Call to Arms

by Frederick Nolan

  A tall, slender woman with auburn hair and green eyes full of sleepy malice came across the room towards him. She had high cheekbones: they gave her face a feline look that was emphasized by her walk. Men turned automatically as she passed them. One or two laid a gently detaining hand on her arm, but she shook her head.

  ‘Colonel Strong?’ she said. Her voice was low-pitched. ‘I am Jessica McCabe.’

  She was the diametric opposite of what Andrew had been expecting. It took him a moment to recover and mumble his name. The hint of dimples indicated that she had noticed his surprise.

  ‘I was most interested to have your letter, sir,’ she said. ‘And to learn that you agree with my thoughts about a campaign in Tennessee.’

  ‘I didn’t say I agreed with them, ma’am,’ Andrew said. ‘What I said was that I thought there was a lot of merit in them.’

  ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘You’re not one of those careful soldiers our army seems to be so blessed with, are you, Colonel?’

  ‘I don’t believe so, ma’am,’ Andrew said. ‘Although I haven’t yet tested the theory on a battlefield.’

  ‘You are in the War Department, I believe?’

  ‘Was,’ Andrew said, and told her about his collision with Masters. He had discovered subsequent to that interview that McLellan had thought fit to forward Jessica McCabe’s letter to the general commanding the District of Southeastern Missouri, and then hauled Masters over the coals for not having appended his own observations to Andrew’s memorandum. Whereupon the discomfited Masters was faced with the choice of admitting that he had tried to prevent Andrew from submitting the letter or confessing that he thought the scheme worthless. Since he really could do neither, he took his tongue-lashing and limped back to his lair thinking of revenge.

  ‘And so they are sending you to Cairo?’ Jessica McCabe said.

  ‘Only because there are no rail connections to Hades,’ Andrew grinned. ‘Otherwise, I’d already be on my way there.’

  ‘Do you know Cairo?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘And are you prone to fevers?’

  ‘You just lost me, Miss McCabe.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I shall find you when I need you, sir,’ she said. ‘Go into the library and find Mr. Dickens’ American Notes. Third shelf, second section.’ And she was gone, whisked away by one of the senior officers, who favored Andrew with a glare as he departed.

  Andrew went across the hall to the library. It was a fine, high-ceilinged room, paneled in oak and mahogany, with floor-to-ceiling bookcases full of richly bound books. Andrew was tempted to browse: he could spend days in a library such as this, forgetting time, food, everything. He shook his head and went directly to the shelf Jessica McCabe had mentioned.

  ‘American Notes, American Notes,’ he muttered, running his finger along the spines of the collected works of Charles Dickens. ‘Ah!’

  In Chapter Twelve he found what she had sent him to find, Dickens’ observations made on his trip up the Ohio River.

  At length upon the morning of the third day we arrived at a spot so much more desolate than any that we had yet beheld that the forlornest places we had passed were, in comparison with it, full of interest. At the junction of the two rivers, on ground so flat and low and marshy, that at certain seasons of the year it is inundated to the housetops, lies a breeding-place of fever, ague and death; vaunted in England as a mine of golden hope, and speculated in on the faith of monstrous representations, to many people’s ruin. A dismal swamp on which the half-built houses rot away; cleared here and there for the space of a few yards, and teeming, then, with rank, unwholesome vegetation, in whose baleful shade the wretched wanderers who are tempted hither droop, and die, and lay their bones; the hateful Mississippi circling and eddying before it, and turning off upon its southern course, a slimy monster hideous to behold; a hotbed of diseases, an ugly sepulcher, a grave uncheered by any gleam of promise, a place without one single quality, in earth, air or water to commend it; such is this dismal Cairo.

  ‘Didn’t care for the place, eh?’ Andrew said, replacing the book on the shelf. Something nagged at the edges of his memory. Hadn’t Dickens used Cairo as the model for a town in one of the novels? He looked along the shelf at the titles. Yes: Martin Chuzzlewit. And there was the scene in which Martin, who has bought a plot of land in a town in Illinois, called ‘Eden’ in the book, arrives there to find only ‘a hideous swamp, choked with slime and matted growth’.

  Well, Simeon Masters’ revenge was typical of the man, Andrew thought. All he could hope was that Cairo had improved somewhat since Dickens’ day.

  To his surprise, he was invited to stay for supper. He tried to make an excuse but Jessica McCabe would have none of it. ‘I want you to meet my father,’ she said. ‘And he wants to meet you.’

  She had said it would only be ‘a small affair’, but when Andrew joined the other guests in the great hall he discovered that there would be twenty of them at table. He wondered what the McCabes considered a large affair.

  The talk at table was of many things; McLellan’s new expedition south, Lincoln’s cack-handed administration of the war, the Mason and Slidell business. Andrew contributed politely when someone addressed him; he was probably the most junior officer in the room, he thought. He talked at some length with Senator McCabe, a tall man with a leonine head and pure white hair, spare and tough-looking. He was about fifty, Andrew guessed; if it were not for a slightly sagging jawline and the beginnings of a thickness at the middle he would have looked no more than forty. McCabe had a prominent nose and piercing eyes beneath heavy black brows. He used his hands a lot to emphasize what he said.

  ‘Well, Colonel,’ he said to Andrew. ‘What do you make of my Jess?’

  ‘A striking woman, Senator,’ Andrew said.

  ‘All of that,’ McCabe agreed. ‘She tells me you quite like her Tennessee idea.’

  ‘I understand General McLellan said that he thought using gunboats and troops on the Tennessee or Mississippi could only be a diversionary action, nothing more. He wants General Buell to attack Nashville overland.’

  ‘Typical!’ McCabe snorted. ‘Their minds all run on trolley tracks.’

  ‘Nevertheless, General McLellan forwarded Miss McCabe’s letter to the general commanding in Missouri.’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘General Grant, sir.’

  ‘They say he’s a doer,’ McCabe said. ‘They also say he drinks.’

  ‘I’m not qualified to comment, Senator,’ Andrew said.

  ‘You think he might be interested in the idea, though?’ McCabe said. ‘Look at the way the River Tennessee bends in a great arc into Mississippi, Alabama and North Carolina,’ he went on. ‘Troops ascending it could flank Memphis and Nashville, take the vital railroad junctions at Corinth and Decatur, and even, if there was high water at Muscle Shoals, take Chattanooga itself. Gunboats on the river could disrupt traffic between East and West and seize Nashville, which is already a great arsenal of Confederate weapons and ammunition.’

  ‘Where on earth did you get all this information, sir?’ Andrew asked him. McCabe grinned and tapped the side of his nose.

  ‘I talked to St Louis steamboat men. I met a captain of General Frémont’s staff, Charles d’Arnaud, who’d been behind the Confederate lines, and knew exactly where Forts Henry and Donelson were. I was in Cairo in the summer, I’m a director of the Illinois Central. I talked to people there. It seemed self-evident to me that the Confederate troops in that region were ill-equipped and badly organized. Jess was with me. Unlike me, she did something about it.’

  ‘What was that, Daddy?’ Jessica McCabe said, picking up the conversation. ‘What did I do?’

  ‘We’re talking about your letter to the War Department,’ McCabe said.

  ‘The War Department!’ she said, with a moue of disdain. The longer they talked, the more Andrew was astonished, delighted, impressed. Jessica McCabe had brains as well as beauty, and a healthy, manners-bedamned app
roach to things. A formidable combination in a man; in a woman they were devastating. He imagined her outspokenness had jarred not a few men off balance. She had none of Ruth Chalfont’s sweetness. Jessica was bold and confident where Ruth would have been shy and timid. Jessica would challenge where Ruth would have acquiesced. She was beautiful, but not in the simple, unpretentious way that Ruth had been. Jessica McCabe knew that she was a good-looking woman with a fine body, and that a fine body was an asset with which men could be manipulated. He watched her: she had the ability to make each man who spoke to her feel that he was the only person in the room she found interesting. She did it by looking into their eyes, leaning forward slightly. Once in a while she might touch the man’s arm, laughing with him. They all ended up with the same foolish male grin on their faces, thinking themselves conquerors when in fact they had been easily conquered. I’ve probably got the same dam fool grin myself, Andrew thought.

  ‘Well, Colonel,’ she said to him later. ‘You’ve been watching me all evening.’

  ‘You’re worth watching, Miss McCabe,’ he said. ‘It’s always a pleasure to watch a professional at work.’

  Her face altered slightly, and there was a cold light in the cat eyes. ‘What does that mean, Colonel?’ she said icily.

  ‘You can’t be in love with every man in the room, Miss McCabe,’ he said, smiling to take any sting out of his words she might choose to find in them. ‘But I’d wager every man in the room thinks you are.’

  ‘You are frank.’

  ‘I see no point in being otherwise,’ Andrew said.

  ‘Bold, even,’ Jessica said, as if she was considering his finer points. ‘You’d best beware, Colonel Strong. We women don’t like our little tricks seen through quite so easily.’

  ‘Your secrets are safe with me,’ he said. ‘About Cairo?’

  ‘You looked it up?’

  ‘I did. It sounds less than delightful.’

  ‘Oh, it’s not as bad as Dickens made out,’ she said. ‘He probably lost money on those land frauds. When do you leave?’

  ‘I’m to report at headquarters in St Louis by January first,’ he said. ‘Then proceed downriver to Cairo.’ He waited a moment before he spoke again, looking for the right way to say it.

  ‘I’d like to see you again before I leave,’ he said.

  ‘Really?’ She put frost on the word but he smiled.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You interest me.’

  ‘You’ve got a damned high opinion of yourself, Colonel,’ she retorted, but he thought he saw that hint of dimples again and did not retreat. He had the feeling that if he retreated, all would be lost.

  ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘Believe it or not, I’m usually a bit shy where women are concerned. Especially …’ He paused.

  ‘Especially women like me, were you going to say?’

  ‘Something along those lines,’ Andrew replied. He felt very confident, and wondered why. It was as if this conversation they were having was a mere preamble to something foreordained. Jessica McCabe regarded him warily, her eyes searching for something in his. Then the frown turned into a smile.

  ‘I hope you will not think it vain of me, Colonel, if I say I have had more romantic proposals than that!’

  ‘Aye, I wouldn’t doubt it,’ he said. ‘You’re a beautiful woman, Jessica McCabe.’

  ‘Don’t!’ she said, sharply. ‘Don’t sweet-talk me! I mean it, Colonel! You treat me like some simpering little Southern belle and I’ll drop you like a hot potato!’

  ‘You won’t drop me, Jessica,’ Andrew said. ‘I’m going to be very important in your life!’

  She put her hands on her hips and cocked her head to one side, regarding him incredulously. She said, ‘Have you gone crazy, sir?’

  ‘No,’ Andrew said. ‘For once in my life I am saying exactly what I mean, and meaning exactly what I say. You see, Miss McCabe, I have discovered that I hate sham, hate lies. I hate all the silly little games that people play with each other, the tricks they use to win their tawdry little victories. It’s not something you can tell everyone, but I thought ... I thought that you were different. I thought that I could be honest with you and I thought you would respect that.’

  ‘You are a dangerous man, Andrew,’ she whispered when he had finished. ‘A very dangerous man.’

  There was a different light in her eyes, something he had not seen there before. She put her hand on his arm and they walked into the silent library together. It smelled of leather and dust.

  ‘I am cursed with intelligence, Andrew,’ she said.

  ‘Cursed? I don’t see intelligence as a curse.’

  ‘It can be, if you are a woman, in this day and age. You see clearly what is expected of you. Be dutiful, obedient, compliant, loyal, but do not think. That’s what you men want from us, isn’t it?’

  ‘We don’t all want the same things, Jessica.’

  ‘Yes, you do!’ she said and he sensed the anger in her. ‘You come to us with your little repertoire of tricks, a joke here, a compliment there, a kiss. You want applause. You want someone who will listen to you as if you were gods. You want a body, lips, hands to bend to you.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, softly. ‘We all want that. But some of us want more. Other things. Some of us are—’

  ‘Different, Andrew?’ she said. ‘You all say that, too.’

  ‘You sound almost … bitter.’

  ‘I am not vain,’ she said. ‘I know I am an attractive woman. There have been ... more than a few men in my life. But there has never been one who told me the truth.’

  ‘That’s one of the saddest things I’ve ever heard,’ Andrew said.

  ‘Don’t make the mistake of feeling sorry for me!’ she said sharply. ‘I don’t need pity!’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t offering pity. Sympathy, maybe.’

  ‘Sympathy?’

  ‘I … loved a girl,’ Andrew said. ‘She … died recently. A lot of things died at the same time. Hopes, plans, dreams. I think that must happen every time love dies. It doesn’t make any difference whether the person actually dies or simply stops caring. The result is the same. All the hopes die, all the dreams. That’s what I meant. I know what it’s like to lose someone you love. Sympathy.’

  ‘You are different,’ Jessica said softly.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Andrew said. ‘Maybe not.’

  ‘I think so,’ she said. ‘You ask me to speak, not to listen. You ask me to feel, not to submit. You ask me to think, not obey. That’s very seductive, but you have to tell me this: why?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Andrew said. ‘I – it’s taken me as much by surprise as it has you, I think. Yet I cannot pretend it has not happened, or lie to you about it.’

  ‘Damn you!’ Jessica McCabe said, softly. ‘Damn you, Andrew Strong. You’re the one thing I never expected – an honest man!’

  He saw her only once more before he left Washington. There was no opportunity to speak to her until just before he was leaving the house in Annandale, and when he did, he found her cool and unreadable.

  ‘I wonder if you would let me write to you,’ he said. ‘There are so many things that there just does not seem time enough to say, that I would like to tell you.’

  ‘I think … perhaps not, Andrew,’ she said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because … oh, listen to me, Andrew,’ she said. ‘Try to understand. You are asking me for commitments I do not yet want to make.’

  ‘I didn’t ask—’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘But you will. You’ll go away, thinking I belong to you because I have promised to write to you, or keep a lock of your hair, or a rose you gave me. Men do that. Men always do that.’

  ‘Not all of us,’ he said.

  ‘I’m going to forget you, Andrew,’ she said. ‘I’m going to let you get on that train and steam right out of my life. I’m not going to write to you, and if you write to me I’ll burn your letters unopened. Do you understand? I am going to forget you!’
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br />   ‘Is that what you want?’

  ‘No, damn you!’ she said. ‘But it’s what I’m going to do!’

  ‘Jessica,’ he said. ‘Jess, Jess.’

  His arms went around her. Her lips were as fierce, as demanding as his. They stayed like that, worlds spinning around them, for what seemed an eternity. Then, almost savagely, Jessica tore herself free of his embrace.

  ‘Damn you, Andrew Strong!’ she panted. ‘I meant what I said. I am going to forget you!’

  He lifted a hand; then let it drop without touching her.

  ‘Jess,’ he said softly.

  ‘No, Andrew!’ she said. ‘Don’t!’

  She ran from the room, and although he waited almost an hour she did not come back again. He let himself quietly out of the house and went back to Washington. He left for Cairo without seeing her again.

  The old trail, scoured into the land over the decades by the wagon trains bringing supplies and settlers to Santa Fé, stretched ahead of them along the valley of the Cimarron. Seven hundred and eighty miles from one end to the other, fording as it went the Canadian River, the Pecos, Rock Creek, Rabbit Ear Creek, McNee’s Creek, Cold Spring, Upper Spring, Willow Bar – which lay just ahead of them now – with Middle Spring, the Cimarron, Sand Creek, the Arkansas, Coon Creek, Pawnee Fork, Ash Creek, Walnut Creek, and then the Big Bend of the Arkansas, where they said the mosquitoes were so big they held you down while they bit you. After the Big Bend would come Cow Creek, the Little Arkansas, Turkey Creek, Cottonwood Creek, Lost Spring, Big John’s Spring, Bridge Creek, Hundred-and-ten-mile Creek – which was ninety-five and not a hundred and ten miles from Independence – and finally, Willow Springs.