High Hearts (53 page)

“He’s alive,” Kate said with relief.

Lutie opened her letter. “It’s from Jimmy. I want to read this to Sin-Sin and Di-Peachy, too.” She found them in the parlor and motioned for them to come out.

“Ground must be paste down there.” Mars appraised the land below Evelington Heights, a long ride overlooking the James River. McClellan’s army huddled around smoky, sputtering campfires, built with wet wood. William Byrd’s mansion, Westover, acquired by him in 1688, was surrounded by sullen Federals. Mars hoped this piece of history wouldn’t fall to the torch.

Yesterday’s chill made his arm ache, but his fever was nearly gone. He felt terrible, but as he’d always enjoyed a strong constitution, he forced himself back to work. He’d heard when dawn finally came to Malvern Hill, the wounded writhed on the ground like worms in hot ashes. Until certain that the Yankees had evacuated, no one could or would retrieve them. He figured he was in better shape than those poor devils.

The Ninth Virginia Cavalry protected their rear as the remainder of Stuart’s force dismounted, pulled out their rifles, and waited for the Yankees to come up the hill. Captain Pelham had dragged up his lone howitzer in the night. Satisfied that the Confederates were as ready as they’d ever be, he was ordered, Let ’em have it.

The first shell spiraled and splattered below, sending teamsters
and their horses scurrying. Pelham continued a steady, controlled firing.

“Think they’ll come up?” Geneva asked Nash.

“Once they figure out it’s just us, I don’t see why not. They may be demoralized, but they’re not stupid.”

“Longstreet and Jackson are movin’. If they get here in time, we’ll have ’em dancin’ the Turkey Trot.” Banjo watched the running figures below.

The gun, while an irritant, did not cause mass panic. Bobbing on the James were Federal gunboats, whose men feared no land force, confident that their shells would blow anyone to kingdom come. The U.S.S.
Monitor was
anchored around the river bend at Haxall’s Landing.

Geneva, born for the saddle, exhibited no appreciation or understanding of the navy’s role in warfare. As far as she was concerned, they should steam off to the Atlantic or the Chesapeake and sail around one another, firing their big guns. They got in the way of real fighting. But by this time in her passionate embrace of cavalry, she was beginning to think that infantry got in the way of fighting, too.

While Pelham fired his lonely gun, someone below started thinking. A Federal battery rolled up east of Herring Creek, which slogs though marshes across the south face of Evelington Heights. It was about 9
A.M.

“Lining the boys up. You know, I can’t abide the color blue. After these unpleasantries between the states are settled, I don’t never want to see blue nothing!” Banjo bit off the end of his cigar and spit it as far as he could. “No blue booties on baby boys’ feet, no blue ribbons in little girls’ hair, no blue dresses on the good ladies—not even sky blue and I was formerly partial to sky blue. I want lots of red and yellow and sea-green. I love sea-green on a woman. No blue jewelry neither!”

“You mean sapphires.” Geneva, interest aroused by the activities below, moved over the ridge a bit.

“Yep. What do you call those pretty light ones.”

“Aquamarines.”

“Well, I don’t want to see nary a one!”

“What are they doing down there?” Geneva borrowed Sam Wells’s field glasses. “They’re going to come on the flank.”

“We’ve got sharpshooters on our right. That’ll slow them for a bit.” Nash sounded worried nonetheless.

“I’ll tell the colonel.” She gave the glasses back to Sam, who was showing the effects of lack of sleep.

“What else do you tell the colonel? You two are getting very matey,” Nash grumbled. “Why you risked your life to save his bones, I’ll never know. That was a damn crazy thing you did!”

Banjo, wearily accustomed to their flare-ups, kept his eyes trained on the Yankees. The three of them were lying side by side over the ridge while Nash and Geneva argued.

“Then you and Banjo were as crazy as I was, running along that stone wall.”

“At least I knew who I was fighting for.”

“So did I!”

“That’s my point,” Nash hissed. “God, I hate that man!”

Nash flipped over to find Mars Vickers behind him. He got to his feet. “No point lying about it. I’m as ready to say it to your face as behind your back.”

Geneva stood up. The front of her uniform was wet from the damp earth. “Don’t fight, you two. Colonel, your left arm isn’t any good anyway.”

Suddenly boiling over, Nash pushed her on the ground. “Take his part!” A grip like a vise closed around his throat. He found himself not two inches from Mars’s face.

“Don’t ever do that again.” He released Nash, who rubbed his throat. “Now come with me. We aren’t going to fight.”

The earth slurped at their boots. They walked behind the center of their line.

“You and I will never see eye to eye,” Mars began.

Nash, without waiting for him to finish, blurted, “We never will. I can’t abide the way you glorify combat.”

“If a man’s not willing to fight, then he’s not worth his salt.”

“The ground turns to salt under your feet!” Nash insulted him.

Mars wheeled, his heel sinking deeper into the mud. “Don’t provoke me. We serve no useful purpose by fighting. As to this war, Piggy, what the hell is the answer: To kill ten thousand men in one day or to take ten days to do it? That’s what it’s come to. This is a new kind of war.” Noticing that his adversary lapsed into an unagreeable quiet, he said, “The main problem between us, aside from our temperaments, is
Jimmy. I misunderstood your relationship, and I leaned on you pretty hard. I want to apologize.”

Nash never expected this. “You do?”

“I know.” Mars conveyed his meaning.

“She didn’t tell me—but we don’t talk much anymore.” Nash fumbled.

“You want to know what makes me sick? You’ve got more love than any man deserves in this life, but you’re more worried about somebody thinking you’re a pansy than you are grateful for that love.”

“What?” Nash was now completely off guard.

“If I had what you have, I wouldn’t give a good goddamn what anybody thought of me!”

“What passed between you two at White House Landing?”

“It was more what passed between us at Black Creek. I was delirious, and Jimmy fished me out of the water. Obviously, once she got me on shore, the game was up. I was delirious, but I wasn’t blind.”

“Why don’t you muster her out?” Nash sounded hopeful. “She’s got no business here.”

Mars laughed. “Best soldier I’ve got. I’m not sure I could do without her.”

“I appreciate your admiration for Jimmy.” Nash paused. “Funny how I never call her by her right name anymore. Colonel, this is easy for you to talk about. You’re married to the most beautiful woman in the world who is doing what she’s supposed to be doing: nursing the sick and behaving like a lady.”

“You’re a damned fool, Nash Hart, and I reckon you always will be.”

Stuart’s men fought the methodical pressure on their right as the Yankee infantry pressed them. At two in the afternoon, Captain Pelham fired his last shell. There was no more ammunition nor any relief in sight. Jackson and Longstreet never showed.

With great reluctance, Stuart withdrew two miles to the north and went into camp.

A carnival of hope infected Richmond. McClellan stayed at Harrison’s Landing. He plopped there like a frog full of buckshot. He moved neither forward nor backward, but seemed imprisoned by his own weight. Richmond was saved. Churches offered up services, people shouted, “Gloria in Excelsis,” and Lee, instead of being the goat, was now the hero.

While Lutie, like everyone around her, offered up prayers of thanksgiving to Almighty God, she thought of the weeks of battles as the slaughterhouse of heroes. The death lists were appalling. The best families of the South lost their husbands, sons, and brothers. Hardly anyone was untouched, especially since the upper classes led the regiments, brigades, and divisions. The leaders, the wealthy and the gifted, were cut down by the scythe of war no less than the small farmer, the shopkeeper, even the vagrant seeking to redeem himself by military service. They died alike, and Death, as always, impartially selected his victims. She used to think of Death as a personal force, the god of the underworld, Hades or Pluto. Odd, too, that Pluto was the god of riches. Each day you bargained with this god, but in the end he got the better of the deal. She put aside that embroidered, mythical notion. Death these days was a threshing machine. Someone started the blades whirling, and it wouldn’t cut off.

She suffered a brief spasm of hope that the North would sue for peace. McClellan was beaten. Even if the general refused to admit it, how could Washington ignore the results of those terrible days?

No peace offer arrived. No courier rode with a white flag from the Federal army. Nothing.

Lutie thought to herself, Here we are in the midst of
death, and we persist in thinking it is something that happens to others, not ourselves. She didn’t think, not for one minute, although surrounded by an enemy over one hundred thousand strong that she herself would die. But then she didn’t think Henley would die either. Perhaps if she had been at Chatfield, she would have sensed it or heard the baying of those black and tans. Here in Richmond, separated from the coordinates of her life, she wondered if she was able to put events in perspective. She would die someday, but not now. She would die an old lady; like a wave receding from the shore, she would prepare to leave the earth at last. She had much life left in her. She felt it strongly, but where this life would lead her, she didn’t know.

She had seen things that decades would not wipe from her mind. It wasn’t really the occasional grotesque sight that shook her: a corpse already blowing up with gas or a dog running down Franklin Street with a man’s foot in its mouth. Even the bone-throbbing screams could be borne. What seeped into her marrow were the little things, those small incidents that caught her unawares like a bright, shining pool of blood on cobblestones. No body was in sight, yet the blood was as fresh and slick as if someone dumped a bucket of red paint on the street. Those were the things that shifted her inner compass. It was as if a voice incanted, “You who have seen this will never be the same.”

No one would be the same. Not the men who fought, or the women who nursed them, or the children who bore mute witness to the carnage. When Lutie was a child, her mammy used to scare her, saying, “Raw Head and Bloody Bones gonna get you.” The children of Richmond had seen this devil. What would come of them? What world would they invent when this was over?

A fog rolled up from the James. Lutie was in Kate’s stable just to get away from the commotion of the house for a minute. She realized the sweet smell of hay, leather, and horse sweat reminded her of Henley. She felt closer to him here than anywhere. She realized since Sumner had died, she spoke to Emil less and less, and when Henley was killed, she’d quite forgotten her old friend. She wondered if Emil had been her answer to Henley. Once her husband was dead, she no longer needed a confidant. Lutie used to tell herself that she and Emil would travel to Cairo in a pelican’s beak.
She laughed out loud and startled one of the horses. “No one can accuse me of lacking imagination.”

There was precious little to laugh about outside herself. The chemistry labs at the university were manufacturing gunpowder. The men of enrollment age had all enlisted, and many of them were already dead. People in Charlottes ville questioned whether the school could survive the war.

Elizabeth Van Lew performed her “mission work” among the Northern prisoners. Maud Windsor no longer thought her peculiar neighbor was feeble-minded. She thought she was an outright spy and should be marched, silken curls and petticoats, to the garden wall and shot.

Shooting civilians, unbelievable as that sounded to Lutie, might enter the war. The newspapers carried General John Pope’s address to his Union troops when he took over command in the Shenandoah Valley. He said that any resistance on the part of “disloyal” citizens would be met with harsh resistance, even death. Up until now, the war was between armed men who chose to fight. A note of bitterness was creeping into conversations. Lutie noticed that the combination of Pope’s extraordinary statement and the constant presence of death was hardening many hearts. Worse, some people, reading Northern newspapers that blamed the war on slavery, began to believe it themselves. Instead of feeling shame for their “peculiar institution,” they began to express outright hostility against the Negro race. Irrationality was more to be feared than outright cruelty in Lutie’s mind. She carefully distinguished between irrationality and suprarationality. The former was illogical, the latter was beyond logic and therefore spiritual. It did not occur to her that this explanation was self-serving.

Poofy had not written, or rather, her letters had not gotten through the lines. Lutie missed her sister and she missed her younger brother, T. Pritchard Chalfonte, though he scribbled a message from time to time. But most of all, Lutie missed her husband. She scarcely believed it possible that she could so long for the man who had once brought her so much pain, the man she subsequently shut out of her heart for years. Well, thank God, she had that good last year with him. She couldn’t think of her losses. She put Henley and Sumner out of her mind and concentrated on the enveloping fog, a shroud pulled over the capital.