The Brightest Day, the Darkest Night, page 27
‘You would?’ she asked, surprised by his answer and wondered if he had.
He smiled at her. ‘Have you not yet learned, Miss Ellie, that reason is only skin deep. It is our emotions that drive us … protect us … betray us – not reason.’
Again, she felt as if he was talking directly to her – as if he knew. It bothered her. Was her true nature writ so large upon her face that this old man could see it?
‘Consider it,’ he said, ‘the great minds, the philosophers of old, whose wisdom has been sent down through the ages. Put a sword in their hands. Clad them in blue or grey, with the mad generals shouting at them to kill or be killed. He paused. ‘What would happen, Miss Ellie?’
‘They would refuse the sword in the first instance,’ she answered, ‘because of the intellect.’
He never said ‘yea’ or ‘nay’ to her, only gave her one more conundrum on which to dwell. ‘It is another interesting proposition,’ he said, scrutinising her intently, ‘the battle between reason and original sin.’
That night, sleep would not come easy. Her mind wrestled with all that the old man had said. She wondered from where it was he got his wisdom. Day after day out here in the backwoods of America with his peach orchard and sucking his empty pipe. Why didn’t his like ever end up in the White House at Washington, or the Confederate White House in Richmond?
She had asked him.
‘I’m not good with words,’ he replied, ‘not good with the big city words. The things I know, I know. Nothing fancy, plain as that old peach tree. The buds come, the peach grows. I pluck ’em. I eat ’em. Next year they grows again. That’s all I know. Can’t explain it better than that! Peaches get eat. Sure they do … and people too.’
Her own thoughts were anything but ‘plain as the old peach tree’. Half of her wondered what on earth she was doing here, journeying to the ends of the earth? What did she expect to find there? The girl, Emmeline – Patrick’s sweetheart? And what then? Stephen had told her that Lavelle was not in Louisiana. He didn’t know where her husband was. Nor, it seemed, had Patrick known. Nobody knew. Lavelle had disappeared, or was dead. This last thought she utterly disbelieved without fully knowing why. He was somewhere in this Great War. She just knew it. But on which side? Some said that in excess of a quarter of a million Irish were in uniform on both sides, the bulk with the North. She was unsure as to where Lavelle’s allegiance would finally lie. He was passionate about ‘freedoms’ – whether now it was the ‘republican’ freedom of the South or the ‘greater’ freedom of the Union of States, she could not be sure. That Patrick’s, dear Patrick’s sympathies had lain with the South she was not surprised at. Stephen’s she could not have guessed.
Finding Lavelle seemed an impossibility. She wondered if perhaps he too was still searching for her? At this stage, with the passage of years, it seemed a doubtful endeavour. She could not expect a love to be still so enduring. After how she had defiled it.
She got up, went to the window. The moon, bright-grandeured, splayed over the land, seeming to soak up the singing sound of Quince’s stream, so that the song-notes rippled upwards into the brimming light. She turned to see the peach orchard. Thought of the old man’s words again. Life was plain and simple – if you kept it that way. As she watched, a peach, heavy on the bough and blushed with life, dropped. The fruit, ripe to its core, fell like the moon, yellowing its way to Earth.
It decided her. That and the state flag Quince had given her. Pointing out to her the figure of Virtue, dressed as a woman warrior. The state motto Perseverando – by persevering. Again she thought Quince could see into her soul. Virtuous she might not be but she could at least live out the other call of Virginia – and persevere. She would not go back. Reason would be put aside and she would continue South. At least meet Patrick’s Emmeline.
In the morning Quince bade her goodbye, gave her a sunburst of peaches to bring with her, smiling while telling her, ‘The peach alone is wise.’ Then pointed her on the way.
‘Ah, Richmond, sad, sad, Richmond. It is another land,’ he echoed after her.
She gave the silvery grey its head, pondering the miles with all the old man had said.
EIGHTY-SEVEN
Trains always made her reflect on life, and as Ellen left Richmond behind all the events of the previous weeks seemed to evaporate, be back there in some other geography. Freeing her mind.
Her story was not yet finished. That was how she saw it. And she had to see it out to the very end. Whatever that ending, whatever the twists and turns. Whether her story had already been written, she just finding her way through it as she went, she didn’t know.
It was the old question for her. Once upon a time she thought she was the writer, the puppeteer of her own destiny. Then, she had thought the opposite. Surrendered herself and her every thought, word and action to the higher power. Now she wanted to take back that power to herself. It was to be yet another new epiphany.
She had always sought it, the always further off land of self. Was love, she wondered, the greatest transcender to that land, or the greatest pretender? At any rate, she now followed its uncertain path, as the train plunged her southwards, transcending her into that other America – Dixie. What she could do there in Dixie – if anything – she was unsure.
She snuggled into the corner between the window and the seat back, her mind afflicted by all that she had lost … and thoughts of Louisa and Lavelle – all that still remained to be lost.
EIGHTY-EIGHT
Labiche Plantation, Louisiana
Ellen took in the woman addressing her.
She had arrived at Le Petit Versailles, the previous day, already exhausted from the steaming Southern climate. Even at night, she had noted, when darkness came, it still did not yield any respite from the draining humidity of the air. Exhaustion, or no, the splendour – the vastness – of the house occupied by this woman, was such that Ellen regained all her energies on first sight of it. Her immediate thought being, what a fine hospital it would make, with its different rooms for surgery, recovery, sleeping quarters, storage and a well-fitted kitchen.
Madame Labiche, when Ellen had introduced herself as ‘Patrick O’Malley’s mother’, had welcomed her with true if somewhat reserved Southern fashion. The woman then would hear of nothing but only to bid one of the black slaves, to take Ellen, to have her bathed and fed and rested. They would talk in the morning.
Ellen had slept late … and been left undisturbed.
Madame Labiche, it appeared, had been absorbed by urgent plantation business, until almost evening time.
Ellen listened as the woman told her of Patrick.
‘Your son, Patrick,’ Madame Labiche began, ‘first came to us as a guest of the gallant Captain Joyce – a gentleman and a true friend to this house, and more latterly a loyal defender of our Republic.’ The plantation mistress sucked in her breath, narrowing further the purse of her lips. ‘Often they were accompanied by a companion of your son’s – the unfortunate Mr Moran.’
‘Why unfortunate?’ Ellen asked.
‘My husband and I never thought Mr Moran to be fully qualified as a gentleman … and indeed we were proven correct,’ Lucretia Labiche replied. ‘Mr Moran traded his country’s flag … for a … tignon!’
‘I don’t understand,’ Ellen interjected.
‘A tignon, Mrs Lavelle …’ Madame Labiche said tartly as if her guest should know, ‘… a tignon is a headdress, worn by white “ladies” – though General Butler would not call them so. White “ladies”,’ she re-emphasised, ‘of high colour who are to be found in New Orleans. However, the deserter received his just deserts and the Pontchartrain claimed the temptress – we shall not mention her name.’ There the matter rested.
‘Poor Oxy,’ Ellen thought to herself, ‘to America to claim a deserter’s bullet.’
Ellen had so many questions to put to the impenetrable Madame Labiche but doubted if she would receive any further enlightenment on matters Madame deemed rested. So she asked no question, wanting the other woman to proceed, which Madame Labiche commenced to do.
‘Your son corresponded briefly with us. He was a friend to my own two boys, Lamarr and Lovelace.’ She reclined her head almost imperceptibly towards the black-draped mirror.
‘Oh, Madame Labiche, I am sorry …’ Ellen said, moving towards her, but the woman raised her fan, the slight but considered movement blocking any intimacy.
‘They will not have died in vain, if the tyranny of the North is broken, as broken it shall be,’ Lucretia Labiche said, apparently unmoved by the memory of her loss. ‘We were then surprised, within the past few weeks, by your husband, who arrived here, hands bloodied by the death of your son … and in the service of the Yankee interlopers. Your paths must have crossed!’
So matter of factly did the woman speak – each topic of equal weight with the next – that the import of what she was saying was almost lost on her listener.
‘Lavelle …?’ Ellen began. ‘Patrick …?’ She raised her voice as the incredulity of what she was hearing, sank in. ‘What are you saying?’ Ellen demanded of the woman. ‘What are you saying … that Lavelle was here … my husband? That my husband killed my son Patrick?’ She got up, went and stood in front of the woman, scrutinising her face, demanding some sense of her.
‘You have said it, Mrs Lavelle. There is no other way in which to put it.’
‘Oh my God – how – can’t you just tell me … instead of all this?’ Ellen beseeched.
‘It was an accident, Mrs Lavelle – an unfortunate accident of war. That your husband and son were both sharpshooters – but on opposite sides …’ Madame Labiche let it hang there.
Ellen was in a state of shock. How could Madame Lebiche possibly have known that it was Lavelle’s bullet that had delivered her dead son to her? What must have been the chances of such an event? Out of all who fought on either side? Though she had heard stories of brother killing brother, even … father and son. It was a sign … a further cruel punishment, like Mary.
She was aware of the woman watching her, evaluating her conflicting emotions. ‘An accident of war,’ Ellen said, barely audibly. ‘An accident of war?’ Then, louder to the woman. ‘But there are no accidents of war, Madame Labiche. All war is intentional. War does not just happen of its own accord. People … men … go to war. Your sons, your husband; my son, my husband. They are sent by other husbands and sons … and they go.’ Ellen said, in a state of detached reverie. The woman approached her, said nothing, just touched her arm and withdrew. It was, Ellen knew, a journey of a thousand miles for Lucretia Lebiche.
‘Thank you!’ Ellen said softly.
Noiselessly the slave girl appeared with pepper-mint-flavoured water. It helped revive Ellen.
‘How did Lavelle know to come here?’ Ellen asked, after a moment, the answer not really mattering. Only that he had been. Had been and had scarcely gone again, before she had arrived.
‘The letters,’ Madame Labiche replied.
‘Letters?’ Ellen queried.
‘Yes, letters. Mr Lavelle found them in your son’s possession … with a book.’
Ellen started. So it was Lavelle who had taken the book, Stephen’s book – her book.
‘The letters were kind responses from Emmeline to a soldier at the battlefront – slightly misguided … open to misinterpretation,’ the woman answered, for once without Ellen’s asking.
‘Can I see them?’ Ellen asked, desperate to have something of Patrick, some understanding of his state.
‘They were returned to the possession of this house … and destroyed.’
‘And the book?’
‘The book? Oh, the book was Mr Lavelle’s own – not the property of the house – the poems, if they could be called such, of the Reverend Mr Donne! Your husband took it when he escaped our custody.’
‘Escaped custody?’ Ellen asked, again uncertain of what she was being told.
‘He was an enemy soldier, we imprisoned him in the Sugar House – the slaves freed him. Your husband, Mrs Lavelle, has cost me my overseer, Mr Clinch, who pursued him, and Beauty, the plantation’s hound – neither of whom have returned. Now I must be both overseer as well as master of the plantation.’
There was no hint of self-pity in how Lucretia Labiche spoke, only the pragmatism of the day-to-day truth the woman grappled with, untainted, or so it appeared, by any defeating emotions.
Ellen needed time to think, to be on her own. She excused herself and retired. As she lay in the opulent splendour of Le Petit Versailles, Ellen wondered if hers was the bed in which Patrick had lain, or the ill-fated Oxy or even Stephen? She hoped it was Patrick’s and turned her head into the comforting whiteness of the pillow. Patrick had been here, Oxy too and Stephen – then Lavelle. All of them drawn here, and now her. The house was the magnet. She wondered at the name Le Petit Versailles – Little Versailles – wondering too, at the lifestyles lived in the muddy South, which aspired to those lived in the great palace of the French monarchy – before the Revolution? At least the Labiche arrogance hadn’t stretched so far as to call it by its original name or, worse again, ‘Le Grande Versailles’.
Again and again, her mind returned to Lavelle … and Patrick. She wrestled with the awful tragedy of it all. Lavelle her husband, Patrick her son. How could it have been? What chance out of all the speeding bullets between North and South? But that was it … it had not been chance … it had been ordained. Had it also been ordained that they had spoken before Patrick had died … that Lavelle should discover his terrible deed? He, also, be punished, forever to live with Patrick’s blood on his hands – as well as her desertion. She drove her head into the pillow, willing it to have been Patrick’s; her tears seeping into its fine fabric. Fabric soft as skin.
The next morning, Madame Labiche offered some insights into southern living – and southern women – to Ellen.
‘I am afraid, Mrs Lavelle, us plantation mistresses have, undeservedly, been made into the stuff of legend …’ Madame Labiche explained over a breakfast table, heavily laden with fruits, hams, cheeses and pigeons’ eggs delicately stuffed with a sage and parsley concoction. ‘… and by none more so than the Northern novelists,’ she continued. ‘To them we are symbols of the South – its haute grandeur, its undeserved wealth, its grande dame lifestyle. We are but porcelain dolls in flouncy dresses, decorative and much admired but of no earthly use.’ Madame Labiche laughed. It was the first time Ellen had heard her do so. ‘If Monsieur Labiche were to hear me talk thus …’ She let the sentence trail off and started a new one.
‘Do you know I can bleed a hog as good as any man?’ she proclaimed. ‘Accompany me and you’ll see – if your Yankee stomach is not too delicate,’ she challenged.
‘I am no Yankee’ Ellen retorted. ‘I am Irish and a nurse. I serve equally the fallen of both sides … and the sights of blood hold no fear for me.’
Madame Labiche smiled and summoned one of the slaves. ‘Cicero, our Irish visitor wants to see how we southern ladies fend for ourselves. Go fetch a hog and an axe,’ she ordered.
The slave nodded and left but already the mistress of Le Petit Versailles was reaching under her pretty cream crinoline dress and removing the hoop which bouffanted it out from her body on all sides.
Cicero returned with a sturdy axe and the trio made their way to the hog pen and cornered a well-padded hog. The slave neck-wrestled it out of the pen, the hog’s squeals attracting some of the other slaves.
‘Hold it steady, Cicero!’ Lucretia Labiche ordered as the slave pinned down the struggling hog.
Ellen continued to gape in amazement as the mistress of the house swung her axe to and fro, resisting its inertia, building it up towards its full axis. Then Madame Labiche brought the blunt head of the axe four square down on the skull of her victim. The stunning blow seemed to shudder through the ground towards Ellen. Calmly, the woman put aside the axe and then drew a knife from the folds of her dress and slit the nut-brown throat of the animal. At this a cheer went up from the onlookers. She then manhandled the animal over to a largish, shallow container and straddled the hog’s hindquarters, pulling its head backwards towards her so that its lifeblood gurgled downwards into the large, receiving bucket. A procession of four slaves then carried the lifeless hog to a waiting cauldron of scalding water over which a wooden frame had been erected. The hog was hoisted on the frame, pulley-style, then lowered into the water to scald the bristling hairs from its body. When again it was hoisted free, Lucretia Labiche was ready to dismember it.
During the process, she stopped, turned, then proffered the large knife she held towards Ellen. They all watched her, this white woman from the North. Steadily, Ellen took the knife from the woman, stood in her place and began to further dissect the animal. Slowly but with assured hands, she worked, conscious of the silence, all eyes watching, to see the Yankee fail … the knife slip, she gash herself. Gradually, then, the sound arose again, small, unconnected sounds at first. Then more sounds, connecting to those already made, until it became a chorus of assent … and then a clapping from the assembled slaves. Only then did Lucretia Labiche come to her, take Ellen’s knife hand in hers and hold it aloft in the air. The still warm hog’s blood on the knife trickled down over its handle, onto their hands and wrists, like some ancient ritual.
‘Now we are sisters,’ the woman said to Ellen. ‘Sisters in blood.’
Later, at supper, a succulent loin of pork, scalded head intact, was served. Ellen paused a moment considering the dish. It was not today’s victim. The one she had seen Madame Labiche skin and bleed, and from which she herself had carved cuts for curing that would some day appear at this table.
