The Calm and the Strife

by David J. Sloat

  He began to wonder if perhaps Ben was right, that he was acting foolishly. If he were caught now, who would mourn him? How could he get into Gettysburg in uniform, and how risky would it be to use civilian clothes as a disguise? He had left his only friends to go to a place where everyone was the enemy. Except for Ginnie. He needed to get to Ginnie. That single thought kept him pressing forward. If he could only see Ginnie, it would be worth the risk.

  The darker it got, the more his courage returned and he moved back onto the road. In the starlight, he began to make good progress, his military conditioning serving him well. He walked well into the night, only seeking cover three or four times. By three a.m., however, his strength was waning and he decided not to risk his safety by getting so tired as to become careless. Pleased by the distance he had come since dark, he found a grove of trees, plunged into them until he was far from the road, and fell asleep surrounded by dense brush.

  A persistent scratching on his nose awoke Wes a few hours later. He rubbed it and heard a gasp in response. In an instant, he was fully awake. It was broad daylight. Staring at him, only a few paces away, were two young boys. The older one held a long twig with which he had been touching Wes’ face. He turned to his friend and said with satisfaction, “See, I told you he wasn’t dead.”

  The smaller boy stared at him, mouth agape, as Wes struggled to his feet. The first boy looked at Wes without the slightest hint of fear. “Mister, are you a Johnny Reb?” he asked boldly. Wes could not think how to respond and held his tongue. The boy nodded as if confirming the fact. “Well, you don’t look like no monster. My Pa says all Rebs are monsters.”

  Wes was considering whether to capture the boys and tie them up when the younger one walked up and pointed at Wes’ belt. “Is that a canteen?” Wes nodded. “What’s in it?” he asked. Wes took the canteen from his belt and offered it to the boy, who took it, removed the cap and smelled the contents with grave interest. Handing it to his friend to examine, he asked, “Can I keep it?”

  “No,” Wes said, smiling to soften the refusal. “Maybe I’ll give you a button off my blouse. See, it says ‘C.S.A’ on it. But you have to promise me something.” The boys nodded with great earnestness. “You can’t tell anyone that you talked to me. Understand?”

  The boys nodded again and, before Wes could say anything else, the taller one snatched the cap from Wes’ head and bolted away, bounding happily through the trees, whooping about his captured treasure. Wes started after them, then thought better of it and watched them go. He wanted to put as much distance as possible between himself and this place now that he had been discovered. But since the sun was up, it would be safer to find a good hiding place. He chided himself for sleeping so late and, even worse, for avoiding the entire Federal army and then allowing himself to be found by a couple of small boys. Within a mile, he found a shallow cave and crawled inside.

  For several hours he listened to every sound outside, sure that the army would come for him at any moment. But there was only silence and he convinced himself that the boys had not turned him in. He dozed a while. When he woke, he was instantly filled with terror. Hounds were baying nearby, hot on the trail of some prey, which Wes could only assume was himself. The sun was high in the sky and there was no way he could run without being spotted by the search party. He moved as far into the cave as possible, hiding behind a small outcropping of stone. The baying got louder by the minute and Wes felt himself washed by waves of panic. Helpless, he saw the long silhouette of a man suddenly block the entrance to the cave. Wes could see by his shadow that he carried a shotgun in his hand.

  “Hey, Matt, come over here a second.”

  Another shadow joined the first. This one had a pack of dogs attached to it and their baying echoed in the cave. Wes, trapped like an animal, waited to be torn to pieces by the dogs. There was nothing to do, nowhere to run. The two shadows tried to decide what to do. They hadn’t seen him yet, but the dogs had certainly scented him and were tugging at the ropes, yelping to be let at him.

  The man with the dogs pulled them away from the cave, and Wes thought for a moment that he had escaped detection. But then the first man spoke directly to him. “Boy, I know you’re in there. I’m not going to mess around with you. You either come out now or I’ll let the dogs loose and there won’t be anything left of you to bring out.” He paused, waiting for a response. Wes didn’t move. “I’m gonna count to three. One....” Wes could imagine the dogs ripping at his legs and arms. “Two....” The dogs would slaver all over him, reaching for his throat as he tried futilely to push them away. “Three!”

  “All right!” He crawled out toward the light, too frightened to think. The man raised his gun and pointed it at Wes’ head. For a moment, half expecting the man to pull the trigger, Wes braced himself for the impact. But when he looked up, he saw the man’s grinning face. “Boy, did you get lost or are you just plain stupid?” Wes didn’t answer. He stood, trembling in fear, furious at his carelessness.

  The man tied Wes’ hands behind him, then led him back toward the road. He was joined by the man with the dogs. The animals, catching Wes’ scent again, strained to get at him, barking viciously and snapping at his heels. By the time they reached the road, a small group had gathered to stare at the captured rebel as he was marched past them to the man’s cart. A woman stepped from the crowd and stood blocking Wes’ path. He looked up into her face and was chilled to see a look of shimmering hatred. She spat on him and the warm spittle slid down his cheek as he was shoved roughly up into the cart.

  Turning, he caught sight of a familiar face, the taller of the two boys he had seen earlier. The child, wearing a gray Confederate cap, smiled innocently and waved at Wes.

  Chapter 14

  A LOST CAUSE

  Harrisburg, Pennsylvania

  March 1862

  Wes wrapped a weary arm around his aching ribs and shifted his body in a vain attempt to get comfortable on the rough wooden floor. Pain rippled through him, causing him to gasp involuntarily. It had been nearly a week since his capture and the white hot dagger in his chest had not subsided. He decided that he had a broken rib or two. It was not surprising, considering the vicious beating to which his captors had subjected him.

  He had almost been glad to be handed over to the Federals. They, at least, were professionals; they had treated him roughly, but they hadn’t beaten him. He wondered if they would have been more vicious had they discovered that he was a northerner. The civilians who caught him hadn’t cared where he came from. All they knew was that the uniform he wore was gray. They did care about their brothers and neighbors who had gone off to fight him and the rest of his friends, and so they figured they were helping in their own way by beating up one lonely rebel. Wes would have laughed, but the pain in his ribs prevented him. The irony was too great. They thought they were protecting their neighbors; in fact, it was one of their neighbors they were abusing.

  Once he had been turned over to the Federal army, he had been moved from place to place, joining larger and larger groups of captured rebels. At first, there were only three or four of them. The men were strangers to Wes, but in every sense they were more his brothers than the northerners swarming about them in blue. After a few days, there were enough of them, about two dozen, to move to more permanent quarters. They were marched up the road to a train stop, loaded aboard a freight car like so many cattle, and moved north. Wes, knowing roughly where the rail lines ran, wondered whether the journey would take him near Gettysburg.

  As the train crawled north, stopping at every little station to pick up civilians and occasionally another prisoner-of-war, he peered anxiously between the slats of the car waiting for familiar landmarks to roll into view. Just as he feared, he began to recognize the hills from his youth. The train was in fact nearing Gettysburg. He closed his eyes and listened, praying that they would keep rolling, that they would stop anywhere but there, someplace where no one knew him. But the train pulled into the north end of town and
stopped at the station. Perhaps they were just picking up passengers, Wes thought. But soon, the doors slid open and the group was told to get out. Wes descended, afraid to look about, fearing that someone he knew might be nearby. He saw a group gathered at a distance down the platform. Wes couldn’t make out the faces in the dim light, and was relieved to realize they couldn’t recognize him either. He turned to face the train so it would be harder for anyone to catch sight of him.

  Suddenly, he heard voices approaching, young voices, high and happy. He noticed a group of boys just as they discovered the twenty-five disheveled prisoners. They stopped in the middle of the street and stared. Wes was turning back toward the train when something crashed against the door of their freight car. Startled, he turned and saw that the boys were throwing things at them. Several impacted the ground in front of them, spraying their shoes with bits of rotten apple. As the prisoners raised their arms to protect themselves from the barrage, one of the Federal guards shouted, “You boys get out of here!” The boys jeered at him.

  A crowd gathered to watch the spectacle and Wes’ apprehension grew. Fortunately, the guards were even more concerned. The sergeant of the detail ordered them back into the car, and Wes scrambled up quickly, relieved to be out of sight of the townspeople. He stared through the slats at the boys who were calling the prisoners every unpleasant name they could think of. One particularly loud participant threw another apple toward the train. It banged against the side, echoing through the wooden car. Wes saw a woman step from the crowd, move toward the culprit, and call in a voice that was high and piercing, “Harry Wade, you come home right now.”

  Wes felt a moment of dizziness. He stared at Mary Wade as she dragged her boy away from the group. Holding him by the ear, she marched him to the far end of the platform where another figure waited. Wes could not see the other person clearly, but he pressed his face against the slats, desperate to discover who it might be. The figure turned and walked away. Was it Ginnie? As the three moved beyond his range of vision, Wes sank to the floor, overcome.

  That scene replayed itself again and again in Wes’ mind as the train rolled on toward Harrisburg. When they arrived, their guards could not find room for them in the temporary stockades so, as a result, the rebels ended up in the city jail. Wes shared his cramped ten by ten foot cell with twelve other soldiers. Given no beds or blankets, they had to make do with what they had, pillowing their heads against each other, crowding together for warmth during the drafty nights. After a few days of repeated pleas, Wes finally had his ribs tended to by an aged doctor who reeked of liquor and resentment. He wrapped the bandages too tightly and made the pain even worse. Wes rewrapped the bindings as soon as he returned to the cell, and the pain in his chest subsided somewhat.

  Life as the prisoner was life in hell. He had lost everything, literally everything. None of his dreams remained. Ginnie was lost to him; there was no doubt about that. His friends in the South were now lost too. He had risked one for the other and had lost both.

  There was only one person who would still accept him, only one who would be willing to look beyond his mistakes to his dreams: Julia. Wes knew that Ginnie would never understand him now, especially since he was a prisoner. He would be a reminder to her of the sins of her own father. But Julia would understand. The idea kindled a faint light in his soul.

  From one of the other prisoners he got a scrap of paper and then begged a pencil from a guard. In his desperate need to reach out to someone who still cared for him, he wrote Julia, asking for help, for supplies with which to bribe the guards for his basic needs. He asked her to consider coming to visit him, feeling that merely seeing her face again would bring a ray of light into his darkness. And he asked that she keep the truth about him quiet.

  Getting the letter sent was easier than he had imagined. He promised the guard that sending it would bring a relative who would pay him for his services. The guards, who cared little for politics but a great deal about lining their own pockets, were willing to listen to anything that promised them money. Wes picked one of the guards whom others in the cell had found willing to help. At first, the man was hesitant about taking the letter, until he found out that the recipient was a young woman.

  A week passed and they began to hear that they might be moved north to a prison camp near Lake Erie. This rekindled Wes’ anxiety; he imagined Julia arriving in Harrisburg the day after he left. But the only move that materialized was to a barbed wire enclosure, a holding pen for Confederate soldiers on the edge of Camp Curtin in Harrisburg. It was somewhat larger but even less comfortable because it consisted of a roof supported on posts but without walls. There was practically no protection from the weather.

  The days settled back into an endless and mind-numbing routine. The others played cards with a makeshift deck and chatted idly, sharing rumors about the fighting further south. One of the more literate Yankee guards spent his afternoons reading newspaper articles to the prisoners, stressing how the South was losing every engagement. But the effort proved to be therapeutic because it kept Wes and the others in touch with the world that existed outside of their miserable environment.

  Many of the articles were about The Stonewall Brigade which earned Wes some small notoriety among the others. Jackson was running around the Shenandoah Valley, totally confusing a Federal army twice his size. He continued to surprise the enemy forces, constantly outguessing and out-maneuvering them. Wes listened with pride but also with a bit of trepidation, wondering how Ben and the others in his company were faring. Eventually, his worry turned to jealousy as he realized that, since he was no longer with the 2nd, he could not share in the victories which were making his friends immortal.

  At night, after the lamps were extinguished and the others tried to sleep, Wes lay thinking about all that had happened. In the quiet, he cursed God for taking away everything that he loved. There was a strange consistency to his life: each time he loved something, it was ripped out of his hands. He had chosen to leave the North and that had cost him Ginnie and his family. Now, he had chosen to leave the South and that had cost him his friends and his chance at fame. And perhaps his life.

  A foot in his back woke him in the morning a week later. The sun was high and the others were already playing cards. Wes looked up to see one of the guards.

  “Culp?”

  “Yes.” Wes tried to stand but his legs had cramped in the night and threatened to give out. He braced himself against one of the roof posts and stood upright to look the man in the eye. The others had stopped their cards and were watching the interchange with interest since the guards rarely took such personal interest in them.

  “You’ve got visitors.”

  Wes stood still for a moment, letting the information sink in. Visitors. Who would have come with Julia? Maybe Annie, or perhaps she had been unable to keep it from Will and he had gotten off and come with Julia. Then again, perhaps someone had learned that the captive they held was a northerner, a traitor, and they had come to take him away. His mind swam with that frightening possibility.

  The guard opened the gate, which creaked noisily on its rusted hinges, allowing Wes into the outer pen, the exercise yard. “Who’s out there, Culp?” one of his fellow prisoners asked with a hint of jealousy.

  Another man answered, “Maybe old Stonewall’s come to escort him back personally.” The others laughed.

  The guard shut the pen door and locked it, motioning for Wes to follow him around the corner of the main prison building. Despite the pen’s openness, it was gloomy, bathed in shadow. So the light outside tore at his eyes and Wes tried to shield them with his hand.

  The guard led him toward a side gate, hidden from the main entrance. He said gruffly, “You have ten minutes,” then stood in place, obviously planning to monitor the visit. As Wes’ eyes adjusted, he could make out the gate twenty yards away in the corner of their muddy exercise yard. On the other side of the fence stood two shadows whose faces he could not make out. Both seemed to be female
. So, it was Annie who had come with Julia. That made sense. She might be unpleasant to him, but at least it wasn’t Will.

  Wes stumbled forward, trying to keep his footing on the uneven ground. Between his sleepy leg and the bright light, he imagined that he looked like a madman. But it didn’t really matter. Julia was here and she would forgive the way he looked.

  “Julia?” he asked as he got close enough to identify her features. She was even more elegant than when he had last seen her, in a dark dress and bonnet. Then he looked at the other figure and felt his heart miss a beat. “Ginnie?” It was a whisper, a choked cry of joy. He felt that he was hallucinating and that at any moment he would awaken back in the pen.

  But the moment passed and she was still standing there, more beautiful than he remembered. He forgot everything for an instant. Nothing existed but the two of them. He grasped the wire mesh between them frantically, searching her face. She smiled a sad smile that communicated pain and pity. It was warm but it was also distant; she seemed to be horrified by what she was seeing.

  “I can’t believe you’re here,” he said in amazement, his eyes immediately welling up uncontrollably. He was astonished at his own weeping, but was powerless to stop it. He reached through the fence to touch them. Julia, who had been able to master her emotions to this point, lost all control and began to sob. She grasped at his hand protruding through the wire, and touched it lightly to her face. Wes tried his best to quiet her and looked to Ginnie for help. She moved closer to Julia and put her arm around her friend’s shoulder.