"I don't know how many times we have to whip them to make them understand they're whipped," Alcibiades said.
"You didn't answer my question," Robert said.
"She loves you dearly, no doubt about it, and she'll marry you the day you turn your slaves loose and denounce all this out here," his friend said, waving his hand at the churned field, the horses that lay bloated and stiff in the irrigation ditches, the dead soldiers who'd had their pockets pulled inside out and their shoes stripped from their feet.
Robert put away Abigail's letter and stared at the shells bursting over the hills in the distance. Ten minutes later he advanced with the others in a long gray and butternut line through the whine of minie balls and the trajectory scream of a Yankee mortar Southerners called Whistling Dick. On either side of him he could hear bullets and canister and case shot thudding into the bodies of friends with whom he had eaten breakfast only a short time ago.
The hills in the distance reminded him of a woman's breasts. That fact made him clench his hands on the stock of his carbine with a degree of visceral anger he did not understand.
JEAN-JACQUES LaRose loved clipper ships, playing the piano, fist-fighting in saloons, and the world of commerce. He thought politics was a confidence game, created to fool those gullible enough to trust their money and well-being to others. The notion of an egalitarian society and seeking justice in the courts was another fool's venture. The real equalizer in the world was money.
Early on he knew he had a knack for business and how to recognize cupidity in others and how to use it to drive them against the wall. In business Scavenger Jack took no prisoners. Money gave him power, and with power he could flaunt his illiteracy and whorehouse manners and stick his bastard birth status in the faces of all those who had sent him around to their back doors when he was a child.
According to the gospel of Jean-Jacques LaRose, anyone who said money was not important was probably working on a plan to take it from you.
He was childish, slovenly, sentimental, a slobbering drunk, a ferocious barroom brawler who could leave a saloon in splinters, true to his word, honest about his debts, at least when he could remember them, and absolutely fearless when it came to running the Union blockade out on the salt.
He also loved the ship he had bought five years before the war from a famous French shipbuilder in the West Indies. It was long and sleek, and was constructed both with boilers and masts and could outdistance most of the Union gunboats that patrolled the mouth of the Mississippi or the entrances to the waterways along the wetlands of Louisiana.
In no time Jean-Jacques discovered that the Secession he had opposed was probably the best stroke of historical luck he could have fallen into. He took cotton out and brought coffee and rum in, with such a regular degree of success two men from the state government and one from the army came to him with a proposal about slipping through the blockade with a cargo of Enfield rifles.
Seems like the patriotic thing to do, Jean-Jacques told himself.
He picked up the rifles in the Berry Islands, west of Nassau. Cockneys who carried knives on their belts worked all night loading the hold, and the ship's captain Jean-Jacques paid in gold coin was an evil-smelling man who had a rouged West Indian boy in his cabin. But at false dawn Jean-Jacques' visitors were gone. The sails popped with a fresh breeze, and as the tide lifted him over the sandbar at the entrance to the cove where he had anchored, the waves were green and the coconuts floating inside them thudded against the solidness of the hull and the gulls hung on the breeze above his wake like a testament to HIs good fortune. It was going to be a splendid day, he told himself.
At noon he passed over reefs of fire coral, through small islands that swarmed with land crabs, and saw the steel-gray backs of porpoises arcing out of the water and stingrays and jellyfish toppling from the waves that slid against his bow. The air was hot and close and smelled like brass, like hurricane weather, but the sky was clear, the water lime-green with hot blue patches in it like floating clouds of India ink. He saw a ship briefly on the southern horizon, one with stacks and black smoke trailing off its stern, but the ship disappeared and he gave it no more thought.
Not until he was south of Dry Tortugas, in no more than fifteen feet of water, when the wind dropped, his sails went slack, and a Parrott gun at Fort Jefferson lobbed a round forty yards off his bow.
His boilers were cold. Jean-Jacques ran up a Spanish flag. Another round arced out of its trajectory, this one a fused shell that exploded in a dirty scorch overhead and showered his deck with strips of hot metal.
Then he felt the wind at his back, like the collective breath of angels. The sails on his masts filled and soon Fort Jefferson and the Straits of Florida were just a bad memory.
He sailed on a westerly course far south of New Orleans to avoid the noose the Yankee navy had placed around the city, then turned north, toward Cote Blanche Bay, leaving the murky green pitch and roll of the Gulf, entering the alluvial fan of the Mississippi that flowed westward like a river of silt.
He waited for nightfall to go in. But even though the moon was down, the sky flickered with heat lightning, and at three in the morning two Yankee ships opened up on him, at least one of them using cast-iron cannonballs, hooked together with chain, that spun like a windmill and could cut a deckhand in half.
The twin paddle-wheels on his port and starboard were churning full-out, the boilers red-hot, one mast down on the deck, the sails ripped into shreds. Lightning rippled across the sky and in the distance he saw the low, black-green silhouette of the Louisiana coastline. But he knew he would not reach it. Grapeshot that was still glowing rained across the entirety of the ship, fizzing when it hit the bilge down below, blowing the windows out of his cabin, setting fires all over the deck. Then a Confederate shore battery boomed in the darkness and he saw a shell spark across the sky and light up a Yankee gunboat as though a flare had burst inside its rigging.
As if obeying a prearranged understanding, all the firing ceased and Marsh Island slid by on his port side and he sailed into the quiet waters of Cote Blanche Bay at low tide, scraping across a sandbar, drifting into the smell of schooled-up shrimp and flooded saw grass and sour mud and huge garfish that had died in hoop nets and floated swollen and ratchet-jawed to the surface.
He believed it was the most lovely nocturnal scene he had ever set his eyes on. He breathed the night air into his lungs, uncorked a wine bottle and, with the bottle up-ended, drank most
of it in one long, chugging swallow, until he lost his balance and fell backward over a shattered spar. One by one, his four crew members found him, all of them still scared to death, none of them seriously hurt. They threw roped buckets overboard and drenched the fires on deck, then drank a case of wine and went to sleep on the piles of canvas that had fallen from the masts.
The next day Jean-Jacques discovered his real problems had just begun.
Two dozen mule-drawn wagons and twice that many blacks and Confederate enlisted men arrived in a forest of persimmon, pecan, and live oak trees to take possession of the Enfield rifles. The floor of the forest was dotted with palmettos, the air hazy and golden with dust. The officer in charge of the transfer was Captain Rufus Atkins.
"I thought you was off fighting Yankees," Jean-Jacques said.
"Currently on leave from the 18th Lou'sana," Atkins said.
It was warm inside the trees. The wind had died and the bay looked like a sheet of tin. Atkins wiped his face with a handkerchief.
"We need to settle up," Jean-Jacques said.
"This is Mr. Guilbeau. Assistant to the gov'nor. He'll make everything right for you, Jack," Atkins said.