Sang Pour Sang

By W. Ryan Smith

In the Spring of 1864, Adam Pierce is a Louisiana creole of color passing for white. His home, Natchitoches Parish and the Red River Valley, is being destroyed as the closing days of the Civil War bring destruction. Pierce, a depressed castoff of campaigns long past, enlists once again. The war gives Adam a sense of purpose, but what he isn&rsqu

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press
• Release date: Oct 17, 2018
• ISBN: 9781946160454

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Go to now, ye rich men: weep and howl in your miseries, which shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted: and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver is cankered: and the rust of them shall be for a testimony against you and shall eat your flesh like fire. You have stored up to yourselves wrath against the last days. Behold the hire of the laborers who have reaped down your fields, which by fraud has been kept back by you, crieth: and the cry of them hath entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabbath.

James 5:1-4

Contents

Le Ruisseau, April 1862

1

Le Côte Joyeuse, March 1864

2

3

4

5

Le Pinière

6

7

8

Terre de Feu

9

10

11

12

Sang Pour Sang

13

14

15

16

Le Ruisseau

April 1862

1

Loud. Above all else, they were loud. The federal shells slashed through the forest canopy and burst in sprays of shrapnel, leveling trees and killing men. Sergeant Adam Pierce stumbled on behind the line. The acrid powder smoke filled his lungs and scorched his throat; at times, it blinded him so that he had to reach for the blanket roll of the man to his front to maintain his place behind the line. He chased them through the bottomland and scrub brush, until the rays of the sun shone through a wide gap in the forest. There, the regiment came to the edge of a plowed field. There they stood, and there they were torn apart.

†

When Adam came to, he was lying on his back and staring at the sky. His ears rang like he had just emerged from inside a clanging church bell, but this was his first assurance that he was alive. Then the pain hit him. He cried out and tried to sit up, but everything he saw—the distant trees and the staggering men—danced around him in a dizzying swirl. He had to lie back again. He shut his eyes, but this was no use: in the darkness, the screams of the injured and dying were even more frightening. He found himself weeping in fear, eyes wide-open. When the uncontrolled sobs quit his eyes came back into focus. He saw his palm was held out and floating idly above him. Around him, more distant and contorted figures darted in and out of view.

He felt the urge to leave. Sensation returned to his arms and he tugged furiously at his gray frock coat. It was smeared with blood, covered in Tennessee mud and pasted with fallen leaves. Two brass pelican buttons gave way and he shoved first one hand and then the other about his torso. He was searching to find his wound.

I’ve got to leave…God, he thought, let me find my body whole.

He tugged furiously at his shirt, angry that it kept him from feeling his own skin at a desperate time like this. He moved his search below the waist.

His anguish was beyond unbearable. His desperation to find his wound was more demanding of attention than the excruciating pain the search was inflicting. It was a mad hunt. Yet in an instant, his trembling hand reached a painfully tender left hip and he felt the running warmth of blood across his broken skin. He whispered aloud, Mercy.

A voice from above came to him. It was loud and, in its suddenness, startling.

Sergeant Pierce? Is that you? Lord, I thought you was done for! Tell me, friend, where does it hurt? A bearded figure hovered over him. Where does it hurt Sergeant Pierce?

The man sounded more curious than concerned. He was Private John Franklin Henry, a lanky, un-soldierly man from Company C. It was Henry who once set the company’s Sibley tent on fire at Camp Moore while trying to burn a louse-infested pile of blankets. The irony that Sergeant Adam Pierce might be saved by the most hapless man in the regiment was not lost on him.

It’s my hip, Adam gasped. Jesus, Mary! I think it’s shattered to pieces.

It was a Yankee shell that got you, yelled Henry, matter-of-fact. Took down two sections. I seen it! Not all of them dead though… blew you clean back down to the bayou. Say, have you seen your rifle?

Henry was rummaging around Adam the way one does when he misplaces his spectacles in the study. Adam drew his attention away from Private Henry and noticed the sound of the battle was moving away from them. He tried to focus on one of the shapes moving in the near distance. It was then he realized his feet were elevated; he lay with his head down the slope of a little rivulet cutting through a steep bottom, his feet pointed toward the crest of the ravine he had topped just moments before with the rest of the 18th Louisiana Infantry.

Private Henry was staring at him.

Our boys are up in the plowed field now, he said. Yankee infantry and two guns to the front. Plenty of them… saw more than one standard. We’re catching hell. You know Lieutenant Cloutier sent me to help with our wounded on account my rifle’s all fouled up. Won’t shoot at all.

Private Henry’s voice trailed off.

Adam let his head fall backwards into the soft leaves. He tried to look beyond the trees at the sky. He drifted off for a moment and relaxed his muscles. He closed his eyes. It was then he felt two trembles in the earth, followed by what sounded like a shouting mob moving toward him.

Then the thicket above him burst with a rush and shearing of a thousand leaves caught floating and twisting in the smoke. A throng of frantic men appeared at the crest of the ravine and darted down the slope, running, falling and tumbling toward the little bayou and the two men at the water’s edge.

The tide of hysterical infantryman enveloped the two men in the ravine, the one lying prone and staring in bewilderment at the spectacle before him. The other man was crouching, expressionless, and idly frozen in a prior moment’s offering of water from a dropped federal canteen.

†

Raindrops thumped on the ground cloth that was draped over his face and most of his body. He was cold, but he dared not move to even shiver. To his relief his body was mostly compliant. Two men were carrying him on a stretched blanket and it seemed he was floating, though not without frequent knocks or sudden changes in direction.

The men were carrying Adam back through the heavy brush where the once tightly packed regiment had crossed before emerging at the plowed field. The men carrying the blanket tried one approach, and then backed up and tried another. On the last effort, a clinging branch caught the ground cloth covering him just below his nose and pulled the cover from his face.

The light from above shocked and burned his eyes. Pine branches hovered overhead, pointing down at the mess those men had left at their roots, praying for solace in the forest to pass over the foreign scene below. The earth was churned in every direction with paper cartridges, shucked masses of clothing, dropped bandages, the castoff munitions of war and its fallen human participants littering the ground.

Often, perhaps every few seconds, several musket balls, the residual of some distant volley, would cut through the branches. The green leaves were clipped from the wood where their massed siblings floated in their given arrangements. They drifted down toward the men on the ground, torn from life in April, long before the proper close of their time on earth.

Passing through the brush the men carrying the litter reached a clearing and laid Adam Pierce down. Here now were two dead men, rebels, by the look of their non-uniform clothing. The dead men appeared as though they had been discarded, as one might toss the wax paper and mold-eaten poke sacks of a spoiled ration. They were shaped by tangled wads of clothing, ripped and soaked with blood, limbs twisted and cocked in uneasy positions and pale faces crowned with greasy matted hair. The closest man’s left hand was draped on the gawking and open-mouthed face of his silent neighbor.

They were the ones who died during the trek on the blanket from the plowed field. Now, they were left here for a later party to find. One of the walking men pulled Adam off the ground and threw him over the shoulder of a third man, who began to carry Adam in this manner farther from the edge of the battle. Adam lifted his chin up, watching the men with the blankets move back toward the fray, and disappear into the brush and haze.

He drifted in and out of consciousness a few more times, choosing not to open his eyes again even as he regained his senses. Instead, he only listened, noting the changing sound of terrain under the feet of his purveyor: the stamping through leaves and cracking of twigs in great crunching steps. This was followed by the sloshing of slick, clayey mud, and then the soft brushing of grass on wet wool trousers. Here, in the tall, moist grass, he was again laid upon the ground.

The powder burns on his face and eyes were bothering him so that it was quite painful to keep them open. Instead, he held them shut, even as a line of men began to form around him, growing all the time in numbers and stretching in two directions from him.

Adam rested and gathered his thoughts, but the growing cries of the wounded men were just as unnerving as the sounds he was hearing before the stretcher men pulled him in from the bayou by the plowed field. It was there the 18th Louisiana was torn to pieces. He felt a longing for comfort, reaching out his arms around him, and he found the hand of another man on his right. The man yanked his own arm quickly away and sobbed, muttering Leave me alone, leave me alone.

On his right, Adam found the wrist of another man and held on to it for a moment. It seemed dry and unnoticing. Adam dropped the wrist suddenly, jerking his own arm back to his side. His impetuous movements brought him a shot of searing pain and a terrible tingling sensation across his torso. His thoughts again drifted into a more comfortable blackness, a void, an oblivion. The rain was now falling more steadily on the ground cloth, which covered his face. He was thankful for it, that no other stick had callously pulled it away. He felt the creeping damp of the earth in his backside and coolness on his wet feet, which were protruding from the ground cover.

Le Côte Joyeuse

March 1864

2

The rain was falling in torrents and the temperature had dropped so that it seemed like ice might fall from the midnight sky at any time. A man dressed in a poncho and clinging to a melting short-brimmed black hat passed through the brush and braced against the gusts of wind as he climbed the hill before him. Following behind were four federal officers dressed in civilian clothes and then behind them, at about sixty yards, was a regiment of dismounted Federal Cavalry.

Crashes of lightning revealed the movement of the men on the surface of the hill in sporadic moments that each man instinctively used to plunge to the earth, sloshing in the mire and cursing quietly at the cruel necessity of it. They were not moving silently by any means, but noise mattered little in the calamity of the intense thunderstorm. They sought only to keep a low profile on the hillside.

The man in the poncho leading them made a hand motion to the officers at his side and two of them left immediately for the regiment behind. The group of three that remained continued, making but a few paces when lightning flashed again across the heavens and they were greeted with a stern warning.

Halt!

The man in the poncho stood completely erect. He knew he was surely spotted and thought that was the best way not to get shot. He called back at once, shouting with his hands cupped around his mouth.

Easy there friend…easy. Colonel Vincent sent us out earlier.

The sentry retorted.

Damn you to hell if you don’t give the sign!

The three men caught sight of the motion of the sentry leveling his short rifle at them. The man in the poncho cried out before his counterpart got any more nervous.

Joseph is that you?

There was a tense silence that lasted too long for the federal officers, they stirred nervously, gripping their small arms hidden under their saturated overcoats. The man in the poncho held his palm out behind him to the officers. The rain was falling so heavily now, runoff from brim of his hat rushed down the back of his neck. He cocked his head to side to redirect the current and squinted his eyes in the direction of the sentry.

No…It’s Robert…who…who’s out there?

The man in the poncho grinned.

Robert! It’s me…the colonel sent us out earlier…we didn’t get the sign.

There was another pause, one of the officers around the man in the poncho started to speak but stopped, momentarily forgetting himself. Robert! We’ll catch our deaths out here!

All right, said the sentry. It’s…Gibraltar. And damn you to hell if you tell anyone I told you.

We’ll see you shortly Robert, the man in the poncho said, gotta go back right now.

Wait! Ain’t you coming through?

†

Adam Pierce shuffled his way down Front Street in Natchitoches, staggering a few paces in front of the grand LeComte townhouse, laced with iron balconies above high archways at the street level. He crossed Rue St. Denis and proceeded west at an indolent pace. The storm had passed, and the people were out. Two late-adolescent girls and their maidservant were watching him from the LeComte balcony above. He knew them. Elise and Cora. They were grand in every respect, classic French ladies that could charm the shrewdest miser out of his last dime. They didn’t need money. They were well clothed, educated and full of life, so unlike everyone else around them. The depression and rationing of the war had famously done little to tarnish their radiance. Adam could feel their eyes on him as he trudged by, or maybe he just wanted to.

Bonsoir…good evening, Monsieur Pierce, Elise called out suddenly from above.

Adam saw Cora tug at Elise’s arm, but could not make out the expressions on their faces in the dark. He stared at the silhouetted figures above him for a long second and then he tipped his hat. He opened his dry mouth and started to mumble a response but stopped himself, unable to continue. He moved on without further hesitation. Aunt Ti’, their maidservant, moved effortlessly despite her considerable size. She floated across the balcony and began shuttering the array of batten doors one by one, as she had done ten thousand nights before that moment. Adam could hear a drunkard shouting along the riverbank behind him.

Cross! He says to me…What the devil have ye done with that man’s harrse?

This was followed by a round of insidious laughter from a number of fellow revelers. Adam knew they could be refugees, or maybe they were hands attached to the army in some way, or detached as scouts even, but they were not locals and they were not the men who could save the town from what was coming.

The hour was late. Leaving the fat-burning oil lamps of Front Street meant passing into a shadowy streetscape bisected by a single narrow ally before reaching the next block. Brown’s Dry Goods was first on his left. It was closed most of the time, for want of regular shipments of merchandise since the fall of New Orleans and Baton Rouge.

It was rumored that the federals controlled much of the lower Red River valley. Still, old man Brown sat propped in a bautac chair guarding the front stoop and watching Adam with seemingly little interest, and probably some measure of indignation as the drunk, crippled and papist river rat tramped by.

Good Evening, Adam said as he touched the tip of his charcoal plug hat with a subtle nod, a gesture any gentleman–drunk or sober–would recognize. Old man Brown said nothing and seemed to stare only further into the midnight abyss. Brown’s only son was away with the army in the east and it was rumored around town that old man had not heard from him in some time.

The brick Caspari and Gozine cottages were next. Caspari’s was all dark and quiet but emanating from Gozine’s house came the sound of an old Creole tune, rolling off a feminine tongue in the perfect melancholy company of a shrill violin. Three of the four front doorways were battened for the evening. A glimpse through the fogged glazing of the last door revealed only shadowy, molten figures pacing the floors through dim candle light.

Adam paused at the wide breadth of Second Street, composing himself before attempting the crossing. Just as he readied his legs once more, three soldiers passed in front of him on the street. He studied them for a moment. They were dressed in undyed jean wool shell jackets with brightly polished brass buttons. A single dark band running down the outer leg seam, plunging over muddy infantryman’s bootees, marked their baggy trousers of the same material. The un-dyed material gave the three soldiers a peculiar appearance, so that they almost glowed in the moonlight.

Adorning their crowns were a perfect variety of infantryman’s headwear: a slouch hat, an old shako-style militia broad-brimmed hat and a regulation, government issue kepi. They carried no equipment save a ceramic tankard each, which they hoisted in a jubilation of less than perfect unison about every eight paces. The shortest, the one with the most generous beard and the rather awkward shako, gave a subtle nod as the trio passed Adam.

Adam presented his own bottle, though to a man they paid him no further attention. Following a taste, he watched the troop pass north on Second Street into the night, finally dropping from his vision as a blotch of a white shifting mass fading out as they topped the hill by the tall, galleried Carver house.

Confederate reserve forces and home guard units were moving throughout the area clearing out munitions and aiding the civilians in evacuating before the Yankees arrived. It was rumored that General Richard Taylor, son of Zachary Taylor—the shortest-lived former President of the United States—was retreating in earnest before an enormous federal horde, who were said to be supported by dozens of ironclad gunboats bristling with cannon. The war was coming to Natchitoches.

The moonlight shone bright above the fortress-like turrets of St. Francis Cathedral and cast a crenellated silhouette on the packed earth street before Adam as he made his way to the livery behind the parish courthouse. Construction on this new church had begun ten years prior, the previous chapel—itself a relic of the colonial days—having burnt to the ground mysteriously one St. Patrick’s Day. It was Adam’s cousin, Charley Conley, who found the effigy of Paddy hanging from a noose off an oak branch on the lawn of the parish courthouse that morning.

Grueber’s livery straddled the ditch between Second and Third Streets and would be his domicile for the evening. Adam rooted out a large gray cat in the horse pen, prowling no doubt for an evening meal. Scratching a hovel out of the straw and pulling a saddle blanket off one unattended beast he noticed a thick paper flyer fall from its folds. He held it toward the street’s lamplight and read it:

Attention Citizens! The enemy being once again at our very door, it behooves every man to come forward and assist in defending his home. For the purposes of organization, a meeting will be held this evening 7 o’clock, at the New Court House. Let every man attend!

He balled up the paper in one hand and tore as he wadded it up. In the morning, he would worry with waking to the new world coming to wrest everything that remained from him.

†

Schoolgirls were gathering on Second Street, making their way to the Catholic academy above the town. They were singing schoolgirl rhymes as they climbed the hill and woke Adam Pierce. The early morning’s sun was streaming in from across the river and illuminating the stable as though a great door in the sky had been pulled open suddenly and the darkness and all it masks were burned out in a jarring instant. Adam was fully exposed for the townspeople to see, hunched, as he was near prostrate on the side of the ditch between Second and Third Streets. The livery provided only a solitary wall and shed roof for shelter.

The Natchitoches Adam awoke to was in 1864 a place almost foreign to its own natives. The federal control of the cotton markets below Alexandria on the Red River, the cursed blockade, the occupation of New Orleans two years prior and the fall of Baton Rouge last year had stagnated the economy such as only the eldest of the parish had ever seen. Nearly all the male inhabitants under the age of forty-five were at war and the residual population remaining behind were these days nearly as terrified of their own soldiers as those of the enemy.

Adam straightened up after catching a glimpse of Bishop Martin and an entourage of two young priests in long black cassocks, followed in turn by four nuns making their way down Second Street in his direction. Adam pretended he was studying his overnight companion’s front leg and hoof and bid an unanswered Bonjour. Truthfully, Adam owned no horses and generally performed no duties these days that required their use. His cousin Claude Moran kept the ferry going now.

Leaving his overnight companion, Adam descended St. Denis Street. Then he crossed to Horne and proceeded to Front Street along the river. As he passed Prud’homme’s townhouse, he could smell a heavy breakfast of squab and toast emanating from the rear kitchen building across the brick courtyard from the dwelling. The two and one-half story Creole townhouse had four of its five front doors shuttered from the night before. The northernmost was open and Adam caught a glimpse of a house servant dowsing lamps and shooing a gray cat from an envious perch on a plush side chair in the front parlor. It was Adam’s other nocturnal companion.

When he reached Front Street three boys of about ten, street urchins really, watched him keenly from the river side of the street as he moved north. They had just reached the top of the bank with an assortment of tin cups, bottles and tankards clanking noisily in their hands when Adam stepped onto the street, startling them. There was no doubt that the vessels had been borrowed from the sleeping revelers on the riverbank below.

Passing the post office, he tipped his hat, a dirty, weathered charcoal plug of English import, at the portly old man Vignaund who was filling his normal morning perch by the post office steps. Adam crossed through the Texas Street plaza, took Washington Street and moved north on foot. The air was fragrant with ash and the smell of burning wood. He knew the aromas drifting in on the morning breeze brought news of the progression of the northern army. The wind brushed across the surface of the river and pulled up the sand off the riverbank, tossing it about the street above in little hurricanes that danced in front of the street urchins as they made off with their morning loot.

†

The early sun was already burning through the panes of the murky window glass at the Coffee House in Grand Ecore. Martin Fosdick, proprietor, peered through with squinted eyes and bushy blonde brows as rays of light illuminated a million floating particles in the stale, heavy air of the room. He pushed a navy and brown checkered rag across the table where his late-night guests had kept him up hurrahing Old Jeff Davis and Kirby Smith, too! into the morning hours. From what he understood, they were government agents moving through the countryside seeking provisions, recruiting volunteers—of which there were few since the draft had been in effect for two years now—and finding the best routes for the retreating Confederate army.

His own frailties kept Martin Fosdick from the army. Martin was born with one leg painfully shorter than the other. He compensated with an odd-looking triple-soled shoe on the shortest limb, but still he was forced to shuffle noticeably across the floor in an unnatural gait. He walked like the old field hands do when they leave the furrows at the call of last bell. His parents had been among the first American settlers of the village. When they died during the fever-season eleven years prior, they bequeathed him enough to open the coffee and boarding house. Now Martin hardly ever left the place.

The war years had been the hardest since the fever had nearly killed off the whole village those eleven years ago. Government rationing and the blockade kept his stocks so depleted that the few customers that came through these days were rarely offered more than substitution coffee and grain whiskey. But the three strangers last night paid him well in government notes and did not once complain at the meager fare, which was after all, the best he had to offer for any occasion.

What Martin overheard last night seemed ominous. General Taylor’s army would be moving through the area soon. The three strangers had come from the south, ahead of the retreating rebels. Word of this much-reviled retreat had already reached Grand Ecore from the waning river traffic, but Martin acted interested anyhow, like he did with all of his gentlemen customers. The men were boarded upstairs now. When one would drop a saddlebag on the floorboards above little trickles of dust would fall from their roots in the ceiling and float across the room. Between his clanking of glasses and ceramic mugs as he tidied up from the late evening he heard them moving about above him, stomping, gathering things and heading down the creaking stairs outside.

The first two men passed in front of the shop without stopping and headed with their baggage, percussion carbines and map cases down the street toward the ferry. The third, the elder of the group, opened the front door and stepped into one of those piercing rays of light shining through the eastern windows. He called out to Martin in a friendly manner. The room still smelled of horse sweat and stale liquor. The open door sent an immediate rush of wood smoke and tree pollen pulling through the air in the room. A horsefly rushed like a whip behind Fosdick and slapped against a windowpane.

We appreciate your hospitality Mr. Fosdick. I wish you the best of luck in the coming days.

The man paused briefly for dramatic effect and then continued, There would be no shame in boarding up and leaving town. I can’t tell you what Billy has in mind for this place.

Martin figured he must look as helpless and incapable of defense as he felt.

All right Mr. Boggs. You men watch yourselves now, Martin replied, sweeping the roughhewn floorboards beneath him in short rapid strokes.

The old broom he was using seemed to shed more loose fibers into the air than dust it was collecting from the floorboards in the process. The door closed behind the man with a clamorous sound of finality that rattled a few glasses on the table nearest to Martin. He shuffled to the window at the front of the shop and watched the men make for the livery across the street. He could see that everyone in the village was also watching them and those closest to them stopped to let them pass, measuring their every move with their foreboding eyes.

†

John Pressley Vincent counted the cannons as they passed down the road. The captured soldiers, Louisiana cavalry, looked half-drowned and more disheveled than any group of rebels he had ever seen. Getting the signs was easy enough, easier than even he had thought it would be. The officers of Colonel Lucas’ cavalry brigade were toasting themselves with the spoils of some Louisiana rum captured along with the rebel artillery battery. John Vincent watched them all intently from under the fly of a shelter half stretched between two wagons.

Two years. He thought to himself.

He had been waiting for this moment for more than two years. Soon the plantations all along the Red River would burn. The navy was busy stealing cotton from the secessionist planters.