Forty-One. The Guns at Labadieville
Chapter Forty-One
The Guns at Labadieville
The war came into that street as talk, and for the first time since he had come into the state Nelson could hear the talk.
That was the whole difference the language made in the first part of that year. He got the news the same day the news got there instead of a week after, and he got it in the shape it came in and not in the shape somebody had cut down to give him.
The news came four ways. It came off the bayou, from the men on the boats, who talked to whoever was at the landing.
It came out of the store on the place, where a man buying tobacco heard what the storekeeper was saying to somebody else.
It came from the two men on that place who had wives on other places and went to see them on a Sunday with a pass.
And it came from Numa, who said things before Duplessis said them, and let a thing out at the end of a row, in half a sentence, and went on.
The New Orleans business got to Bergeron’s place in the first week of May, about a week behind the fact.
Nothing happened.
The cane was hoed the second time in the second week of May, on the day it was going to be hoed.
The ration came out on the Saturday, a peck of meal and three pounds of pork.
Numa was in the ground before four. Duplessis came out at eleven.
Nelson turned twenty-two in February and went on hoeing in May and nothing in his life was different on the fifteenth than it had been on the first.
He had not expected anything and he watched for it anyway, and there was nothing there to watch.
—
What changed was slower and it was all on the other side of the ledger.
The sugar did not move. There were hogsheads standing under the shed from the crop of ’61 that should have gone down the bayou in February and were still standing there in June, and then in July they were still standing there.
The store began to be short. First of one thing and then of another, and then the prices in it went strange, and then a man’s credit at it was reckoned in a way that nobody could get an account of.
And Bergeron began travelling. He was away four days in June and a fortnight in July, and the second time he came back he had two men with him who walked the place with him for a whole afternoon and looked at the sugar house and looked at the people in the street and went away again.
Duplessis was gone by the middle of August. Nobody told the street where or why and it was not hard to work out, because every white man on that bayou between twenty and thirty-five was going somewhere that summer.
After that Bergeron came out at eleven himself, on a horse, and rode the headland, and was gone by one.
Nelson stood in a row in September and watched him do it and thought that the arrangement had not changed by so much as a minute; only the man in it had.
—
The thing that frightened the street that summer was not soldiers. It was Texas.
A man named Robichaux on the other side of Thibodaux took the whole of his people west in July — sixty-odd, in carts and on foot, with the stock — and word came back down the bayou in pieces over about a month.
That they had been twelve days on the road to the Atchafalaya.
That two had died. That a family had been broken up on the way to hire two men out at a place they went through.
That nobody knew where any of them were.
That was the shape of the danger and everybody in that street had it plain by August: that a planter who thought the army was coming would put his people on a road going west, and that a road going west had no bottom to it.
Nelson took it in a particular way that he could not have said out loud to anybody there.
He had been sold once and moved eleven hundred miles by other men’s arrangements, and he knew exactly what it cost, and he knew it in a way that the men born on that place did not, because they had never been made to do it.
He had spent three years getting to where he was: a man with a name in a street, who could sharpen, who was on the second watch, who had a place at two or three fires, whom Numa kept putting on the ditch below the sugar house without explaining it.
He knew to a certainty what the west end of a road did to all of that.
There was no way of saying any of that in that street without it sounding like a man who did not want to be free.
—
In the autumn the rumour came up the bayou that they were making Black soldiers in New Orleans.
It came in about the middle of September and half the street would not have it.
It was a thing a boatman had said. Then it was a thing two boatmen had said.
Then a man at the landing had it that there were three regiments of them and that they had officers of their own colour, which was the part nobody could get down at all, and men stood in that street in the evening and argued about whether such a thing was possible in the world.
Nelson did not argue either side of it. He asked one question, of four different people over two weeks, and it was always the same question: where are they.
New Orleans. Down at the forts. Somewhere below the city.
Nobody could tell him one thing about Virginia.
—
They began cutting on the twentieth of October and the mill lit on the twenty-first, and Nelson went onto the second watch at the furnace under the batterie, the same as the two years before.
The guns started on the morning of the twenty-seventh.
It was somewhere up above Labadieville, seven or eight miles, and it was a sound he had never heard and knew immediately, a flat knocking coming across all that level ground with the sound of it arriving long after whatever made it, and it went on for a good part of the day.
Nelson was inside the sugar house.
He was on his second hour. There were three men on the platform with ladles and Anténor at the batterie and a kettle coming up, and the flue could not be let down.
So he fed his fire.
He fed it for six more hours while the guns went, and he could hear them under the mill when the mill was between stalks, and every man in that building could hear them, and Anténor struck the batterie five times that day and every strike of it was good sugar.
—
The column came down the bayou road on the twenty-ninth and thirtieth.
Nelson saw it from the second field. Infantry going by in the road on the far side of the bayou for the better part of two days, in blue, with wagons and guns, and a band at one point in the afternoon, and it went on so long that men stopped standing up to look at it and went back to work and looked at it sideways.
And behind it and beside it and mixed all through it there were people walking.
Not soldiers. People off the places. They were on the road and on the levee and in the fields alongside the road, whole families of them, carrying things, and they came out of every place up that bayou as the column came past it, and by the second afternoon there were more of them in that road than there were soldiers.
Nobody on Bergeron’s place had to be told what it was. Nobody had to be told anything. The road was three hundred yards off and it was going by in daylight.
—
Twenty-eight people went off that place in nine days.
Nelson had it exact, because he had counted the street in his first three days on that place and had never stopped counting it. There were eighty-nine people at Bergeron’s on the twenty-seventh of October. On the fifth of November there were sixty-one.
Whole families went. Rosalie’s mother went and took Rosalie and two others, at night, and Nelson found out in the morning like everybody else.
Zénon went with his wife’s people. Fielding went, on the second day, and came and told Nelson he was going, and Nelson said, “All right,” and shook his hand, and that was the whole of it.
Ovide went.
He was one of the eleven born on that place.
He was twenty-six years old and had never in his life been further from that street than Thibodaux, and he brought Nelson his cane knife on the last Sunday in October and asked him to put an edge on it, which he had never done in three years, and Nelson took it and did it and gave it back and did not say anything about it either.
Two days later he was gone and he took the knife.
Jonah stayed.
He did not say anything about it, to Nelson or to anybody in Nelson’s hearing, in either language. On the first Sunday in November he went up the tramway into the swamp with the sack folded under his arm and came back at the middle of the afternoon with it full.
—
Nelson worked at it for twelve days like a sum, which is what he had instead of an answer.
He asked everybody he could get to. He asked a man at the landing and he asked a boatman and he asked a soldier on the levee road who was eating and who answered him civilly for about a minute.
He asked where the army was going. He asked what was done with the people who came in behind it.
He asked whether a man could get taken on for wages and what the wages were and who paid them.
He asked, twice, whether there was any way in the world for a man to get word to Virginia.
What he got was this. The army was going west, toward Berwick, or it was going back to New Orleans, and the soldier did not know and said so. The people who came in were put in camps at Donaldsonville and at Thibodaux and at the city. There was talk of wages. Nobody he asked had seen any wages.
And Virginia was where the war was, and there was no road to it from Lafourche Parish that any man he spoke to could describe.
Then Basile came back.
He had gone on the second day with the column and he was back on the twenty-second of November, and he had walked from Donaldsonville, and he had lost thirty pounds and had a bad foot.
They had put him on a shovel at the fortifications.
He had been on it three weeks. There had been no pay of any kind and the ration was less than Bergeron’s and there had been nowhere to sleep out of the weather, and when he said he wanted to go he was not stopped, because nobody there had any particular interest in him one way or the other.
He said the thing that went round that street for a month: “They ain’t got nothing for you. They just ain’t got nobody stopping you.”
—
The other half of it came in December, and it came in the yard, in front of everybody, and Nelson understood every word of all three sides of it.
An officer came out from Thibodaux with two men and stood in Bergeron’s yard for about an hour.
Bergeron came down. They talked in the yard by the steps, in English, and then Bergeron said something to Numa in the other thing, and Numa answered him, and the officer said something to Bergeron about the answer, and Bergeron put it into English for him.
What it came to was this. The crop was to be got in.
Sugar was wanted and the mill was to run.
Bergeron would swear whatever there was to swear and had, in fact, already sworn it in Thibodaux in November.
There would be an accounting of the hands and there was to be a rate of wages set for them by and by, and the officer said “by and by” in those words, and there would be no interference with the place from the army so long as the sugar was made.
And there was a thing said about the people who had gone. The officer said the army was not in the business of fetching them back and was not in the business of keeping them either, and Bergeron said he understood that perfectly, and they left it there.
Then the officer got on his horse and the two men got on theirs and they went back down the road toward Thibodaux, which was nine miles, which is better than two hours at a walk.
Numa turned round and sent the second gang up to the sugar house.
Nelson went. He was still, on the fourth day of December in the year 1862, with the United States Army nine miles off down a road he could see from the field, the property of Onézime Bergeron of Lafourche Parish, and there was not one document or word or act anywhere in the world that said otherwise.
The mill ran until the eleventh of January.
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