The Last Crossing (39 page)

CHARLES
I believe that Straw’s sudden terrible ailment has done much to undermine the morale of Grunewald, Barker, and Ayto. For
the past week, I sensed their anxiety that they, too, might be stricken with illness. There was much muttering about smallpox. So when my brother decided, after wasting a week near the former site of Chesterfield House, to alter our plans and set out north for Fort Edmonton rather than the American whisky posts to the west, the men greeted this announcement with approbation. They fear the Blackfoot will have been made restive by the outbreak of smallpox and will wreak summary retribution on any white men they encounter.

When I challenged Addington for reversing a plan we had agreed to, his excuses were so feeble as to be derisory. He said that Edmonton is a likely place of information, a great centre of British commerce, a magnet for all the plains tribes. “Go to the market, if you wish to hear the news,” he proclaimed.

I did my best to reason with him. Yes, I said, Fort Edmonton is indeed a British possession, a possession in regular communication with England. Remember, Father wrote to them many months ago, requesting any news they might have of Simon and the reply was that they had none. Would it not be a better use of our time to visit the whisky posts with which Father had not been in communication?

With cold officiousness, he replied, “You are my subordinate, Charles. It was understood by Father that my experience in military matters gives me precedence in the field. It does no good for you to question my every decision. What do you know of conducting and commanding an expedition?”

“Nothing,” I said. “But I do recognize this one lacks a brain.”

He threatened to strike me. I invited him to. The men crowded round. I saw Ayto grin. Grunewald and Barker were eager for fisticuffs. I walked away.

Addington’s moods, his desires, rule the day. He has become obsessed with ticking off the sights other travellers have noted. His motive in going to Fort Edmonton is transparent. All English gentlemen adventurers make a visit there, and just as a Grand Tour of the continent would be incomplete if one missed certain highly celebrated spots, Addington’s movements in the North-West must not depart
from custom. Hence Fort Edmonton. Palliser, Cheadle, Butler all gazed upon the sublime Rockies. So in good time will Addington. He shall insist upon it.

After Addington’s and my angry encounter, Lucy found me standing on the bank of the Saskatchewan, brooding. She slipped a hand inside my shirt, laid it to my chest while I gazed upon the brown and sullen water. It had a direction, and I had none.

CUSTIS
Dr. Bengough was up to see me again today, sat on a chair beside my bed, back humped and shoulders touching his earlobes like an old vulture with the smell of rotten meat in his nostrils. This morning he said, “I knew from the beginning it wasn’t cholera. The cholera movement resembles rice water, clear and copious, whereas yours are sanguinary.”

I told him, “Well, I’m plenty copious.”

“Pectin and cheese, Custis, you must eat your pectin and cheese. God helps those who help themselves.”

That’s been my fate for a month now, lie abed and listen to Bengough talk bowels and Aloysius talk blood. “He’s taken four pint out of you, Custis, thick and black as blood pudding.” Thank God, I prevailed upon Aloysius to open up the Stubhorn again so I wouldn’t have to abide him hovering about, clucking and fussing. But he saw to it I wasn’t left entirely bereft of tender ministrations. He bought me a whorehouse commode from Catch-all Kate and hired Black Pompey’s little son, Garrison, to give me a shoulder to the johnny whenever my guts clutch, which is frequent. Bengough sees to it the boy ties a knot in a string every time I evacuate. He’s a thorough man of science, Bengough. Yesterday I did fourteen knots, and today I’ve already run up six and it hasn’t reached noon yet. The boy’s got a full-time job knotting string and paring cheddar.

I could use some distraction, but Garrison doesn’t talk much. The orphan state is a melancholy one, and tending to a white man and his stinks is bound to lower your spirits even further. I’ve only got one smile out of him so far. That was when I begged the boy’s clay-shooter marble and showed him how it’d fit in that old wound in my leg like a stopper in a bung hole. “Look at that,” I said. “If I was my old fat self, I could make it wink like an eye.”

Time lies heavy on a man’s hands without whisky. Bengough and Aloysius won’t bend on that question, so I’m kept dry. A little whisky might help keep me from thinking of Lucy Stoveall and her Englishman. That’s a bitterer pill to swallow than Bengough could ever force down my throat. It seems strange to me now that I ever hoped to overcome Charles Gaunt’s handsome face with what I got to offer, but I was bound to try. I brought Lucy Stoveall back to him and I shed blood to do it. I suppose that’s what Bengough would call irony. I count myself lucky for the megrim, and then the fever that took hold of me on the ride back to the Gaunts’ camp because it made everything blur. Just a day or two ago, Aloysius remarked to me Lucy Stoveall looked fierce as a queen coming home from war, the Kelsos vanquished. I have no memory of that, but if I did, I’d be burdened with remembering her face when she and Charles Gaunt saw each other again.

When I’m not squatting on the commode, goose-bumped and shivery, I try to distract myself with the Good Book. Bengough is an unbeliever, which makes him curious about my affection for Scripture and almighty persistent in his questions on the whys and wherefores of my Bible reading.

I have trouble explaining it to myself, but I once tried to answer him. “The first time I read the Bible cover to cover, I was in an army hospital in Washington,” I said. “I had a mind to make myself believe every single word was true. The second time I read it to satisfy myself it was all a lie. Now I read it to weigh both sides, and find some truth.”

Bengough nodded. “And what in the Good Book have you decided is absolutely and indisputably true?”

I thought for a moment. “That verse that says ‘Jesus wept.’ ”

Bengough sat stroking his nose with his gloved forefinger. “And was it some intimation of mortality in that military hospital – was that what led you to examine spiritual matters?”

“Yes,” I said. But that was a lie. It wasn’t fear of death. I was empty. As empty as I am now. I’d lost my faith, in the dark, tangly woods of the Wilderness. There I denied Mr. Burns of Gettysburg and everything he stood for, just like Peter did Christ.

I wouldn’t have gone to war if Louella hadn’t died the year before. She would have seen to it I remained at home milking and ploughing. Louella and me were ill-suited from the start, but a barren womb made our differences worse. A childless man and woman need to be friends, and our natures were opposed. If the quinsy that carried her off hadn’t swelled her throat shut, I believe my wife would have died cursing me. I saw it in her eyes when she passed over.

A thirty-five-year-old widower with no prospects. Just as it had Ulysses S. Grant, the coming of war freed me. The general gave up the life of a counterjumper in a leather goods store in Galena, and I walked away from staring up a mule’s ass from dawn to dusk. I signed the muster in July of 1861 and walked away from that hateful farm in Indiana and its hateful memories, left it in my brother-in-law’s care. Never went back.

That fine, brave summer of bands and parades, General Gibbon set a black Hardee hat on my head, put me in a frock coat, kersey blue trousers, and white gaiters. I figured I wouldn’t wear them more than six months. The war would be over by then or so we thought.

Funny to think Gibbon, a North Carolinian, was such a dyed-in-the-wool Union man. Born in the North I fought for the North, that was the long and the short of it for me. Gibbon was a mystery, a man who won the battle in his heart before he ever took it into the field. It takes a brave man to oppose his homeland and his kin for the sake of an idea. Gibbon had principles. I had none, only wanted to escape my dreary situation. But one affray was enough to teach me that a single drop of blood spilled was a sinful outrage unless it could be justified. Soon the blood was raining down thick and fast all about me. Bull Run followed by Second Bull Run. At South Mountain, we
Western Yankees were drenched in it, mired in it, soaked to the tops of our white gaiters in it. South Mountain earned us the nickname the Iron Brigade. Braced by our hard name, braced by that hard Southerner Gibbon, we fought on, wading through the slaughter of Antietam, Fredericksburg, a dozen smaller horrors.

Then came the day Mr. John Burns of Gettysburg came out of the town to join us on McPherson’s Ridge. This little old civilian, seventy-five years old if he was a day, stomping up to our lines in an old-fashioned swallowtail coat, brass buttons rubbed bright, a black stovepipe hat on his head, a hunting rifle slanted over his shoulder. I remember how word of his arrival ran up and down the ranks. “Reinforcements!”

“Mr. Burns of Gettysburg has come to smash up Lee!” A few of the boys laughed, but the most of us tossed our hats high in the air and hurrahed him, ran to clap him on the back. I was one of those who got close enough to touch him. Felt his bony shoulder blade through the cloth of that down-at-heels swallowtail coat. A veteran of the War of 1812, Mr. Burns had sniffed the peril, knew the fate of the Republic hung in the balance that day, and left his parlour to defend it, to stand with us at Willoughby’s Run.

My face ran with tears at the sight of him falling into the ranks of the 7th Wisconsin, struggling to uncrook his bent spine, pull himself as straight as he stood fifty years before when he faced the British. Maybe Mr. Burns was a fire-breathing abolitionist, or maybe he believed the Republic was the light of the world and its holy salvation. I don’t know which. But his reason, whatever it was, had to have been deep in the marrow of his bones to risk the shattering of them at Gettysburg.

Mr. Burns heartened me that morning more than flags and bugles. The winter before, I’d been edging my way towards his kind of commitment. In the long doldrums of winter quarters some of the young soldiers with schooling were forming lyceums to discuss politics and the conduct of the war. They arranged debates. I listened close and learned the fancy turns of phrase of high-toned argument – the affirmative, the negative, the “be it resolved.” “Be it resolved that the constitutional relations of the Rebel states be fixed by Congress only.” “Be it resolved the Rebel states be reduced to territories.” I’d
always had a taste for oratory and speechifying, and so I never missed a meeting. I’d been sprayed by the spit of word-walloping backwoods politicians and camp preachers, ranters, roarers, suspender-poppers and hat throwers, men who howled to God or the ghost of George Washington to rain brimstone on the Episcopalians or the die-hard Jacksonians. But these men talked quietly, racked their brains to make their meaning clear, often paused before marching into the next sentence. One night I heard two privates argue the case for “The rights of the South” and damn near carry the vote. It made me proud, an army that could consider the hearts of the enemy.

Plenty of muckety-muck officers hated the lyceums, hated ordinary soldiers in time of war wrangling about what the meaning of it all was. But they were wrong. They had no right to ask us to die like dumb cattle led to the butcher’s knife by Judas steers. Those days I was reading every newspaper I could lay hands on, mulling over the meaning of our agony. I hadn’t turned to the Bible, not yet.

Hell, I even bucked up courage and spoke once. The question was, “Do the signs of the times point to the downfall of our Republic?” I took the affirmative.

A still night, snow sifting down on the assembly. Standing near a torch you could hear the sizzle of the big flakes melting, the sound of white moths frying in the flame. Men hooded in blankets to keep the snow off, pine knots blooming fiery flowers in the dark, everybody silently turning over what was said. Men pondering.

I was the last to speak. Signs of the fall of the Republic were plain in the army like damp on a plaster wall, I said. Too many officers got commissions by pulling political strings, and if it wasn’t stopped, the sheep would soon be in charge of the lions. Another thing. It was wrong for provost marshals to drive the broken back into battle with jabs of the bayonet, screaming they must “Show blood!” before they could retreat. We were free men and should not be treated in such a way. Provost marshals were no better than slave drivers flogging Negroes to pick cotton. It was an insult to citizen soldiers.

I could sense the men harkening, still not sure whether their silence was for me or against me. I took a breath and went on. I said rich
men buying other men to serve for them was the worst of disgraces. If the rich, who had gained so much from the Republic, wouldn’t fight for it, that was proof enough it was rotten. I told them I didn’t want to stand beside a bounty man who’d sold his body for three hundred dollars because when danger came he’d sell mine out for even less. Some said this was a rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight. It was the duty of every soldier to give the lie to this, lay claim to this war as rightfully his own.