The Better Angels of Our Nature (50 page)

Daylight was trying to creep under the shutters in the now-empty foyer when Jesse, awake all night, saw Major Jackson striding across the carpet to the front doors. She jumped up and called him. He turned and stared at her, then he took off his hat and scratched his head.

“Well, I’ll be a lop-eared—I was just comin’ to get you. The gen’al wants to see you.” He manhandled her around and gave her an unnecessary shove toward the elevator. This was one time that the scrupulously truthful and plain-speaking Hoosier appeared unable to bring those small gray eyes into contact with Jesse’s earnest, questioning gaze.

In a room on the second floor, where twelve months ago Sherman had held ruthless but benign sway over the wavering citizens of this Secesh city, Jesse now found him awaiting her arrival. He was standing at the window, staring out at the emerging dawn, his back to the door, smoking a cigar. He was one of those restless creatures who cannot be closed up without a glimpse of sky, open fields, a horizon beyond which the naked eye can see, as an unhappy animal will pace the floor of his cage, stare longingly through the bars at some image in his own imagination, memory, vision, of a time when freedom was his. Sherman was like one of those caged animals. In any room or tent, he would be drawn automatically to the window or flaps where the open road beckoned like a siren song.

Without turning around he said, “Thank you for coming.”

“You have no need to thank me.” When he remained silent she said, “How is Willy?”

“The doctors say there is nothing more to be done. My son lies there dying, so brave, though he realizes that he is breathing his last hours on earth.”

“I’m…so…sorry—” Her eyes had filled with tears, but Sherman’s next words were destined to fill them with consternation.

“I asked you to come here because even before the Shiloh Battle, I had heard the men talking about you, about your…your powers of healing.” As the Ohioan turned from the window and looked at her for the first time, she saw that the past few days had taken their toll, more than all the marching and fighting, fighting not only with the Rebels, but with political generals and newspapers. The lines in that molded-clay face had deepened almost to scars, the mouth was straight and turning bitter, only the eyes revealed the pain of a father struggling to come to terms with the knowledge that his dearest child, the one who was the extension of his own life and ambitions, might soon be taken from him.

Jesse briefly shook her head, her big sad eyes on the lined map of sorrow that was his face.

“All who have spoken about you to me, even the rational Major Jackson, a man who would doubt the evidence of his own eyes—” He paused to lift a trembling hand to his furrowed brow. Sherman the realist was evidently very uncomfortable with what he was about to say. “At Chewalla, while we were salvaging the cars from the swamps, I was stricken with malarial fever. You nursed me.”

“Dr. Cartwright brought you back to health, sir, Doctor Cartwright and quinine.”

“
No.
That is not the whole story. Major Jackson told me.” His tone and his eyes were hardening a degree with every word. “He told me you reduced my fever by merely placing your hand on my burning brow. He told me how you spoke in the voice of my Minnie and thereby comforted me when I might have sent you away from me, when you
knew
I
would
have sent you away from me.”

Jesse was staring at him, at last understanding. She moistened her lips before she said finally, and with finality, “I
cannot
help your son.”

Sherman came near and placed a hand on her shoulder. He spoke inexorably, as if his ears were closed to her protestations. “We both know that you are different. Do you recall you once told me, you are anything we wish you to be? I have at times suspected that might be true—the idealistic Cartwright, the compassionate Dutchman, the moral young Ransom, my own aides, the roughest, wildest men of my Fifteenth Corps. Can you deny that you affect all who touch or are touched by you?”

“I too have been profoundly touched by those I have known here—”

Sherman gave a dismissive shake of his head as if her feelings did not count at this moment. “Jesse, I would not ask for me,
believe me,
if it were not for my poor wife—”

“Sir.” She looked him directly in his deep-set piercing eyes. “I cannot help the boy. I cannot save Willy’s life any more than—”

“I care little for my own future and will care even less without my precious son.” He leaned forward and spoke into her face in that rasping voice. He seemed not to have heard her, or wasn’t listening, except to the grief in his own heart. “Willy is my namesake. The child on whose future I have based all the ambition I ever had, the child who will follow me into the army. Willy
is
my future! I am not a religious man, though, as you know, I believe in God. I ask this of you not for myself, but for Mrs. Sherman, who blames herself for not realizing sooner that our child was so ill. Yet I know I am the guilty one for bringing Willy to this sickly region in the summertime, but I truly believed my camps were clean and free of fever, and I have ever put my duty to my country, to the lawful government before all else. If this is God’s punishment for my devotion to country above family, then let him punish me and not Willy.”

“Please, sir, I beg you, believe me when I say I have no power to help your son. So much do I love you and know how deeply you love your son that I would forfeit my own precious existence now if it would save him. But it would not. I’ve seen so many brave men breathe their last on the battlefield, in the hospital tents, if I could have given even one of them an extra hour, an extra day of life—would I not have done so? I can offer comfort, hope—”

“He has plenty of comfort and hope from his mother, his brother and sisters,” Sherman cut in harshly. “They believe unwaveringly in an everlasting life. They believe that his soul will live forever in heaven. I only know that he is the pride and hope of my life here on earth. I can only believe in the beautiful child with whom I can converse and laugh and hug to my chest. The child that I will lose because I brought him here to this accursed place.”

Jesse tried to touch his hand but he shook her off. As the tears overflowed her lashes and ran down her face, he said in a frighteningly composed voice, a voice far more menacing for that. “I ask you once more—” Jesse gazed up at him in silence. “I beg you—” After a second of composing himself, he said, “Get out—you are dismissed.”

She left him as she had found him, staring out the window at the blue-gray dawn.

At seven that evening, with his family all around him, with Father Carrier administering last rites and several nuns from Sister Angela’s old convent in attendance, William T. Sherman Junior, five months past his ninth birthday, passed away.

His father spent the night searching all of Memphis for a small lead casket.

The following morning the child’s mortal remains, dressed in his beloved sergeant’s uniform, sealed in that lead casket, was escorted from the Gayoso House with full military honors by the Thirteenth Regulars, weeping bare-headed men of Sergeant Willy’s own battalion, to the steamship
Gray Eagle,
for burial in the North.

The regulars gently removed the small coffin from the gun carriage and carried it with deep respect up the gangway, Sherman remaining on the quayside, watching. Among the crowds of mourning soldiers were Seth Cartwright, Jacob De Groot, and Jesse Davis.

Mrs. Sherman, face and eyes red and swollen with weeping, and three of her children boarded the ship for their last journey with their brother.

The
Gray Eagle
steamed slowly out of the harbor and the general, a terrible suffering burned into his brow, turned to the grizzled, hardened veterans, none of whom hid their tears. As he murmured his appreciation, his tragic gaze came to rest, by accident it seemed, upon Jesse. With a tightening of his features, he looked away.

Cartwright put an arm around her shoulders and stared at her sorrowful profile. Under different circumstances, there were reasons he might feel pleased that morning. Ransom was out of his hair, sent off, according to Jacob, who’d had a brief note from him, to Texas as part of Banks’ Army of the Gulf, and far away from Jesse, who didn’t seem to care about that fact. Somehow Cartwright couldn’t rejoice. There was no letup to the slaughter and death.

“That little boy was just as much a victim of this lousy stinking war as if he had been struck down by shot or shell,” he said suddenly, bitterly.

An enlisted man, standing near, the veteran of a hundred skirmishes and a dozen battles, from Donelson to Vicksburg, spoke up, as he wiped his damp eyes.

“Yer right there, Doc, and I wouldn’t wanna be in the boots a any damn Rebel that crosses Billy Sherman’s path from this time on.”

The war would not stop because William Tecumseh Sherman had lost his son.

Sons were dying every day. There was little time to grieve.

Charged with moving his twenty thousand men, their horses, artillery, and equipment, a distance of three hundred miles over steep rolling hills through hostile country and across the Tennessee River, urged by Henry Halleck in Washington to “act with all possible promptness,” Sherman’s duty was clear to him.

His special orders were to make all haste to Chattanooga, using the Memphis and Charleston Railroad, repairing it as he went, and to draw supplies on that route so that no further burden should be put on the already overtaxed roads back to Nashville, upon which Rosecrans’s besieged forces in Chattanooga were dependent for their meager rations.

On October 2, 1863, as Sherman and his family had arrived at Memphis with their mortally sick child, the Ohioan had learned the movements of his divisions. General Osterhaus had already taken his by rail as far as Corinth. The Second Division was ready to start for that place by the same means after reaching Memphis in tandem with their corps commander. The Fourth Division, led by General John Corse, had arrived two days later.

The railroad as far as Corinth, already two-thirds destroyed and running across territory wide open to Rebel guerrillas and cavalry, was being repaired daily, but cars to carry the troops and locomotives to pull them were in short supply. Therefore it wasn’t until the ninth that the Second Division got off, followed by the Fourth, who gave new meaning to the phrase “foot soldiers.” Because of the lack of rolling stock and Sherman’s worries for the safety of a railroad, they were set off overland, with artillery and horses, to march the ninety-six miles to Corinth.

Sherman was forced to wait three more days for a special train. But during the time of Mrs. Sherman’s departure and his own, he had thrown himself into making his usual detailed and meticulous arrangements. A welcome diversion for a man who could not sleep, nor even close his eyes, without seeing the sweet face of his lost child.

Every day Jesse appeared at his headquarters, and every day Captain Jackson told her, “Get yerself back to the hospital. If the gen’al wants yer, he’ll send for yer.”

On Sunday the eleventh, while most of Memphis was still abed, Sherman and his entire headquarters staff, along with clerks, orderlies, and horses, boarded the cars.

On the roof were the faithful battalion of the Thirteenth United States Regulars,
Willy’s own.

Jesse Davis tied Quicksand’s lead rope to the tailboard of a nearby wagon and quickly approached Major Van Allen as he was heading toward Sherman and a group of officers.

“Sir.” She touched his arm, in her eyes such a desperation that he said, “Wait here a moment, Lieutenant.”

She watched him speak to Sherman, and saw the Ohioan give a downward jerk of his head. She held her breath until the New Englander’s return.

“You may travel on the cars with the horses, Jesse.” He saw her face. Her eyes. “I’m sorry, it’s the best I can do.”

“No—no sir, that’s…wonderful—at least I’ll be on the same train as the general.” The journey between Memphis and Chattanooga was a long one, over the roughest, most difficult terrain; anything could happen.

He touched her arm, his brief smile reassuring.

Jesse traveled in one of the horseboxes with Quicksand. There were worse places to be, but with the heat, and the flies, and the steaming horse manure it would have been difficult to think of one. There was an air of melancholy about the horses this morning. Jesse knew how they felt. Dear old Sam, their leader, so beloved of Sergeant Willy as he rode in reviews by his father’s side, had been left with Captain Lewis, the quartermaster at Memphis, to be sent on to Lancaster. Sam’s war was over. His master wished him kept safe for Willy’s sake. He had earned an honorable discharge and comfortable retirement, but he would be sorely missed, by his fellow mounts and by a commander who had grown to respect his courage and fortitude.

Jesse pressed her face to the wooden slats. They were passing through Germantown, eight miles out of Memphis. She had dropped off, but not completely, and a noise had brought her back to wakefulness. Now she could hear shouting, but it wasn’t the Rebels, it was the men of the Thirteenth Regulars crowded onto the roof of the train, jeering and laughing at their less fortunate comrades, Corse’s division marching beside the track. Several well-aimed missiles were traded, among them tin cups and plates that clattered against the boxcars, as well as a battery of equally bruising insults. Soon however Corse’s footsore soldiers and their loud cursing were left far behind.

Around noon Jesse squinted once more through the slats as the sun’s rays slanted across the dusty boxcar. They were coming into Colliersville station, where soldiers from the small garrison guarding the depot waved at their comrades and exchanged the usual bantering. The train went right on through without stopping.

Another half-mile down the line the train suddenly jolted, throwing several of the horses against the sides of the car, then shunted back and forth and slowed down. Jesse spent the next few minutes trying to calm the nervous animals as they moved restlessly about in the stiflingly hot, confined space, before the train finally came to a shuddering halt. She stared through the slats. All she could see were Sherman’s men running up and down the platform. While she stood there trying to decide what to do next there were several bursts of sporadic gunfire, followed by shouting. A blue-clad soldier paused outside the boxcar, a single shot rang out and he fell clutching his stomach. There was the chatter of musketry and a terrific roar and crash that she recognized as cannon firing, a roar and crash that was quickly answered.