Back to Wando Passo, David Payne [little red riding hood ebook .TXT] 📗

in Cheraw, Addie leaves the hall door open when she goes to bed. She lies awake and waits, and nothing comes. And the fear passes, as it did when she was eight. She’s still shy of mirrors, though, and when the fields are flowed, Addie makes a point to not look down.

She takes satisfaction in the work. By 1863, there’s beginning to be hunger everywhere. Fifteen cents before the war, beef, now, in Charleston, is three dollars a pound…. A dollar for a cabbage—not even the head, but just the leaves! She must see the crop is made. There’s nothing but her will holding things together anymore. Running off in twos and threes since ’61, the slaves, emboldened by Emancipation, vanish now in fives and tens and take the boats. A quarter of them, gone. So every morning now this spring, in one of Percival’s straw hats, she’s on the first flat to the fields. Her face and arms, by May, are long since brown. She wears a dress of white and purple calico sewn by her own hand from the same bolt pilfered from the storehouse by Clarisse. Addie’s last good dress—the blue from Mrs. Cummings’s shop in the now-dated style called bayadere—went to the Ladies Christian Auxiliary for bandages, to wrap the bloody stump of some poor amputee. The hospitals…the suffering is so terrible there. Three-quarters of her crop of rye is flatted to the still in Mars Bluff, made into demijohns of whiskey and shipped out on the train. For what relief have they to give the wounded and the dying now but drunkenness? And Wando Passo’s mistress will starve her animals to give it to them, and who shall tell her no?

No, she will stay and do her little part, though some mornings, on the dike, so help her, when the slant sun hits the fields—which are under the Long Water now, as Oliver and Tim wade through and rake away the trash—she wonders how Almighty God can justify such beauty, how He can still allow the sun to shine, the rice to needle up and head, so bountiful and green, out of the mud.

And Chancellorsville, dear God, another victory—and how is she to feel? Her heart cannot but exult for Lee and for his gallant troops. But, oh, the cost. Jackson, lost, oh, Jackson. They shall not soon find his like. For Addie, now, despite the exultation, the notion of young boys with feathers in their caps, running yelling up a hill behind a flag into a withering rain of iron fire, dying with high hearts and cheers upon their lips, no longer seems so fine as once it did. Against the roll, the absent names, the funerals, the mothers dressed in black and clutching handkerchiefs, not to weep in, but to catch some last, brief scent their sons or husbands left in them, the waste, the appalling, simple waste of it, on fine May mornings such as this, makes her want to fall and beat her fists against the earth and cry, What for? What is it for? States’ rights? Self-determination? The orators intone in terms like these. “The torch of liberty, passed from the framers’ hands, falls now to us to defend against the Northern despots as once our fathers fought the English kings….” Addie hears the fine, high-sounding words, but it’s hard for her to think in such abstractions anymore. Watching Oliver and Tim, waist-deep in black water in their swimming shirts, alert for moccasins, Addie thinks, States’ rights, self-determination, the torch of liberty…it all boils down to this: the right to keep them here, unpaid, against their will, to make the rice for which we shall receive the gain. The framers fought for freedom from oppression; we fight for the freedom to continue to oppress. Is this not so? Is this not the “right” her state has chosen to assert, the path that Southern “self-determination” takes? A spy, a stranger, in her own land, yet Addie stays to make the rice. And will God, Addie wonders, let us win?

The twenty-first of June…The Point Flow is off now. The fields are dry and they’re pulling weeds by hand, when word comes up from Hasty Point—Lee has crossed the Potomac and is marching north toward the Susquehanna with 160,000 men! The whole South waits with bated breath. Those whose faces have settled into the long stare look about with timid wonder, as though waking up for the first time in two years. And from Vicksburg—they’re saying Grant is dead! That he’s retired his forces to Grand Gulf!

July the first…The Army of Northern Virginia has taken York—they’re fifteen miles from Harrisburg! On the third, the smuggled papers out of Baltimore speak of a chance skirmish between Lee’s force and Meade’s, some little place called Gettysburg…. On the sixth, they say a major battle has been fought…. The result is “indecisive,” a Northern code word for a Southern victory…By the eighth, the absence of dispatches from Lee’s army is creating an uneasy mood…. And then the tenth, the tenth, oh, the tenth! Vicksburg, fallen! Pemberton has surrendered his command, his whole command, to Grant, who still lives after all. And Port Hudson, lost…The whole Mississippi under Federal control, the Confederacy, cut in half. And Lee, oh, now word comes, a defeat with terrible losses, and the army in full retreat back over the Potomac, under the old man’s grieving, stoic gaze…

That terrible July, that day of fate, the tenth, as John is opening the trunks with the high tide and letting the Layby water flood the fields, word comes from Charleston, too…. Gillmore’s forces have crossed Lighthouse Inlet from Folly Beach and overrun the Confederate rifle pits on Morris Island. Wagner, where Harlan is, has held, but three-quarters of the island has been lost. The battery is in desperate straits, under constant enfilading fire from the monitors offshore, which raise their guns and rain killing grape and canister over the fort, as Federal troops dig