Call to Arms

by Frederick Nolan

  ‘Who’s down there?’ she called.

  ‘It’s Tim Daniels, Mary!’ the farmer shouted.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, and her voice changed, ‘I’ll come down.’

  In a moment or two, the door opened wide. Mary Hardy had a smile on her face that slipped slightly when she saw Jedediah.

  ‘And who might you be?’ she said, arms akimbo, glaring at him as if he was a naughty boy come home dirty from the woods.

  ‘Captain Jedediah Strong, ma’am,’ Jed said. ‘I need a horse real bad. Can you help me?’

  ‘No, sir, I cannot help you!’ Mary Hardy said firmly. ‘And you ought to know better than to bring him here, Tim Daniels!’

  ‘Wait on, Mary!’ Daniels said. ‘This young feller’s hurt. You come take a look at his leg.’

  ‘Hurt, you say?’ the woman said dubiously. ‘Oh, blazes! You’d best come in, then!’

  They trooped inside and Jed saw that Mary Hardy was a woman of middle years, plump, rosy-cheeked, sturdy. She wore a simple muslin dress with an apron over it. Her brown hair was held back with a tortoiseshell comb and her eyes were a very pale hazel green.

  ‘Well?’ she said, turning to face Jed. ‘Let’s take a look at you, then.’ When Jed hesitated slightly, amusement stirred in her pale eyes. ‘Come along, sir!’ she said. ‘You won’t be the first male I ever saw with his pants off!’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ Jed said with a rueful smile.

  ‘Git up on the table there!’ she said. ‘And you, Tim Daniels, don’t stand gawking! You make us some tea!’

  ‘Sure, sure,’ Daniels said. ‘Where’s Jethro?’

  ‘Out!’ she said. ‘He’ll be back soon.’ She deftly snipped away Jed’s makeshift bandage with a pair of scissors and frowned as she examined the wound.

  ‘How’d this happen?’ she said and her voice was softer. Jed told her. She listened in silence, swabbing away the dried blood, her hands sure and firm. She got some hot water from the kettle Daniels had boiled, and washed the wound carefully. Then she went across to the kitchen cupboard and got out a bottle.

  ‘Gin,’ she explained. ‘This is going to sting some, captain.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ Jed said. He got himself braced. Even so he groaned when pain surged from the wound through his body like fire. By the time she had cut strips from a sheet and bound Jed’s leg, Tim Daniels had brewed a pot of tea. He seemed to know exactly where everything was kept. Mary Hardy poured a healthy slug of the gin into Jed’s cup. It tasted strong, and Jed felt warmth flood through him.

  ‘That’s good gin,’ he said.

  ‘Aye,’ Tim Daniels said. ‘She makes it herself.’

  They sat in companionable silence for a few minutes. Then they heard the sound of a wagon being drawn to a halt in the yard in the back. Mary Hardy went across to her kitchen window.

  ‘It’s Jethro,’ she said. She looked at Tim Daniels and Jed thought he saw something pass between them. A few minutes later Jethro Hardy came in. He was a tall man, thin and stooped. He looked at least twenty years older than his wife.

  ‘Well, you here again, Tim Daniels? When d’you ever get your work done?’

  ‘Just helping the young captain here, Jethro,’ Daniels said. ‘He’s in need of a horse.’

  ‘A horse, eh?’ Hardy said. ‘And what in tarnation possessed you to bring him out here?’

  ‘He’s got a persuasive way with him,’ Daniels said with a grin. ‘And a big pistol.’

  ‘Pistol?’ Jethro Hardy glared at Jed. ‘You aimin’ to point your pistol at me, boy?’

  ‘Not if I don’t have to,’ Jed said. He stood up, testing his leg. The pain was a solid, dull throb. ‘I better get started,’ he said. ‘It’s vital General Jackson’s dispatches get to Culpeper today.’

  Hardy looked at his wife and then at Tim Daniels. They looked at each other. Jethro Hardy slapped his thigh with his hand. ‘Well, damn and blast Stonewall Jackson to Hell and beyond!’ he said angrily. He stamped out of the house and into the yard. ‘Peter! Peter! Where the devil is that damned nigger?’ they heard him shouting. ‘There you are, damn your woolly head! Go saddle my black mare and fetch her out here. Right now, hear me?’ He came back inside and again he looked at his wife and Tim Daniels first. He jerked his chin at Jed.

  ‘All right, captain,’ he said. ‘The boy’s bringing you a horse.’ He went outside again and Jed followed him.

  ‘That’s a big animal, sir,’ Jed said, as the young negro boy led the horse across the cobbled yard. The mare looked as high as a camel.

  ‘She ain’t altogether used to the bridle yet,’ Jethro Hardy told him, ‘but she’ll go all day if you don’t push her too hard.’

  ‘She’ll do, sir. And I thank you. I’ll bring her back as soon as I’ve delivered General Jackson’s dispatches.’ The old man laid a gnarled hand on Jed’s shoulder and turned Jed to face him. His voice was soft as he spoke. ‘What’s your name again, son?’

  ‘Strong, sir. Jedediah Strong.’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Twenty-nine.’

  ‘And you’re with Jackson?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Jed said.

  ‘I got a boy with Jackson. Name of Walker. Walker Hardy.’

  ‘Infantry?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘What brigade?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Hardy said. ‘He don’t write none.’ He watched as Jed checked the cinch and climbed up into the saddle. As Jed turned the animal out of the yard, Mary Hardy and Tim Daniels came out of the house. They stood very close together. The old man lifted a hand in farewell. His craggy face was sad, and Jed thought he knew why.

  Around noon, he ran into a cavalry patrol who told him where to find Ewell. Ten miles further on he was hailed by pickets, and a young private led him to Ewell’s tent. Jed dismounted outside it and presented his compliments to the general’s orderly. A few moments later, General Ewell lifted the flap of the tent and came outside. He looked like a big-beaked parrot with a moustache, if you could imagine such a bird with big, protuberant eyes and scrawny to boot. Jed saluted and presented Jackson’s much-creased missive. Hurry up, Popeye, he willed Ewell. There was a strange fluttering inside Jed’s head; he could scarcely keep his eyes open. Ewell turned as if to say something. He caught Jed as Jed swayed.

  ‘Orderly!’ Jed heard him shout in his piping voice. ‘On the double, dammit!’

  He helped Jed to a cot, and Jed slumped on it gratefully. He had ridden something like sixty miles, round one set of mountains and over another, not to mention the fight with the deserters. The orderly brought him a tin cup full of coffee, into which Ewell sloshed some brandy from a bottle on his day table. Jed drank the hot brew greedily.

  ‘Meeting of staff officers in half an hour!’ he heard Ewell tell the orderly. He watched the general lay the dispatch he had brought from Jackson on the table as gently as if it were made of gold leaf.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Well. Old Jack’s on the move again, is he?’ His hands moved continually, scratching an ear, rubbing his nose. ‘On the move again, the old fox!’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘We’re to march to Swift Run Gap,’ Ewell told him. ‘Jackson will move to Conrad’s Store. That way we’ll be nicely placed to outflank Banks if he moves south of Harrisonburg. Oh, yes, very nice, very nice indeed.’ And he rubbed his ear and scratched his chin and patted his thigh.

  Jed pictured the wide Shenandoah Valley, a long trough, ten miles wide, with Massanutton Mountain on the east and the foothills of the Shenandoah Mountains on the other side. Harrisonburg lay at the southern end of this trough where it opened out above Staunton. Jackson, poised on the side of the trough with his six thousand men, backed by Ewell’s eight thousand, could let Banks march past, then fall like a wolf on his rear and flanks. As he did so, he could order up General Edward Johnson, ‘Old Blucher’, from Staunton, to hit Banks’ front a mortal blow while Banks was cut off from the supplies and ammunition he had left behind in Strasburg. Jed was
a little surprised to realize how simple and how effective Jackson’s tactical decisions were. He got to his feet as Ewell rose and put on his campaign hat. The general’s face was stern and preoccupied, but he found a smile for Jed.

  ‘Get that leg attended to, captain,’ he said, moving restlessly from one foot to the other. ‘Then get back to Jackson. I’ve no doubt he’ll be needing you. And Captain …’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Well done.’

  He was gone before Jed could thank him. Jed asked the orderly where the hospital was and limped over there to get a clean dressing on his leg.

  ‘You’re lucky,’ the doctor said. ‘Nine out of ten of these bayonet wounds get poisonous. Damned men use those things for cooking, digging latrines, God alone knows what else. Who dressed it for you?’

  ‘A lady named Hardy,’ Jed said. ‘Farmer’s wife.’

  ‘She did a good job,’ the doctor said. ‘Try to keep off the leg for a day or two.’

  ‘I want to ride over to Culpeper,’ Jed told him. ‘See my father.’

  The doctor shrugged ruefully. ‘Your leg, son,’ he said. ‘Try to rest up a few hours, at least.’

  Jed took his advice and slept for eight hours solid on a cot in the rear of the hospital. When he awoke it was still raining; they told him it had not stopped all the time he had been asleep. When he went outside, sergeants were bawling long lines of marching infantry down the Madison road. Jed mounted up and twenty minutes later, saw Washington Farm off to his left. Here, as throughout this part of the country, the land had been scarred and altered by the passing of armies. The rolling pastures were covered by row after row of pup-tents, a town of them, with a sound and a smell alien and inescapable. Artillery caissons stood in waiting rows beneath the great oaks lining the long drive. Where are all our horses? Jed wondered as he rode down the avenue. Groups of soldiers watched him incuriously as he went by. He dismounted before the main door of the house. A sentry guarding it with a musket watched Jed closely, as if expecting him to commit some hostile act. Through the window, Jed saw officers sitting around the table in the dining room. He grinned at the sight: they were cavalrymen. The foot soldiers always complained that cavalrymen got the best billets and the softest beds. He nodded to the sentry and went inside. There were muddy stains on the fine parquet. Jed presented his compliments to the orderly sergeant, who led him to the officer commanding, a tall, stooping man with lank hair that fell in a curving comma over his right eyebrow. He told Jed his name was Major Richard Drew. His uniform looked as if it was a size too big for him and his moustache and beard were unkempt.

  ‘I’m looking for the owner of this house, Major,’ Jed said.

  ‘May I ask why, Captain?’

  ‘I am his son.’

  Drew’s eyebrows rose. ‘This – is your home?’

  ‘It is,’ Jed said. ‘Was, anyway.’

  ‘I regret your finding it in such poor shape, captain,’ Drew said, with a gesture of the hand that apologized for the futility of an apology. ‘The war …’

  ‘I’ve fought out of other people’s homes, Major,’ Jed said, impatiently. ‘It’s unavoidable. Now, my father?’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ Drew said, and the way he said it told Jed that Drew and his father had clashed. ‘Your father. He was … reluctant to let us requisition the house.’

  ‘I can believe it,’ Jed said. I’m only surprised he didn’t run you off with a horsewhip, he thought, but he did not say it.

  Drew smiled briefly to acknowledge Jed’s understatement, then his face resumed its mournful cast. ‘I think I’d better warn you that your father ... is not a well man, Captain Strong.’

  ‘He’s been ill?’

  ‘Not ill. Unwell.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘He moved out to the servants’ quarters, at the back of the house,’ Drew said. ‘But not before he told General Johnston that he was a damned piratical thief and that he was equally damned if he’d spend one night under the same roof as him.’

  ‘Sounds like Pa,’ Jed smiled.

  ‘Shall I get an orderly to show you?’

  ‘Thank you, major,’ Jed said, holding up a hand. ‘I know my way.’

  ‘Of course,’ Drew said. ‘Stupid of me.’

  Jed walked across the familiar yard and down the graveled path to the old cottages. The rain had stopped at last. It was muggy and warm. Midges danced over the horse trough. An air of sad stillness hung over the place.

  He turned the corner and saw an old man sawing wood. He was wearing a work shirt and a pair of pants held up by a belt of twine. Jed started across to ask him where he might find his father, and stopped, stunned, as he realized that the old man was David.

  ‘Pa?’ he said.

  David Strong frowned and then straightened up, a little at a time, the way a man might do who had just laid down a heavy burden he has carried a long way.

  ‘Jed?’ he said softly. ‘Oh, sweet Jesus, Jedediah, is it you?’ He came over and put his hands on Jed’s shoulders, looking straight into his eyes as if he was trying to see inside him. David had a grizzle of white stubble on his cheeks and there were lines of pain on his face that Jed had never seen before. David shook his head slowly from side to side, like a man who cannot believe his good fortune. Then he grabbed Jed in a bear-hug and looked up at the sky. It could have been to thank whatever God he believed in, or perhaps, Jed thought, because a man will sometimes do that to keep the tears out of his eyes.

  ‘Jed, Jed,’ David said, ‘it’s so damned good to see you.’

  ‘It’s good to be home, Pa.’

  ‘You’re on furlough?’

  ‘I brought a dispatch to General Ewell. I have to go back directly.’

  ‘Where are you stationed?’ David asked. ‘You don’t write. Gets so a man don’t even know where his own son is fighting.’ He realized he sounded peevish but he didn’t care.

  ‘You keep your ears skinned for news of Jeb Stuart’s cavalry, Pa,’ Jed said. ‘Wherever he is, that’s where I’ll be. There, or thereabouts.’

  ‘Hell’s teeth!’ David said, slapping his thigh like a man vexed by his own forgetfulness. ‘You’ll be hungry. I’ll get Betty to cook you something.’

  ‘Moses and Betty stayed with you, then?’

  ‘Where else would they go?’

  ‘A lot of negroes are going north to work in the factories,’ Jed told him. ‘They can make good money.’

  ‘Money,’ David said. ‘What would negroes do with money?’ Jed looked at him, surprised; then he laughed. ‘You know, Pa, for a man as liberal as you are, you’re damned old-fashioned once in a while!’

  There didn’t seem to be any point in answering that so David didn’t bother. Jed’s visit was too precious to spoil it with an argument.

  ‘You’ll be able to move back into the big house in a few days, Pa,’ Jed said.

  David scowled. ‘Not sure I want to,’ he said. ‘I’ll wager your fellow officers have made a pigsty of the place.’

  ‘They’re soldiers, Pa,’ Jed said. ‘A house is just a house to them, somewhere safe to lay down for a night, a week. They don’t have any feelings about a house. Tomorrow or the next day they will be in another one, fifty miles away. Or dead.’

  ‘I know,’ David growled. ‘I know, boy.’

  There was a big oak in the center of the yard with a bench around its huge trunk. It had been his mother’s favorite spot, Jed recalled. He had a picture of her in his memory, dressed in white, sitting beneath the big tree with a little table laid for tea, watching while Andrew rode his pony around the yard. The sound of his father’s voice calling out the names of his servants dispelled the reverie. He looked up as the old negro and his wife came out of the stone building. Aunty Betty had thinned down some, Jed thought. Moses looked the same as he had always looked, tall, stooped, wrinkled.

  ‘Boy, boy, boy!’ Aunty Betty sniffled, pulling him into her ample embrace. ‘If you ain’t a sight for so’ eyes. If you just ain’t a sight for th
ese po’, so’ eyes!’ She hugged Jed and patted him and hugged him again, while old Moses did a sort of shuffling jig, his lined face creased into a great, wide, toothless grin.

  ‘He he he,’ he kept saying. ‘He he he.’

  ‘Now, Betty, you leave go of that boy!’ David said. ‘He needs something to eat, you hear me?’

  ‘Ah heahs you,’ Aunt Betty said and quit hugging Jed. ‘Ah heahs you. Moses, you go fetch me some o’ them aigs we done hid in de barn.’ Moses nodded, the grin stuck on his face like a mask. He took hold of Jed’s hand and pumped it up and down.

  ‘Good to see you, Mahse Jed,’ he said. ‘Good to see you!’

  ‘You keeping well, Moses?’ Jed asked. ‘My Pa looking after you all right?’ It was an old family joke. Moses’ grin got even wider, if that was possible.

  ‘He he he,’ he said. ‘He doin’ fine, Mahse Jed.’

  ‘Ah goan put on de skillet,’ Aunty Betty said, making it sound like a threat. ‘You goan find dem aigs or not, Moses Wilberforce?’

  ‘Ah’m goan, woman, Ah’m goan,’ Moses said querulously. He went shuffling off towards the barn, still grinning, still going he-he-he.

  ‘Come and sit till the food’s ready,’ David said. They walked over towards the slatted bench beneath the oak. The first fine misty green of tiny buds was on the boughs: spring was not far away. The sun was trying to come out and there was mist along the bottom land. Jed watched his father ease himself down on the seat as if the very act was painful. He’s ill, he kept thinking, he’s ill. It was like a betrayal. Without really thinking about it, he had come home expecting everything to be the same: nothing was. He thought that after a while he might become accustomed to what had happened to the house. But to find his father so sick and old was difficult to accept. He wondered whether Andrew knew and decided not. David would not have been able to write to him or to Sam. Even if it was possible, he would not have told them, Jed thought. He’s a proud old man, and he would see that as a failing, a weakness. Pa, he thought, why can’t we tell each other things?