Call Each River Jordan

by Ralph Peters (as Owen Parry)

  “No, sir. He preached a chapel. And did it lovely, I am told. But the cholera took him and my mother, God rest them. A high-church gentleman took me in, but he found me a disappointment. Twas him put me out to the tannery.”

  And then I added something else, although it had no place, for it was a trivial, silly and personal matter. But Grant had the gift of making others speak.

  “More than anything,” I said, “I feared the yard horse. When I did not finish my work to satisfaction, I was locked in a stall with the creature. It had a wicked temper with a boy. And I was small, see. Since that day I do not favor horses.”

  Grant smiled, bemused. I never sensed unkindness in the man. He knew the pain of those whose life turns downward.

  “Well, we’re different there, Jones. Sometimes I think a horse is an animal of a higher order than the average specimen of mankind.” He laid his arm across my filthy shoulder. I smelled tobacco on his clothes and breath. “We’ve got the tanyard in common, though. And the cholera.” I felt his muscles clinch ever so slightly. “Worst days of my life were crossing Panama with the 4th Infantry. On the way to California. Worse than the tan-yard by a country mile. Cholera hit us. They left me behind to look after the sick and the women and children.” He shook his head. With a slowness near despair. “I was troubled for a time after that.”

  The door opened. Rawlins, the hard and humorless fellow, stepped in. Grant dropped his arm away and hunted through his pockets for a smoke.

  “John,” the general said to his aide, “see that Major Jones here has an opportunity to make himself presentable as our emissary. Scare him up a fresh uniform, would you? And get him a hot bath. Two, if necessary. I have a message to write. Then we’ll send him back upriver to Sherman.”

  Rawlins mumbled, as if such tasks were beneath him, complaining of the want of uniforms in the battle’s wake. But Grant was unconcerned. He stretched out his hand and laid it upon my shoulder a last time.

  “Good luck,” he said. Then he bit a cigar’s tip and added, “Strikes me that I never did get very far from that tan-yard.”

  THREE

  OH, A WASH IS A LOVELY THING. A SHAME IT IS WE cannot scrub our souls as we do our bodies. A tin tub in a tent set me up proper, and I grew almost jolly, soap in hand and all the world forgotten for the moment. I am, by nature, clean about my person, and wish that others were more fond of water, for careless habits lead us toward sin. I fear I was a terror to the Irish in my sergeanting days.

  Two farmboys squeezed into uniforms assisted me, as if I were the Marquess of Bute himself. I was so foul they fetched fresh water twice, dumping it over me by the bucketful. Good lads they were, and not above a laugh, but they were green. When first I shed my rags, the taller of the two had marked my ant bites, for I had been scratching. Smirking, he asked me if I had the camp itch. Then my decline in dress revealed my campaign scars, livid as sins on doomsday. The poor boy stopped grinning and paled.

  I am not proud of my irregularities, and keep me private when a fellow may. The scars of battle should be hid, for badges of shame they are, and not of pride. But in a camp few secrets last. Shaking out a just-delivered uniform, the tall boy said:

  “Major, you look like you been rasslin’ bobcats.”

  But I have wrestled men, and that is worse.

  I bought a tin of oysters from a Hebrew. I would have rubbed the oil across my snout to mask the greater stink of death around me. But that would have been sloven and improper. I have always been sensitive to smells, see, and some are worse than others by a mile. The rotting human carcass tops them all. The air was poisoned. So the camphor reek of the new uniform pleased me, although it is a smell I much dislike, for it left no room in my nose for other scents.

  The peddler sold all I needed. More soap, and a toothbrush. A clap-to razor, since whiskers are a vanity. A pen and ink, and paper. For I had to write to my darling and our little John, to tell them I was still among the living. I tried to write my Mary Myfanwy daily, but war corrupts our habits. Now I would be gone unto our enemies, and might not have the chance to write for a muchness. The sutler’s prices startled me, and wasted pennies lead to a wasted life, yet I would have paid him thrice to write my lovely.

  The writing had to be postponed until night, for my dispatches were ready and Rawlins burned to start me on my way. Ever a sour man he was, unobliging to all but Grant. But first there was a tussle about pay. Although I had a special authorization from the War Department, the clerk regarded me as he might a criminal. It is the constant temper of such fellows, who come to think the pay chest is their own. Rawlins had to bark at the man. Even then, the business proceeded slowly.

  At last, I signed my chits and got my wages. I had been down to my secret service funds, which must not be applied to private use. My farewell from New York had come all sudden and my affairs were in disarray. I kept a tithe-worth of my pay for expenses, sending back the rest to dear old Pottsville, to Mr. Evans at the Miner’s Bank. So my wife might draw to furnish her needs, while a portion could be put into railroad shares.

  It cost me dear to send the sum along, but we must pay for safety and convenience. Bonded agents hovered by the pay tent, speaking German, Swedish, Norwegian and such, as well as queer varieties of English. Money could be sent from there to Pomerania, or off to County Mayo to be drunk up. Twas a commerce of vigor, the forwarding of monies. Of course, those fellows should have been in uniform, for healthy sorts they seemed and in their prime. But business will not pause for war, and many’s the man who covets the soldier’s pay.

  But let that bide.

  Soon enough, I was back upon the river, with a young lieutenant detailed to guide me to Sherman. The day had clouded and the water sulked. Here and there, the banks had snagged a corpse. The earth stank mighty with the scent of dying, and black birds circled. But Abel Jones felt like a man reborn, scrubbed and decked out spotless, with a high kepi clapped to my head. The staff had even found me a pair of shoulder boards. Spotted they were, and I chose not to think on their origins. Fit precisely frock and pants did not, for I am short but broad across the chest. I fear I always want a bit of tailoring. Sleeves and trousers hung a trifle long, but I rolled them up and pinned them fast, intending to sit down and sew that night. Thread and needle are the soldier’s friends.

  We rode an emptied ambulance up from the dock. The teamster seemed glad of a healthy cargo. The wagon’s canvas walls had been rolled high and we perched on a lip of boards behind the driver. I recognized the road that I had walked along that first, desperate morning of the fight. Now dawdling soldiers lingered at their chores, while others, urgent, squatted in the trees. The army had not learned to cook or clean. Still, this was but the old routine of camp, found everywhere that soldiers pitch their tents. If not for the stench and shattered groves, you might have missed the evidence of battle.

  My escort had not been engaged in combat, but spent his time as an orderly in the rear. He did not know his way upon the field and seemed a silly choice to make a guide. The driver had to ask the way as we went, for he was not assigned to Sherman’s division. Besides, the camps had been muddled by the fighting. We wandered through a fading afternoon. At first, the lieutenant’s eyes shimmered to come so close to war at last, and he bothered me with questions from a schoolyard.

  Until we turned a bend and saw a detail flinging Rebel corpses in a ditch. Our boys were buried proper, but communal pits were all the enemy got. Clods of shoveled earth slapped bloated bellies. Many of the dead had twisted up queer, as if tormented. Stiff legs angled skyward. Teeth were bared and eyes stared at the Judgement. Comrades blackened in each other’s arms. Shovels sparked off rocks, and dirt fell in curtains. Swollen bowels exploded in a cannonade of stink. But the shock of death was gone and the soldiers on the burial party joked.

  Do not imagine dignity in death. We rot, and will not rise. Not in the flesh.

  We passed a scorched grove and a half-burned field. I saw white bones. But I refused to thin
k more on the battle, ignoring the lieutenant’s dismayed looks. I filled my mind with images of home, of wife and child and little joys we shared. I would have shut my eyes and held my nose, but that would have made me a poor example. Lieutenants are the army’s softest clay. The boy beside me had all he could do to keep from puking down the side of the wagon.

  He put me in mind of the son of an earl, a subaltern I knew in India. His red coat never sat well on parade, though Corporal Deane and I did what we could, and the newfangled khaki made him look a fool. The boy gave orders from his mouth, but never from his eyes, leaving me the duties and the discipline. He was ever writing letters in his tent, one a day at least to a lass named Jenny. I thought she was his sweetheart back in England, but later learned she was the poor boy’s sister. He died in our camp by Peshawar, of nothing. The surgeon wrote him down dead of the flux.

  Look you. Not all men are cut out for the army, and hard it is when parents press them in. Or when friends draw them on with wicked teasing. I conjured up Lieutenant Livingston, too, the lad in Washington, sick and sad and dead before his time. Suddenly, I swelled up with near-hatred toward the playroom soldier at my side. A stupid child who knew not what he had done. I would have liked to slap him and send him off to his mother.

  A group of tattered horsemen passed us by, led by one dressed black as any preacher. And then we had arrived at Sherman’s camp, amid tents lined up neat, though scorched and torn. I smelled great pots of beans and heard commands of drill from nearby fields, as companies were mended from the battle. The voices of the officers come hoarse, still raw from shouting in the noise and smoke.

  General Grant had given me two letters. One would introduce me to the Rebels. The second was addressed to General Sherman. I was to give it him directly. But difficulties arose.

  The general had taken to his bed.

  An aide said it was asthma, which afflicted Sherman in the campaign’s lulls. Now that was queer, although it explained his cough. Where I had served that ailment touched only the children who lived in the officers’ bungalows or the offspring of high administrators. The sort whose mothers took them off to hill stations when the heat rose, little boys got up with ringlet curls and girls with drowsy eyes and beribboned waists. When lesser folk could not breathe we called it a wheeze. Unless blood come to the lips, which meant consumption. But high sorts want a different class of ailment to set them up above the common run.

  I thought on these things while I waited. I had given the aide Grant’s note to take in, see. It was the best that Abel Jones might do. I could not plough into a general’s tent like some snooty Frenchman.

  I sent the lieutenant back to the river and I think he was afraid to go alone. No doubt he made a detour round the death pit. And likely found another for his trouble. I leaned against a tree by Sherman’s tent, trying to read a verse or two of the Gospels. My Testament was stained, the text obscured in places. But I recalled most of the missing bits. I had just got me to Jerusalem when I heard a fit of coughing and bubbling phlegm. The aide come out a moment later, bilious and confused.

  “The general wants to see you right now,” he said. “Funny, he don’t usually visit with nobody when he’s like this.” He stepped aside and told me, “Go on in.”

  I pocketed my Testament and poked my head inside the shut-up tent, getting a snoutful of stale air for a welcome. General Sherman sat on his cot, wearing trousers with his braces down and a red undergarment for a shirt. He looked as though too little skin had been stretched over too much skull, and he was sweating.

  He glared my way and coughed, but it soon passed.

  “Sit down there, Jones.” He pointed to a camp chair with his bandaged hand. “And tell me something.” His eyes were red as if plucked from a brazier.

  I sat and said, “Yes, sir?”

  “Grant sent me a note. He says you’ve got an iron declaring you the hero of Bull Run.”

  “Sir, I never would make such a claim, I only—”

  “Just answer me this.” His fierce eyes sought remembrance. “Are you the little fellow had that company high up on the ridge? The one who sent down the reply that there was no way in Hell you were going to retreat?”

  Twas not a precise account. I never would have used a word like “Hell” under official circumstances. Not even to the colonel he had been at Bull Run, though many’s the colonel could do with a splash of cold water. But well I recalled the day and our exchange. Twas only that a man must not presume. And I had not thought Sherman would remember. My role was minor, and the battle lost.

  “I had a company then, sir. My boys put up a steady front. My boys it was who did the work, not me. Twas only that a battery come along—”

  Sherman held up his wounded hand to hush me. “Damnedest thing I ever saw.” He shook his head and let a little cough. “Just the damnedest thing. You and that little company standing up there, with the whole damned army running away on both sides of you . . .”

  “You did not run, sir. Your brigade went off in good order.”

  Sherman grimaced, wheezing. “Damnedest thing . . .”

  “Sir,” I said, for I would change the subject, “if you have need of a doctor, there is a fine fellow of my acquaintance with the army, one Dr. Tyrone.”

  “Silent Mick?” Sherman asked. With an abrupt smile.

  “I believe he has been called so, sir.”

  Sherman nodded and began to laugh, only to end up in a fit of gasping. Yet, ill or no, his humor had come up. When he got back, to words, he said, “I’d be scared to go near the man. Tough as old boots. He’s famous in this army, Mick Tyrone. Damned near good as Brinton. But one hard case. Cut a general’s head off in a minute, if he doesn’t get his way about his supplies.”

  “He is a lovely doctor, sir. He saved me from the typhoid.”

  Sherman waved all medicine away, and doctors, hospitals and hopes of cure. “Well, I suspect he’s got his hands full, at the moment. Likely has a tired right arm by now. Listen, Jones, we’ve got to get about your business. Micah Lott’s in camp.” His mouth turned wry. “That ‘Captain’ Lott I told you about. He’ll take you on your grand tour, then pass you south. But be careful. I’ve sent Sanger over to give him his orders. No skirmishing, or any kind of nonsense. Just get you out to the scene of the butchery, then slip you south to where you can approach the Confederate lines without getting your head blown off.”

  His cough swelled back and drew more sweat. “But watch him. You watch him. The man hates Southrons. Hates the South, Jones. Anything to do with slavery. He’s fanatical.” Sherman snorted at his thoughts. “Makes John Brown look like a parlor preacher drinking tea with the ladies.” He paused to catch his breath again and seemed a fragile child. Narrow of form he was, like Mick Tyrone. “If I didn’t need scouts so badly, I’d send him packing.” He wiped his sweating forehead with a kerchief. “You rank him. Even if he does have a captain’s patent from somewhere out in the territories. Keep him on course. You understand?”

  “Yes, sir. I believe so, sir.”

  “And you’ll just have to put up with his Bible-thumping.” He raised an eyebrow. “You religious, Jones? You sounded a tad on the holy side back at Grant’s shack.”

  I could not help but think about the fighting. And what a heathen creature I remained. But I told him, “I count myself a Christian, sir. And a Methodist.”

  Sherman twisted up his mouth again and his body tensed with his ailment. When he spoke, the words rode on a wheeze. “Well, you may not find Captain Lott’s brand of Christianity everything you’re used to. He’s a touch on the severe side. Plenty of that out here, though. Country brings it out. Anyway, you just let it roll off your back. I’d send you out with an escort of regular cavalry, but they’d only get you killed.”

  “I see no need of cavalry, sir,” I hastened to agree. I fear I have a horror of the equine.

  Sherman made an ugly sound. Deep in his throat. “Your mission’s important, Jones. I’ve been thinking about it. An
d about that business with England. Maybe this killing’s even more important than we’ve got at yet. But, right now, we have to keep the lid on the pot. Before it boils over and makes one hell of a mess.” He sucked in air and braced his hands on his knees. “Find out who killed those niggers.”

  At that, the coughing ripped down to his soul. His undergarment shirt darkened with sweat. I feared his lungs would come right out his mouth.

  He gulped a potion from a medicine bottle, spilling some over his chin and onto his bandaged palm. He only choked the worse for the elixir. It was a hard thing, watching a general struggle. We are but sorry flesh, and the mighty are humbled. I wondered then if he was fit to lead.

  What man can see beyond the present day’s confusions?

  Between his seizures, Sherman called for his aide. And sent me on my journey to the damned.

  FROM ALL I HAD BEEN TOLD of Captain Lott, I thought his camp would be a tabernacle. Instead, I stumbled upon a wrestling match.

  A crowd had gathered, lolling, sitting and leaning, where a black man and a white man clutched each other. Naked shoulders gleamed, and the opponents showed their teeth like vicious dogs. The white man was the taller of the two, all blond and sturdy. Thick, he looked to be a Swede or such. Muscled like a man who tills poor land. When the wrestlers broke apart, with a growl, the Swedish fellow straightened and gulped him a chestful of the air. I do believe he was six foot and six, and don’t know how the Rebel bullets missed him. Stripped to the waist, his pale flesh bulged from his trousers, reddened where the Negro’s hands had gripped.

  The black mail lacked his foe’s commanding height. But he looked hard. With muscles thick as the ropes that fasten ships. Oiled to an Ethiopian hue, his shoulders would have yoked two fattened oxen. His neck was a siege gun’s muzzle. But when he moved he showed a dervish grace. He was the one who pleased the eye, emanating a force words do not fit.