“Pity,” the man in buckskins murmured, and Ratcliff’s hopes leaped. “We officers and ladies do enjoy our theatricals. Tom, wouldn’t this buck make a splendid harem guard?”
“Sir?” Ratcliff’s attention was rigid as stone.
“I’ve always fancied the stage,” Custer mused. “Tom, can’t you picture me as Hamlet?” He stood, thrust his hand into his jacket, and peered across the landscape as if something more interesting than dust were out there. “To be or not to be, that . . . that gentlemen, is something we all got to figger.”
Several officers applauded and he grinned infectiously. “And this boy here”—he pointed—“Othello the Moor!”
“Uh-huh,” Tom Custer said. He pursed his lips and pointed down the tent street. “Quartermaster’s tent’s there, Sergeant. See him about your rations.”
“Sir, I—”
“If you don’t git, my brother’ll put you in a turban.”
Ratcliff executed a smart about-face and marched away. They probably didn’t care whether he heard their guffaws.
He took a breath before ducking into the quartermaster’s tent, which, like all such, was cluttered with barrels and wooden crates. The quartermaster was a sleepy, hatless fat man whose buttocks overflowed his stool. He thumbed through manifests. “Rations for the 38th USCT. Sure, they got here. That’s as far as they got.” The quartermaster read aloud. “They was two beef cows, twenty barrels of salt pork, hardtack, coffee, sugar, and”—he tapped the list—“five gallons of medicinal brandy.”
“Well, Sergeant,” Ratcliff said, “suppose you send our rations on their way.”
“Can’t. Beeves been et and Tom Custer got yer brandy. I never sent the salt pork nor hardtack because I figured you’d be better off makin’ a fresh requisition.” The man scratched his head and inspected his fingernails for louse eggs. “General threw a barbecue for the mayor n’ the high n’ mighty Texans. They ate all afternoon and then they danced. General’s got the best band in Texas.” He spat.
“What else he got?”
The quartermaster peered closely. “Be damned if you ain’t a nigger! And here I was a-talkin’ to you like you was a white man.”
Ratcliff looked at him.
“Oh, it don’t matter none. No offense. Top Sergeant’s a Top Sergeant, I guess.” He dipped his shoulder in a limp shrug.
Ratcliff thought the world was filled with white fools. “This Custer—”
“Which Custer you inquirin’ about?” The quartermaster sneered. “The Custer that won’t drink or the one that drinks too much? Both bastards favor the bullwhip.”
“White soldiers?”
“We done wrote our senator. We got us up a petition and everybody signed. ’Deed we did.”
Ratcliff yawned. “General Sheridan favors the Custers and General Sherman thinks the sun rises and sets on George Custer’s ass.”
“Ain’t everybody thinks so high of ’em.” The man sulked. “You heard about the victory parade?”
“How he lost control of his horse?”
The quartermaster snorted. “Lost control? He galloped the whole length of the victory parade and back again. Saluted the reviewing stand twict. Custer upstaged General Grant’s entire army. That’s one senior officer don’t think too high of ‘the Boy General.’ ” The quartermaster leaned forward. “He’s a mean son of a bitch, that’s who he is. Him and that damned brother of his.” The quartermaster heaved himself off his stool and waddled to the front of the tent to pull the flap shut. He wagged his finger. “I’ll swear I never told you nothin’ . . .”
“Never heard a word,” Ratcliff assured him. “Nary a word.”
“Well, since you’re a nigger, I ’spose I can tell you.” He settled his rump on his stool and lifted his eyes to the tent peak and closed them. “It was payday, so I bought a jug. I’ze off duty. Ain’t nobody’s business what I do!”
“Just the same everywhere,” Ratcliff assented.
“I drunk it. Now, maybe I shouldn’t have drunk so much as I did. I was headin’ for my tent, but I laid down and fell asleep. Wasn’t like I was doin’ anybody any harm . . .”
“No harm ’tall.”
“Don’t rightly know how long I was out. When I woke, it was pitch-black and kind of, you know . . . stiflin’. Close. It was stiflin’. When I reached out I strikes wood. There’s wood on either side and atop of me and it’s so tight I can’t get my arms above my head. After a time inside I knew where I was. I knew exactly where I was.” He licked his lips. “Top Sergeant, I was in a coffin. You can’t be no soldier without you know about coffins, and that’s where I was. Tom Custer had come upon me on the parade ground when I was passed out and helpless. He’d set a coffin over me and pegged it down so I couldn’t get out. Then him and his brother and their friends stood around laughin’ whilst I hollered and begged to get out.” He licked his lips, looked down, and spoke quietly. “Oh, I reckon they had theyselves a big time.”
SO FAR AS Sergeant Major Edward Ratcliff was concerned, Custer could upstage every victory parade and trap any number of drunk quartermasters under coffins: George Armstrong Custer could help him stay in the army.
At New Market Heights, after all the officers were killed, Top Sergeant Ratcliff took command. Hissing mortar shells had landed at his feet and failed to explode. He’d been shot at and stabbed at and knocked down by cavalry horses. He’d been buried alive when his bombproof collapsed under bombardment. He’d dug himself out that time, and by God, he was going to dig himself out now.
Still, it took nerve to walk down the street to Colonel George Custer’s regimental headquarters and mount those stairs into the white officers’ indolent stares.
Tom Custer was perched on the railing smoking a cigar. Ratcliff stood in front of the man. “Lieutenant. I figure we got something in common.”
Another officer sang out, “Good God, Tom! Is the nigger claiming kin?”
Ratcliff touched his medal. “I hear you got two of these damn things,” he said.
“What if I do?”
“Then you’re a brave son of a bitch.”
“I didn’t know negro soldiers—”
“Got Medals of Honor? Not many of us did. General Butler give me mine.”
“I suppose that makes you a brave son of a bitch.”
“Suppose it does. I got somethin’ to ask of you and the General.”
The slightly built yellow-haired man uncoiled from the rail, yawned, and patted his mouth. “Every soldier’s brave, Sergeant.” His smile was as iridescent as it was unexpected. “Soldiers get medals if they’re lucky. Unlucky soldiers get killed. Tell me, what’s special about you?”
“Well, sir, four years ago I was a nigger slave and now I’m a Top Sergeant.” Ratcliff touched his medal tenderly. “This proves I’m lucky and brave. Army’s the only real home I ever had and they’re going to throw me out on the street.”
Light flared in Custer’s eyes, like oil burning on water. “I was brevetted a major general and everybody calls me ‘General Custer.’ But I’m a damned lieutenant colonel now. That’s how this army does things.”
When the light went out of George Custer’s eyes it left loneliness behind. Without caring much one way or another, he added, “Napoleon had a nigger marshall. Did you know that?”
“No, sir.”
“So now you do.” He spun toward his officers as if movement would energize him. “Boys, the sun is high in the heavens. What say we go hunting?”
His officers stirred.
Edward Ratcliff would rather have faced rebel bullets. “Sir, I—”
“Once the sergeant has finished, we’ll see if we can’t find us a buffalo. You finished, Sergeant?”
“Sir, I need your help.”
“With your horse?” Tom Custer asked.
“What?”
“I asked if you needed help with your horse: mounting it and riding out of here.”
George Custer shouted for his orderly. “Bring my Creedmore and
plenty of bullets.”
Ratcliff saluted the man’s back, pivoted, and marched down the stairs to his horse. He swung his leg over the animal’s back and settled into the saddle. His horse exploded in furious bucking and if Ratcliff had expected it, he might have stayed in the saddle, but he hadn’t.
His head thumped Texas earth so hard, stars flashed before his eyes and he bit through his lower lip. He rolled to his knees and covered his mouth. Who would have thought one lip would hold so much blood? He ran his tongue around his teeth. His dress hat was mashed flat. His horse was sunfishing down the tent street as mildly curious white soldiers watched it pass. Custer’s officers’ laughter rolled over him like surf breaking over his head.
Their voices were shrill as children at play. “Tom, I feared you’d spoiled the jest asking about his horse . . .”
“Don’t get mad, boy,” someone called. “Don’t get a burr under your saddle . . .”
Tom Custer was doubled over with laughter. “Christ! A nigger pretendin’ he’s a soldier.”
The Top Sergeant rolled onto his feet and brushed dust from his uniform. One pant leg was inside his boot, the other out. When he slapped his hat against his leg, that small dust cloud produced more laughter. His horse was gone. His back was sore. His right leg hurt. His head hurt. His mouth was thick with blood. He spat a gob.
He’d wanted to stay in the army. He wondered to himself, was that so much to ask?
He set his ruined hat on his head and marched up onto the porch to face Tom Custer and the red-faced laughing officers.
“I ain’t pretending to be no soldier,” Ratcliff said softly. “I is one.”
SIX MONTHS AFTERWARD, Private Ratcliff dug dottle from his pipe. “Tom Custer was lucky I didn’t hit him twice. Two hits would have killed the sorry bastard. Hell, maybe I’ll go be an indian. My ma was half Cherokee. I know some of their lingo.
“Jesse, you think there’s anyplace on this earth where a nigger gets treated like a man?” Ratcliff pocketed the pipe. “Heard from your wife?”
When Virginia newspapers resumed publication, Jesse had placed ads in the long columns of ads from former slaves seeking their families. Jesse had written the Freedmen’s Bureaus too.
“No. Not a word,” Jesse said.
Ratcliff figured he’d been married three times—depending on what counted as married. “Might be she’s dead. Plenty niggers sold south into Mississippi didn’t live through the first summer.”
“I believe I’d feel it if Maggie was dead. I believe Maggie knows I’m looking for her and doesn’t intend to be found.”
“Friend Jesse, there’s other women. There’s plenty of fish in the sea.”
“Friend Edward, I don’t know that’s true.”
A few discharged soldiers still waited for wagons. A tenor began singing and other voices picked up his tune, their music sucked dry by the Texas air.
Ratcliff said, “Well, friend, we have had us some times.” He shouldered his haversack and stuck out his hand. “Good luck to you. I believe I’ll head west for a spell.”
CHAPTER 7
THE ATLANTIC, MISSISSIPPI & OHIO
EBEN BARNWELL SAT AT MAJOR GENERAL WILLIAM MAHONE’S RIGHT hand. Mahone: famed around the globe as Robert E. Lee’s most trusted lieutenant. Chestnut trees whose leaves were no bigger than a squirrel’s ear shaded the veranda of the Warm Springs Hotel. Redbuds, dogwoods, forsythias, lilacs, and quince were in exuberant bloom along the promenade and the air was lush with scent. At Major General William Mahone’s left hand sat Mr. Samuel Gatewood: distinguished proprietor of a venerable Virginia plantation.
As a boy, Eben Barnwell had milked cows in a Vermont barn so cold the milk froze into white rings on the iron hoops of his wooden bucket and he pressed into the cows’ flanks for body heat.
These days Eben Barnwell believed he could become whomever he wished. That hope blazing in the man had barely flickered in the boy.
Mahone and Gatewood had offered Eben so many delicate courtesies Thomas Byrd’s dislike was the hint of rue that makes sweetness sweeter.
General Mahone ignored Thomas Byrd and seemed amused by Eben’s ebullience.
Eben vowed to emulate Mahone’s detachment. Surely the General’s ability to consider one problem while hip-deep in another was key to the General’s wartime achievements.
Mahone shrugged. “Gatewood, if your mill was nearer Norfolk . . .”
“I can deliver any quantity of ties to the Jackson River railhead,” Gatewood insisted. “Heartwood; no cracks or checks.”
“But that is days from my Norfolk headquarters.” Mahone tapped his newspaper. “President Johnson declares our rebellion ended. I thought it ended a year ago. Barnwell, does news travel so slowly in the North?”
Eben said, “Johnson’s official pronouncement will encourage our English investors.”
“I leave those details to you.” A tiny dyspeptic man, “Little Billy” Mahone was fussy about diet and had kept a milk cow at his wartime headquarters. Though his soldiers joked about that cow, no one joked where Little Billy might overhear. After the surrender, William Mahone merged the Norfolk & Peters-burg Railway with the Southside to create the grandly named Atlantic, Mississippi & Ohio Railroad, which cynics promptly dubbed “All Mine and Otelia’s.”
As agent for A.M.&O. securities, Eben Barnwell had sailed to England courting investors who’d made fortunes in British railroads and were considering America.
In gentlemen’s clubs, country houses, and quiet, paneled investment banks, Eben spoke about William Mahone and the Great Dismal Swamp, that impenetrable wilderness which in 1856 had thwarted the construction of the Norfolk & Petersburg Railroad: “Meandering streams, sawgrass islands, lakes, and bottomless mud. How,” Eben asked rhetorically, “do you lay tracks across the Great Dismal Swamp? How, gentlemen, do you walk across water?”
Eben sustained his knowing smile until the potential investors confessed ignorance; whereupon Eben imitated the axeman’s swing. “Submerged trees, gentlemen, cannot rot! William Mahone had trees felled, one atop of another, forming a submerged vegetative mass to support his roadbed.
“The A.M.&O. trains cross Dismal Swamp to this day: level grade, nary a bend, straight as an arrow.
“Gentlemen, long before he embarked on his military career, William Mahone was the ablest railroad president in North America.”
Potential investors dutifully examined the A.M.&O.’s optimistic prospectus but asked about Mahone’s wartime exploits. Eben obliged, citing General Lee’s entire reliance upon Mahone, who, had Lee been slain (according to Eben), was Robert E. Lee’s chosen successor.
Eben concluded with a desanguinated description of the Crater Battle. “Grant mined Confederate defensive lines and blew them, men, horses, iron cannon—to kingdom come! Grant pushed three divisions into the tremendous breach. Opposing them? A single understrength Confederate battalion. General Grant’s victory was assured. He would cut the Confederate line in twain, as a farmer hoes a serpent.
“But Ulysses S. Grant had underestimated his foe. For the man commanding the battalion was none other than Major General William Mahone!”
Eben found the money Mahone needed and some of it stuck to his fingers. That Eben’s account of Mahone’s Crater battle had been drawn from Harper’s Weekly magazine and was less privileged than his English listeners may have believed didn’t trouble Eben. Eben asked Mahone about the Crater once. Mahone wouldn’t talk about it.
EBEN’S FATHER HAD BEEN a Vermont peddler. Jack Barnwell had mended pots and pans and sharpened knives, but never stepped inside the farm wife’s kitchen door. Eben’s mother was dead or absconded—Jack Barnwell never talked about her.
Sometimes when the Barnwells clattered through tiny villages at night, young Eben heard singing or a pianoforte behind lighted windows.These glimpses of better lives made the boy wonder if he and his father weren’t aliens passing through the habitations of another race.
Jack Barnwell’s morose silen
ces could fill days and the only remark Eben remembered was, “Rich man never let the poor man get up”; which sentence became Eben’s entire inheritance when Jack Barnwell died. As Eben was without known kin, the twelve-year-old fell onto the mercies of the county. The county commissioners thought tinkers a half step above gypsies.
The boy trembling before the commissioners might have stirred their consciences. On the other hand, while Eben Barnwell housed at the county poor farm would cost the county twelve cents per diem, that same fellow fostered to a farmer in need of an able young man would fetch the county two dollars a month and honest work was morally improving.
Eben went to work for Daniel and Ezekiel Knapp. These bachelors, never having had children themselves, presumed children were small varieties of grown men, as a pony is a small variety of horse. Since for their weight ponies can pull better than a horse, the brothers thought Eben’s chronic exhaustion was obstinacy. Daniel Knapp beat the boy until he wet himself and then beat him for filthiness. Eben feared Daniel Knapp, but when he finally ran away he fled not blows but words. Eben Barnwell ran from Ezekiel Knapp’s oft-repeated judgment: “Boy, you ain’t nothin’, and you ain’t ever gonna be nothin’.”
STRATFORD’S LADIES HAD COME to Warm Springs to greet General Mahone and bathe in healing waters, which had erased the troubled lines on Abigail Gatewood’s face and restored her complexion to the glow Samuel Gatewood had first admired so many years before.
General Mahone assisted his wife, Otelia, to a rocker and tenderly laid a lap robe across her knees. Pauline took the rocker beside Mr. Barnwell and Cousin Molly settled in a swing.
Sallie set her hassock aside to lean against Duncan’s knees.
Duncan had served under General Mahone, and when General Mahone became A.M.&O. president, Duncan wrote offering Stratford’s Mill railroad ties, best quality, the same ties they’d sold the Virginia Central before the war.
Welcome news came by return mail: William and Otelia Mahone would be taking the waters at Warm Springs. Since that spa was no great distance from Stratford Plantation, perhaps Duncan could call upon them. The A.M.&O., Mahone wrote mysteriously, had “a great many needs.” Excited by the prospect of restarting Stratford’s mill, Samuel Gatewood and Jack worked up a price list.
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