As usual, Kizzy let her in wordlessly, took her coat, and hung it on the hall tree. As usual, the girl waited alone in the garden room. As usual, the heap of histories, magazines, and dusty reminiscences seemed disturbed: different-sized stacks, different books on top. The girl wondered if every night the old woman, like Scheherazade, invented the story she told the next day.
“Again you honor us with your presence,” Marguerite Omohundru said, as she made room for herself among the magazines.
“I don’t know . . .” the girl said.
“We needed this rain,” Marguerite observed. “See how the garden glistens.”
Kizzy brought their single tray, two cups, one teapot, the cream and sugar neither used, two small silver spoons for stirring the cream and sugar neither used.
“I have been thinking about families,” Marguerite said. “Are your people well?”
“They’re off this weekend to open our summer place. They asked me to go. . . .”
“Richmond can be disagreeable in the summertime,” Marguerite observed.
She paused for a polite moment before taking up the theme she had determined upon. “Families can only take so much hurt. When a family is injured it tries to heal, but sometimes the healing shrieks as loudly as the hurt. Thomas Gatewood, Samuel’s father, owned a great competency: thousands of fertile acres, cattle, sheep, a mill. He was magistrate and postmaster. Before any civic change was initiated in the countryside near SunRise, Virginia, Thomas Gatewood was consulted. He already had what most men spend their lifetime pursuing, but Thomas was not satisfied; Thomas must also have his neighbor’s wife. Perhaps he thought he was not governed by the inflexible laws that govern others. Perhaps he thought his great desire excused itself.
“I believe his son, Samuel Gatewood, tried to atone for his father’s guilt, but the powerful Gatewood family—which seemed, I can assure you, more like a fact of nature than a merely human institution—had weakness at its core. They were caught by surprise when their son, Duncan, took up with an ignorant little colored girl.” She smiled her most charming smile.
Wistfulness transformed her face like a mask. “That Christmas, the last Christmas before the war, when Duncan held Baby Jacob for the only time he ever did, he loved his son. He could see himself, his family, his future in that boy, and his eyes glowed with love.”
CHANCELLORSVILLE, VIRGINIA MAY 2, 1863
In the spring of 1863, General Joseph Hooker, “Fighting Joe” Hooker, was a vigorous field commander and one of the hardest drinkers in the Federal army. Ambitious, he’d openly schemed to seize the Army of the Potomac from Ambrose Burnside (who hadn’t wanted command in the first place, but wouldn’t turn it loose once he had it). In his letter of appointment, President Lincoln warned Hooker against rashness. There was something about Fighting Joe that made Lincoln apprehensive.
Despite his Fredericksburg victory, Lee’s starving army was disintegrating. Desertions were epidemic, and Stonewall Jackson had issued orders to his troops that no unwounded men were to accompany the wounded to the rear. Rations were short: regiments detailed men to forage for wild onions, sassafras buds, and poke sprouts. After a winter’s use, the clothing they’d taken from the Federal dead at Fredericksburg was worn out.
When they crossed into Virginia, each man in Hooker’s army carried eight days’ rations and sixty rounds of ammunition. They got across the Rappahannock unopposed, passed Fredericksburg, and marched into the tangle of cutover scrub woods called the Wilderness. It was miserable country. Narrow roads connected tiny villages, clearings were small and few, and the tangled woods could conceal God knew what. The moment he struck some of Lee’s troops, Joe Hooker stopped in his tracks. Hooker put his enormous army into a defensive line at a crossroads called Chancellorsville and boasted: “I have Lee in one hand and Richmond in the other.”
The next morning, Robert E. Lee sent Stonewall Jackson’s corps—the bulk of his army—on a twelve-mile march across Hooker’s front to the Federal right flank. He urged Jackson, “Get at those people.”
In Jackson’s absence, Lee would hold Hooker’s eighty-thousand-man army with fifteen thousand men of his own.
Hooker was as still as a bird paralyzed by a serpent. At midday on May 2, 1863, some of Hooker’s men saw Jackson’s great force sliding through the woods. Federal scouts and pickets sent urgent reports of masses of men moving across the army’s front.
Years afterward, when someone asked Joe Hooker what he was thinking of, why he froze up the way he did, Hooker said simply, “I just lost faith in Joe Hooker.”
In the late afternoon of that day, a cavalry officer accompanied Stonewall Jackson up the small hill behind Joe Hooker’s lines. Thoroughly exposed and as thoroughly unnoticed, Jackson gazed on the Federal troops. The officer reported: “Jackson’s expression was one of intense interest. To the remarks made to him while the unconscious line of blue was pointed out, he did not reply once during the five minutes he was on the hill, and yet his lips were moving. Oh! beware of rashness, General Hooker. Stonewall is praying in full view and in the rear of your right flank.”
The butcher of the 153rd Pennsylvania and two helpers dragged the lead rope of a terrified steer; the nearer the beast came to the tripods where six of its brethren dangled, the louder it bellowed. From frying pans on nearby campfires arose the pleasant smell of liver and spring onions. The steer smelled only death. Neck extended, resisting with all its strength, it was hauled nearer while the butcher called endearments—endearments the steer knew to be lies. “Come along, Liebchen,” the butcher murmured. “It is not far. Soon you will rest.”
Soldiers waited near the tripod with a tin washtub with which they intended to retrieve the steer’s steaming liver.
“Move back, you boys. Can’t you see you’re scaring him?”
The butcher of the 153rd Pennsylvania was famous throughout Howard’s corps for his sausages. The butcher had made sausages in Prussia, until the revolution there, when he and many other soon-to-be American immigrants had picked the losing side.
He would not make sausage of this steer. He wouldn’t reserve the blood for blutwurst, nor the liver for liverwurst, and the scraps would go for soldiers’ stews, not the garlic sausage, his particular specialty. In winter quarters he busied himself with savories for the ranking officers: General Howard himself was partial to liverwurst. But in the field, the butcher could do nothing so complicated. The beef would hang overnight, no more, before being produced for the 11th Corps’ breakfast. He’d save the kidneys as a special breakfast for General Howard. “Move back, you boys. The little one is frightened, can’t you see? He is afraid like the Confederate soldiers and would run away like they do. Ha, ha, ha.”
It was a peaceful evening at the far end of the Federal line. Men played cards and cookfires glowed. The two guns aimed down the plank road were unmanned, and the infantrymen’s muskets were neatly stacked. “Come on, you boys, can’t you pull?”
The steer’s eyes rolled. Froth dribbled in ropes from its mouth.
“You boys. Set down that tub and push. This youngster is not wishing to be your breakfast. Ha, ha, ha.”
“Damn, he’s filthy back here.”
“First the courage fails and then the bowels. You are a soldier. You have seen it before. Push on him. You can wash up after!”
The terrible abatis—the cluster of sharpened poles—formed a manmade thicket across the plank road. The abatis was like the barricades the revolutionaries had thrown up on the streets of Berlin, which slowed the Prussian soldiers but hadn’t stopped them.
Behind the abatis were the breastworks, then the plank road which connected the long line of Federal troops. General Hooker had inspected them this morning and everyone had cheered. The general said Lee’s army now belonged to the Army of the Potomac.
“Push, boys. Do not be afraid, Liebchen. It will soon all be over. Get the hammer and the knife. Do not let the edge touch against anything. It is sharp just the way I like it.”
Suddenly a deer bounded out of the woods on their right. Another. Another. Knife in hand, the butcher stared as the thickets exploded with fleeing animals. Dozens of rabbits raced from the undergrowth. More deer. Squirrels flew from tree to tree, quail whirred into the air, crows shrieked raucous objections, a fox loped into the open, and when it saw the Federal soldiers it turned and ran through the abatis, straight at where, until this moment, the Federals had supposed the Confederates to be.
Ten minutes before, Captain Duncan Gatewood had dismounted so Gypsy could make water. She didn’t like to piss with him on her back, and during the long march around the Federal front, she had filled with fluid. The mare splashed gratefully, and in the woods on either side, Confederate soldiers were doing the same. Getting ready for an attack always presses the bladder.
General Rodes’s division—North Carolina regiments, several from Alabama—had already disappeared into the woods. A double battle line was swallowed in that thicket, as if it had never been.
Two months ago, Colonel Walker had taken sick, and now Duncan’s brigade had a real general, J. T. Jones, and a couple of colonels too. In this outfit, captain didn’t amount to much.
Sergeant Fisher gave Duncan the neatly patched regimental colors. FREDERICKSBURG had been stitched along the bottom seam with the older names. “Don’t drop it now,” the sergeant said. “It’s bad luck, you drop it.”
Men snapped and resnapped ammunition pouches. Some men counted primers into their breast pockets: other veterans counseled against the practice: “What if you get tapped in the chest by a spent round?” one said. “Primers blow up and you’ll be a damn fireworks display.”
J.E.B. Stuart had his horse artillery on the plank road; the horses were dancing in the traces.
When the drums sounded the charge, Duncan hoisted the 44th Virginia’s colors high and moved Gypsy forward at a walk.
Rodes’s division started yip-yip-yipping and their musketry destroyed the quiet and they came clear of the woods, hurtling at Federal soldiers who, until this moment, had thought that life was rather agreeable.
It had been such an ordinary spring evening. Now, unfinished letters fluttered against low bushes, were sent whirling aloft by shell concussions; playing cards were scattered, and near where slaughtered beeves dangled from tripods, a dead steer sprawled, a dead Federal soldier sprawled across his hindquarters, the man’s blood as rich and red as the steer’s.
Men wearing haversacks cut the straps of their haversacks and threw their rifles away to run the faster. Apron clutched around his waist, the German butcher fled for his life..
Across the wide meadow they ran, past a little church and the tavern where their officers had planned to meet that night. Scant air in their lungs, they ran, hearts bursting in their throats, young legs working like machines of panic.
Federal artillerymen unhitched guns and jump-mounted the horses and put the spurs to them, limber chests bouncing and case shot flying into the air whenever the equipage hit a rut, and other riderless horses ran wide-eyed, nostrils flaring, beside them.
Blood pounded in Duncan’s ears and his perspective shortened to what was directly in front. Insensibly, the brigade’s pace increased from quickstep to double-quick, and Duncan’s men intertwined with Rodes’s, two brigades screaming as one, killing fleeing men, point-blank. Federals dropped their swords, their guns, and threw up their hands and cried “I surrender” and were ignored by hot-eyed Confederates streaming past.
Stuart’s horse artillery dashed down the plank road ahead of columns of men, four abreast. Duncan caught up to a shirtless Federal, his braces flapping, face half-lathered with shaving soap. Duncan dipped his regimental flag, the Confederate colors crept past the man’s face, into his view, and the man lowered his head and lifted his knees, pumping, pumping, and suddenly the man tripped or was shot.
A Federal line was forming ahead, and a growl rose up in Duncan’s throat and he was thinking, I’ll show you, I’ll show you, though what he was going to show the quavering line of frightened men he never knew.
Duncan and Gypsy and Stonewall Jackson’s corps, Army of Northern Virginia, cavalry, infantry, artillery, entangled in a hard knot, struck the Federal line and disintegrated it.
The Confederates were exultant murderous men who worked in a red fury and could not afterward remember how they bayoneted that gunner, the gunner’s blood and the sunset the same red. Others killed coolly, fastidiously, and their memories would be cooler than the reality had been: how the bare trees looked in the sunset or the empty rocking chairs on the porch of the little tavern, waiting for Federal officers who would never sit in them. Men forgot how they loaded and fired and killed and killed and fired and killed.
Although the Confederates had marched twelve miles that day, they fought as if it were Monday morning after a day of rest. They’d eaten only salt pork and hardtack that day but fought as if they’d feasted. Some of the men were old men, some damaged in other battles: at Chancellorsville they were boys and whole. They outran the desperately fleeing Federals, and after enough butternut soldiers passed them, many Federals sat by the roadside with their hands atop their heads.
Men fell and men were blown apart and men pitched forward like bundles of rags. Black-powder smoke hung over the field, lifting and lowering like mist, and men swooped through it like raptors. The smoke made their eyes prickle and their shoulders ached from the continual slam of firing, and when their rifles got too fouled to load, they snatched new ones from the unresisting hands of the Federals.
On the road, Duncan was jammed together with infantrymen, officers on horseback, color bearers, a limber of artillery—at a pace too fast for a man, too slow for a horse. The woods hemmed them in on both sides and there were yells and shots and explosions in those woods, but the men in the road paid no heed. Around a bend, three hundred yards ahead, trotted a column of Federal cavalry, unconcerned as if on parade. Startled officers shouted urgently and the columns hurtled toward each other, one brandishing sabers, the other bayonets. They collided with a shock; a bayonet darkened itself in an officer’s rib cage, a saber split a man’s clavicle. A horse was shot in the chest. Another, delicately trying to avoid trampling a wounded man, crushed a bald-headed man against a tree.
Duncan shifted the colors to his left hand and wrapped Gypsy’s reins around his wrist, and when a fat Federal trooper raised his saber, Duncan thumbed off two shots, the first he’d fired, and lifted the man out of his saddle. The Confederate infantry was volleying, most of the Federal cavalry was down, but here came a second Federal troop full-tilt, and the infantry’s rifles were empty and a cry, half rage half despair, issued from a thousand throats as big horses crashed into them. Men clubbed Federals off their horses, horses reared and their flailing iron hooves crushed skulls. Sabers were dipped with blood as a pen nib is dipped with ink.
Duncan shot a man and the man’s hands clamped his face and his fingers spurted blood. A cavalryman slashed at Duncan and missed, but cut Gypsy, opening her neck muscles, red and white striations, stretching, contracting, stretching, contracting. Duncan lowered his banner like a jousting lance and skewered the Federal cavalryman, and the sudden weight on the end of his staff almost ripped it from his hands, but Duncan stood in his stirrups until the mortally wounded man flopped into the chaos where men fought with pistols and knives and teeth.
From a low hill, backlit by the setting sun, was a tremendous flash as Federal guns opened fire, and double-shotted canister smote the men
on the road like a death wall. The echoes rang into silence, replaced by the shrieking of horses and men, and Gypsy was down on her knees, and Duncan slid off and looked for someone to kill, but the Federals had fled—a few had cut their way free and those who hadn’t lay in the road.
When Gypsy staggered to her feet, her intestines spilled so she was stepping on them, and with each step more gray guts slipped onto the road. The colors fell from Duncan’s hand. He said calmly, “I cannot bear this,” and clapped his revolver to his mare’s ear and pulled the trigger, but there was no report, pulled it again, no report, and Gypsy screamed, reared clumsily, and her hooves trampled her own guts, so Duncan cut her throat.
The Confederate attack was finally halted by Federal artillery at the crossroads of the Hazel Grove Road and the old Orange Turnpike.
Blood-covered soldiers collapsed—in the woods, beside the road, on an overturned limber. With hoarse, unnatural voices, lost men sought their regiments. “Twelfth North Carolina?” “Fourth Georgia?” “Has any-damn-body seen Colquitt’s brigade?”
Some picked through Federal haversacks for rations. Others counted fresh ammunition from the pouches of the dead. Some accompanied despairing Federal prisoners to the rear.
Duncan’s flagstaff was cracked from butt to tip. He wiped the bloody tip clean with a blue forage cap. His eyes felt scratched by sand. He wondered where Catesby was, whether he lived.
The full moon rose smoky and red, and the entreaties of wounded men were muted as if night would heal them. A voice cried, “My God, boys! Stonewall’s been shot.”
LETTER FROM LIEUTENANT CATESBY
BYRD TO HIS WIFE, LEONA
RICHMOND, VIRGINIA
MAY 10, 1863
Jacob's Ladder: A Story of Virginia During the War Page 30