Chickamauga (20 page)

Jonah!—a homely face to her, that could still look back from the red lane he’d gone down, even if it was too late to speak. He was her Jonah, her Phinny, her black monkey; she worshiped him still, though it was long ago he was taken from her the first time.

Stiffly, Delilah got to her feet. She cocked her head, looked sharp into the mirror, and caught the motherly image—head wagging in the flayed forehead of a horse with ears and crest up stiff, the shield and the drum of big swamp birdskins, the horns of deer sharpened to cut and kill with. She showed her teeth. Then she looked in the feathery ashes and found Phinny’s bones. She
ripped a square from her manifold fullness of skirts and tied up the bones in it.

She set foot in the road then, walking stilted in Miss Myra’s shoes and carrying Miss Theo’s shoes tied together around her neck, her train in the road behind her. She wore Miss Myra’s willing rings—had filled up two fingers—-but she had had at last to give up the puzzle of Miss Theo’s bracelet with the chain. They were two stones now, scalding-white. When the combs were being lifted from her hair, Miss Myra had come down too, beside her sister.

Light on Delilah’s head the Jubilee cup was set. She paused now and then to lick the rim and taste again the ghost of sweet that could still make her tongue start clinging—some sweet lapped up greedily long ago, only a mystery now when or who by. She carried her own black locust stick to drive the snakes.

Following the smell of horses and fire, to men, she kept in the wheel tracks till they broke down at the river. In the shade underneath the burned and fallen bridge she sat on a stump and chewed for a while, without dreams, the comb of a dirtdauber. Then once more kneeling, she took a. drink from the Big Black, and pulled the shoes off her feet and waded in.

Submerged to the waist, to the breast, stretching her throat like a sunflower stalk above the river’s opaque skin, she kept on, her treasure stacked on the roof of her head, hands laced upon it. She had forgotten how or when she knew, and she did not know what day this was, but she knew—it would not rain, the river would not rise, until Saturday.

Ankle deep in the dusty places, the road led twelve miles from the landing, around the head of a horseshoe lake and down its eastern slope where the houses were. We left the gunboat at eight oclock in brilliant sunlight, two mounted officers wearing sabers and sashes and thirty Negro infantrymen in neat blue uniforms; at noon the colonel halted the column before a two-story frame structure with a brick portico and squat, whitewashed pillars. He sat a hammer-headed roan, an early-middle-aged man with a patch across one eye.

“Looks old,” he said, rolling his cigar along his lower lip. He faced front, addressing the house itself. “Ought to burn pretty,” he added after a pause, perhaps to explain why he had not chosen one of the larger ones in both directions. I saw that he was smiling, and that was as usual at such a time, the head lifted to expose the mouth beneath the wide pepper-and-salt mustache. Behind us the troops were quiet: so quiet that when the colonel turned in the saddle, leather squeaked. “Walk up there, Mr. Lundy, and give them the news.”

The troops stood at ease in a column of fours, the rifle barrels slanting and glinting. Above their tunics, which were powdered with dust except where they were splotched a darker blue at backs and armpits from four hours of hard marching, their faces appeared cracked as if by erosion where sweat had run.

“Orderly,” I said. A soldier stepped out of ranks
and held the reins near the snaffle while I dismounted on the off side, favoring my stiff right leg. I went up toward the house. When the colonel called after me, something I could not distinguish above the sound of my boots crunching gravel on the driveway, I halted and faced about. “Sir?”

“Tell them twenty minutes!” With one arm he made the sweeping gesture I had come to know so well. “To clear out!” I heard him call.

I went on—this was nothing new; it was always twenty minutes—remembering, as I had done now for the past two years whenever I approached a strange house, that I had lost a friend this way. It was in Virginia, after Second Bull Run, the hot first day of September, ’62. The two of us, separated from our command in the retreat, walked up to a roadside cabin to ask the way, and someone fired at us from behind a shuttered window. I ran out of range before the man (or woman; I never knew) could reload, and by the time I got up courage enough to come back, half an hour later, no one was there except my friend, lying in the yard in his gaudy zouave uniform with his knees drawn up and both hands clapped tight against his belt buckle. He looked pinch-faced and very dead, and it seemed indeed a useless way to die.

That was while I was still just Private Lundy, within a month of the day I enlisted back home in Cashtown; that was my baptism of fire, as they like to call it. After that came Antietam and Fredericksburg, where I won my stripes. The war moved fast in those days and while I was in Washington recovering from my Chancellorsville wound I received my commission and orders to report directly to the War Department after a twenty-day convalescent leave. I enjoyed the visit home, limping on a cane and having people admire my
new shoulder straps and fire-gilt buttons. “Adam, you’re looking fit,” they said, pretending not to notice the ruined knee. ‘Fit’ was their notion of a soldier word, though in fact the only way any soldier ever used it was as the past tense of fight.

When I reported back to the capital I was assigned to the West, arriving during the siege of Vicksburg and serving as liaison officer on one of the gunboats. Thus I missed the fighting at Gettysburg, up near home. It was not unpleasant duty. I had a bed to sleep in, with sheets, and three real meals every twenty-four hours, plus coffee in the galley whenever I wanted it. We shot at them, they shot at us: I could tell myself I was helping to win the war. Independence Day the city fell, and in early August I was ordered to report for duty with Colonel Nathan Frisbie aboard the gunboat
Starlight.
Up till then it had all been more or less average, including the wound; there were thousands like me. But now it changed, and I knew it from the first time I saw him.

He looked at me hard with his one gray eye before returning the salute. “Glad to have you aboard,” he said at last. A Negro corporal was braced in a position of exaggerated attention beside a stand of colors at the rear of the cabin. “Orderly,” the colonel said. The corporal rolled his eyes. “Show the lieutenant his quarters.”

Next morning at six o’clock the corporal rapped at the door of my cabin, then entered and gave me the colonel’s compliments, along with instructions to report to the orderly room for a tour of inspection before breakfast. I’d been asleep; I dressed in a hurry, flustered at being late on my first day of duty. Colonel Frisbie was checking the morning report when I came in. He glanced up and said quietly, “Get your saber, Mr Lundy.” I returned to my cabin, took the saber out of its wrappings, and buckled it on. I hadnt worn it since the
convalescent leave, and in fact hadnt thought I’d ever wear it again.

The troops were on the after deck, each man standing beside his pallet; the colonel and I followed the first sergeant down the aisle. From time to time Colonel Frisbie would pause and lift an article from the display of equipment on one of the pads, then look sharply at the owner before passing on. “Take his name, Sergeant.” Their dark faces were empty of everything, but I saw that each man trembled slightly while the colonel stood before him.

After breakfast Colonel Frisbie called me into the orderly room for a conference. This was the first of many. He sat at his desk, forearms flat along its top, the patch over his eye dead black like a target center, his lips hidden beneath the blousy, slightly grizzled mustache. There was hardly any motion in his face as he spoke.

When Vicksburg fell, the colonel said, Mr Lincoln announced that the Mississippi “flowed un vexed to the sea.” But, like so many political announcements, this was not strictly true; there was still considerable vexation in the form of sniping from the levee, raids by bodies of regular and irregular cavalry—bushwhackers, the colonel called them—and random incidents involving plunder and disrespect to the flag. So while Sherman sidestepped his way to Atlanta, commanders of districts flanking the river were instructed to end all such troubles. On the theory that partisan troops could not function without the support of the people who lived year-round in the theater, the commanders adopted a policy of holding the civilian population responsible.

“They started this thing, Mr Lundy,” the colonel said. “They began it, sir, and while they had the upper hand they thought it was mighty fine. Remember the
plumes and roses in those days? Well,
we’re
top dog now, East and West, and we’ll give them what they blustered for. Indeed. We’ll give them war enough to last the time of man.”

He brooded, his face in shadow, his hands resting within the circle of yellow lamplight on his desk. I wondered if this silence, which seemed long, was a sign that the conference was over. But just as I was about to excuse myself, the colonel spoke again. He cleared his throat. “Lieutenant, does that knee bother you?”

“Not often, sir. Just when—”

“Never you mind,” Colonel Frisbie said, and moving one hand suddenly to the lamp he turned the wick up full and tilted the shade so that the light was thrown directly on his face. His expression was strained, the patch neat and exact. “Theyll pay for that knee, lieutenant. And they will pay for this!” He lifted the patch onto his forehead. The empty socket pulsed as red and raw as when the wound was new.

During the year that followed, the colonel spoke to me often of these and other things. Every morning there was a meeting in the orderly room after breakfast—‘conferences’ he called them, but he did the talking. I understood how he felt about the eye, the desire to make someone pay for its loss; I had felt it myself about the ruined knee and the death of my friend in Virginia, until I reminded myself, in the case of the knee, that the bullets flew both ways, and in the case of my friend that it was primarily a question of whose home was being invaded. I had more or less put it behind me, this thought of repayment; but with Colonel Frisbie it was different, and for many reasons. He was a New Englander, a lawyer in civilian life, an original abolitionist. He had been active in the underground railroad during the ’50s, and when war came he entered the army as a
captain under Frémont in Saint Louis. These were things he told me from time to time, but there were things he did not tell, things I found out later.

He had been with Sherman at Shiloh, a major by then, adjutant in an Indiana regiment which broke badly under the Sunday dawn attack. He was near the bluff above Pittsburg Landing, using the flat of his saber on stragglers, when a stray minié came his way with a spent whine and took out his left eye: whereupon he went under the bluff, tore off his shoulder straps, and lay down among the skulkers. There were ten thousand others down there, including officers, and only a few of them wounded; he had better provocation than most. Yet he could not accept it in the way those others apparently could. When the battle was over he bandaged his eye with a strip from his shirt, rejoined his regiment, and later was commended in reports. There were men in his outfit, however, including some of his own clerks, who had also been under the bluff, and he saw them looking at him as if to say, “If you wont tell on me, I wont on you.” Soon afterwards he was assigned to courts martial duty with the Adjutant General’s Department. When the army adopted its reprisal policy in the lower Mississippi Valley, he was given another promotion and a gunboat with special troops aboard to enforce it.

Patrolling the river from Vicksburg north to Memphis, two hundred and fifty air-line miles and almost twice that far by water, One-Eye Frisbie and the
Starlight
became well known throughout the delta country. Where partisan resistance had once been strongest, soon there was little activity of any kind. It became a bleak region, populated only by women and children and old men and house servants too feeble to join the others gone as ‘contraband’ with the Union armies. The fields
lay fallow, last year’s cotton drooping on dead brown stalks. Even the birds went hungry, what few remained. The land was desolated as if by plague.

The only protest now was an occasional shot from the levee, which was followed by instant reprisal in accordance with the Army policy. Colonel Frisbie would tie up at the nearest river town, sending word for evacuation within twenty minutes, and then would give the
Starlight
gunners half an hour’s brisk drill, throwing explosive shells over the levee and into the empty buildings and streets where chickens and dogs fluttered and slunk and squawked and howled. Or he would tie up at the point where the sniping occurred, lead the troops ashore, and march them overland sometimes as far as a dozen miles to burn an isolated plantation house.

I was with him from the beginning and I remember him mainly as straddled in silhouette before the lick and soar of flames. Dispossessed, the family huddled somewhere in the background. At first they had been arrogant, threatening reprisal by Forrest or Jameson or Van Dorn. “You had better burn the trees as well,” one woman told us. “When we first came there was nothing but woods and we built our homes. We’ll build them again.” But when Atlanta was besieged their defiance faltered, and when Sherman had taken the city and was preparing for the march that would “make Georgia howl,” they knew they were beaten and their armies would never return. There had been a time when they sent their plantation bells and even their brass doorknobs to be melted for cannon; but not any more. Now the war had left them. They were faced with the aftermath before the finish.