by Shelby Foote
“Looks old,” he said, rolling his cigar along his lower lip. He faced front, addressing the house itself. “Ought to burn pretty,” he added after a pause, perhaps to explain why he had not chosen one of the larger ones in both directions. I saw that he was smiling, and that was as usual at such a time, the head lifted to expose the mouth beneath the wide pepper-and-salt mustache. Behind us the troops were quiet: so quiet that when the colonel turned in the saddle, leather squeaked. “Walk up there, Mr. Lundy, and give them the news.”
The troops stood at ease in a column of fours, the rifle barrels slanting and glinting. Above their tunics, which were powdered with dust except where they were splotched a darker blue at backs and armpits from four hours of hard marching, their faces appeared cracked as if by erosion where sweat had run.
“Orderly,” I said. A soldier stepped out of ranks and held the reins near the snaffle while I dismounted on the off side, favoring my stiff right leg. I went up toward the house. When the colonel called after me, something I could not distinguish above the sound of my boots crunching gravel on the driveway, I halted and faced about. “Sir?”
“Tell them twenty minutes!” With one arm he made the sweeping gesture I had come to know so well. “To clear out!” I heard him call.
I went on—this was nothing new; it was always twenty minutes—remembering, as I had done now for the past two years whenever I approached a strange house, that I had lost a friend this way. It was in Virginia, after Second Bull Run, the hot first day of September, ’62. The two of us, separated from our command in the retreat, walked up to a roadside cabin to ask the way, and someone fired at us from behind a shuttered window. I ran out of range before the man (or woman; I never knew) could reload, and by the time I got up courage enough to come back, half an hour later, no one was there except my friend, lying in the yard in his gaudy zouave uniform with his knees drawn up and both hands clapped tight against his belt buckle. He looked pinch-faced and very dead, and it seemed indeed a useless way to die.
That was while I was still just Private Lundy, within a month of the day I enlisted back home in Cashtown; that was my baptism of fire, as they like to call it. After that came Antietam and Fredericksburg, where I won my stripes. The war moved fast in those days and while I was in Washington recovering from my Chancellorsville wound I received my commission and orders to report directly to the War Department after a twenty-day convalescent leave. I enjoyed the visit home, limping on a cane and having people admire my new shoulder straps and fire-gilt buttons. “Adam, you’re looking fit,” they said, pretending not to notice the ruined knee. ‘Fit’ was their notion of a soldier word, though in fact the only way any soldier ever used it was as the past tense of fight.
When I reported back to the capital I was assigned to the West, arriving during the siege of Vicksburg and serving as liaison officer on one of the gunboats. Thus I missed the fighting at Gettysburg, up near home. It was not unpleasant duty. I had a bed to sleep in, with sheets, and three real meals every twenty-four hours, plus coffee in the galley whenever I wanted it. We shot at them, they shot at us: I could tell myself I was helping to win the war. Independence Day the city fell, and in early August I was ordered to report for duty with Colonel Nathan Frisbie aboard the gunboat Starlight. Up till then it had all been more or less average, including the wound; there were thousands like me. But now it changed, and I knew it from the first time I saw him.
He looked at me hard with his one gray eye before returning the salute. “Glad to have you aboard,” he said at last. A Negro corporal was braced in a position of exaggerated attention beside a stand of colors at the rear of the cabin. “Orderly,” the colonel said. The corporal rolled his eyes. “Show the lieutenant his quarters.”
Next morning at six o’clock the corporal rapped at the door of my cabin, then entered and gave me the colonel’s compliments, along with instructions to report to the orderly room for a tour of inspection before breakfast. I’d been asleep; I dressed in a hurry, flustered at being late on my first day of duty. Colonel Frisbie was checking the morning report when I came in. He glanced up and said quietly, “Get your saber, Mr Lundy.” I returned to my cabin, took the saber out of its wrappings, and buckled it on. I hadnt worn it since the convalescent leave, and in fact hadnt thought I’d ever wear it again.
The troops were on the after deck, each man standing beside his pallet; the colonel and I followed the first sergeant down the aisle. From time to time Colonel Frisbie would pause and lift an article from the display of equipment on one of the pads, then look sharply at the owner before passing on. “Take his name, Sergeant.” Their dark faces were empty of everything, but I saw that each man trembled slightly while the colonel stood before him.
After breakfast Colonel Frisbie called me into the orderly room for a conference. This was the first of many. He sat at his desk, forearms flat along its top, the patch over his eye dead black like a target center, his lips hidden beneath the blousy, slightly grizzled mustache. There was hardly any motion in his face as he spoke.
When Vicksburg fell, the colonel said, Mr Lincoln announced that the Mississippi “flowed un vexed to the sea.” But, like so many political announcements, this was not strictly true; there was still considerable vexation in the form of sniping from the levee, raids by bodies of regular and irregular cavalry—bushwhackers, the colonel called them—and random incidents involving plunder and disrespect to the flag. So while Sherman sidestepped his way to Atlanta, commanders of districts flanking the river were instructed to end all such troubles. On the theory that partisan troops could not function without the support of the people who lived year-round in the theater, the commanders adopted a policy of holding the civilian population responsible.
“They started this thing, Mr Lundy,” the colonel said. “They began it, sir, and while they had the upper hand they thought it was mighty fine. Remember the plumes and roses in those days? Well, we’re top dog now, East and West, and we’ll give them what they blustered for. Indeed. We’ll give them war enough to last the time of man.”
He brooded, his face in shadow, his hands resting within the circle of yellow lamplight on his desk. I wondered if this silence, which seemed long, was a sign that the conference was over. But just as I was about to excuse myself, the colonel spoke again. He cleared his throat. “Lieutenant, does that knee bother you?”
“Not often, sir. Just when—”
“Never you mind,” Colonel Frisbie said, and moving one hand suddenly to the lamp he turned the wick up full and tilted the shade so that the light was thrown directly on his face. His expression was strained, the patch neat and exact. “Theyll pay for that knee, lieutenant. And they will pay for this!” He lifted the patch onto his forehead. The empty socket pulsed as red and raw as when the wound was new.
During the year that followed, the colonel spoke to me often of these and other things. Every morning there was a meeting in the orderly room after breakfast—‘conferences’ he called them, but he did the talking. I understood how he felt about the eye, the desire to make someone pay for its loss; I had felt it myself about the ruined knee and the death of my friend in Virginia, until I reminded myself, in the case of the knee, that the bullets flew both ways, and in the case of my friend that it was primarily a question of whose home was being invaded. I had more or less put it behind me, this thought of repayment; but with Colonel Frisbie it was different, and for many reasons. He was a New Englander, a lawyer in civilian life, an original abolitionist. He had been active in the underground railroad during the ’50s, and when war came he entered the army as a captain under Frémont in Saint Louis. These were things he told me from time to time, but there were things he did not tell, things I found out later.
He had been with Sherman at Shiloh, a major by then, adjutant in an Indiana regiment which broke badly under the Sunday dawn attack. He was near the bluff above Pittsburg Landing, using the flat of his saber on stragglers, when a stray minié came his way with a spent whine a
nd took out his left eye: whereupon he went under the bluff, tore off his shoulder straps, and lay down among the skulkers. There were ten thousand others down there, including officers, and only a few of them wounded; he had better provocation than most. Yet he could not accept it in the way those others apparently could. When the battle was over he bandaged his eye with a strip from his shirt, rejoined his regiment, and later was commended in reports. There were men in his outfit, however, including some of his own clerks, who had also been under the bluff, and he saw them looking at him as if to say, “If you wont tell on me, I wont on you.” Soon afterwards he was assigned to courts martial duty with the Adjutant General’s Department. When the army adopted its reprisal policy in the lower Mississippi Valley, he was given another promotion and a gunboat with special troops aboard to enforce it.
Patrolling the river from Vicksburg north to Memphis, two hundred and fifty air-line miles and almost twice that far by water, One-Eye Frisbie and the Starlight became well known throughout the delta country. Where partisan resistance had once been strongest, soon there was little activity of any kind. It became a bleak region, populated only by women and children and old men and house servants too feeble to join the others gone as ‘contraband’ with the Union armies. The fields lay fallow, last year’s cotton drooping on dead brown stalks. Even the birds went hungry, what few remained. The land was desolated as if by plague.
The only protest now was an occasional shot from the levee, which was followed by instant reprisal in accordance with the Army policy. Colonel Frisbie would tie up at the nearest river town, sending word for evacuation within twenty minutes, and then would give the Starlight gunners half an hour’s brisk drill, throwing explosive shells over the levee and into the empty buildings and streets where chickens and dogs fluttered and slunk and squawked and howled. Or he would tie up at the point where the sniping occurred, lead the troops ashore, and march them overland sometimes as far as a dozen miles to burn an isolated plantation house.
I was with him from the beginning and I remember him mainly as straddled in silhouette before the lick and soar of flames. Dispossessed, the family huddled somewhere in the background. At first they had been arrogant, threatening reprisal by Forrest or Jameson or Van Dorn. “You had better burn the trees as well,” one woman told us. “When we first came there was nothing but woods and we built our homes. We’ll build them again.” But when Atlanta was besieged their defiance faltered, and when Sherman had taken the city and was preparing for the march that would “make Georgia howl,” they knew they were beaten and their armies would never return. There had been a time when they sent their plantation bells and even their brass doorknobs to be melted for cannon; but not any more. Now the war had left them. They were faced with the aftermath before the finish.
Colonel Frisbie looked upon all this as indemnity collectible for the loss of his eye and his courage at Shiloh. Saber and sash and gray eye glinting firelight, he would watch a house burn with a smile that was more like a grimace, lip lifted to expose the white teeth clamping the cigar. That was the way I remembered him now as I continued to walk up the driveway toward the house. Around one of its corners I saw that the outbuildings had already burned, and I wondered if it had been done by accident—a not uncommon plantation mishap—or by one of our armies passing through at the time of the Vicksburg campaign. Then, nearing the portico, I saw that the door was ajar. Beyond it I could see into a high dim hall where a staircase rose in a slow curve. I stood in the doorway, listening, then rapped.
The rapping was abrupt and loud against the silence. Then there was only vacancy, somehow even more empty than before.
“Hello!” I cried, my voice as reverberant as if I had spoken from the bottom of a well. “Hello in there!”
I had a moment of sharp fear, a sudden vision of someone crouched at the top of the staircase, sighting down a rifle barrel at me with a hot, unwinking eye. But when I bent forward and peered, there was no one, nothing. I went in.
Through a doorway on the right I saw a tall black man standing beside an armchair. He wore a rusty claw-hammer coat with buttons of tarnished brass, and on his head there was what appeared to be a pair of enormous white horns. Looking closer I saw that the Negro had bound a dinner napkin about his jaws, one of which was badly swollen, and had tied it at the crown of his head so that the corners stood up stiffly from the knot like the ears on a rabbit. The armchair was wide and deep; it faced the cold fireplace, its high, fan-shaped back turned toward the door.
I said, “Didnt you hear me calling?” The Negro just stood there, saying nothing. It occurred to me then that he might be deaf; he had that peculiar, vacant look on his face. I came forward. “I said didnt …”
But as I approached him, obliquing to avoid the chair, I saw something else.
There was a hand on the chair arm. Pale against the leather and mottled with dark brown liver spots, it resembled the hand of a mummy, the nails long and narrow, almond-shaped. Crossing to the hearth I looked down at the man in the chair, and the man looked up at me. He was old—though old was hardly word enough to express it; he was ancient—with sunken cheeks and a mass of white hair like a mane, obviously a tall man and probably a big one, once, but thin now to the point of emaciation, as if he had been reduced to skin and skeleton and only the most essential organs, heart and lungs and maybe bowels, though not very much of either—‘Except heart; there’s plenty of that,’ I thought, looking into the cold green eyes. His chin, resting upon a high stock, trembled as he spoke.
“Have you brum to run my howl?” he said.
I stared at him. “How’s that?” I asked. But the old man did not answer.
“He hyar you, captain,” the Negro said. His enormous horns bobbed with the motion of his jaw. “He hyar you well enough, but something happen to him lately he caint talk right.”
This was Isaac Jameson, who was born in a wilderness shack beside the Trace while his father, a South Carolina merchant, was removing his family and his business to the Natchez District as part of a caravan which he and other Loyalists had organized to escape the Revolution on the seaboard. Thus in later years, like so many of the leaders of his time, Isaac was able to say in truth that he was a log cabin boy. But it was misleading, for his father, who had prospered under the Crown back east, became even wealthier in the west, and Isaac grew up in a fine big house on the bluff overlooking the river. From the gallery he could watch Spanish sentries patrolling the wharf where steamboats, up from New Orleans, put in with goods for the Jameson warehouse. He was grown, twenty years old and four inches over six feet tall, when John Adams sent troops to take over for the United States and created the Mississippi Territory. The Republic, which his father had come seven hundred miles to escape, had dogged his heels.
Isaac was sixth among eight sons, and he was unlike the others. It was not only that he stood half a head taller; there was some intrinsic difference. They were reliable men, even the two younger ones who followed the removal. But Isaac would not stand at a desk totting figures or checking bills of lading. He was off to cockfights or horseraces, and he spent more evenings in the Under-the-Hill section than he did in Natchez proper. His father, remembering the shack by the Trace, the panthers screaming in the outward darkness while his wife was in labor, believed that his son—wilderness born, conceived in a time of revolution—had received in his blood, along with whatever it was that had given him the extra height and the unaccountable width of his shoulders, some goading spark of rebellion, some fierce, hot distillate of the jungle itself.
Then one day he was gone. He did not say where he was going, or even that he was leaving; he just went. Then ten years later he turned up again, with a bad leg wound from the Battle of New Orleans. He was a year mending. Then he spent another year trying to make up for lost time. But it did not go right. There were still the cockfights and the grog shops and the women under the hill, but the old life had palled on him. He was thirty-nine, a bachelor, well into middle age, and ap
parently it had all come to nothing.
Then he found what he had been seeking from the start, though he did not know he was looking for it until some time after he found it. Just before his fortieth birthday—in the spring of 1818; Mississippi had entered the Union in December—he rode into the northern wilderness with two trappers who had come to town on their annual spree. This time he was gone a little over two years. Shortly after the treaty of Doaks Stand opened five and a half million acres of Choctaw land across the middle of the state, he reappeared at his father’s house. He was in buckskins, his hair shoulder length.
Next day he was gone for good, with ten of his father’s Negroes and five thousand dollars in gold in his saddle-bags. He had come back to claim his legacy, to take this now instead of his share in the Jameson estate when the old man died. The brothers were willing, since it would mean a larger share for them when the time came. The father considered it a down-right bargain; he would have given twice that amount for Isaac’s guarantee to stay away from Natchez with his escapades and his damage to the name. He said, “If you want to play prodigal it’s all right with me. But mind you: when youre swilling with swine and chomping the husks, dont cut your eyes around in my direction. There wont be any lamp in the window, or fatted calf either. This is all.”
It was all Isaac wanted, apparently. Between sunup and nightfall of the following day—a Sunday, early in June—they rolled forty miles along the road connecting hamlets north of Natchez. Sundown of the third day they made camp on the near bank of the Yazoo, gazing down off the Walnut Hills, and Wednesday they entered the delta, a flat land baked gray by the sun wherever it exposed itself, which was rare, from under the intertwined branches of sycamores and water oaks and cottonwoods and elms. Grass grew so thick that even the broad tires of the Conestoga left no mark of passage. Slow, circuitous creeks, covered with dusty scum and steaming in the heat, drained east and south, away from the river, each doubling back on itself in convulsive loops and coils like a snake fighting lice. For four days then, while the Negroes clutched desperately at seats and stanchions in a din of creaking wood and clattering metal (they had been warehouse hands, townspeople, and ones the brothers could easiest spare at that) the wagon lurched through thickets of scrub oak and stunted willow and over fallen trunks and rotted stumps. It had a pitching roll, like that of a ship riding a heavy swell, which actually did cause most of the Negroes to become seasick four hundred miles from salt water.