The Better Angels of Our Nature (43 page)

“I didn’t know you had an engineering degree.”

“We don’t know much about each other. Your letters, when you did send them, were always full of what Sherman or the doctor was doing.”

“Yes, I’m sorry.” She opened her haversack, took out a piece of clean cloth, dampened it with fresh water from the canteen, and started to bathe his bloodied and scratched torso. “Lie back and relax. Close your eyes.”

He rested his head against the trunk of the tree. “I want to look at your face. That feels so good, so soothing. You have the gentlest touch.”

She started to work on his face, lowering her gaze when he smiled so tenderly at her.

“Norwich,” he said, “Norwich University. That’s where I got my engineering degree.”

“The doctor attended Rush Medical in Chicago.”

“Chicago? I know it well. My uncle George and I went into partnership in Chicago.”

“Is Norwich University in Chicago?”

“No. Northfield, in Vermont.”

“Do they have picnics in Vermont?”

“Picnics?” He laughed at the strangeness of the question. “Yes. Picnics are an American institution. We have extra-fine ones in Vermont.”

“I’ve never been to a picnic.”

“I’ll take you one day, when the war is over. I’ll take you on a picnic every Sunday,” he murmured, sleepily. He leaned back, his blue eyes focused steadily on her face as she painstakingly cleaned the blood and dirt from every cut and graze on his brow and cheek, from his arms and chest and shoulders. When her face came close to his she could hear his shallow breathing. She pressed the damp cloth carefully against his forehead and cheeks. His eyes dropped from her face to the shell necklace around her throat. He put his hand on her face. She removed it, with an almost imperceptible shake of her head. Then, immediately, she grasped his hand and put it back on her cheek. She stared at him and then as he stroked her freckled cheek with his thumb she closed her eyes and swallowed thickly. He leaned forward and lightly touched her lips with his own. A shiver passed through her slender frame. He moved a little closer and kissed her brow, her nose, and then her lips again. He heard the breath catch in her throat. She remained perfectly still, her lips slightly parted, moist and full, and her brow drawn into a frown, as if she were experiencing something that awed her completely, that could not be understood unless she gave it her absolute attention. She was so still that she seemed like a statue, except that he could hear her breathing.

“Jesse—” he said after a moment.

“I want to…remember everything—” she whispered. “I don’t think it’s possible—after I am no longer…in this existence—but I want to try.”

This time when Ransom touched her lips with his own she put her arm about his neck and returned the pressure, so much so that he pulled away. Her eyes opened, questioning, confused, his intense gaze was on her face and she shivered. She kissed his cheek, the corner of his mouth, ran her hands over his hair.

“It hurts—” she said, “—when you kiss me—it hurts with a pain that is so exquisitely beautiful that I feel as if I will pass out. Breathing, eating and seeing, walking and hearing, is not living, is it?” she asked him earnestly. “It’s not truly being alive, is it? You have to
feel
to be truly alive. Feeling is living. At this moment”—she put his trembling hand to her cheek—“I feel truly alive.” She put her fingertips to his sculptured lips. “You’ve breathed life into me. My lips are burning, though the fire is down here.” She touched just below her stomach. “Why are you looking at me that way? Did I say something wrong?”

“I want to do the right thing by you.”

She moved her fingers across his naked chest, up to his shoulders, and then rested at his throat. “I like to watch the pulse beating in the hollow of your throat. I feel as if I have a pulse beating—down there.” She touched the place.

Ransom got to his feet. He helped the girl up.

“What is it? What have I done wrong?” she asked pleadingly.

“Nothing at all. You are alone in the world. No parents, no guardian. I will not take advantage of your innocence. If we were back North now I would ask permission to call upon you and we’d talk in your parents’ drawing room—”

“But we’re not back North. I have no parents and therefore no drawing room. If you knew how I felt right now—”

“If you care for me, then do as I say.” He bent down to get his shirt. “When the war is over—”

She backed away from him. “That’s not what I want, or need. I want
now.
I want to love and feel
now.
I want to go on a picnic now.” She scooped up her haversack. “You started this feeling in me. It was as if I was asleep. A sleepwalker. You woke me. You opened my eyes and my heart. Please don’t put me to sleep again—I couldn’t bear it.”

There was now nothing to prevent the Army of the Tennessee from marching right up to the back door of Vicksburg itself and they did just that.

On May 18, Grant ordered his triumphant army to surround the city.

During this nineteen-day campaign, starting with the Bruinsburg landing and ending with the investment of Vicksburg, Grant’s armies had fought and won five battles; captured five thousand prisoners; burned Jackson and destroyed its rail network; and hurled Pemberton’s army back inside the fortress city. No wonder Sherman had turned to Grant and said, “I want to congratulate you on the success of your plan. And it’s your plan too, by heaven, and nobody else’s. For nobody else believed in it. Until this moment, I never thought your expedition a success. I never could see the end clearly ’til now. But this is a campaign, this is a success if we never take the town.”

By midday, Grant had made up his mind. He believed, he told Sherman and McPherson in his headquarters, that the Rebel army had been demoralized by their recent clutch of defeats, and persuaded that his own army, in contrast, was confident enough, he ordered a general assault to take place at two o’clock that same day. He was convinced that an immediate hard push, while the Rebels were still licking their wounds, would capture the city, sooner rather than later. “Besides,” he added, the trapdoor mouth and deceptively sad eyes bringing forth the hint of an embarrassed smile, “I don’t think our boys will have it any other way.”

At the appointed hour Jesse stood to Sherman’s rear and heard the three salvos that signaled the start of the assault. By 4:00
P
.
M
. the assault was over, called off by the more than usually stoical Grant.

The Federals had attacked with almost blind confidence and been repulsed with a vicious ferocity.

In this hurriedly prepared movement Sherman’s only regular battalion, the Thirteenth Regulars of the U.S. Army, had lost forty-three percent of their brave number as they attacked. So determined were these men to uphold the reputation of the United States Regular Army that five standard-bearers fell trying to get their shot-torn flag to their objective, before Sherman’s own brother-in-law planted it on the exterior slope of the Stockade Redan where it hung, shredded but proud, holed fifty-five times.

While the dead rotted in the Mississippi sun and before the casualties were hardly back inside their lines, Grant had already issued orders for another assault to take place on the twenty-second.

22

The women who went to the field

Jesse Davis opened her eyes. The sun was high overhead. The Mississippi sun. She was lying on her back on the bare ground. She was stiff and every part of her body ached. Sweat was rolling down her face, down her back inside her coat, and her hair was damp. She shivered. Hot and then cold. She heard a low groan, which surprised her, because she was not the type to groan, at least not aloud. Then she realized that the groan had come from someone else. With a considerable effort, she rose into a sitting position and stared at her bare feet. That someone had stolen her shoes came as no surprise. Wherever she was, it was not at Sherman’s headquarters, and she was not alone. She was at the end of a long row of soldiers, sitting, lying, and stretched out, all wearing blue. The soldier beside her was the one moaning. He was begging for water now. She felt for her canteen. It wasn’t there. She too was thirsty. Her throat was parched. Her lips felt cracked. Her medical haversack was gone. She felt with sudden panic at her waist. The Bowie knife that Thomas had given her was also gone. She squinted up at the sun and tried to remember.

The morning of May 22, the dawn’s silence had been broken by the crash of thunder and the glare of lightning from a hundred Federal field guns. In a while the sharpshooters, who by now had acquired a feel for the ground, joined the artillery fire, the whizzing of the balls lost in the unceasing shriek, hiss, and scream of bursting, swooping shells that made the soldiers in their holes wonder if the whole world was exploding about them. As Grant’s infantry assaulted the Rebel breastworks from the land side, Admiral Porter’s gunships had supported their army comrades with a coordinating bombardment on Vicksburg from the river on the western side.

Four hours of nonstop barrage, of deafening, discordant explosions that had filled the sky with palls of smoke, smoke that rose up from the sandy yellow clay of the hillsides, turning the air yellow-black above the Federal parapets and Rebel breastworks, making their occupants cough and choke, and bringing burning tears to eyes already bloodshot and strained.

To the soldiers who awaited their turn to move forward, it seemed not like a pall of smoke at all, but a giant, sulfurous cloud of doom, ready to envelop and carry them off to the nether region.

During the bombardment, General Sherman and his staff had taken up a position within two hundred yards of the Rebel parapet in their front, on a sloping grassy spur of ground, from where the commander could watch the proceedings through field glasses. Most of those present agreed they had never see anything to compare with what happened next, and most prayed they would never witness anything like it again.

A simultaneous attack had been launched by all three corps along the three miles of the Federal front.

Hundreds of columns of cheering men and boys, veterans all, led by officers wielding swords above their heads, seemed to rise up out of the very bowels of the earth and rush forward, a solid mass of blue, as though neither shot nor shell, nor musket ball, could break their ranks. Almost at the same moment, blood-chilling, heart-stopping, and with equal suddenness, equal determination, a wall of gray rose up behind the works and poured the most fearful fire into this charging, reeling, shouting, agonized mass.

Repeatedly the Federals tried to advance under a relentless hail of lead, repeatedly was it thrown back and cut down as it fought to overwhelm the Rebel fortifications. From behind every protective head-log, every fort and embrasure, every lunette, ditch and cavern, every hole and rampart, clearly visible against a now mockingly blue sky along the high, irregular bluffs, rifles, siege guns, and cannons exploded into the faces and bodies of the crumbling Union advance. Down went officers and men who had been with Grant since Belmont and Donelson and Shiloh, their lives ending here on the broken ground before Hill City, crying as they fell, “
Vicksburg or hell!
”

Leading the way were the color bearers, proud to be so honored, brave to the point of recklessness, as they carried their regiment’s flag into battle.

Jesse had watched, tears rolling down her cheeks, tears of sorrow and anger, as one after another, first the color sergeants, then the corporals, and finally any soldier with courage enough to lift the precious flag and run forward, only to be mown down. Some managed to advance as far as the earthworks, but could get no farther, and planted their colors on a forward slope, before succumbing. Others used the shot-torn emblem to encourage the failing, crumbling columns, waving it back and forth to rally men caught up in the gathering darkness of defeat, in the raging storm of death and injury.

A glimpse of the flag brought new strength.

A frightened soldier, seeing his regimental colors swirling defiantly in the wind, might forget that all around him, beneath his stumbling, ill-measured steps, lay a carpet of blue stained with blood. He would no longer see headless bodies, bloody torsos, and dismembered limbs. He would go deaf to the shocked cry of a comrade struck by minié ball or shell. Perhaps now
he
could go on, this frightened soldier, less conscience of his own fears, seeing less and less, hearing only the loud beating of his heart in his heaving chest through the leaden storm.

Eight good men were lost trying to plant the emerald-green flag of the Seventh Missouri on the parapet of the Great Redoubt. Sherman’s men.

Turning to look at the staff officers, Jesse saw their impassioned faces, heard their fervent pleas as they cheered these men on, willed them to succeed, or merely to survive.

“Ammunition, for God’s sake! Send up ammunition! We must have more ammunition!”

It was a hellish place. Infantrymen lying upon their fallen comrades, piled high in the ditches outside the enemy earthworks, a hellish place from which, without covering support, they could not crawl back nor go forward. She knew for she had been one of them.

“Ammunition, for God’s sake! Send up ammunition!” had shouted the courier who spurred his horse up to Sherman’s side, and Jesse had responded to his plea.

“Water…water…oh Lord…please give me water.”

Jesse blinked and turned her gaze upon the wounded boy, as if coming out of a trance.

He was crying like a child. His right leg was gone below the knee. The wound was open, raw, exposed, and smelled just awful. Blood was dripping into the earth beneath. Her own jacket was torn away at the right shoulder. There was some dried blood on the sleeve, but if it was hers she felt no pain. Some determined pulling with her left hand and the sleeve came away. She used it to bind up the boy’s knee.

“I’ll get you some water,” she told him.

He clutched at her coat, blood was coming from his mouth as he said, “I’m dyin’…dyin’…and ma folks won’t…even know. They…they don’t bury us…Yankees—they let us rot…in the sun—”

Jesse frowned. What was he talking about? She looked around her. Her wits were gradually returning. Now she saw that the injured were lying everywhere. She had seen enough of these places to know she was in some kind of makeshift dressing station. But this one was different. Most of the soldiers here were wearing gray. This was a Rebel dressing station. She looked at the heavily bearded gray-clad soldier leaning against a tree to her left, a musket cradled in his arms, smoking a corncob pipe. He too seemed in a daze until he saw her stand up, shakily, like an uncertain drunk swaying on the sidewalk, and then he stirred.

“Don’t you try nuthin’ now, yer hear?” he called lazily, as if it would have involved a great effort on his part to even raise his musket, never mind sight it and pull the trigger. “I can see just as fine outa one good eye, than some so-called markses-men shoot outa two.”

“Water,” she said, holding out her hand. The guard, for that was what he was, had a canteen hanging around his shoulder.
“Please.”

“Sit down,” the Rebel said with a little more energy.

“Just a mouthful for this soldier.” Jesse pointed to the soldier with the leg wound.

Some of the others in the line joined their plea to hers.

“I said ter sit down,” the guard insisted. He was angry now that his peace had been disturbed by this squirt of a Yankee boy, getting all the others riled up and vocal. There was always one. You shot him and you didn’t get a peep out of the others.

Jesse sat back down. Now she was the one in the daze. What had the insane urgings of her limitless pride led her into this time? Shock distorted her features. She brought a trembling hand to her brow. She was a prisoner of war.

She had moved along the parapets and ridges, crouching low, she and another, a large man who did not move with her agility; they had filled their shirts and hats with ammunition taken from the dead and wounded, passing it out to the men whose rifles were silenced by a lack of cartridges.

Her companion, even as he bent low between the ravines, was too large a target and was cut down almost immediately in his work, clutching his head, before tumbling down the steeply sloping Rebel works. She had carried on, small and swift, a tiny figure gathering up ammunition with a furious energy matched only by the desperation of the men to load their weapons.

She stumbled over the uneven ground as a hail of musket balls sent up clods of hard dry earth that struck her a blow at every part of her body. Her hat was gone. But she held something else in her hand. A flag, regimental colors for which so many men had paid dearly trying to plant it on the Rebel works. She had run with but a few brave souls to keep her straight and true, soldiers who rallied to that beacon of light in the gathering darkness. Jesse and her small escort made it to the front of the Great Redoubt. Beside her a soldier fell. Hands reached out to help her, and together they planted the flag beneath the enemy’s muskets and cannons. How easy it had seemed. How easy to grab up a flag and run. As she had been reflecting on this there had been an explosion, followed by an overwhelming hush that fell over the forward slopes.

“Jesse is missing.” Sherman, being Sherman, came straight to the point, speaking three words that made Cartwright’s chest constrict and brought beads of fresh sweat to his already damp brow.

“
Missing?
What do you mean missing? How can she be missing?” the surgeon heard himself ask as though from a far-off place, and as if he had lost control of his mouth. If Seth Cartwright asked once through that long and bloody day as he worked on shattered limbs, he must have asked a hundred times. “Has anyone seen Jesse? Where the hell is Jesse?” Now he had his answer. It was late evening and Sherman was standing before him outside the operating tent, both men surrounded by the injured and dying of that day’s madness. The surgeon jerked his aching shoulders. He blinked out from under his damp fringe, frowned, blinked, twitched. Sweat ran into his bloodshot eyes and stung like hell.

Jacob, at his side, stared at the surgeon’s drawn, sweaty, blood-besmirched face, the soft lips grown thin and hard as he demanded to know, “Missing where? Missing in what way?”

“Missing out there.” Sherman waved his cigar toward the parapets. “Corporal Davis fell in the assault. I knew how much Jesse meant to you. I wanted to tell you myself before you heard it from someone else.”

“What are you talking about?” Cartwright uncurled the wire earpieces and held his blood-spattered spectacles with shaking hands. He looked at Captain Jackson and at Marcus Van Allen, who flanked their commander. “How can she be missing? How can she have fallen in the assault? She was with you. She’s
always
with you.”

“There were calls for ammunition, Doc,” Andy said. “Jesse answered those calls—darn it, she even planted a regimental flag on one of the Reb forts—there was a big explosion, then we couldn’t see her no more.”

Cartwright stared at Captain Jackson. The aide’s words made no sense to him. How could a girl, barely sixteen, with her whole beautiful life ahead of her, be missing in the assault? He had a newspaper article in his pocket, all about Lincoln’s Homestead Act. He and Jesse were going to California after the war and get some land to work for their kids. She didn’t know that yet, he was going to tell her when the time was right. He was going to be one of those doctors who worked their land. That way your family never went hungry. He knew how hard a doctor had to work to put food on the table and a roof over his family’s head. If your patients paid you in chickens, how could you pay the rent?

So how in the name of all that was holy could she have planted a flag on the Rebel fort?

This was utter madness. The world was spinning;
his
world was spinning. Then far down, buried deep, almost out of reach in its own shadowy darkness, he located a hope, crouching there like a fearful animal, something to cling onto in this madly spinning universe.