The Warriors (12 page)

Just after he’d washed out the blood, Maum Isabella had delivered a pair of the colonel’s linen trousers and a luxurious white silk shirt, as well as underclothing. Everything was too small. He looked and felt like a bumpkin in the ill-fitting garments. Neither did he like wearing a dead man’s clothes.

And before the service, he’d been required to meet all the guests and repeat an involved series of falsehoods about his wounds and fictitious discharge. Grave-faced people, among them a couple named Jesperson, had bobbed their heads sympathetically in response to his romanticized description of Henry Rose’s death.

“Under the shadow of Thy throne,

Still may we dwell secure
—”

Pretending to sing, he found his mind returning to the crosscurrents that seemed to be aswirl in the house. There was a curious, secretive quality about them. For instance, while standing at Catherine’s elbow and speaking with two of the visitors, he’d picked up the unmistakable tang of blackberry wine again. If she’d drink before company came, she was under greater tension than she permitted others to see.

The right hand of the Congregational pastor, the Reverend Emory Pettus, arced back and forth as he led the hymn to its loud climax. Pettus was an immense, paunchy man in a warm-looking black alpaca coat with a secession rosette in the lapel. He kept his eyes on the ceiling and sang in a bellowing baritone.

“Sufficient is Thine arm alone,

And our defense is—”

Abruptly Serena lifted her fingers from the keyboard and turned toward the open front windows nearby. Her net-bound chignon glowed even with the morning sun muted by the gently stirring lace curtains.

The various singers straggled on to a weak finish. Pettus frowned as Catherine took her hand from the hymnal she’d been sharing with the minister.

“Serena, why did you stop?”

The girl pointed outdoors. “I heard the bell ring. Twice.”

“Nonsense.” Catherine smiled frostily. “No one would ring the bell and disturb—”

She was interrupted by a commotion on the piazza. A white-haired old fellow with palsy tottered to a window, mumbling complaints. Outside, a black shouted, “Miz Catherine? Buggy comin’ up the lane!”

“I told you someone rang the bell!” Serena was vindicated.

Catherine ignored her, looking concerned. A slave boy of fourteen or fifteen slipped through the crowd in the sitting room, an apologetic expression on his face.

“Who is it, Zeph?” Catherine asked.

“Marse Claypool, ma’am.”

The one referred to as the judge? Jeremiah wondered. Catherine had already commented on the surprising absence of the Claypools.

Jeremiah heard a rattle of wheels and the sound of hoofs scattering small stones. The nigras outdoors shouted questions as the vehicle halted. The horses of the other rigs pulled up in front began to neigh and stamp. Catherine hurried to one of the open windows, thrust the curtains aside, and stuck her head out, not a little annoyed.

“Theodore, we’re right in the middle of the service!”

“My profound apologies.” The man had a wheezy voice, sounded out of breath. “I’d have been here sooner, but I was waiting for Floyd to come back from another trip to Milledgeville. Those folks indoors—all of you—better pay attention! The Yanks are in the capital!”

The guests all began talking at once. The slaves murmured among themselves. Over the noise, Catherine called, “Are you sure?”

“Positive. The first of them arrived day before yesterday. Two whole corps of Union infantry, the Fourteenth and the Twentieth. Sherman’s with their commander, General Slocum.”

Absolute pandemonium then. A portly woman near Jeremiah gasped, closed her eyes, and started to faint. Her male companion tried to catch her, failed, and knelt beside her, chafing her wrists and whispering, “God preserve us. God preserve us.”

Jeremiah shoved his way to the windows to hear the rest.

“—wouldn’t believe what’s happening in Milledgeville, Catherine. The Yanks are tearing up the railroad tracks! Heating the ties and bending ’em around trees. Sherman’s hairpins, that’s their clever little name for ’em. Floyd said he saw soldiers destroying books from the state library. And Secretary of State Burnett’s wife”—the unseen man paused to suck in another breath as the guests and the blacks fell silent—“she had to bury the state seal under her house and hide documents from the legislature in her pigsty.”

Catherine leaned halfway out the window. “In heaven’s name why?”

“Because that infernal Sherman has issued orders that his men can forage liberally on the country. Those were his exact words—‘
forage liberally!’
Of course the sanctimonious devil’s also announcing that he hasn’t authorized his men to enter homes or molest citizens unless there’s guerrilla resistance.”

“But the Home Guards are mobilized!” someone exclaimed.

The judge snorted. “Precisely. That qualifies as resistance. So Sherman looks the other way while his scalawags rob private dwellings and burn farms and plantations where the owners have tried to hide some of their crops. Evidently
that’s
guerrilla resistance, too! Believe me, Floyd saw barns and gins being put to the torch—houses being gutted in Milledgeville—he talked to one family whose whole place was torn down! They had to take refuge in an overturned boxcar in the rail yards.”

Jeremiah pressed up beside Catherine and lifted the curtain. In the drive he saw a bony, perspiring old man seated in a two-wheeled hooded chaise. Red dust covered the man’s frock coat and trousers.

“Can’t the militia stop them?” Jeremiah asked.

“Old codgers like me? Boys? A few cavalrymen?” Claypool harumphed. “I doubt it.”

“Are they headed this way?”

“Well, they seem to be after rail junctions and the larger towns, so I expect they are. They’ll probably come right past here on the way to Millen.”

Consternation again.

The man whose wife had fainted helped her to her feet, muttering apologies to Catherine. She didn’t hear, standing with one hand shielding her half-closed eyes. The man and his wife edged through the crowd toward the hall. Reverend Pettus announced that they’d better end the service and return to their homes at once.

The words were superfluous. A small stampede had already started, guests jabbering and pushing the blacks aside to get to the buggies and phaetons outside. Jeremiah was suddenly thankful he still had the sheathed knife tucked in his boot. Sherman’s shadow was growing longer. Touching Rosewood now.

Still, he had a hard time believing the Yanks would destroy undefended private property on any large scale. Surely they couldn’t be that dishonorable. The outbreak in Milledgeville must be an isolated case. Even the razing of Atlanta had had some strategic purpose. But the incidents the dusty old man in the chaise described had none at all, unless you counted the kind of thing Jeremiah was witnessing at this moment: the creation of utter panic among defenseless civilians.

One phaeton was already gone, clattering down the lane in a cloud of sunlit dust. The driver lashed his team as though Satan were three feet behind.

“Catherine? What are we going to do?”

Jeremiah and the older woman both turned at the sound of Serena’s voice. The girl didn’t appear worried, merely curious.

Judge Claypool came struggling in against the tide of the exodus, talking first to one person, then another. “—swear to Jesus—oh! Excuse my language, Reverend—it’s all true! They’ve got a flock of runaway niggers dogging ’em wherever they go. Disloyal, disreputable niggers, every one!”

The judge’s announcement in the hall caused another, somewhat more restrained stir, this time among the blacks. Claypool fanned back his dusty coat to display a holstered horse pistol. “Thank God we have none of that kind around here. If we did they’d be candidates for shooting. And I don’t mean by Yanks.”

Serena prodded her stepmother. “Well, Catherine?”

“If they come,” Jeremiah said abruptly, “we’ll stand up to them.”

“Really?” Serena inquired. “How?”

“War or no war, they have no right to ruin private property. We’ll make them understand that.”

Serena’s blue eyes grew amused. “My, you certainly have faith in the decency of Yankees.”

The sarcasm rankled. He
had
to believe the cruelty of the battlefield couldn’t spread into civilian territory. He had nothing else to believe in any longer. It was his last article of faith. He tried to justify it.

“I just don’t think any army would go on burning and looting that way. Sherman’s men have probably done it around Milledgeville because that’s the capital.”

Catherine took encouragement from the words. “I’m sure he’s right, Serena. Provisioning an army off enemy land’s one thing. Ruining civilian property is another. They certainly won’t continue—”

“Don’t be too damn sure, Catherine,” Judge Claypool warned.

“By God, we won’t stand for it,” Jeremiah blurted. “It’s against all the laws of decency!”

Someone laughed.

He spun, his eyes locking with those of Price.

The slave’s face was blank again. But Jeremiah was positive Price was the culprit. A young woman with her hair covered by a bandana was backing away from him. And Maum Isabella was staring at him too, lips pinched tight together.

Jeremiah glared at the slave but drew no response. Price’s pupils might have been brown stones.

A few remaining guests clustered around Catherine, offering apologies and empty condolences before they departed. Jeremiah drew Serena aside.

“We’d better get your stepmother working on her list.”

“What list?”

“The one she mentioned last night. Covering anything on the place that ought to be hidden. Are there firearms in the house?”

“No, none. Papa took everything.” With her back to Price, who hadn’t changed his position in the hall, she whispered, “There’s a musket somewhere—” She seemed to be goading him.

“We’ll do the best we can without it,” Jeremiah declared, even though the lack of the Enfield left him feeling less than whole.

The vehicles belonging to the guests rattled down to the highway one after another. Maum Isabella had put grief behind her and was shooing some of the nigras through the house toward their cabins. At last Price turned and strolled off in the same direction.

Dust boiled through the open windows of the sitting room, billowing the curtains and settling on the polished wood of the pianoforte. A last visitor tipped a table and spilled back issues of the
Southern Literary Messenger
in his haste to depart. As the copies plopped on the carpet, Jeremiah heard faint laughter again, then Maum Isabella’s voice, loud and scolding.

“Jeremiah?”

He turned to Catherine.

“Serena asked a very pertinent question. We must plan what we’re going to do if the enemy comes.”

Remembering the laughter, Jeremiah thought,
He’s already here.

T
HANKSGIVING DINNER WAS A
tense, joyless affair.

Jeremiah suspected it might turn out that way the moment Catherine appeared, bringing her cut glass decanter of blackberry wine out in the open—right to the table. As she set it down she murmured an excuse about needing a “medicinal tonic” after the strain of the service and Judge Claypool’s arrival with the bad news from Milledgeville.

Maum Isabella hadn’t stinted on preparing a good meal. But Jeremiah and the two women barely touched their food. Unpleasant questions seemed to come up almost at once. Would Sherman actually reach the Louisville district? Would his troops behave as badly as they had in the capital? Jeremiah gave encouraging answers, as much to reassure himself as to reassure them.

Catherine inquired about his initiation into the war. The words he used in reply automatically carried his thoughts to a place he preferred to forget:

To a hillside in the northwest part of the state. In September twilight a year ago, he’d gone up that hillside with his bayonet fixed and his palms sweating, ducking and starting at his first exposure to the whine of Minié balls.

The Confederates had been trying to take a position held by the Yank general, Pap Thomas. After the battle, Thomas came to be called The Rock because his lines held and blew back charge after Rebel charge while, behind them, routed Rosecrans fled for Chattanooga. Jeremiah narrated an account of the engagement, but said nothing about how terrified he’d been at first.

He described the ball that had grazed his scalp and produced the streak of white hair. He told them how he’d shot his first Yank—the first one he was certain he’d killed, that is. But he didn’t mention the disturbing feelings he’d experienced watching the young man fall.

He’d shot as he was supposed to shoot—obeying orders—yet his reaction to the hit had been a kind of cold joy. He tried not to remember the joy. It didn’t fit with his concept of war honorably conducted.

He hated to admit there was an aspect of his nature, slowly strengthened as he gained proficiency with firearms, that could be termed ruthless. At times he even denied the trait’s existence. But it was there, and he guarded against giving in to it.

Once in a while he did succumb. Before escaping from the farmer with the pitchfork, he’d struck the back of the man’s neck and felt absolutely no pity. Nor had he experienced any qualms about the whipping of Price.

While Jeremiah talked, he noticed Serena picking at her cloved ham and glancing around the room in a restless way. She was certainly a creature of moods. Last night, she’d declared she was his ally. This morning he seemed to bore her. He concluded that her night visit must have been solely an act of defiance directed against her stepmother. His account of his experiences in battle didn’t interest her. This afternoon he was merely a guest to be tolerated. A boy.

It was infuriating.

Yet he couldn’t help being fascinated. The late afternoon sun haloed her red hair and profile, making her look like some beautiful image from a church window.

Catherine drank two goblets of blackberry wine during the meal. She didn’t touch the quill pen, the inkstand, or the foolscap sheet in front of her place. One line was written at the top of the sheet in a delicate, slanting hand: