Lavelle had grown to hate the smell of sugar. It was everywhere around him: in the air … in his clothes and hair … in his nostrils … his eyes … his mouth. The whole surface of his skin felt as though a thin layer of suffocating molasses had been spread all over it.
‘Food, Yankee soldier.’ The girl who had come into the Sugar House put the plate of mush between his hands and feet, laughed and skipped away to a safe distance. ‘How you goin’ free us poor niggers now?
‘Massa gonna string you high as soon as he comes back.’
With this comforting thought the girl laughed even more.
At the door she turned smilingly to say, ‘Now don’t go nowhere, Yankee, you hear!’
Lavelle didn’t quite see the funny side to his predicament that the girl obviously saw. He had carried out Patrick’s dying wish. Now, here he was an enemy soldier, shackled hand and foot like a slave, in the sickly sweet Sugar House of a southern plantation.
The Labiche woman had called Clinch and the dog. Two of the blacks he and the rest of the North wanted to set free, had manacled him. If he wasn’t strung up by the ‘massa’ he faced another just as dire possibility – a desertion charge for breaking his furlough.
Three days now he had been held prisoner in the sugar house. Sugar and cotton – and the control of it – at the bottom of this whole sorry mess. Young men like Patrick … told to go and fight for it. A gun jammed into their hands. And the glory of America rammed down their throats.
Some, hardly old enough to dress themselves without a mother’s helping hand. Lavelle had seen them – nine, ten, twelve, thirteen years of age. Skin soft as a baby’s bottom, ripped open by shells big as themselves. Or, like unripened watermelon sliced into slivers before an enemy bayonet. Most of them only trying to get a few dollars to send to mothers who now would not want the use of it. Only their darlings to be back home again.
Mothers would struggle to tell themselves how important it was that their babies had fought and died, and to banish any thought of ripped-out stomachs or worms and flesh-picking birds. Nor the hot broiling sun, scorching and stenching their longing-to-be-held babes-in-arms.
Oh no, none of that! Only ‘defending the flag’, when they should be wiping their arses with it.
Flags, marching songs, countries – all bullshit!
Then would come the cold-comfort letters from Lincoln in Washington or Davis in Richmond … both in their grand White Houses. All worded the same. ‘The great sacrifice your son has made …’ and ‘freedom’. It would make a man puke.
The two Presidents didn’t know one piece of cannon fodder from the next and didn’t give a fuck either! Would stand up after fine dinners, and wipe away the crumbs from their lips with fine linen. Then, in the company of fine ladies, speak bravely and dreamily of Liberty and the Constitution. Dab away a crocodile tear or two for ‘our gallant boys at the front’ and light a foreign cigar with which to comfort themselves.
And then at the table around them, applauding the Presidents for keeping the war going, those men who made the rifles and the cannons and grew fat on war. Oh, they would be free all right … their money safely made.
Lavelle was reminded of other men, those little slieveens who, like carrion, arrived before the battle hour, pushing cards into the shitting-themselves hands of young men. So that, when cut down and cut in half, the self-same cards would be found on their young bodies. Commerce done.
O’Shea and Sons: Coffins, Undertakings, Professional Embalmers
Lavelle once had one pressed into his own hand before battle. He had flung it at the scavengers and cursed them – the Irish feeding off the dead of their own country.
War was such a business and a profitable one. The more killing, the better. The gout-ridden generals, who could scarce mount a horse, would bask in the reflected glory of the blood of their men. And ladies like Madame Labiche and Miss Emmeline – and all the vapid ladies of Richmond and Boston – would be fascinated and hearts-a-fluttering at stories of gallantry by generals at table. Some of whom had never led a charge, or strayed within range of a careless bullet.
Lavelle was angry. Angry at the waste of it all … the hypocrisy of it all. Angry at himself … angry at Ellen.
And that was not all. Some other great foreboding now hung over him, like that damnable sugar vapour.
His mind had begun to put together the puzzle regarding Ellen. Much as Lavelle wanted answers, so equally did he fear them.
He kicked away the plate the girl had brought. Cupid she had said her name was. Cupid! From where did they get such foolish names?
He went back over the events of Ellen’s leaving, the fact that out of all else she had taken the book. It must have been of great significance for her – these Love Elegies and Holy Sonnets. Somehow, then, her book had wound up with Patrick.
It was becoming increasingly clear from his visit here, that it was unlikely to have been Ellen who had given the book to Patrick: the girl, Emmeline, had seemed to say as much. If it had not been Ellen then the boy had received it from someone else … Stephen Joyce!
It had some meaning.
Was it Stephen’s own book? If so, why this of all books for Patrick?
Lavelle’s emotions fought against the unerring conclusion towards which his mind was leading him. If it were not Stephen’s own book, then it was Ellen’s … and she had given it to Stephen. And since the time she had deserted them in Boston!
The book was the connection between her, Stephen and Patrick. The truth at last was beginning to manifest itself. Ellen’s disappearance was linked with Stephen Joyce.