by John Jakes
“Guaranteed,” Charles said, leading the balking animal into the dark.
He had his pass, and Billy had the one Orry had forged, so they traveled north through the defense lines without incident. They dismounted in an orchard, and Charles gave his friend a second smaller, bundle.
“That’s a little hardtack and sliced ham Madeline fixed up. I wish I had a gun for you, or more gear, so you’d look more like a furloughed soldier.”
“I’ll make it the way I am,” Billy promised. “What I wish for is more time for the two of us to catch up on things.” Once past the last picket post, they had hardly stopped talking, covering the whereabouts and fortunes of most of the members of both families. Charles learned why the guard at the prison entrance had taken special interest in Billy; the story of the ride on the caisson wheel disgusted him and, as a Southerner, shamed him, too.
Now he said, “I’d like to take you to see Orry and Madeline, but it’s better if you put some miles between yourself and Richmond before daylight. With a spot of luck, you should be all right even if you’re stopped and questioned. The pass will take you through. When you reach your own lines, don’t forget to ditch the cap and jacket.”
“I won’t—and I’ll approach with my hands high in the air, believe me.”
Both were trying to minimize what lay ahead for him: hours of riding, patrols on the road, hunger, anxiety. And all of it made worse by his weakened condition. There was plenty to contend with, and Billy knew it. But there was also hope now. A goal. The safety of his own side.
The chance to write Brett with miraculous news.
The wind tore petals from the trees and whirled them around the two friends in the spring dark, each a little awkward with the other because the intervening years had made them near-strangers.
“Bison.”
Eyes fixed on the Richmond road, Charles said, “Um?”
“You saved me once before. Now I’ll never get out of your debt.”
“Just get out of the Confederacy; that’s good enough. That’ll make me happy.”
“My worst problem’s liable to be my accent. If I have to answer questions—”
“Speak slowly. Like—this—here. Drop some of your g’s and tell ’em you’re from out West. Nobody in Virginia really knows how a Missouri reb talks.”
Billy smiled. “Good idea. I was stationed in St. Louis—I can pass.” More soberly: “You told me about Orry’s marriage and a lot of other things, but you haven’t said a word about yourself. How have you been getting along? What command are you with?”
“I’m a scout for General Wade Hampton’s cavalry, and I’m getting along fine,” Charles lied. “I’d be getting along a hell of a lot better if this war was over. I guess it will be soon.”
He thought of saying something about Gus. But why mention a relationship that had to end? “I’d like to talk all night, but you ought to go.”
“Yes, I guess I should.” Billy patted his pocket to be sure he had the pass. Then, with slow, pained movements, he mounted the mule. Charles didn’t help him; Billy had to do it himself.
Once Billy was in the saddle, Charles stepped forward. They clasped hands.
“Safe journey. My love to Cousin Brett when you see her.”
“Mine to Madeline and Orry. I know what he risked to help me. You, too.”
The laugh was dry and forced. “West Point looks after its own, doesn’t it?”
“Don’t joke, Bison. I’ll never be able to repay you.”
“I don’t expect it. Just stay away from our bullets for the next eight or ten months, and then we can have a good, long visit in Pennsylvania or South Carolina. Now get going.”
“God bless you, Bison.”
In a surprisingly strong voice, Billy hawed to the mule and rode rapidly out of the orchard. He was soon gone in the darkness.
Petals blew around Charles, a light, sweet cloud, as he thought, He’ll either make it or he won’t. I did all I could. He was unable to forget the dead guard, but it had nothing to do with regrets about killing him.
He felt drained. He wanted whiskey. “Come on,” he said to the gray, and mounted.
The clock chimed four. Bare feet stretched to a hassock,
Charles swirled the last of the bourbon in the bottom of the glass, then swallowed it.
“I got scared and shot him. Panic—that’s the only word for it.”
Madeline said, “I imagine killing someone, even an enemy, isn’t easy.”
“Oh, you get used to it,” Charles said. She and Orry exchanged swift looks that he didn’t see. “Anyway, the guard was the one who tortured Billy. The reason it bothers me is, I lost control. I’ve seen the elephant often enough. I thought I could handle tight spots.”
“But how many prison escapes have you staged?” Orry asked.
“Yes, there’s that.” Charles nodded, but he remained unconvinced.
“How did Billy look?” Madeline asked.
“White and sickly. Feeble as the devil. I don’t know if he can make it even halfway to the Rapidan.”
“How is Brett? Did he say?”
Charles answered her with a shake of his head. “He hasn’t heard from Brett in months. That guard, Vesey, destroyed every letter Billy wrote, so I’d guess he destroyed any that came in, too. Orry, can you spare some cash for the liveryman? He’ll never see his mule again.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Orry promised.
Charles yawned. He was worn out, ashamed of his loss of self-control, and most of all saddened by the reunion with Billy. It seemed to him their talk had been trivial and difficult to carry on. Years of separation, their service on different sides—everything took its toll. They were friends and foes at the same time, and every halting sentence they had spoken expressed that without words.
“One more drink, and I’m going to get some sleep,” he announced. “I’d like to be out of Richmond early in the morning. We’ll be in the field soon—” He extended his glass to Orry; the liquor trickled noisily from the brown bottle. “Have you heard Grant’s bringing a new cavalry commander from the West? Phil Sheridan. I knew him at West Point. Tough little Irishman. Greatest man with a cussword I ever met. I hate to see him in Virginia. Still—”
He tossed off the two inches with a speed that made Madeline frown. “It just means things will wind up that much faster.”
Orry watched him a moment. “You don’t think we can win?”
“Do you?”
Orry sat still, his gaze wandering through the pattern of the carpet.
Presently Charles stretched and yawned again. “Hell,” he said, “I’m not even sure we can sue for peace on favorable terms. Not with Unconditional Surrender Grant turning the screw.”
“I knew him,” Orry mused. “We drank beer together in Mexico.”
“What’s he like?”
“Oh, it’s been years since I saw him. Our keen-minded Southern journalists scorn him for being round-shouldered and slovenly. Really important considerations, eh? Ask Pete Longstreet whether he respects Sam Grant. Ask Dick Ewell. Three years ago, Ewell said there was an obscure West Point man somewhere in Missouri whom he hoped the Yankees would never discover. He said he feared him more than all the others put together.”
“God help us,” Charles remarked, reaching for a blanket. “Would it be all right with you two if I went to sleep now?” Orry turned off the gas, and he and Madeline said good night. Still fully dressed, Charles rolled up in the blanket and shut his eyes.
He found it hard to rest. Too many ghosts had arisen and roamed tonight.
He dragged the blanket against his cheek. He didn’t want to think about it. Not about Billy in enemy country, riding for his life. Not about the Union horse already surprisingly good but now with a chance at supremacy under Sheridan. Not about Grant, who preached something called “enlightened warfare,” which meant, so far as he could make out, throwing your men away like matchsticks because you always had more.
He fell as
leep as some distant steeple rang five. He slept an hour, dreaming of Gus, and of Billy lying in a sunlit field, pierced by bullet holes thick and black with swarming flies.
When he woke, the comforting aroma of the Marshall Street substitute for coffee permeated the flat. In the first wan light, he trudged to the privy behind the building, then returned and splashed water on his face and hands and sat down opposite his cousin over cups of the strong brew Madeline poured for them.
Orry’s expression indicated something serious was on his mind. Charles waited till his cousin came out with it.
“We had so much to talk about last night, I never got to the other bad news.”
“Trouble back home?”
“No. Right here in the city. I uncovered a plot to assassinate the President and members of his cabinet.” Disbelief prompted Charles to smile; Orry’s somber expression restrained him. “Someone well known and close to both of us is involved.”
“Who?”
“Your cousin. My sister.”
“Ashton?”
“Yes.”
“Great balls of Union-blue fire,” Charles said, in the same tone he might have taken if someone had told him the paymaster would be late again. He was startled to probe his feelings and find so little astonishment; scarcely more than mild surprise. There was a hardening center in him that nothing much could reach, let alone affect.
Orry described all that had happened thus far, beginning with Mrs. Halloran’s visit and ending with the abrupt and mysterious disappearance of the chief conspirator and the arms and ammunition Orry had seen at the farm downriver on the James.
“For a few days after that, I thought I was crazy. I’ve gotten over it. They may have highly placed friends helping them cover the trail, and I know what I saw. The plot’s real, Huntoon’s involved, and so is Ashton.”
“What are you going to do?”
Orry’s stare told Charles he wasn’t the only one whose hide had thickened.
“I’m going to catch her.”
103
THEY SURPRISED HIM ON the creek bank at first light, creeping up while he slept. None of the three identified himself. He named them silently—Scars, One Thumb, Hound Face. All of them wore tattered Confederate uniforms.
To allay suspicion, he shared the last of his hardtack and ham. They shared their experiences of the past few days. Not to be sociable, Billy guessed, merely to fill the silence of the May morning.
“Grant put a hundred thousand into the Wilderness ’gainst our sixty or so. It got so fierce, the trees caught on fire, and our boys either choked to death on the smoke or burned up when the branches dropped on ’em.” One Thumb, whose left eyelid drooped noticeably, shook his head and laid the last morsel of ham in his toothless mouth.
“How far are the lines?” Billy asked.
Hound Face answered, “Twenty, thirty mile. Would you say that?” His companions nodded. “But we all are goin’ the other way. Back to Alabam.” He gave Billy a searching look, awaiting reaction; condemnation, perhaps.
“The omens are bad,” One Thumb resumed. “Old Pete Longstreet, he was wounded by a bullet from our side, just like Stonewall a year ago. And I hear tell Jeff Davis’s little boy fell off a White House balcony a few days ago. Killed him. Like I say—bad omens.”
Scars, the oldest, wiped grease from his mouth. “Mighty kind of you to share your grub, Missouri. We ain’t got much of anythin’ to aid us on our way home”—smoothly, he pulled his side arm and pointed it at Billy—“so we’ll be obliged if you don’t fuss an’ help us out.”
They disappeared five minutes later, having taken his mule and his pass.
Lanterns shone on the bare-chested black men. The May dark resounded with shouting, the clang and bang of rails being unloaded from a flatcar, the pound of mallets, the honk of frogs in the marshy lowlands near the Potomac. A group of George’s men seized each rail, ran it forward, and dropped it on crossties laid only moments before. The rail carriers jumped aside to make room for men with mauls and buckets of spikes. It was the night of May 9; more accurately, the morning of May 10. Repair work to reopen the damaged Aquia Creek & Fredericksburg line down to Falmouth had been under way since dawn yesterday.
The butcher’s bill from the Wilderness had been staggering. Now Lee had entrenched at or near Spotsylvania, and presumably the Union Army was shifting that way to engage. Without being told, George knew why the major portion of the Orange & Alexandria had been abandoned on the very morning Grant started his war machine across the Rapidan and why the Construction Corps had been transferred eastward to this duty. These tracks would soon carry dead and wounded.
George saw one of his best workers, a huge brown youngster named Scow, stumble suddenly. This forced the men behind him to halt. A lantern on a pole reflected in Scow’s eyes as he swung to stare at his commander.
“’M gonna drop.”
George slipped in behind him and took the rail on his own shoulder. “Rest for ten minutes. Then come back. After we finish this fourteen miles of track, there’s the Potomac Creek bridge to repair.”
“You keep givin’ ever’ one of these niggers ten minutes, you gonna run out of minutes an’ fall over yourself.”
“You let me worry about that. Get going.”
Scow rubbed his mouth, admiration and suspicion mingled on his face. “You’re some damn boss,” he said, and walked off, leaving George in doubt about which way to take that. With a grim amusement, he wondered what Scow would say if he knew his commander controlled and ran a huge ironworks and a thriving bank.
He took Scow’s place in the rail-carrying team. Dizzy and growing sick to his stomach, he strove to hide it. “Come on,” he yelled to the other men. He knew they felt as bad as he did, hurt in every muscle as he did. But together they ran the next rail forward, placed it, jumped down off the roadbed as the first mauls arched over and struck, and dashed back for the next one.
On the Brock Road, Billy fell to his knees and crawled into a ditch as a shell whistled in and burst, tossing up a cloud of dirt and stones. Sharp rock fragments rained on his bare neck as he lay in the weeds, the wind and what little strength he possessed knocked out of him.
From the west, the north, the east, he heard the multitudinous sounds of battle. They seemed loudest to the east. He had worked his way through the smoke-filled streets of Spotsylvania Court House and out this far without detection or interference. But as he began to breathe regularly again, and with effort regained the road, staggering from tiredness and hunger and lingering pain, a captain on horseback—from one of Jubal Early’s commands, he presumed—loomed through the smoke deepening the gray of the morning.
The bearded officer galloped past Billy before he really took notice of him. He reined in, dismounted swiftly, and wrenched his sword from his sheath. “No straggling,” he shouted, hitting Billy’s back with the flat of his sword. “The lines are that way.”
He pointed eastward with the blade. The ends of a strip of black silk tied around his right sleeve fluttered in the breeze. Mumbling to disguise his voice, Billy said, “Sir, I lost my musket—”
“You won’t find another cowering back here.” A second stab east. “Move, soldier.”
Billy blinked, thinking, I’ll have to try to cross some place. Guess it might as well be here.
“You and your kind disgust me,” the captain said gratuitously. “We lose a great man, and your tribute to his memory is a display of cowardice.”
Billy didn’t want to speak again but felt he must. “Don’t know what you mean, sir.” He didn’t. “Who’s been lost?”
“General Stuart, you damn fool. Sheridan’s horse went around our flank to Richmond. They killed the general at Yellow Tavern day before yesterday. Now get moving or you’re under arrest.”
Billy turned, staggered down the road shoulder, and moved in ungainly fashion through high weeds toward distantly seen entrenchments. A shell burst over him, a black flower. He covered his head and stumbled on, hurtin
g more at every step.
At Potomac Creek, the gap from bluff to bluff was four hundred feet. A deck bridge eighty feet above the water spanned it, but the Confederates had destroyed the bridge. Haupt had rebuilt it; Burnside had destroyed it a second time so the enemy couldn’t use it. Now the Construction Corps was building it again.
At the bottom of the chasm, George and his men cut and laid logs for the crib foundation. Haupt was gone, but not his plans and methods. In forty hours, a duplicate of the trestle Mr. Lincoln had wryly referred to as a mighty structure of beanpoles and cornstalks was complete.
They had to rush the work, sacrificing sleep, because men returning from the battle joined around Spotsylvania Court House said the Union and Confederate casualties were piling up like cordwood in the autumn. The temporary hospitals could hold only the worst cases. During the frantic rebuilding of the trestle, eight men fell off from various places. Four died. Their funeral rites consisted of quick concealment beneath tarpaulins.
Now the rails were laid, the huge hawsers rigged across the bridge, the locomotive brought up.
“Pull,” the black men and their white officers chanted together, thick ropes running through their hands and over their shoulders and across the trestle to the locomotive spouting steam on the far side. “Pull—and—pull.”
As Haupt’s Wisconsin and Indiana volunteers had done once before, they pulled the empty locomotive across the trestle while a lurid green twilight came down, presaging storm. Lightning flickered and ran around the horizon. The sky seemed to complain, and so did the bridge. It swayed. It creaked.
But it stood.
Now. Now. Now.
He had been saying that to himself for ten minutes to strengthen his nerve because his body was still so weak. Finally he knew he had to obey the silent command. One hand tight on the Confederate musket they had given him, Billy clawed a hold on the top of the earthwork and labored over while the torrential rain soaked him.