Love and War

by John Jakes

  “What’s your name and unit, Billy Yank?” the other orderly demanded. The Yank licked his lips while Orry held up his hand.

  “Time for that later.”

  The second orderly registered displeasure as he got down from the saddle. “Might as well shoot him, too, wouldn’t you say, sir? Wounded that way, what chance has he got?”

  True enough. Stomach wounds were usually mortal. It would save their hard-pressed doctors time and effort if he just put a ball through the soldier’s heart and was done with it. That was more humane than leaving him to suffer, and it might be wise from another standpoint as well. Orry distrusted the look in the young trooper’s eyes.

  Then shame flooded in. What sort of monster was he becoming even to entertain such thoughts? Slowly, he maneuvered the uncocked revolver into the holster on his left hip, beneath the overcoat. He dismounted and took pains to stand erect, a strangely courtly figure in spite of his patched and shabby coat of gray with its pinned-up sleeve.

  “We should let the surgeons determine his chances,” he said to the Virginia boys. He stepped toward the wounded trooper, who displayed no gratitude, no emotion at all. Well, Orry understood how emotion could be whipped out of a man by war’s fatigue and pain. His wariness changed to cool pity as he stared down at the trooper, who stared back, forced by his position to look at Orry with a great deal of white showing in his eyes.

  Orry stepped backward two paces to a point between the Yank’s outstretched leg and the orderlies. He turned toward the pair, pointing. “See if we can fashion some of those limbs and a saddle blanket into a litter. Then—”

  He heard the sounds behind him. Saw, at the same instant, the shock and fear on one orderly’s face. Orry’s tall body had momentarily prevented the young men from seeing the wounded Yank, who had used the opportunity to slide a concealed Colt from under his right thigh. He aimed at the back of Orry’s head and fired.

  The booming shot lifted most of the top of Orry’s skull. As he dropped to his knees, already dead, the cursing, screaming orderlies began pumping shots into the Yank. The bullets jerked him one way, then another, like some berserk marionette. When the shooting stopped, he leaned to the right with a peculiar, peaceful sigh and lay down as if asleep. The trembling orderlies lowered their smoking pieces as the white silence settled again.

  At a few minutes before noon that day, Madeline left Belvedere to walk in the hills. There was an air of jubilation throughout the house, generated by news that had come over the telegraph wire earlier in the morning and spread through all of Lehigh Station within two hours. Three days before, General Sherman had sent an unexpected greeting to the President.

  I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah.

  Madeline couldn’t share the mood of celebration. Constance in particular was sensitive to this, and restrained in her remarks about Sherman’s incredible march to the sea. Yet it was easy to detect her delight. Even Brett seemed pleased by the news, though she said nothing to indicate it. All of which made Madeline more than a little resentful.

  She wasn’t proud of the feeling, which she tried to purge as she adjusted her shawl around her shoulders and climbed a path toward one of the rounded summits covered with laurel. The December sun lent the day a welcome warmth. The weather had been unusually mild recently, almost autumnal. She wondered why she had bothered with the shawl.

  From the hilltop, she heard the first clang from a steeple. St. Margaret’s-in-the-Vale, she decided. After just a few weeks, she was able to identify the different churches by their bells. She had learned a lot about the industrial town and received a warm welcome there from the Hazards and all the servants. Yet Lehigh Station remained an alien place. Study it as she would, she couldn’t create the illusion that she belonged here.

  One by one, the other churches began to peal their bells in celebration of the news. Head down, Madeline faced away from the hazy vista of town and factory, obsessed by a single thought: How I wish Orry were here for Christmas.

  Suddenly, feeling something on her neck, she raised her head and turned around. She studied the sky. A wide gray mass showed in the northwest. What she had felt was the wind shifting to a different quarter. It was chilly now.

  She adjusted her shawl again, grateful that she had it. The colder wind began to tug and snap the hem of her skirt. She mustn’t resent the bells, but find joy in them. Every Union victory sped the day when Orry would be free to leave Richmond and rejoin her at Mont Royal. Considered that way, the bells pealed a message of hope.

  The earlier resentment gone, she lingered beneath the rapidly graying sky to listen to the loud, discordant, yet strangely beautiful music from the steeples. The peace of the season slowly filled her and showed her visions of many other Christmases she would share with her beloved Orry. She was happy when she took the downward path again.

  BOOK SIX

  THE JUDGMENTS OF THE LORD

  My views are, sir, that our people are tired of war, feel themselves whipped, and will not fight. Our country is overrun.

  GENERAL JOE JOHNSTON TO JEFFERSON DAVIS, after Appomattox, 1865.

  119

  MR. LONZO PERDUE, POSTAL clerk and third-generation resident of Richmond, was a man beset by miseries. Scores of small signs warned that the Confederacy’s death agony had begun, which meant the death agony of the city as well. Mr. Perdue wanted to rush his beloved wife and daughters away to safety. But where did safety lie with the Yankees so close? And even if he found sanctuary, how would he provide for his dear ones? The money with which the government paid him was worthless. If an officer on leave was lucky enough to find a pair of secondhand boots these days, he would buy them for fifteen hundred Confederate dollars and tip the clerk another five hundred.

  It was January, the coldest in Lonzo Perdue’s memory. The upper crust, a section of the social pie in which no one had ever placed Mr. Perdue, even by mistake, continued to hold parties, which the papers dutifully reported. They were called “starvation parties” now. The nobs attending drank lukewarm dandelion coffee and munched bits of James River ice served on dessert plates.

  Not only were there snow flurries in the freezing air, there was despair. The brigand Sherman was loose in the Carolinas, burning, raping, and pillaging as he had done while crossing Georgia. Admiral Porter had closed on Fort Fisher with a Union flotilla and would soon force a surrender, if he hadn’t already; lately the war news traveled like corn syrup left outdoors overnight.

  Mr. Perdue decided this was because all the news was bad and that egotistical, half-blind bungler Davis didn’t want any more of it to reach the people than was absolutely necessary. In his bureaucratic post, Mr. Perdue naturally heard rumors. The principal ones concerned the President, who was said to be madly suing for peace in secret. As well he might. The Enquirer scathingly asserted that, come spring, not one man in two would be left in the trenches at Petersburg.

  There were harbingers of collapse everywhere. Mrs. Perdue, ever a champion of good works, divided her time between the Soup Association, whose kitchens dispensed a watery potato-flavored liquid to the starving, and a ladies’ circle from St. Paul’s Church that located old pieces of carpet, then sectioned and packed them for shipment to the lines. Each carpet square was intended as a blanket.

  On his way to his daily job, Mr. Perdue no longer stopped to visit with acquaintances encountered on the street. His only overcoat had been donated—foolishly, he now realized—to army collection agents last fall. His only pair of woolen gloves, riddled with holes, kept him about as warm as no gloves whatever.

  Of course he didn’t bump into many acquaintances these days. Wounded soldiers—oh, yes, plenty of those. And roving niggers. But the decent people had deserted the streets. Mr. Perdue no longer ventured out after dark, for those hours now belonged to the sharps who ran the faro banks that were still booming and the pluguglies who made brawls and robberies commonplace and the carriages of the few speculators still enjoying champagne and foie gras
—the damned traitors.

  An upright and sober man all his life, Mr. Perdue had now become a suspicious and embittered one who whiffed betrayal and conspiracy everywhere. He was sick of a diet of white beans and a once-weekly portion of slightly gamy sliced turkey washed down with a tiny amount of apple brandy. He loved oysters and hadn’t tasted one for a year, though he presumed King Jeff still dined on them regularly.

  He hated the unseen, unknown powers who had reduced his poor wife and daughters to shabbiness. When they needed pins, they settled for slivers of palmetto. When they needed dress buttons, they dyed small bits of gourd. For his daughter Clytemnestra’s eleventh birthday in December, the only present he had been able to find—and afford—angered him and broke his heart, too. It was a cheap little necklace of silvery iridescent flowers made from fish scales; price, thirty dollars.

  The newspapers confirmed the approaching end in other ways. Theatrical performances were advertised as sold out, the mobs enjoying a final orgiastic revel. Advertisements for runaway slaves appeared infrequently; some days, there were none. Owners knew they had little chance of recovering their property, thanks to the looming military disaster and the wicked pronouncements of the Original Gorilla.

  Mr. Perdue’s ears also told him the end was near. It was an unusual day or night that didn’t include at least one interval of artillery fire from the defense lines to the south. The cannonading had become such a fact of life that it was worrisome if a day or a night passed without any.

  On this particular morning, sunnier than most but still very cold, Mr. Perdue had left his wife in tears. For their daughter Marcelline’s thirteenth birthday two days hence, Mrs. Perdue had struggled to find enough scrap satin to re-cover the girl’s last pair of shoes. That would be her gift. At half past twelve last night, Mrs. Perdue had broken a needle, then broken down when she realized that her estimate of the amount of material needed was wrong. Half of one shoe could not be finished, and she couldn’t buy any more satin to match.

  His wife’s plight was another stimulus of Mr. Perdue’s anger. He looked even sourer than usual when he reached Goddin Hall, the four-story brick structure at Eleventh and Bank streets, just below Capitol Square. The first-floor post office shared the building with the Confederate patent office and various army functionaries. Mr. Perdue stuffed his three-fingered gloves in one pocket and started work next to his old post office colleague, Salvarini, the middle-aged son of a noted meat market proprietor who had lately closed his doors, refusing to butcher and sell dogs and cats.

  Salvarini had already dumped two large pouches of incoming mail on the work counter, to be sorted into other crates or cloth and canvas bags lying about. There was little order in the post office anymore and no uniformity in what its employees did or how they did it.

  “My wife’s jaundiced color is worse,” Salvarini said to his friend as they began sorting letters written on brown paper, wallpaper, newspaper—all kinds of paper. “I’ve got to find a doctor.”

  “They’re all in the trenches,” snapped Mr. Perdue. Hands warming at last, he began to whiz letters to the crates and bags or to various Richmond pigeonholes in front of him, with his usual dexterity. “Best thing you can do is consult a leecher.”

  “Is it safe? Are they clean?”

  “I can’t answer either question, but I know they’re available. Read the papers. Dozens of them advertising. I did hear Mrs. Perdue remark that the one opposite the American Hotel is considered among the more reliable—here, what’s this?”

  He held up an envelope distinguished by the fact that it was exactly that—a genuine envelope, properly sealed with a blob of dark blue wax and addressed in a bold hand. The correspondent had identified himself in the upper corner as I. Duncan, Esq.

  “The addresses are getting vaguer by the day,” Mr. Perdue complained. “Look.” He handed the envelope to Salvarini, who studied what was written on it. Maj. Chas. Main, Hampton’s Cavalry Corps, C.S.A.

  Salvarini nodded. “Also, there’s no stamp.”

  “Yes, I saw that.” Mr. Perdue scowled. “I’ll bet some damn Yankee sent this by illegal courier and the courier didn’t bother with a stamp when he posted it locally. I’ll be hanged if I’ll handle enemy mail.”

  Salvarini was more charitable. “Perhaps the sender’s a Southerner who couldn’t afford the stamp.”

  Lonzo Perdue, respectable husband, worried father, betrayed patriot, stared at the letter while his mouth turned downward still further. There was a distant rumbling, a whine of glass in the windows above them. Salvarini greeted the start of the bombardment with an expression bordering on relief.

  “The rules are the rules,” declared Mr. Perdue.

  “But you don’t know what this contains, Lonzo. Suppose it’s important. News of some relative’s death—something like that?”

  “Let this Major Main learn of it some other way,” his colleague retorted. With an outward snap of his hand, Mr. Perdue sailed the envelope into a wooden box already half filled with misaddressed letters, small parcels with the inking obliterated by rain or dirt—undeliverable items destined for storage and eventual destruction.

  120

  CHARLES FELT INCREASINGLY ALONE, taking part in what was now beyond all doubt a losing fight. Even General Hampton no longer expressed confidence, though he swore to expend his last blood before he quit. The general had grown dour and, some said, revenge-crazed since his son and aide, Preston, had been killed near Hatcher’s Run last October. Hampton’s son Wade had received a wound in the same action.

  Charles functioned—he rode and shot—yet his real self lived apart from daily events in some mental netherworld from which associates and friends departed one by one. Following his promotion, Hampton had gone up to staff, and Charles no longer saw him except from afar. Calbraith Butler and his division, after riding all night through the winter’s worst sleetstorm to help drive back Gouverneur Warren’s augmented Fifth Corps striking at the Weldon Railroad, were now bound for home. In South Carolina the men were to find remounts and, more important, defend the state against Sherman’s horde.

  All of this and January’s cold wrapped Charles in the deepest depression he had ever experienced. The worst of it was a thought that marched into his mind at all hours of the day and night, as unstoppable as Grant’s war machine. In leaving Gus, Charles was beginning to believe, he had made the worst mistake of his life.

  His beard, white-speared, hung below the midpoint of his chest. His own smell was an offense to his nostrils; the army had run out of soap last autumn. To keep warm in the freezing weather, he used needle and thread from his preciously guarded housewife to fashion a poncho-like garment of rags and pieces of ruined uniforms. As the great robe grew longer and larger, it earned him a new nickname.

  He was wearing the robe when he and Jim Pickles crouched beside a small fire one black January night. A bitter wind blew as they enjoyed their meal of the day—one handful of dried and badly burned corn.

  “Gypsy?” Charles looked up. Jim groped under his filthy coat with a mittened hand. “Got some mail today.”

  Charles said nothing. He no longer looked for any for himself, hence never knew when deliveries were made. Jim tugged out a single soiled sheet and held it between index and middle fingers, well away from the fire.

  “This was writ at home ’bout six weeks ago. My mama’s dyin’, if—” he cleared his throat, his breath pluming “—if she ain’t gone already.” A pause. He watched his friend closely to gauge the impact of what he said next.

  “I’m leavin’.”

  The announcement wasn’t unexpected. But Charles’s voice was as cold as the weather when he answered it.

  “That’s desertion.”

  “So what? There’s nobody else to care for the young ones after Mama’s gone. Nobody but me.”

  Charles shook his head. “It’s your duty to stay.”

  “Don’t talk about duty when half the army’s already took to the southbound roads.” Jim’
s mouth, chapped and raw, grew thinner. “Don’t give me that stuff. I know shit when I smell it.”

  “Makes no difference,” Charles said in a strange, dead voice. “You can’t go.”

  “Makes no difference if I stay, either.” Jim flung the last of his small ration in the fire; that should have warned Charles to be careful. “We’re whipped, Gypsy. Done for! Jeff Davis knows it, Bob Lee knows it, General Hampton—everybody but you.”

  “Still—” Charles shrugged “—you can’t go.” He stared. “I won’t allow it.”

  Jim rubbed the palms of his mittens on his stubbled face. Beyond the perimeter of firelight, Sport whickered in hunger. There was no decent forage; the animals were eating wastepaper and each other’s tails again.

  “Say that again, Gypsy.”

  “Simple enough. I won’t permit you to desert.”

  Jim jumped to his feet. No longer burly, his body appeared shrunken and frail. “You damn—”

  He stopped, swallowed, regained control. Great leafless boughs above him moaned. Scattered through the chasm of the night, other little fires flickered and flared in the wind. “Back off, Charlie. Please. You’re my best friend, but I swear to Jesus—you try to stop me, I’ll hurt you. I’ll hurt you bad.”

  Feeling heavy and tired as he rested on his haunches, Charles continued to stare from beneath the dirty brim of his old wool hat. Jim Pickles meant it. He really meant it. Charles had his army Colt under the robe, but he didn’t reach for it. He remained motionless, the robe’s hem dragging in the light snow left from the afternoon’s fall.

  Sadly: “Somethin’s made you crazy, Charlie. You better straighten yourself out ’fore you try workin’ on the rest of us.”