It’s herself you’re thinking of?
I fear stepma’m will not want to live no more.
You told me she never did much for her slaves.
Nosir, she didn’t. Didn’t care, didn’t stop’m when he sold families apart, the pap, didn’t stop’m when he took the lash to someone. She wasn’t bad like him, yellin and screamin, she just didn’t think about nothin. A weak thing. Liked to play her piano and let the world be.
Well, now it’s come home to her.
Stephen Walsh, won’t you hep me find where they keep the captured mens?
He shook his head. Oh Lord. And what will you be doing if you do find him?
Don’t know.
Aren’t you tired? I’m tired. Let’s find somewhere to lie down. And we’ll talk about it in the morning.
They held hands as they walked to the house. Pearl looked back across the road. It so witchy how all along the march she has worried the dead to find her son and now she has found him, Pearl said.
PEARL WOKE HIM before dawn and they were out on the wet road, riding one of the wagon mules bareback. She held Stephen Walsh about his waist. Only the birds were up, singing in the swampland and leaving shadows of themselves as they flew across the road so swift that their color didn’t register. Pearl knew the songs back in Georgia, but these were unknown to her. They were not purely tuneful but softer, twittier songs, like the birds knew full well what a fearful war was around them.
The column stretched back forever, it seemed, the wagon trains lined up on the road and the regimental camps in the pines on either side. Pickets out on the flanks, a cooking fire here and there.
Stephen felt her arms around his waist as her trust in him. He could feel her breasts pressed to him and the beating of her heart. Or was it his own? Whole hours went by in which he accepted this state of intimacy without thinking about it, just living in it, as if Pearl had led him there by the hand. It had become so naturally assumed that the worst thing he could do, he knew, was to express his feeling for her—it would alarm her, frighten her. He wouldn’t have to speak of it to make sure it was there and that she knew it. She knew it as long as it went unspoken.
He was a changed man in having forsworn his habit of melancholic reflection. Never had he opened himself to his life to this extent, living it with no questions, simply living it, though swept up in this nomadic war with its bizarre triteness of death. He had a new strong faith that he would survive and that he and Pearl Jameson would go on. How extraordinary that this girl had become the organizing principle of his life. Yet they were only keeping company. He smiled. What you did, when another person was at the center of your being, was to accommodate her wishes no matter what your own judgment might be.
As the mule clopped on, and as the darkness began to pale and the sounds drifted through the trees of men and animals beginning to stir, the pine trees themselves, as they became distinguishable, seemed to be taking the darkness out of the night and invoking it in themselves. And then, with the first touches of the sun in the treetops, the mule rounded a bend and Stephen pointed to an open field. The encampment of Reb prisoners was unmistakable. These soldiers had no fly tents and no weapons stacked, and they lay about on the ground or sat with their arms around their knees, as dispirited an assembly of men as Stephen had ever seen. In fact, they were not wholly men—in their rags and makeshift uniforms many of them were no more than boys. He felt old looking at them. The few standing pickets at the perimeters testified to the unlikeliness of this sad host attempting to escape.
Stephen and Pearl dismounted, tied the mule to a wagon trace, and without ceremony or finding a need to explain themselves went into the field to walk among the prisoners. The guards watched them idly, yawning or nodding good morning. If there was an officer in command, he was still asleep in the sidewall tent before a stand of pines at the far end of the field.
The youth of so many of the prisoners suggested to Pearl that she might be on the right track. When questioned, the boys spoke of General Hardee, who had been skirmishing with Sherman’s troops since back in Georgia. They were unfailingly polite, answering Pearl’s inquiries with yes ma’ms and no ma’ms. Poor shivering things, Pearl said quietly to Stephen, skairt of their own shadows. They are well chastened for the years coming when the black mens workin their land will get wages or their neighbors are black farmers.
And then, of course, she found him, Jamie, the brother two. He was alone, huddled up with his arms folded, and he was shivering though sitting in a patch of morning sun, and the sun on his face showed his thin, hollow cheeks and skin marred with scabs and dirt under his nose, and dull eyes with pink rims and hair that had grown longer than she remembered it, and dirtier, not blond anymore, and caked with mud. Brudder two, Pearl said, you are a mess. I can hardly bear to look on you.
He gazed up at her with no recognition.
You comin with us. Come on, get up now.
It was a struggle just getting him to comprehend. Stephen yanked him to his feet, and while the other prisoners watched idly he held the boy by the arm and led him to the road. But at this point a guard stopped them and told them to wait, and back across the field an officer, mounted, was riding through the assemblage of prisoners scattering them right and left. He came up, swung off his horse, and demanded to know what was going on.
Stephen Walsh saluted. He was aware that the officer, a lieutenant, was hatless and half unbuttoned, with the galluses hanging out from under his tunic. It was not a sought-after duty, guarding prisoners. Sir, he said, we have orders from Colonel Sartorius of the Medical Department to remove diseased prisoners from your encampment.
The officer took in Stephen’s lapel insignia, the Department caduceus, and looked Pearl up and down. Pearl was wearing her army nurse’s cape, which Emily Thompson had given her, and a private’s hat by which she proposed to further authenticate her military service. Why has the Colonel given this order?
This man is sick, Pearl said. You see his eyes, you see his skin? He’s got a catching disease.
A what disease?
I ain’t sick, Jamie Jameson said.
Sir, Stephen said quickly, the man has an infectious erysipelas that can lead to death. In such cases the patient is isolated lest he infect everyone around him with the fever. It has been known to ravage whole regiments.
What do I care if these Rebs catch his disease? the officer said. More power to it.
Sir, it doesn’t stop at blue uniforms.
The officer jumped back, with a worried glance at the prisoner.
Nor at officers, Pearl put in.
I ain’t sick, said Jamie Jameson.
The officer glanced at him with contempt. Get him out of here, he said, as if the order was his rather than the Medical Department’s.
IF HE’D THOUGHT to ask for a written order we were finished.
You do learn your words, Stephen Walsh, Pearl said. She hugged him.
I ain’t sick, Jamie Jameson shouted. They were walking him behind the mule, with his wrists tied and the other end of the rope wrapped around Stephen’s hand.
Pearl looked back at him. Shut your mouth, stupid brother, she said. Can’t tell what’s good from what’s bad.
He had recognized Pearl by now. Don’t need to hear fum no nigger gal.
They didn’t bother to prepare him in any way, but when they were back with the medicals they located Mattie, who was in the house, and they untied the boy and sent him in there for their reunion. Not something I want to hear or see, Pearl said.
EVERYONE WAS GETTING ready to march. Everywhere in the woods and fields, bugles sounded the order. Sartorius, coming from the farmhouse, looked at the sky and pulled on his gloves. From the road came the cries of the teamsters, and the creak and rumble of wagons. The regimental medical ambulances were, one by one, leaving the yard to join the procession. Pearl had collected Mattie Jameson’s few belongings in a sack and ran into the house to find her and her son sitting close together on a sofa, Mattie
crying and holding his hand and staring at him, and Jamie Jameson looking uncomfortable.
Pearl took the boy aside. When we are gone, you best stay out of sight of the prisoners marching. Where the Rebel wounded have been put in the barn back here, they are free now, with your own officers to take care of them and even some little food. You and your mama stay with them apiece, and then you find a way to get yoursels back to Georgia.
Howmi gonna do that?
You get down to Columbia. Your mama knows Miz Emily Thompson there who will hep you.
Pearl took the knotted handkerchief out of her skirt pocket, untied it, and gave the boy one of her precious gold eagles. He looked at it in his hand. This is twenty dollar Fed’ral.
That’s right, brudder two. It will keep you awhile. And you will have your whole life to ’member it was me, Pearl, got you your freedom to go home.
The boy turned the eagle over in his hands. That’s my Roscoe’s coin from a life of nigger work I given you, Pearl said. And nothin you will ever do in your life will be enough to pay us back. I jes want you to know that.
Pearl turned to Mattie and took her hand. Bye-bye, stepma’m. I thank you for the reading lessons. Your boy will take you home to Fiel’stone. Maybe some of the slave quarters is still standin to start you out in.
On the way to the door Pearl said to the brother two, Your mama ain’t always right in the head. You take care of her, hear? Or I will come back and see to you.
And out the door she ran.
V
EARLY SUNDAY MORNING HUGH PRYCE, RIDING UP with General Carlin’s division at the head of Slocum’s left wing, knew something was wrong. It was the kind of raw spring day when the energies of rebirth seem ominous and one’s own blood races nervously in its course. The sky was a quivering brilliant blue and everything of the visible earth had a preternatural color to it: woods and lowland, rocks and grass, and even the mud in the road—all in the superb self-definition of a world Pryce felt was about to explode. Of course, he had real evidence for his premonition. There had been reports the night before of heavy Rebel troop movements in the neighborhood. Though these had been discounted by Generals Sherman and Slocum—Sherman having thought so little of them as to have ridden off to join General Howard’s wing a good dozen miles to the east—Brigadier General Carlin’s order of march anticipated battle. And Carlin himself worriedly peered ahead even as his skirmishers were moving out against the Reb cavalry to test the position.
The advance brigades were approaching the junction of the two roads, the one leading east to Cox’s Bridge and Goldsboro, the other diverging up toward Bentonville. Within the forks was a plantation the officers knew as the Cole place. A mile beyond, to the northeast, was a thick woodland of black pine. Whoever Cole was, his fields, marshes, and woods were about to be contested, not for their value, not for possession of them, but simply because two armies were met there. A barrage of artillery fire from Carlin’s right flank stopped his advance brigades, and the day was announced.
ONLY WHEN THE troops had been deployed and their earthworks hastily thrown together—Carlin’s division, bolstered by brigades of Brigadier General Morgan—did the Union commanders begin to suspect the true size of the Confederate force. General Slocum had come up to review the position and ordered an advance. Carlin’s and Morgan’s troops rose from their entrenchment, charged, and were met by blistering infantry fire, not only from their flank but on a long line stretching to the pinewoods, which seemed to light up with the explosion of musketry. The Federals fell back. Pryce stood with the two generals, who watched as an adjutant drew on a map laid out on the ground the outlines of the Rebel position deduced from the reports of field officers. The line drawn suggested to Pryce the form of the Big Dipper. Or a frying pan. And they were in it.
Pryce stood by silently scribbling his notes, secure at least that in such moments of crisis, despite his height, he had become almost invisible to the officers. Slocum, whose mustache and closely trimmed brown hair framed a face recessively chinned and clerklike, gave orders to bring up the full complement of the two corps that made up his wing. Then he beckoned to one of his staff officers and walked away with him a bit, speaking quietly with his hand on the young officer’s shoulder. Pryce watched as the officer, a lieutenant, nodded, saluted, and leapt on his horse. In a moment the fellow was gone off on a great detour, back and around the Rebel line. Pryce watched until he could no longer see him, but the direction was clear: he was riding east, presumably to Cox’s Bridge and Goldsboro, where General Sherman had gone to meet with the other wing of his army.
BY EARLY AFTERNOON the word had come miles back down the road to where the wagon train stood mired in the mud, and Sartorius, choosing only his assistant surgeon, a male nurse, and Stephen Walsh to go with him, rode forward to establish a surgery tent on the field of battle. Several of the regimental surgeons were so ordered. Sartorius and the others rode horses. Stephen drove the four-wheeled medicine-supply wagon. The going was difficult because much of the distance had to be traveled off-road. He could hear the medicine bottles clinking in their racks. The mule strained, the wheels jamming, then rolling over rocks, or tilting dangerously in mud pits, and Stephen was bumped airborne from his perch, as he raced forward. Now the sounds of a skirmish were sharp and precise. He heard shouting, the crack of rifles, and, following the Colonel into the declivitous patch in sight of the plantation house, he was, once again, introduced to combat.
They set up the field surgery at the base of a black oak perhaps two hundred yards behind an earthwork of logs and brush that the troops were still constructing. Once the battle began and the wounded arrived for treatment, so, theoretically, would brigade ambulances come up to carry them off afterward. The nurse and the assistant surgeon set the operating slab on sawhorses, and Stephen climbed to the lowest branch of the oak to tie the tent corners in lieu of poles. With that done, he took a moment to climb a bit higher for the view it afforded. Another Union line was off to the right, arrayed behind an improvised breastworks that came across the road. The positions looked shaky to him, shallow and unconnected. No artillery was in place. He wondered where the Rebels were, why they were not moving on a clearly unprepared Union force.
The gunfire tailed off and in the silence, after a moment or so, he heard birdsong.
MIDAFTERNOON THE OFFICERS at the fortifications saw their skirmishers dropping back, and then turning and running outright and clambering over the entrenchment, shouting and falling all over themselves. Here they come, boys, a sergeant said. Bobby Brasil steadied his rifle on his sighting log. He peered through the opening. Indeed they were coming and, given their intention, it was strangely beautiful to see, but their lines were straight with their mounted officers waving their sabers and their color-bearers carrying the battle flags flying, and they singing their pagan Rebel shrieksong, which was enough to make Brasil’s neck hair rise. Where did they get them all, it’s a whole damn army, Brasil muttered. Fire! the Sergeant shouted and so he did, and so did everyone, so that his ears went dead with the concussion. In the smoke and fire he could see men going down, but the charge did not waver, they were keeping on, and now from the corner of his eye they were coming from the flank, too, it was like one long, flowing banner of sparkling fire, the bullets cracking against the log, scutting up bark, as suddenly a Rebel officer was risen into view, his horse rearing, and he turning it and waving his men on, his broad back square in Brasil’s sights, like a gift. And how sad to destroy such a great, stolid human gallant with just the slightest squeeze of the finger. But they had breached the barricade, they were coming over, and Brasil, catching one on his bayonet, couldn’t shake it out of the boy, so left it and the rifle stuck there and turned and ran, finding himself not alone, the onslaught unstoppable, the shouting and scrambling screaming not from his own throat alone. And he ran and ran through the woods till he found the reserve lines, where he fell down to catch his breath, panting and gasping behind the sheer bulk of blue uniforms pressi
ng forward to take their turn. And good luck to them, Brasil thought, for I have not known such terror since I was held back in the third grade under Sister Agnes Angelica.
TWO MILES AWAY on the road, Pearl could hear the battle, they all could, the teamsters standing by and talking among themselves, the officers pacing up and down, the horses nickering and lifting their heads with each thump of the cannon. A mile behind her, the cattle drove lowing and, in the wagon in his traveling box, Albion Simms going boom boom boom like as if it wasn’t enough to hear the real thing. Pearl was thinking of Stephen Walsh. He was so good at everything he did that the Colonel-doctor relied on him now as almost he didn’t on anyone else. For sure not on me. But it wasn’t as if she worried about Stephen, just that she was frightened to be without him in her sight. Here she was sitting in this wagon up in North Carolina, with the cold spring breezes and the march held up by a battle so as to give her the clear feeling of being unattached to anywheres or anything, not even a miserable life in the quarters. Just a girl who is free, she thought. And there was such a big blank empty space of life ahead of her with nothing to fix on, nothing to take comfort in. She could see only as far as that Number 12 and the Washington Square in New York. And when she said goodbye to those sad people in that house and came out the door, where would her life be, in what direction would she turn, and down which street, and with whom?
In her anxiety she hadn’t heard David awaken. He came out and sat himself down in her lap, still yawning and rubbing his eyes. Well, boy, she said, you sure know how to sleep, don’t you? You hear that? That’s a war going on.
Yes’m, I hears it.
It don’t worry you none?
Naw. I hungry, he said.
She got some hardtack out of the rations box and handed it to him, and soon he was chewing away, studying the hardtack in his hand and taking a bite out of it, and studying it again as it slowly got smaller and smaller.