My Vicksburg (2 page)

And, of a sudden, Pa was out of his surgery, which was attached to the white, rambling house with the porch in front, and he was in the parlor, calling you before him. And still, though he didn't raise his voice one octave, you were asked something like: "Did I have to leave Jimmy Otis with a three-inch cut in his head for
this?
"

And of course you said nosir. You answered properlike. Even though James would cry and reach out his arms to be comforted. It must have torn Pa to pieces not to be able to soothe the little fellow until he was finished scolding.

I
wanted
to cry, but dared not. I usually hiccuped instead. He'd order me to stop hiccuping, even though he knew I couldn't. So, disgusted with me, he'd send me to the cellar for the rest of the afternoon. The
cellar,
where all my demons came to join me. I was terrified of the cellar and Pa knew it. If Landon was home, he'd come and join me.

Landon, now, he'd take his just deserts, yessir and nosir Pa to death, and go sullenly into a cellar of his own making, chastising himself more than Pa ever could.

The point is we all adored Pa. He knew it. And he very much knew we were alive and thinking and plotting
and doing all sorts of things that young people do when they are struggling to figure out their place in the world. Or at least in Vicksburg.

Now, he was leaving us.

He and I had a serious talk at my grandparents' plantation just before we left. Pa had already put on the uniform of a Confederate major and, oh, it made it difficult for me to look up at him, what with the mustard-colored sash and the sword and the high boots and the epaulets on his shoulders.

If I was sometimes put off by my father, I was outright afraid of him in this uniform. He was now with the 2nd Mississippi Regiment going to join up with Lee on his move north, headed to Pennsylvania. No more would he stitch up a three-inch cut on a little boy's head. Now he would have to cut off a leg or an arm on a grown man.

"I have no doubt you'd have been safe with the Clarkes," he told me. "They're good people. It isn't that. It's that we have to stay together as a family. I'm looking to you to help keep the family together, Claire Louise. Landon has gone off to join forces with the devil, and I'm leaving tomorrow. I expect you to be a comfort to your mother and to look after your little brother. The Clarkes are sticking together, aren't they?"

I can lie as good as the next one when the occasion warrants it. "Yessir," I said.

"Be careful of the older girl. Sarah. There's something going on with her," he said. "And I think it's more than just romancing Landon."

I looked at him quickly. "What?"

"I'm not talking out of school if I tell you that she came to my surgery to have a mole removed from her face. Said she didn't want to be recognized by it. I laughingly asked her if she was going to be a spy for the Confederacy, and she didn't answer. Just be careful and don't be influenced by anything she says. All right?"

"Yessir," I said again.

And there it was in a nutshell, why Amy needed me. Her older sister, Sarah, who was seventeen, was going to give her family trouble.

Sarah was joining the Southern army. As a man. She was going for a soldier. And only Amy and I knew it. Lan-don didn't know it before he left. Oh no, Landon could not be told, or he'd never have gone. Sarah had decided that.

Riding in the surrey with Mama and James on the way back to Vicksburg, with Pa alongside us on his black stallion, Mercer, I worried. Had Sarah Clarke left yet as a soldier? If so, what did she tell her family? Did they know? Or did only Amy know? Oh, I must be allowed to be excused as soon as we got home to go next door and see her.

I was still thinking of home as it was when we left it, with its pristine houses and church spires and view of the river in the distance. When we got close to the Joe Davis plantation (he is the brother of President Jefferson Davis), we first heard the firing of the cannon, which we soon learned was the battle of Champion Hill.

Cannon fire soon filled the air, and James began to
cry. Pa reached over from Mercer's back and took James onto the saddle with him. Pa had a special place in his heart for James.

My one wish in life was to find my special place in Pa's heart. Times I saw him eyeing me with a fondness when he didn't think I saw. But then Pa would say something jagged, covered by humor, that cut like a scalpel.

Mama said he did not know how to act with me at my sensitive age. "When was the last time he took you on his lap?" she asked.

Tears came to my eyes. I could not remember.

"He doesn't want you to grow up," she told me. "He doesn't know what to do with you now that you are growing up. So he teases you."

"He's always telling me to grow up."

"He means behave. He is more comfortable," she said, "with his sons. So he gets brusque and stern. He dies a little inside, thinking of the boys he someday may have to share you with."

"Mama, I'm only thirteen. Why punish me for it now?"

"He knows what's coming."

It sounded right, but it was not right. Not by my calculations. Pa was a doctor. He should know, more than anybody, what a girl went through when she was growing up, and what love she needed from her own father. And he was not giving it. And now he was leaving.

As we got closer to Vicksburg, the road before us
became crowded with soldiers—Confederate soldiers, ragged and some barefoot, with dirty faces and hollow eyes and shamefaced looks. They stopped and saluted when they saw Pa.

"We been beat, sir. The enemy is pursuing us from Big Black and Bridgeport Ferry."

"Never mind that," Pa said. "I understand there are Louisiana and Tennessee troops commanding the riverfront. So we're still strong. Vicksburg won't fall. Now, is anybody here hurt?

One man had a slash on his head and Pa stopped, took his doctor's bag right out of the surrey, and fixed the head right there. Then we went on.

It was night by the time we got to Vicksburg. Fierce shelling was going on from Porter's ironclad boats on the river. It was like fireworks on the Fourth of July. We didn't go home. Home was across town, Pa said, and he wouldn't let us go there. We went, instead, inside a church. The street outside was crowded with wagons, caissons, artillery, surreys, and waiting horses. I think it was the Catholic Church, St. Paul's, on the corner of Crawford and Walnut streets. We weren't Catholic, but Pa knew we would be welcome. He took us to the basement, where it was lighted with tall candles and people were sleeping in pews and on the floor.

Soldiers and families. Up front was a grotto with the Virgin Mary in it. It was deep and looked like it was made with real rocks and it scared me. But I have friends in
school who are Catholic and they tell me that if you are of that religion you are supposed to be scared, about everything.

That goes against the grain of my family, who teach us not to be frightened of anything, that if we are right and good, nothing bad can happen to us.

There were soldiers sleeping all over on the floor of the grotto. It seemed as if the Virgin Mary was watching them ...

Pa went and spoke with the priest. He came back and found us a place in a corner and we settled on a rug near the confessional. He covered us with blankets Mama had brought from our grandparents. James was sleeping already.

"I'm told there's a woman having a baby upstairs," he said to Mama. "I've got to see to her."

Then, without caring who was looking, he took Mama in his arms and kissed her like they'd just been married. And held her close. And whispered something so low even I couldn't hear.

Mama nodded and he held her that way for a long moment.

He released her and looked down at me, quizzically. "You get the urge, confess your sins," he said solemnly. "The priest is right over there."

There was the humor again. Covering what? What did he want to say? "I've got no sins," I said.

He looked down at me for a long minute, taking my
measure until I became uncomfortable. What was coming next? "Only God knows different," he said. "And me."

I said nothing. What did he know? "What had I done?

"Get up when I'm speaking to you," he said.

Oh Lord, not here, not now.
What
had
I done?

I stood before him.

"Don't you know you're supposed to stand in the presence of your commanding officer?" he asked.

"Yessir," I said.

He took off my bonnet and dropped it on the floor. He kissed me on the forehead. He looked into my face as if searching a map to find his way somewhere. Then he tenderly brushed some hair away from my face and tucked it behind my ear.

"Kiss your pa," he ordered.

I stood on tiptoe and kissed the side of his face. He hugged me, picking me up off my feet to do so. It was a hug that needed no words. A hug that said everything. I didn't think he'd ever let me go.

Then he set me down on my feet, and, without looking at me, told me roughly that I had best behave while he was gone, and take care of Mama, and if he heard anything to the contrary I would not sit down for a week.

He'd never spanked me. He was making up for his display of affection. I said, "Yessir."

In the next minute he was gone. And if I had sins, I knew they were forgiven.

The next morning the good sisters of the church gave us coffee and bread and butter, and it never tasted so wonderful to me in my life.

Pa was gone. He'd left at first light, Mama said, and I felt his loss like a hole inside me. I felt his unseen presence worse. Who would direct us, scold us, tell us to mind? Mama had all she could do to manage herself and the servants.

Easter helped her gather up the blankets, and we took our leave of the church. The nuns had said there were times when we could go outside without chance of being killed.

Life had come down to that, it seemed. Those times were an hour at eight in the morning, an hour at noon, and an hour at eight at night, when the Union artillerymen ate their meals.

We waited until noon and then drove across town to our house, which hadn't been destroyed yet. Mama couldn't control James, who leaped from the surrey and ran up the front steps of the house, and nearly into
Clothilda's arms. She and her husband, Andy, had been keeping the place while we were gone.

"Where is he? Where's Sammy?" James demanded.

"Good Lord, chile, he's out back, takin' in God's good sunlight," Clothilda said.

James bounded through the center hall and out the back door. "Sammy, Sammy, I'm home. I'm here. You don't have to be frightened anymore."

Mama shook her head in despair. "Tell me how that boy is going to live in a cave." Then to Clothilda, "We have to go to the cave my husband prepared for us."

"I know, ma'am," Clothilda agreed. "He wuz here early this mornin' and gave us instructions. We all ready."

"God bless that man," Mama said fervently. "Now we have less than an hour before the artillery begins again. Quickly, let's get some things together."

"Most of it be together already." Clothilda pointed to the stack of parcels across the hall in the front parlor—blankets and pillows, sheets and towels, boxes filled with kitchen supplies. "There be food in barrels out on the back porch," Clothilda told Mama. "Andy be gettin' the sides o' ham."

I saw tears in Mama's eyes. "I must assemble my remedies in a box," she said.

The windows of the house were open and I heard voices from next door. Amy and her sister.

The last I'd spoken with her, Amy had told me her father had hinted that they might go to Jackson if the Yankees came. They had people in Jackson.

"Claire Louise, put the blankets and sheets into the wagon," Mama ordered.

I did so and now I had some extra time. But I also had a dilemma.

Should I go to the barn and say hello to my horse, Jewel? And tell her how sorry I was that I hadn't taken her to Grandmother's? I'd wanted to take her, but Pa said no. Grandmother had enough horses, and Andy would care for her.

Or should I slip through the hedges that separated our property and go to the Clarkes'? I more or less owed that to Landon. He'd asked me to keep him apprised of Sarah Clarke's welfare.

To put it in a delicate way, Landon was daft over Sarah. I knew they'd had some sort of falling out before he'd left, but I didn't know why.

"Mama, can I go next door and visit Amy?"

"No. I need you."

I didn't bother knocking on the front door. Amy and I were that close. Her mother, Virginia, passed me in the hall. "Back, are you? How is your mother faring? Did your papa leave yet? Where did you all sleep last night? Do you all have a cave assigned to you?"

She did go on, that woman. And she never waited for an answer. Never expected one. Just kept on with what she was about. I know she drove Landon to distraction sometimes. But he'd resigned himself to just yes-ma'aming and no-ma'aming her to death.

I went on upstairs where I found Amy and Sarah. They were bundling some clothes into a pillowcase for Sarah.

"Claire Louise, you're back!" Amy near screamed it.

She and I hugged, and she inquired where we were going to stay. "Neither of our houses has been hit yet," she said. "But Pa says we are going to Jackson anyway. Oh, Claire Louise, I don't want to go! I don't want to be parted from you!"

She was crying, and now I started in, too.

Sarah just stood by. I noticed her hair was cut short. It should have detracted from her looks, but it didn't. It made her prettier, if you ask me, more elfin looking. And she had beautiful large blue eyes. I think, I told myself, that she must have broken my brother's heart by now.

I noticed she had on boots and a man's trousers and shirt. And there was no mole on her face.

"Where are you going in those clothes?" I pretended ignorance.

"To Washington," she said. "To be a nurse. Clara Barton needs nurses."

Even if I hadn't already known the truth I'd have seen that for a lie. I ought to recognize one—I tell enough of them. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Amy roll her eyes and shake her head, no.