The Railroad War (21 page)

After a time, though, her control returned. She rose from the armchair she’d placed next to his bed and bent down over her
father.

“Father?” she said, kissing him lightly.

He lay there unmoving, staring up at her with eyes that might or might not have seen her.

“Father, how do you feel? Can I bring you anything? How can I make you more comfortable?”

There was the slightest stir of tension in his throat muscles, but Pierce was not able to make a sound.

“He’s paralyzed,” she said to herself. “And I don’t know what to do.”

She stayed that way for a few minutes, wondering whether she should ring for somebody to come help her. While she watched
him, she saw movement. He managed a long, slow dropping of his lids. Then the lids opened again.

“Is that on purpose?” she asked, partly to him and partly to herself. And then to him: “Can you do that again?”

No response.

There was a hand bell on a table next to Pierce’s bed. She reached over and shook it hard and long. As she rang the bell,
she kept her eyes focused on her father’s face.

“There!” she said. “There it is again!” Her father’s lids had once again drooped shut, and there was a barely perceptible
tremor of his lips.

Moments later Ariel rushed in.

“What happened?” Ariel asked, breathless.

Miranda told her, even though she had hoped it would be Ash who responded to her rings. He would know what to make of her
father’s condition.

“Do you think he has regained consciousness?” Ariel asked after Miranda finished telling her what she had seen.

“I can’t think of any other explanation for it,” Miranda said.

Ariel stared, and Pierce obliged her by shutting and opening his eyes once more.

“Oh,” Ariel said with a shudder. To her, Pierce’s action was not hopeful; it was creepy.

And then his face almost seemed to animate, and his mouth moved as though he was trying to shape words.

“Father!” both women said simultaneously.

There was a sound in his throat.

“He wants to speak,” Ariel said.

“Where’s Ash?” Miranda said. “He’ll know what to do.”

“I don’t know,” Ariel said. “He vanished outside this morning, and he didn’t return for lunch.”

“Why did he have to go off,” Miranda said, annoyed, “and leave us alone?” She then wiped her father’s face with a dry cloth.
“What are you trying to tell us?” she said to him.

Pierce made no response. He had faded once more into unawareness.

Ariel and Miranda watched him silently for a time, and then Ariel said, “I’ll go find Ash, or Lam, or somebody.”

Miranda nodded absently. “Yes. Good idea,” she said.

Ariel made as though to leave.

But then, “No wait. Please!” Miranda cried. A wave of anguish had passed through her heart; the fear made her shudder.

“What, Miranda?”

“I have to tell you something,” Miranda said. Ariel looked at her. “I brought this on him.”

“You?” Ariel asked, staring without comprehension. “Not you, Miranda.”

“No, I
did,”
Miranda said. “It had to be me. Last night,” she went on, “after you left for bed, he and I talked…and we fought. A horrible
fight.” Tears began forming in Miranda’s eyes.

“A fight?” Ariel asked in wonderment. “What about?”

Miranda explained, and Ariel, with ever-growing disbelief, listened.

“And that’s all?” Ariel asked when Miranda was finished.

“Well, yes,” Miranda said.

“Don’t blame yourself, darling. He fought
everyone
yesterday. It wasn’t just you. It’s not your fault—especially for this.” She pointed at the inert form on the bed.

“Don’t you see? His words to me were so..
.final.
It wasn’t just a fight. He wanted me out of his life. He wanted me with Mother.”

“Isn’t that exactly where you’d really like to be? With Mother?”

Miranda didn’t answer that.

“Maybe he was just trying to be kind to you.”

“But if you could have only seen his face,” Miranda said. “His face said that he wanted to stay with me. His face said that
he needs me!”

Ariel looked away for a moment; she stared out the window. “He’s a hard one to figure out, darling. He always was, and if
he lives, he always will be. Don’t try to understand him. And don’t blame yourself.”

“He’s my father,” Miranda said. “He needs my love, and I failed him last night, when he most needed me. And now look at him!”

They both switched their gaze toward Pierce.

His eyes were open and alive with awareness. He focused first on Ariel, then on Miranda.

“Oh, my Lord!” Ariel said.

He was trying to speak, but words still could not come.

“He heard us!” Miranda said. “He was listening! He heard me tell you about last night.”

“Do you know something, darling,” Ariel said, more than a little exasperated with her sister’s persistent harping, “I doubt
that he’s able to hear anything.”

“But he wants to tell me something,” Miranda went on, racing full speed down the track she’d set herself on. “Look at him,”
she cried. “See? Look at his face. He wants to explain!”

She was right about at least one thing. There was motion again in his face, his features were more animated than they had
been since she had begun her vigil that morning.

“What is there to explain, darling?” Ariel asked.

“Whether I should go to Mother or stay here,” Miranda said. “I have to know what he wants me to do. I have to know his last
wish for me!” She stopped, then resumed. “I have to know that, because he is…” She did not finish the thought, for in her
heart she felt he could hear her every word.

“What difference does that make?” Ariel, always the practical one, asked. “If he survives this, you must stay with him. If
the worst happens, do as you will.”

But Miranda who was not far from hysteria now, ignored her. Her father was dying, and she had unfinished business with him.
The decision she wanted from him touched her like fire. She felt this was as important a decision as she would ever make in
her life.

“Father,” she said, turning away from Ariel and back to Pierce, “you were listening, weren’t you?” She stared at him hard
and long, searching for a sign.

At last one came. His lids moved. When that happened, she drew in her breath slowly, brought her face down within inches of
his, and spoke into his ear.

“You heard, didn’t you, Father? And you will tell me what you want me to do, won’t you?” she said. “And you can give me an
indication of that with your eyes?”

She waited. In time the lids moved.

She looked at her sister. “There!” Miranda said triumphantly.

“You’re making too much of this,” Ariel warned.

“No!” Miranda insisted. “I’m not at all. Don’t you see? I’ve
reached
him!”

But Ariel, fearing that further denial would only provoke Miranda more, turned and left the room, hoping to find the men.

“Shall I leave and got to Mother?” Miranda whispered in her father’s ear after Ariel had departed.

She waited, watched.

There was no movement on her father’s face.

“Shall I stay here, then? In Georgia?”

She watched.

Slowly the dying man’s lids flickered, dropped, opened.

Miranda trembled. The next words she spoke ever so slowly and with greatly exaggerated clarity. “You are telling me to disregard
your words last night?” she said in his ear. “You didn’t mean them, did you?”

Another wait. Another watch. Finally there was another movement of his lids, the barest flutter. Then Pierce stared into her
face with eyes full of emptiness and pain.

He had given her the sign that she’d wanted.

Then, in blessing and farewell, Miranda lifted his head in her arms and cradled him, showering his face with kisses. After
that, she pulled away from him, satisfied. She returned to her chair and collapsed into it, waiting for the others to arrive.

Pierce Kemble died that night, without, in his brother Ash’s opinion, ever having regained consciousness after his fall down
the stairs. In this, Ariel and Lamar concurred.

But Miranda maintained otherwise. She was convinced that she and her father had reached one another during that long and harrowing
last afternoon of his life. And long after she had returned to Atlanta, she continued to believe that Pierce had communicated
with her.

Pierce Kemble was buried in the family plot on Kemble Island on Monday, July 27, 1863.

Okolona, Mississippi lay approximately a hundred miles north of Meridian as the crow flies, and about ten miles more than
that on the Mobile & Ohio Railroad. That made Okolona almost an eight-hour journey by train from Meridian at an average speed
of fifteen miles an hour.

The train that was carrying Major Noah Ballard and Captain William Hottel to Okolona consisted of a locomotive, a tender,
a flatcar with a barricade of cotton bales along its sides, and a single passenger car. In the best of worlds, it would have
made better time, but the condition of the tracks and roadbeds dictated otherwise. Much of the Mobile & Ohio track north of
Meridian had been wrecked by raids from General Grenville Dodge’s cavalry. The tracks had been repaired, but not nearly up
to peacetime standards. To do that was impossible. Not a single piece of track had been manufactured in the states of the
Southern Confederacy since 1861.

Under those conditions, fifteen miles an hour was excellent time.

The train left Meridian at five in the morning. In addition to its two passengers, it carried a platoon of riflemen (a squad
on the flat car and another squad in the passenger car). They were there for protection against the threat of General Dodge’s
cavalry. Federal horse soldiers were ranging unhindered ever closer to Meridian, attacking and destroying any target that
pleased their fancy.

The presence of the squad of guards put Noah Ballard in a cold fury as he sat on his seat and watched the farms and countryside
roll by. He didn’t regret having them—he was not a fool—he regretted the need. The Confederacy was contracting. What was theirs
last week belonged to the northerners now. And a simple journey like the one he was on today had to be conducted timidly,
almost apologetically.

All things considered, the prudent thing would have been to undertake the journey under cover of night, but Noah had vetoed
that idea. The prudent thing, he reasoned, would be pretty much the same as admitting defeat. As far as Noah was concerned,
the territory from Meridian north to Tupelo was still contested.

Noah Ballard’s cold rage had started on the morning of the savage train wreck between Jackson and Meridian, a wreck that had
been engineered by a Union spy. His rage had been building with ever more alarming reports of rape and pillage by the troops
of General Sherman. The Yankees were systematically laying waste to Jackson and all the lands around it. That they were winning
the battles Noah could accept. But the harm the Union armies were doing to the land, the towns, the productive capacity of
the nation, and to the women and children and old people—
that
was unforgivable.

This wasting of the South was not a consequence of fair and honorable defeat in armed combat—it was a crushing humiliation.
And that Major Noah Ballard could only take as a personal insult. It was an assault upon his own dignity. It was an assault
against the right order of things—tantamount to saying that anything is permitted in war because civilized limits and boundaries
don’t hold any longer. The result was dead mothers, mutilated children, and starving old people.

It was said that the Union brass believed the devastation would shorten the war, but to Noah Ballard, the opposite was the
case. With word of each additional outrage, his resolve grew. He would fight on until he had nothing left to fight with. And
he was sure everyone else in the South would act likewise.

If the war turned out to last a hundred years, so be it.

When Noah was not nourishing his fury at the destruction of Mississippi and the humiliation of the South, he worried about
Jane Featherstone. Noah had secured a place for her on the last train out of Jackson on the sixteenth of July, and she had
given him her word she would use the space reserved for her. But Jane was not on the train when it arrived in Meridian, and
she had not made an appearance in the days following Joe Johnston’s exodus. Jane was resourceful, Noah knew, but she was nevertheless
a woman, attractive and vulnerable, and Sherman’s savage hordes were not famous for observing the sanctity of womanhood. Noah
cared about Jane, and he missed her.

Captain Hottel sat a few rows up from Noah, chatting with the sergeant of the squad of guards. His face was animated, and
the sergeant was listening with rapt attention. The captain was quite a charmer.

Noah had not seen much of the captain during the days following the retreat from Jackson, and that had suited Noah just fine.
It wasn’t because he disliked Hottel; rather, he didn’t want to have to deal with the possibility that Hottel might invade
the territory Noah had come to call his own—the railroads that remained available to Joe Johnston in eastern Mississippi.
But it turned out that Noah had nothing to fear on that account. William Hottel had devoted his entire energies to finding
the missing railroad equipment.

The expedition they were on now was a demonstration of the success of his efforts.

When Hottel had returned to General Johnston’s headquarters, his report had played down his success. He had told Noah and
the general that, yes, he’d had some luck. Yes, there were locomotives hidden here and there both north of Meridian and north
of Jackson. But perhaps, he’d gone on to say, there ought to be a report independent of his, a report based on another personal
examination of a small but representative number of the locomotives. More than one head was needed, he claimed, to judge how
to dispose of them.