“I’m talking about the Army.”
“I can’t speak for them.”
I thought over what he had said, and told him: “You catch me by surprise, as I hadn’t known until now there was anything I could do—an army does not, as a rule, need help to run. So I don’t know what answer to give you.”
“Answer? You haven’t been asked, yet.”
“Thing like this, I shouldn’t wait to be asked.”
“You mean, you’d even go?”
That was Mignon, and when I said yes, she exploded in my face. “Well, all I can say, Willie Cresap,” she blazed, switching her skirt around, “is I wish you’d make up your mind. First you come up here, to condole with me, so you said—if that be something to do. Then, with my help and Father’s help and Sandy’s help, you turn around and decide to trade in cotton—and we sign the papers for you. Now you think you may build a dam! What next, pray tell—if you know? Picking daisies, maybe, and starting a flower shop? Or buying a sword-cane and rake and going in business with her, running a gambling dive? Is that what it’s been all along? Is that what you’re up to, is that what you really want?”
“She talks like a wife,” said Sandy, “and she might even be right. Wife, I’ve noticed, generally is.”
“I wonder,” I said. “Maybe.”
Mr. Landry got in it then, repeating Sandy’s arguments, and not repeating hers, but adding some stuff of his own. And on top of everything else was my own feeling about it, that the dam was just plain silly. And what I might have decided I can’t exactly say, but while we were arguing about it there came a knock down the hall. Mr. Landry answered, but came back with word that no one was there. Mignon glanced at him sharply, and I thought he looked very strange. Then the knock was repeated, and he gave her a long stare. That’s when I woke up. I scooted down the hall, but didn’t turn into the crosshall that led to the outside entrance. I kept on to the trapdoor in the pantry. I flung it up, drawing my gun, and calling: “Come up, whoever you are—you’re covered, so keep your hands high!” Then a ragged, filthy, bony thing clambered out, wearing a thick gray beard and squinting with watery eyes. I had slapped it up for guns and taken the Navy Colt before the jackboots told me who it was that I had.
It was Burke.
“I think you know everybody,” I told him very coolly, as I marched him into the sitting room. “Don’t stand on ceremony. Have a chair, take the load off your feet. Make yourself at home.”
“It’s my home,” snapped Mr. Landry, furiously.
“Then you invite him, why don’t you?”
“Frank,” he said, “is that you? I hardly know you.”
“Aye,” Burke groaned in a hollow voice, “ ’tis I—but the ghost of the man you knew. I never reached the Sabine at all. I was taken direct to Shreveport as soon as I crossed their lines, and escaped by the barest chance—I’d hate to say what it cost me in bright, yellow gold.” He said he’d arrived in the night, but not wanting to be seen, had come in the back way, using his key as before, as soon as he’d had some sleep. Then: “What brought me, Adolphe, is the news I picked up in Shreveport—’tis tremenjous.”
“Later, Frank—it’ll keep.”
“Just now, I could use a bit of food.”
“I’ll get you some,” she chirped.
“Not so fast,” I said, blocking her from the door.
They’d been playing it as though they hadn’t seen Burke before, but there’d been that exchange of looks, and I took it for an act. If that seems slightly unbalanced, there were things setting me off, like the prickles I felt all over me at her friendly concern for his hunger, and what it was going to be like with me out of the way and him under foot all the time. I stood there waving the gun, trying to calm myself down, but feeling my gorge rising. I said, licking my lips, swallowing now and then, and spacing my words kind of queerly: “Mr. Landry—it’s all quite clear to me now—why nobody seemed to mind—that I was shoving off. With someone to take my place—with another godpappy to claim the Shreveport cotton—to pick up that million bucks—why should anyone mind?”
“You talking about me?” she asked. “Well I don’t!”
“I’m not talking—about any particular one.”
“Then who are you talking about?”
“All,” I said. “Everyone.”
“Not me,” said Burke. “Do I care what you do?”
“Oh yes, you,” I told him, feeling for some reason humorous. “Take it easy. Stick around—I’ll explain where you come in.”
“And certainly not me?”
That was Sandy. I said: “Especially you.”
Then to Burke, pushing the gun at him: “What’s your tremenjous news?” And when he didn’t answer: “Come on, talk, spit it out!”
“The Rebs—” he began.
“Now we’re coming,” I said. “The Rebs?”
“Have overplayed it! They’re trying to bag two armies, instead of going for one! They’ve divided their forces, they’ve left their fortress unguarded! ... ’Tis all I know, me boy! I thought Adolphe might like to hear it!”
“Why should he like it?”
“Well—he lives here, after all!”
“You’ve heard the Union’s going to march up there?”
“Aye, if this dam goes out they’ll have to!”
“And then there’ll be the cotton?”
“ ’Twas the whole reason for this fiasco!”
“That’s all I wanted to know.”
I waited, no doubt with a grin on my face such as Samson may have had before he pulled down the temple. I said, mainly to Burke, but including them all: “There’ll be no march on Shreveport, no million made by claiming the Shreveport cotton. That dam is going to be built! It can’t be done, but I’ll build it! So calm down, one and all—Burke’s tremenjous news has been superseded by Cresap’s tremenjouser news!”
“But Bill,” said Sandy, “you’re leaving!”
“Oh no I’m not,” I said. “Nobody’s leaving! And so no one is tempted to, so there’s not any reason to leave, we’re doing away with this cotton, this devil’s bait we all sold our souls to grab—we’re burning it, right now!”
“No!” she screamed. “No!”
“Not me own cotton?” wailed Burke.
“The same old stuff!” I said. “Surprise!”
“Bill, you can’t!” yelled Sandy.
“Oh yes I can—hand me my bag,”
Nobody handed it to me, but I grabbed it up and piled on back to the kitchen. They were all on top of me, but a maniac waving a pistol doesn’t get interfered with. It was a chorus of despair as I opened the bag and dug into it, coming up with the same swatch of papers, done up in the same Navy oilskin, I had tucked away there six long weeks before. I lifted the lid on the stove, jammed everything in, and poked it down with the gunpoint while Sandy yelled warnings. I banged the lid on again, and waited while the flames licked up. In five minutes I opened the stove up, and nothing was there but red, black, and gray fluff, curling around. I holstered the gun, picked up the bag, told Sandy, “Come on, let’s go.” But I didn’t get out of there before Mr. Landry told me, a venomous look in his eye: “Maybe you build that dam, but it’s not going to stand, I promise you.”
“It’ll stand till the fleet gets down.”
“We’ll see about that, Mr. Cresap.”
With Sandy, who was so furious he couldn’t talk, I clumped around to my own flat and flung the bag inside. When I got down to the street again, she was there talking to him, her eyes squinched up mean, her mouth twisting around. When I saw she was making spit, I fetched her a clout on the cheek that sent her staggering back to the front of the Schmidt store. Then, grabbing Sandy’s arm, I marched on down to the courthouse and turned in my pass. Then, still with him to take me through, I headed for the bridge.
Chapter 26
I DROVE THEM LIKE ANIMALS; BUT driving was what they wanted, I have to say that for them all—the 29th Maine, which was hewing the trees,
and the colored infantry outfits, known as the Corps D’Afrique, which were detailed as labor. I worked under a Captain Seymour whom Sandy took me to, in the woods on the Pineville side, which smelled of cut wood, where various squads were at work, chopping and sawing and hewing. But he wasn’t at all pleased, in spite of what Sandy had said, about my experience, my previous rank of lieutenant, and my willingness to help, at having a boy wonder, as he called me, “standing around in the shade, with his hands stuck in his pockets, telling me what to do.” He had a Down East way of talking that annoyed me more or less, and I said: “I wouldn’t dream of doing it—how the hell do you tell someone that sounds like a goddam quahog sucking water up with his foot and squirting it out of his eyeballs?” That kind of slowed him down, and he asked: “What’s your idea about it?”
“What do you think?” I fired back. “I figured to sign up.”
“... You mean, join? My outfit?”
“Now you got it, stupid.”
“What about that leg?”
“Leg’s been there before.”
He called to his supply sergeant: “Pair of pants for this recruit—extra longs! Blouse, if you got one!”
“Shirt’ll help,” I said.
“And a shirt!” he bellowed.
And then as we stood there, I in my balbriggans, Sandy helping me into the blues, Seymour asked in a quiet way: “All right, Cresap, what am I doing wrong?”
“Everything,” I said. “As well as everything else.”
“Hell, I know that! But what?”
“To begin with, I’d say you have compression, tension, and function all stewed in one fearful and wonderful pot, so each fouls up the other.”
“Never mind the Trautwine stuff. Say something.”
“I will, don’t worry. Those brackets you’re putting together—trying to put together—are done wrong from the start. Positioning the trees as they fall, then nailing the boards on, then hauling them down to the water, is just asking for trouble. Before it even gets wet, that set, pretty weak to start with, is so rickety from the trip through the woods that it won’t hold up in the water, can’t take the strain when you try to work it with lines—and that’s why it goes floating off. Haul your trees to the water’s edge first! Then put together your bracket! Brace it with proper struts! Saw planks into four-foot lengths, notch ’em, and shove ’em between. That’ll take care of compression. Then lash on line, and tighten with clubs used as turnbuckles! That’ll take care of tension!”
“Where the hell do we get this line?”
“Navy,” said Sandy. “We got it.”
“Go on,” the captain told me.
“Then nail on your boards. They’re function.”
“I got it now. All right, then we—”
“Goddam it, who’s supposed to be talking?”
“I’m sorry, Cresap. What else?”
“When that’s all done, when the thing’s ready to go, notch the butts of those trees and lash a shackle on. Something a hawser can bend to, so the boats can give you help. Something that’s going to hold, so you’re running the set and the set’s not running you!”
“... Anything else?”
“Split your men into gangs, each with a job assigned that it rightly understands. Then, ’stead of laying around all the time, asleep under the trees, they’ll know what to do and do it. If the gang doesn’t speak English, pick out one man who does. Get some system into it!”
“You can work a gang?”
“Anyone that has sense can.”
“We haven’t been having much luck.”
“That’s because, instead of letting them know what you want, you’re making speeches at them about Lincoln, telling ’em how much he loves ’em. They don’t care about Lincoln—all they want is their grub and to be told what to do.”
“Then you’ll tell ’em?”
“I think first I have to tell you.”
We fixed it up, since I had to sign on as a private, that I’d tell and he’d beller, as he called it, but actually, by the time I’d been there an hour, I had it all to myself, doing the telling, bellering, and cussing all at the same time—but with some slight success. I don’t say I built the Red River dam. Colonel Joseph Bailey, of a Wisconsin outfit, thought the idea up and was in complete command. I do say that before I got there, things were in a mess, but that after I got on the spot, they began to go right.
By sundown, we had six sets in place which I anchored by floating crosslogs down, then letting them wash up on the brackets and lashing them in place, somewhat out of water to give a bit more weight and offset the tendency to float, which the whole thing suffered from. The Navy helped in grim earnest, and Sandy was there all the time, first on one boat, then on another, taking charge of lines, capstans, or barges, as they came up with stone for the cribs—or with bricks, or busted-up sugar mills, or whatever they could find for ballast. The third night, after I’d eaten the handful of beans my squad had cooked for mess and was stretched out beside the fire, Sandy suddenly appeared, squatting down beside me with a very different look from the one he had been wearing, which hadn’t been too friendly toward me. When I’d told him hello, he drew a deep breath and said: “Bill, I want to apologize.”
“Oh?” I asked him. “What for?”
“Various things. You heard about the Warner?”
“The boat I was to take? No. What about her?”
“She got sunk.”
“Ouch. You mean the Rebs got her?”
“Not only her but the Covington. And not only her but the Signal. And not only her but the City Belle, a boat that was coming up with a bunch of replacement troops. Scores of men were killed, and it’s just one more thing. But what gets me is this: Suppose you had been killed? I’d never forgive myself. And I’d like to come out and say it: I glory in you, Bill. You burned those papers first, before the Warner left. And told everyone why—including me. Including her.”
“Leave her out, if you don’t mind.”
“All right. She has her troubles, though.”
“... What troubles?”
“Death. She was in a funeral procession.”
“When was this, Sandy?”
“Today. The Forest Rose had to heave to and idle in the current while this hearse went over the draw, a little bunch of people following along behind. It was kind of pathetic, at that. No horses now, you know—at least available to the Rebs. Pulling the hearse was Mr. Landry on one side of the tongue, with a rope harness hooked to one singletree, that fellow Burke to the other. She kind of brought up the rear, in that black dress she wears, looking damned cute, with the wind whipping her bottom.”
“I said leave her out! And her bottom!”
“Bill, you’re still stuck on that girl.”
“I’m not. I hope never to see her again. But—”
“You are. If you weren’t, you’d be the first to tell me that bottom is all mine, if I can manage to get it. Well, I’d love to, I own, if it weren’t—”
“You want a puck on the jaw?”
“... Who died, do you have any idea?”
“What do I care who died?”
“I’m just curious, that’s all.”
Two days later it was done, and we’d succeeded only too well. We’d got a rise all right, five feet of it at least, reaching back to the head of the falls, and enough, you’d have thought, for the Great Eastern to turn around in. Still the Navy wanted more depth, and as no bracket could possibly hold out there near the middle, we put six cribs in, like the ones on the other side, and the Navy filled them with stone. But even that wasn’t enough, and the Navy drove pilings, in threes braced with planks, and hauled four barges up that they moored to the pilings with hawsers. The water rose still more, until you stood there holding your breath, watching the whole thing shake from the pressure backed up behind it and its own will to float, knowing as you did that something had to give. The whole Army started to yell that now was the time, or never, that the Navy had to come dow
n. They built a fire, a great thing of pine logs that blazed to the sky from the burning resin, so it looked like a scene from hell. The idea was to give light for the boats to come down by, but still nothing happened, and word came through the woods that the Navy didn’t have steam. That was the last straw, and the yells began to sound ugly.
Still, I was done, and the captain was, and we were stretched out by his fire, sipping some coffee he had, when suddenly Sandy was there. By then, the Navy or anything like it had kind of a rat-poison look, so the welcome he got from the captain was not of a rousing kind. But when he came up with the news, and made it pretty curt, that the reason no boats could come down was “this insane fire you’ve built, that has blinded all our pilots,” it kind of quenched the discussion, and I could feel Sandy out, as I thought he had stuff on his mind. “Bill,” he said when the captain subsided, “this may be nothing at all—a mare’s nest pure and simple. But I keep thinking about it.”
“Go on,” I said. “Shoot.”
“My boat,” he began, “the Neosho, is moored to the right bank up there—and of course we don’t keep a lookout posted. Just the same, a seaman was there, in the pilothouse polishing brass, when he saw a skiff upstream—a joeboat, they call it. Square-ended thing that seemed to be drifting down. Then he didn’t see it, that’s all.”
“You mean it disappeared?”
“That’s it. It was there, and then it wasn’t there.”
“Could have grounded. Maybe bushes hid it.”
“Maybe. Maybe.”
“What did your skipper say?”
“Told the boy thanks.”
“Well, that’s not much of a help.”
“Bill, I can’t shake it out of my head, the threats that man made, your friend Mr. Landry, as we left that day—and he wasn’t just talking to talk; he meant something. And he has some motive, I gathered, for wanting this dam to go out?”
“Just a million dollars is all.”
“That’s in cotton, up at Shreveport?”
“That he can grab with Burke as godpappy.”
“Providing, Bill, that the Navy doesn’t get out, and the Army, to save its face, marches upriver again, ’stead of down?”