Джеймс Кейн - Mignon

“What are you getting at now?”

“Your Union allegiance, Mr. Landry.”

“It was coerced from me. I never took any oath.”

“You took your freedom, though.”

“I was born free!”

“You were set free when I proclaimed you loyal. Then loyal you ’ re going to be! Take off your bag, Mr. Landry. You’re not going anywhere.”

“I’m going. And I warn you I’m armed.”

“I know you’re armed — I can see the bulge in your pocket. I didn’t myself think necessary to strap on my Moore and Pond. But you start out of this place, I’m following you down to the street, I’m hailing the guard at Biossat’s, I’m having you taken in, and I’m charging you as a spy!”

“Then, my departure must wait on yours.”

“Meaning, I’m to leave your house?”

“I hope you don’t make me say it.”

“I don’t go till I have your parole.”

“Parole? Parole? ”

“Your word to me you’re going to stay put!”

“Mr. Cresap, I think you forget yourself.”

“Mr. Landry, I must have your promise.”

“Sir, I will not accept dictation—”

“Goddam it, Mr. Landry, do you think I’m playing games? Speak, and speak now, or I will! I’ll not let you up easy, and they will break your neck!”

“... Sir, you leave me no choice.”

“Say it.”

“I pledge myself not to join—”

“—the enemies of my country—”

“—the Confederate States of America.”

“I’ll accept that.”

“Then, sir?”

“Leaving now, Mr. Landry.”

I turned on my heel, walked out of there, and returned to my own flat. I went to the front room, peered out on the street, and everything looked the same. I wondered if it was true, the news that Landry had heard. I tried to think what it would mean to me. I was still trying when the knock came on the door. I let her in and followed her into the sitting room, but got kind of annoyed when all she did was stare. “What’s the matter?” I growled. “Something on me?”

“Willie, I don’t know you any more.”

“Don’t worry, it’s me, the same old one.”

“But how could you talk to him like that?”

“You don’t see the reason?”

“I certainly don’t.”

“Then maybe you need talking to, too.”

She started to rake me over for how ungrateful I was, “after the way he’s treated you, almost as a son, asking you in all the time, letting me give you your meals, putting you in on the cotton...”

“ I ’ m sick of that damned cotton! ”

“Well, it’s his , you know!”

“Listen, I don’t know what’s his, what’s mine, or what’s the Navy’s any more, but I know this: He’s been deceiving himself, with all this talk of his about the half-war-half-peace we’ve got, the life-in-death that was inflicted on the Ancient Mariner. Don’t you know what that life-in-death was? That albatross on his neck? Don’t you know what he meant, that Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the man who wrote that poem?”

“... What are you talking about?”

“He was an opium-eater!”

“What’s that got to do with Father?”

“The cotton’s his opium, that’s what. He thinks, in this half-war-half-peace he imagines, that it’s every man for himself, anything goes, devil take the hindmost. That’s not true. It’s not half-war-half-peace; it’s war, as Dan Dorsey’s been trying to say, and it’s not any the less war that your father doesn’t like it and it doesn’t like him! All of a sudden, with the guilty conscience he’s got, he makes a break to help Taylor, and that’s wonderful, isn’t it? But the cotton’s there all the time, it’s the main thing he thinks about, as it has been from the start, and though he was hot to join Taylor, he was dead sure that I, as an honorable man, would cut him in on the tin that we would make when I auctioned to Union buyers after a Union court awarded me! Well, he can guess again; he can’t have it both ways! I’ll cut him in, now that I have his parole, but I’d never have cut in a Reb who was out there shooting at me — and even that much I don’t pretend to like! I told him once, and I tell you again, the cotton stinks — and I only live to see the day when I’ll be shut of it forever!”

“ But taking it off her doesn ’ t stink? ”

“Her?... Her? ”

“You know who I’m talking about!”

“Is she all that you’ve got on your mind?”

“Until that cotton is sold, yes.”

“There’s a war going on that concerns you.”

“What do I care about war?”

“All right. Now we know.”

We were atremble, and from the beautiful time we’d had, after breakfast that morning, it was cold, bitter, and ugly.

It was true, all right; we’d had the stuffing kicked out of us and skedasis was complete. We were on our way out and overnight, from being a quiet riverside town, with flowers perfuming the air, Alexandria was a hellhole on earth, with wounded men limping in, horses dying in the streets, splintered boats crashing down the falls, and in place of the perfume a smell of death, rot, and war. Hanging over it all was danger, because maybe we wanted out, but Taylor had different ideas and meant to bag us all. He surrounded the town and kept tightening the noose, his fires out in the woods creeping closer and closer, his skirmishers giving no peace. He cut the river below so no supplies could come up, and suddenly rations were short. Also water was short; with thirty thousand men and five thousand horses penned up in place built for four thousand, with no wells and cisterns not refilled since the rain Taylor arrived in, the supply ran out fast. That left Red River water, but it was so foul with corpses, swill, and filth that the boys got desperately sick, and their filth was added to the original filth.

Worst of all was the drought in Texas, which made the river low, so it didn’t take a rise as it generally did in spring. It fell, and the Navy got stuck in the mud, ten of its best boats, up above the falls. That’s what hung things, because instead of continuing its march the Army had to halt, dig in, and try to get them out. And what it decided to do was put in a dam of sticks and stones and trees just above the town, to bulge the water up for enough depth to float the boats. It was such a weird idea that I hadn’t the heart to look. The Red River current, which I’d already clocked with my eye by watching snags float by, was at least nine miles an hour, and trying to hold it with a makeshift pile of brush struck me as pathetic, like trying to hold an elephant by tying him with knitting yarn. Just the same, they started in to do it. Colored troops put in a pontoon bridge from a ramp in front of the courthouse to a spot on the left bank, which they finished in one day, and construction crews streamed over, so work could go forward from both sides of the river at once. Every day boats would go up through the swing draw out in the middle, with barges of stone and rubble, and axes would speak all the time, upriver from Alexandria and from the woods above Pineville.

And all during that we sat, she, Mr. Landry, and I, in their sitting room, for an even queerer three weeks than the other three weeks had been. He made it up with me, coming over after she left the same day as our brawl, to thank me “for the information, which Mignon has just mentioned to me, about Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I hadn’t known it before, but just verified it in the Britannica , and am truly grateful for it.” I said you couldn’t prove it by me, but I did hear it in college, and he repeated that such things to him were important and he counted himself in my debt. Then he asked me to supper, and I resumed taking my meals with them — a good thing, since the hotel ran out of food and otherwise I’d have been out of luck. We didn’t eat well but we ate, dried stuff from the store, prunes and apples and apricots, beans and peas and rice, stocked in barrels and sacks and kegs. He wouldn’t allow me below to help bring anything up, and once when I glimpsed the kegs I suspected they were the reason, and wondered what was in them. Every day he’d go out for a stroll, to pick up such news as he could, and I’d go down to the courthouse, which had been converted into a hospital and stank of wounded men, to pester for my pass. In between, the three of us would talk.