Reaching St. Matthews took her more than twice as long as she’d thought it would, and she hadn’t been optimistic setting out from the refugee camp. By the time she got to the town nearest Marshlands, she found herself astonished she’d made it at all. She was also filthy from head to foot, having repaired three punctures along the way.
St. Matthews shocked her again. It wasn’t so badly smashed up as some of the territory through which she’d driven; the rebellion had been dying on its feet by the time Confederate forces reached the town, and the Reds hadn’t fought house to house here. But St. Matthews was the town she knew best: in the back of her mind, she expected to see it as it always had been, with whitewashed picket fences, neatly painted storefronts and even warehouses, and streets lined with live oaks shaggy with moss.
Most of the fences had been knocked flat. Two of the four big cotton warehouses were only burnt-out wreckage. Some of the live oaks still stood, but the artillery bombardment before the assault on the town had put paid to most of them. It would be a hundred years before saplings grew into trees that could match the ones now ruined.
Anne’s eyes filled with tears. She’d kept trying to think of the rebellion as something that, once defeated, could in large measure be brushed aside. Negroes working under white men’s guns had gone a fair way toward telling her how foolish that was. The blasted oaks, though, warned even more loudly that the uprising would echo for generations.
A gray-haired white man in an old-fashioned gray uniform shifted a plug of tobacco from one ill-shaven cheek to the other and held up a hand, ordering her to stop. “What the-blazes you doin’here, lady?” he demanded. “Don’t you know there’s still all kinds o’ bandits and crazy niggers running around loose?”
“What am I doing here?” Anne replied crisply. “I am going home. Here is my authorization.” She handed the militiaman a letter she had browbeaten out of the colonel in charge of the refugee camp.
By the way this fellow stared at the sheet of paper, he couldn’t read. That she had it, though, impressed him into standing aside. “If’n they say it’s all right, reckon it is,” he said, touching the brim of his forage cap. “But you want to be careful out there.”
“I intend to be careful,” Anne said, a thumping lie if ever there was one. She put some snap in her voice: “Now kindly give that letter back, so I can use it again at need.”
“Oh. Yes, ma’am. Sorry, ma’am.” Where her grimy appearance and this beat-up motorcar hadn’t convinced the militiaman she was a person of quality, her manner did. He handed the letter back to her.
The road from St. Matthews to Marshlands was not so heavily cratered as the highway up to town had been. By the time the rebels abandoned St. Matthews, they’d pretty much abandoned organized resistance against Confederate forces, too. But that thought had hardly crossed her mind before she heard a couple of brisk spatters of gunfire from the north, the direction of the Congaree swamps. Not all the Reds, it seemed, had given up.
Woods blocked any view of Marshlands from the road till not long before a traveler needed to turn onto the lane leading up to the mansion. I am ready for anything, Anne told herself, again and again. Whatever I see, I will bear up under it.
Coughing and wheezing, the Ford passed the last trees. There, familiar as the mole she carried on one wrist, was the opening into that winding lane. Just before you turned, you looked along the lane and you saw…
“Hell,” she said quietly. She’d been hoping the place had survived, but it looked like a skeleton with most of the flesh rotted away. Altogether against her will, tears blurred her eyes. “Jacob,” she whispered. If Marshlands had burned, her brother must have burned with it.
By contrast, the Negro cottages off to one side of the great house looked exactly as they had before the Red uprising began. A couple of men were out hoeing in their gardens; a couple of women were feeding chickens; a whole raft of pickaninnies were running around raising hell.
After a little while, her eyes left the vicinity of the mansion and traveled out to the cotton fields. Her teeth closed hard on the soft flesh inside her lower lip. If anyone had done anything with the cotton since she’d left for Charleston all those months before, she would have been astonished. Was that what the Red revolution had been about-the freedom not to work? Her face twisted into an expression half sneer, half snarl.
If the rest of the plantations in what had been the Congaree Socialist Republic looked the same way, a lot of planters were bankrupt, busted, flat. She wasn’t; she’d invested wisely ever since Marshlands came into her hands. Most people, though, couldn’t see past their noses. And, speaking of seeing…
One of the men in the garden plots had spotted her. He dropped his hoe and pointed, calling out to the rest. One after another, heads swung in her direction. Other than that, none of the Negroes moved. That in itself chilled her. Before the uprising, they would have come running up to her motorcar, calling greetings and hoping she had trinkets for them. Telling lies, she realized. Hiding what they really thought.
For a moment, she was especially glad of the Tredegar on the seat beside her. Then, all at once, she wasn’t. How much good would it do her? What kind of arsenal did the Negroes have hidden in those cabins? She’d prided herself on knowing her laborers well. She hadn’t known them at all. Maybe the Army men had been right when they thought her crazy to come here by herself.
A woman walked slowly toward her. It was, she realized after too long, Julia, who had been her body servant. The young woman, instead of a maid’s shirtwaist and black dress, wore homespun made gaudy with bits of probably stolen finery. She was also several months pregnant.
The only reason Anne hadn’t taken her to Charleston was that she’d gone there for an assignation, not legitimate business. Had it been otherwise, would Julia have turned on her? The thought was chilling, but could hardly be avoided.
“So you’s come back, Miss Anne,” Julia said. Her voice had something of the old servile tone left in it, but not much.
“Yes, I’m back.” Anne looked over the neglected acres of what had been the finest plantation in South Carolina. “I don’t know why the hell I bothered.”
“Things, they ain’t the same no mo’,” Julia said. Had truer words ever been spoken, Anne hadn’t heard them.
Almost as one equal to another, she asked, “And what did you do in the uprising, Julia? What did the niggers here do?”
“Nothin’,” Julia said. “We stay here, we mind we bidness.” But now she didn’t meet Anne’s eyes.
Anne nodded. This was a lie she recognized. “What happens when the soldiers start asking the same thing?” she said. Julia flinched. Anne smiled to herself. Yes, no matter what, she could manage. “Mind my business”-she pointed to the forgotten fields-“along with your own, and I’ll keep the soldiers off your back. You know I can do things like that. Have we got a bargain?”
Julia thought for most of a minute, then nodded. “Miss Anne, I think we has.”
George Enos had felt constricted on the Mississippi. He was used to the broad reaches of the Atlantic, to looking around from his perch on deck and seeing nothing but the endless ocean in all directions. Next to the Atlantic, any river, even the Father of Waters, seemed hardly more than an irrigation ditch.
And the Cumberland was considerably narrower than the Mississippi. These days, he and his fellow deck hands aboard the Punishment wore Army helmets painted Navy blue. This stretch of the river was supposed to be pretty clear of snipers, but nobody with the brains God gave a haddock felt like betting his life on it.