The child was beautiful—; more beautiful even than its mother. No trace of its father was visible, save possibly about the eyes. It was covered in a fine, luminescent down, like the down at the base of Clementine’s back—; but also like the fine, pale hair on Parson’s cheeks. Its fingers and toes were bunched defensively together, as though it had been rudely roused from sleep. Its eyes were raised knowingly to the heavens, like those in portraits of the infant Jesus. There was something about the eyes, however, that no such portrait ever showed. When I realized what it was I let out a cry of wonder.
Both the infant’s eyes were blind.
I shut my own eyes for an instant. When I opened them the child was close at hand—; almost close enough to touch. I began to hear the sounds of fighting again, very faintly, and see shadowy figures about me in the grass. As I reached toward the child a ball from a musket grazed my skull, clipping a penny-sized scrap of flesh from my ear and dropping me lightly to the ground. The fighting was suddenly all about me, full and murderous and shrill, but the child remained exactly as it was, indifferent to the shortcomings of the world. I lay flat on my back, easeful and expectant, and let the vision fall over me like a sheet.
As I watched it, the child commenced to revolve, imperceptibly at first but with ever greater speed, quickening and blurring along its edges, mustering itself into a ball. Blood was running down my neck and shirt-front but I paid it no attention. I felt invulnerable, sacrosanct. My heart and mind exulted, as though a question I’d long been on the verge of asking was finally going to be answered. Looking closely at the ball, I saw that it was not smooth, but rather cut into a myriad of facets, like the bell-weight to a chandelier. I recognized it at once as the shape from the Hyapatia Lee.
It made sense that the shape should return to me now—: the future it had warned me of had finally come to pass. I let my eyes fall closed, not troubling further about the connection between the war, the spinning ball, and Clementine’s babe. That my child should visit me on the first day of the end of the world seemed altogether fitting.
I AWOKE PERHAPS AN HOUR LATER, blood-caked and bewildered, to a sight no manner of vision could have prepared me for. The grassy slope had been exchanged for a curved wall of mud in which bearded, naked corpses, whole or in bits, were set like crockery chips in an alley. Rain was coming down in sheets—; a man close by, who’d died in the middle of a yell, had a mouth overflowing with it. I recognized him after a moment as the corporal who’d told me about Johnston and Little Napoleon the night before.
I tried to get to my feet, but a heaviness at the back of my skull prevented me. I crawled toward the river-bank on all fours, searching for Beauregard among the dying, knowing that I would never find him there. The fighting ahead of me was as furious as ever—; the farther I crawled, the deeper the shell-holes and higher the heaps of offal grew. The Yankees had two Pook’s Turtles anchored in the river, and the explosions from their shells sent horse-cart-sized discs of mud whistling into the sky. Each wounded man I passed bade me desperately for something — a sip of water, a spoonful of laudanum, a bullet in the temple — but I paid none of them any heed. They were none of them my child, none of them my Clementine, none of them my Redeemer. And I had no further business with any living soul.
I kept doggedly on for perhaps another quarter-hour, oblivious to the shells and seemingly immune to them—: then sobriety returned to me. I dashed for the cover of a stand of choke-cherry trees, kicking like a mule, and had only just reached it when the field folded over on itself, bringing the sky down with it, and I hit the ground as heavily as a corpse myself.
I NEVER SAW BEAUREGARD AGAIN. The fighting at Shiloh went on for another night and day, as fierce and rudderless as ever, but by the time I’d recovered my strength I was miles behind Union lines. I spent the next week no differently than a genuine Rebel would have done—: scuttling from bush to bush, searching fallen men for victuals and water, making as straight as I could for the Confederate front. The Confederacy, however, seemed to be retreating faster than I could run.
News of my failure would reach 37 ahead of me, I knew. I was thus returning willingly to my own execution. And yet it was not self-hatred alone, nor desire for revenge, that drew me back to the Redeemer like a tick to blood—; there was also the fact — or the company, better said— of my miraculous child.
The child came to me each day, some days more than once, and always suddenly. As the weeks went by I saw it lose the sleek, feral look of a new-born and grow plump and wide-eyed and aware. It seemed a strong child, possessed of a fine, loud voice, possibly given to tantrums. Its eyes remained turned inward, as my own left eye is—; and it remained a child whose every gesture bespoke an other-worldly power. It was realer to me by far than the people I encountered, the battered country-side I traveled through, or my own filthy and bedraggled body. The thought that this child — my child — had been born into Morelle’s hands, that he might at that very moment be cooing over its cradle, rocking it to sleep, or looking on as it was fed, never failed to sicken me. By the time I got to Vicksburg I could think of nothing else.
The child would have a hard lot, gifted as it was—; hadn’t I suffered for my own small gift? It would have need of a friend, as it grew, to share its troubles with. That Morelle — or for that matter, Clem herself — had no further use for me was clear enough, but the child—? Surely this wondrous creature, blessed and blighted as it was, had need of practically no-one else.
It was with a fierce determination, therefore, to see my child — to see it and to cradle it, however briefly, in my arms — that I made the long and miserable journey south.
Clementine Gilchrist
HE HADN’T MOVED FOR THE WHOLE TELLING of it and neither had I. He stared down stupidly at his hat. He’d told the story like a fable, or like the history of a saint—; he’d told it like an entertainment. He wasn’t telling it to me at all. He was a character in the fable, and so was I. His telling made us flat as paper.
“That’s fine, Virgil,” I said to him when he’d finished. “But my babe died two hours after she came out of me. On December seventh, at six-thirty in the morning.”
A little breath crept out through his teeth. I could see it even though it was close and dim in the little room. He looked at me.
“She—?” he said.
I got to my feet. “That’s right, Virgil. Her name was Cecilia Ann.”
Conspiracy
IT ENDED WITH A BETRAYAL, Delamare says. What doesn’t? Soon after the war began, the Trade was interrupted. Not destroyed (as nothing so profitable can be killed by any war, religious revival, or act of Congress) but temporarily dissolved. Even this came as a shock to us, however. It was a surprise even to the Redeemer. He’d done his best to get the war begun, thinking we’d fall comfortably through the cracks, only to discover that war, once got in motion, was a grander thing by far than our humble corporation. Little by little our confederates, associates, and stock-holders were caught up in it, to one side or the other—; a goodly number of them forgot, for a brief but shining moment, about the usefulness of money. “It’s a natural wonder, Oliver,” the Redeemer would murmur sadly, and I couldn’t but agree. In the end, however, it wasn’t pollution of the network by high-mindedness (or by fire-eating) that shut the Trade down. The river itself — our long-time co-conspirator — betrayed us.
It should have been clear from the start that the Mississippi would see a heap of action, and that this, in turn, would hamper our own fleet—; but all of us, especially the Redeemer (whom I came to know better and better, as Virgil Ball fell out of favor), had a religious faith in its deviousness. We knew it better than the navy did, we reasoned—; in any case, it was vast enough to give shelter to us all. And it could have done so easily, had it chosen to. Instead it took the opportunity to be rid of us, with no more effort than a horse might make to brush away a fly.