Savannah, or a Gift for Mr. Lincoln, Page 3

  Miss Vee cast a wistful eye at the mantel of the brick fireplace; it was the one spot free of books. “I do so admire that photograph of your papa,” she said. Next to a daguerreotype of Sara’s parents, Reverend and Mrs. Chider, a similar photograph presented Ladson Lester as he was in 1860, a year before his inglorious death: a solemn oval face, a head already bald, a mustache full and down-sweeping, as though much of his hair had migrated south from his pate.

  Hattie nodded in agreement; she loved the picture, though it hardly reflected the father she remembered—the man whose blue eyes sparkled, who sang cheerfully as he worked, who hugged his wife and daughter with jolly abandon. Miss Vee responded to the picture for a different reason. Back in school, Sara confided, Miss Vee had been “disappointed in love,” her heart permanently broken. She envied women more fortunate than herself.

  Soon Sara arrived with a tray, an assortment of cups, and a blue pot from the kiln of a local potter. She poured three cups and passed them around. “Now, what is this awful news?”

  “Milledgeville,” the guest announced, as though someone had died. “Milledgeville has fallen.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Oh, yes. Two days ago, Sherman’s left wing took the town. The lad who rode to Savannah with the news said the barbarians had already moved out again, across the Oconee River bridge, coming this way, surely.”

  Hattie spoke up. “Our neighbor Legrand Parmenter was here a while ago. He said Milledgeville was in danger, but we didn’t know it had been captured.”

  “Captured and vandalized. Atrocity after atrocity. The weather was frosty, like today. The Yankees chopped up church pews for firewood.”

  Sara shuddered. “Dreadful.”

  “There’s more.” Miss Vee leaned forward; again the creaks, and Hattie thought one end of the sofa sagged. “They looted the treasury of stacks of unsigned Confederate notes and lit their cigars with them. They carried fine books from the state library and threw them in the mud. They held a mock session of the legislature that lasted all night. That debauched devil Kilpatrick”—Hattie recognized the name of the infamous general of Union cavalry—“drunkenly orated on the merits of various whiskies.”

  “Where was Governor Brown while this was going on?”

  “Fled, who knows where? The cowardly legislators too. That isn’t the worst.” Miss Vee’s tone inspired a thrill of fear in Hattie. The day had become dusk; they needed to light the fatwood in the hearth to drive out the shadows and the chill.

  “The vandals burned the state prison. The governor had already offered the inmates amnesty if they would enlist to fight. Some did; many did not. The Yankees set fire to the place, and the remaining inmates were released to run amok. There are”—she lowered her voice—“Sara, should your daughter listen to this?”

  “This is wartime, Vee. Hattie is quite grown up. Please proceed.”

  “Well, all right. Between the escaped criminals and Sherman’s plundering horde, I am reliably informed that no decent woman in Milledgeville was safe, not even in her own home. Women of all ages were—outraged. Do you know what that means?”

  “I have heard the expression.” Sara’s reply was sober, unemotional. Hattie had a vague idea of what Miss Vee was trying to say. She didn’t quite understand the mechanics of men and women together, but she’d been around livestock most of her life and could fill in the gaps with imagination.

  Sara asked, “Did the person who reported this actually witness any such outrages?”

  “I don’t believe so, but—”

  “Then let us hope these particular rumors are nothing more than that. I’ve never visited the North, although my father did, several times. I don’t believe the Yankees are saints, but neither do I believe they’re monsters.”

  “They are men, Sara. Lustful men. For months, perhaps years, they have been denied the wholesome calming influence of mothers, sisters, and sweethearts. Sherman allows them to have their way,” she concluded with a finality that brooked no disagreement.

  Sara sipped tea. Hattie balanced her cracked cup on her knee, unwilling to drink the dismal stuff; she’d spied a piece of bark floating.

  “I appreciate your informing us, Vee. We’ll pray that General Sherman can control his soldiers.”

  “What about the jailbirds running hither and yon? He has no control over them. Certainly some may come this way. Which brings me to the second reason for my visit. I want to offer you the sanctuary of my house. You and Hattie will be much safer in Savannah.”

  “There’s Amelia,” Hattie began.

  “She is welcome too. Close up this place. Pack a valise, and come stay with me.”

  Hattie responded with a vigorous nod. The plantation had become fearfully isolated. Sara, however, had a contrary response: “Abandon Silverglass? I don’t think I can, not yet.”

  “Don’t wait too long,” Miss Vee warned as she finished her tea and prepared to leave.

  Sara and her friend exchanged sisterly hugs and kisses. Outside, the carriage horse seemed to cast a despairing eye at the fleshy passenger rolling toward him. Sara assisted her friend into the gig, and Miss Vee drove away, chicken feathers waving.

  “She’s a dear person,” Sara said as they went inside again. “I don’t doubt the Yankees have done some terrible things, but I refuse to believe all this talk of outrages. Not until there’s evidence.” She pondered a moment. “In regard to such threats to herself, perhaps Vee is—um—slightly too hopeful. Do you take my meaning, Hattie?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I think so. It was generous of her to offer us a safe place, though.”

  “Very generous,” Sara agreed.

  “Can’t we go?”

  “Only if it becomes necessary. I’ll decide.”

  Which was the answer Hattie expected, and profoundly unsettling. Off in the November night, the Yankees were coming, possibly the convicts too.

  Sara saw her daughter’s anxious look, patted her gently.

  “Help me find a lamp. If we don’t pick those crabs, we’ll never eat dinner.”

  Wagons, he wrote, hundreds of wagons, inundating the land like Noah’s flood or Pharaoh’s plagues—

  No. Plumb, his irascible editor at the New York Eye, would slash that out, assuming he read it, which assumed eventual reestablishment of telegraph connections to the North. Plumb wanted war dispatches written in short, bleak sentences. Stephen tore the sheet from his pad and tossed it in the ditch behind him. He hailed from the city, where you disposed of trash that way. He licked the tip of his pencil and contemplated a new beginning.

  Ah, but bleakness was hard; the passage of this army hour after hour invited fanciful allusions. The left wing was a chaotic, ever-changing spectacle: infantry columns slogging by—the tall, tough, sunburnt “Westerners” from Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, feared in the South far more than Grant’s immigrants and shopkeepers; then a dozen sutler’s wagons; drovers herding cattle; a band of ragged Negroes, some with babes in arms. They followed the army without purpose or permission; Uncle Billy resented it.

  Stephen observed the Sabbath spectacle from a shoulder of the sandy road leading to the county seat. Marauders had carried off most of a hand-hewn fence behind the ditch. The adjoining field ran to a forest of sixty-foot pines; the field had been trampled and rutted by horses and wagons of the army foragers—“bummers,” most people called them. The creak of iron wagon tires, the lowing of cattle, the cursing of teamsters, the singing of the black folks, the occasional distant pop of a weapon blended into a weird music. Not, however, the kind of music Stephen appreciated most.

  Stephen was a slender, dark-haired chap of thirty-two. Large dark eyes and pleasing swarthy features spoke of his heritage: black Irish Presbyterian father, mother from the Italian community in Rochester. In 1852, their only son had decamped for the wicked metropolis to start his career by sweeping floors at the Eye on Park Row.

  A dawn fog had lifted, but the sky remained cloudy. Elements of the XIV Corps commanded by Gen. Jeffers
on C. Davis continued to pass. Stephen had it on his mental task list to interview the unpopular and unfortunately named Jef Davis, but he didn’t look forward to it.

  From the direction of Sandersville he heard a regimental band triumphantly playing “Tramp! Tramp! Tramp!”—quite a contrast with yesterday, when skirmishers from Joe Wheeler’s cavalry, perhaps reinforced by home-grown partisans, had fought for thirty minutes in the streets of Sandersville before being routed. Uncle Billy was in a fury over that, as well as over the earlier delay at Buffalo Creek, where rebs had destroyed a series of small bridges, forcing Captain Poe and his engineers to repair or rebuild them before the army could progress.

  Stephen stuffed his pad into the pocket of his travel-worn uniform blouse, jumped the ditch, and untied his mule. After a week on an Atlanta-bought horse that bucked or bolted at every round of rifle or artillery fire, Stephen heeded the advice of a teamster who handled a six-mule hitch; he traded the horse for the less skittish mule the seller had named Ambrose, to mock the hapless Union general, Ambrose Burnside, who had admitted to blundering at Fredericksburg. “Half an ass if not more,” the seller said, but Stephen kept the name, quickly concluding that Ambrose the mule soldiered more effectively than his two-legged counterpart.

  As he mounted, three officers on horseback appeared. Stephen recognized the major, three years older than himself, who was his favorite on Sherman’s staff. He saluted. “Major Hitchcock.”

  “Captain Hopewell.”

  Stephen exchanged salutes with two lieutenants accompanying the sturdy, blunt-spoken lawyer who’d been assigned to Sherman in Atlanta, chiefly to handle his voluminous correspondence. Although Hitchcock was born in Alabama, his family came from New England; he’d studied at Yale and practiced in St. Louis. He said, “Are you riding to town?”

  “Yes, sir. Did the rebs destroy it yesterday?”

  “No, but the general’s threatening to apply the torch. He’s in one of his tempers. This doesn’t help.” Hitchcock produced a page of newsprint. “The Augusta Constitutionalist urges loyal Georgians to round up Union stragglers and, if surrender is refused, to—I quote—‘beautifully bushwhack them.’ Care to read it?”

  “I take your word, sir. Do you think the general will carry out his threat?”

  “He’ll burn the courthouse if nothing else. The rebs sniped at us from the second floor yesterday.” Hitchcock observed Stephen’s expression. “You don’t wholeheartedly believe in this campaign, do you, Captain?”

  Stephen answered candidly. “I saw no need for setting fire to Atlanta. Also, everyone says the foragers are badly disciplined.”

  “I’d argue the first point but grant you the second. The general set out to ‘make Georgia howl,’ as he phrases it. He wants to be the man to end the war.”

  “By punishing civilians.”

  “I would keep that opinion to yourself. You know what the general thinks of ink slingers.”

  Stephen quoted an overheard remark of Sherman’s: “‘It is impossible to carry on a war with a free press.’”

  “Nevertheless,” Hitchcock said, “the general does not make war on women and children.”

  Only on their homes, livestock, crops, and provender, Stephen thought. But he refrained from saying it. He held his rank by sufferance of the War Department. Uncle Billy detested journalists because certain of them had criticized him for erratic behavior in Kentucky in ’62. The Cincinnati Commercial had actually called him insane—“stark mad.” He fought to ban all newsmen from his army. He lost the battle, and barely tolerated the clutch of reporters who, like Stephen, tagged along with the troops.

  A dispatch rider appeared from the direction of Sandersville, bringing a message for the major. Hitchcock perused it quickly. “The general requires my presence immediately. Good morning, Captain.” Off he galloped with his lieutenants following.

  Ambrose proceeded at a walk while Stephen scribbled phrases on his pad. Suddenly, up ahead, he heard a woman wailing. Not suffering, exactly—protesting. He dropped behind a four-wheeled ambulance, maneuvered through half a dozen plodding steers, and rode up to have a look.

  The sight he came upon appalled him. A band of army foragers had picketed their horses in the dooryard of a large cabin set well back from the road, where the pine forest began. The bummers were a mixed lot: three callow privates, not long off the farm; a homely stoop-shouldered corporal with moles on his cheeks; a giant brown-skinned soldier Stephen took to be one of the Winnebago Indians marching with the army—how had he gotten separated from his Wisconsin regiment?—and finally, a sergeant. The sergeant was arguing with a stout lady at the cabin door.

  “I never wanted this war,” she cried. “You got no right to punish helpless women who never did nothing to harm you.”

  “Oh, yes?” said the noncom, his chin aggressively thrust forward. “Let me ask you—where’s your husband?”

  “Off in the army, but—”

  “Did you use your influence keep him home?”

  “No, but—”

  “Then you did all you could to help the war, and nothing to prevent it. Boys, this is a rebel house. Take whatever we can use.”

  The bummers stampeded inside while Stephen dismounted and approached the peculiar-looking sergeant. The fellow was tall, well muscled, sunburnt. Over his blue tunic he wore a cape improvised from an Oriental carpet. Huge silver spurs, not army issue, clinked and gleamed. He saluted lackadaisically and grinned, as though friendliness would protect him. Stephen snapped a salute in return. “Take off that ridiculous hat.”

  “Yessir.” The young man doffed a black top hat decorated with artificial flowers; his blond hair hadn’t been cut in a while.

  “Whose horse is that?” Stephen indicated the animal whose open saddlebags bulged with ears of corn, yams, books, a silver candelabra, and a dead rooster. The sergeant allowed as how the animal was his.

  “Your name?”

  “Alpheus Winks. Eighty-first Indiana.”

  “Where’s the officer in charge?”

  “Posted to the invalid corps, sir.”

  “Pretty far from your unit, aren’t you?”

  “Foragers are allowed to roam at will, sir.”

  “And plunder at will. Where did you steal those goods?”

  “From reb houses already condemned to be burnt. Sir.” The pause before the final word was pointed.

  “Well, I don’t approve.”

  Two of the farm boys dragged an old rug from the cabin. The stout lady watched, disbelieving, as they spread the rug in the weedy yard. The Indian ran out with a jug containing some kind of syrup, which he proceeded to pour all over the rug. The stout lady reeled back, gasping.

  “That’s criminal,” Stephen barked. “Mount up and leave this property.”

  “Sir, we’re only carrying out Uncle Billy’s—”

  “General Sherman to you.”

  “General Sherman’s Special Order Number One Hundred and Twenty. ‘Forage liberally,’ it says. That’s what we’re doing.”

  “Yes indeedy,” said the corporal, standing in the cabin door with a pair of lapis lazuli ear pendants held up to his ears.

  Winks looked uncomfortable. “Put those back, Professor. We don’t make war on ladies.”

  “What do you call stealing their possessions?” Stephen exclaimed.

  The corporal smirked. “I call it ‘a place for everything, and everything in its place.’ Mr. Emerson said that. I say the place for reb baubles is right here in my pocket. Just so’s you know I’m not a lowlife, I taught the classics at Indiana Asbury College in Greencastle,” he advised Stephen.

  “Corporal Marcus, don’t try to hornswoggle this here officer,” Winks said. “You taught in a four-bit, run-down, one-room schoolhouse in Cloverdale. Now put those things back.” The stout lady leaned against the cabin wall in a state of goggle-eyed suspense.

  Yet the professor hesitated. “She’s got a pump organ, Alph. Ought to be worth a few shekels.” Stephen quivered with a
guilty interest.

  Winks shook his head. “We ain’t in the business of moving pump organs.” He drew his sidearm—an English-made five-shot .44, from the look of it. “Will you git, or do you need encouragement?”

  The corporal vanished. Stephen said, “Marcus. I’ll remember that name.”

  “Marcus O. Marcus,” Winks said. “Putnam County, Indiana. We’re all from there. I have to sit on the professor—he’ll steal anything. Thinks he’s smarter’n the rest of us too.”

  A wild bleating announced two of the farm boys waving sticks and chasing a trio of hapless sheep. The third farm boy followed with a burlap sack; judging from the internal noise and commotion, it contained one or more anxious hens. The farm boys hoisted the sheep and burlap sack into a wagon parked by the road. The Indian clambered in to guard their acquisitions. The professor shambled out of the cabin, looking disgruntled.

  Winks mounted his booty-laden horse and tipped his flowered top hat. “Pleasure meeting you, sir,” he said to Stephen, meaning directly the opposite. They all rode away in the direction of Sandersville, quickly lost in the continual grinding confusion of the advance.

  Stephen’s face was a curious contrast of a beard already showing black since his early-morning shave and, above it, the scarlet of sunburn and frustration. Winks had a certain countrified charm, but he and his men were thieves. When the North won, as it surely would, the state of Georgia might harbor resentment forever, and not without reason.

  The stout lady glared at Stephen and disappeared in her cabin after a last woeful look at her ruined carpet. Stephen wanted to see her pump organ but figured that even asking permission would tar him with the same brush used on the bummers.

  A week after Miss Vee’s visit, other unexpected guests came rolling up the road, not so welcome this time. “It’s the judge and his whole clan,” Sara informed Hattie. “Trailing clouds of spurious respectability.” Sara loved Wordsworth, had in fact memorized many of his poems, including his “Ode on the Intimations of Immortality,” which she readily paraphrased.