When This Cruel War Is Over (29 page)

Read When This Cruel War Is Over Online

Authors: Thomas Fleming

BOOK: When This Cruel War Is Over
8.21Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
Janet picked up one of the guns. “You must teach me how to use this,” she said to Paul.
“Never,” Paul said.
“General Burbridge isn't going to throw me into a stinking jail if he catches me,” Janet said. “I want to put up a fight.”
“It looks like you've got a woman warrior on your hands, Major,” Bart Mason said.
“Our motto is victory or death,” Janet said.
Was she telling Paul that he was in love with an adventuress who was determined to invade all parts of his male world—including the battlefield? This was neither the time nor the place to argue about it. But Paul silently vowed to make sure Janet never got near enemy gunfire. From now on, he was in command of their perilous partnership.
Stop kidding yourself, Paulie,
whispered his Gettysburg wound.
FIASCO.
THE WORD HUMMED THROUGH Henry Gentry's head like a swarm of Confederate minié balls. Behind him, the beaten Army of Kentucky plodded through the heat. Half the wounded had died, mostly for want of water on the torturous descent from the mountains.
Just ahead on his big bay horse, Major General Stephen Burbridge slumped in his saddle down, a veritable condensation of gloom. Knowing how much he was hated by nine out of ten Kentuckians, he could easily imagine the derision that would be flung at him in the newspapers, the laughs that would be enjoyed behind his back for the disaster at Saltville.
In Louisville, they found Burbridge's headquarters in turmoil. Confederate guerrillas had burned a steamboat at the docks. Guards had captured two men running away as the boat caught fire. In a valise were a half-dozen hand grenades that exploded and burned furiously, resisting all attempts to douse them. Burbridge ordered the two incendiaries shot immediately.
The general wondered if anyone could tell him what these flaming grenades contained. “It's Greek fire,” Gentry said. “The Sons of Liberty have been talking about it as a secret weapon.”
“Why have
you
kept this a secret?” Burbridge asked.
“I sent a report on it to Washington,” Gentry said. “I thought they'd warn you about it.”
“They don't give Kentucky ten seconds of thought in Washington,” Burbridge raged. “Lincoln doesn't want
to know the kind of war we're fighting here. Surrounded by traitors and guerrillas and secret agents.”
Gentry let General Burbridge stew in his self-pity for a few hours, then returned to his headquarters. Burbridge was at his desk, dictating a report on Saltville to one of his aides. He let Gentry wait until he finished a completely imaginary account of the battle, in which he estimated Adam Jameson's force at eight thousand men, equipped with heavy cannon. He was practically daring Gentry to send Lincoln an accurate version.
“General,” Gentry said, when they were alone. “I know you don't want to see or hear from me again. But there's a favor I'd like to ask.”
“A favor?” Burbridge growled incredulously.
“I'd like you to put Adam Jameson's brother, Robin, at the head of the list for the draft in Daviess County. If certain things transpire as I think they might, I'd like you to take him off the list when I send you a two-word telegram: ‘All's well.' Can you arrange that? I presume you have some influence with the draft commissioners.”
“There isn't anyone or anything in this miserable state that I don't have influence with,” Burbridge said. “What's supposed to happen? Will your ‘all's well' mean anything? Or will it be a repetition of your brilliant idea for an attack on Saltville?”
“We can only hope for the best, General,” Gentry replied.
“And fear the worst, with fools like you around,” Burbridge said.
With those warm words, the director of federal intelligence for southern Indiana and the military commander of Kentucky parted. The next day Gentry was back in Keyport. He walked from the ferry to his house through the blazing noon heat. At the door the first person he saw was Dorothy Schreiber. “How is Lucy?” he asked.
“Come up and see for yourself,” Dorothy said.
Upstairs in Major Stapleton's former bedroom, Lucy
was sitting in a chair, wearing a blue robe that Gentry thought he had last seen on Dorothy. The ex-slave girl seemed thin and sickly but her smile was bright. In her lap was a book. She was painfully moving her finger from word to word, trying to sound out each one.
“Lucy's learning to read,” Dorothy said. “I'm having such fun teaching her. I never thought teaching could be so enjoyable. I've always hated school.”
“Have you gotten a letter from Moses Washington?” Gentry asked Lucy.
She held up three fingers.
“Three! That's even better news,” Gentry said. He gave her an exaggerated report of Washington's heroism in the battle. “He was at the head of the attack. He's a brave man.”
Lucy glowed. “He says he loves me. That's the best news I've heard in my whole miserable life.”
“Eins, zwei, drei, vier!” The stentorian voice drifted in the open bedroom window.
“What's that?” Gentry asked.
“General Carrington heard about the casualties at Saltville,” Dorothy said. “He's sent us a hundred Germans to replace the nig—I mean the colored troopers.”
“You heard about Captain Otis too?”
“Yes,” Dorothy said. “Did he run away again?”
“No. He died at the head of his men,” Gentry said.
“Eins, zwei, drei, vier!” roared the German voice.
“They're goin' to be the best soldiers in the world,” Dorothy said. “They drill all the time. Every day at least one of them falls over from sunstroke.”
“Have you heard from your father?” Gentry asked.
“Yes. He's stayin' in Tennessee, thank goodness. They're not goin' to join Sherman in Georgia. Maybe they think Lincoln's Own has had enough hard fightin'.”
“I would certainly agree with that idea,” Gentry said.
“I wrote him a letter. I told him about Lucy. I told him I was glad he was fightin' to free the slaves. It's the first
time I've been able to say anything good about him bein' in the army. Momma hated it so much. I hope she won't feel bad if she hears about it in heaven.”
“I don't think she will, Dorothy,” Gentry said. “That letter will mean a lot to your father.” Dorothy had matured amazingly in the ten days Gentry was away on the expedition to Saltville.
In the front parlor, he found his mother reading a copy of the
Keyport Record.
“This report of the battle of Saltville convinces me all over again that your friend Lincoln is an idiot,” she said.
Gentry glanced at the story. “COLORED TROOPS ROUTED” was the headline. There was not a word about the murder of the wounded blacks. His old friend Andy Conway was continuing the great tradition of the Democratic Party, lying to the American people at every opportunity.
“The Africans weren't routed. They were slaughtered. Thanks to the stupidity of General Burbridge.”
“When are you going to get that little nigger out of Major Stapleton's bedroom?”
Gentry chose to ignore the question. “Have you heard from Major Stapleton?”
“Not a word. How long was his leave?”
“I didn't set a number. His mother was quite ill.”
Down in his cellar office, Gentry pondered the calendar. Today was August 5. Sometime between now and November, when the voters would go to the polls to decide Lincoln's and the country's fate, Adam Jameson and his cavalrymen would head for Kentucky and the Sons of Liberty would rise. Unless he knew the exact date, he would be helpless to prevent it.
Roads could not be patrolled indefinitely to challenge Jameson's invasion. There were too many possible routes. They did not have the manpower to cover them all. If he arrested Gabriel Todd and the others before they struck, he would have no evidence of an act of treason
and they could only be held by ignoring habeus corpus à la General Carrington. Gentry had spent a good year damning Carrington in his letters to Lincoln. He could not change his mind at this late date and adopt the general's deplorable tactics.
Gentry sat there, sipping bourbon, thinking of Amelia Conway Jameson in her bedroom at Rose Hill, fingering the notice that Robin Jameson was subject to an immediate draft into the Union Army. He imagined her pondering one more plea to her snarling husband and winced at what might happen during that interview, remembering the time he had seen Amelia in Keyport with bruises on her face. With his jaw wired shut Rogers Jameson would be even more likely to consider his fists the best available answer.
Could he bear the thought of another bruise on Amelia's cheek? With the help of a steady supply of bourbon, he would try. Amelia was his one hope now. Gentry was sure Major Paul Stapleton was gone beyond recall. Ten days in hotels with Janet Todd would make him a confederate in every possible meaning of that word.
Gentry grieved for Paul. There were so many young men like him, torn between the atavistic pull of the Democratic Party and the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln's switch from a war to save the Union to a crusade to abolish slavery would be debated by historians for generations. If the South won, it would be described as a cynical trick that failed. If the North won, it would become a brilliant stroke that drove the South from the moral high ground the Confederates possessed as defenders of their invaded country.
Neither would be true, of course. Only Gentry and a few others knew the real author of that transforming proclamation: God. Gentry tried to think about the word, the idea, and failed. Lincoln's new theology bewildered him. God was in charge of this cataclysm?
What kind of a God slaughtered his followers on both sides of the battle line with such seeming indifference? Yet here was Abe Lincoln, the man whose soul exceeded in range and capacity any that Gentry had ever seen, testifying that God had guided him and America in this completely unexpected direction.
If, as Jesus said, God was love, it was a very terrible brand of that commodity. In the name of God's war, Gentry was forcing the only woman he loved to choose between her sons, to betray one son and her husband—to covertly confess to a man she would henceforth loathe that she had been living a lie, she had made a stupid mistake when she left Henry Gentry keening laments into the Ohio River's mists and married Rogers Jameson.
Amelia was southern, Democratic, to the core of her soul. She could only see her choice as something inflicted on her by Gentry's arrogant possibly diabolical friend Lincoln, for whom her erstwhile lover Gentry was only too happy to play smirking surrogate.
Henry Gentry gulped his bourbon. He wished he could pray to someone for forgiveness. But he had no hope or faith in such a possibility. Since Harvard, he had never been a believer in much of anything beyond Ralph Waldo Emerson's careless God, Brahma, the blind slayer of the evil and the good.
We're doing it the hard way, Abe.
PAUL STAPLETON STOOD BESIDE JANET Todd on the deck of the small paddle wheeler as it approached Hopemont. The mansion's chimneys rose above the trees like dumb sentinels. Along the shore, the Ohio River was still a procession of sandbars and puddles. Colonel Todd had laid down a floating walkway of planks on barrels to enable passengers to debark from the channel. The drought continued; the deck was so hot you could feel it through the soles of your shoes.
“I wish I could go ashore with you. But I'd better report to Colonel Gentry. I'm still in the Union Army, you know,” he said.
She kissed him on the lips. “Come over as soon as possible,” she said. “There's a great deal to discuss.”
Janet no longer even considered the possibility of failure. The Spencer repeating rifles that were rumbling toward Indiana in anonymous boxcars guaranteed the birth of the western confederacy. Paul had to admit she might be right. Even in the hands of amateurs, Spencers were formidable weapons. The Confederates called the Spencer “the horizontal shot tower.” They had learned never to charge a regiment equipped with Spencers.
Fifteen thousand men with Spencers would easily demolish the second-rate federal troops in Indiana and the third-rate state militia, all of whom still used muzzle-loading single-shot Springfields, thanks to the colossal stupidity of the U.S. Army's ordnance department. It would be their just desserts if the war was ended by Rebels with guns that every Union soldier should have
been using by now. It was of a piece with the way the war had been fought. The ugly carnage of The Crater was like a final exclamation point in Paul's mind, proving every negative he had ever thought about Northern generalship.
Paul carried Janet's bags along the floating walkway to the Hopemont dock. One of the Todd slaves, a boy of about thirteen, greeted them and followed Janet up the hill to the house with the luggage. On the rear second-floor porch, Colonel Todd waved to him. Paul waved back. Janet would soon be telling him the story of Major Stapleton's heroism in New York.
Why didn't he feel like a hero? Because he was a traitor? No, he rejected that idea. It had something to do with General Lee's concept of honor as a commitment from which a man never wavered. His love for Janet had become a new kind of honor—but part of his soul still longed for the older simpler ideal. Maybe General Lee had similar conflicts. The imperatives of his heart's devotion to Virginia had sundered his oath of loyalty to the United States of America.
Two miles down the river on the Indiana side, Paul debarked at the Keyport town landing. He paid a boy wearing a wide straw hat twenty-five cents to walk two miles to the Gentry house and ask the colonel to send a buggy. Paul retreated from the ferocious sun to the comparatively cool interior of Kingsley's Saloon, on the main street. There he found Andrew Conway, editor of the
Keyport Record
, nursing a tall ice-filled glass.
“What's in that thing?” Paul asked.
“Gin and bitters.”
Paul told the bartender to bring him one.
“You've been east, I hear,” Conway said.
“My mother was ill.”
“Better, I hope.”
“Much.”
“What's New Jersey saying about the war?”
“They're as sick of it as they are in Indiana.”
“Someone told me they saw you on the street in Cincinnati with Janet Todd.”
“They must have bad eyes or hallucinations from the heat.”
Conway stroked his drooping black mustache. “It's all right. I've been told certain things and figured out one or two others. But I don't think you're free and clear. Not if Adam Jameson gets in your vicinity. I'd still devote an hour or two a day to pistol practice.”
“I was the best shot in my class at the military academy.”
“Then maybe you got nothin' to worry about.”
Conway looked around the barroom. There was only one other drinker, an old man at a table in the back, mumbling to himself. The bartender was serving him another stein of beer. “Poor Smitty hasn't been sober since his boy was killed at Chickamauga,” Conway said. “Do you think the Sons of Liberty will succeed?”
“If the men in the ranks are led with determination, they have a chance.”
“Have they given you a command?”
“Not yet. I expect to hear from them in a day or two.”
Conway raised his glass. “I've got an edition set in type proclaiming the rise of the new confederacy.”
“I can't wait to read it.”
“Paul?” It was Colonel Gentry in person, come to transport him to The Grange.
“I thought you'd send someone—”
Gentry waved aside his apology. “I needed some fresh air. If ninety-eight degrees leaves anything fresh. How are you, Andy?”
“Just fine, Henry. I've been wanting to ask you what part you played in the battle of Saltville.”
“Dismayed spectator.”
“According to some things I hear, it was your idea.”
“One-armed men don't go looking for battles.”
“I wouldn't say that. Look at General Hood. I hear he's given Sherman another licking in front of Atlanta.”
“That sounds about as accurate as your story on the battle of Saltville.”
“I used only eyewitness accounts, Henry.”
“Why didn't you call me? I would have told you what happened to the blacks.”
“I don't publish Republican lies, Henry.”
Outside, Paul threw his bag in the netting at the back of the gig and climbed in beside Gentry. “So you were at the battle of Saltville,” he said as they headed down the river road. Waves of heat shimmered in the air ahead of them.
“Yes.”
“Was it your idea?”
“I tried to seize the initiative,” Gentry said. “Someone told me that's how West Pointers are taught to fight battles.”
Paul smiled briefly. “Sometimes it works. Sometimes you get a bloody nose.”
“We got a very bloody nose.”
“You used Negro troops?” Paul said.
“Yes.”
“How did our boys perform? I read that Otis was killed.”
“They performed well. But it didn't do them any good. General Burbridge fought an idiotic battle. Bodies against riflemen in fortifications. It was a little Fredericksburg.”
“They—took some losses?”
“They were wiped out, almost to a man. Only Washington and a half-dozen others survived. They're all in the hospital.”
“How could that be? Didn't they do anything for the wounded?”
Paul knew there were four men wounded to every
man killed in almost any battle. This gruesome arithmetic had become an axiom for any veteran of the war.
“The Confederates shot the wounded.”
“They—shot—the—wounded?” Paul said.
“Only the blacks. They shot them. I saw it. I rescued Washington when I rode up to protest it.”
“They shot the wounded,” Paul said.
“Yes.”
They shot my men.
That was what Paul wanted to say.
They shot my men.
The men he had trained to be soldiers. The men he had taught how to shoot, how to ride, how to wield a saber.
They shot my men.
How could he fight for people who did something like that? He had heard reports of a massacre of black troops in the Confederate attack on Fort Pillow, Tennessee, last year. But he had suspected it was exaggerated by civilians who did not know the wild things soldiers did when they stormed a fort.
But no one had stormed anything at Saltville. As Gentry described it, the Union troops never got near enough to fire more than a few random shots. They had been cut to pieces by well-aimed volleys before they came within two hundred yards of the fort.
“How was your trip?” Gentry asked.
“Uneventful.”
“Completely uneventful? You have nothing to report?”
“Nothing.”
The ferocious heat combined with the appalling news of Saltville to all but shut down Paul's brain. He could only stumble forward like an infantryman in an attack that had failed, waiting for the bullet that would finish him.
“Did you buy guns? There's a rumor about guns arriving any day.”
“I'm sorry, Colonel. I don't feel free to continue this conversation.”
The gig rattled and swayed along the rutted road as Gentry absorbed the meaning of Paul's refusal. “I hope
you won't mind sleeping on the third floor. I've given your room to Janet Todd's Lucy. She's not strong enough to climb stairs—”
“What's she doing in your house?”
Gentry told him how Lucy had arrived on his doorstep, her body a mass of bleeding welts. “I think they presumed she was going to die. But Walter Yancey outdid himself to save her. He was inspired by my promise of a five-hundred-dollar bonus.”
“Who beat her?” Paul asked.
“Gabriel Todd and Rogers Jameson.”
“I'm amazed—that Janet Todd let such a thing happen.”
“I am, too,” Gentry said.
“Why did they do it? And then send her to you?”
“I suspect it was a kind of bravado. Lucy was spying for me. They found out about it somehow. They wanted to let me know they didn't care what I found out. They had plans that were immune to my prying.”
“Plans,” Paul said dazedly.
The gig rattled on. Gentry stared straight ahead at the sunbaked road. “I don't think Lincoln can survive it.”
“What will he do?”
“Quit, I imagine. He's written to me about doing it more than once. The job's beyond his capacity. Beyond any man's capacity, I suspect.”
“What's happened to Private Garner?”
“Lincoln pardoned him. He's returned to his regiment, where he'll probably desert again if he gets a chance.”
Soon they were jogging up the long curving drive of the Gentry mansion, beneath the shade of the stately beech trees. In the house, Paul lugged his bag up to his new room on the third floor. Under the sunbaked roof, it was an inferno.
On the bed were several letters. One was from his mother, written a week before their meeting in New York. It was full of her usual equivocations about the
war. She predicted Lincoln's defeat in November if the Union Army lost another battle. She described how unhappy his brother Jonathan's two sons were; their father had not been home in a year. His wife's health was deteriorating from the perpetual dread of seeing his name on a casualty list.
Wormwood,
Paul thought. That was all Jonathan could expect from Caroline Kemble Stapleton for the rest of his days. He had refused to listen to her counsel of neutrality in 1861. He had insisted on lending the Stapleton name to Lincoln's war.
Paul ripped open a letter from Major General George Armstrong Custer. It described his victory over their classmate, Confederate Brigadier General Tom Rosser in the Shenandoah Valley.
I captured Tom's wagon train with his full dress uniform in it. Naturally anything cut for that behemoth didn't fit me. I sent him a note under a flag of truce, telling him to make the tails shorter next time.
Custer closed urging Paul to join him immediately, if he felt up to it:
I need a fighting brigadier and I can't imagine a better one than you.
The third letter was from his brother, Jonathan, a scribbled note written in the trenches before Richmond. He gave him some grisly additional details about The Crater, embellished by a ferocious denunciation of General Ambrose Burnside. General Stapleton raged against the folly of keeping such a discredited birdbrain in a command position because he had good political connections. He ended with the hope that all was quiet in Indiana.
Suddenly Paul was spurring his horse into Antietam Creek to show the infantrymen how shallow it was. General Reynolds had sent him forward to find out why the Union attack was stalled. He found General Burnside was destroying regiment after regiment, trying to cross a narrow bridge. Riding back, Paul encountered
his brother leading his division forward. Paul had urged him to avoid the bridge and cross the creek downstream.
Seconds after Paul plunged into the creek, a Confederate bullet smashed him out of the saddle. “Paul!” he heard Jonathan cry as hundreds of guns fired in unison from both sides of the creek with an ear-shattering crash that sounded like the entire world had exploded.
Hands seized him. Brave men, ignoring the bullets. One toppled with a cry and slid beneath the creek's now muddy surface. They labored up the bank while Jonathan roared for a stretcher. Paul's body felt like a sack of oats. He did not seem to have arms or legs. The sun whirled in the vibrating sky to be suddenly replaced by Jonathan's long lean visage. It was streaked with tears. “Paul, Paul,” he said.

Other books

Out of the Blue by Alan Judd
Reclaim My Heart by Fasano, Donna
Eternal Melody by Anisa Claire West
A New Fear by R.L. Stine
Elohim III: The Return by Barger, Kerry
Valley Fever by Katherine Taylor
A Land to Call Home by Lauraine Snelling
Dare to Love by Tara Taylor Quinn