The Banished Children of Eve (61 page)

Noonan went outside. His
brother was standing by the wall in a slow but soaking rain.

“He's mad,” John said.

“He's old, that's all.”

“His mind is gone.”

“He doesn't think as clearly as he once did.”

“Little difference between the two, at least as far as I'm concerned, stuck here day after day with that raving relic of a man. Jesus, 'tis work enough to wring the rent out of this barren piece of land without having to carry him on me back. But how would you know? 'Tis neat and tidy work you do, done on paper, and never any lack of it.”

“Work I took because this land was promised you, and there was nothing for me here.”

John walked away without reply, crossed the muddy yard and the road beyond, into the fields. Noonan mounted his horse and set out for Dundalk, turning around only once, for what would be his last glimpse of home.

In the morning, after the guns had finished firing, Noonan put on his tunic and went out to General Wool's coach. Wool appeared a few moments later. He was stooped, and walked with a stiff, shuffling gait. He was already sweating profusely, and grunted loudly as he mounted the coach. He waved away Noonan's offered hand, falling into his seat with such force that he made the coach rock.

“Let us be off,” Wool said. The sweat was beaded on his forehead and upper lip. “It is impolite to keep any man waiting, but to do so to the honored dead is downright insulting.”

A private viewing of General Samuel Zook's body was scheduled for eight o'clock, in City Hall. He had been killed on the second day of Gettysburg. Before his body was offered for public viewing, his military comrades were to pay their respects.

“If you don't mind, General, I have offered Major Ahearn a ride with us,” Noonan said. “He should be here momentarily.”

“Damn you, Noonan, for turning my coach into an omnibus, and damn Acorn for being late.”

“Ahearn,
not Acorn.”

“From the look of him, it would seem his pubes grew in the week before last. Nothing but an acorn, and he's a major already. We are awash in acorns, Colonel. We have been for some time. You see them everywhere, in business, the clergy, the Army, an endless parade of boys, none of them willing to wait, all of them in such a ferocious hurry. It is a dangerous thing when a country becomes all ambition and no wisdom, but it's what happens when experience is pushed aside and mere youth put in its place.”

“Ahearn is an experienced officer,” Noonan said. “I served with him on the Peninsula. He was wounded at Fredericksburg.”

On the other side of the parade ground, Ahearn came down the front steps of his quarters. He walked with his head down, the same deliberate, plodding step as on that morning seven months before, when the Irish Brigade had crossed the pontoon bridges into Fredericksburg. The men had picked their way through the debris and smashed furniture scattered around the narrow streets. A storm of soft, fluffy goose feathers, the innards of disemboweled mattresses, blew about like snow. Noonan stood with Ahearn at the top of Hanover Street, the last protected space before the open fields that swelled in gentle waves toward Marye's Heights. In the northern sky, above the rooftops and over the river, was an Army observation balloon, a large white sphere as bright and prominent as the moon. As the Union guns began to pound the heights above the town, the tiny figures in the basket suspended beneath the balloon waved signal flags that told the gunners how to adjust their fire.

In a short while, General Thomas Francis Meagher came up the crowded street on horseback. The men stood aside to let him pass. Ahead was a small bridge that they had to funnel together in order to cross. Once across, the brigade formed into battle ranks, and when Meagher rode out onto the field, he was cheered. He leaned over a row of evergreen bushes, tore off a sprig of green, and stuck it into his hat. The men broke ranks. They clutched and ripped at the branches and stuck green sprigs into their caps. Noonan shouted for them to get back into line. Meagher sat facing the Heights, oblivious to the confusion behind him, and raised his sword. He yelled something that Noonan couldn't hear, and then the whole brigade went forward. They reached the first rise. The Rebels held their fire. Off to his right, Noonan saw Ahearn walking amid the ranks, encouraging the men, his face white and taut. As they approached the second rise, the thunderclap struck, Rebel artillery and muskets firing simultaneously; the entire front rank seemed to go down together, in unison, and the smoke rolled down on top of them. The gunfire was ceaseless. The sergeant in front of Noonan was hit in the mouth by a piece of canister that blew out the back of his head. Noonan fell over him, then stood and brushed off his clothes, aware of the ridiculous futility of his gesture even as he did it. He ran forward, sword in hand, and yelled at the top of his lungs. Through the smoke he caught glimpses of the Rebels: indistinguishable faces beneath slouched hats.

One ball hit him in the side and
stopped him cold. The next one passed through his right thigh and lodged behind his left knee. He limped forward a few steps before he fell, and a soldier with a shattered chest fell on top of him, his eyes open and blood spurting from his mouth and the hole in his chest. Noonan rolled him off. He tried to stand but couldn't. He looked up and saw Ahearn go past, quickly disappearing into a curtain of smoke.

Wool looked out the window of the coach when Ahearn entered. He grunted in response to Ahearn's greeting. There were no more attempts at conversation. As the coach rolled off the ferry toward City Hall, the temperature seemed to increase appreciably. Hot as it had been on Governors Island, the city was far hotter.

At City Hall, Ahearn exited first. He offered his hand to Wool, but the old man glowered at him and came out unassisted. Noonan ascended the stairs of City Hall beside Wool. At the top, Mayor Opdyke greeted them. “Well, Colonel, I don't think we have anything to worry about, do you?” The Mayor looked ill. His hair was matted with perspiration. Around his eyes there was a Nile tint to the skin.

“I will be better able to
answer that question this evening,” Noonan said.

General Charles Sanford, Commander of the State Militia, came up behind Mayor Opdyke and put his hand on the Mayor's shoulder. “Pardon me for interrupting, but I wish to offer the Colonel congratulations on a job well done.”

“We haven't begun yet,” Noonan said.

“You've completed the enrollment of a hundred thousand men and established draft offices throughout the city, all without the slightest disturbance. I'd say you're well begun and half done, as the Greeks put it.”

“The Colonel won't permit himself such happy thoughts,” the Mayor said. “Perhaps he's just being superstitious, a not uncommon trait among the Irish, or perhaps he's merely being cautious, a necessary virtue among military men, I suppose.”

“A good soldier must know when to be cautious and when to be brave,” Wool said. “Noonan knows both.” He walked away from them into City Hall; Noonan followed.

General Zook lay in state in a large rectangular room on the first floor. His catafalque was swathed in black bunting and banked with lily plants. Beneath, out of view, was a copper-lined vat of tightly packed ice in which the coffin sat. The heat was already causing the ice to melt. A steady drip fell, turning the red carpet around the coffin as dark as blood.

Zook had been dead over a week. Neither ice nor flowers nor the aromatic fragrances the undertaker had sprayed around the room could erase entirely the faint odor of corruption. Zook's face had been given a fresh dusting of talc to cover its sea-green hue. Zook had been shot at Gettysburg in the chest and the groin; he'd fallen from his horse and bled to death. Now his eyes were closed, as if he were asleep, but despite the undertaker's labors, the mouth was twisted rather than reposed, the final agony still on it. His gloved hands were crossed on the buckle of his sword belt, the gesture of the dead. Solid, reliable Samuel Zook. Noonan had last seen him alive on the morning of the assault on Fredericksburg. Zook had been supervising the repair of the pontoon bridges damaged by Confederate artillery fire. He wore spectacles at the end of his thick nose, and scratched at his frizzy brown beard as he moved back and forth. He looked more like a botanist gathering specimens in a spring field than a soldier in imminent danger of being punctured by a sniper's bullet. He walked back to the Union lines in the same deliberate way as he had paced the bridges, as though taking his daily constitutional. Noonan stopped to greet Zook as the brigade moved down to the river. Zook was sitting on a campstool, his head bowed in a silent grace before he took his breakfast. Although he had abandoned the pacifist tenets of his Mennonite faith, he was a rigorously devout man who refrained from alcohol, tobacco, and swearing, and who encouraged his men to do the same. “Sanctity Sam,” they called him, yet it wasn't so much piety Zook radiated as the rock-hard holiness of a biblical prophet, a grim resolve to wear down the evil in the world.

Zook had moved from Pennsylvania
to New York in the 1840s as the superintendent of the Washington & New York Telegraph Company. He was one of the few men in the business who was willing to hire Irishmen, and the first winter Noonan was in the city, Zook had taken him on as an assistant. Their days were spent running and repairing wires in the financial district. It was a boom-time business. New trading offices opened constantly, some of them little more than a desk and a telegraph key, and the brokers made a sport of cutting one another's wires. Zook liked to take his men out to drink after work, and the carousing often lasted until the following morning, when they went straight from the tavern to their jobs. Zook never seemed to tire of this routine, until the spring the cholera struck and carried away his twin sons, age six.

Noonan attended the funeral, at a Quaker church in the rural precincts of Brooklyn. Zook was crushed with grief. Noonan knew there were those who said that the cholera was carried by the Irish, as endemic among them as popery and vice, and that to associate with Paddies was to risk exposure to the onslaughts of the disease. But Zook neither shunned nor condemned Noonan. He simply stood by the graveside, the two small coffins laid at his feet, and cried out over and over, “O Lord, I am a sinner!”

Zook returned to work a
changed man, reserved and religious.

Noonan left the telegraph company the next year and didn't run into his erstwhile boss again until after Bull Run, when Zook arrived outside Washington at the head of the Fifty-seventh New York, no trace left of his lighthearted, whiskey-loving days.

Now Zook was this lifeless husk. Noonan took his seat. He contemplated that Wool had been wrong when he had described the gap in the country as a matter of age, the ceaseless promotion of youth. In truth, it was a difference less measurable, if just as real. It was a contest between those like Zook, who understood war for what it really was, the business of killing, and sought to wind it up as efficiently as possible, and those who saw it as adventure, glorious and invigorating, a contest that ennobled its participants.

A minister read Psalm 25: “Unto thee, O Lord, do I lift up my soul. O my God, I trust in thee: Let me not be ashamed, let not mine enemies triumph over me.” Zook's widow, a stout, German-looking woman, wept quietly. At one point there was a small commotion at the back of the room as late arrivals took their place. The minister looked up without interrupting his reading. The service over, a diminutive man in black walked down the aisle to Mrs. Zook. He spoke a few words to her, patting her hand as he did. The undertaker, Noonan thought; then the little man turned to come back up the aisle, and Noonan recognized General George McClellan. Although in civilian clothes, McClellan was accompanied by a retinue of officers, who waited for him by the door. He walked solemnly, at a deliberate pace, stopped at the door, and greeted each mourner as he departed. It was as if Zook had been a son or brother of his.

Noonan and Wool were last in line. Wool shuffled his feet impatiently as they waited. He whispered to Noonan, “I think our boy here is going into politics.” McClellan seemed delighted to see Wool. “Ellis, old friend,” he said, “how goes it?”

Wool's face was
expressionless. “I'm doing my best, George,” he said.

“No doubt of that, never was. We couldn't have had a Peninsula Campaign without you. If you hadn't saved Fort Monroe for the Union in '61, the door to Richmond would have been slammed in our faces.”

“It got slammed anyway,” Wool said as he moved on.

McClellan called after him, “That was the President's decision, not ours, Ellis. It was the President who decided to withhold the forces we needed to take Richmond.”

Wool walked away without responding.

McClellan turned to Noonan. “Colonel Noonan, of the Sixty-ninth New York, adjutant to Thomas Francis Meagher.”

Noonan was astonished that McClellan remembered him. They had met only once, a year ago, on Malvern Hill, on the morning of the last battle of the ill-fated Peninsula Campaign. Noonan had accompanied General Meagher. They had walked to the top of the hill, through a wall of guns, to a large field tent with its flaps raised. In the middle, atop a portable wooden floor, was an Oriental rug that had been confiscated from the home of some departed Rebel planter. Officers stood around, leaning over tables and examining maps. From the direction of the James came a galloping squad of horsemen. McClellan was in the lead. He held his hat at his side in continuous acknowledgment of the soldiers and artillerists who cheered his approach. He dismounted gracefully in front of the tent. Meagher stepped forward to greet him, and McClellan clasped Meagher's hand. Meagher introduced Noonan, who was struck by McClellan's boyishness, which was suggested not only by his shortness and his thick stock of black hair but by his smooth, soft face.

An orderly brought them hot coffee in white ceramic mugs. McClellan sat on a campstool.