The March Read online

  THERE WAS NOTHING else for it but to let the darkies find places for themselves and their belongings in the wagons, sitting amid the plunder or up beside the teamsters. They had come up with a pony cart for the old granny. Clarke was made somber by their joy. They could not be usefully conscripted. They were a hindrance. There would be no food for them, and no shelter. About a thousand blacks were following the army now. They would have to be sent back, but where? We do not leave a new civil government behind us. We burn the country and go on. They are as likely to be recaptured as not—or worse, with guerrillas riding in our wake.

  The men had thrown their torches through the windows, and now the first smoke rose from the roof and licks of fire began to flash out of the siding. Clarke thought, We are burning the darkies’ livelihood. But everyone was merry, chattering and laughing. Sergeant Malone wore the Massah’s top hat and cutaways over his uniform. They had found some old colonial militia hats for the slave children. Private Toller had donned a flouncy dress, and each and every man, including the two old Negroes, was smoking a cigar. Christ, what am I leading here? Clarke said to no one in particular. He gave the signal to move out. The whips cracked, the wheels rolled, the horses were urged to a trot. Clarke, riding on, saw from the corner of his eye the white nigger girl. She had stood apart, not having joined the others aboard the train, and there she was now, in her bare feet with her grand red-and-gold shawl tied around her, watching them go. Later, Clarke would wonder why he didn’t think it ridiculous that she required a special invitation. He swung his mount around, cantered back, leaned over, and grabbed her hand. You’ll ride with me, missy, he said, and in a moment she was behind him in the saddle, with her arms wound tightly around his waist. He didn’t understand his feelings at this moment, except that the heavy responsibilities of his command had suddenly lifted from him. He felt the warmth of her arms and their tight grip. She rested her cheek on his shoulder, and after a while her tears came through his tunic.

  And in this way, in the late afternoon of a still warm November, they moved out, whites and blacks, toward the column of sunlit dust pushing southeast in the Georgia sky.

  II

  AT FIRST THE BOY, WILL, WOULDN’T EAT ANYTHING. HE had been brought in thin as a rail, no flesh on his bony face, a pair of eyes on a stick as he held on to the bars and stared across the corridor. Arly, in the cell opposite, said, You got to eat, boy. They’re intending to kill you doesn’t mean you have to do it for ’em.

  Arly kept up his chatter, conceiving it as a tonic. Supposing it happens we are reprieved? he said. Won’t do you no good if you’re too weak to march out the door. Me, I will eat their maggoty salt pork and beans and politely thank Prison Sergeant Baumgartner down the corridor there for the fine vittles, though in fact he is as deaf as a doorpost. What was your affront, young Will? Say what?

  Deserting, the boy whispered. I just needed to go home.

  Now, I didn’t know that is become a capital offense. So many of the boys are quitting this war I guess the C.S.A. needs to set an example. Me, I was found for sleeping on picket duty. But it could be worse. Raper John, who was up here until just last week? He got hisself hanged, but that was for affronting the civil law. You and I, as soldiers coming afoul of military legalisms of one sort or another, will only be put in front of a firing squad.

  The boy didn’t smile but went to his pallet and lay on his back with his hands behind his head.

  But don’t you worry, Arly continued, because General Hood, he likes to march a company in front and a company behind, and stand everyone out in their raiment with the flags flying and the drummers drumming and whoever is to be killed sitting on the edge of their coffins so as to drop right in them when the firing squad squeezes the trigger. But since every mother’s son was dispatched to the redoubts in Atlanta, there isn’t enough troops in Milledgeville to mount a fitting execution. There is cay-dets from the Military Institute up the street, but wiser heads must have thought as their being small boys it was no proper job for them. Are you for religion, young Will?

  I never did countenance it.

  Well, I look at it this way. God has raised his hand to give us respite. It could be he has something more in mind for us. With this time on our hands, we should try to figure what it is. Because he don’t do pointless acts of charity.

  THE WARMTH OF early November dropped off suddenly, and the two men wore their blankets around themselves day and night. The cell windows were without sashes. When it rained the walls turned damp, and then when it cleared and grew colder the stone coated up with ice. The bars were too cold to touch. The Milledgeville penitentiary was as moldy and cold as a crypt.

  Sergeant Baumgartner, sir, you have that little fire pail at your feet, Arly shouted. Why don’t you move it up here, along with yourself, so as we don’t freeze to death before you shoot us.

  The prison guard said nothing. He was a fat man who could be heard drawing every breath.

  Sergeant Baumgartner, Arly shouted, I do prophesy the day is coming when you will unlock these doors and set us free.

  Baumgartner sighed. I am too old to fight, he said, and so my service is to sit here with the likes of you. If that don’t deserve a medal I surely don’t know what does.

  THEY WERE UP before dawn, as usual, jumping up and down to get the blood moving, and lifting their knees high in a stationary walk. Will had watched Arly do this, and it became his own regimen. But on this morning at first light there was something else besides the chill in their bones and the sight of their expelled breaths. They heard the agitation of raised voices and the rattle of carriage wheels. Will went to his window and stood on tiptoe to look through the bars. He had a view down the hill.

  What is it? Arly said.

  One carriage after another. Like a parade, Will said. They are whipping their horses.

  By God, then, it’s come!

  Above all this clamor Will heard something from the sky—not so much a wind as like a pressure of the air, as if the sky was being pushed in on itself, and it had a murmur to it, or maybe a scent, like what you sometimes smelled after a bolt of lightning. He sensed the heaviness of a storm approaching, though as the sun rose the sky turned a cold blue and there was no approaching storm that he could see.

  There was now a commotion inside the penitentiary. They were on the top floor and they could hear shouting on the floors below. The convicts had begun to rap their tin cups against the bars. Whistles blew.

  Arly had a big grin on his face: You had best gather your belongings, young Will. We are leaving our dear home.

  Sergeant Baumgartner, alarmed by the ruckus, had roused himself and stood facing the oaken door, his musket at the ready.

  Oh now, Mr. Baumgartner, sir, Arly called, be careful with that thing lest you hurt yourself.

  As if agreeing, the poor man sat back down to catch his breath.

  They heard footsteps on the stone floors, the clanging of cell gates. For a moment, Will worried that in their little aerie, too far away from everything, they would be overlooked. But then came a pounding on the door. Baumgartner, startled out of his wits, had all he could do to find the right latchkey.

  Arly and Will met outside their cells and shook hands for the first time in their friendship. They joined the procession of convicts down the iron flights and came out into the prison yard in the cold sun, amid maybe a hundred and fifty others also in their shoes without laces and their blankets wrapped around them.

  They stood there shivering. This ain’t the prettiest picture in the world, Arly said, looking around at the weathered bearded faces and the hunched shoulders in their blankets and the guards and gray stone walls and the packed, hard earth under their feet. But it’s God-created, Will my man, it is his mysterious work, all right.

  A lieutenant and four enlisted men with rifles escorted a senior officer in handsome gray attire into the yard. He was clearly important, with a plume in his hat and a maroon sash around his belly. They helped him to stand on a box. The
convicts murmured among themselves when they saw his epaulets. He waited until they were quiet, then he cupped his hands around his mouth. I am Major General Nathaniel Wayne, he said. With the full agreement of Governor Brown, I am authorized to declare your sentence served, every damn one of you, providing you accept induction into the militia and swear to defend our great state of Georgia under my command!

  Behind him, guards had brought out a table and a chair.

  You have three minutes. I’ll give you three minutes to raise your right hand to be sworn and signed up, with all the rights and privileges of this service. If not, back to your cage you go, and may you sit there until Hell freezes over.

  Everyone was astir at that. Some of the convicts were for it, and some, who were close to parole, against. Arly shook his head. It was a debate as if by a legislature in session. A felon shouted, I’d rather rot here than have my balls shot off!

  Everyone was talking at once. These men ain’t no fools, Arly said. Atlanta is burned and the war is coming in this direction. If the militia is so shorthanded as to put guns in the hands of common criminals, you know what the odds are for any one of us coming out alive?

  Piss poor? Will said.

  That’s about right. I don’t know about you, Willie boy, said Arly, raising his hand high. But it’s all the same to me how I am to be killed.

  HOURS LATER, AS militiamen, they found themselves in the contingent deployed to defend a wooden trestle across the Oconee River about fifteen miles south of the city. They were hunkered down in the swamp mud under hanging moss on the east bank. They had muskets and cartridge boxes, hardtack in their pockets, shoes with no socks, and worn, blood-rusted tunics buttoned over their prison pajamas. They wore their blankets as capes. It was cold enough so that when they stepped in the mud their shoes left a broken imprint in a thin pane of ice.

  The train that had brought them here sat on the tracks behind them, with a fieldpiece mounted on a flatbed. On the west bank, the boys from the Georgia Military Institute who had been given the honor of bearing the brunt of an attack were entrenched behind works improvised from the forest floor.

  Arly said, I would have thought to make our stand back in the city to protect the women and children there, but seemingly they are of no military importance. He looked over at Will. Even chewing his hardtack the boy was given to a mournful facial expression.

  You are not one to kick your heels up about anything, are you, young Will?

  What does that mean?

  It means we’re out of those cells. It means you are a gloomy son of a bitch, for a man just removed from the valley of the shadow of death.

  Sitting here under this tree, with ice water dripping down my neck and I’m waiting to be stomped on by an army? It’s not much different that I can see.

  Well, you might find some satisfaction at least in taking a Yank or two with you as you go. Besides which I been thinking. The paper we signed said our sentences were declared served. How can you have already served a death sentence? One way is by being executed and coming back from the dead.

  I don’t remember doing that.

  I neither. The other way to have served a death sentence is by dispensation from God. I mean, no general can decide that. Not even the Governor has the authority to do that. The inspiration for it has to come from God, because it is such a serious supernatural matter, turning death into life. Do you agree?

  I suppose.

  And so why would God reprieve us from the firing squad if he only intended for us to die in the muck by a railroad trestle? And the answer is, He wouldn’t. So try to put a proper face on things.

  At that moment they caught their first sight of the enemy, a cluster of blue cavalry through the trees beyond the opposite bank, pulling up their reins as their horses reared in the cracking of gunfire. Will found himself relieved to see they were just human beings. But after that his mind was stripped of thought, as if thinking was an indulgence. He would later reflect that although a deserter he had proved himself no coward, but at the moment he was simply assistant to a musket. He knelt and fired and reloaded and fired again. He was no longer cold. It was as if the air had heated up from the friction of shot and shell. The cannonade behind them was deafening. As the fieldpiece fired, his ears felt the concussion, and everything for seconds afterward was silence. Treetops across the river fell away in the silence, convicts on his line clutched their chests and fell, in silence. Then, all at once, the racket returned. Beside him Arly was coolly blowing the smoke off his musket barrel. Shatterings of tree ice collapsed on their heads. The bullets whistled. They got them new repeating rifles, Arly shouted as he raised his musket for firing. One of the bluecoat riders reached the bank, where he took a ball, the force of which wrenched him half out of the saddle, overturning his steed, and they both fell into the river.

  Will couldn’t tell if he had shot anyone. All at once the bluecoats withdrew and faded back into the woods. An officer shouted, Hold your fire! And in the ear-ringing peace some of the men began to cheer. Arly said, The cheers’ll stick in their throats come the next foray. Will was breathing as hard as if he had been running. The woods were hung with smoke.

  And then the Yanks were back, but with no more tactics on their part than the first time. It was as if they had to learn that the trestle was defended. Will seemed to sink farther into the mud each time he fired. The rifles snapped and the shells exploded, and the pungency of the battle seeped into his nostrils. He heard the shouts and cries of boys, and the screams of horses, until the Union force in its superior numbers withdrew once more. Now the silence seemed menacing. Smoke drifted through the trees.

  That wasn’t the full army we heard from, Arly said. That was the cavalry out to poke into places and see what happens. Now they will bring up the armaments, and while we are busy with that they will send around a flanking movement upstream, with their pontoons, and we will be overrun.

  Will was sweating, his hair was damp. He made to brush the sweat from his forehead and his hand came away with blood. I’m shot, he muttered.

  Well damn, so you are.

  I’m bleeding.

  You got a nice little furrow in your scalp, that’s all, Arly said. As I told you, God has his eye out for us. But that don’t mean he can’t play around a little. Look.

  To their right and left, the convict militia were rising from their positions, throwing their weapons down and turning tail. An officer shouted and fired his pistol into the air.

  They have the right idea but the wrong direction, Arly said. Follow me. Before Will knew it, Arly had scrambled down the embankment onto the bridge. He turned and beckoned.

  They ran across the bridge, which was on fire in places. Men were throwing blankets down and stomping on the flames. Arly and Will donated their blankets and kept running. Over on the other side the terrain was less swampy, and in the mossy glades Milledgeville cadets lay dead or wounded behind their logs and mounds of earth. Boys without a scratch on them wandered in a daze. Some were crying. Cadet officers went among them, pushing them back to their positions, slapping them to make them obey.

  Arly led Will forward past their lines. They stumbled on some Union dead along the railroad tracks. Also fallen mounts groaning like men, some struggling to raise their heads off the ground.

  They heard voices echoing in the forest ahead, and the crashing of caissons through the brush. Hurry, Arly said. He began stripping the uniform off one of the dead Yankees.

  What are you doing? Will said.

  Find something that fits you, boy!

  Will looked around and pulled the tunic off a fellow who, as he lay with legs splayed, seemed about his height. He’d had his eye shot out. Will tugged off the trousers and the boots. His stomach turned with the resistance he felt from the dead body. What are we doing? he muttered, availing himself of the rolled poncho and the hat in the grass, though there was blood on it. Then he noticed that the dead man held one of the new repeating rifles, so he threw his weapon away, be
nt the clenched fingers back, and took up the rifle. Then the cartridge box and his tin drinking cup.

  With their bundles in their arms they ran along in a crouch parallel to the river. They came upon a riderless horse, its nose in yellowing grass, and, leading it by the bridle, pressed on until they were a good mile downriver. There they halted and dressed themselves as Union soldiers.

  Will shivered in the cold, damp uniform. His face was smeared with his own blood. He walked in circles, trying not to feel the tunic as it pressed across his back and dug under his arms. He tried to remember what the word was for the next thing down from a deserter.

  Arly sat cross-legged, with his back against a tree. We are rich men with that horse, he said. Patting his tunic, he found a flask of bourbon in the pocket. He unscrewed the cap and took a swig. Whooee! Taste this, young Will. Go on. If you had any doubts God meant us to survive, just you have a taste of this.

  III

  EMILY THOMPSON SENT WILMA UPSTAIRS TO SIT WITH him in his bedroom. I have the steam kettle on the hearth so the Judge will breathe easier, she said. If he wakes, call me.

  Yes’m.

  She’d done all she could—hidden coffee, sugar, cornmeal, lard, and two hams in the hope chest under two embroidered pillows and her mother’s wedding gown. She’d left enough of the staples in the pantry so that they might not think she had hidden anything. Then she threw on a shawl and stood outside at the top of the steps, with the front door closed behind her. She was Georgia Supreme Court Justice Horace Thompson’s daughter, and she posed herself with her hands clasped at her waist to indicate as much, though her heartbeat was tremulous as a rabbit’s.