But maybe Mattie Jameson did understand, as Pearl looked at her, for she was smiling and maybe thinking of Georgia and remembering that they had shared something back then, maybe without even knowing it.
THE GOOD WEATHER was a relief to Sherman, who couldn’t have been happier to be out of South Carolina, a swampland, to his thinking, with its spreading rivers and miserable, seditious souls. All that moldy wetness had aggravated his asthma. His chest breathed music—for days at a time he was like a walking harmonium. But when it was really bad, drawing breath was an act of will. The terror of his life was not having enough air. It was why he hated water, it was why he couldn’t sleep at night in a closed-up room as well as he could in the outdoors under a vast black sky, with the stars assuring him that there was enough volume of space and air for him to breathe.
He didn’t want Fayetteville to be another Columbia. He had sent down to the brigades his order that the people of this state were to be treated with respect. The kind of thing he had tolerated to the south must not be repeated. Generally, the North Carolinians had been reluctant secessionists and he did not feel they deserved the kind of punishment he had doled out down there. But, orders or no orders, there were sixty thousand men in this army and something more than a general order was required. He chose regiments of the Fourteenth Corps to guard the city—those he thought were the most disciplined of his boys, the least raucous, hailing generally from the northern Midwestern states of pious, obedient people.
Fayetteville was a handsome city, and not that much had to be destroyed. They had found that the old U.S. Arsenal, on a plateau overlooking the city, was a hive of Confederate ordnance—rifles, fieldpieces, thousands of barrels of gunpowder. Its foundries had been producing Napoleons and nine-pounders. Its machine shops had shelves and shelves of turned rifle stocks. Sherman ordered the entire complex to be readied for demolishment when the army was about to decamp. It’s a shame, really, he said to Colonel Teack. But we can’t spare a garrison to guard it. Riding around town, he pointed to a manufactory here, a textile mill there, and Teack dutifully wrote them down for destruction.
And then there was the matter of the murdered soldiers. Sherman had restrained Kilpatrick, who had vowed to match every Reb murder with one of his own. But now another instance was reported—one of the advance patrol entering Fayetteville had been captured by the retreating Rebs and shot and his body hanged from a lamppost. Generals Hardee and Wheeler both had been sent messages as to what would happen if this foul murdering practice continued. Sherman ordered a public execution of a Confederate prisoner chosen by lot.
There were perhaps three hundred secesh marching under guard with the army, prisoner exchanges at this point being few and far between. They had been encamped in a field to the east of Fayetteville and were sitting on the ground in rows when a cavalry sergeant rode up, whipped a lariat in circles overhead, and hurled it as far as he could. One of the prisoners, a scrawny pimply-faced boy with a long neck and a prominent Adam’s apple, who was known as his company’s clown, stood up, with a grin, and caught the rope, assuming this was one of those periods of relaxed hostilities when the two sides could have some sport. A moment later the lariat was around his waist and he was lassoed out of the ranks, his arms bound tightly to his sides. Some of the prisoners stood and started shouting and raising their fists. But dozens of cavalry were on guard, each of them with a rifle in hand.
This execution was duly effected with a solemn march to a central square, the drums beating and the unlucky prisoner marched through a gantlet of soldiers at attention and officers on horseback. Such public ceremony, with a hushed, sorrowing crowd watching, Sherman thought of as the best form of communiqué to the Southern generals as to what they might expect were their men to continue murdering Federal prisoners.
It had fallen to Wrede Sartorius to certify the death of the executed man. He removed the bloodied blindfold. One bullet had gone through the left cheek. The chest was riddled, and one shot had passed through the forehead. Wrede nodded and a burial squad laid the body on a wooden gurney and wheeled it away.
THE NEXT DAY was a Sunday, with the chastened Fayettevillians marching rather righteously to their churches, to be joined, somewhat to their discomfort, by men in blue. But it was a peaceful morning, the sky clear and the weather not entirely warm but windless. With the regiments everywhere encamped in an orderly fashion, and the troops taking their ease for the first time after the long marches of the previous weeks, the army was like some great herd of ruminants quietly grazing.
Even the contingents of bummers fanning out into the countryside were soft-spoken and courteous as they trooped into homes and gathered up blankets and feather pillows, rugs for their saddle cloths and tents, and all the provender they could find.
Many of the men went down to the river to wash their clothes or hired black women to do it for them, and it was this community of the hygienists who first saw the smoke rising from the funnel of a steam tug coming upriver from the coast. The shouting and waving began even before the boat appeared around the bend, and moments later, when the steam whistle was heard across the city, it had the effect of a joyous announcement: after their long isolation in enemy territory, contact had been made with other Union forces.
Sherman was as excited as everyone else. A week before, while in the town of Laurel Hill, he had sent a courier in civilian guise down the Cape Fear River to Wilmington, informing the Union general there of the army’s impending arrival in Fayetteville. Hearing the steam whistle now, Sherman knew his courier had gotten through. It told him, too, that the river was clear and that navy transports were at his disposal.
Down at the dock, troops had gathered around the boat to remark, none too kindly, on the cleanliness of the sailors’ uniforms.
WHILE THE TUG’S captain waited in an anteroom up at the Arsenal quarters, Sherman dictated letters as he paced back and forth, the adjutant writing madly to keep up with him. Teack brought in two more junior officers to secretary, so tirelessly was Sherman’s mind working. To Grant he described his intent to join with General Schofield’s Army of the Ohio at Goldsboro, which would bring their combined forces to ninety thousand men. He anticipated a major battle with the regrouped Rebel forces under General Joe Johnston, the one capable general they had. He did not want Johnston to interpose between him and Schofield, who was coming up from New Bern along the Neuse River, so time was of the essence.
To Stanton in Washington he bragged about the accomplishments of his army since Savannah—the railroads destroyed, the towns overrun, the armaments captured. Let Lee hold on to Richmond, he wrote, and we will destroy his country; and then of what use is Richmond?
Letters were put in the mailbag for the chief of staff, General Halleck in Washington, General Terry, in command of the forces in Wilmington, and, in fact, every Union general remotely connected with the campaign in the Southeast. I am back in the world, Sherman seemed to be saying. Perhaps my long Hegira since Shiloh will be over before summer, he wrote to his wife. Your arms, my dear Ellen, are my Medina. Back and forth he strode, scratching his head, rubbing his hands, as the pens flew to transcribe his words. To Colonel Teack, Sherman’s mania could mean only one thing: the General smelled victory.
But no detail was too small to consider. When he’d finished with his letters, Sherman called Teack aside. The boat is sailing back to Wilmington at six this evening, he said. That toothsome refugee Kilpatrick took away with him in Columbia—what the devil is her name? Marie Boozer, Teack said. Yes, Marie Boozer, Sherman said. I want her on that boat. And her mother as well. And see to it that Kilpatrick doesn’t swim after them.
GENERAL KILPATRICK HAD not seen Miss Boozer since the engagement with the Reb cavalry at Solomon’s Grove, when he led a successful counterattack in his underwear. Afterward he had been told by one of his men that she had been seen riding off dressed only in Kilpatrick’s battle flag. The loss of his personal battle flag was a general’s greatest humiliation, but for Kilpa
trick the loss of Marie and his colors together was a blow hardly to be endured. Where had she gone, and with whom? For it was unlikely she’d left the field of battle alone. Her bags and baggage had disappeared as well. Once in Fayetteville he had looked everywhere for her. He was a man obsessed. He thought if he found her to take her away to the South Seas and live with her on a beach. He would catch fish and shake coconut trees for their dinner. Or if she liked being a famous general’s wife he would finish the war in glory and run for President. If it was money she needed, he had that—he had contrived to amass quite a bit of it on this campaign. Back in South Carolina his men had found a caravan sneaking through the woods, an entire commercial bank’s treasury in two covered wagons. The safes were filled with silver bullion, gold coins, specie, bonds. Of course, most of it had been turned over to Sherman’s quartermaster. But my men deserved a reward, and so did I. It is no less than on the sea that there is a law of salvage.
Kilpatrick’s staff worried about him as he wandered about the camp in uncharacteristic thought, his head bowed, his hands behind his back, the rude facial features, so apt for a warrior in the field, having sagged into the mask of a dying voluptuary. He had sent several men to the city to scout about and find out what they could. Now a report came back to him: she and her mother had been seen at the riverside.
It was early evening, the sun shining coldly in a low quarter of the sky and the city blanched in a pale light. Kilpatrick galloped into town, scattering pedestrians in his path, and came up to the wharf beside the Wilmington tug, his stallion’s hoofs clumping on the wooden planks. A crowd had gathered to see the boat off. The gangplank had just been pulled aboard, and sailors at the prow and stern were prepared to haul in the lines. There she was at the railing, the glorious little whore, her hand on the arm of a disgustingly handsome young officer. They looked at him. Kilpatrick, on his steed, stood in the stirrups as if he might leap from the saddle to the deck. His horse wheeling restlessly, the conversation seemed to spin around like the hands of a clock. What was that she said? This major—Kilpatrick didn’t recognize him—taking dispatches to Washington, had kindly offered to escort Marie and her mother there on the ship connecting from Wilmington. The damn jittery horse would not stand still. Marie, he called, listen to me, I— But at that moment two piercing steamboat whistles blasted his ears. His mount reared. Marie laughed, and the gallant officer covered her tiny ears with his white gloved hands. They weren’t the only passengers—there were other Southern civilians aboard. They waved to the people on the dock, and the people on the dock cheered and waved at them. Slowly the boat came away from its berth. A lead of water widened. A sailor appeared at Marie’s side and handed her something—a package, was it? General! He heard her call, and his horse circled once again, and when he was turned toward the boat something flew through the air, came apart, fluttered in the breeze, and stuck to Kilpatrick’s face and chest. He heard her laughter, and the officer’s, and when he pulled whatever it was off his face the boat was out in the stream, white and trim against the green far bank. And Kilpatrick was left with his battle flag and the churned blue water where the boat had been, and the laughter of that heartless girl blowing off in the wind.
THE NEXT DAY gunboats and transports arrived with coffee and sugar for the army. They were to take back to Wilmington more of the fugitive whites who had attached themselves to the march. Sherman had initiated another one of his divestitures. He wanted nothing to encumber the coming campaign. The freed slaves who had followed along since Savannah now numbered more than twenty-five thousand useless mouths. They were to be organized into a separate march with whatever wagons and supplies he could spare and sent off to the coast under the direction of a few officers. Let them continue their exodus, Sherman muttered, but not in the direction I am going.
The numbers of sick and wounded accumulated on the march—they, too, received their orders, and a transport came up the river to take them away. And so a slow, sad procession of ambulances was seen winding its way through the streets of Fayetteville behind a military band. The band music was intended to honor the heroic sacrifice of the men in the wagons but, more practically, to mask their cries and moans. Nevertheless the citizenry did stop and stare in stunned contemplation of the costs of war.
At the docks, regimental surgeons and their assistants and army nurses oversaw the transfer of the patients on their litters up the gangplank to their berths aboard ship. Pearl went alongside the patients, talking to them over their moans, dabbing their fevered foreheads with wet compresses, holding their hands, smiling and assuring them they were going to where the hospitals up North would heal their hurts and send them home. Working beside her, Stephen Walsh marveled at Pearl’s composure. She was strong for one so young, and while he had seen his share of horrors in combat, he turned away from surgical procedures, and was demoralized to hear the sounds that pain made in the aggregate, and to see how many diseases there were to which an army of men were subject, and which rendered them pathetic and grotesque and difficult to look upon with their variety of torments—the skin lesions or deliriums or swellings or foul emanations—all of this in clear, godless mockery of the idea of human dignity. Pearl seemed to be able to see beyond the affliction to the person that had been and, with luck, might be again.
You’re a feisty miss, Pearl Jameson, he said one day when they’d been attending to the detritus of one of Colonel Sartorius’s field surgeries. To oblige yourself to see to these matters.
An you the big North city boy, Stephen Walsh. Else you would know what I see on this march ain’t what a slave child don’t see beginning wif the day she come into this world.
Stephen, as his burns healed, had applied for reassignment to the Medical Department so that he could be with her. Wrede Sartorius, always in need of help, had signed the necessary papers. Though medical duties did not usually attract volunteers and, in fact, transfers to the department were sometimes meted out as punishment, he did not question Stephen or inquire into his motives, nor did he give a moment to think what they might be. Instead, as the army left Columbia, he had Stephen sit up in the wagon beside him and drew a sketch: it was of a vertical box frame of some size, with a seat and restraining straps and a removable hand bar. The structure was to be floored and nailed to a wagon bed. Stephen did not need to be told the purpose of the rig. Wandering around the hospital that first night in Columbia, he had seen the soldier with the spike in his temple. The soldier, sitting on a table, had smiled at him and waved with a wiggle of his fingers. Later that night Colonel Sartorius had had the fellow strapped to a pallet on his back so that he could not turn in his sleep. But Stephen was surprised that, without inquiring, Sartorius assumed that he could carpenter. He could, in fact, and was handy with machine tools as well. He liked to work with his hands.
In the town of Cheraw, just shy of the border with North Carolina, the local armory included a machine shop and a lumberyard. Working from the sketch, Stephen set to his task. Outside, the town was going through the usual ordeal. He could hear the troops in their pillaging. Later they were put on parade, this happening to be the day of President Lincoln’s second inauguration. Cannon were lined up and the ground shook with a twenty-three-gun salute. Stephen measured and sawed and planed. He was as painstaking as if he were at work on the finest cabinetry. He took satisfaction in the assembly of this box that a man was to sit in. He walled in the framework only up to the waist. He used heavy woods, carefully chosen. He bolted the corners. He made the restraining straps from harness and cut the iron bar for the man to hold as the wagon swayed and lurched through the ruts and over the corduroyed roads.
How peaceful to concentrate on this specific thing. It assured you that it could be attained. It would find its form and be. In the field surgeries nothing seemed to be resolved unless by death. On the march there was no one place from which all others were measured. It was as if the earth itself rolled backward under one’s feet, it was as if the armies were strung from the floatin
g clouds.
When the box was finished he sat down in it and closed his eyes. The Colonel had trusted him to do this, and he had done it. He felt a surge of passionate loyalty to the man. And after Wrede had come around to see it and said it would do, Stephen Walsh laughed, because he felt as if he’d been awarded the Army Medal of Honor.
SARTORIUS AND HIS medical staff were billeted in a house at the eastern end of Fayetteville. The army had been in residence for four days, and tomorrow at dawn it would resume the march. By midnight everyone was asleep except Pearl and Stephen. They had come down from their attic billet to the kitchen because Pearl wanted a bath. They lit some candles and Stephen threw split logs and brush into the stove to get the fire up. He drew water from the well out back. One bucket he left standing, and the other he put on the stove to heat. Together they carried in the tin tub from the mudroom.
Pearl removed her clothes as Stephen filled the tub with the heated water and then put the second bucket on the stovetop. I like the water hot as hot can be, Pearl said. Ain’t nothin better’n a hot-water bath. He tried not to look, but she didn’t seem to mind being seen this way, though she had made sure the door was closed and the curtains drawn. Her hair had gotten long and she stood there tying it back with a ribbon. He poured in the second bucket, and she put a hand on his shoulder as she dipped a toe into the water and smiled at him. He had never known anything to render him so stupid and speechless as this slender white Negro girl standing naked in front of him.