The March (27 page)

Yet Pearl smelled spring. As the Sartorius medical train rolled down the wide main street she stood up beside the wagoner to take in the breeze, to read it: a whiff of turned-over farmland, the rot of winter fields, and—was it possible?—the scent of lilac. She saw at the curbsides patches of yellow crocus just sticking their heads up, and sprigs of fox grape. In one fine yard were the greenish yellowing blossoms of forsythia. She wanted to tell Stephen to come look, but he was riding up with Dr. Sartorius. She called back to Mattie Jameson, who stuck her head out of the canvas, blinking like a groundhog coming up from the winter.

You smell the spring, stepma’m, you smell it? Pearl said.

Mattie smiled her vacant smile. But as if Pearl’s announcement were the occasion for primping up, she removed the combs from her hair, let it fall, and then, after running her fingers through it, bound it back up again with the combs.

Pearl wondered if the woman understood. What spring could Pearl be talking about except the spring back in Georgia, on the plantation where until this freedom she had lived her whole life? Every spring she was to have on this earth would recall her to those first springs of her understanding, when for a few moments life shone on her with beneficence and she could see there was something else above all that that was going on, something above her fear and her pap’s whip on the backs of men old enough to be her grandfathers, and her mother’s misery, and the soulful singing in the white cotton, when all that whiteness seemed to bury who worked there, drown them in it, like cotton was water and they could not climb out of it—above all that, and not ruled by it, so that it was to her as a little child like the real, true Massah saying, I’m here, child, to let you know there is more than all that, as I’m showing you in these little flowers forming up everywhere for you to look at and smell and see how your pap can’t do nothing about it.

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 Kilpatrick 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.