Hell or Richmond (35 page)

He was paying for his pride now, for his brash abundance of confidence. He might find a thousand faults with the Army of the Potomac, picking at one officer for this and another for that, had he a mind to. But the truth was that he had underestimated Lee. The result had been slovenly butchery out in those woods.

And there would be more butchery to come, he saw that now. He still hoped to break Lee and his army by the summer. But he recognized that the cost would be higher, the effort required greater, and the risks more daunting than he and the men he trusted most had believed.

He assumed that Lee was reveling in his embarrassment, gloating about fighting him to a standstill in their first match. Nothing Grant had done, no order Meade had issued at his behest, had moved Lee. At least, not for long. The man’s skill and resilience were unsettling.

His weeping slowed, leaving the bedclothes beneath his face as sodden as a consumptive’s. He
would
defeat Lee. It would just take a bit longer. And it would be bloodier. And so be it. If he had to bleed the South to death, he would.

He yearned for a smashing victory over the man once idolized by the old Army in which he had failed. Whatever sorrow he felt over the men who lay dead or maimed, he knew he would pay the price it took to win. That was what soldiers did. He would destroy Lee for the sake of President Lincoln and the Union, and for himself. Whatever it took, he would break the Virginia grandee like the head of a china doll bashed on a stone.

He was done fighting here, though, in this hopeless place.

Grant wept a little longer, easing toward sleep. But before he drifted off, he made his decision: Come morning, he would order Meade to ready the army to march.

South.

PART

III

A NEW KIND OF WAR

THIRTEEN

May 8, nine thirty a.m.
Shady Grove Church Road

Young gals in their Sunday best, sweet as wild honey, went their way afoot against the flow of trudging men. Demure, laced tight, and bonneted, the quality sort made their way along in bright-eyed detachments of sisters, followed by old men poking canes in the dust and joyless matrons with handkerchiefs pressed to their mouths. All buggy horses had long since been requisitioned for the army, so the middling sort and better of the succulents were as sweat-stained as the poor whites, heading to church, or maybe home from it, on the hottest day yet of the year, stepping as handsomely as they could through the dust of an army. Their fashions had not been renewed, Oates had the eye to tell that of a woman, but the only purpose of a skirt, after all, was to be lifted waist-high by a bold man. He would have liked to draw one black-haired creature, especially, up behind his saddle and ride off.

His men were respectful, admirably so, with the girls who looked properly raised, but when they came upon a chippy or two, they called out a range of greetings, most of them amiable. They were a weary, ragged bunch, his men. He still had the 48th Alabama under him, in addition to his 15th, but together they didn’t make one proper regiment. Their march had begun deep in the night, with but one stop for cold rations, and men who had not slept three hours in three days, men who had fought bitterly, plodded along as gamely as they could, first through the puke-up death-stink of the battlefield, then, startlingly, bewilderingly, through green and peaceful country where, despite the tattle and rattle of distant musketry, these ribbon-waisted Baptists and Presbyterians, equal before God in their virginity, intact or feigned, were all close to equal in beauty when judged by sunken-eyed men got up in the blackface of powder, men with dust glued to their flesh by sweat, foul and fouler, but awakened to high delight at the sight of bounty made flesh in a young gal’s form. A smile from one such slaked a thirst no water would ever vanquish.

Oates was never too worn to regard a woman. And that black-haired gal, perhaps not the best in virtue, nor perfect in her complexion—indeed, almost with the look of a French-talking slut come in from the bayous to a New Orleans house—that woman-gal’s imagined scent stayed with him as he rode another mile, his morning enriched by a dream of supple flesh. He let his fantasy roam, returning from the war to find her willing.

But if he burst to life at the sight of those perspiring angels, and if they made the men straighten their backs and step smartly, it was funny and crying sad at once to watch the lasses and their watchful families struggle to mask their shock at what
they
saw. And what they smelled. An army of black-mouthed ragamuffins stumbled along, not only trailing a shithole stink, but sending it out to precede them. The noble young ladies sought to bear up, committed to taking pride in their brave army, resolutely declining to bring
their
handkerchiefs—this one adorned with violets, the next embroidered with roses—anywhere near their nostrils, unwilling to shame the men marching along, but, oh, their eyes, their eyes betrayed them, appalled eyes, eyes that said,
But this … surely these men … the novels never…,
and, scrapping along behind, the little boys who once would have saluted and emulated their marching now pinched their nostrils shut and made idiot faces. The old men were angry and wet-eyed.

“Unfurl the flags,” Oates called back over his saddle.

The rags for which men die. Let them take note: We are still proud. But, oh, he wished to kiss that raven-haired missy’s lips, to press his mouth to hers and then do more.

Men collapsed by the roadside, ruined by the heat and the hour still short of noon. But he knew his men, they’d come along when they could. Those who remained in the ranks would remain to the end, or until killed or shredded unto uselessness. Oates smirked. Except for Lowther, of course. His major had convinced a surgeon to dispatch him to Richmond for medical treatment for a wound that was no more than a bruise to his foot. Well, good riddance. Lowther wasn’t worth a damn, present or gone off larking. The man had pull, though, at home in Alabama and in Richmond. Oates couldn’t quite figure it, but for all his sick leaves and even one murky letter of resignation, Lowther kept reappearing when things were easy, then disappeared again when a scrap got going. And for all that, Evander Law himself, the best of men, had ordered Oates not to chastise the major or put him on report.

Christ, it was hot.

At least they had pride of place this morning at the head of the division. The dust was wicked enough at the front of the column, pity the sorry devils who marched in the rear.

The churchgoers thinned, then disappeared, gone to their prayers and hymn singing, but no bells marked the hour or called the faithful, all their pealing sacrificed on the altar of Tredegar, melted down for cannon, and his mother, boiled in belief, able to bear the loss of a beloved son because she knew she would see him again eternally, young John, sweet John, his mother who could barely write had scratched out a letter mourning the loss of the slap-tin bell from the ramshackle church past Oates’s Corners half a mile, the only complaint she had made through all the war, aching to hear that most unmusical bell on a Sunday morning, her Gideon’s trumpet, or, perhaps, the voice of Jesus metaled over … how could she believe, how could those fine, sweat-bothered, unknowing, good people off to church or chapel, how could they believe, Oates wanted to know, in a merciful God after three mad years of this? He liked to fight, didn’t mind killing, but, damnation and worse, there was nothing godly he could see in this war. Sometimes it delighted him, exciting his blood as powerfully as any woman had done, more powerfully even, but he could not reconcile sermons with the slaughter. Mixing war and religion struck him as the blasphemy of blasphemies, redolent of unforgivable sin even to one who did not believe a whit. His mother’s faith, once bearable from a distance, now seemed naught but the frothing of a rabid bitch in Hell-dirt.
He could not believe.
And he would not believe. Once, he had wished he might find faith, but now he had no interest in a parson’s tales. Better a kiss from that black-haired gal, one kiss, than eternity on a cloud where neither fist nor cock was of use to a man. When he killed men, he killed them, and he didn’t need a Bible verse to excuse it.

And yet, he knelt when his men knelt. Not out of respect for God, but out of care for those who fought beside him.

All the grand and eloquent speeches, all the books and pamphlets extolling the nobility of their cause—of any cause—even the scrawls and scribbles he had committed on the newspaper side of his lawyering, all of it had less value than a turd, which might at least fertilize a few inches of furrow. They weren’t fighting for their rights. They were fighting because they damned well had wanted to fight, because it had just come time to fight, and fighting had seemed like a mighty fine idea.

Now this, they had come to this: filthy men whose odor made young girls ill. And those men were the fortunate ones.

Yet, he would fight until he could fight no longer. Because that was what he was formed for, from sacred clay or bloody jissom, no matter. He would fight. But he would not beautify blood-glutton deeds with lies.

Gunfire. Lots of it. Cannon, too. To the left, a mile or so off, almost behind the marching columns now. For hours, quick, hot fights had pecked the morning, always to the left, but first ahead, then alongside the marching column, and now, queerly, behind the bent shoulders of the marching men. An accident of how the roads bent? Oates wondered. He had no map, no familiarity with this stretch of Virginia, with its deep-down creeks that weren’t quite rivers and fields that looked plowed by womenfolk, even the earth grown war-weary. All he had was the name of a more-or-less destination: Spotsylvania Court House.

And more gunfire. A serious to-do. He could feel his men quicken behind him, their pace the same until commanded otherwise, but blood coursing through them, eyes opened all the way.

A rider came back from Colonel Perry’s party, which had gone on ahead. The courier hardly got his yap open before the colonel himself galloped back to Oates.

“Hard doings yonder,” he said. “Stuart’s been delaying the varmints all morning. Kershaw’s up with him now, holding a ridge north of town, but Yank cavalry are pawing around the courthouse. Behind our boys.”

Oates waited for the orders that must follow.

“You take your men,” Perry continued, “and go fast. There’s a lane to the left a quarter mile on. Get up it as fast as you can and go in where Stuart wants you. I’m going to pay off those blue-bellies at the courthouse.”

Why, surely, Oates thought. We’ll run us a happy old footrace. Fresh and full of spunk, every last one of us.… But that was just the surly side of his nature, an amusement even to himself, so he saluted and turned a hot face to his nearest officers and the skeletal regiments trailing them.

“That there firing,” he hollered. “Yankees are overstepping again. Boys up there need help.” He gathered his breath. “At the double-quick …
forward!
”

Wondering how many men he’d lose to this Hell-heat before they fired a shot, this infernal, wet, worse-than-Pike-County heat, for his men were tired beyond biblical measure, beyond four score and ten years’ worth of weariness.

They hadn’t a cheer in them, not yet, not without Yankees plain to their front, but the men growled through mouths full of dust and picked up to a dogtrot, and Oates knew just how much he was asking of them, their canteens doubtless empty or nigh on it, so he steered his horse to the roadside and waved up his nigger, who shambled along as if born for the heat, blood of ape ancestors cooked by the African sun, and Oates dismounted and said, “You take care of this horse now. Lose him, boy, and I’ll whip you from here to Montgomery.”

“Ain’t never us lost no horse, Marse.”

But Oates had already turned, pain-bitten by his bad-dog hip, one of the wounds that had shocked him with the knowledge that he was not invulnerable and might not be immortal upon this earth, and that hip hurt infernally, but he marched on afoot, beside his men, every step a small misery and a pride.

“Colonel, you ought to ride that nag of your’n, that’s what he’s for,” a soldier called. “Leastwise, till the ruckus comes on.”

“Horse needs a rest, I don’t.”

He waved to Captain Shaaf, who had not possessed a horse of his own for months. The commander of Company A stepped up and strode next to him.

“We get to that lane where those limbers sit, and we’re going left and on in. Be ready to move your company out as skirmishers, once we get our bearings.”

“Would’ve been right disappointed, had you asked somebody else, sir,” the captain told him.

“See how you feel come nightfall.”

No sooner had they turned into the lane than they found themselves amid the castoffs of battle, stray wagons, emptied caissons, cavalry mounts husbanded from danger, and officers on horseback humming back and forth like bees ’round a hive, all these things set upon a field bright with wildflowers.

Pretty as a lady, if a bearded one, General Stuart cantered up. He wore a barn-dance grin and waved his hat. A black plume lofted.