Mignon (24 page)

“How long is this thing going to take?”

“It’s win or lose in a week.”

“You mean, win or starve in a week?”

“Yes, that’s
just
what I mean!”

“There’s talk going around that in the event the dam doesn’t hold the march will be resumed up the river to Shreveport.”

“Not by the Navy. It doesn’t have the water.”

“I’m talking about the Army.”

“I can’t speak for them.”

I thought over what he had said, and told him: “You catch me by surprise, as I hadn’t known until now there was anything I could do—an army does not, as a rule, need help to run. So I don’t know what answer to give you.”

“Answer? You haven’t been asked, yet.”

“Thing like this, I shouldn’t wait to be asked.”

“You mean, you’d even
go?
”

That was Mignon, and when I said yes, she exploded in my face. “Well, all I can say, Willie Cresap,” she blazed, switching her skirt around, “is I wish you’d make up your mind. First you come up here, to condole with me, so you said—if
that
be something to do. Then, with my help and Father’s help and Sandy’s help, you turn around and decide to trade in cotton—and we sign the papers for you.
Now
you think you may build a dam! What next, pray tell—if you know? Picking daisies, maybe, and starting a flower shop? Or buying a sword-cane and rake and going in business with
her
, running a gambling dive? Is that what it’s been all along? Is that what you’re up to, is that what you really want?”

“She talks like a wife,” said Sandy, “and she might even be right. Wife, I’ve noticed, generally is.”

“I wonder,” I said. “Maybe.”

Mr. Landry got in it then, repeating Sandy’s arguments, and not repeating hers, but adding some stuff of his own. And on top of everything else was my own feeling about it, that the dam was just plain silly. And what I might have decided I can’t exactly say, but while we were arguing about it there came a knock down the hall. Mr. Landry answered, but came back with word that no one was there. Mignon glanced at him sharply, and I thought he looked very strange. Then the knock was repeated, and he gave her a long stare. That’s when I woke up. I scooted down the hall, but didn’t turn into the crosshall that led to the outside entrance. I kept on to the trapdoor in the pantry. I flung it up, drawing my gun, and calling: “Come up, whoever you are—you’re covered, so keep your hands high!” Then a ragged, filthy, bony thing clambered out, wearing a thick gray beard and squinting with watery eyes. I had slapped it up for guns and taken the Navy Colt before the jackboots told me who it was that I had.

It was Burke.

“I think you know everybody,” I told him very coolly, as I marched him into the sitting room. “Don’t stand on ceremony. Have a chair, take the load off your feet. Make yourself at home.”

“It’s my home,” snapped Mr. Landry, furiously.

“Then you invite him, why don’t you?”

“Frank,” he said, “is that you? I hardly know you.”

“Aye,” Burke groaned in a hollow voice, “ ’tis I—but the ghost of the man you knew. I never reached the Sabine at all. I was taken direct to Shreveport as soon as I crossed their lines, and escaped by the barest chance—I’d hate to say what it cost me in bright, yellow gold.” He said he’d arrived in the night, but not wanting to be seen, had come in the back way, using his key as before, as soon as he’d had some sleep. Then: “What brought me, Adolphe, is the news I picked up in Shreveport—’tis tremenjous.”

“Later, Frank—it’ll keep.”

“Just now, I could use a bit of food.”

“I’ll get you some,” she chirped.

“Not so fast,” I said, blocking her from the door.

They’d been playing it as though they hadn’t seen Burke before, but there’d been that exchange of looks, and I took it for an act. If that seems slightly unbalanced, there were things setting me off, like the prickles I felt all over me at her friendly concern for his hunger, and what it was going to be like with me out of the way and him under foot all the time. I stood there waving the gun, trying to calm myself down, but feeling my gorge rising. I said, licking my lips, swallowing now and then, and spacing my words kind of queerly: “Mr. Landry—it’s all quite clear to me now—why nobody seemed to mind—that I was shoving off. With someone to take my place—with another godpappy to claim the Shreveport cotton—to pick up that million bucks—why should anyone mind?”

“You talking about me?” she asked. “Well I don’t!”

“I’m not talking—about any particular one.”

“Then who
are
you talking about?”

“All,” I said. “Everyone.”

“Not me,” said Burke. “Do I care what you do?”

“Oh yes, you,” I told him, feeling for some reason humorous. “Take it easy. Stick around—I’ll explain where you come in.”

“And certainly not me?”

That was Sandy. I said: “Especially you.”

Then to Burke, pushing the gun at him: “What’s your tremenjous news?” And when he didn’t answer: “Come on, talk,
spit it out!
”

“The Rebs—” he began.

“Now we’re coming,” I said. “The Rebs?”

“Have overplayed it! They’re trying to bag two armies, instead of going for one! They’ve divided their forces, they’ve left their fortress unguarded! ... ’Tis all I know, me boy! I thought Adolphe might like to hear it!”

“Why should he like it?”

“Well—he lives here, after all!”

“You’ve heard the Union’s going to march up there?”

“Aye, if this dam goes out they’ll have to!”

“And then there’ll be the cotton?”

“ ’
Twas the whole reason for this fiasco!
”

“That’s all I wanted to know.”

I waited, no doubt with a grin on my face such as Samson may have had before he pulled down the temple. I said, mainly to Burke, but including them all: “There’ll be no march on Shreveport, no million made by claiming the Shreveport cotton.
That dam is going to be built!
It can’t be done, but I’ll build it! So calm down, one and all—Burke’s tremenjous news has been superseded by Cresap’s tremenjouser news!”

“But Bill,” said Sandy, “
you
’
re leaving!
”

“Oh no I’m not,” I said. “Nobody’s leaving! And so no one is tempted to, so there’s not any reason to leave, we’re doing away with this cotton, this devil’s bait we all sold our souls to grab—we’re burning it, right now!”

“No!” she screamed. “
No!
”

“Not me own cotton?” wailed Burke.

“The same old stuff!” I said. “
Surprise!
”

“Bill, you can’t!” yelled Sandy.

“Oh yes I can—hand me my bag,”

Nobody handed it to me, but I grabbed it up and piled on back to the kitchen. They were all on top of me, but a maniac waving a pistol doesn’t get interfered with. It was a chorus of despair as I opened the bag and dug into it, coming up with the same swatch of papers, done up in the same Navy oilskin, I had tucked away there six long weeks before. I lifted the lid on the stove, jammed everything in, and poked it down with the gunpoint while Sandy yelled warnings. I banged the lid on again, and waited while the flames licked up. In five minutes I opened the stove up, and nothing was there but red, black, and gray fluff, curling around. I holstered the gun, picked up the bag, told Sandy, “Come on, let’s go.” But I didn’t get out of there before Mr. Landry told me, a venomous look in his eye: “Maybe you build that dam, but it’s not going to stand, I promise you.”

“It’ll stand till the fleet gets down.”

“We’ll see about that, Mr. Cresap.”

With Sandy, who was so furious he couldn’t talk, I clumped around to my own flat and flung the bag inside. When I got down to the street again, she was there talking to him, her eyes squinched up mean, her mouth twisting around. When I saw she was making spit, I fetched her a clout on the cheek that sent her staggering back to the front of the Schmidt store. Then, grabbing Sandy’s arm, I marched on down to the courthouse and turned in my pass. Then, still with him to take me through, I headed for the bridge.

I
DROVE THEM LIKE ANIMALS; BUT
driving was what they wanted, I have to say that for them all—the 29th Maine, which was hewing the trees, and the colored infantry outfits, known as the Corps D’Afrique, which were detailed as labor. I worked under a Captain Seymour whom Sandy took me to, in the woods on the Pineville side, which smelled of cut wood, where various squads were at work, chopping and sawing and hewing. But he wasn’t at all pleased, in spite of what Sandy had said, about my experience, my previous rank of lieutenant, and my willingness to help, at having a boy wonder, as he called me, “standing around in the shade, with his hands stuck in his pockets, telling me what to do.” He had a Down East way of talking that annoyed me more or less, and I said: “I wouldn’t dream of doing it—how the hell do you tell someone that sounds like a goddam quahog sucking water up with his foot and squirting it out of his eyeballs?” That kind of slowed him down, and he asked: “What’s your idea about it?”

“What do you think?” I fired back. “I figured to sign up.”

“... You mean, join? My outfit?”

“Now you got it, stupid.”

“What about that leg?”

“Leg’s been there before.”

He called to his supply sergeant: “Pair of pants for this recruit—extra longs! Blouse, if you got one!”

“Shirt’ll help,” I said.

“And a shirt!” he bellowed.

And then as we stood there, I in my balbriggans, Sandy helping me into the blues, Seymour asked in a quiet way: “All right, Cresap, what am I doing wrong?”

“Everything,” I said. “As well as everything else.”

“Hell, I know that! But
what?
”

“To begin with, I’d say you have compression, tension, and function all stewed in one fearful and wonderful pot, so each fouls up the other.”

“Never mind the Trautwine stuff. Say something.”

“I will, don’t worry. Those brackets you’re putting together—trying to put together—are done wrong from the start. Positioning the trees as they fall, then nailing the boards on, then hauling them down to the water, is just asking for trouble. Before it even gets wet, that set, pretty weak to start with, is so rickety from the trip through the woods that it won’t hold up in the water, can’t take the strain when you try to work it with lines—and
that
’
s
why it goes floating off. Haul your trees to the water’s edge
first! Then
put together your bracket!
Brace
it with proper
struts!
Saw planks into four-foot lengths, notch ’em, and shove ’em between. That’ll take care of compression. Then lash on line, and tighten with clubs used as turnbuckles! That’ll take care of tension!”

“Where the hell do we get this line?”

“Navy,” said Sandy. “We got it.”

“Go on,” the captain told me.

“Then nail on your boards. They’re function.”

“I got it now. All right, then we—”

“Goddam it, who’s supposed to be talking?”

“I’m sorry, Cresap. What else?”

“When that’s all done, when the thing’s ready to go, notch the butts of those trees and lash a shackle on. Something a hawser can bend to, so the boats can give you help. Something that’s going to hold, so you’re running the set and the set’s not running you!”

“... Anything else?”

“Split your men into gangs, each with a job assigned that it rightly understands. Then, ’stead of laying around all the time, asleep under the trees, they’ll know what to do and do it. If the gang doesn’t speak English, pick out one man who does. Get some system into it!”

“You can work a gang?”

“Anyone that has sense can.”

“We haven’t been having much luck.”

“That’s because, instead of letting them know what you want, you’re making speeches at them about Lincoln, telling ’em how much he loves ’em. They don’t care about Lincoln—all they want is their grub and to be told what to do.”

“Then you’ll tell ’em?”

“I think first I have to tell you.”

We fixed it up, since I had to sign on as a private, that I’d tell and he’d beller, as he called it, but actually, by the time I’d been there an hour, I had it all to myself, doing the telling, bellering, and cussing all at the same time—but with some slight success. I don’t say I built the Red River dam. Colonel Joseph Bailey, of a Wisconsin outfit, thought the idea up and was in complete command. I do say that before I got there, things were in a mess, but that after I got on the spot, they began to go right.

By sundown, we had six sets in place which I anchored by floating crosslogs down, then letting them wash up on the brackets and lashing them in place, somewhat out of water to give a bit more weight and offset the tendency to float, which the whole thing suffered from. The Navy helped in grim earnest, and Sandy was there all the time, first on one boat, then on another, taking charge of lines, capstans, or barges, as they came up with stone for the cribs—or with bricks, or busted-up sugar mills, or whatever they could find for ballast. The third night, after I’d eaten the handful of beans my squad had cooked for mess and was stretched out beside the fire, Sandy suddenly appeared, squatting down beside me with a very different look from the one he had been wearing, which hadn’t been too friendly toward me. When I’d told him hello, he drew a deep breath and said: “Bill, I want to apologize.”

“Oh?” I asked him. “What for?”

“Various things. You heard about the
Warner?
”

“The boat I was to take? No. What about her?”

“She got sunk.”

“Ouch. You mean the Rebs got her?”

“Not only her but the
Covington
. And not only
her
but the
Signal
. And not only
her
but the
City Belle
, a boat that was coming up with a bunch of replacement troops. Scores of men were killed, and it’s just one more thing. But what gets me is this: Suppose
you
had been killed? I’d never forgive myself. And I’d like to come out and say it: I glory in you, Bill. You burned those papers first,
before
the
Warner
left. And told everyone why—including me. Including her.”