Authors: Paulette Jiles
—
Reminiscences of Mrs. C. C. Rainwater
In Camp before Spanish Fort. Mobile Ala., April 7th, 1865
We heard pretty good news yesterday, that Sherman had possession of Charleston. I think we will soon have the bottom knocked out of the Confederacy we are pouring it on them thick and fast and I hope we will continue to do so, till they have not a place left to lay their heads and call their own. I forgot in my last to tell you what a time for oysters we have had over in Cedar Point on the west side of the bay a man could roll up his breeches and walk in and get as many as he wanted I got some vinegar in my canteen and sat down to a pile with my screwdriver and opened and eat till I could eat no more. We are laying close siege to the works the mortar battery right by us is firing on them throwing 120 pound shells and I tell you it shakes the ground when one of them fires.
—L
ETTER FROM
F. F. A
UDSLEY,
C
OMPANY
A, F
ORTY-FOURTH
I
NFANTRY
M
ISSOURI
V
OLUNTEERS
(U
NION
),
TO HIS WIFE,
W
ESTERN
H
ISTORICAL
M
ANUSCRIPT
C
OLLECTION,
U
NIVERSITY OF
M
ISSOURI,
C
OLUMBIA,
M
ISSOURI
T
HE
LADY JANE
was a side-wheeler of ninety feet and she had lost the railing on her Texas deck to Rebel artillery and was punctured here and there with bullet holes. One of the more experienced officers on board the
Lady Jane
advised Major Neumann not to hang on the rail to watch the scenery go by. Rebel sharpshooters sat out there in those swamps. They especially liked the glitter of officers’ insignia.
So William Neumann stood between the great side wheel and the
passenger accommodations on the second deck, looking forward. He stood in the wind and watched the broad Mississippi and its uncut swamplands sliding past, the state of Mississippi on one side and Arkansas on the other. His orders were to report to Colonel Benjamin Hayes of the First Indiana Heavy Artillery at Mobile. He turned his back to the wind to light his cigar.
He would bring her with him when he struck out, after the war. They were alike, the two of them; almost alike. Neumann enjoyed being among society more than he had admitted to her, and it was because he saw himself walking into some gathering with her on his arm. How they would stand at the double doors of their home and greet the guests, and the guests would all linger to look at her because she was so beautiful and so lively. They would walk out under cottonwood trees of great height to the whitewashed stables. And afterward they would talk about the people who had come and the dancing. In their own bedroom. When that mass of black hair fell down her back and it would be like silk in his hands.
About one in the afternoon the
Lady Jane
slid past Greenville, Mississippi, with its wood yard and the planked-over log cabins on a low shore. A man in a blouse-sleeved shirt was asleep on the woodpile with his pipe unlit in his hand. Major Neumann stood on the Arkansas side of the steamer; the swamplands glided by and the sun’s reflection galloped along after them, glinting through the duckweed and the cypresses. The trees would make the best lumber on earth, fine grained and perfectly straight, as much as sixty feet without a knot in them. He thought how he would see to the construction of a house of that lumber for himself and Adair. Neumann watched while the fifteen-foot blades of the side wheel roared over his head, flinging flat sheets of water, and crashed into the river, smiting it.
He wished he had acquired a daguerreotype of her. Or a tintype or some sort of mechanical reproduction of her face. Then he would not have to puzzle over his memories, of exactly how she had appeared.
At two in the afternoon a minié ball came directly between the
blades of the side wheel and struck him with a ripping sound he later remembered hearing even above the noise of the machinery. It felt as if he had been struck in the face with a poker. Blood jumped in ropes down his tunic. It was splashing on his hands, running out of him, staining everything red. Lieutenant Brawley came running at him with wide eyes.
Neumann pulled his revolver so fast he didn’t remember doing it, and stood at the rail with it at arm’s length looking for a target and his hand was stained with blood. He saw a puff of ochre gunpowder smoke rising above a tall cypress in the swamps on the Arkansas side.
There he is!
Sir, get away! Brawley yelled at him. He’s reloading!
The hard watery wind off the Mississippi tore into his eyes and the shifting brilliant planes dazzled him but he held to the rail and tried to take aim. Another ball came past and below men were yelling
Sharpshooter! Sharpshooter!
Neumann fired all five shots in quick succession out of rage, though he had no chance of hitting anything. One was a misfire but the other four clipped a limb from a cypress and sent the new green needles spraying. Neumann stood watching intently, he was seized by the fierce craving to see a man fall out of one of the cypresses, to see him tumble out with his long rifle crashing through limbs before him. Thick smoke from his revolver barrel drifted away in lengthening streams, and the side-wheeler slid downstream on its flat, keelless bottom.
He looked down at his uniform coat and saw streams of blood staining it, running off and spattering the deck. Where am I hit? Where am I hit? I’ve been hit.
Come on, sir, down to sick bay!
Brawley pulled out a cotton handkerchief and shoved it against the major’s right cheek. Brawley pressed hard and the side wheel churned on, bearing them downstream, past whatever cypress remote in those swamps that had been the perch of the Rebel sharpshooter.
Here, let me have it, said Neumann. He snatched the handkerchief
out of Brawley’s hand. Damn that son of a bitch, damn that son of a bitch.
He proceeded to walk calmly down the vibrating deck and into the passenger compartments, laying out behind him a train of blood like a powder fuse. He walked down the stairs to the first deck. There some of the troops looked up at him from where they lay sprawled on the decks.
Knock any teeth out? said an infantryman of the Eighth Iowa. I’d rather lose a finger than get any teeth knocked out.
At ease! yelled the lieutenant. He walked behind the major to watch and see if he would faint or not. The men stuck their heads out of the cargo doors where they had been bunked in. At ease!
Two men were busily cleaning their rifles, sawing up and down industriously with the ramrods.
Did you get him, sir?
No. I just knocked his teeth out. Neumann had to say this around the bubbling blood in his mouth. He had to lean and spit.
I don’t see no teeth in that, the infantryman said.
I don’t expect he got him, said a sergeant. Usually you can hear them splash. They go eeeeeeeee whumph.
Neumann lay down on the cot in sick bay and turned to one side as the doctor began threading his needle. He stared resolutely at the white-painted wainscoting. His thoughts were nothing but a long furious stream of swearing. The curved needle penetrated the skin of his cheek and his guts coiled inside him as he felt the thread being drawn through.
That night he sat in his bunk in passenger accommodation no. 10, fighting against the pain. His face was swollen like a full moon and his skin strained at the stitches. Lieutenant Brawley read the New Orleans newspaper by the light of a candle. There was a ping and Brawley looked up.
There was one, he said.
I think they’re shooting at your candlelight, said Neumann.
Let ’em shoot, sir, said Brawley. What they’re using is those old smoothbores. That ball can’t penetrate nothing.
Did pretty well on me, said Neumann. His whole head throbbed, and it beat out a rhythm with the blades.
I mean these bulkheads. The lieutenant looked up from his newspaper. Now, if it had hit you in the skull, you see, you’d never have felt it. Brawley laughed in a sort of snorting chortle.
Goddamn, Neumann said. Just think. There was another ping, and a thunking sound. They both looked up. The old conical .54 caliber ball had bit into the bulkhead and stopped. He thought, One could well come through the window. But neither of them had his head hanging out the window so he supposed it was all right. The side wheel walked across the waters of the Mississippi with smashing steps, drawing them down into the sugar country.
THE NIGHT BEFORE
the Bombardment of the Defenses of Mobile, Major Neumann had absentmindedly pulled out all the stitches of his face wound. His face was permanently distorted where the ball had chipped a cheekbone but he didn’t think about it, he was possessed with the nervousness men had before a battle, a kind of vivid, jittering dread.
The Federal baggage train had bogged down in the sandy road coming up from Fish River, and the wagoneers were trying to jack the wheels out of the sand with new-cut pine poles. Neumann rode full tilt between the pines to one side of the jammed-up Federal wagons, looking for the First Indiana Artillery, his orders in his tunic pocket. The road alongside Mobile Bay snaked among the saw palmettos and the pines, a highway of red sand into which wheels sank and men straggled ankle deep. Enormous horseflies feasted on them at leisure.
A. J. Smith’s men were volunteer troops from Iowa and Indiana. Veterans of Chattanooga and the march through Georgia. They called themselves Smith’s Gorillas and had learned to pray and eat and reload on the run and they were good at arson. The men had started burning houses and barns and sheds and fence rails at Fish River, as soon as the gangplanks were down. They marched through the sandy pine forests
from one small village to another, from Fairhope to Montrose, and more often than not they took what was available.
Neumann and Lieutenant Brawley came upon Company A of the Eighth Iowa Infantry rooting around in the sheds of a small farm among the pines. They called out to the dusty veterans in their blue faded tunics to keep moving on. The men dodged him. They had chickens tied to their haversacks and bunches of sugarcane in their hands.
Wait till we get within range of their guns! Neumann shouted. Then you’ll think about something else!
Go on, Major. A bearded and weathered corporal walked and ate a slab of the sludge called candy that came from the last boiling of the cane. I didn’t have my breakfast.
There’s killing going to go on today, said Brawley. As if he had experienced much.
I hope you find time to do some fighting, Corporal, said Neumann. As well as eating.
I’ll see what I can do, sir.
They slogged on through the sea grape and wait-a-minute vines. In the villages alongside Mobile Bay, hidden back in the thin forests, Neumann saw a people that seemed to him to be Red Indians. They stood in the doorways of huts thatched with palm leaf and moved very slowly out of the way as Smith’s Gorillas set the huts afire. They dressed themselves in dusty fustian with bright woven sashes and their bangs cut straight across their foreheads. They were a people of ancient lineage who cared little about modern war or soldiers of any stripe. As if they had retired from the world and from all desire for real estate or love of possessions. They sat on the ground beside their hammocks and watched their huts burn and the rats bolt out of the burning thatch.
The corporal came upon a basket of dried peaches and began to devour them with one hand while carrying his Springfield in the other.
Neumann rode past and said, If you men would stop having yourselves a party!
One of the Iowa men yelled at him, Sir! The corporal’s eeeatin’ agaiiiiin!! You better stop him! Once he gets started he eats everthing, live chickens and everthing!
Neumann shut his mouth and looked straight ahead.
We’ll keep you informed whenever he’s eatin’ again! The private that yelled this at Neumann nodded eagerly with a bright sarcastic smile.
Thank you, Private, said Neumann and rode ahead.
The lines of men in blue forged on at route step. The veterans had tied rags or socks over the firing mechanisms of their rifles to protect them from the sand, and as they swung along in they sang.
They marched past large plantations, and the slaves abandoned their tools in the sugar fields, among the new shoots of cotton, their hands scarred with the cuts of cane leaves, burned with the sugar-boiling. So cruelly marked by their enslavement and yet they came singing. Four women with their arms across one another’s shoulders, dancing a jumping line dance. Calling to the men in a kind of song, and the men came before them calling out the response. Neumann could not understand the words, but it lifted his heart. The former slaves followed the army in the hundreds, shouting and waving.
Then they came within range of the Confederate guns at Spanish Fort. Neumann heard a heavy crump. The groups of slaves from the fields turned and ran into the line of trees, and the women’s dresses flew like sheets before the wind, like quilts on a line, and they carried their children against them as they ran.
A fountain of sand and palm leaves and pine branches blew skyward and it then rained down on the blue-clad troops with rattling noises, then two other hits nearby. So began their bombardment. And behind the screen of their artillery the Confederates put out one last line of troops.
The Confederate infantry fired one volley from the pines, and then Neumann saw a solid wall of running men in butternut, the flash of ramrods in the air as they reloaded. They came running out of their
own thick banks of smoke. They appeared out of the palmetto and pine like dismal ragged spirits, screaming, and their torn clothing fluttered. Neumann drew his revolver and suddenly found himself staggering forward on foot and his horse thrashing on the ground behind him. Apparently his horse had been shot out from under him and he had landed on his feet or maybe scrambled up.