Call to Arms

by Frederick Nolan

  ‘No, my darling,’ she whispered. ‘I want this to last and last and last.’

  ‘I have to warn you,’ he said smiling as he kissed her. ‘I’m not supposed to do anything strenuous.’

  ‘But you will,’ she hissed into his ear, her hand sliding sinuously down his body. She found the hot, hard center of him and the softest groan of pleasure left him like a sigh. She pushed the bedclothes back and away. ‘I want to see you,’ she said. ‘I want you to see me.’

  He ran his hand down the long valley of her back and under the high, firm rise of her buttocks. She rolled over and on top of him. Her body was soft-warm-damp and her hair fell across his face like gentle rain.

  ‘Ah, Jess,’ he said. ‘Jess.’

  He turned so that she gently rolled upon her side and then again so that his long weight lay upon her. She felt rather than saw him wince.

  ‘Let me, my darling,’ she said. ‘Let me.’

  And now, slowly, gently, she turned so that they lay side by side facing each other. She kissed his lips, his eyes. And then she bestrode him, sitting upon his thighs, and used both her hands to hold him as she rose and then lowered herself upon him. He reached up and put his hands on her breasts, stroking downwards to the slender waist and the swell of thigh below.

  ‘I thought you said you wanted this to last and last,’ he said as she began to move.

  ‘Ah, my love,’ she said, her smile as wicked as Eve’s, ‘but I want it to end, too!’ And as she moved herself he moved too, and then they were in unison, one joined, blind wanton need that mounted and grew until its sweet intensity was all they knew in all the world, and then, and then, like the explosion of some far-off rocket, bursting silently, their oneness became separate again, joined yet apart, dying, falling, done.

  Afterwards, they talked of marriage. Perhaps in the fall, if the war was ‘over. If not, in the spring. Surely it must be over in the spring, she said.

  ‘Let’s hope so,’ he answered, not wishing to sadden her. He did not think the war would be over for a long time yet, but no use to tell her that. He remembered Senator McCabe telling him that sometimes it was better not to tell the truth. ‘There are times when wisdom lies in saying nothing,’ he had said. Andrew thought he would agree that this was one of them.

  He didn’t look back as he drove up the hill from the farm, although he knew she would be watching. His mind was already full of the things which would await him when he got back to Grant’s headquarters, back to the chaotically ordered routine of daily life on the battlefield, the coming and going of couriers, the chattering of the field telegraphs, the tinny blare of the bugles, cavalry jingling through camp. He stopped the horse at the gate on the turnpike, his mind far away. As he did he saw a man come up out of the ditch. The horse shied violently and Andrew fought to control it. When he got the animal under control he turned to face the man and as he did, the man said ‘Andy?’

  Jesus Christ, it’s Jedediah, he thought. Jed was wearing a battered Federal infantry overcoat, stained pants, muddy boots. A slouch hat concealed his eyes, a bushy black beard his face. He looked haggard: there were dark rings beneath the deep-set eyes.

  ‘Jed!’ Andrew said, jumping down from the carriage. ‘Jed, is it really you?’ He threw his arms around his brother and hugged him, and only then realized that the right-hand sleeve of the overcoat was empty. He recoiled, horrified.

  ‘Oh, Jesus, Jed, where did it happen?’ he said.

  ‘Gettysburg.’ Jed did not elaborate. ‘Bo, it’s good to see you! You wouldn’t have anything to eat in that rattletrap, would you?’

  ‘You’re in luck,’ Andrew said. ‘Aunt Betty made me some sandwiches. Here, take them!’ He unwrapped the bread and gave it to Jed, who wolfed the food down in great mouthfuls. ‘God, that’s good,’ he said. Then, after a momentary frown. ‘Aunt Betty?’

  ‘She’s down at the farm,’ Andrew told him. ‘With Jess.’

  ‘And who is Jess?’

  ‘I met someone, Jed. Her name is Jessica McCabe.’

  ‘You still with Grant?’

  ‘I’m just heading back. I was wounded. Nothing worth talking about,’ he said. ‘Now tell me how the devil you got here. ‘

  ‘Walked,’ Jed replied. ‘I’ve been on the road for a long time. I was … sick for a while. Stayed with … someone. Then I made my way down here. Hiding in barns, dodging militia patrols. Plenty of places up north they’d be glad to hang a Johnny Reb like me!’ His face changed to a bitter set as he spoke the words. ‘You know about Pa, I guess.’

  ‘I know,’ Andrew said. ‘That black bastard Edward Maxwell!’

  ‘That’s why I’ve come down here,’ Jed said. ‘To try to get a line on him.’

  ‘I’ve tried,’ Andrew said. ‘Nobody knows.’

  ‘You got any money, Bo?’ Jed said, ignoring Andrew’s words.

  ‘About forty dollars. Take it.’

  ‘I’ll take twenty. That’ll be enough.’

  ‘It’s dangerous, walking around in those clothes, Jed. If you were stopped and questioned … .’ He let it trail in the air.

  ‘Ah, the whole damned countryside is full of stragglers, men trying to get back to their units. Anyone asks me, I’m trying to find the Twentieth Maine. They’re down on the James or somewhere.’

  ‘How did you … tell me about Gettysburg.’

  Jed told his brother about the battle and the hospital, and what Billy Christman had done. ‘They were getting ready to send us to some prison camp, so I got the hell out of there. ‘

  ‘Listen, why don’t we go on down to the farm? Aunt Betty can feed you, and you can meet Jess—’

  ‘Thanks, Bo,’ Jed said. ‘I’ve got to get moving.’

  ‘You trying to reach Lee’s army?’

  ‘Why’d you ask?’

  ‘ Jed, Jed, don’t go back!’ Andrew pleaded. ‘They’ve lost. It’s only a matter of time. I don’t want to see you killed for a lost cause.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be too mad about the idea myself,’ Jed said and the years fell away as he grinned.

  ‘You’ll never make it through the lines,’ Andrew told him. ‘Federal troops are as thick as flies between here and Richmond, for God’s sake!’

  ‘Don’t worry, Bo,’ Jed said quietly. ‘I’m not going back.’

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘I told you. I’m going to skulk around Culpeper for a little while. See if I can’t get a handle on that black hearted sonofabitch Edward Maxwell.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Then I am going to go wherever he is,’ Jed said calmly, ‘and kill him.’ He said it the way another man might have said he was going to have another cup of coffee.

  ‘No, Jed, listen …’ Andrew began, but Jed held up his hand to stop any remonstration.

  ‘Don’t tell me it can’t be done or it shouldn’t,’ he said. ‘My mind’s fair made up, Andrew. He’s got to be somewhere in these United States, and if he is I intend to hunt him down!’

  ‘I’d like to say I’ll come with you,’ Andrew said quietly. ‘But that isn’t the way I’d go at it, Jed.’ Jed looked at him for a long moment and then laid his hand on Andrew’s shoulder in a gesture of fondness and farewell.

  ‘I know it, Bo,’ he said. ‘You go fight your war your way. And I’ll fight mine my way.’

  ‘There’s nothing you need?’

  ‘Only luck,’ Jed said. ‘And I seem to have plenty of that.’ He lifted his hand and then strode off across the fields towards the woods. After a while, Andrew clucked the horse into movement and headed on into Culpeper.

  He got back to headquarters to find that he had been breveted brigadier-general for, his part in repelling Ewell’s flank thrust at Spotsylvania.

  ‘We’ve lost a lot of good men,’ Grant rasped when Andrew thanked him. ‘Fortunately, we seem to have equally good ones to replace them.’ He shook Andrew’s hand, scowling with pleasure around his cigar as the other staff officers crowded around to congratulate Andrew. Then he clapped
Andrew on the shoulder and jerked his head towards the door.

  ‘Well, General,’ he said. ‘Let’s get on with the goddamned war!’

  Twenty-Seven – The Story of Abigail Strong

  May 1864

  Things are going well, Abby thought. Keep on like this and I wouldn’t be surprised if we didn’t all end up rich. She smiled fondly at the sleeping babies in their crib. Louise had called the twins Joab and Jonathan. Well, it looked as if Joab and Jonathan would have a secure future. The Carver carbine was fast becoming the standard weapon of the Federal Army. Sam said they couldn’t turn them out fast enough. The factory was on round-the-clock shifts. Sam was opening a new one in Philadelphia. He worked an eighteen-hour day without complaint. Once in a while he slept at the plant. Abby didn’t mind. She had the babies. It was like having Travis and Henry all over again, without the anguish. They had money now, a nice home, no worries. That made a big difference to the way you brought up your children.

  Well, they all deserved good luck, she thought. Nothing but bad news the year before, David’s death in Culpeper, Travis disappearing, the visit from young Billy Christman to tell them that Little Jed had lost an arm at Gettysburg and to put a full stop to the story of Mary Strong that Sam had brought home from Washington.

  She remembered that day so well, so joyous and yet somehow slightly sad. They opened a bottle of champagne and celebrated Sam’s success. Abby was pleased and happy because his faith in himself, which had been so sorely tested for so many years, had at last been vindicated.

  They dined at Delmonico’s with Ezra Carver and Louise; and Ezra, who was usually stiff and formal, unbent and even flirted with Louise. She was one of the family now. Sam, although he had balked a little when Abby first brought her home, had taken a real shine to Louise. And for Abby it was wonderful to have a friend and confidante. Her old fears were finally buried beneath more recent, happier memories.

  She wrote to Henry in Cincinnati and told him that Louise had moved in with them. Henry wrote back that he was shocked and appalled by their taking Louise in, and said that he would never spend a night beneath any roof where such a creature lived. The letter was full of Biblical quotations, the fiery damnations of the Old Testament. Abby decided that Henry had gotten religion. He was seeing the daughter of a minister, he said, Ann Beecher. She was a decent, God-fearing girl who viewed the fleshpots with as much anathema as he. They planned to devote their lives after the war to missionary work in Africa, he wrote.

  As for Louise, he was adamant. ‘The woman Travis brought to your house is unclean,’ he wrote. ‘And God will judge you harshly for condoning her sins by giving her shelter. You may be certain, Mother, that I would never expose dear Ann to the presence of that brazen strumpet. As soon as the war is over Ann and I will be married. Obviously, we would have wished for your presence at our wedding, but you must understand that we could never countenance the attendance of a scarlet woman. I leave you and Father, and that fallen creature, to the mercy of our Almighty Father.’

  Let him who is without sin cast the first stone, Abby thought as she laid the letter down. Henry was a long way away. Louise was here and the children were here. She would worry about what was right and what was wrong when the war was over, which didn’t look to be for some time yet. Sam said that President Lincoln had kicked ‘Old Brains’ Halleck upstairs and made Andrew’s commander, General Grant, the chief of the army. Sam said that if Grant had been at Antietam he would have demolished Lee and that if he had been at Gettysburg, the Confederates would never had gotten back across the Potomac. Grant was moving his headquarters down to Culpeper according to Andrew, whose letter had arrived only a few days ago. He explained how he had found Aunt Betty and that Washington Farm was in ruins. Sam told him that he had the family Bible and Grandpa Davy’s broken sword, which had been sent north by David.

  ‘We’ll put them back where they belong one day,’ Andrew wrote. ‘But there’ll be many a battle before it comes.’

  Aye, there will, Abby thought, and I wonder in which of them my son will die, if he is not dead already? The only cloud on her horizon was that she did not know what had happened to Travis. It seemed obvious that he had ‘substituted’ for someone able to afford the three hundred dollars it took to buy out of conscription, and given the money to Louise. But in which regiment had he enlisted and in which battles had he fought? He could be alive, he could be dead, and no one would know. Thousands had died, on battlefields and elsewhere, to be buried nameless in unmarked graves. She had heard that soldiers went into battle so sure of impending death that they wrote their names on slips of paper and pinned them to their clothes so that they would be identified later. She didn’t want Joab and Jonathan to grow up without a father. Yet, paradoxically, she didn’t want Travis to come back and spoil everything either. He would take them away, God knew where. And they were all so happy: Sam, the babies, Louise.

  Yes, Louise was as happy as a puppy dog with two tails. She had asked Sam to find her a job, anything at all, at the factory.

  ‘You ought to stay home,’ he said. ‘Look after the babes.’ He was very easy with her, Abby thought fondly, like a father with a favorite daughter. But then, Sam had always had a way with the ladies.

  ‘Samble, my brain’ll explode if I don’t find something to use it for!’ Louise said. She had nicknamed him ‘Samble’ and it had stuck: Abby sometimes found herself using the sobriquet herself. ‘Don’t forget I know a little something about running a business!’

  ‘Well, harrumph, yes,’ Sam said, as if he’d just as soon not get into any discussion about how Louise had run her ‘business’, as she called it. ‘But that’s not the same as working in a gun factory.’

  ‘You have an accounting department, don’t you?’

  ‘Well,’ Sam said. ‘Sort of. I handle most of that side of the business myself.’

  ‘How about if you had an assistant?’ she said perkily. ‘Good at figures? Makes coffee? Don’t even swear anymore?’ She gave him her best, mischievous, cornflower-blue-eyed look and Sam laughed.

  ‘Won’t pay much,’ he said. ‘I’m a mean old devil!’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’ll weasel it out of you!’ And they all laughed. Abby didn’t mind being left to look after the children. If she’d been Louise’s age, she’d have been the first one to want to get out and do something too.

  Better start stirring your stumps and think about supper, my girl, she thought. Sam and Louise will be home soon. They usually rode in together in the carriage Sam had bought soon after the first army order was paid for.

  ‘Hell, I know it’s extravagant!’ he smiled when she had protested. ‘But I reckon a man of fifty’s entitled to a little extravagance, ain’t he?’

  And with that, she couldn’t argue. Dear Sam, who had worked so hard all his life to give her good things. If anyone had told Abby, that first day when he came into the scullery and looked at her and she knew what he had in mind, if anyone had told her then, that one day she would love him so warmly, so truly and so completely as she knew now that she did, Abby would have laughed in their face. But it was true. Dear Sam. She got up and went into the kitchen, rubbing her upper left arm. There was a long, nagging pain up there, that throbbed in time with the beating of her heart. You’re getting old, Abigail, she told herself as she passed the mirror in the hallway.

  June came.

  The dreadful toll of the great battles in the South went endlessly on. More than three years of carnage, and nothing to show for it but two hundred thousand graves of Northern boys staring at the sky, Sam said. Greeley’s Tribune kept a standing headline: ‘The Great Contest’, On May 11, 1864, such a bulletin announced: ‘Our Losses So Far Forty Thousand’. That was after the battle of the Wilderness. It sounded almost Biblical, Abby thought. Every day the newspapers carried long, long lists of the dead and maimed. When Sam went to work, Abby would go through them name by name, always empty with apprehension that today, this time, she would find the n
ame of her son among them. But she never did. The day never passed but that the papers blared, beneath banner headlines, ‘The Rebels Fly By Night!’

  ‘Lee Terribly Beaten!’ And then in small print, you would get the facts of it. At the Wilderness 5597 killed, 21,463 wounded, 10,677 missing on the Federal side. On the Confederate side, rounder figures: 2000 killed, 6,000 wounded, 3400 missing. At Todd’s Tavern, at Spotsylvania, at Varnell’s Station, at Swift Creek, at Cloyd’s Mountain, at New River Bridge, at Beaver Dam Station, at South Anna Bridge, at Yellow Tavern, where the dashing ‘Jeb’ Stuart was cut down by the bullet of a lowly private. Tens, hundreds, thousands of names, in print so close-set it made her eyes blur, and she would read them all again in case she had missed one, the vital one, Travis Strong, named for the hero of another battle in a time as remote now as Agincourt.

  ‘Hell of a battle going on,’ Sam said as they sat in the parlor after dinner. ‘Some place called Cold Harbor. Not even a town, according to the Tribune. Just a crossroads someplace down near Mechanicsville. They’re fighting over the same damn ground they fought over in ’62!’ He looked at the two women over the top of his spectacles. ‘Think maybe that General Grant feller meant it, when he said he was going to fight it out on that line if it took him all summer. ‘

  ‘Who wants some more coffee?’ Louise said, getting to her feet. As she did there was a thunderous hammering on the front door of the house. Abby jumped, almost dropping her knitting: she was making little woolen suits for the two babies.

  ‘What in the name of all that’s holy …?’ Sam said.

  ‘I’ll get it!’ Louise said. ‘I’m already up!’

  She went out into the hall and they heard her tell May it was all right. Then there was a little silence and then a scream. Abby ran out into the hall with Sam close behind her. They found Louise cowering back from the doorway. In it, his wild eyes bright in the lamplight, stood Travis Strong!