Chickamauga (22 page)

In September of that year he sent his son, who had reached fifteen the month before, to the Virginia Military Institute. This was at the boy’s insistence, and Isaac was willing: not because he wanted him to become a soldier (he wanted no such thing; he had known too many soldiers in his time) but because in preparation for the life of a planter it did not much matter what form the schooling took. In fact a military school was probably best, since the boy would be less likely to become seriously involved with books. A young man’s true education began when he was through with school and had come back home to learn the running of the plantation, the particular temper and whims of cotton as well as the temper and whims of the people who worked it, meaning Negroes. Besides, the Mexican War was recently over. Young men throughout the South were admiring General Winfield Scott and old Rough-and-Ready Taylor, Captain Bragg the artilleryman who “gave them a little more grape,” and Colonel Davis from down near Natchez who formed his regiment, the Mississippi Rifles, in a V at Buena Vista and won the battle with a single charge.

Early in June, nine months later, when Isaac went to Bristol to meet him at the station, Clive was in uniform, the buttons bright against black facings on the
slate-gray cloth. All down the platform, people were looking at him. Isaac was impressed.

“I declare, boy, you look almost grown to me.”

“Hello, papa,” he said, and extended his hand. Always before that they had kissed.

Three Juries later, when he came home from graduation, tall, slim, handsome, blond, nineteen, he was the catch of the lake. It was not only his looks; he could be amusing, too, as for instance when he gave an imitation of his mathematics instructor, T. J. Jackson, who wound up every lecture covered with chalkdust and perspiration and who sometimes became so interested in solving algebra and trigonometry problems that he forgot the students were present and just stood there reasoning with himself and Euclid. Clive had much success with this; “Give us Professor Jackson,” they would beg him in houses along the lake. Soon, however, his social horizon widened. He was one of the real catches of the delta. Isaac and Mrs Jameson were impressed, and so were the various girls; but the ones who were most impressed were the girls’ mothers. They preened their daughters, set their caps, and laid their snares. At dances and outings he moved among them, attentive, grave, pleasant, quite conscious of the advantages of his position.

Isaac was amused, but he was also rather awed. His own youth had been so different. Past seventy, nearing eighty, he could look back on a life divided neatly into two unequal compartments, the first containing fifty years of wildness and the second containing twenty-odd—nearly thirty—years of domesticity, with marriage like an airtight door between them. Now, though he did not know it and could have done nothing about it anyhow, he was moving toward another door which led to a third compartment, less roomy than either
of the other two, with a closer atmosphere, even stifling in the end, and more different from both of the previous two than those two had been different from each other. In a sense beyond longevity he led three lives in one.

Since 1850, the year of the Compromise, planters in the lake region had been talking disunion. As a topic for discussion it had crowded out the weather and even the cotton market. Seated on their verandas or in their parlors, clutching juleps in their fists, they blustered. They had built their fine big neo-Tidewater houses, displaying them to their neighbors and whoever passed along the lakeside road, each as a sort of patent of nobility, a claim to traditions and ancestry which they for the most part lacked. Insecurity had bred a semblance of security, until now no one questioned their right to anything at all. When Lincoln was nominated in 1860 they took it as a pointed insult. Not that they believed he would be elected; no; “Never in all this world,” they said. “Those abolitionist scoundrels just want to flaunt this ape in our faces for the purpose of watching our reaction. Yes. Well, we’ll show them something in the havent bargained for, if they dont watch out. Let them be warned,” they added solemnly.

They admired the spirit and emulated the manner of the Texas senator, an ex-South Carolinian with a reputation as a duelist, who said to his Northern fellow-senators, smiling as he said it though not in friendliness at all: “The difficulty between you and us, gentlemen, is that you will not send the right sort of people here. Why will you not send either Christians or gentlemen?”

“Wigfall knows how to treat them,” the planters said. “A few more like him and Preston Brooks and we’d have this hooraw hushed.”

But Isaac, who had fought under Andrew Jackson
at New Orleans and followed his politics ever since, believed in the Union in much the same way as Jackson had believed in it. He thought sectional differences could be solved better within the Union than outside it. At first he would say so, with the others watching him hot-eyed over the frosted rim of goblets. Later he saw that it was no use. Like much of the rest of the nation, they were determined to have violence as the answer to some deep-seated need, as actual as thirst.

Clive took little or no part in these discussions which went on all around him. He had come home from the Institute with a soldier’s training, but now he was busy learning the life of a planter; the slate-gray uniforms and the tactics texts had been folded away in a trunk with the unblooded sword. He was closer to his mother than he was to Isaac. He was quiet, indeed somewhat vague in his manner, with gentle eyes; his way now was very little different, in fact, from the way in which he had moved among the Bristol matrons and fanned their hopes with his almost casual attentiveness. He loved horses and spent much of his time in the stables. Behind the softness of his eyes and voice there was something wild that matched the wildness of horses, and this was where he most resembled his father.

Then Lincoln was elected—the planters had said it would never happen; “Never in all this world,” they said—and South Carolina seceded, followed within two weeks by Mississippi and then the others among the Deep South fire-eater states. That was in January. Moderation was gone now, what little had remained. Clive even heard from the Institute that the chalkdusty Professor Jackson, a Mexican War veteran himself, had stood up in chapel and made a speech; “Draw the sword and throw away the scabbard!” he had cried. It did not sound at all like him, but anything was believable
in these times. Two months later, a month before Sumter, Clive rode off as captain of a cavalry troop formed by the lake planters and their sons. With their wagons, their spare mounts and body servants, they made a long column; their ornaments flashed in the sunlight.

Nearly all of them returned within four months, not as a unit but in straggling twos and threes. It was the common end of such ‘elite’ organizations; they had not expected war to be like that. The excitement lasted not even as long as the glitter of their collar ornaments. Once it was gone they thought they might as well come home. They had seen no fighting anyhow. It was mostly drill and guard mount, patrolling encampments while the infantry slept, moving from place to place, then back again. The glory had departed, and so did they.

When Clive came home, his uniform and saber sash a bit faded from the weather, Isaac came out to meet him in the yard, looking somehow more military in broadcloth than his son looked in uniform. They stood looking at each other. “How did it go?” Isaac asked him.

“It went all right, considering. There just wasnt anything to do.”

“You wanted it another way. Was that it?”

“I didnt want it the way it was. We disbanded piecemeal, man by man. They would come and say they were leaving. Then theyd leave. Finally there were less than a dozen of us; so we left too. We made it official.”

They stood facing each other in the hot summer sunlight; First Manassas had been fought two weeks ago. Clive was smiling. Isaac did not smile. “And what are you going to do now?” he asked. “Stay here and farm the place?”

“I might.”

“So?”

“I might.…”

“So?”

“No, papa. I’ll go back. But different.”

“So,” Isaac said.

He stayed ten days, and then he left again. This time he went alone. Within two years Clive Jameson was one of the sainted names of the Confederacy. It began when he came out of Donelson with Forrest, escaping through icy backwater saddle-skirt deep. Then he distinguished himself at Shiloh, leading a cavalry charge against the Peach Orchard and another at Fallen Timbers after the battle; Beauregard cited him as one of the heroes of that field. By the time of Vicksburg, in the summer of ’63, newspapers were beginning to print the story of his life. Southern accounts always mentioned his having been born the year the stars fell; Starborn, one called him, and the others took it up. Poetesses laureate in a hundred backwoods counties submitted verse in which they told how he had streamed down to earth like a meteor to save the South; they made much of the flaming wake. Northern accounts, on the other hand, made much of the fact that his mother had tended bar in her father’s taproom.

He never wrote. They did not see him again until late in ’63 when he was wounded at Chickamauga, his fifth but his first really serious wound, and was brought home in an ambulance to recover. He was still a young man, just past his thirtieth birthday, but he looked older than his years. It was as if the furnace of war had baked the flesh of his hard, handsome face, which by now was tacked in replica on cabin walls, badly reproduced pen-and-ink sketches clipped from newspapers, and mooned over by girls in attic bedrooms. The softness had gone from his eyes and voice. He did not resemble
himself; he resembled his pictures. Having him at Solitaire was like having a segment of some actual blasted battlefield at hand. His mother, after an hour with him, came away shaking her head. “What have they done to my boy?” she asked.

“He’s a hero,” Isaac said. He had seen and known heroes before. “What did you expect?”

Clive mended fast, however, and soon after the first of the year he rode away. They heard of his raid into Kentucky that spring—‘brilliant’ was the word that appeared most frequently in the newspaper accounts; the columns bristled with it, alongside ‘gallant’—and in June he led his brigade in the attack that crumpled Grierson’s flank at Brice’s Crossroads and sent the invaders stumbling back to Memphis. The papers were full of it, prose and verse.

Mrs Jameson sealed off the upper story of her house. She and Isaac lived downstairs. She was fifty-six, an active, bustling woman who got things done. She still had the yellow hair and even the beautifully rounded arms, but she was subject to dizzy spells, which she called the Vapors, and during such an attack her mind would wander. She would imagine the war was over and her son was dead. A moment later, though, she would sigh and say, “I’m glad he’s doing well, but I wish they would let him come home for a while. I really do.”

She never thought of him the way he had been when he was there with his Chickamauga wound. In her mind she saw him as he had been when he rode away that first time, in the spring of ’61, with the soft voice and gentle eyes, or as he was in the daguerreotype which she kept on the night table beside her bed. It had been taken when he was a child; he wore button shoes and ribbed stockings and a jacket of watered silk, and
there was a small-boy sweetness in his face. Sometimes in the night Isaac would wake to find the candle burning at the bedside and Mrs Jameson sitting bolt upright, propped on three pillows, with the picture in her hands. There would be tears in her eyes, and if he spoke to her at such a time she would turn and look at him with the face of a stranger.

On a hot July morning she was waxing the dining room table—a task she had always reserved for herself because it gave her a particular pleasure—when suddenly she paused and a peculiar expression came over her face, the expression of someone about to sneeze. Then she did; she sneezed loudly. “God bless me,” she said, automatically, and went on with her work, applying the wax in long, even strokes. Presently she raised one hand to her forehead, palm outward, fingers relaxed. “I feel so dizzy,” she said. She looked frightened. Isaac reached her just as she fell. He carried her to a couch in the living room and knelt beside her, patting her wrists. Her breath came in harsh stertorous groans.

“Katy!” Isaac kept saying. “Katy, dont you know me?”

She did not know him; she did not know anything. Foam kept forming on her lips and Isaac wiped it away with his handkerchief. Two Negroes stood in the background. There was nothing they could do. All the doctors were off to war, but that was just as well since there was nothing they could have done either. It was a cerebral hemorrhage and she died within four hours.

Next day they buried her in the cedar grove, at the near end of the row of small, weathered crosses. Isaac was dry-eyed at the burial; he did not seem to understand what had happened. He was bewildered at last by mortality, by a world in which a person could sneeze
and say, “God bless me: I feel dizzy,” and then be dead. He was eighty-six years old.

All but three of the slaves had left by then, gone on their own or as dish-washers and ditch-diggers with the Union armies which had roamed the district at will and without real opposition since early ’64. There was Edward, the butler, who was almost seventy, the last of the original ten who had come with Isaac in the Conestoga north from Natchez. He was stone deaf, a tall, straight-backed Negro, mute and inscrutable behind his wall of dignity and deafness. The other two were women; both were old, one lame (she did the cooking, what there was to cook) and the other half-witted. These three lived in one of the cabins that formed a double row, called the Quarters, half a mile behind the house. The other cabins were empty, beginning to dry rot from disuse, and the street between the rows, formerly grassless, polished by generations of bare feet until it was almost as smooth and shiny as a ballroom floor, was beginning to spring up in weeds. When Mrs Jameson died Edward moved into the house with Isaac. Five weeks later the two women joined them because a Federal platoon, out on patrol, burned the quarters.