had arrived on the far shore. Some transports loaded with wounded and sick had left for New Orleans, and others were leaving in the morning. The captain said we had little chance of crossing until the next evening. Then, to the soldiers I must have appeared dumbstruck, for less than a stag’s leap away walked Mink, green-eyed and hair the color of oak flowers, leading a bob-tailed horse up the cut. He did not see me, for I used the soldiers as a screen until he went out of sight over the hill. I followed him at once.
Mink went straight to a big red-brick house that served as a headquarters for the Yankees. I slipped along the wall of the house next door until I could conceal myself under a thick rose arbor. Mink tied the horse to the picket fence, climbed the steps, and spoke to a guard at the front door. The guard went in and soon returned, followed by a fat, hog-jowled Yankee officer with a cordial in his hand. This man walked around the horse looking her over carefully. Finally, he turned toward Mink and spoke in a high squeaky voice, “Tell your fancy mistress she kin rent my horse anytime. The price’ll be the same.” He hitched up his pants and whistled a jig back into the house. I did not know what to make of the situation then, but I do now.
Mink left the house and backtracked. He walked back through town and down the cut to the landing. He went downstream on the sandbar past the boats and the groups of soldiers. I stayed far enough behind to avoid being detected. The sun was beginning to set and fired the looming bluffs on our left with the flat streams of evening light. Tall, limber willows grew nearest the foot of the bluffs, and others became ever shorter as they marched across the newer sands toward the river. Mink plodded on for a half mile and finally turned into the thicket out of my sight. I continued on beyond for a short way, crossed a small stream that ran into the river, and also turned in toward the bluff, never crossing his tracks. He had stopped.
Darkness came on, and I soon heard the noise of their camp. Mink was beating driftwood limbs against a tree to break them into firewood. A panther never stalked his prey quieter than I crept forward. The sand swallowed my footfall, and sparks rising from their fire and dying in the river breeze led me in. The camp lay where springs and seeps at the foot of the bluff joined to make the stream, which in a few hundred feet flowed into the river. Anatilda sat under a mosquito bar and watched Mink cook supper on the too-hot fire. I could not see Minor, but a lean-to stood in the shadows and I figured he was there. An hour passed while they cooked and ate and laid their bedding. During this time Mink carried food to the lean-to. Soon they settled for the night, and I began to think of my plight. This situation was so different from any that I had imagined. I could not recollect ideas that would guide me forward from the mind-full of plans in my head. So I just squatted there in the mosquitoes, brooding, but not for long.
Anatilda sat up and called out, “Mink ----- Mink!”
“I’z heah, Miz Tilda.” He sounded weary. “Don’t be skeered.”
“Git up, you fool, and light the candles. I’m gonna look at him.”
Mink rose and rustled around in a pack. He found a candle and lit it in the fire.
“Miz Tilda, you bes let him res. He been wore out today.”
Anatilda was up now. She ordered him, “Bring the light.”
They went to the lean-to, and as they moved so did I, around and much closer. The fire was now behind the lean-to and forged crisp shadows on the thin canvas wall. Anatilda and Mink stood over Minor as he lay on a low cot.
She spoke to him sweetly, “Minor darling, I am going to examine your injury. You are my husband, remember. We were married and you left before I could enjoy the pleasures of being your wife.”
Minor stirred but did not speak.
“Pull down his pants,” she told Mink.
Mink did this and I heard Minor groan. I became aware then that my fingers hurt from squeezing the handle of Mr. Carter’s large hunting knife. I do not know how long I had clutched it to my breast; it happened without thoughts.
“Move the bandages aside and give me the candle,” Anatilda urged her slave. On the canvas her silhouette was traced into the shape of a preying mantis. She looked closely at Minor and stepped back quickly. After a moment she passed judgment: “He’s ruined.” Anatilda said this in a final way like a guilty verdict, and the feelings in her voice suddenly relieved me of worries long pushed into the back corners of my mind. Hope sprang forth once again.
Anatilda left the lean-to and walked to the edge of the firelight. She stared into the darkness for a while and then called to Mink again, “Fetch the boat. We’ll cross tonight.”
Mink began to beg.
“Miz Tilda, we drown fer sho. Dis ain’t de Bayou l’Outre. Dis de mighty Mississip. I cain’t swim a lick and dem suckholes’ll take us straight down to hell. Please les wait on de light.”
He carried on so and it was pitiful to hear him, but Anatilda would have none of it. Finally he got quiet and accepted his fate for the duration of the crime. He waded off down the stream and soon came back pulling a small bateau. They got Minor up, and Mink practically carried him to the boat. Anatilda climbed into the back and sat on the only seat, holding a candle. I watched this tiny light fade away as Mink pulled them back down the shallow creek toward the river. When I walked through the camp to follow, it did not strike me as peculiar that they had left all their belongings behind.
The stream cut through a long, wide sandbar to enter the river. The moon was not full, but, in the open away from the trees, forms were obvious and the currents danced with quicksilver. Up the river, watch lights showed from atop the row of boats at the landing, and the breeze bore lonesome notes of fiddle music down from the bluff. Only the squawk of a night heron saved me from detection by Anatilda and Mink. I had pursued them closer than I had thought, and when the bateaux startled the bird I was close enough to hear them clearly again. They were at the mouth of the stream.
“Gittin’ deep up heah, Miz Tilda.”
“Hie on Mink. Your knees are dry yet.” She talked as if in a trance.
“I feels de quicksan’ on my laig. I bes git in now.”
The next thing I hear is a loud splash and Anatilda cussin’ Mink like the devil himself. I ran closer and saw Anatilda waist deep behind the boat pushing it out into the river with all her might. Mink was standing aside. With one final shove she cried out, “Be gone!” and turned back toward the shore. Just as the pharaoh did to boy babies in the time of Moses, Anatilda cast poor Minor into the river. Current grabbed the bateaux, spun it crossways for a better grip, and hauled it onward.
Mink’s words reflected my thoughts too. “You done finish what de Yankees started, Miz Tilda. He a daid man now.” Anatilda waded back up the stream with Mink in tow.
When I was a small child in my mother’s village, two nightmares often came late in the night, finding me deep in the folds of trade blankets. One carried a fire demon that appeared suddenly and always consumed my mother’s shoes before cornering me. Every time, I yielded without a struggle and was devoured by the fire. I had no shoes in those days.
The other nightmare began as I was sent to fetch water from a well on a dark, cloudy day. The well had a low curbing, and I always fell in. I always knew I would fall in. A hand deep in the cold water would grab my foot and try to pull me down. In this dream I never gave up. I kicked until I woke crying and upset my mother.
After the night on the river below Vicksburg, this nightmare began to visit me again and still does from time to time.