Back to Wando Passo by David Payne (books to improve english txt) 📕

Not till the fifteenth does Addie learn that Harlan has survived. He writes from Fort Moultrie, where he arrived on Saturday, when the garrison was relieved. Tomorrow, Wednesday, under cover of dark, the boats will take them back. “In haste,” he writes. “Forgive the appearance of the page. A shell has overturned the inkstand. We are under constant fire from Dalgren’s fleet. One can hardly hear to think. The men are tired, but morale is good. The assault on Wagner is expected momently. When I return next week, I shall seek leave. Meet me at the Mills, Tues., inst., at 6 o’clock. I shall only have till midnight. So, my dear, till then…”

The grand assault comes the night of the eighteenth. By noon the following day, word comes that the battery has held, yet Addie has no word from Harlan. None the next day, nor the next. On Tuesday, nonetheless, she is at the Mills House at five o’clock. At six, he isn’t there. Eight comes. Then ten. Finally, at a quarter past, he walks in. He is so thin, so sunburnt! His full lips look chewed and scabbed. His face and hands are clean, and he’s shined his boots, but they’re down at heel. His cuffs are frayed and his uniform smells of powder and is only as clean as clothes can be that have been washed in seawater without soap. And even as he takes off his hat and smiles across the room, she can see the terrible somberness that’s settled upon him, settled on all of them, the somberness of those who’ve looked upon a fearful secret they must keep both from and for the rest.

“Forgive me, the boat…” He takes her shoulders in his hands.

She puts three fingers, tenderly, on his chapped lips. “It’s nothing. I’m so relieved.”

“It’s been impossible to write.”

“I have champagne….”

He looks at it and smiles. “We have little time. In two hours, I must be at the Laurens Street wharf. Let’s take it with us to the room….”

She gazes up at him, forthright, the way she did their wedding night, and goes.

Upstairs, though, things do not proceed as she expects. “Forgive me, dear,” he says, “I disgust myself. I should like to take a bath.”

“Of course.”

“But pour a glass, and sit with me.”

“You are so thin, Harlan,” she says, running her hand over his bare chest, where she can count the ribs.

“As are you. Look at your hands, Addie!”

“I’ve learned to work.”

“Would that you’d not had to.”

“There are worse fates than that.”

“So there are.” He steps into the tub, leans back, sips his champagne, and puts the glass down on the floor. He closes his eyes. “Such a thing as water, hot water…One forgets….” And now he opens them again. “How are you, Addie?”

“I hardly know,” she says. “I work and sleep and dread tomorrow’s news. Little else. But we shall make a crop.”

His eyes study her with a knowing, soft attention she does not remember from before. “You’ve had a time of it, I think.”

“Little enough, compared to yours.”

“You see now what Jarry meant to us….”

She holds his gaze, but doesn’t answer this.

“You know,” he says, after a time, “he’s in Beaufort. Or he was. He was seen. I believe he’s given them intelligence.”

Her heart beats harder still.

“I was certain we would meet upon the parapets. I had such a feeling, Addie, almost a premonition.”

“And did…”

He shakes his head wearily. “If he was there, I didn’t see him. I suspect and pray he’s dead and lying in the trench upon the beach with Shaw and all the rest. They killed Cheeves, Addie.”

“Langdon!”

“Yes. And Haskell, we think. He’s been missing since the tenth. And Johnny Bee. Macbeth…” He closes his eyes and shakes his head. “God, such a night…I hope to never see its like again…. I don’t want to speak of it….”

“No, my dear, put it out of your mind.” She touches his hand, dangling limp over the rim.

“They were three and four deep in the moat,” he says, almost immediately. “The bodies, Addie…” He looks at her with that terrible stare, bemused and vulnerable and deep. “In the dark, we didn’t know who they were till they were almost on the wall…. The cowards, Addie, they sent the niggers in, the Fifty-fourth, to show us their contempt. The Yankees let them take the fire…. They came at eight o’clock, a little before, marching in good order up the beach, and we held our fire and watched them come…. A hundred yards beyond the moat, they charged, and we fired into them…. The whole front of the battery was a streak of fire. It was like tossing pebbles at a cake…. They simply melted, a quarter of their number, perhaps half, in a minute and a half…. The Yankees didn’t even give them scaling ladders. They were left to climb the walls by hand as we rained musket fire down on them. And their boy colonel, Shaw…he wasn’t forty yards from me…he made it to the parapet in the first wave and raised his sword. ‘Onward, boys!’ I heard him shout. Really, he was rather fine, but it was suicide. A dozen balls hit him in the face and chest and down he fell into our ranks…. And still the niggers came…. We fought them on the ramparts, Addie, hand to hand, with swords and bayonets. I have to say, they fought like men, but they had no chance. They could not advance, and to retreat was suicide. It put them back under our artillery…. When it was done atone o’clock that night, they lay tangled in the moat and on the sea beach, rolling in the swash…. There is this new light, Addie, this terrible calcium light they turn upon the walls to blind our gunners. I shall never forget when it was over…. They swept the beach with that, and the fiddler crabs, Addie—hundreds, thousands of them—you could see them creeping from