“Did you find skiffs?”
“Yeah, they were down there. Missus takes her boy and her aunt and her daughter, and they go down to the skiffs to find one to take them. I went with them, and they left Aunt Nancy Lynne up on the road with the wagon. Took us a while. Had to walk a ways down the river. But they found a man who agreed to take them. We walked all the way back to the road. And you know what? Wagon was gone.”
“Gone?”
“Yeah, gone. Aunt Nancy Lynne rode off with everything!”
I gasped. “You’re sure? She could have been attacked by soldiers.”
“Oh no. I know for certain! Missus was wild and screaming. She said, ‘Go get her, Phocas! Go get her! She can’t be far.’ And I set my horse to running.” Phocas laughed and slapped the table with his hand. “Yeah, I caught up with her. And we just kept going! What we gonna go back to them for? Aunt Nancy Lynne said, ‘Ain’t nobody gon’ say we stealing because I’ll tell ’em what’s what: that I’m just collecting on an old debt.’”
“Oh my goodness!” I couldn’t help but laugh. Of course she was. Oh, Aunt Nancy Lynne was so brilliant! “Where did you two go?”
“We got to a Union camp, and she turned the goods over to them and asked for help gettin’ north. That’s when I last saw her, with a regiment heading that way. She’s probably nursing them just like you are. I stayed with the camp, though. Got a wife. Hoping to find her. Don’t know if the slaves ran or what after Missus left.”
“Do you think the Holloways went back to the house after Aunt Nancy Lynne left?”
“If Missus know what’s good for her, they went back down to that skiff and kept going like they planned. Nothing for them left at that house. Who knows if it ain’t burned by now?”
After Phocas left, I got ready for bed and thought about what I had learned. I thought about how I had felt about the Holloway Plantation after hearing about the Emancipation Proclamation and felt ashamed. Why wouldn’t another slave feel the same way about Catalpa Valley—glorying in its destruction? I had been a child there, and my idealized memories didn’t include the sound of lashings or the smell of burnt flesh from brandings. It must have happened there. Even if not during Papa’s lifetime, I had no doubt Madame would have stirred up enough enmity after he’d died to make up for it. Dorinda had been whipped; she’d as much as told me that herself. And why wouldn’t the Yankees consume Catalpa Valley like the plantations in Mississippi? I grew heartsick worrying about Calista and Dorinda.
The effects of the siege began to ripen in June. The people of Vicksburg were starving. It was not uncommon for a Confederate soldier, in a tattered and barely recognizable uniform, to sneak into one of the Union camps to beg for something to eat. Soldiers, on both sides, were dying so fast that the men doing the burying fell behind. Often they couldn’t even retrieve the bodies because it wasn’t safe—there was no cease-fire to allow for the collection of the dead. The ungodly stink of the corpses hung in the damp summer air.
It was so strange that with such hunger rampant up in Vicksburg, we at the hospital and in the camps wanted for nothing. Grant kept the Yankee camps well supplied. He was constantly sending the quartermasters out to forage for what was needed. They even jerry-built a rough road through the Louisiana swamps, a road reached by ferrying across from a plantation called Hard Times. The quartermasters traveled far and wide regularly and returned with bounty: barrels of bacon and cured pork, molasses, cornmeal, cheeses, salt, sugar, and whiskey and wines. One load included thousands of bars of much-needed soap, not just for our personal use. Mother B. insisted on keeping the hospital and the wounded as clean as possible. She would send notes to General Grant to complain whenever the stock of soap got too low. I happened to be walking down to the tents when Lieutenant Stone drove by on a supply wagon. He called out to me. “Miss Bébinn! Soap!”
He tossed a small burlap bag to me. I smiled. Small moments of grace and happiness comforted my heart, and I was glad of it. If such things no longer moved me, I would be in danger. This would be worse than losing my upset over the wounds I saw daily from the fields.
There were two bars in the bag. I pulled out a small fragrant brick and held it underneath my nose. On the surface of the bar I could see a shape carved or stamped onto it. I held it flat in my hand to study it. It was a flower of some sort, but then I saw that it wasn’t just a flower; it was an insignia stamp. And I recognized it at once—a catalpa blossom. It was the insignia of Catalpa Valley.
I ran back to my room and shut the door so I could sit and study the soap again. I couldn’t remember soap being made on Papa’s plantation, but that didn’t mean anything. This could be a new thing. Later Walter would tell me that they had brought 150,000 bars up the jerry-rigged road from Louisiana. That meant the soap had been made on a large scale; it wasn’t just a hoarded supply stolen from a house. I saw the possibility, and it thrilled me: Catalpa Valley might be intact—intact and producing. But how? I felt hope, an energy that felt like life, which I hadn’t experienced in a long time.
This moment of hope, though, was brief. When I woke the next day, my hands shook slightly and I was dizzy. I thought the dizziness was because I hadn’t eaten, but I had no appetite. And I thought the shaking was nervous energy from having learned about Catalpa Valley. But my symptoms only worsened. I fainted in the hospital, and they took me up to my room. I didn’t know if they didn’t keep me in the infirmary because I was a woman or because they feared I might be contagious with a fever. I was too sick to understand much of anything. I slept—not a normal sleep. It seemed like I was tumbling into a dark hole. Waking up felt like trying to climb out of the hole. Only I couldn’t do it. It was too hard—I couldn’t reach the top of the abyss, and so I let go and tumbled back into darkness.
I sensed people around me. I was sure Mother B. was one of them. She consulted with a male voice—one of the doctors. They seemed to be concerned with time—how long I’d been sick, what would happen if I stayed this way too long.
One night I sensed a chill deep within me. The same chill moved about the room above my head. It swirled to the ceiling and seemed to come down to rest beside me. I was deeply afraid. But then the moment blossomed into a tiny flower of familiarity so palpable that my fingers moved to grasp it in my hand.
This is death, I thought.
I’d felt it before in Papa’s room, and it had been over Fanny right before she’d died. It was like a thin veil that someone had tossed into the air, and now it was floating down to land over me. But it didn’t fall entirely. It was suspended just above me, and a gentle hand held it aside, like holding a curtain open.
There was a question—I didn’t hear words, but I felt a question. It was like a tingling from the top of my head to the tip of my toes. The question was suspended over me, just like the veil. I had to answer. A presence was insisting I answer.
“No,” I whispered. “Not now.”
I think I slept then. All that I had sensed before, the veil, the flower, was gone. I wasn’t conscious again until I opened my eyes to see the pink stain of sunrise spreading through the sky outside my window. My forehead was damp with sweat, and I was thirsty.