Annie, Between the States

by L. M. Elliott

  Laurence clearly had no idea of Annie’s foolish notions about Jeb Stuart. And they were silly, overly romantic, she knew. She smiled down at her brother and repeated from Romeo and Juliet, “‘I’ll look to like, if looking liking move.’” She’d always loved the alliteration of that line, and marveled at how dutiful Juliet had been in promising to look favorably at a suitor of her parents’ picking. If only Annie could make herself be that agreeable.

  “What did you say?” Laurence asked. “You see, you prove my point.” He teased, “You two should get married and he can try to keep you from jumping fences with crazy horses.”

  Annie swatted his arm and whispered back, “You mind your own romantic interests, brother. I don’t suppose you chose this house for coffee by accident, did you?”

  Laurence held up his cup, silently asking for a refill. Only his dimpled smile gave him away.

  Despite the pelting thunderstorm, Stuart’s raid had gone well, Laurence said. The aim had been to cut the telegraph wires linking Pope to Washington and to burn a railroad bridge over Cedar Run near Catlett Station along the Orange & Alexandria line. Without the bridge, reinforcements and supplies could not make it south from Federally occupied Alexandria to Pope’s army. Robert E. Lee’s plan was to isolate Pope, back him up against the rivers, and then attack him full force with the massed Confederate armies led by Jackson, Longstreet, and Lee himself.

  Unfortunately, the downpour had so saturated the bridge that it wouldn’t torch. Laurence and his brigade had even tried to chop it to ruin, but they were under severe gunfire from Federals across the stream, dug in on a cliff. They had managed, though, to slip through all the pickets in the black, stormy night and found themselves right in the middle of Pope’s headquarters. As jagged lightning crackled through the heavens and lit their way, Stuart’s men stampeded through dozens of tents.

  There they discovered a treasure trove—a money chest containing thousands upon thousands of Federal greenbacks plus Pope’s dispatch book. The book revealed Pope’s fear of being attacked before Federal reinforcements arrived. The Confederates also captured a herd of well-fed, rested horses; wagons full of bacon, medicine, and Havana cigars; plus almost three hundred prisoners, many of them officers. To their disappointment, they found Pope was not in camp to capture.

  “Oh, yes.” Laurence sat up suddenly after relating all their success. “That field quartermaster, that Yankee major your friend was so interested in. We did catch him. General Stuart is going to present him to Miss Eliza so that she can honor her bet with him—since this very day he will be off to Richmond as he boasted. Of course, he is going as our prisoner, not a conquering invader—not exactly the way he hoped to win his bet, I’m sure!” He and his companions laughed. “Would you like to see the fun?”

  Charlotte and Annie certainly would!

  They arrived at the courthouse just in time to see the Federal major, still good-humored, still pleasant, accept his bottle of champagne from Eliza. “I shall be happy to drink the health of so charming a person,” he said.

  Eliza was dressed in her finest lavender silk. She curtsied prettily to the throng of Stuart’s men, who cheered and laughed and wished the major a happy journey and stay in Richmond!

  Eliza would be famous. Someone will probably write a song about her, thought Annie with a jealousy she couldn’t squelch.

  After that, Stuart announced that he held another honored guest as prisoner—General Pope’s full dress blue uniform! Laurence’s brigade leader, Fitz Lee, had found it in Pope’s tent.

  Stuart unfurled the long blue coat with delight and shouted to his assembled men: “I think I’ll send a dispatch to General Pope asking for a fair exchange of prisoners—his best coat for my plumed hat.

  “What do you think, boys? Shall I do it?”

  His men laughed and laughed. It was like a game, the whole thing, a glorious cat-and-mouse chase, with ennobling salutes across the tournament fields from an impressed and amused enemy. Annie looked at the men, so enraptured by Stuart, so energized by his theatrical wit and sweeping charisma, which made the war seem a grand adventure. No wonder they followed so willingly behind him and his banjo picker, fiddler, and bones player. Annie glanced at Laurence, whose actions and conversation had always been tempered by his sensible and responsible nature. Her brother glowed. Annie felt swept up in it all, too, the feeling of invincibility, patriotism, and legend being made.

  “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers…” a voice behind her recited.

  It was the scout, William Farley. His face didn’t have the same luminous excitement that his compatriots’ did. It was more a studious recognition of the stirring scene before him—a scholarly spectator.

  Annie knew the line from Shakespeare’s Henry V. It was one of the playwright’s most rousing, heart-stopping speeches, the words steeling a small force of peasants to go into a battle that by all odds would crush them.

  Instinctively, the next phrase came out of Annie: “For he today that sheds his blood with me / Shall be my brother.”

  Farley turned to Annie with a shocked and impressed look. She nodded at him and in her own mind continued: And gentlemen in England now abed / Shall think themselves accursed they were not here / And hold their manhoods cheap….

  Was that it? A sense of history, of being part of a tremendous, perhaps immortal moment of change that helped shore up these men, these boys, her brother? Was it the fear of being left out—abed in England, as Shakespeare put it—that pushed Jamie into such foolish brags? Is that what drove her to want to be part of it somehow?

  Her thoughts were interrupted by the plea of one prisoner, who did not share the light-hearted jollity that Eliza’s major had. It was a woman—a woman disguised in a Federal’s private’s uniform. She’d been posing as a man in Pope’s infantry. Even the Union men who’d fought with her in her unit, who stood to the side under Confederate guard, seemed annoyed to learn her true identity.

  The woman spoke: “General Stuart, sir, I insist that you release me.” Although she stood tall and straight at attention, her voice was shrill, jittery. Her face was young, pretty, and frightened. “My gender should excuse me from going to a common Confederate prison. In all decency, please.”

  Stuart stared at her. Then he answered in words Annie would never forget: “If you’re man enough to enlist, you ought to be man enough to go to prison.”

  Stuart’s riders left immediately after that, a rush of hooves, huzzahs, and tearful good-byes, horses replenished by good feed, bucking a bit in exuberance. Warrenton seemed ghostly quiet afterward—the townspeople left behind to wait for news of the next battle, the next shift in the parameters of their lives and expectations, the next joy and the next sorrow.

  Annie and Jamie left, too, after the roads dried a bit. All the way home, Jamie sang a new song written about Stuart, inspired by his raid on Catlett Station.

  “Now each cavalier that loves Honor and Right

  Let him follow the feather of Stuart tonight.

  We are three thousand horses, and not one afraid;

  We are three thousand sabres and not a dull blade.

  Come tighten your girth and slacken your rein;

  Come buckle your blanket and holster again;

  Try the click of your trigger and balance your blade,

  For he must ride sure that goes Riding a Raid!”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  September 2, 1862

  The town of Middleburg,

  east of Hickory Heights

  “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me….”

  The cherub-faced boy whispered his prayers and then looked at Miriam with huge, clear, blue eyes. They glistened with unshed tears, but his gaze was direct and steady and riveted on Miriam. She was smiling at him, that soothing, loving smile of hers.

  “It’s all right, ma’am,” he said in a hushed calm.

  “You can let go now.”

&nbs
p; Miriam nodded, swallowed hard, kept her eyes on that young, beautiful face, and took her fingers away from his throat. Immediately, blood gushed along the boy’s collar and onto his chest. Their eyes did not part until the boy’s no longer had life in them.

  Miriam reached out to close them. She folded his hands on his chest. Then she collapsed.

  The doctor bundled her into Annie’s arms. “When your mother comes to, take her outside for some fresh air,” he said.

  Numb with what she’d just witnessed, Annie fanned her mother with a towel.

  Miriam had been plugging an artery in the boy’s neck. He’d come in with the hundreds of wounded flooding Middleburg from the second Battle of Manassas and the Battle of Ox Hill. When they’d lifted him off the wagon, the wound, which had been bound with linen strips, suddenly burst open. Miriam had somehow known to staunch it with her fingers and had held herself there until the surgeons had determined there was nothing they could do to save the boy. He would bleed to death within moments from the sliced artery. Only her fingers—like a cork in a dike—kept him alive.

  The boy listened to the surgeons explain. They were sorry, they said. The boy took a long, deep, wrenching breath and pressed his lips together to quell their quivering. Then he’d asked Miriam to write his parents and to tell them he had been as brave as he could. “You’ll find the right words for me, won’t you, ma’am? I never was good at letters.”

  When Miriam revived, she looked up at Annie with eyes that seemed a hundred years older.

  She and Annie dragged themselves out of the church that had—like all the buildings in the town—been turned into a makeshift hospital. Although the air was clean and sweet from recent rains, being outside offered little relief to them as the wounded lay everywhere in the streets and under shade trees, awaiting help.

  Women moved among them, offering them water and food. Wagons pulled up with meals hastily cooked by the residents of nearby farms. Aunt May was somewhere, ladling out stew they’d brought in from Hickory Heights. The Confederate army had dragged nearly eighteen hundred wounded men back from the battlefield but provided rations for only two hundred.

  “Hmpf,” Aunt May had grunted when she’d seen what meager biscuits, bacon, and beans the army offered. “Twenty hungry men could eat that for one meal.”

  At least the tide of bleeding bodies seemed to have stopped. The Confederates, led by Stonewall Jackson, Lee, and old Pete Longstreet, had yet again pushed the Union forces back over Bull Run, back behind their line of fortifications ringing the city of Washington. All the talk was about Jackson’s infantry, which had managed to march on foot fifty-four miles in two days to catch Pope by surprise. Jackson’s soldiers were hailed as “the foot cavalry” for their remarkable speed and tenacity.

  There was even speculation about Lee moving into Maryland, to circle up behind the city of Washington, isolate it, and perhaps then capture it from the north. The main hope was that Lee’s maneuver would lure Federal troops out of Virginia and take some of the pressure off the state, which had been a constant battlefield and food store for both armies for the last year. Lee was adamant that this was not to be an occupation of Maryland but simply a march through the border state to feed his men and horses and to bring an end to the war. His purpose, he announced, was to defend the Southern homeland, not to invade or occupy as had “those people,” his term for Yankees.

  Annie watched the progress of the news through town. Whenever people huddled together and listeners closed their eyes and tipped their heads toward heaven, they were praying, “Please God, let it be so. Let this end the war now.”

  Finding Aunt May and their wagon, Miriam crawled onto the driving bench. At the sight of her, Aunt May stopped serving stew and fussed, “Missus Miriam, you look all wrung out. We need to get you home now.” When Miriam nodded feebly and said nothing, Annie knew something was wrong. But she assumed it was the tragedy of not being able to save that sweet young soldier. It wasn’t until they reached Hickory Heights that she and Aunt May recognized how feverish Miriam was.

  “It’s diphtheria sure,” said a local doctor that night. “Her throat is covered with the gray membrane. Several people are sick with it around here. The army must have brought it with them as they passed through on the way to fight at Manassas. Seems like wherever they go, they spread contagion. Last winter, when they encamped in Fredericksburg, more than two hundred children died of scarlet fever. I hear of regiments losing half their men from typhoid and dysentery. Army surgeons tell me they can hardly keep them well long enough to send them into battle to be shot down.” He shook his head grimly.

  Annie heard little of what the physician was saying. She could only focus on the word: diphtheria. People typically died of diphtheria, suffocating because their throats were swollen shut.

  The doctor was still talking, handing quinine to Aunt May and explaining that Miriam should take it and be bathed frequently. He wasn’t going to use leeches unless he had to. He’d be back as soon as he could. There were so many wounded to tend to; he was trying to help out the army. If she survived the next seven days, she should live. Annie and Jamie, he finished, should not get near their mother.

  In a daze, Annie watched Aunt May let the doctor out the front door. When she bustled back, she was as in command as if she were a general. “Annie, lamb, you listen to me good now. I can’t let you back in the room with your mama. She’d rather die than you get sick. But you can help Isaac and Rachel gather up some things for me. I need spice bush for a tea, mashed garlic for a poultice for her chest. I need them to find some horehound and wild cherry bark, too. I need to mix it up with some honey and whiskey. Praise God we saved a little whiskey from those thieving Yankees.” She pushed the quinine into Annie’s hand. “Put that in the larder. It won’t do Missus Miriam no good. All them surgeon quacks know are calomel and quinine and sawing off things. I seen them. Grandma Hettie taught me how to do for sick folk. I watched Missus Miriam, too. I know what to do, child.” She patted Annie’s face. “G’on, honey.”

  Annie staggered to do Aunt May’s bidding, herself completely unprepared to nurse Miriam. Oh, if only she’d paid more attention to the things her mother had told her about tending the sick. She’d just always expected her mother to be there, the kind, nurturing, wise miracle worker. What would she do if Miriam died?

  For two weeks, Hickory Heights hung in a gloom, waiting, as Miriam trembled with fever and chills, coughed and lurched for each breath. Aunt May emerged only to ask for clean linens, fresh water, and more of the syrups and teas she’d made. She ordered Isaac to burn the dampened cloths she’d used to cool Miriam.

  Everyone tried to keep things running as Miriam would. Rachel took up Aunt May’s cooking duties and Annie tried to help. Isaac, Bob, and Jamie separated the lambs from the ewes and counted a dozen males that could be slaughtered for meat for the winter, less than a third of what they’d had the year before. They cut and stacked twenty acres of timothy hay and began gathering wood to lay in for winter. But no one’s mind was really on work. Everyone’s thoughts were focused on Miriam’s bedroom.

  Once Annie found Jamie sitting outside Miriam’s bedroom, his face hard against the door, trying to hear what was happening inside. Annie sat down with him and also pressed her ear to the thick, wooden door. All she could make out was Miriam’s wrenching cough and the answering murmur of Aunt May’s voice, gentle, soft, coaxing. The two of them remained huddled there. Instinctively, Annie put her arm around Jamie’s shoulder, the way the two of them used to nestle together when they were little and Laurence read aloud by the fireside.

  “Annie.” Jamie looked at her with fearful eyes, naked of his usual defensive swagger. “Do you think Mother will die?”

  “I’m praying not, Jamie. She’s strong of heart. She’ll fight to stay with us.”

  “Do you think she loves us that much?”

  “Why, of course she does, Jamie.” Annie squeezed him a little. He shrugged and looked down.

&nbs
p; “Maybe she loves Laurence that much.”

  Annie sighed. She’d been thinking a lot about Miriam in the past few days, thinking about how devastated her mother had been when the boy soldier died despite her heroic attempt to save his life. It had stolen a little piece of her being. Annie had seen it.

  “You know, Jamie,” she said slowly, weighing her words as they came out for accuracy of what she meant, “I think Mother changed after our brothers and Father died. We were too little to remember what she was like beforehand. I imagine she was more carefree, more confident about life. I think her being with them when they died took away her ability to love without fear. I think she cares for us as dearly as she can while still worrying that someday we might get sick and die. I think she holds back just a little to protect herself.”

  Jamie mulled it over. Annie could tell he wanted to understand it. Of course, understanding and not being hurt were two different things. “She’s not that way with Laurence,” he finally mumbled.

  No, she wasn’t. Jamie was right about that. “Maybe it’s because Laurence is of the old days for her. His childhood was mostly lived before Father and the boys got sick and died. Ours was just beginning afterward, after she was so changed by tragedy. Does that make sense?”

  After a few moments, Jamie nodded.

  Annie added, “And besides, Laurence is a good man, Jamie—you know that.”

  Jamie shuffled his feet around and nodded again, looking at the floor.

  “Annie?”

  “What?”

  Jamie looked up at her, and there were tears in his eyes. “Do you remember the time Laurence got so torn up when his horse threw him?”