The Better Angels of Our Nature (51 page)

The Rebels were attacking the train.

In another moment she heard horses pounding down the embankment, saw the gray uniforms of Rebel cavalry, shouted orders, the flash of gunpowder. She snatched up her carbine and checked the chamber. It was fully loaded, but as she stood beside the door, it was abruptly and violently thrown open. She just managed to jump aside as a lighted torch was tossed onto the hay by a heavily bearded lieutenant. She had never acted so quickly in her life. She grabbed Dolly’s head rein, led her to the entrance, and found herself face to face with the Rebel lieutenant and two others, all wearing self-satisfied grins.

“Too hot in thar, Yankee boy?” one demanded to know, waving his pistol in the air.

They had already put down a ramp. The lieutenant leapt up onto the car, snatched Dolly’s reins from Jesse’s hands, and shoved her aside as though she was no more nuisance than a fly. He then sent the heaving, sweating, and overexcited animal down the ramp to his fellow soldiers. Then he stared around him with wild eyes, eyes that alighted on the handsome palomino, which was a terrible mistake. Jesse got to her feet and held onto the Rebel’s arm. He tried to shake her off, but with Quicksand bucking and kicking and the straw on fire around his feet, this time she was not so easy to dislodge. He released Quicksand and brought his hand around, striking Jesse across the right ear. Staggering, lights flashing inside her head, she fell back against the side of the car and sank down, stunned by the violence of the blow and bleeding from her ear. She was conscious, barely, watching as though through a trembling mist as Quicksand, rolling his eyes until the red had completely filled the outer corners of the sockets, reared up on his hind legs and brought his front near foot down upon the Rebel lieutenant’s head, crushing the skull with the ease of a sledgehammer crushing an egg, and with quite as messy a result. There was more firing, shouting, cursing; a shot pierced the wooden slats just above her head. Blue-clad men were leading the horses gently down the ramp as the flames licked up the side of the boxcar. Thank God the horses would be safe. Jesse’s eyelids drooped.

“Sir, those godforsaken Reb bastards, if you’ll excuse me, have made a bloody mess a the rear of this train, sir—got their filthy hands on five of our best horses, sir, and it would have been more but for the lad—he tried his damnedest to stop ’em, sir, and got a goddamn box on the ears for his trouble, sir.” Sergeant O’Connor, head teamster, was in full flow. “Sir—those thievin’ bastards tried to have it away with the lad’s own beloved animal, sir—but that dee-vil of a beast went berserk, sir, I ain’t never seen nuthin’ to compare—crushed that Reb’s skull to a gray pulp right after he laid his fists upon the young lieutenant. He’s deader than a turkey at Thanksgivin’.”

Andy and Marcus exchanged looks. Andy lifted his hat and was scratching his head as he looked at the mess of bone, blood, and brains spread across the damp straw.

Jesse opened her eyes. For a moment, she had trouble remembering where she was and what had happened, but a sharp pain in her ear and the smell of burned straw quickly reminded her. She looked dazedly over to where the teamster was pointing, as if General Sherman couldn’t see for himself the Rebel officer with a crushed gray pulp where his brains had once been. Sherman waited for the last of the horses to be led down the ramp, then, without a word, he tossed his cigar stub aside and walked up the ramp. He stood there a moment, unable to take his piercing eyes off Jesse’s face as she stared up at him. Her cheeks were smeared with soot and sweat and her beautiful eyes made red by the smoke. That strong jaw already bore the promise of dark bruising, but it was the thin trickle of blood, which came from inside her right ear and ran down her neck into the grimy collar of her shirt that held him fascinated. He knelt down, held her chin, and turning it aside, asked in an emotionally thickened voice, “What have they done to you, Lieutenant Davis?” He took the clean handkerchief that Van Allen held out to him and dabbed at her bleeding ear.

“They got your favorite mare, sir. I tried to stop them, but there were too many of them and the flames made the horses crazy. More than anything, sir, horses hate fire. Though I stopped them getting Duke, they badly wanted Duke and Quicksand, but Dolly has gone.”

“I appreciate your grand efforts on my behalf, Lieutenant.” He drew in a deep breath. “I regret the loss of my favorite mare, but it affords me great satisfaction to know that she’ll break the neck of the first guerrilla that fires a pistol from her back. Can you stand, Lieutenant, if I assist you?” He held her about the waist and she got groggily to her feet. Even when she became more steady he gave her his arm to lean on as they walked slowly down the ramp.

“Quicksand saved my life, sir,” she said. “The Rebel struck me across the ear and would have done worse if not for Quicksand.”

At that moment an orderly came running up, saluted, and blurted out nervously to Sherman, “Sir, they got your second-best uniform.”

“Goddamn those wretches,” Sherman cried. “Did they victimize only General Sherman?”

“Oh no, sir,” the orderly said, smiling suddenly, relieved that he could report the tale of another officer’s woe. “The Rebs used Colonel Audenreid’s fine shirts to kindle the blaze.”

“That makes
me
feel better, but I am damned sure the news will bring no relief whatsoever to Colonel Audenreid.”

It was indeed a fine greeting for a new member of the commander’s staff.

Sherman was staring out of the train window into a darkness studded with the crackling bivouac fires of his Thirteenth Regulars as they cooked their evening meal. Jesse placed the tin plate and coffee cup on the wooden seat beside him. He looked at her reflection in the window.

“Did you see my surgeon about your ear?” he inquired tersely.

“Yes sir.” The hearing seemed to have lessened on that side, but the surgeon had assured her it was only a temporary condition. “Will you eat something?”

He glanced with disinterest at the plate of food and then out of the window at the shimmering campfires. The sight somehow comforted him. “I confess, I am somewhat ashamed—I should not have asked you to help my son. My grief and that of Mrs. Sherman combined was more than I could bear.”

“Please, you don’t have—”

“Let me finish. As I told you before, I do not believe in spectral visions, unearthly phantoms, or any such nonsense, but that night I was not myself. You were right to refuse my request.”

“Sir”—Jesse’s frown deepened to show the extent of her almost physical pain—“I did not refuse. I spoke the truth; I had no power to help your son.”

“I can see my little boy now stumbling over the sand hills on Harrison Street in San Francisco, where he was born, eating his supper at the table in Leavenworth, running to meet me with open arms at Black River. Will my son ever understand and forgive me—with so many officers requesting furloughs I felt it my duty to remain with my command and bring my family to me.”

“They wanted to come here; Mrs. Sherman and the children were excited to see you.”

“
I know that,
” he flared up, “but they came at my bidding.
I
told them that my camps were free of fever.”

“How do you know Willy became ill at our camp? He went to Vicksburg often, he rode about Big Black. It wasn’t your fault, you acted in good faith.”

“Good faith—what is good faith when the life of my beloved child has ebbed away—tell me, why should my son be taken from us? Would that I could subside into some quiet corner and live the remainder of my life in peace—but how can I? I will go on to the end but the chief stay to my faltering heart is now gone.”

“Willy thought himself a sergeant of the Thirteenth; he showed the same courage in death as he had shown in life. If you falter now other fathers will weep as you weep now, as they
have
wept in the past two years and there will be no end to their tears. The war will not cease, even for a moment, to listen to the sound of one father weeping for a lost son. You, sir, know the truth of this better than anyone, for would you not tell a mourning father to dry his tears and go on and do his duty for his country as you have done these past few days?”

“Let me alone, Jesse,” he said in a voice devoid of emotion, “I wish to be alone with my memories, with my grief.”

The following morning, with the locomotive and railroad repaired, the train was ready to continue on to Corinth. Jesse approached Sherman on the platform as he was about to climb aboard. He stopped, looked at her, and waited.

“Sir, I realize you have much on your mind and I hesitate to ask, but in our camp on the Big Black you had me transferred to the medical department and I have remained there for four months. May I now know my duties and my fate?”

“Your fate, Lieutenant Davis, is known only to Almighty God; your duties, however, are well known to yourself, as you have on many occasions demonstrated to the complete satisfaction of your commander. Now hasten aboard, sir, hasten aboard, we have a long way to go.”

Jesse stood on the platform car at the rear of the train. She felt as if she was saying good-bye to something. Something was ending and another thing taking its place. However, the ending and the beginning were not yet complete. She needed to perform some kind of ceremony. She brought a sheet of folded paper from inside her shirt. She dropped her saddened gaze to the final lines of Thomas Ransom’s year-old letter.

“—But most of all I think of you, your compassion and courage, your love of country, my darling Jesse, a bright and constant light, guiding us all through the dark days to come—”

With a deep breath and setting her face determinedly, she screwed up the letter and tossed it onto the tracks. In a moment, it was out of sight, left behind, a painful if sobering memory.

They were on their way to Chattanooga, where the Army of the Cumberland was besieged in the shadow of Lookout Mountain and, after that, it could be Mobile, Alabama, or Atlanta, Georgia, or even Virginia. Already there had been rumors that Sherman would be given the Army of the Potomac. He would resist any efforts on the part of Washington to send him east, to the Virginia battlefields. His mission, as he saw it, was to protect the newly liberated Mississippi.

As for her, she also knew her mission. She had lost sight of it for a while there, but that was to be expected. Romantic love was the most powerful of all human emotions. Stronger even than fear and greed, vanity and man’s desire to go to war—why, it had even been known to stand up to death itself. More than once she’d heard Seth liken it to a fever that no amount of quinine could dispel. It has to run its course, he had said. In her it had run its course and now, thankfully, she’d come to her senses again. The fever was passed. She had woken up with a clear head.

She went into the car. Across the aisle Sherman’s harsh voice was raised in bitterness:

“I was wrong, gentlemen, two years have passed and the Rebel flag still haunts our nation’s capital. I see no end—or even the beginning of the end. Jeff Davis is as defiant as ever, and will not stop until the South is on her knees, begging for mercy. We cannot change the hearts of these people of the South, but we can make war so terrible and make them so sick of war that generations will pass before they again appeal to it. War is the remedy our enemies have chosen and I say let us give them all they want, not a word of argument, not a sign of letup, no cave in, till we are whipped—or they are!”

Oh yes, she knew her mission. She clutched at the compass Sherman had given her. He was right; she would never again lose her way.

I would like to begin by acknowledging my unquantifiable debt to Major General William Tecumseh Sherman—to his incomparable
Memoirs,
his published letters, his unforgettable quotes, his inexhaustible opinions on every subject under the sun, and his indefatigable energy in conveying them to posterity. It is on these that I have based my humble portrait of this great American patriot and the story of his war. The characters who surround him, with obvious exceptions, are of course fictional, the better to tell his story, and theirs.

I also acknowledge a debt to all Sherman biographers and to the best histories of that war.

If an author is fortunate, the most important person on the list of those to thank will be his or her editor. I am one of the most fortunate. My editor is Robert D. Loomis. He does not lead a horse to water—he simply points out the well. Sometimes he just tells me it exists. That is his genius.

My gratitude goes to the following people:

Mark J. Schaadt, M.D., chairman of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Blessing Hospital in Quincy, Illinois, and one of the country’s foremost experts on Civil War medicine and surgery. He became my guide and mentor through the blood and horror of a Civil War operating tent.

My research on Thomas E. G. Ransom would have come to a frustrating halt if not for James Huffstodt, author of
Hard Dying Men,
the story of General T.E.G. Ransom, and his Eleventh Illinois. Jim’s great-grandfather Martin Baker served under Ransom as a private soldier.

Mary Carpenter, support services manager at Council Bluffs Public Library, Iowa, tracked down much of the information available on Thomas Ransom.

A very personal thank-you goes to my dear friend Marvin Terban—scholar, educator, author. His wit, wisdom, and encouragement never faltered. He helped in ways he understands.