Not in a good season, though. Evening before last, he had passed near the route of march of General Sherman's vast army and seen fire in the heavens — Kilpatrick's horse leading the way and signaling its position to the infantry in the rear, a frightened farmer told him. Little Kil's riders were advancing toward Columbia through an avenue of burning pines. It was that conflagration filling the night sky with a furnace glow and that of the day with plumes of resinous smoke.
'I heard what them boys is sayin',' the frightened farmer declared as Charles drank from his well. 'They say they're gonna wipe this hellhole of secession off the earth. The say here's where treason began and here's where it's gonna end.'
'I wouldn't take that lightly,' Charles advised. 'I'd watch your womenfolk and expect the worst. This war's turned mean. Many thanks for the water.'
It now appeared that Sherman, who had vowed to make Georgia howl, then done it, had kept on going due north, bypassing the Ashley district. Charles walked slowly up the lane with a weary wonder in his eyes; the place appeared untouched by the war. Then he began to change his mind. He saw noticeable wear on the buildings and a marked absence of slaves. How many of them had run away?
The signs increased as he drew closer. Tall weeds grew where lawn had spread before. A wagon without front wheels and axle lay abandoned near the office. He went all the way to the house, a dirty, bearded, ragged specter with a revolver on his hip, and no one opened a door or raised a window.
A few azalea bushes around the wisteria-clad chimney showed early buds; the weather had been unusually warm. He passed the chimney and continued along the half-oval of the hard-packed drive, spying a woman previously hidden by a pillar. She rose from her chair with a vague smile as he approached.
He stopped, thankful that he could soon pull off his boots and bathe his blisters. To the small, stout woman on the piazza he said politely, 'Hello, Aunt Clarissa.'
She frowned, studied him — especially the revolver and the wrapped sword under his arm — a few seconds more. Then she raised her palms to her cheeks and screamed in mortal fright to announce his homecoming.
That brought people all right. Two of the house servants ran out to take charge of Clarissa. How grizzled and stooped they looked, Charles thought as he waited to be recognized. It took them a minute — they were hovering around his aunt, who struggled — and during the interval he wondered whether none but the old, tired blacks had stayed.
'Charles? Charles Main?'
He tilted his hat back but couldn't manage a smile, even though he was nearly as astonished as Clairssa had been. 'Yes, Judith, it's me. What are you doing here?'
'I'm dying to ask the same of you.' She rushed to embrace him; felt his arms and torso stiffen at her touch. His garments were filthy. They reeked.
The two servants, one so old he hobbled, helped Clarissa inside.
The hobbling Negro gave Charles a curious stare but no greeting. Charles knew the man recognized him. In the old days, a stern master would have laid on the cane to punish such disrespect. Things had surely changed.
To answer Judith, he said, 'I lost my horse up at Petersburg. I came all the way down here hunting a remount.'
'Are the trains running?'
'Some. Mostly I walked. When I left North Carolina, I figured I'd find a horse — or a mule, anyway — before I got this far. Guessed wrong,' he finished soberly, as Orry's older brother stepped onto the piazza. In shirt sleeves, a ledger under one arm, Cooper recognized Charles and let out his name with a whoop. Husband and wife shepherded the new arrival into the well-loved, well-remembered house, but Charles hardly saw it. One thought obsessed him.
On the curve of the drive opposite the one where Charles had approached, motion stirred a tall, thick row of untended ileagnus. The motion suggested birds squabbling in the dense foliage. In the excitement of Charles's arrival, no one noticed.
On the other side of the shrubbery, after the front door closed, a narrow-faced young man with a smooth beige complexion crawled away through the weeds. He was barefoot, and his old jeans pants had a yellowing star on the rump. When the seat of his pants had worn through, his mother, who later died, had patched the hole with white flannel and imagination. The star was the North Star — the freedom star — and when his mama had sewn it on, he had still been property.
He had been sent to Mont Royal to estimate the number of men still present on the plantation. He had been born there and spent most of his life in the slave community. Now he had some real news to report.
Charles bathed in a big zinc tub in Cooper and Judith's bedroom — the same spacious chamber that once had belonged to Tillet and Clarissa and then, he presumed, to Orry and Madeline.
He had forgotten how it felt to have his long hair so clean it squeaked when he rubbed his palms over it. He put on a shirt and pair of pants borrowed from Cooper and went downstairs. His arrival had caused a great stir. There were nigras swarming all over the house — damn near as if they were Cooper and Judith's equals, he thought without animosity, just recognition of another remarkable change. He met a muscular, well-proportioned driver named Andy and a handsome black woman named Jane, who shook his hand in a grave way as she said, 'I've heard of you.'
Her steady stare, not hostile but not friendly either, conveyed meaning with perfect clarity. What it said was,
Maybe he was being too thin-skinned, but he thought that was what she meant. Despite her attitude and her reserve, she still impressed him in a positive way.
Philemon Meek, the new and elderly overseer, shuffled in to join them for the midday meal — the most bounteous they could provide, Judith said with embarrassment. Each plate held a bit of saffroned rice, a few field peas, a one-inch square of corn bread, and two strips of chicken cooked for the second or third time.
'Don't apologize,' Charles said. 'Compared to the fare up North, this is a feast.'
The dining room, its rich woods gleaming, was both familiar and comforting. He started eating rapidly. Meek watched him over his half-glasses, and it was from the overseer that Charles presently heard of the guerrilla band operating in the neighborhood. Runaway slaves and army deserters, they were like the bummers traveling on the fringes of Sherman's army.
'But this bunch has stayed put in the low country,' Meek said. 'I'm told the leader is an old chum of yours — nigra named Cuffey.'
Mildly startled, Charles finished the field peas and started to wipe his mouth with the back of his hand. He noticed Marie-Louise, grown now and quite pretty, staring at him. The skin above his beard turned pink as he snatched his napkin from his lap.
'Cuffey,' he repeated. 'Imagine that. Think Mont Royal might be in for some trouble?'
'We've been preparing for that eventuality,' Meek said.
'It appears to me you don't have many men left on the plantation. Except for your driver, those I've seen are gray as the moss outside that window.'
'We're down to thirty-seven people,' Cooper admitted. 'Barely enough to run the place. I thought of closing the rice mill entirely for a while, but how would we survive? I don't mean just Judith and Marie-Louise and Mother; I mean everyone. Especially the older nigras. They're too worn out and frightened to run away.'
'Which is what the rest did, I presume?'
Cooper nodded. 'Liberty's a magnet for human beings. One of the strongest in creation. That's a point I frequently made to my father, to no avail. For a while I also forgot it myself, I'm ashamed to say. Ah, well. Why rake up the past? I want to hear the news from Virginia. Have you been in Richmond at all? Seen Orry or Madeline?'
To Charles's left, Clarissa sat with her meager meal untouched. Hands folded under the table, she studied him with the eyes of a threatened child. She had been doing so ever since they sat down. Those eyes held the kind of awe and fright with which long-ago European folk must have watched the pony-mounted Mongols storm out of Asia.
