by John Jakes
“All right, Jim. Let’s get the word back to Hampton. That dust is Kilpatrick, trying a flanking movement.”
As they turned about and started east on the deserted road, Pickles broke into a huge grin. “Lord God, Charlie, you’re somethin’. Cool as a block from the icehouse. ’Course, I feel kinda sorry for that Yank. He was only reachin’ down because he was hurtin’.”
“Sometimes your hand has to move faster than your brain,” Charles answered with a shrug. “If I’d waited, he might have pulled the pistol. Better a mistake than a grave.”
The younger man chuckled. “Ain’t you somethin’. You boys in the scouts, you’re regular killin’ machines.”
“That’s the general idea. Every dead man on their side means fewer on ours.”
Jim Pickles shivered, not entirely in admiration. To the south, the guns at Gettysburg kept roaring.
Pitch black ahead, pitch black behind. Rain rivered from Charles’s hat. It had soaked through his cape hours ago.
In many respects it was the worst night he had ever spent as a soldier. They were bound south to the Potomac, in retreat, a train of confiscated farm wagons, most springless, each hung with a pale lantern. The procession stretched out for miles.
Hampton’s men had drawn the honored position of rear guard. To Charles it was more like duty on the perimeter of hell. Full of irony, too. The day now passing into its last hours was July fourth.
Yesterday Hampton had taken a third wound, a shrapnel fragment, in a hot fight with Michigan and Pennsylvania horse, part of a failed effort to sweep around and attack Meade’s rear. In some quarters Stuart was being blamed openly for the Gettysburg debacle. Critics continued to say his long ride away from Lee had deprived the army of its eyes and ears.
The Second South Carolina was down to around a hundred effectives. Visiting with his old outfit for an hour, Charles had heard that Calbraith Butler, invalided home after Brandy Station, would spend the rest of his life with a cork foot. The memory stuck with him tonight, and added to it were the outcries of the hurt and maimed packed like fish into the springless wagons whose every roll and lurch increased their pain. The voices filled the rainy dark.
“Let me die. Let me die.”
“Jesus Christ, put me out of this wagon. Have mercy. Kill me.”
“Please, won’t someone come? Take my wife’s name and write her?”
That came from the wagon nearest Charles. Feeling Sport stagger and slip in the mud, he tried to shut his mind to the noise. But it went on: the hiss of rain; the squeal of axles; the men crying out like children. It broke his heart to listen to them.
Jim Pickles rode up beside him. “We’re stopped. Somebody’s mired up the line, I s’pect.”
“Won’t someone come? I can’t make it. I need to tell Mary—”
Bursting with rage, wanting to pull his Colt and blow out the screamer’s brains, Charles whipped his right leg over the saddle. He jumped down, splashing deep in mud. He slapped Sport’s reins into Pickles’s palm.
“Hold him.”
He climbed the rear wheel of the ambulance wagon and fought his way under the canvas into the slithering stir and stink. He thought of Christmas in ’61. Snowing then. Raining now. But the same work to be done.
He was sick in his soul. Sick of the madness and folly of killing men on the other side to save some of his own. Why had they said not one damn word about this kind of thing back at the Academy?
Hands plucked his trousers, the shy, soft touches of frightened children. The rain beat hard on the hooped canvas top. He raised his voice in order to be heard, yet sounded quite gentle.
“Where’s the man who needs to write his wife? If he will identify himself, I’ll help.”
From the parlor window, Orry gazed along Marshall at the rooftops and row houses reddened by the cloudless sunset. An abnormal silence had enveloped the city for several days, for reasons the general populace did not as yet understand. But he did.
“Some of the fools in the department are trying to say Lee was successful—that he did what he set out to do: reprovision the army off the enemy’s land.” Serious and silent, wearing gray, Madeline sat waiting till he continued. “The truth is, Lee’s in retreat. His casualties may have run as high as thirty percent.”
“Dear God,” she whispered. “When will that be known?”
“You mean when will the papers get hold of it? A day or two, I suppose.” He rubbed his temple, aching suddenly in the broiling heat. “They say Pickett charged the Union positions on Cemetery Hill in broad daylight. With no cover. His men went down like scythed wheat. Poor George—Why did we begin this damned business?”
She went to him, slipped her arms around him, pressed her cheek against his shoulder, wishing she could provide an answer. They held each other in the red light deepening to dark.
In a squalid taproom down by the river basin, Elkanah Bent ordered a mug of beer, which turned out to be warm and flat. Disgusted, he set it down as a white-haired man ran in, tears on his cheeks.
“Pemberton gave up. On the fourth of July. The Enquirer just printed an extra. Grant starved him out. The Yanks have got Vicksburg and mebbe the whole goddamn river. We can’t even hold our own goddamn territory.”
Bent added his sympathetic curse to those of others at the mahogany bar. In the distance, church bells began to toll. Had he slipped into Richmond just when everything was falling apart? All the more reason to locate that fellow Powell.
Mr. Jasper Dills suffered a headache even worse than Orry Main’s. The headache started on Independence Day, a Saturday, when word reached the city of a stunning success at Gettysburg. Washington had been waiting for good news for days. Its arrival put some heart into the holiday celebration.
That very morning, he had returned from his vacation cottage on Chesapeake Bay, where he had prudently retired when rumors reached him of a possible rebel invasion. He was soon driven to distraction by the crackling of squibs that youngsters set off outside his house.
To add to the commotion, bands blared patriotic airs in the streets, and jubilant crowds surged through President’s Park, serenading at the windows of the Executive Mansion as the news got better and better. Lee whipped; Vicksburg taken; Grant and Sherman and Meade heroes.
The glad tidings couldn’t compensate for the debilitating effects of the din on lawyer Dills, nor for the familiar pattern that developed in the steamy days following the celebration. Like all the generals before him, Meade appeared to falter and lose nerve. He failed to pursue Lee aggressively, throwing away the chance to destroy the main Confederate army. The illuminations in the windows of mansions and public buildings went dark. The corner bonfires sparked and subsided into acrid smoke.
Head still pounding, Dills pondered two other pieces of unpleasant information, between which he ultimately perceived a relationship. His butler told him Bent had been at the front door, raving like a madman. And a sharp letter from Stanley Hazard informed Dills that the man he had recommended had nearly precipitated a catastrophe by beating a Democratic newsman when no such treatment had been ordered.
Stanton had demanded someone be held accountable. “Ezra Dayton” was dismissed, ordered out of Washington—and Mr. Dills would be so good as to make no further recommendations to the special service, thank you.
For two days and nights, messengers employed by Dills’s firm had been sent out to search the city. It was true—Bent was gone. No one knew where. Dills sat in his office, head throbbing, urgent briefs piling up on his desk while he thought of the stipend, the stipend that would end if he lost track of Starkwether’s son. What should he do? What could he do?
“The day has been a disaster,” Stanley complained at supper on the Tuesday after Independence Day. “The secretary’s furious because Meade won’t move, and he blames me for the mess with Randolph.”
“I thought you managed to hush that up.”
“To a certain extent. Randolph won’t publish anything. That is, his paper in Cin
cinnati won’t. But Randolph’s on the streets again, and his bruises are a regular advertisement of what was done to him. Then this afternoon, we had more bad news. Laurette?”
He pointed to his empty glass. Isabel touched her upper lip with her handkerchief. “You’ve had four already, Stanley.”
“Well, I want another. Laurette!”
The maid filled the glass with red Bordeaux. He swallowed a third of it while his wife shielded her eyes with her hand. Her husband was undergoing peculiar changes. The responsibilities imposed by his position and the huge sums accumulating in their bank accounts seemed too much for him somehow.
“What else went wrong?” she asked.
“One of Baker’s men was in Port Tobacco. He heard that Mr. Dayton, the fellow who brutalized Randolph, apparently deserted to the enemy after Baker drove him out of town. God knows what sensitive information he took with him. The whole business reflects shamefully on the department. No one admits publicly that we control Baker, but everyone knows it. On top of that—” he guzzled the rest of the wine and signaled the maid, who poured another glass after casting an anxious glance at her mistress “—on top of that, as of today, the Conscription Act is officially in force. People hate it. We’ve already had reports of protests, incidents of violence—”
“Here?”
“New York, mainly.”
“Well, my sweet, that’s far away from this house—and for once you might reflect on your good fortune. You could be drafted—you’re still young enough—if you weren’t in the War Department or sufficiently wealthy to pay for a substitute.”
Stanley sipped his wine, still looking morose. Isabel ordered Laurette out of the room and came around to his end of the long, shining table. Standing behind her husband, she restrained his hand when he reached for the wine glass again. Resting her long chin on the top of his head, she patted his arm in an unusual display of affection.
“Despite all your troubles, we’re very lucky, Stanley. We should be grateful Congress had the wisdom to enact that substitute clause. Thankful that it’s a rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight, as they say.”
But he wasn’t comforted. He sat contemplating all of the changes in his life during the past couple of years. One was the development of a consuming thirst for strong drink—which could wreck a man’s career. On the other hand, that tended to happen less often if you were wealthy. He must do his best to keep the tippling under control and keep selling shoes to the poor fools who were dying for slogans on both sides of the war.
“Constance?” In bed beside George on that sultry Wednesday after Gettysburg, she murmured to signify she was listening. “What will I do?”
The question was one she had been expecting—dreading—for months. She heard the strain in his voice, put there during an evening quarrel with their headstrong son. William had once again absented himself from his late-afternoon dancing class and sneaked off for a game of baseball with some Georgetown boys. Although George championed the game over a quadrille, he nevertheless had to reprimand William. The reprimand led to argument, and the argument ended with shouts from the father, sullen looks of rebellion from the son.
“You mean about the department?” she asked, though it was hardly necessary.
“Yes. I can’t abide the stupidity and politicking any longer. And all the money being made from death and suffering—Thank God I have nothing to do with Stanley’s contracts. I’d stuff them down his throat till he choked.”
A pain started in her left breast. She had experienced many such dull aches lately, in her legs, her upper body, behind her forehead. She suspected the cause was a simple one—worry. She worried about her children, her father in far-off California, her weight creeping up a pound or two each month. She worried about George most of all. Night after night, he brought his troubles home and dwelled on them all evening.
Ripley’s obstinacy in particular had become too much to bear. George cited a new example at least once a week. Recently General Rosecrans, hearing that Ordnance had some of those repeating coffee-mill guns in storage, had requested them for his Western command. At first Ripley wouldn’t ship a single one; he still disapproved of the design. Finally, forced, he sent ten—and Rosecrans in return sent glowing performance reports to Lincoln. The President urged Ripley to reconsider the purchase of more of the guns. Ripley buried the request.
Constance knew Ripley’s crimes by heart. He continued to campaign against breechloaders and repeaters, refusing to issue them to any but the mounted service. He tried to cancel existing contracts for them and wrote No more wanted across proposals from manufacturers.
“And yet,” George had raged only last night, “not forty-eight hours after poor George Pickett’s men were slaughtered charging our positions, I saw a report from a captured reb who fought against Bredan’s Sharpshooters at Little Round Top. In twenty minutes, with single-shot breechloaders, Bredan’s men fired about a hundred rounds each. The reb said his commander thought they had run into two whole regiments.”
“Had they?”
George laughed. “Bredan had one hundred men. And still that old son of a bitch writes ‘rejected’ or ‘tabled’ on every plea for better shoulder weapons.”
There was nothing new about such complaints from George. What was new was the frequency and the ferocity with which he voiced them. She dated that change from about a month ago, before the fall of Vicksburg, when an angry report on faulty Parrott shells crossed his desk. On investigation, he discovered the shells were part of a shipment from a Buffalo ammunition works whose samples he had inspected and turned back. The casings were pitted with holes resulting from faulty sand casting. How vividly she remembered his rage when he came home that evening.
“The slimy wretches had the gall to try to disguise the defects. They filled the holes with putty colored to match the metal.”
Next day there was another blow:
“Ripley countermanded my rejection order. He approved the shipment. Seems the manufacturer’s a distant relative of his wife. God, I’d love to lob some of those shells up his rear end. It would be the biggest service anyone could do for the Union.”
That was the background, the accumulating bitterness that prompted his question tonight. She lay motionless in the dark of their bed, knowing the inevitable question she was duty-bound to ask by way of reply.
“What would you like to do, George?”
“Which answer do you want, the ideal or the realistic?”
“There are two? The former first, then.”
“I’d like to work for Lincoln.”
“Honestly? You admire him that much?”
“I do. Since that night we met at the arsenal, I feel I’ve come to know him well. He’s in and out of our offices several times a week, asking questions, prodding, encouraging good ideas in spite of—maybe because of—our departmental dullness. I admit the man’s rough-hewn, and it’s lucky that campaigns aren’t won or lost on the candidate’s ability to look and act presentable, or he’d never be elected to anything. He doesn’t dissemble, and some say that’s a flaw—he never hides his doubts or dark moods. Ward Lamon told me several months ago that Lincoln’s convinced he won’t live to see Springfield again. But the man has qualities that are in damn short supply in this town. Honesty. Idealism. Strength. Good Lord, Constance, considering all the burdens he bears, from national to domestic, his strength is monumental. Yes, I wish I could work for him in some capacity, but there’s no place.”
“You inquired?”
“Discreetly. I didn’t say anything to you because I felt sure it was an impossibility.”
“Then what’s the realistic answer?”
“I can go with the military railroads if Herman Haupt will have me. It’s a good alternative. And I’m eager.”
He said it so promptly she knew he had been ready with the idea for some time. Trying to keep her voice calm, she said, “That’s field duty. Close to the battle lines—”
“Sometimes, yes. Bu
t what’s important is this. It’s work I believe I can do and take pride in.”
Silence, broken by the inevitable rumbling of the night wagons. Sensing her tension, he rolled on his side—they were sleeping without clothes, as they often did—and caressed her bosom, soft, springy, wonderfully comforting in its familiarity.
“Do you not want me to do it?”
“George, in—” she cleared her throat “—in this marriage, you know neither party ever asks or answers that kind of question.”
“I’d still like to know what you—”
“Do what you must,” she said, kissing him, one palm against his face. She blinked rapidly, hoping he wouldn’t feel the fear-inspired tears that sprang to her eyes.
“So, Herman—will you accept a new man?”
George asked that late the next day as he and the bearded brigadier leaned on Willard’s bar. Haupt looked worn out. He had been shunting back and forth to Pennsylvania to get the rail lines from Gettysburg in repair.
“You know the answer to that. Question is, will the secretary release you?”
“By God, he’d better. I can’t stand working within a mile of that man.” He swallowed a raw oyster from the plate in front of him. “I suppose you’ve heard of the Randolph scandal—”
“Who hasn’t? I gather he’s forbidden to write about it, but he recruits listeners and repeats the story every chance he gets.”
“He damn well should. It’s a disgrace.”
“Well, such philosophic reflections aside, I urge you to move fast. I think Stanton wants my head. I dislike him as much as you do, and he knows it. I refuse to put up with his prejudices and arrogance—” Haupt tossed off the rest of his whiskey with a dour smile. “—since I have my own to maintain.”
They divided the remaining oysters. After the last one, George belched—one more irksome sign, along with joints that ached in the morning and gray hairs in his mustache, that his time was hurrying by.
Haupt asked how he hoped to effect the transfer. “It won’t work if I simply request your services.”