The March (28 page)

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 floating 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.

But she sat down in the water cross-legged, like a child, and splashed water on her face and sank down to the shoulders to soak herself and sat up again with a bar of brown soap, which she ran around her neck and over her breasts, looking up at him with such pleasure in her eyes that he felt vile for the feelings going through him. Yet he could tell Pearl knew the effect she was having.

You c’n do my back, please, she said.

He pulled up a stool and sat behind her and ran the soap along her shoulders and down her back, attending glumly to each vertebra.

Now, Stephen Walsh, she said, I know what all mens have in dere minds. Don’t I know? How old are you?

Nineteen.

Well, I don’t know how old I am. I think thirteen—I know not much more than fourteen. I know, ’cause my stepma’m’s sons, brudder one and two, they was there since I can remember and brudder two he had a birfday of fifteen this las summer. And dey both taller? So I knows that way.

You don’t have to worry.

Oh I . . . I know that. I wouldn’t be sittin here in the altogether if I didn’t know that.

Then he nearly dropped the soap, because she said, An when the time comes when I feel it upon me, I s’pose who it is will be you, Stephen Walsh.

HE FOUND SOME
towels and wrapped one around her as she stood up from the tub. She was still as he rubbed her shoulders and back and buttocks and thighs through the towel.

Wif all the soldiers writin letters for the mail boat, Pearl said, did you?

No. No one I care to write to.

No fambly?

They wouldn’t read it if I did.

She turned and faced him, holding the towel around her at the throat. Sad, she said. Sad sad sad. An you from the New York City where the perfec Union is. I’m goin there, you know that?

No. Since when?

Yes, when the war is done. That poor Lieutenant Clarke’s letter, ’member I tole you?

Yes?

Why give it for the mail boat if I can read the envelope now with the ad-dress? I will take that letter to his mama and papa in the New York City, so as I may tell them.

Tell them what?

How he took care of Pearl and hid her and made her a drummer boy to keep her safe. Dey will need comfort.

What is the address?

The Number 12 Washing-ton Square, as I have read it.

Sure, and that’s a neighborhood for the rich folks.

Well, some rich folks is good I ’spect, if their son joined up to free black folks.

She was smiling, with her face still dewy and her hazel eyes wide and the ribbon having fallen from her hair. There rose in Stephen Walsh’s breast a feeling so painfully glorious that it was all he could do to keep from pressing her to him.

Number 12? he said, clearing his throat.

Uh-huh, and Washing-ton Square.

I know where it is, he said. I can take you there.

PEARL WAS AWAKENED
by the moonlight coming through the small attic window. The moon had arisen to shine in her eyes. She found herself with her back snuggled against Stephen. His arm lay over her shoulder. They were lying on a horsehair mattress they had pulled off the little attic bed and put on the floor. Though they were fully dressed it was a thin blanket over them, too thin for the chill of this silvery night. She lay there quite still. She was suddenly irritated by that arm around her. It was heavy, and she leaned away until it slipped to the space between them.

She closed her eyes and tried to go back to sleep. Earlier that evening their wagon had ridden past the fields where the black folk were camped. The picture of that was in her mind now. All of them sitting around their fires, and the children running here and there, and the smell of cooking, and the little tents for their sleep, and the carts for their things. And the singing, the sad hymn singing—it was like a soft murmur of the wind, it was like sound coming up from the earth. It was the sound she had been born to, the prayerful sadness of their lot on earth. And they were singing of it now, all those people like her, except she wasn’t there with them, she was riding by in the army wagon with army clothes on her back and good army food in her stomach and this white boy beside her, attached to her like by a chain. But these folks had heard they were going somewhere else than on the march with General Sherman, and they didn’t know where that was or what they would find or if it was possible to be free men and women without the army to protect them.

She could not get back to sleep. Why had she lied to Stephen Walsh? She knew exactly how old she was, she was fifteen, her mama had told her, and that she was born on the tenth day of June, when the air was like something sweet to drink and the leaves on the trees were still young and soft, like you could feel the sun in them. But she had told him a story so well, and with such detail, about the Jameson brothers one and two that she almost believed it herself. Why? She was attracted to Stephen, she was impressed with him and secretly flattered that he had taken to her, this grown man, to be smitten as he so clearly was by her. It made her feel good and different, so that she was encouraged to be bolder than she had ever before been in the social ways of the world. Because if he was taken with her she would see to it that he was justified.

So why did she lie? It had just come out of her mouth before she knew what she was saying. What was her purpose, because she did have feelings for him. She liked his voice and his manner, the way what he said was always a clear thought. He did not chatter about nothing. He had a silence in him that made you understand he was no fool but a deep-minded person who knew more than he spoke aloud. And that he was angry about something from his life, just as she was—he was a white man with his own troubles—that interested her, and that he didn’t make himself smaller by easily talking about it. From the moment she had held his burned hands, she had felt herself different. And she loved his mouth—it was all she could do sometimes not to lean up and kiss it.

But now the thought came to her that made her sit up and nearly cry out. What had she done since leaving the plantation but attach herself to white men? From the day she was lifted up to the saddle behind Lieutenant Clarke, and then even staying with that Gen’ral Sherman hisself, who had taken to her thinking she was a drummer boy, and then even through Miz Thompson getting to nurse for the Colonel-doctor, and now Stephen, she had acted as white, and lived with the whites with a white stepma’m and dressed her blackness in a uniform given to a white Union army. Oh Lord, such a deep shame now came over her, it made her ill. Was not Jake Early a prophet when he and Jubal Samuels came by to fetch her and he called her a Jez’bel? But you got to be a whore lady to be a Jez’bel, and I ain’t a whore lady. No no, dear God, but I am worse, coddling up to be like one of them, making them like me like slaves do to proteck theirselves, bowin and scrapin to the white folks and smilin like some fool, and even servin Miz Jameson an watchin out for her an takin care of her. Didn’t I know she wanted my pap to sell me away when I was a little chile? Look at me—didn’t nobody sell me off in the auction, I done sold myself, and what does that make me but a slave, a slave like my mama Nancy Wilkins.

This thought had brought Pearl to her feet: I am owned.

She looked down at Stephen Walsh, his face so washed in moonlight as to be spectral. Who was this white man who had felt privileged to put his arm around her? Who was she as a Negro girl that she was allowing it and pushing her body up against his for the warmth? Her mama had lain with Pap Jameson as she had this night next to Stephen Walsh and, surely that arm of Pap’s was as heavy around my mama as Stephen’s around me. So how is I free? Never as a black girl, and not now as a white.

MOMENTS LATER SHE
was flying down the stairs in her bare feet. She let herself out the front door and headed across the road and into the pasture, where, in the distance, the blacks were camped. She could see everything clear in the moonlight, the rises and dips in the earth, the paled leaves of grass, the lean-tos and wagons up ahead, and the embers of the cook fires glowing like stars in the fields. Ten minutes later she was walking in the paths of this improvised settlement, and many people were awake, huddled in their blankets around their fires, or rocking infants in their arms, or simply standing by their rigs and wagons and staring at her as she passed by. In their eyes she was a white woman, an army woman, and if they were curious as to what she was doing among them they did not demean themselves to inquire. They were being sent off to walk by themselves in the direction prescribed for them by their hero and savior, General Sherman. All they had wanted to do was praise him, revere him, and now he was turning them away, sending them off on their own, and what their destination was or what would happen to them when they got there nobody knew. For these people staring her down, she was the General’s stand-in, as if she was responsible for their wretched disillusionment solely by virtue of her color and her uniform. Pearl kept shaking her head as if in discussion with them, though they said nothing, because she knew what they were thinking. And what was she doing here, anyway? She didn’t know. She was looking for someone who knew her. Maybe looking for Jake Early and one-eyed Jubal Samuels, though they would long since have fallen by the wayside. Or Roscoe, from back at the plantation—a good, simple, kind man like no other, who had dropped the two gold eagles wrapped in his kerchief at her feet. She felt now in her pocket to make sure she still had them, something she did at least ten times a day. And for an instant as she passed a man, a skinny bald man with huge dark eyes who smiled a sweet, gap-toothed smile at her, she almost called out, Roscoe! thinking that it was him.