Jacob's Ladder (47 page)

“DON'T WE LOOK LIKE MEN
A-MARCHING . . .” (REPRISE)

T
OWARD
G
ERMANNA
F
ORD
, V
IRGINIA
M
AY
5, 1864

NOSTRILS AND EYELIDS
crusted by dust, lips cracked, shoulders chafed by knapsack straps, gaze filled entirely by the sweat-darkened shirt directly ahead, devoted to finding one less sore resting place for the rifle which lay across too thin muscle and too tender bone like a bar of fire, the regiment stumbled toward the Rappahannock. The color bearers' banners were lifeless as a poor man's laundry.

The 23rd had been called into ranks last night and marched until midnight. They'd breakfasted at three-thirty in the morning and formed in column while the sun rose in the sky. They marched as the sun burned the dew off the May leaves. Horses plodded beside marching men, riders dozing in the saddles.

The country between the Potomac and Rappahannock had been the habitat of generals: Lee and Jackson, Pope, McClellan, Hooker and Burnside. For four years, its plantations and small farms had fed marauding armies. Its rail fences had flared in ten thousand campfires, its standing corn had comforted man and beast. Confederate wives saw the blue regiments approach and locked their doors and went upstairs with a glass of water and a headache, praying someone had warned General Lee, someone. Their pale, ribby children kept to the porches of houses that had once boasted window glass.

War had improved the roads. Cow tracks and country lanes so rough they'd snap the axles of a Concord coach had been widened and leveled and planked and bridged by Federal engineers to speed men to the conflagration.

When the regiment didn't halt at noon, men began dropping out of ranks. Some marched on but so slowly their fellows overtook one rank at a time. Others reeled to the roadside, heads between their knees.

“Close it up!”

“Close it up!” Jesse called through cracked lips. He'd stopped sweating an hour ago: no more sweat in him. A courier's horse's hooves wafted new dust into the air. For a moment the courier rode beside the colonel, the two men inclined toward each other. When the colonel raised his hand, watchful officers took his signal and the bugler sounded a halt. For a second men stood stunned before drifting into the shade. Some pulled off their shoes. Some lay facedown in the grass, gasping.

Jesse uncapped his canteen and took a long swallow, which hurt his throat going down. He leaned against a shagbark hickory, looked up at the tripartite leaves, and wondered why leaves were greener on the top side than the bottom. Samuel Gatewood might know. He took an interest in such matters. Was Samuel still alive? Had the war treated Stratford as harshly as this country they were marching through? Old Uther—was he still alive? Uther wouldn't know about the leaves. His mind never turned to plants or critters. The rights and wrongs of things occupied Uther Botkin.

Jesse had concluded that two of the stars in the Federal flag were his wife, Maggie, and Jacob, his child. Since he could no longer find his family in the night skies he would follow that flag. If General Lee and the Confederate army stood in the way, why then, he'd have to fight them.

“Sergeant Burns!”

“Sir?”

“Sit down, sit down, man. I'm on my feet because I'm saddle-sore.” Captain Fessenden's eyebrows were cast in dust. “Spare me your canteen? There's a clear brook ahead and I'll send a detail to fill them all.” His Adam's apple bobbed. “Never thought lukewarm water could taste so good.”

“Where we goin'?”

The young captain shrugged. “General Grant to General Burnside: ‘Bring up your corps.' Grant must have run into Johnnies.”

“Where we stoppin' today?”

“When we get as far as we're going. General Grant doesn't confide in me.”

“Grant know what he's doin'?”

“I believe Grant and Lee are debating that question on the far side of the Rappahannock. Grant whipped the rebs out west.”

“Him and General Lee, they fightin' now?”

“In the Wilderness again. Same place Lee broke Joe Hooker last year. Tangled brush and saplings so you can't use your guns and can't hardly see the rebs until they come shrieking at you.”

“We gonna fight?”

“We're going to wait here an hour while our stragglers catch up, then we're marching on. That's what I know.”

“Some white soldiers say niggers won't fight.”

Captain Fessenden's eyes were blue and wet under his dusty lashes. “I never had soldiers take to drill and discipline like you men, and you're marching like veterans. We've come eighteen miles today.”

“Grant's been usin' us to guard his supply trains. That's all he's been usin' us for.”

“Maybe he's keeping the division fresh for an assault. Hell, I don't know. You hear the same rumors I do.”

A few men were building dinner fires. Stragglers limped up the road.

“We get marching again, I want you in the rear with me to chivvy the stragglers.” The captain sat with a grunt. “You'll have your share of fighting before this is over. Why are you fellows so fierce?”

“They won't let us surrender. Remember Fort Pillow? Everybody knows the Confeds murdered colored troops after they surrendered. Everybody knows it.” Jesse leaned to stare up at soft green leaves. In a dreamy voice he said, “I had a friend, Rufus. One day we were crossing this long railroad bridge and Rufus said niggers couldn't build it.”

“Killing Johnnies isn't the same as building bridges.”

“We got to do everything—good and bad—that white men do. Come time to whip a man's back, we got to do it. Come time to kill somebody, we got to do that too. We been kindly too long.”

“Your old master. What if he was with Lee's army? Would you be glad to kill him?”

“I'm not afraid of Samuel Gatewood, never was. And I'd put a ball in him as soon as any other Confederate.” Jesse sighed. “I s'pose old Samuel did the best as he could.”

“You have any hardtack?”

Jesse unstrapped his knapsack. The captain rapped crackers against his boot heel. “You remember that hard bread over Christmas? I swear it'd been in the storehouse since the Mexican War. Even the weevils couldn't eat it.”

The regiment rested for an hour. One weary straggler caught up and sat down with a blissful expression just as the regiment fell in again. Angrily he shouted, “Master Abraham set us free!”

Some took off stiff new shoes to march barefoot. Their shoes dangled around their necks.

Jesse and the captain lagged a half mile behind, Captain Fessenden leading his horse. Soft dust covered their shoes. “You want to ride?”

“I'm too big. Horse like that needs a lightweight rider.”

“Do you always do things the hard way?”

“I'm stronger than that horse. I'll be goin' when he's quit.”

They marched through ankle-deep litter—blankets and overcoats shed by earlier white regiments, ripped to angry shreds.

“I'm pleased that our men aren't throwing anything away,” Captain Fessenden noted.

“They're soldiers now,” Jessie lied, because he couldn't admit that no sane colored man would throw away a good blanket or overcoat no matter how awkward or heavy it was. He nodded at the debris. “Some of the white children we been seeing could have made use of those blankets.”

“So could Johnnie. If it wasn't for us supplying him, he would have quit two years ago. What are those people thinking of? Jeff Davis says colored troops get captured he'll put you back into slavery.”

“That's the only way they know how to be. I lived in Washington City long enough to wonder if you yankees are much different.”

“We pay for your work.”

“There's that. Didn't Jeff Davis say there'd be no quarter for a white officer leading colored troops?”

“So I hear.”

“There's that too.”

Jesse thought to tell the captain about Maggie, but Fessenden was an officer and a white man.

When they came up on three stragglers sitting on a log beside the road, Jesse said, “You men got to go on. What'll the others be thinkin' of you?”

One skinny young man had enough strength for talking. “Be thinkin' they didn't sign on to be marched to death, I reckon.”

Jesse attached his bayonet to his rifle.

“What you gonna do with that?”

“Goin' to stick you with it,” Jesse said calmly.

“What you gonna do that for?” The man's voice broke in panic and his companions scrambled down the road.

“Soldier ain't with his regiment as good as dead.” Jesse made a tentative jab. “Might as well be dead.”

Hands out, retreating down the road backward, the man stumbled, turned, ran to catch up.

Captain Fessenden grinned.

“He ain't so whipped as he thought,” Jesse said. “He still got sweat in him.”

They were twenty miles from Germanna Ford when they heard the rumble of guns, and five miles nearer heard the musketry. The sun was setting behind a pall of smoke, and the officers were nervous. Captain Fessenden said, “Welcome to the Wilderness. Looks like Grant's got his hands full.”

A breeze picked up, lifting the colors off their stands and making them pop. From the ranks a singer called, “Don't we look like men a-marchin'?”

When the singer got no response, he raised his clear tenor voice again, demanding, “Don't we look like men a-marchin'?” And though the regiment was road-weary it picked up the cadence, and its officers straightened in their saddles, and when the beast shouted it was a lion's roar: “Don't we look like men o' war?” None of the white officers sang, but they surely wanted to.

THE MULE SHOE

S
POTSYLVANIA
C
OURTHOUSE
, V
IRGINIA
M
AY
12, 1864

Take therefore no thought for the morrow:
for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself.
Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

—Matthew 6:34, text of sermon preached at service
confirming Generals Lee and Longstreet into the
Episcopal Church in the spring of 1864.

“NOW WHY IN
the world,” Catesby Byrd asked James Fisher, “did you ever come back to the army?”

“I was missin' the high life,” Sergeant Fisher said. “What's those?” He pointed at fourteen corn pones laid out on a log.

“That's supper.”

“Goddamned, Catesby, if you fellows ain't been livin' high off the hog.”

“I see the Federals have been feeding you well.”

“ 'Course they did,” said Fisher, who was so emaciated his ribs resembled a washboard. “The guards were all niggers. Mean bastards. Shoot a man for thinkin' about escapin'.”

After Fisher was captured at Gettysburg he had been sent to Point Lookout Prison in Maryland. When the Federals canceled all prisoner exchanges, Fisher escaped, and a sympathetic waterman ferried him across the Chesapeake Bay into Confederate territory.

“Actually,” Fisher said, “I came back hoping to find a game.”

“I am a Christian now,” Catesby said. “I no longer play cards.”

Fisher's disappointment flashed across his face. He spat. “Well, I suppose I took enough of your money anyway.”

The twelve surviving soldiers of F Company, 44th Virginia, were positioned on the right-hand curve of a bulge in the Confederate line. The bulge was shaped like a mule shoe.

Private Mitchell complained, “How the hell we ever gonna get enough to eat when United States Grant leaves his sutler wagons behind? No point in drivin' Federals less'n we get somethin' to eat.”

Corporal McComac scoffed, “We ain't been drivin' them. They been drivin' us.”

“That is surely true,” Mitchell admitted judiciously. “But that's because Grant left his sutler's wagons behind and we've got no reason for driving them.”

Once they had their corn pones most of the men went off to savor them privately, but Mitchell and McComac stayed to bring the returned veteran up to date. “They don't attack with knapsacks no more either. Last night I was taking a message from General Johnson to General Gordon. And since it's a mite shorter I come in front of the lines and was slippin' along where the Federals struck the Georgians yesterday evening and I gets tangled and goes down on my hands and knees and there's racket to wake the dead and our pickets start calling for the countersign and I'd got myself hooked in the sword of this dead Federal major, and I says to myself, ‘Oh-ho.' I don't want his sword. I ain't got but two boy children and they already got their Federal officer's swords. And somebody'd already got his boots. So I go through his pockets, and you know what he had? Naught but a Bible. And him a major! I figured he'd be good for hardtack, maybe a flask of whiskey. I believe that son of a bitch Grant tells his people not to carry no rations when they attack because we'll eat 'em after they gets killed. When we was fightin' with Stonewall, every Federal corpse'd have a couple days' rations somewheres on his person.” He inspected his cylindrical corn pone without fondness. “This is only the third one of these since a week ago.”

“Ten days,” Corporal McComac told Fisher. “We left winter camp first of May and been marchin' and fighting ever since. I cannot purely count how many times we fought. I remember the first fight in the Wilderness when we was holdin' the road and they flanked us. But everything's a blue after that.”

“Let Marse Robert worry about it,” Catesby suggested. “It's in his and God's hands.”

“Lee tries to lead any more charges his ownself, it won't be in anybody's hands. Federal sharpshooter get General Lee in his sights, that sharpshooter he'll think about going home.”

“General Lee never used to lead no charges,” Fisher said. “He let Stonewall do it, or Pender or Armistead or Hood.”

“They're dead—except Hood—and most of Hood is shot away. Might be Marse Robert thinks he's the only one left.”

Fisher shook his head. “This army's gone plumb to hell without me.”

“Oh, we missed you something awful, Sergeant.” Private Mitchell brushed crumbs from his lips, and his tongue darted into his palm to retrieve them. “Come over here and set.” He patted a rain-slick gun carriage. “This Grant fellow ain't like them other Federal Generals,” he began. “Grant don't stay whupped.”

They'd whipped Grant at the Wilderness, smashed attack after attack, and they'd outmarched him here to Spotsylvania Courthouse though they'd marched all night to do it and they'd whipped him here too. Yesterday they'd beaten back a terrific attack on the mule shoe. Wagonloads of Federal dead and wounded trundled north and replacements trundled south, but Grant kept on coming.

“Oh, we been hit hard,” Mitchell complained. “Many brave boys, and officers kilt. Poor Private James, a mortar cut him plumb in half. When Colonel Higginbotham took us over, they kilt him too, and Lieutenant Colonel Buckner is dyin'. Anybody know our new colonel?”

“Witcham seems a good man,” Catesby said. “He says we're to get some conscripts.”

“Eighteen-year-old boys . . .” That was Corporal McComac “They been eatin' too regular be any help to us. They got too much room in their gut and their feet are unblemished as a virgin's good name. How they gonna live? How they gonna march without shoes?”

“Hell,” Fisher said, “good strong boy of eighteen—I've seen many a good soldier younger. Stuart's drummer, that boy's not fifteen. Remember Private Ryals? He made a soldier at Gaines's Mill. What was it killed Ryals? I disremember.”

“Cholera. My son, Thomas, turned seventeen in February,” Catesby said.

Private Mitchell prayed, “This Christian army is blessed in your sight, Lord. It is not ourselves we pray for, Lord, but our dearest ones at home. Amen.”

“If I was a prayin' man like you,” Corporal McComac replied, “I'd pray for any reinforcements the good Lord might care to send us. Shoot one bastard Federal and two more spring up to take his place.”

“Don't curse,” Catesby said quietly.

Corporal McComac patted the top log of the breastworks. “So long as I got a plenty of dirt and wood 'twixt me and them, I ain't awful scared. I'm a man puts his faith in a deep rifle pit.”

The five-foot breastwork was dirt they'd dug from the trench they stood in and faced with logs. A spiky abatis of pointed poles paralleled the lines fifty feet in front, with small gaps where the pickets could slip through. The breastworks were topped with logs, and a man could fire underneath the top log without exposing himself. Inside the fortifications, perpendicular to the breastworks, were log traverses—walls—and should a Federal assault penetrate the line, the Confederates could retreat behind these interior walls and pour fire on the attackers.

The survivors of Company F faced a meadow and, across it, dark, dark woods.

“Here comes the rain again,” Sergeant Fisher announced.

“See anything over there?” Catesby asked. “I wonder what they're up to?”

“Same as us: gettin' wet. I wish we had a fire.”

Catesby closed his eyes to pray but couldn't think of anything he wanted. Thank you, Lord, he prayed in his mind, for all you have given us. May we be worthy of your grace.

“You prayin' for me?” Fisher asked.

“Nope. I don't figure to press my luck.”

Fisher grinned. “Cap'n, you're a fine fellow and one hell of a soldier, but you got to learn to laugh. Man can't laugh at this”—a dribble of rain slipped from his slouch hat onto his nose—“can't laugh at anything. Think on it. There's a hundred fifty thousand of them and fifty thousand of us. The cropland around here is two inches of good soil over dead red clay. Tomorrow or day after there's gonna be two hundred thousand men willing to give their lives for ground wouldn't have fetched ten bucks the acre before the war. Now, I think that's funny.”

Fisher's laugh sounded to Catesby like a mule's bray, and he said so.

Corporal McComac said, “Remember that mule our sharpshooters killed when they was trying those new English rifles? I never thought to eat roasted mule before. If we don't find ourselves some well-rationed dead Federals in the next day or so I'm gonna ‘reconsider' our mules.”

Artillerymen were hooking guns to the limber chests and hitching up.

Catesby splashed through the mud. “We pullin' out?”

The lieutenant of artillery shrugged. “Evenin', Captain. Can't say. I heard Grant was retreating to Fredericksburg and that Marse Robert wants to hit him before he gets away. Pull the guns back before dark—that's my orders. Maybe you'll be pulled out too.”

“This rain ever going to let up?”

“Another day of it and we won't be moving anywhere. Least the guns won't. You infantry can keep going a sight longer than us.”

“Fredericksburg, eh?”

Another shrug. “That's what I heard.”

Warmness settled into Catesby's chest. Maybe once again Lee's ragged veterans had broken the Federals' will. Maybe another Federal general was retiring across the Rappahannock to lick his wounds. Maybe Lincoln would lose the fall election to a more reasonable man—a new northern President who'd let the Confederate States depart in peace. Again Catesby closed his eyes and prayed his thanks.

“What'd the gunner say?” Sergeant Fisher asked.

Catesby had an aversion to spreading pleasant rumors. Life was hard enough without disappointed hopes. “Said he had orders to move his guns before sundown.”

Fisher pursed his lips. “We're bare-ass naked out here without those guns. You know, I'm beginnin' to wonder if coming back to this army was the best idea I ever had.”

Catesby said, “Maybe we'll be pulled out too.”

“Sure thing.” Fisher watched the last gun disappear in the woods before he slumped down against the traverse and cut a plug of tobacco. “You're welcome to join me,” he said. “Rain don't blow so bad on this side.”

Catesby unfolded his groundsheet, wrapped blankets around his legs, and tucked his ammunition pouch behind his knees to keep it dry. One fat log crossed his back just at the shoulder blades and a smaller log was exactly the right height for his pillow.

“You think any of us gonna live through this?” Fisher asked in a voice absent of its familiar acidity.

“If it is God's will,” Catesby said.

“That really does comfort you, don't it? I wish to hell I had something to comfort me. My brother's got himself killed at Manassas and my nephew died in the hospital at Chattanooga. My mother and sister are tryin' to hold things together on the farm, but there's work they can't do. Our nigger Mose been with us since he was a youngster—just like a member of the family—but he run off. Might be he's guardin' Confederate prisoners somewheres. I hear Grant's got colored troops.”

“I haven't seen any.”

“Care for a chew? I wonder if Mose is over there with the Federals, studyin' on how to kill us. I thought I knew that boy, but I guess I didn't.”

“No thanks. I smoke some tobacco when I have it.”

“Night like this, man with a pipe, he's out of luck. You can chew anytime.”

“See anything out there?”

“Fog's comin' off the ground. Twenty-first Virginia is pickets tonight. They'll let us know if the Federals come.”

“They're good boys,” Catesby said. But his eyes were closing and he was thinking the prayer he'd learned in childhood:

Now I lay me down to sleep.

    I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

If I should die before I wake

    I pray the Lord my soul to take.

Catesby fell into sleep as a boy dives into a quarry pool; relief closed over him from top of his head to tip of his toes.

Someone shook him awake. Although it was still pitch-black, it wasn't raining. He rubbed his blurry eyes and, guided by the logs at his back, got to his feet. “Major.”

“Captain Byrd, our pickets report a godalmighty rumbling out there. Come with me.”

Major Anderson was officer of the day. Catesby asked, “Do you know the time?”

“It must be after midnight.” The glow behind the clouds was the moon. The traverses were filled with sleeping men; none had fires.

“This rain will be good for the grass,” Catesby found himself saying.

“You are a farmer then?”

“Lawyer. County-seat lawyer, hoping to be a judge.”

“I was a planter before. I wonder how I can return to that patient occupation when this war is over.”