Michener, James A. (121 page)

'Distance is seven feet, Reb.'

'You could spit into our lunette.'

'Spittin' even a foot with you Rebs is difficult.'

The two men sat side by side on the edge of the fatal trench, and each knew that when it progressed a few feet farther, the Texas position could be blown to hell with dynamite charges.

'You 'bout starved out, Reb 7 '

'Well, now . . .' The posturing was ended. Macnab could joke about death, and the Union failure to consolidate, but he could no longer joke about starvation. 'One hell of a way to end a battle.'

'Only way you left us, you stubborn bastards.'

As they parted for the last time, the Union man looked about swiftly, then moved toward Macnab: 'I could be shot. If they catch you, say you stole it.' And into Otto's pocket he stuffed two pieces of bread and a chunk of Wisconsin cheese.

Back in the lunette, Macnab knew that as a human being and especially as an officer, he ought to share his unexpected treasure with his men, but this he could not do. Surreptitiously he gnawed at a tiny piece of the cheese, and he believed that he had never tasted anything so delicious in his life, he could feel the nourish-

ment racing through his body, as if one organ were shouting to another: 'Food at last! Sweet Jesus, food at last.'

He had slowly, secretly consumed one of the pieces of bread and much of the cheese when an orderly passed by: 'Colonel wants to see you.'

When he reported, his stomach reveling in the rood it had found, the colonel, a medical doctor from Connecticut and a Yak-graduate but now the defender of a lunette on the Mississippi, said: 'I suppose vou've heard about Major Cobb?'

'What?'

'Visiting his two old ladies. Smuggling them food, I suppose. Came out of their cave just in time to meet a Union shell head-on '

'Dead?'

'Left arm blown off. The slave who ran out here said they thought he bled to death.'

'May I go in?'

'You're needed here. You're Major Macnab now, and your job is to hold off those sappers at the foot of our lunette.'

'Yes, sir.' All day on the second of July, Macnab devised tricks for rolling giant fused bombs down into the Northern trench only a few feet away, and once when he was successful, blowing up an entire length of the trench and all its occupants, his men crowded around to congratulate him. That was the last major event at the Texas lunette, for that night the soldiers of each side, without orders from General Grant or anyone else, quietly decided that this part of the war was over.

'Pemberton sent Grant a letter,' a Northerner said. 'I spoke with the orderly.'

'I think Pemberton wants to surrender right now,' a Rebel reported. 'But Grant, he'll want it for a big show on the Fourth of July.'

'For us it ends tonight.'

Otto searched for O'Callahan, but no one had seen him, so, still a professional, he walked to the daring sap which had carried the Union lines so close to his. 'Six more days/ he told a Northern soldier, 'you'd have made it.'

'We'd of made it today, but some clever Greycoat dropped a tornado on us.'

'You know a man named O'Caliahan 7 '

'One of your rolling bombs got him this afternoon.'

'Dead?'

'Probably alive. I saw them drag him away.'

In the distance there was singing, 'Aura Lee' from the Northerners, and then, as an act of final Confederate defiance, 'The

Bonnie Blue Flag,' whispered at first by the defeated Southerners and then bellowed, with many Northerners joining in:

'We are a band of brothers And native to the soil, Fighting for the property We won with honest toil.'

Along the Vicksburg line that night there was not one Negro in uniform, on either side. The fight had been about him but never by him. One Confederate trooper, who operated a cotton gin at Nacogdoches, summarized Texan thinking: 'No nigger's ever been born could handle a gun. They'd be useless.'

The month of July 1863 was one of overwhelming sorrow at the Jefferson plantation, for tragedy seemed to strike the Cobbs from all sides. Petty Prue, in the big house at Lammermoor, knew that her husband was dead at Vicksburg and her older son at Gettysburg. Her younger boy was fighting somewhere in Virginia. On some hot mornings she doubted that she could climb out of bed, so oppressive was the day, so oppressive was her life.

But she had a plantation to run, some ninety slaves to keep busy, and cotton to be handled for the Confederacy, so at dawn each day she was up and working just as if her husband were absent for a few weeks and the crop promised to some factor in New Orleans. What perplexed her as the cotton matured in its bolls and the picking began was how to handle the crop when it had been harvested, for the Yankee blockade of all the seaports prevented open shipments of fiber to Liverpool. Cotton was being grown but it was not being moved, and there was always the danger that if the bales accumulated at a spot like Jefferson, so near the border, Union forces might rush in and burn them, and the plantations, and set free the slaves. Now, with the entire Mississippi River in Union hands, the possibility of such a foray grew, and a lone woman like Petty Prue, somewhat flighty in peacetime, faced problems she could scarcely solve.

The dismal news affected Millicent too, for in mid-July word was received via the telegraph to New Orleans that Colonel Persifer Cobb of Edisto, that erect, formal gentleman with his West Point education, had died at Gettysburg. The telegram had ended:

SON JOHN ALSO DIED WILL YOU ALL COME BACK AND SUPERVISE PLANTATION TESSA MAE

Millicent, weakened by the privations of war, was incapable of grappling with the changes contained in this message. Vaguely she

remembered that it had been sweet-talking Tessa Mae who had encouraged the expulsion of the Somerset Cobbs from Edisto, and Millicent could not imagine any terms on which they might con sent to return. But such selfish considerations vanished when she thought of Tessa Mae's double bereavement and of how distraught she must be trying to manage that vast plantation. During the better part of a morning she wept for the lone widow on Edisto and for all the other widows this war was making.

This led her to thoughts about herself, and her head sagged, for she could not be sure that Somerset was alive. All she knew for certain was that in the final days of Vicksburg a Yankee shell had ripped off his left arm. At first he had been reported dead from loss of blood, but then soldiers from his unit, now in prison camp in Mississippi, had sent word that Major Cobb—'not the redheaded one'—had been taken in by two elderly women in the town and nursed. 'And you can thank God for that,' a fellow officer wrote, 'because if he had fallen into one of our hospitals or into a Yankee prison camp, he'd be dead.'

Perhaps he was dead. Perhaps her son Reverdy was dead, too. Perhaps the Yankees would invade Texas and set the plantations aflame, as they were doing in other parts of the Confederacy The possibilities for disaster were so overwhelming that she could not face them, and her health, never good, began to deteriorate badly. As the heat of summer increased she found difficulty in breathing, and on one extremely hot afternoon she felt she must apologize to her energetic cousin: 'Petty Prue, I am not malingering. I want to help but I'm truly sick, and I'm frightened.'

'Stay in bed, Lissa. I'll manage.'

Prue could not have done it alone, but like many women all over Texas who had to manage large holdings while their men were absent, she learned that she could rely on her slaves, especially Jaxifer from Georgia and Trajan from Edisto. With no white master to berate him, and sometimes beat him, Jaxifer assumed a more important role, issuing orders to other slaves and seeing that they were carried out. It was he who kept a small herd of cattle hidden in the brakes, away from government agents who would have impressed them for military use. Occasionally he would butcher one of the precious steers in the dark of night and mysteriously appear in the morning with small portions of beef for all: 'We got meat.'

Trajan was even more ingenious. He found the honey trees which provided a substitute for sugar. He tracked down a bear now and then, knowing that when smoked, this made bacon almost as tasty as a hog's, but when he first placed it on the table, Millicent

whispered: 'One can hardly eat this without salt.' Trajan heard, and although store salt was absolutely unobtainable, he had the clever idea of digging up the soil where meat had been cured in peacetime and boiling it until salt could be skimmed off. It was dirty, but it was good.

His major contribution to Petty Prue was the substitute he devised for coffee: 'Now, this here is parched corn and this is charred okra, you mix them just right, you got . . .'

it tastes . . . well . . .'

'Well, it ain't coffee, and it don't taste like coffee, but it looks like it.'

Often during that dreadful July, Petty Prue wondered why her slaves did not run away, for with no master to check them they could have, but they stayed, without restraint, to keep the two plantations running. 'It's because,' Prue explained to her neighbors, 'they're happy here. They like being slaves when the master is kind.'

In whispers, when she attended church on Sunday, she asked the older people: 'Do you think the slaves know what Mr. Lincoln's done?' The white folk were aware that on the first day of January 1863 he had tried to put into effect his Emancipation Proclamation freeing slaves, and by the most rigid controls the whites in remote areas like Jefferson prevented this news from reaching their slaves, so that men like Jaxifer and Trajan worked on, legally free but actually still slaves.

Tell them nothin'!' Petty Prue warned Millicent and the two Cobb daughters, and when an elderly white man from the village came to visit and refresh himself with the good food raised at Lammermoor, he gave them reason to keep silent.

'Emancipation Proclamation! Rubbish. The most cynical thing that evil man in the White House ever did.'

"Some day the slaves will have to be freed,' Millicent protested.

'Many would agree with you,' the old man said. 'Economically?' He shrugged his shoulders. 'That young fellow who stayed with you—Carmody, who wrote the book about us. He made some points. But the slaves will never be freed the way Lincoln said.'

'What did the gangling fool say?' Petty Prue asked, for she was willing to believe anything bad about Lincoln, author of so many tragedies.

'It isn't what he said. It's what he didn't say.'

'Tell me, please.'

'Duplicity. Total duplicity. He has freed the slaves in all those parts of the former Union over which he now has no control. And he has not freed them in the areas which he does control.'

i can't believe it,' Prue snapped.

'You better. Your slaves here in Texas—where his words don't mean a damn, thank God—are freed. So are they in Carolina and Georgia, and the rest of the Confederacy. But in Maryland, and Kentucky, and Tennessee and even in Louisiana, where the Federals control, they are not freed, because Good Honest Abe does not want to irritate his Northern allies, God damn their souls.'

The four Cobb women had a difficult time digesting this immoral Northern charade, but the old man made it simple: 'Where he can, he won't. And where he can't, he does. Some patriot with good sense ought to shoot him.'

The owners of plantations had extra reason for caution, because once the slaves learned that they were free, they would surely desert and the cotton would rot in the fields. But by extreme caution they continued to keep news of emancipation, fraudulent though it might be, from their slaves, and it was well known that anyone who divulged the information, or even hinted at it, would be hanged.

But now the problem arose as to what to do with this new crop of cotton which could no longer be sent to New Orleans, and Petty Prue, as the one who had to make decisions, pondered this for a long time, and the same old man, a furious patriot, came out from Jefferson to counsel with her.

if I was younger, ma'am, you can be sure I'd be tryin' to sneak this cotton through the blockade to Liverpool. But I'm not young any more, and no woman by herself could do it.'

'What can I do?'

'Keep your voice down,' the old man said conspiratorily as he led her to the gin, 'but this cotton is the lifeblood of the Confederacy. We have no manufacturing, as your book-writing fellow said. And we have few railroads. But by God we have cotton, and the world needs it.' Picking at the edge of a bale, he fingered the precious fiber he had spent his life producing. 'On this wharf it's worth a cent and three-quarters a pound. Aboard ship to Europe, it's worth a dollar-sixty a pound. With Vicksburg gone and Lee thrown back at Gettysburg, we must get it on board some ship somehow.'

'I'll try anything,' Prue said.

The old man looked at the bayou to which boats ought to have been coming, and tears showed in his eyes: 'By water, no hope. Even if you could get it overland to Galveston, the Yankees would still intercept it when you tried to ship.' Then his eyes brightened with the thrill of old challenges: 'But, ma'am, if you could somehow work your bales far inland and then drop down to the safety

of Matamoros in Old Mexico, you'd have a market as big as the world.'

'I do not understand,' Prue said, and the old man explained: 'Abe Lincoln's warships keep us bottled up everywhere. Oh, a few blockade runners slip in and out of the Atlantic ports, but not many. They've tied up Texas, too. For a while Brownsville was kept open, but Abe corked that real quick. So what does that leave us? Matamoros, just over the Rio Grande from Brownsville.'

When he told her that sometimes as many as a hundred ships lay off Matamoros, hungry for cotton, she asked: 'Why doesn't Lincoln sink them?' and he cried: 'That's the arrow that we have in our quiver. What one thing could win the war for us tomorrow?' When she said she didn't know, he explained: 'If England and France jump in on our side to ensure safe delivery of cotton. Lincoln doesn't dare antagonize Europe. So he's got to let English and French ships come to Matamoros and load up.'

Petty Prue walked up and down her wharf, studied the accumulating bales, then snapped her fingers: 'I'm taking ours to Matamoros.'

Once the decision was made, she never looked back. With an energy that would have alarmed her husband, who had known her as a little wren of a woman, she worked almost without sleeping, and her enthusiasm ignited the imaginations of her slaves.

'There are two ways we can go,' she said at the beginning of the discussions with Jaxifer and Trajan. 'We can cut west to Waco, where they're assembling shipments, and sell to the government. Lose half our profit. Or we can drop in a straight line down to Matamoros, and sell our bales for maybe eighty cents a pound.'

The two men listened, then Jaxifer asked: 'You goin' wid us?'

'It's my cotton. My responsibility.'

A plan was devised whereby four extra-stout carts would be loaded, each with five bales of five hundred pounds each. If they could deliver the cotton to the Mexican side, it would bring eight thousand dollars, a gamble worth taking. But one night as she concluded the final plans for the bold journey, she had a frightening doubt, and ordering her carriage to be readied, she had Jaxifer drive her to Jefferson, where she asked the old man one question: 'When we get to the Rio Grande, how do we get the^bales across to Mexico?' and he said: if cotton is so valuable, they'll work out a way.'

'But they say there's no bridge. No ferry could handle all the bales you speak of.'

if the world needs cotton, they'll find a way.'

'I'll risk it, then.'

The old man grasped Prue's hands: 'I wish 1 had a daughter like you,' but this farewell was dampened by the agitated arrival of a horseman from Lammermoor: 'Missy, hurrv 1 Miss Lissa she sick bad.'

The old man insisted upon accompanying Prue to the plantations, and when they reached the kitchen at Lammermoor they found that Millicent had been working there with the slaves, making jelly and preserving fruit in the last moments before she died. Prue, looking at the scene she had shared so often with her cousin, did not weep or cry out. Slowly she slipped to the polished floor, and there she stared at the uneven patterns, for life had become too complex for her to unravel.

The old man proved to be most valuable, not because of anything he did, for he was frail and nearing his own death, but because of the sensible advice he gave and his shrewd analysis of alternatives: 'Of course you could go with your cotton, Miss Prue, but what happens to the plantations if you do? What makes you think Somerset will ever return, if his wound was as bad as they say? With you gone, Jaxifer gone, Trajan gone, crows will tend cotton on this farm.' Patiently he led her to the only sensible conclusion: 'Would to God I could volunteer to manage your place while you go, but I'm too old.' He fought back tears. 'I won't live to see the end of this war. If I did take charge and died while you were gone, chaos, chaos.'

'What must I do?'

'You have two treasures. These valuable bales. These valuable plantations. Surely, the second is more important than the first.'

'But I'm going to protect both,' she said stubbornly.

'The only way, send your cotton south with Trajan and Jaxifer.'

'Can I trust them?'

'What choice have you? You've got to stay here, with that trustworthy slave Big Matthew. And pray for the best.'

Again, once the decision was reached she did not flinch. Inspecting the four wagons, she was satisfied from what jaxifer told her that they would withstand the load and the six-hundred-mile trip. She watched as the men loaded each wagon, three bales crossways on the bottom, two perched on top, and satisfied herself that each wagon carried heavy grease for the axles, and when all was ready she asked the old man to deliver to each of the four slaves who would be driving the wagons a copy of a letter he had had the local judge prepare:

Jefferson, Marion County, Texas 21 July 1863

To Whom It May Concern:

This will certify that the bearer of this note, the slave known as trajan, is on official duty for the Confederate government, delivering cotton to Matamoros in Mexico and returning home to his plantation, as above The government will appreciate any consideration and protection you may give him while he is discharging this important assignment.