High Hearts

by Rita Mae Brown

  “Lining the boys up. You know, I can’t abide the color blue. After these unpleasantries between the states are settled, I don’t never want to see blue nothing!” Banjo bit off the end of his cigar and spit it as far as he could. “No blue booties on baby boys’ feet, no blue ribbons in little girls’ hair, no blue dresses on the good ladies—not even sky blue and I was formerly partial to sky blue. I want lots of red and yellow and sea-green. I love sea-green on a woman. No blue jewelry neither!”

  “You mean sapphires.” Geneva, interest aroused by the activities below, moved over the ridge a bit.

  “Yep. What do you call those pretty light ones.”

  “Aquamarines.”

  “Well, I don’t want to see nary a one!”

  “What are they doing down there?” Geneva borrowed Sam Wells’s field glasses. “They’re going to come on the flank.”

  “We’ve got sharpshooters on our right. That’ll slow them for a bit.” Nash sounded worried nonetheless.

  “I’ll tell the colonel.” She gave the glasses back to Sam, who was showing the effects of lack of sleep.

  “What else do you tell the colonel? You two are getting very matey,” Nash grumbled. “Why you risked your life to save his bones, I’ll never know. That was a damn crazy thing you did!”

  Banjo, wearily accustomed to their flare-ups, kept his eyes trained on the Yankees. The three of them were lying side by side over the ridge while Nash and Geneva argued.

  “Then you and Banjo were as crazy as I was, running along that stone wall.”

  “At least I knew who I was fighting for.”

  “So did I!”

  “That’s my point,” Nash hissed. “God, I hate that man!”

  Nash flipped over to find Mars Vickers behind him. He got to his feet. “No point lying about it. I’m as ready to say it to your face as behind your back.”

  Geneva stood up. The front of her uniform was wet from the damp earth. “Don’t fight, you two. Colonel, your left arm isn’t any good anyway.”

  Suddenly boiling over, Nash pushed her on the ground. “Take his part!” A grip like a vise closed around his throat. He found himself not two inches from Mars’s face.

  “Don’t ever do that again.” He released Nash, who rubbed his throat. “Now come with me. We aren’t going to fight.”

  The earth slurped at their boots. They walked behind the center of their line.

  “You and I will never see eye to eye,” Mars began.

  Nash, without waiting for him to finish, blurted, “We never will. I can’t abide the way you glorify combat.”

  “If a man’s not willing to fight, then he’s not worth his salt.”

  “The ground turns to salt under your feet!” Nash insulted him.

  Mars wheeled, his heel sinking deeper into the mud. “Don’t provoke me. We serve no useful purpose by fighting. As to this war, Piggy, what the hell is the answer: To kill ten thousand men in one day or to take ten days to do it? That’s what it’s come to. This is a new kind of war.” Noticing that his adversary lapsed into an unagreeable quiet, he said, “The main problem between us, aside from our temperaments, is Jimmy. I misunderstood your relationship, and I leaned on you pretty hard. I want to apologize.”

  Nash never expected this. “You do?”

  “I know.” Mars conveyed his meaning.

  “She didn’t tell me—but we don’t talk much anymore.” Nash fumbled.

  “You want to know what makes me sick? You’ve got more love than any man deserves in this life, but you’re more worried about somebody thinking you’re a pansy than you are grateful for that love.”

  “What?” Nash was now completely off guard.

  “If I had what you have, I wouldn’t give a good goddamn what anybody thought of me!”

  “What passed between you two at White House Landing?”

  “It was more what passed between us at Black Creek. I was delirious, and Jimmy fished me out of the water. Obviously, once she got me on shore, the game was up. I was delirious, but I wasn’t blind.”

  “Why don’t you muster her out?” Nash sounded hopeful. “She’s got no business here.”

  Mars laughed. “Best soldier I’ve got. I’m not sure I could do without her.”

  “I appreciate your admiration for Jimmy.” Nash paused. “Funny how I never call her by her right name anymore. Colonel, this is easy for you to talk about. You’re married to the most beautiful woman in the world who is doing what she’s supposed to be doing: nursing the sick and behaving like a lady.”

  “You’re a damned fool, Nash Hart, and I reckon you always will be.”

  Stuart’s men fought the methodical pressure on their right as the Yankee infantry pressed them. At two in the afternoon, Captain Pelham fired his last shell. There was no more ammunition nor any relief in sight. Jackson and Longstreet never showed.

  With great reluctance, Stuart withdrew two miles to the north and went into camp.

  JULY 20, 1862

  A carnival of hope infected Richmond. McClellan stayed at Harrison’s Landing. He plopped there like a frog full of buckshot. He moved neither forward nor backward, but seemed imprisoned by his own weight. Richmond was saved. Churches offered up services, people shouted, “Gloria in Excelsis,” and Lee, instead of being the goat, was now the hero.

  While Lutie, like everyone around her, offered up prayers of thanksgiving to Almighty God, she thought of the weeks of battles as the slaughterhouse of heroes. The death lists were appalling. The best families of the South lost their husbands, sons, and brothers. Hardly anyone was untouched, especially since the upper classes led the regiments, brigades, and divisions. The leaders, the wealthy and the gifted, were cut down by the scythe of war no less than the small farmer, the shopkeeper, even the vagrant seeking to redeem himself by military service. They died alike, and Death, as always, impartially selected his victims. She used to think of Death as a personal force, the god of the underworld, Hades or Pluto. Odd, too, that Pluto was the god of riches. Each day you bargained with this god, but in the end he got the better of the deal. She put aside that embroidered, mythical notion. Death these days was a threshing machine. Someone started the blades whirling, and it wouldn’t cut off.

  She suffered a brief spasm of hope that the North would sue for peace. McClellan was beaten. Even if the general refused to admit it, how could Washington ignore the results of those terrible days?

  No peace offer arrived. No courier rode with a white flag from the Federal army. Nothing.

  Lutie thought to herself, Here we are in the midst of death, and we persist in thinking it is something that happens to others, not ourselves. She didn’t think, not for one minute, although surrounded by an enemy over one hundred thousand strong that she herself would die. But then she didn’t think Henley would die either. Perhaps if she had been at Chatfield, she would have sensed it or heard the baying of those black and tans. Here in Richmond, separated from the coordinates of her life, she wondered if she was able to put events in perspective. She would die someday, but not now. She would die an old lady; like a wave receding from the shore, she would prepare to leave the earth at last. She had much life left in her. She felt it strongly, but where this life would lead her, she didn’t know.

  She had seen things that decades would not wipe from her mind. It wasn’t really the occasional grotesque sight that shook her: a corpse already blowing up with gas or a dog running down Franklin Street with a man’s foot in its mouth. Even the bone-throbbing screams could be borne. What seeped into her marrow were the little things, those small incidents that caught her unawares like a bright, shining pool of blood on cobblestones. No body was in sight, yet the blood was as fresh and slick as if someone dumped a bucket of red paint on the street. Those were the things that shifted her inner compass. It was as if a voice incanted, “You who have seen this will never be the same.”

  No one would be the same. Not the men who fought, or the women who nursed them, or the children who bore mute
witness to the carnage. When Lutie was a child, her mammy used to scare her, saying, “Raw Head and Bloody Bones gonna get you.” The children of Richmond had seen this devil. What would come of them? What world would they invent when this was over?

  A fog rolled up from the James. Lutie was in Kate’s stable just to get away from the commotion of the house for a minute. She realized the sweet smell of hay, leather, and horse sweat reminded her of Henley. She felt closer to him here than anywhere. She realized since Sumner had died, she spoke to Emil less and less, and when Henley was killed, she’d quite forgotten her old friend. She wondered if Emil had been her answer to Henley. Once her husband was dead, she no longer needed a confidant. Lutie used to tell herself that she and Emil would travel to Cairo in a pelican’s beak. She laughed out loud and startled one of the horses. “No one can accuse me of lacking imagination.”

  There was precious little to laugh about outside herself. The chemistry labs at the university were manufacturing gunpowder. The men of enrollment age had all enlisted, and many of them were already dead. People in Charlottes ville questioned whether the school could survive the war.

  Elizabeth Van Lew performed her “mission work” among the Northern prisoners. Maud Windsor no longer thought her peculiar neighbor was feeble-minded. She thought she was an outright spy and should be marched, silken curls and petticoats, to the garden wall and shot.

  Shooting civilians, unbelievable as that sounded to Lutie, might enter the war. The newspapers carried General John Pope’s address to his Union troops when he took over command in the Shenandoah Valley. He said that any resistance on the part of “disloyal” citizens would be met with harsh resistance, even death. Up until now, the war was between armed men who chose to fight. A note of bitterness was creeping into conversations. Lutie noticed that the combination of Pope’s extraordinary statement and the constant presence of death was hardening many hearts. Worse, some people, reading Northern newspapers that blamed the war on slavery, began to believe it themselves. Instead of feeling shame for their “peculiar institution,” they began to express outright hostility against the Negro race. Irrationality was more to be feared than outright cruelty in Lutie’s mind. She carefully distinguished between irrationality and suprarationality. The former was illogical, the latter was beyond logic and therefore spiritual. It did not occur to her that this explanation was self-serving.

  Poofy had not written, or rather, her letters had not gotten through the lines. Lutie missed her sister and she missed her younger brother, T. Pritchard Chalfonte, though he scribbled a message from time to time. But most of all, Lutie missed her husband. She scarcely believed it possible that she could so long for the man who had once brought her so much pain, the man she subsequently shut out of her heart for years. Well, thank God, she had that good last year with him. She couldn’t think of her losses. She put Henley and Sumner out of her mind and concentrated on the enveloping fog, a shroud pulled over the capital.

  Humans are unwilling to believe that great suffering and disaster can be inflicted without moral justification. She had often told herself that. Lutie now knew that there was no moral justification for the maelstrom of events. The entire human race was swimming in a night sea of darkness.

  JULY 21, 1862

  The workload eased. The worst cases had died. Those with minor wounds had been moved to other locations. What remained were men too seriously wounded to move who nonetheless had a chance.

  “Were you married?” Evangelista asked Sin-Sin as they sat on the back porch covered with trumpet vines.

  “Ha! I wisht I had a halter on that husband of mine. Thass a long time ago.”

  “I’d better find a man soon.” Evangelista wrinkled her pretty nose. “I want a man that’s bright. Can’t marry an ebony man. And he must have a good trade.”

  “My Marcus was a blacksmith. Get you a big, strong man like that.”

  “How’d you land him?” Evangelista thought of love as a form of fishing.

  “I sashay ’bout that man ’til I wore out his indifference!” She laughed. “Course if you need love charms, I knows a few.”

  “Like what?”

  “If you wishes a man to fall in love with you, you got to take the small bow from the sweatband ’round his cap. You wears that under your clothes next to your body. That man be yours in no time.”

  Not exactly convinced, Evangelista changed the subject. “Miss Kate says that you Albemarle people will be going home soon. She says we’re gonna come visit in late August or September. Unless there’s another battle around here.”

  “Doan look like it.”

  “I never knew so many people could die at one time.”

  “Not since the great flood, I reckon. Everybody died then.”

  Evangelista watched the cook tend to her small herb garden. “The man I felt sorry for was that one had his”—she paused—“his manhood torn away.”

  “Man can live without pleasure, but doan know if he can live without the future.”

  “Do you think about the future, Auntie Sin-Sin?” Shrewdness was written all over her voice. The future meant the hope for freedom. “I do. Constantly.”

  “Then I sees you at Chatfield. Thass enough future.” Sin-Sin smiled.

  Evangelista thought, What a crafty old fox.

  AUGUST 15, 1862

  Lutie, Sin-Sin, and Di-Peachy returned to Chatfield on August seventh. Charlottesville, crowded with walking wounded, had so far escaped any other mark of war.

  The drive up to the big house, its huge trees deep green in August glory, brought forth tears to their eyes. Every hand on the estate crowded on the graceful front steps to greet them. Ernie June, as happy to see Lutie as she was soured to see her nemesis, did the honors for Chatfield’s people by welcoming Lutie home. When she mentioned Henley’s name, she broke down. Even Braxton, a controlled man, cried. What would become of them now that the master was killed and Sumner, too?

  Lutie, deeply moved at this outburst, assured everyone that Henley’s remains would be transferred to the quiet land he loved. Once the war ended, the horse breeding program would continue under the direction of Geneva.

  Walking the grounds with Sin-Sin, she noted with delight that the gardens were luxurious, the stables were as spotless as when Henley supervised them, and not one thing was missing from the big house except for a feather bed. Sin-Sin told Lutie to snatch it right back from Ernie’s little cabin, but Lutie informed her that Ernie had done her duty, and she deserved the mattress. No word from or about Boyd. Sin-Sin said she thought she’d come home by Weeping Cross. She meant that Boyd would come home with her tail between her legs.

  Frederica was pregnant again, and Timothy had grown a foot or so. The air hummed with bumblebees, honeybees, sweat bees, yellow jackets, dragonflies, damselflies, and every variety of horsefly known to man.

  What Lutie did not discuss was the persistent rumors that Abraham Lincoln was preparing a carte blanche document concerning all slaves. He had already made provisions for slaves in occupied territory, and these provisions had grown progressively more radical since the beginning of the war. Lutie knew a servant grapevine carried news quickly. Well, she wasn’t going to worry about the effect of such calculated bombast on her people. Much as she was opposed to it, she talked to her attorneys. She would fulfill Henley’s wishes on Christmas Day.

  Since the Battle of Seven Days, as the battle around Richmond was being called, the Confederate generals squabbled like boys fighting over marbles. General Toombs challenged General D.H. Hill to a duel because he thought D.H. impugned his courage. Only the skillful intervention of the friends of each man kept them from depriving the army of one or both of their services.

  A duel she understood. When men got hotheaded, she’d rather see a duel than one man dragging another to court. Henley used to say, “The law allows what honor forbids.” Henley was right.

  What Lutie couldn’t believe was that Colonel H.L. Benning nearly got himself arrested and General
A.P. Hill succeeded in getting arrested. The scandal was the talk of Richmond and the entire nation. Benning, violent in his protests against conscription, endangered himself. When it was pointed out to him that the North had been employing conscription, he said that only further hardened his opinion against it. If a man doesn’t willingly volunteer to defend his nation, then he isn’t worth a damn. The conscripts will get in the way of the real men. The pungent phrase attributed to Benning was, The wheat are in the army; the chaff is at home. Even worse in Colonel Benning’s eyes was the fact that conscription was unconstitutional. Were we to become like our enemy? First conscription and then income tax? Lincoln had signed into law on July first a three percent tax on annual incomes of $600-10,000 and five percent on any income above $10,000. That, too, was unconstitutional. The South must keep to its standards of individual initiative and individual sacrifice. Benning’s superiors shut him up with difficulty. The unspoken feeling was that conscription might be unconstitutional but necessary.

  The fact that the Yankees submitted to income tax further convinced every Southerner that they were a nation of sheep.

  The other news from the enemy capital, news met with howls of derision in Richmond, was that on August 4, Lincoln refused to accept two black regiments from Indiana into his armed forces. Ernie June called him a “hippocat.”

  But the Longstreet affair put every other misdeed in the shade. Generals Longstreet and A.P. Hill shocked everyone by challenging one another in the newspapers. The Richmond Examiner printed praise of A.P. Hill. Then Longstreet engaged his adjunct general to write a letter to The Richmond Whig that Hill was overpraised. This caused more uproar than McClellan’s cannonades. Longstreet, the senior officer, then had Hill arrested. The entire affair flourished out of petty jealousy. To further accent the humiliation, everyone in Richmond knew that everyone in Washington was laughing, too.