The Warriors (6 page)

How vividly Jeremiah remembered the sweaty excitement on Matt’s face one autumn afternoon years ago—he could recall the color and texture of the sunshine, though not the date—the ebullience with which Matt whooped and pranced when he came home, celebrating the way he’d pounded out three aces with his bat, and singlehandedly carried his ball team of five black boys and four white ones to a victory.

Matt possessed a talent for drawing that he’d somehow discovered in himself when he was young. In his imagination, Jeremiah could still see some of the charcoal sketches Matt had sent home occasionally after taking his first berth on a Charleston cotton packet. The style of the drawings was bold, personal, and unforgettable. Though Jeremiah had seen less of Matt than he had of Gideon, he felt a closer bond with Matt, and prayed he was safe.

The cloud drifted away from the moon. He drew deep breaths. The Enfield on his shoulder actually weighed only eight pounds fourteen and a half ounces, but it seemed ten times heavier tonight.

He pulled the canvas sling off and laid the piece in the dirt, shutting his eyes until the attack of dizziness passed.

While he stood swaying in the center of the road, his right hand strayed to his belt, closed unconsciously, protectively over the piece of oilskin containing the precious letter he’d promised to deliver.

He opened his eyes. The small animal noises had stopped in the plum orchard. Or perhaps he didn’t hear them because of the ringing in his ears.

He licked the dry inside of his cheek, sniffed his own abominable, unwashed smell. He wanted to stop awhile but felt he shouldn’t. What if the farmer was hunting a horse, still intending to chase him?

Well, if that happened, let it. He’d just take to the fields, where he could easily elude one pursuer. He’d make faster progress if he had a short rest.

He sank down on the shoulder, the Enfield near his feet. For a brief moment a shameful despondency swept over him. Everything was failing. The war was lost, or would be soon, now that Lincoln had been returned to the Presidency of the North just a couple of weeks ago.

Lincoln hadn’t run as a Republican, but under some new label—the National Union party, Jeremiah thought it was. As his running mate, Abe the Ape had chosen a damned, ignorant Tennessee politician named Johnson who’d betrayed his own kind and sided with the North, claiming the Constitution forbade any other decision. The bottle forbade any other decision, Rose had commented a day or two before his death. Johnson, he said, was a drunkard.

Johnson would have no hand in carrying the war forward, though. Just as Jefferson Davis did, Lincoln personally picked and supervised his generals.

At first he’d chosen poor ones. The pompous Democrat, Little Mac McClellan. Old Burnside. Hooker, who had inexplicably lost his nerve at Chancellorsville and squandered a chance for a stunning victory.

But Jackson had been accidentally shot by men on his own side at Chancellorsville, and that battle had turned out to be less of a Southern triumph than it might have been, even though J.E.B. Stuart had led the infantry from horseback, flourishing his saber, jumping his stallion into enemy cannon emplacements, and creating on the spot, to the tune of “Old Dan Tucker,” a derisive song urging Old Joe Hooker to come out of the Wilderness and fight.

But then Jackson had perished of pneumonia. His presence had been missed when Lee made his bold foray into Pennsylvania a month later. Even Meade, who’d defeated Lee in the North, wasn’t merciless enough to satisfy Lincoln. The Yankee President wanted, and ultimately found, a supreme commander who fought like a madman: Unconditional Surrender Grant. Another drunkard!

But he’d been sober enough to crush Vicksburg in the west. Sober enough to take charge of the Army of the Potomac in March of this year, and begin to spend his soldiers by the thousands, the tens of thousands, as though they weren’t human beings but manufactured parts in a grinding, unstoppable war engine lubricated by blood and more blood.

The zest, the zeal that had led the South to stunning successes early in the war had all but vanished.

Jeremiah could recall one or another officer speaking with sad pride of Pickett’s rush up a gentle hillside toward a clump of trees on the final day at Gettysburg, where Lee had ultimately failed in his attempt to reprovision his army with Yankee grain and Yankee meat, win a daring victory on enemy ground, prove the folly of Davis’ policy of only fighting a defensive war on Southern soil, and perhaps frighten the enemy into suing for peace—all at one time!

The heroes such as Pickett were still praised, but few of the living pretended their heroism had made much difference. If the Confederacy hadn’t surrendered in fact, it had surrendered in spirit. Even the most ardent patriot now had trouble believing otherwise.

That the South was indeed facing defeat had been borne out by Fan’s last letter, written late in June and weeks in transit. The fury of the war had found Fan at last. But that hadn’t been the only sad news.

The letter contained tragic tidings about Gideon.

Having escaped death on the Peninsula in ’62, Jeremiah’s oldest brother had ridden unscathed through action after action—until chance took him to a place called Yellow Tavern on the eleventh of May. There, he and General Stuart had met Union horse soldiers of a kind they’d never encountered before.

Even a year earlier, under Pleasonton, the Yank cavalry couldn’t match the South’s. But it had been growing steadily—dangerously—better. Now, led by Sheridan, it had turned into a scythe sweeping across Virginia. At Yellow Tavern the blade had struck and killed Jeb Stuart.

Stuart’s men had run into fierce, competent opposition. The most dangerous Yanks turned out to be Michigan men, riders who sported red neckerchiefs, and whose regimental band played them into the charge with “Yankee Doodle.” They were commanded by an officer almost as flamboyant as Stuart himself—twenty-four-year-old George Armstrong Custer, the “boy general,” who led them, screaming,
“Come on, you Wolverines!”

Custer wore gold spurs, slept with a pet raccoon, and dressed his long curls with cinnamon oil. Jeremiah had read occasional newspaper accounts describing him as a man who expressed no great personal animosity toward Southerners; he was just out to whip them.

Like Stuart, he thrived on being called a daredevil. The personal motto he’d brought with him from West Point was “promotion or death”—though from the way he often defied caution in battle, the motto apparently meant
his
promotion would be earned by the deaths of others. A Democrat, he still managed to remain the darling of the Washington Republicans, the public, and a press that eulogized him as Napoleon’s successor.

At Yellow Tavern one of Custer’s Wolverines had shot Stuart out of the saddle. Another had engaged Gideon—or so his immediate superior wrote Fan the following week. During the combat, horseman against horseman, Gideon had reared back in his saddle to dodge a saber stroke, lost his balance, and tumbled to the ground. In a matter of seconds enemy troopers had swarmed around him, taking him prisoner.

So now Gideon was either dead, or alive and rotting in one of the prison pits of the North. Fort Delaware, or possibly Elmira in New York.

And as if that loss hadn’t been grievous enough, Fan’s letter, also reported that Hunter’s cavalry had swept through the Valley to Lexington. In the surrounding countryside, the Yankee horsemen had burned mills, granaries, farm implements—then buildings in the town, including the Military Institute, Governor Letcher’s residence, and other private homes. Only old Washington College had been spared at the last moment because some of Hunter’s men refused to torch an institution honoring the nation’s first President.

Fan tried to conceal her sadness when she wrote her youngest son. But it came through clearly in the final paragraphs which spoke of the privation sweeping the Confederacy as the enemy blockade bottled up port after port.

Profiteers had driven prices out of the reach of ordinary people. Fan commented that she had no good cotton stockings left, but would make do with old ones since she couldn’t afford eight dollars for a new pair.

She’d forgotten what coffee tasted like, she said. Southerners who had cornered the existing supply demanded up to forty dollars a pound.

And when her doctor had prescribed a dose of calomel, it was unaffordable at twenty dollars the ounce.

Even the physical look of the letter was testimony that the end was coming. There was no more writing paper to be had in Lexington, Fan noted. So an enterprising merchant had devised some from an old roll of wall paper. Inside the envelope, and on the back of each sheet, was a crudely printed floral pattern.

It was almost over.

Rose had been right. His wife and daughter undoubtedly needed Jeremiah’s help more than the army did. With the Rose women, he’d find a place where his presence would make a difference again.

But if he was going to find them, he couldn’t sit in the moonlight. Weary as he was, he had to keep moving.

With effort, he stood up. Reached down for the Enfield. When his fingers were an inch from the weapon, he heard a sound on the road behind him.

He straightened, searching the shifting silver shadows of the landscape.

He couldn’t see them; they were too far away. But he heard them.

Mounted men. Coming fast.

That farmer.
That damned, vengeful old man!

He hadn’t been satisfied to locate one horse and ride after Jeremiah alone—he’d had to roust out his neighbors and lead them in pursuit.

Jeremiah shivered, remembering the farmer’s warning.

As punishment for his desertion, he’d hang.

A
LMOST AS SOON AS
the appalling thought struck him, Jeremiah began to question whether it made sense. How the devil could an old man muster a party of neighbors in a rural area? There were damn few males left on homesteads anywhere in the South, unless you counted boys and old men. Horses were equally scarce, that much Jeremiah knew for certain.

Still, those
were
horsemen hammering toward him. Who could they be?

Georgia Home Guards? No, he’d heard they couldn’t find mounts either.

Enemy cavalry, then? Some of the ruffians who rode with the blond-bearded Yank Judson Kilpatrick?

He didn’t know. But he didn’t intend to linger in the middle of the road and find out. The riders were coming faster than he’d anticipated. The moon’s whiteness lit a rolling, phosphorescent cloud of dust at the crest of a hill he judged to be no more than half a mile away. Figures that seemed part man, part horse, appeared and vanished in the swirling dust.

Jeremiah grabbed the Enfield and sprinted for the ditch to the left of the road, where the brook ran. A small boulder hidden in the long grass tripped him. With a curse, he went tumbling down the incline. He splashed into the shallow water, remembering at the last moment to twist his body to keep the oilskin pouch and his cartridge box dry.

The dust cloud rolled toward him, the hammer of hooves growing steadily louder. As he lay with his right side in water that felt incredibly cold, he realized he’d dropped the Enfield when he fell.

He raised himself a little—the movement seemed to create a noise loud as a waterfall—just as the first of the horsemen thundered by. Once more a cloud cleared the edge of the moon. There, plainly visible on the shoulder, his piece shone bright.

Someone saw it. Yelled. The horsemen reined in, the leading riders turning back. As he sank down and lay still, Jeremiah tried to count the looming figures. A dozen, maybe more.

A man dismounted, cocking a pistol. He reached for the Enfield. He wore a forage cap much like Jeremiah’s.

“Enfield, Captain.” The man raised the piece to his chest. “I can feel stamping—C.S.A.”

Another man pointed. “Weeds are matted down right there. Whoever dropped it may be hidin’.”

Two more pistols were cocked. The horses fretted and stamped. A tall man rode through the group to the side of the road nearest the brook. He leaned over his horse’s neck, as if studying the ground. Then he called out, “You down there. You better come out.”

Jeremiah thought the voice had a soft, relaxed sound. A Southern sound.

The tall man drew a carbine from a saddle scabbard. “
I said, come out.”

Soaked, Jeremiah staggered to his feet and clambered through the grass to the road, his hands raised above his head.

The barrel of the tall man’s carbine glowed in a spill of moonlight. Water dripped from Jeremiah’s fingers, from the bandage on his thigh, the torn hem of his tunic, the have-lock attached to his cap.

“Captain?” one of the men exclaimed. “He looks like one of ours!”

They
were
Southerners. The moon showed him dusty cadet gray sleeves and trouser legs that matched his own, except for the yellow trim. This wasn’t as bad as being caught by Yanks—unless the men were as ferocious about desertion as that old farmer.

The captain waggled his carbine. Jeremiah glimpsed a double line of gold braid on his cap as he asked, “Who are you?”

Jeremiah pivoted slightly so the moonlight would show the chevrons on his sleeve. “Corporal Kent, sir.”

“Turn. I can’t see the badge on your cap.”

“I lost it, sir.” He’d learned a lesson from the farmer. He tried to sound calm, as if he had nothing to hide. “I’m from the Sixty-third Virginia, last with Reynolds’s brigade, Stevenson’s division—”

A horseman further back growled, “Didn’t know they was any Virginny boys with the Army of Tennessee, Cap’n.”

“Two or three regiments, I think.” The captain was a heavy man, with jowls. Moonlight on one cheek showed a scattering of pox scars like miniature black craters. “Corporal, give me the name of your corps commander.”

Cautiously, Jeremiah said, “You know we were Hood’s Corps, sir. But General Hood was leading the whole army, so our actual commander was General Lee. General Stephen D. Lee,” he added for authenticity.

The mutter of a couple of the men said they recognized that he was telling the truth. The captain raised the carbine to quiet them. Then he sharply added, “Were you with Bob Lee in Pennsylvania?”