The March Read online

  PRIVATE TOLLER, PUDGE TOLLER, the pianist, helped him out of his tunic and tore out the sleeve of his long john to make a tourniquet. That he was bleeding from a bullet wound in his arm he was hardly aware.

  A dozen of Clarke’s men were in the jail cell with him. He didn’t know how many others had gotten away or how many were dead. He believed Pearl was dead. He had put her in harm’s way from the most selfish, immoral impulses. His throat filled with an anguish of self-castigation. He’d always believed in reason, that it was the controlling force in his life, and confident in that belief he had slipped into such an unnatural state of bewitchment that he hardly knew himself. And now she was dead.

  Private Gullis every few minutes grabbed the window bars and chinned himself up. There were two guards outside, he reported. But now some men were standing around talking in groups. He couldn’t tell if they were Reb soldiers or not.

  Toller said, Sir, what will they do with us?

  We’re prisoners of war, Clarke said. They’ll ship us to one of their damn holding pens.

  Clarke wanted to put the best face on things. We have word there’s one such in Millen, he said. That’ll be on the march. We’ll be sent to Millen and in a few days the armies will overrun it and we’ll be back on duty.

  There are more of ’em now, Gullis said. They got rifles.

  With difficulty, Clarke stood up. He realized that all the men in the cell were on their feet and listening. Them guards? Gullis said. I can’t see them no more. Something of a crowd out there now.

  Clarke withdrew writing paper and a carbon pencil from his oilskin packet and, using the stone wall in lieu of a writing box, he spent the next few minutes composing a letter. He could hardly see what he was writing. He had just sealed the letter and addressed the envelope when the first battering jolt shuddered the jailhouse doors.

  PEARL DIDN’T KNOW what to do other than go on. She wanted to find the Lieutenant Clarke. She felt he couldn’t have been one of those who’d run away. But if he hadn’t where was he? If he had driven off the Rebels, why didn’t he come find her? She had watched the road, and once everything was quiet nobody had come by.

  She kept to the woods except where the fog was gathered black and thick like smoke in the kitchens when wind blew down the draft. Then she followed the road. As she approached the outskirts of the village she heard a volley of rifle fire and darted behind a tree. She stood quite still while the sound echoed off into the woods. She waited for something else to happen, but nothing did. Still, she waited.

  Underneath her uniform Pearl wore her frock tied around her waist. She removed her tunic and shook the frock down to her ankles, then rolled up her hat and tunic and hid them at the foot of the tree. When she entered the village, it was as a white Negro girl.

  The fog had lifted and the sky was beginning to clear. She saw a few stars. She stepped in something wet and slippery. Blood was all over the road and it was like a trail, as blots and spots and strings of it led her to the street where the jailhouse was, and right up to the jailhouse doors. The doors were open. It was too dark to see inside, but she smelled the blood and sensed the emptiness.

  Past the jail was an open field and as the clouds cleared there was moonlight to see by, and so she came upon the men’s bodies. Dear God Jesus that you made me see this, she said to herself. Ain’t I seen enough of this since I been born? She found Clarke in a twisted position on his side, one leg flung over the other. His left arm had a big bandage. She pressed his shoulder till he was faceup. He looked about to say something to her. His teeth shone. His eyes were far away. In his hand was a letter and he seemed to clutch it as she pulled it from his fingers.

  VI

  SOPHIE PACKED A HAMPER WITH CORN BREAD, SALT pork, boiled potatoes, sugar, and tea leaves. She put in candles, and soap, silver and table linens, his tobacco and a box of matches. His flask he could stash in his pocket. She packed his valise and then put some of her own things in a shawl, which she tied in a knot and slung from her elbow. She walked behind him through the village, the valise in one hand, the hamper in the other.

  Come along, come along, he growled. He leaned on his cane and hopped right along for a lame old man. With her weight and all she was carrying, she found herself breathless.

  The train was waiting at the station. She helped him up the steps. The car was empty. Nobody but Mr. Marcus Aurelius Thompson wanted to get in the way of this war.

  The train lurched and tilted and stopped, jerked forward and crept along. After several miles the countryside looked flattened hard and scorched, as if a hot clothes iron had been taken to it. It was no longer the natural world God had made. Where houses had been were chimneys standing up from blackened mounds like gravestones.

  In the next village they were told that was the terminus. He was outraged. He would not get off the train. The conductor came in and said, Mr. Thompson, sir, you’re welcome to stay aboard. Sit here ifn you like—we’ll be going back by and by.

  They stood on the station platform, their luggage beside them. They were out in the open, under a clear sky. The depot had been burned to the ground. The village behind it was destroyed, houses and stores collapsed into piles of smoking rubbish. Tufts of cotton were stuck in the bushes. Up ahead, the rails had been torn up and put to fire and twisted around trees.

  Sophie shook her head and sat herself down on a chunk of wall. The old man stood leaning on his cane, his shoulders hunched, and he kept turning his head this way and that in little jerking movements, like some perching bird. I s’pose you want to go back, don’t you? he said.

  No, suh.

  Well, you’re coming with me no matter if it’s to Hell. I have a few things to say to my brother afore he dies.

  The sun was up toward noon before they saw a farmer in his wagon. He was looking at the ground on either side as his mule pulled along. The old man waggled his cane in the air.

  You’ll take us to Milledgeville, he said. How much?

  A thousand of Jeff Davis’s dollars, the man said. He laughed. He was sun-darkened and all hunched up in a gray army coat.

  I’ll do better’n that, Mr. Thompson said. I’ll give you a two-dollar gold piece of the U.S. Treasury. How you going to get me up in the wagon is for you to decide.

  The farmer rode off around the village and came back with a wing chair. Its upholstery was bulged out. Its skirt looked dipped in blood. He and Sophie lifted the old man up by the elbows and stood him in the wagon bed and he sat down in the chair. Sophie, after putting up the luggage, climbed laboriously aboard and sat on the side bench.

  We never did get along, Mr. famous Chief Judge Thompson and I, the old man said. I could tell you things.

  I s’pose.

  No supposing. The man was an atheist—you know what that is?

  Don’t believe in the hereafter.

  That’s right. A blasphemer against the Lord God Jesus Christ.

  The stench from the dead cattle lying beside the road was intolerable. The sun had caused their bellies to burst open. Sophie caught some cotton batting out of the air, and took a vial of cologne from her satchel and soaked the cotton and handed it over to him.

  Where’d you get that? he said.

  Fum the Mistress bureau.

  You stole it?

  She sighed. I keep her room like it was. Everything in its place, just like she still there. You want to keep breavin the stink it’s all the same to me.

  All right, all right, he said, his face muffled in the cotton.

  You ought to know better’n to say that.

  All right, he said.

  The dogged mule, head down, trotted on. What homes were still standing had been stripped bare, the windows shattered, the doors hanging by hinges. Outbuildings fallen in on themselves like playing cards. Corncribs bare, fodder blowing loose in the fields. By and by they were passing soldiers just sitting there beside the road and not even bothering to look up. Then one man staggering after them, begging for something to eat. Away, sir,
said Mr. Thompson, waving his cane in the air. Away with you! Out in the fields people were on their knees culling. But what was there to cull? And the wagon bumping over dead dogs—every hound to be seen was shot through the head.

  She saw one soldier picking oat grains from a pile of horse manure.

  The bridge over the Oconee was down, and they took their place in the line waiting for the ferry. Behind them were the tramped-upon fields where the bluecoats had camped. Down below, across the river, was the destroyed state capital. Corkscrews of smoke arose from the burned buildings.

  What’s taking so long! Old Thompson stood up from his chair and addressed the wagons in front of theirs: What is your business here? He could not bear the wait. He had things to say to Horace before the Devil took him.

  You best not tire yourself with all this frettin, Sophie said.

  She was right. He sat back down, closed his eyes, and said a prayer to calm himself. With his eyes closed, he smelled a dead country.

  Sophie, he said, am I the Pharaoh?

  She shook her head. She never knew what would come out of that mouth. You jes yerself, she said.

  Because if I’m the Pharaoh I’m convinced. I don’t need no frogs, nor no locusts, I’m letting you go. You want your freedom, I grant it to you. And this, he said, waving his hand about, is what goes along with it. This is what you get with your nigger freedom.

  Tears came to his eyes. The wretched war had destroyed not only their country but all their presumptions of human self-regard. What a scant, foolish pretense was a family, a culture, a place in history, when it was all so easily defamed. And God was behind this. It was God who did this, with the Union as his instrument.

  In fact, he loved and admired his brother as much as he hated him. He saw them together as young men in their competition and he dreaded how old and suffering he might find Horace now at the end of life. And as long as he dreaded what he might find, there was resistance in that, resistance to the God who had taken every presumption from them. Even love aghast was love, and God could not destroy that.

  VII

  WREDE’S SURGERY WAGONS WERE WITH THE DIVISION sent up the road to Waynesboro to rescue the embattled cavalry of General Kilpatrick. Sherman had deployed the cavalry as a feint, and the Rebels, thinking he was preparing to move on Augusta, put up a stiff resistance. The strategy worked, but the losses were heavy. With Waynesboro finally secured, Wrede established his field hospital in the railroad depot. There were so many wounded in the hand-to-hand fighting that orderlies had to leave them on canvas stretchers outside on the station platform. They lay there moaning, calling for water. Emily Thompson moved among them with soft words to ease their suffering if she could. She’d discovered, and Wrede had concurred, that a woman’s nursing meant something more to the men in the way of reassurance. His army nurses, too, had noticed the quieting balm of her presence. And she had learned quickly. You did not give men with stomach or chest wounds more than a sip of water. For those whose pain was unendurable, she gently held her hand under their heads and put tincture of opium to their lips. To others she dispensed cups of brandy. The men made weak self-deprecating jokes, or thanked her for her ministrations with tears in their eyes. For some, she wrote their letters as they lay dying.

  Emily was astonished at herself. That she had like a brazen hussy found Wrede Sartorius on the march and joined him. That she had proved able to look upon hideous sights. That she could live in the open as men did, with none of the soft fluff and appurtenances of grooming that women were supposed to find essential to living.

  She felt no pangs of guilt for betraying her Southern loyalties. It all had to do with this Union doctor. She was absolved by his transcendent attentions to the war wounded. North or South, military or civilian—he made no distinctions. Even now, some gray uniforms were among the bluecoats lying on their pallets. He seemed above the warring factions, Wrede Sartorius. He was like some god trying to staunch the flow of human disaster. She had lost her entire family in this war, yet she felt that his comprehension of its tragedy was beyond her own. It was characteristic of him to have come to her home to see about her poor father. She felt privileged when he talked to her or inquired after her comfort. He spoke with something not quite like a foreign accent, it was more an intonation that might have come of his formal way of talking. She did not detect in him any of the signs she had been getting from men since she was a child. Of course his responsibilities were enormous but she felt that even in ordinary social circumstances he would not be given to social stratagems. There would be none of the practiced gallantry of Southern boys who at the same time, she knew, would not think twice if given the opportunity to take advantage of her.

  Yet she received from him a manly acknowledgment of her person, some subtle acceptance of her presence that was not entirely official.

  It was late into the night by the time the work was done. Emily stood in the door of the railroad station watching as, by torchlight, nurses loaded the amputees into ambulances. A few yards into the woods, men dug the pit for the severed limbs. A burial squad arrived with their wagon of coffins to remove the dead to a graveyard. Corpses were searched for personal items—the letters, rings, diaries, and enlistment papers that would identify them. Company commanders were required to write official condolences to the families of the dead men.

  Emily was exhausted. She had as yet no indication of where she was supposed to sleep this night. Inside the depot, nurses were scrubbing the floor and operating tables with sand. Sartorius sat at the stationmaster’s desk writing his notes in the light of a kerosene lamp. For this task he wore wire-rim spectacles that she found charming. He was rendered boyish by them, a student at his studies. And he had the most beautiful hands, squared and strong but with long, slender white fingers. How skillful those hands were. One of the nurses told her, because she still couldn’t manage to watch the surgical procedures, that the doctor was renowned in the corps for removing a leg in twelve seconds. An arm took only nine. The field hospitals always ran short of soporifics. There was never enough chloroform to go around, and so given only a slug of brandy a soldier would have reason to bless the doctor who did the job as quickly as possible.

  WREDE’S MEN FOUND billets for them—a house on the main street that was still reasonably intact, though windows were shattered and grapeshot had pocked and splintered the siding. The owner, an elderly widow woman, met them at the door weeping. I’ve nothing left, she cried, I’m plumb cleaned out. What more do you want of me? She was a wailing supplicant, clasping her hands over her heart. But when she saw Emily she squared her shoulders, threw her head back, and assumed an imperious expression. You run my slaves off, stole my provisions. I thought there was no more you could do to befoul this house, she said to Wrede. Emily looked away, too embarrassed to say anything. But Wrede didn’t seem to be listening. He ordered a private to bring the woman some rations and escorted Emily upstairs.

  They stood for a moment on the landing.

  We return-march to the corps before dawn, Wrede said. He looked at his pocket watch. I’m sorry, I should have released you hours ago.

  I’ve done nothing to compare with what has been required of you this day.

  He smiled and shook his head. We know so little. Our medical service is no less barbarous than the war that requires it. Someday we will have other means. We will have found botanical molds to reverse infection. We will replace lost blood. We will photograph through the body to the bones. And so on.

  Wrede chose a room, nodded, and closed the door behind him.

  Emily stood thinking of what he had said. She didn’t know if she had heard him correctly.

  She went to her room, closed the door, undressed, and lay down in a soft bed for the first time in many nights. Yet she was far from sleep. She had never before known a man whose thoughts could startle her so. She was an educated woman. She had taken first prizes in Essays and French at St. Mary’s Junior College for Episcopal Young Women. After her mother’
s death she sat as hostess at her father’s dinners. Distinguished jurists dined at their table. She’d always acquitted herself well in the conversation which was often philosophical. Yet it was as if this doctor put into her mind images of another world, one she could see only from afar, appearing and disappearing as through drifting clouds.

  She lay staring into the darkness. The bed was cold. She shivered under the blankets. She did not like their smell. In time of war men in uniform could occupy a home with impunity. She herself had suffered such an invasion, had she not? But for a woman it was different. The old lady had simply assumed I was a trollop, Emily thought. I would have made the same assumption in her place. I have compromised myself. Never before in my life have I given anyone reason to question my respectability.

  She sat up in bed. What would Father say? A wave of cold fear, like nausea, passed through her. What could have been in her mind, what had possessed her? To have chosen this vagabondage! She was truly frightened now, shaking and on the verge of tears. She lay back down and pulled the covers to her chin. In the morning, she must somehow find a way to get back home. Yes, that is exactly what she must do. She belonged nowhere else but home.

  Her resolution had the effect of calming her. She thought of the man in the next room. She listened for any sound that might have suggested Wrede Sartorius was awake. She could believe of him that he did not require sleep. But she heard nothing. Nor was any light coming from his room or she would have seen it through her window, where she saw only the shadow of a large tree.

  WREDE HAD PROCURED a mount for her, and on the march she rode beside him. The sun rose as they were passing through a forest of towering pines, straight as a rule and greened out only at the tops. Emily felt herself in a hallowed place, the footfalls of the horses and mules and even the creak of the rolling wagons hushed by the thick bed of brown pine needles covering the forest floor. As the day came on she could see, on either side of them off in the woods, the covering infantry drifting among the trees, disappearing and reappearing as if with discretion.