Chickamauga (24 page)

Isaac saw that the officer was a young man—rather hard-looking, however, as if the face had been baked in
the same crucible that had hardened and glazed the face of his son Clive—and he thought: It’s something the war does to them; North and South, they get this way after a time because nowdays the wars go on too long. Then as they looked at each other, one on the hearth and the other in the chair, Isaac knew why the officer was there. He steadied himself to speak, intending to say, ‘Have you come to burn my house?’ But it did not come out that way; he spoke again in the tongues.

The lieutenant, whose rank Isaac saw when he bent forward, listened to Edward’s explanation of the garbled language, then said carefully: “I have come to give you notice, notification.” He paused, cleared his throat, and continued. He spoke carefully, not as if he were choosing his words, but as if from a memorized speech. “In reprisal for sniping, by a party or parties unknown, against the gunboat
Starlight
at sundown yesterday, I inform you now, by order of Colonel Nathan Frisbie, United States Army, that this house has been selected to be burned. You have exactly twenty minutes.”

Isaac sat watching the hard young face, the moving lips, the bars on the shoulders. The lips stopped, stern-set, but he still watched. “Fire,” he said or intended to say. “It all began and ends in fire.”

Full in our faces the big low blood-red disk of the sun rested its rim on the levee, like a coin balanced lengthwise on a knife edge. We marched westward through a wilderness of briers and canebrakes, along a road that had been cleared by the planters in their palmy days to haul cotton to the steamboat landing for shipment to New Orleans. The column had rounded the head of the lake and turned toward the river where the gunboat waited. Four miles in our rear, beyond the lake,
the reflection of the burning house was a rose-and-violet glow to match the sunset in our front.

I rode beside the colonel at the head and the troops plodded behind in a column of fours. They marched at ease, their boots stirring the dust so that those in the center were hidden from the waist down and those at the tail showed only their heads and shoulders. Their rifle barrels, canted in all directions, caught the ruddy, almost level rays of the sun; the bayonets, fixed, appeared to have been blooded. They kept their heads lowered, their mouths tight shut, breathing through their noses. The only sounds were the more or less steady clink of equipment, the soft clop clop of horses’ hoofs, and the shuffle of shoes in the dust. It somehow had an air of unreality in the failing light.

While the upper half of the sun still showed above the dark knife edge of the levee we approached a live-oak spreading its limbs above a grassy space beside the road. Colonel Frisbie drew rein and raised one arm to signal a halt. The troops came to a jumbled stop, like freight cars. Then the sergeant advanced and stood beside the colonel’s horse, waiting. He was short and muscular, thick-chested and very black, with so little neck that his head seemed to rest directly on his shoulders. “Ten minutes,” the colonel told him.

The sergeant saluted, holding it stiffly until the colonel returned it, then faced about. The troops stood in the dust of the road. He drew himself up, taking a deep breath. “De-tail: ten
shut!”
He glared. “Ground—harms!”

Dismounting, the colonel smiled. “Good man,” he said. “That comes of having trained him myself.”

“Yes sir,” I said.

The platoon fell out, coming apart almost unwillingly, like something coming unglued. Colonel Frisbie
often declared that, properly trained and led, Negro troops made “the finest soldiers on the planet, bar none,” and when he was given command of the
Starlight
he set out to prove his contention by supplying the proper training and leadership. Now he was satisfied; it was no longer a theory, it was a fact. The corporal-orderly took our horses and we crossed the grass and sat with our backs against the trunk of the live-oak. I was glad to rest my knee.

High in the branches a blue jay shrilled and chattered. The colonel looked up, searching, and finally found him. “Isnt today Friday?”

“Yes sir,” I said.

“Thought so. Then here’s another case of these people not knowing what theyre talking about. They say you never see a jay on a Friday because thats the day theyre all in hell getting instructions from the devil. And they believe it, too—I dont exaggerate.” He nodded. Ever since he had heard the fable he had been spending a good part of every Friday watching for a blue jay. It bothered him for a while that he could not find one. But now he had, and he felt better; he could move on to something else, some other old wives’ tale to disprove. “I suppose while we’re whipping the rebelliousness out of them we’d do well to take out some of the superstition along with it. Hey?”

“Yes sir,” I said.

He went on talking and I went on saying Yes sir every time I heard his voice rise to a question. But I was not listening; I could not have repeated a word he said just then. My mind was back on the other side of the lake, where the reflection of the burning house grew brighter against the darkling sky—remembering, then and now:

When I had finished my recitation—“selected to be
burned. You have exactly twenty minutes”—the old man looked up at me out of a face that was older than time. He sank back into the chair. “Far,” he said; “It goes back too far,” and gave no other sign that he had understood or even heard what I said. I left the house, went back down the driveway to where the troops crouched in loose circles, preparing to eat the bread and meat, the midday meal they had brought in their haversacks.

Colonel Frisbie was waiting. “What did they say in there?” he asked.

“It was an old man.…”

“Well?”

“Sir?”

“What did he say?”

“He didnt say anything. He just sat there.”

“Oh?” the colonel said, turning to accept a packet of sandwiches from the orderly. This was officers’ food. “Well. Maybe for once we’ve found one who admits he deserves what he’s going to get. Or maybe it’s not his.” He opened the packet, selected a sandwich, and extended the rest toward me. “Here.” I shook my head but he insisted. “Go on. Take one.” I took one—it was mutton—then sat with it untasted in my hand.

The colonel ate rapidly and efficiently, moving his jaw with a steady sidewise thrust and taking sips from his canteen between bites. When he had eaten a second sandwich he took out his watch, opened the heavy silver case, and laid it face-up on his knee. Soon afterwards he picked it up again; he rose, brushed crumbs from the breast of his uniform, looked hard at the watch for a few more seconds, then snapped it shut with a sharp, decisive click.

“All right, Mr Lundy,” he said. “Time’s up.”

I reentered the house with the sergeant and ten of
the men. From the hall I saw the butler still standing in the parlor beside the fanback chair where the old man sat. At a sign from the sergeant, two of the soldiers took position on opposite sides of the chair, then lifted the old man, chair and all, and carried him through the hall, out of the door and across the porch, and set him down at the foot of the lawn, near the road and facing the front of the house. The butler walked alongside, his pink-palmed hands fluttering in time with the tails of his claw-hammer coat, making gestures of caution. “Keerful, yawl,” he kept saying in the cracked, off-key voice of the deaf. “Be keerful, now.” The napkin-end rabbit ears had broken. One fell sideways, along his jaw, and the other down over his face. He slapped at it from time to time to get it out of his eyes as he stood watching the soldiers set the chair down.

What followed was familiar enough; we had done this at many points along the river between Vicksburg and Memphis, the Walnut Hills and the Lower Chickasaw Bluff, better than two dozen times in the course of a year. The soldiers went from room to room, ripping curtains from the windows and splintering furniture and bed-slats for kindling. When the sergeant reported the preparations complete, I made a tour of inspection, upstairs and down—the upstairs had been closed off for some time now; dust was everywhere, except in one room which apparently was used by one of the servants. At his shouted command, soldiers in half a dozen rooms struck matches simultaneously. (A match was still a rarity but we received a special issue for our work, big sulphur ones that sputtered at first with a great deal of smoke and stench till they burned past the chemical tip.) Then one by one they returned and reported to the sergeant. The sergeant in turn reported to me, and I gave the order to retire. It was like combat,
and all quite military; Colonel Frisbie had worked out the procedure in a company order a year ago, with subparagraphs under paragraphs and a time-schedule running down the margin.

From the lawn, where we turned to watch, the house appeared as peaceful, as undisturbed as it had been before we entered. But soon, one after another, wisps of smoke began to laze out, and presently a lick of flame darted and curled from one of the downstairs windows. As I stood watching the flames begin to catch, I let my eye wander over the front of the house and I saw at an upper window the head and shoulders of a Negro woman. I could see her plainly, even the smallpox scars on her face. She did not seem excited. In fact she seemed quite calm, even decorous, sitting there looking out over the lawn where the soldiers by now were beginning to shout and point: “Look yonder! Look up yonder!”

I ran toward the house. The smoke and flames were mostly from the draperies and splintered furniture, I saw as I entered the hall again, but the smoke was thick enough to send me into a fit of coughing and I saw the staircase through a haze of tears. Climbing at a stumbling run I reached the upper hall. The smoke was less dense here; I managed to choose the door to the proper bedroom. It was not locked, as I had feared it might be. I was about to kick it in, but then I tried the knob and it came open.

The woman sat in a rocking chair beside the window. She had hidden behind some clothes in a closet while we searched and set fire to the house; then she had taken her seat by the window, and from time to time—the gesture was almost coy, coquettish—she raised one hand to wave at all the soldiers on the lawn. “Look yonder! Look up yonder!” they still shouted,
pointing, and she waved back, flirtatious. When I stumbled into the room, half blinded by smoke, she turned and looked at me without surprise; I even had the impression that she had been waiting for me to join her.

“Shame,” she said solemnly. She wagged a finger at me. “Shame on you, captain, for trying to burn Mars Ike’s fine house. I seen you.”

The tears cleared and I found myself looking into the woman’s eyes. They were dark brown, almost black, the yellowed whites flicked with little points of red, and completely mad. Trapped in a burning house with a raving lunatic: it was something out of a nightmare. I was wondering how to get her to leave, whether to use force or try to persuade her, when she solved everything by saying in a hoarse whisper, as if in fear of being overheard: “Sh. Less us git out of here, fo they burns it.” I nodded, afraid to speak because whatever I said might cause her to change her mind. I even bent forward, adopting her air of conspiracy. “Wait,” she said. “I’ll git my things.”

While the flames crackled in an adjoining room, really catching now, she got what she called her ‘things’—a big, brass-hinged family Bible and a cracked porcelain chamberpot with a design of overlapping rose leaves about its rim—and we went downstairs together through the smoke, which was considerably thicker now. “Look to me like they done already started to burn it,” she said. As we came out onto the lawn the soldiers gave a cheer.

But I did not feel heroic. For one thing, there had been small risk involved; and for another, even that small risk had frightened me badly. The house continued to smoulder and smoke, though little tongues of flame licked murmurous at the sills. This went on for what seemed a very long time, myself thinking as I
watched: Go on, burn! Get it over; burn! And then, as if in answer, a great billow of flame rushed from a downstairs window, then another from another and another, rushing, soaring, crackling like laughter, until the whole front of the house was swathed in flames. It did not murmur now. It roared.

Those nearest the house, myself among them, gave back from the press of heat. It came in a rolling wave; our ears were filled with the roaring until we got far enough back to hear a commotion in progress at the opposite end of the lawn, near the road. Turning, we saw what had happened.

The old man in the chair was making some sort of disturbance, jerking his arms and legs and wagging his head. He had been quiet up to this time, but now he appeared to be making a violent speech. The soldiers had crowded around, nudging each other and craning over one another’s shoulders for a better view. Then I got there and I saw what it was. He was having a stroke, perhaps a heart attack. The butler, still wearing the absurd napkin bandage about his jaws, stood on one side of the chair; he bent over the old man, his hands out toward him. On the other side were two women. One was lame and witchlike except that now her eyes were round with fright, the way no witch’s ever where; I had not seen her before. The other was the mad woman I had brought out of the burning house. She still clutched the brass-hinged Bible under one arm, and with the other she had drawn back the chamberpot, holding it by the wire handle and threatening the soldier onlookers with it. It was heavy and substantial looking, despite the crack down its curved flank—a formidable weapon. Brandishing it, she shouted at the soldiers.

“Shame!” she cried, not at all in the playful tone
she had used when she said the word to me in the house a few minutes before. She was really angry now. Her smallpox-pitted face was distorted by rage, and her eyes were wilder than ever. “Whynt you bluebelly hellions let him be? Wicked! Calling yourself soldiers. Burners is all you is. Aint you hurt him enough aready? Shame on you!”

By the time I got there, however, the old man was past being hurt by anyone. The frenzy was finished, whether it came from the heart or the brain. He slumped in the chair, his legs thrust forward, knees stiff, and his arms dropped limp at his flanks, inside the chair arms. The only sign of life was the harsh breathing and the wide, staring eyes; he was going. Soon the breathing stopped, too, and I saw in the dead eyes a stereoscopic reflection of the burning house repeated in double miniature. Behind me the flames soared higher, roaring, crackling. The lame woman dropped to her knees and began to wail.