Jacob's Ladder (33 page)

In the December evening surgeons and matrons ate wordlessly at a makeshift table beside the low shapes of men who awaited their ministrations. Their living breath rose from where they lay.

A CONTRABAND

W
ASHINGTON
C
ITY
, D
ISTRICT
OF
C
OLUMBIA
J
ANUARY
22, 1863

“IT'S CHOKED UP,”
Cuffee announced; without, however, leaving his perch atop the honey cart.

Jesse straightened from the pump handle, set his hands in the small of his back, and stretched. Swirling snow clotted his eyelashes and melted in rivulets down his cheeks.

“Can't be much shit left,” Cuffee opined helpfully.

“Less 'n there was,” Jesse said. “Why is it I always go down in the pit and you always up top?”

Cuffee huffed himself up. “Because that's the way the army want it done. I drives the team, you empties out the cesspool.”

The cesspool in question served one of Washington City's makeshift army hospitals. Three brownstone rowhouses had been combined to care for the wounded. The cesspool out back was Jesse's responsibility: no reason the surgeons or matrons need pay it any mind.

After the Fredericksburg fight, the hospitals had filled and Jesse and his teamster emptied cesspools every second day, but many of the wounded had died, some had been discharged as convalescent, and now Jesse worked no more than ten hours a day. His pay, twenty-five dollars a month, less the five dollars every colored worker was taxed to support frail and sickly colored the government cared for, did not vary no matter if Jesse worked ten hours or twenty. That, as the teamster had explained, was how the army did things.

Some of the city's cesspools had been constructed in George Washington's time, and stone liner walls sometimes caved in and suffocated the hapless cleaner. This was a newer one and the mortar was sound, the lid could be propped open for ventilation, but even so after a few minutes down, Jesse's head would get a little swimmy.

Jessie took a deep breath and climbed down into the sludge on the bottom. He held the mesh-covered end of the sump hose under the liquid so he wouldn't lose the prime as his hands plucked away material—most of it rotten bandages—that clogged the screen and then went up the ladder again to the light where he could take a breath. Jesse bent and coughed and coughed before he spat and began pumping again.

White men wouldn't do this work. There seemed to be plenty of work white men wouldn't do. If work got to be hard enough or dangerous enough or smelled bad enough, work got to be nigger work, and Jesse was glad of it.

Jesse had no objections to cleaning cesspools. If the Emancipation Proclamation had made him any man's equal, it had not advanced him to a state where he needn't earn bread by the labor of his hands. The work wasn't hard except when the hand pump failed (usually its leather gaskets had torn), and then Jesse was obliged to bucket ordure into the honey wagon while the cursing teamster mended the gaskets.

Twenty-five dollars a month was more money than Jesse had ever had, and he was paying for his own food and his own shelter and he had bought these clothes—wool pants and wool shirt—secondhand, and the gumboots he'd bought too.

So much in the world was new to him; sometimes Jesse felt like a child.

“I believe that has it dry.” Cuffee dismounted to remove his mules' nosebags and make minor adjustment to their traces. Jesse coiled the stinking hose, hung the ladder on its pegs, and lashed the pump. He slid the pit cover closed.

When Cuffee climbed onto his perch and gee'd his mules, Jesse clambered onto the wagon and perched atop the pump. Although there was room for two men on the seat, the teamster rode alone. “You smell too bad,” he explained. “I been smelling shit all day. I ain't gonna smell it on my way home.”

The younger teamster who took Cuffee's place when he'd drunk too much the night before—he wasn't so fussy. “But I been a field nigger, like you,” the replacement explained. “Cuffee, he was a house nigger. Cuffee come north as body servant to a Federal captain, and he's disgraced to be on a honeywagon. That top hat he wear? Same hat he used to wear when he was driving Massa and Missus to the ball.”

The replacement teamster had suggested Jesse seek work on the fortifications. “You strong as a ox. You come on down there and they take you on, sure.”

Men didn't stay with cesspool cleaning long. They took a cough or the soldier's disease or a fever and the army had to find another man to climb down into the pit. Jesse had been at it as long as anyone.

Jesse thought it was all right. Rufus had dared to speak up, dared to say who he was. Jesse had broken hard soil with Rufus's farrier's hammer and scooped dirt over Rufus with their battered tin cup after Rufus said who he was.

Washington City was crowded with deserters who wore civilian clothes but walked like soldiers, and when the provost's men rode by, they slipped into doorways or around corners. The provost's men never did much about them, they just rode on by. Despite their new blue uniforms, their well-fed horses and brave epaulettes, the provost's men were discouraged too.

It had been a discouraging war. General McClellan and General Pope and now General Burnside. Cheerfully, drums tapping, bands playing, they'd crossed the Potomac and headed south, “on to Richmond,” and one general after another had his army killed and came back with a list of excuses as long as his casualty list.

Some coloreds—the replacement teamster was one—were talking about moving farther north. The pay was worse, but if the Federals did quit the war, a man farther north wasn't so likely to be taken back into slavery.

Jesse hadn't ever seen Father Abraham, but other coloreds told Jesse all about him. Many evenings, Father Abraham took a horseback ride along the Potomac River, and the coloreds would wait for him there, so they could see he was real and not a dream.

The honey cart paused at the C&O Canal. Jesse stepped down and gave the teamster a wave, which he didn't respond to. He walked along the wooden sidewalk—just another colored worker going home.

The sun had dropped into Virginia, gaslights were on in the shops, colored maids lined up at the bakery windows for aromatic breads and rolls. Jesse turned into an alley behind the big townhouse which had become headquarters for the Military Chaplains' Association. The first-floor curtains were drawn back and several chaplains were drinking tea, conversing, smoking cigars.

Jesse slept in the stone washhouse on the alley. The chaplains' servants did laundry on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and on those nights Jesse didn't have to buy coal.

He stripped off his trousers and washed his hands and arms. His second trousers, spare socks, brogans, knitted woolen scarf, and blanket were tucked behind a cabinet. He'd rented this sleeping space from the chaplains' houseman, after promising he'd be out of the washhouse before five in the morning and that his belongings would be hidden when he wasn't here. Jesse dunked his sodden stinking trousers and socks in the wash kettle. The amulet which hadn't protected Rufus hung from Jesse's neck.

He brushed his brogans before he went out. With a few other colored laborers, Jesse waited at the back door of a grocery on M Street, the snow falling heavier now, whitening hats and shoulders and bare heads. It was a beautiful snow, big white flakes swirling in the gaslights.

Although the little store sold a full range of provender to any white person who entered the front, its back-door fare was more limited: meat pies wrapped in cabbage leaves, slabs of rat cheese, and popskull whiskey at half a dollar the quart.

Jesse bought a pie and a half pound of cheese. As he turned into the storm, some laborers were already sharing their whiskey.

Back at his washhouse, Jesse lit his candle, wrung out trousers and socks, and hung them near the stove to dry. He emptied the wash kettle, rinsed it, and hung it up, because it was important, the houseman said, that he leave no trace. The chaplains would object to his furtive presence among their drying linens, socks, and drawers.

Jesse's rent was eight dollars a month. Another ten went for meat pies and rat cheese and his nightly candle. He had three dollars put away for new trousers when he should require them. He felt fine sitting on the stone floor beside the warm fireless stove. Sometimes, after a day's work, his back throbbed where Samuel Gatewood had whipped him, but next to that warm stove, it uncramped and eased.

He'd picked up a newspaper discarded on the street, and as he ate his meat pie he read every word, including government notices and morticians' advertisements—“Prompt, Sanitary Transportation to anywhere in the U.S.”

Drying shirtfronts hung in ghostly rows on washlines over his head.

After he finished his thorough reading, Jesse rolled the paper and put it in the stove. Housing for free coloreds and runaway slaves was so scarce that hundreds were living in the old slave jail in Alexandria in the same cells where their fathers and mothers might once have been held. But here was Jesse, alone, in quiet, with clean water from a hand pump and a coal stove and the servants' necessary not fifteen feet away. He was a rich man.

He wondered what meat was in the pie tonight. Sometimes it was light meat, sometimes dark. It was always salty and always greasy, but that grease warmed his stomach. He ate the cabbage leaves which had wrapped the pie and served as his dining platter. The rat cheese would be his breakfast. His drink was water, drunk from the metal cup he'd used to bury Rufus.

Jesse touched the amulet and thought: All my friends are in the stars. He turned to the window, but there were no stars tonight, only falling snow, fat moth flakes illuminated by lights from the house, where the Christian soldiers held their nightly discourse.

Sometimes Jesse eavesdropped. The chaplains were convinced that eternal life was assured only to soldiers who never played cards, never drank whiskey, and “suffered not from temptations of the flesh,” which meant, Jesse supposed, visiting the brothels beside the canal. The notion that God would care about cardplaying or finding affection seemed strange to Jesse. There were several brothels where older colored women serviced laborers for a dime or a quarter, but Jesse wasn't tempted. Strong and young as he was, he didn't dream of women, and sometimes when he searched the stars for Maggie, he thought himself more like a child seeking his family than a grown man hunting his rightful wife.

He sipped his water with the delicacy of a white man drinking fine wine.

If he were to go for a job on the fortifications, he'd risk losing his present job. He could probably miss one day, but two days' absence and one of the new contrabands pouring into Washington City would climb on the back of the honey wagon and down the narrow ladder that was so much like the orchard ladders Jesse had once used to pick Uther Botkin's apple trees.

Jesse had been climbing down the cesspool ladder since October, and though he had plenty to eat and a roof over his head, something was gone from when he and Rufus were together. The mountains were bitter and the rivers hazardous, but now it seemed, as Jesse leaned against the washrack, warm stove and belly full, it seemed to him that all the mountains and rivers had disappeared when Rufus died.

He unfolded his blanket and crawled under the laundry table, where he slept. Tomorrow he'd go down to the fortifications and see if they had work for him.

MRS. OMOHUNDRU

W
ARM, GREASY RAIN
slid off the hood of the girl's coupe. As she passed the C&O station, she rubbed her fist against the windshield to clear the condensation. Her daddy had told her to stop wasting her time on that crazy old woman. Her supervisor wanted to know how many real ex-slaves she'd interviewed. Her uncle, who had been the girl's staunchest supporter, wondered, aloud, if Marguerite Omohundru had “a screw loose.”

“Honey,” he said, “she's had a long life and done some wonderful things in Richmond. Mrs. Omohundru has been a godsend to the Historical Society. But she's not herself anymore. Pretending she's a negro, and an ex-slave to boot! Why, Silas Omohundru was a hero in the war! Poor Marguerite! She must be in her nineties.”

“She became a woman the year of Cox's snow,” the girl said.

Letters from Phil lay on her bureau unanswered. Her mother wondered if she had “female problems.”

She couldn't even pretend she was working. After her first visits she quit taking notes and stopped asking questions. Their routine was unvarying. She'd take her seat facing the sofa in that garden room and accept a cup of hot tea—just one—never a second no matter how long she stayed—and she'd listen as the ancient woman spoke about a past and a people that were as strange to her as the heathen Chinese.

Sometimes, after she parked before the overgrown front yard of what had been among the grandest homes in Richmond (so Daddy said), she sat for ten minutes before she found strength to get out of the car.

“That woman is mesmerizing you, sugar,” Daddy said. “That crazy old woman has put you under a spell.”

Daddy said that one night after he'd had too many drinks with the juniors from the law firm and he never repeated his theory. Nonetheless, the girl wondered if maybe it wasn't true. As the old woman talked, she seemed to grow stronger. The color returned to her cheeks, her hands moved more fluidly, she could talk for hours and never tire. In contrast, the girl sank into a curious apathy, a passive state that wasn't restful at all.

As usual, Kizzy let her in wordlessly, took her coat, and hung it on the hall tree. As usual, the girl waited alone in the garden room. As usual, the heap of histories, magazines, and dusty reminiscences seemed disturbed: different-sized stacks, different books on top. The girl wondered if every night the old woman, like Scheherazade, invented the story she told the next day.

“Again you honor us with your presence,” Marguerite Omohundru said, as she made room for herself among the magazines.

“I don't know . . .” the girl said.

“We needed this rain,” Marguerite observed. “See how the garden glistens.”

Kizzy brought their single tray, two cups, one teapot, the cream and sugar neither used, two small silver spoons for stirring the cream and sugar neither used.

“I have been thinking about families,” Marguerite said. “Are your people well?”

“They're off this weekend to open our summer place. They asked me to go. . . .”

“Richmond can be disagreeable in the summertime,” Marguerite observed.

She paused for a polite moment before taking up the theme she had determined upon. “Families can only take so much hurt. When a family is injured it tries to heal, but sometimes the healing shrieks as loudly as the hurt. Thomas Gatewood, Samuel's father, owned a great competency: thousands of fertile acres, cattle, sheep, a mill. He was magistrate and postmaster. Before any civic change was initiated in the countryside near SunRise, Virginia, Thomas Gatewood was consulted. He already had what most men spend their lifetime pursuing, but Thomas was not satisfied; Thomas must also have his neighbor's wife. Perhaps he thought he was not governed by the inflexible laws that govern others. Perhaps he thought his great desire excused itself.

“I believe his son, Samuel Gatewood, tried to atone for his father's guilt, but the powerful Gatewood family—which seemed, I can assure you, more like a fact of nature than a merely human institution—had weakness at its core. They were caught by surprise when their son, Duncan, took up with an ignorant little colored girl.” She smiled her most charming smile.

Wistfulness transformed her face like a mask. “That Christmas, the last Christmas before the war, when Duncan held Baby Jacob for the only time he ever did, he loved his son. He could see himself, his family, his future in that boy, and his eyes glowed with love.”

C
HANCELLORSVILLE
, V
IRGINIA
M
AY
2, 1863

In the spring of 1863, General Joseph Hooker, “Fighting Joe” Hooker, was a vigorous field commander and one of the hardest drinkers in the Federal army. Ambitious, he'd openly schemed to seize the Army of the Potomac from Ambrose Burnside (who hadn't wanted command in the first place, but wouldn't turn it loose once he had it). In his letter of appointment, President Lincoln warned Hooker against rashness. There was something about Fighting Joe that made Lincoln apprehensive.

Despite his Fredericksburg victory, Lee's starving army was disintegrating. Desertions were epidemic, and Stonewall Jackson had issued orders to his troops that no unwounded men were to accompany the wounded to the rear. Rations were short: regiments detailed men to forage for wild onions, sassafras buds, and poke sprouts. After a winter's use, the clothing they'd taken from the Federal dead at Fredericksburg was worn out.

When they crossed into Virginia, each man in Hooker's army carried eight days' rations and sixty rounds of ammunition. They got across the Rappahannock unopposed, passed Fredericksburg, and marched into the tangle of cutover scrub woods called the Wilderness. It was miserable country. Narrow roads connected tiny villages, clearings were small and few, and the tangled woods could conceal God knew what. The moment he struck some of Lee's troops, Joe Hooker stopped in his tracks. Hooker put his enormous army into a defensive line at a crossroads called Chancellorsville and boasted: “I have Lee in one hand and Richmond in the other.”

The next morning, Robert E. Lee sent Stonewall Jackson's corps—the bulk of his army—on a twelve-mile march across Hooker's front to the Federal right flank. He urged Jackson, “Get at those people.”

In Jackson's absence, Lee would hold Hooker's eighty-thousand-man army with fifteen thousand men of his own.

Hooker was as still as a bird paralyzed by a serpent. At midday on May 2, 1863, some of Hooker's men saw Jackson's great force sliding through the woods. Federal scouts and pickets sent urgent reports of masses of men moving across the army's front.

Years afterward, when someone asked Joe Hooker what he was thinking of, why he froze up the way he did, Hooker said simply, “I just lost faith in Joe Hooker.”

In the late afternoon of that day, a cavalry officer accompanied Stonewall Jackson up the small hill behind Joe Hooker's lines. Thoroughly exposed and as thoroughly unnoticed, Jackson gazed on the Federal troops. The officer reported: “Jackson's expression was one of intense interest. To the remarks made to him while the unconscious line of blue was pointed out, he did not reply once during the five minutes he was on the hill, and yet his lips were moving. Oh! beware of rashness, General Hooker. Stonewall is praying in full view and in the rear of your right flank.”

The butcher of the 153rd Pennsylvania and two helpers dragged the lead rope of a terrified steer; the nearer the beast came to the tripods where six of its brethren dangled, the louder it bellowed. From frying pans on nearby campfires arose the pleasant smell of liver and spring onions. The steer smelled only death. Neck extended, resisting with all its strength, it was hauled nearer while the butcher called endearments—endearments the steer knew to be lies. “Come along,
Liebchen,”
the butcher murmured. “It is not far. Soon you will rest.”

Soldiers waited near the tripod with a tin washtub with which they intended to retrieve the steer's steaming liver.

“Move back, you boys. Can't you see you're scaring him?”

The butcher of the 153rd Pennsylvania was famous throughout Howard's corps for his sausages. The butcher had made sausages in Prussia, until the revolution there, when he and many other soon-to-be American immigrants had picked the losing side.

He would not make sausage of this steer. He wouldn't reserve the blood for blutwurst, nor the liver for liverwurst, and the scraps would go for soldiers' stews, not the garlic sausage, his particular specialty. In winter quarters he busied himself with savories for the ranking officers: General Howard himself was partial to liverwurst. But in the field, the butcher could do nothing so complicated. The beef would hang overnight, no more, before being produced for the 11th Corps' breakfast. He'd save the kidneys as a special breakfast for General Howard. “Move back, you boys. The little one is frightened, can't you see? He is afraid like the Confederate soldiers and would run away like they do. Ha, ha, ha.”

It was a peaceful evening at the far end of the Federal line. Men played cards and cookfires glowed. The two guns aimed down the plank road were unmanned, and the infantrymen's muskets were neatly stacked. “Come on, you boys, can't you pull?”

The steer's eyes rolled. Froth dribbled in ropes from its mouth.

“You boys. Set down that tub and push. This youngster is not wishing to be your breakfast. Ha, ha, ha.”

“Damn, he's filthy back here.”

“First the courage fails and then the bowels. You are a soldier. You have seen it before. Push on him. You can wash up after!”

The terrible abatis—the cluster of sharpened poles—formed a manmade thicket across the plank road. The abatis was like the barricades the revolutionaries had thrown up on the streets of Berlin, which slowed the Prussian soldiers but hadn't stopped them.

Behind the abatis were the breastworks, then the plank road which connected the long line of Federal troops. General Hooker had inspected them this morning and everyone had cheered. The general said Lee's army now belonged to the Army of the Potomac.

“Push, boys. Do not be afraid,
Liebchen.
It will soon all be over. Get the hammer and the knife. Do not let the edge touch against anything. It is sharp just the way I like it.”

As soon as the terrified steer was in place, the butcher swung the hammer with a solid thunk on the animal's forehead. The steer crumpled so suddenly the corporal who had complained about getting dirty fell across the animal and got a good deal dirtier. The butcher laughed while reaching for his knife. “Now,” he said, “while I am cutting his throat, I wish you boys to work his leg. Work his leg and the blood all pumps out and does not taint the meat, yes. You must work his leg, just like he is walking away, ha, ha, ha.”

Suddenly a deer bounded out of the woods on their right. Another. Another. Knife in hand, the butcher stared as the thickets exploded with fleeing animals. Dozens of rabbits raced from the undergrowth. More deer. Squirrels flew from tree to tree, quail whirred into the air, crows shrieked raucous objections, a fox loped into the open, and when it saw the Federal soldiers it turned and ran through the abatis, straight at where, until this moment, the Federals had supposed the Confederates to be.

Ten minutes before, Captain Duncan Gatewood had dismounted so Gypsy could make water. She didn't like to piss with him on her back, and during the long march around the Federal front, she had filled with fluid. The mare splashed gratefully, and in the woods on either side, Confederate soldiers were doing the same. Getting ready for an attack always presses the bladder.

General Rodes's division—North Carolina regiments, several from Alabama—had already disappeared into the woods. A double battle line was swallowed in that thicket, as if it had never been.

Two months ago, Colonel Walker had taken sick, and now Duncan's brigade had a real general, J. T. Jones, and a couple of colonels too. In this outfit, captain didn't amount to much.

Sergeant Fisher gave Duncan the neatly patched regimental colors.
FREDERICKSBURG
had been stitched along the bottom seam with the older names. “Don't drop it now,” the sergeant said. “It's bad luck, you drop it.”

Men snapped and resnapped ammunition pouches. Some men counted primers into their breast pockets: other veterans counseled against the practice: “What if you get tapped in the chest by a spent round?” one said. “Primers blow up and you'll be a damn fireworks display.”

J.E.B. Stuart had his horse artillery on the plank road; the horses were dancing in the traces.

When the drums sounded the charge, Duncan hoisted the 44th Virginia's colors high and moved Gypsy forward at a walk.

Rodes's division started yip-yip-yipping and their musketry destroyed the quiet and they came clear of the woods, hurtling at Federal soldiers who, until this moment, had thought that life was rather agreeable.