Darkness at Chancellorsville

by Ralph Peters

  “Easy, George. Calm down. Joe hasn’t done badly. You were shouting hosannas yourself a minute ago.” Yet Slocum’s tightened jaw warred against his words. “I’d wager he’s got something up his sleeve. He must have.”

  “We’ve got a balled fist right here. Your corps, mine. Howard coming up. Second Corps crossing at U.S. Ford. Sickles close behind. That’s five corps, we could smash Lee’s army to bits.” He felt almost faint, breathless. As if his winter fever had weakened his heart. “But not here. We can’t stop here.…”

  “Just follow your orders, George,” Slocum told him, out of patience with the world around him, “and you’ll keep us out of trouble.” Fresh raindrops probed. He added, “Don’t need more goddamned rain, either.”

  As Meade wheeled about to chew his rage alone, waving away his aides and striding off, the girls and women on the porch laughed savagely. As if they had heard and understood every word.

  Four p.m.

  Confederate lines, Fredericksburg

  Samuel Pickens dried his feet, peeling off dead skin. Sometimes a man just seemed to be one big itch.

  The remains of his stockings dangled from sticks placed shy of the played-out fire, and his once fine shoes stood propped at a well-judged distance.

  Wet through for nothing. Again.

  Squatting by the smoking embers, Bob Price said, “Man’s feet are a burden unto him.”

  “Just as soon not do without them,” Pickens replied. “And a man’s more of a burden to his feet, it seems to me.”

  “Don’t help to scratch.”

  “Plenty of things that feel good don’t help.”

  “That’s the Lord’s truth.”

  He clawed himself, drawing blood. “Wouldn’t I like a hot bath, though? If I had one wish?”

  Lean as a willow switch, Bob said, “Choose me a plate of biscuits, with gravy hot to scald. If called on for wishes.”

  Pickens almost told his friend that he’d dreamed of biscuits that night, in his short sleep, but he held his tongue. No man cared to hear another’s dreams. A given law of humanity, that was, and any right-raised progeny of Alabama knew better than to talk phantasms, as surely as a gentleman knew not to pick his teeth at dinner. Not with ladies present. Hadn’t taken Charlottesville to teach him.

  Oh, but that dream! He could’ve wept on waking. He had been home in Umbria, a house not as grand as many hereabouts, though it passed for fine by Greensboro. And this dream had not been a riddle of shards, of nonsensical disjunctures, but real as a man’s lifeblood. He’d been man and boy at once in the dream, but everything else was plain: He sat there in the kitchen, like old times, eating Auntie Delsie’s biscuits with fresh-made butter. His mother had not appeared in the dream, only Delsie, with her mahogany strength and glorious knowledge of what fixed up a stomach. He saw and sensed her so clearly, the suspicion in her eyes directed at everyone but him and her scent a comfort immense—not the reek that porch-talk assigned to niggers, not at all—and the way, of a sudden, she’d spoon up a gob of butter and eat it just so, in one smooth gulp, while she cooked and stirred and hmmm-hmmmed, telling him, “Butter do keep off the misery.” And adding, ever cautionary, “Don’t work for white folks, though.”

  Wasn’t how it was meant to be at all, but Auntie Delsie was home to him in a way he could not limn. It was not, ever, that he’d been fetch-minded by her comely daughter, no, he’d never taken to dark folk that way. Nor, tell the truth, had the bone-shouldered local belles held his attention, weak-pale every one, with perspiration blistering faint mustaches and their smells of lye and lavender. They seemed composed not of flesh but of demands upon a man’s freedom, ensconced in inveterate falsehoods, every one sly as a snake waiting up a tree. Their bank-clerk eyes alarmed him unutterably, that icy reckoning of the portion of wealth he would possess. No, not for him the petting hand of the female—which was but the condescension of a jailer—nor even a night call on a shanty slut, for dread of consequences and bare distaste: an uncle locked away among the mad, disfigured, and the gripping stink of woman-parts that sickened.

  Delsie never smelled that way, just of vinegar and good sweat, and the fragrance of pies on the sill.

  He reckoned he’d marry once he tired of fighting off the savages in crinolines, once he was cornered and had no choice but surrender, but he really didn’t see much worth in a woman beyond the role of family brood mare. Just spoiled a man’s good humor for their pleasure, women did. Their laughter unnerved him, their nails.

  Rather take the dogs down in the live oaks.

  Auntie Delsie, though. Never had felt safer or better than seated at her table, that splinter-edged realm where the house servants fed in their turn. “Ain’t you just the eating-est chile in all of Alabama, ain’t you just?” she asked of him always. And her own brood—assorted, half-assembled—sat there wide-eyed and envious, bound to be fed to fullness but conditioned, already, to fear and furtiveness, learning every day where the secret lines lay, as he had to learn, too, so that the world would turn smoothly on its axis, with all accommodated.

  Folks who went on about slavery just didn’t know. How mixed up everything was—complicated, befuddled, impossible, enduring—a world suspended between the Lord’s ordained order and grievous notes held by the bank.

  Looking back in longing, with a soldier’s peculiar rue, the wide-awake, daylight Sam Pickens figured that the kitchen back home remained his favorite place that had a roof. The rest of the house did not aspire to the halls of the Virginia gentry, but the acreage was good—fine bottomland and more than one paid-off property beyond—with two hundred slaves to render all abundant.

  “Fond of biscuits myself,” he said, and he let it be.

  * * *

  Pickens had come late to the war, tardy to Company D and the 5th Alabama, but he’d entered the Greensboro Guards as a private in penance. He could have bought his way high, even raised his own company, maybe a regiment. Folks speculated that his mother wasn’t only the richest widow in the state, but like to be the richest person, man, woman, or child. Not Virginia rich. And certainly not South Carolina rich. Not like the Hampton clan. But fitted up handsome to any sound man’s needs.

  Could’ve bought his way in or out, but he needed to be with his kith in Company D. And the 5th Alabama had needed new meat to satisfy the war’s hunger.

  He rubbed his feet, half-mad, but restrained his fingernails. And he said:

  “I take it back.”

  Bob Price and the others edging the ashes turned toward him.

  “Before a bath, I’d take a bottle of liniment. Bath could wait.”

  Eyeing Pickens’ hind paws, Price told him, “More like a gallon. Or two. You need to visit the surgeon, Sam. Those feet are bad.”

  Pickens shot back a mirthless laugh. “Surgeon won’t tell me anything Doc Cowin hasn’t. ‘Keep your feet dry and clean, change your stockings daily.’” He shook his head. “A man might as soon expect Abe the Ape to bring him a plate of fried chicken.”

  “Take me some chicken about now,” Joe Grigg put in, stepping up to the circle, newly arrived, eternally gaunt and hound-eyed. “Fried, baked, boiled, or just half-dead. With feathers left on, be all right.”

  “Where’s all that fish you and your skulkers was set to catch?” Bob Price asked.

  “Fish weren’t running.”

  “Well, then,” Price said, fussing with his ever-resistant pipe, “I guess I’ll just set here and eat the rations that didn’t come and drink the coffee I ain’t got.” He narrowed his eyes at Grigg. All mischief. “Bet you ate all you caught on your dawdling way.”

  “I told you the fish weren’t running. And we came back soon as called.”

  “Yankees aren’t running, either, seems like,” Bill Lenier said to ease things. Everyone knew that Grigg was easy to rile. And Price did love to rile him.

  They all bumped along just fine, though. It had taken Pickens some time to decipher the rough-edged humor of soldiers, to understand that duels w
ould not result from ribbings that grew jagged now and then. It was how soldiers beat down their fears and bursts of loneliness. Fact was that they’d die for one another. Just wouldn’t ever say it, nor anything like.

  A man couldn’t.

  Grigg looked down at nothing. “Why’d they want to cross that river, anyway? Just get themselves another whipping, like they got afore Christmas. Don’t make sense.”

  “The ways of the Yankee cannot be known,” Doc Cowin said, joining the forum, “for they are unfathomable and unbounded, lost to reason. Thought I smelled coffee, but I see I was deceived.” The doc was a precious oddity, a physician who chose to serve as an infantry private—although he was not averse to lancing a boil.

  “Likely just another fuss about nothing,” Jim Arrington said. Big Jim mulled things more than was good for a man, and there was a wish in his voice. “Been across since yesterday and still haven’t done a lick. Remember that ‘Mud March’ of theirs? Just fuddled themselves for nothing. Might be no more to any of this.”

  Compelled to honesty, Pickens said, “Feels different this time, Jim. Something’s going on, officers are twitchy.”

  Bob Price folded his arms and considered the point. Then he took his friend’s side. “Yes, sir. Yes, indeed. Something’s boiling in the kettle this time. Take today now. Woken unneedful, in blind dark, and we’re slop-marched and mud-grabbed for miles, then left to stand in trenches ankle-deep in—”

  “Knee-deep,” a voice corrected.

  “—water. And then, when we’re all but drowned, we’re yanked back again, with General Rodes as confused and confounded as anybody, hollering, ‘Y’all be ready now, boys, don’t let your guard down.…’ Him with his mustaches dripping, high on his horse.…”

  “Hard man, but fair,” Corporal Hutchinson judged.

  “Rodes?” Price said. “Hard man, sure, but—”

  “Never saw him do one fool thing,” Hutchinson insisted, voice bearing his rank. “Leastwise, none that wasn’t concocted and ordered by somebody else. Smart fellow, they say.”

  “Smart enough to move to Alabama, ’least for a time. Then fool enough to creep back to Virginia,” Price declared, biting off a cackle. “I, for one, have had my fill of this magnificent commonwealth.”

  “Don’t let Captain Blackwood hear you bad-talk Virginia.”

  “Then why’d he move to Alabama, too?” Price demanded.

  “Schoolteacher, needed a job. Not that you were ever set to learn anything,” Pickens said. His family knew every action taken by man or beast within fifty miles of Umbria. “Rodes now … he’s an engineer. They go wherever there’s engineering to do. Railroad man, that’s his specialty. Brought him down our way. Took an Alabama bride with him when he left, Lord bless him. One less to pester the rest of us.”

  “I believe,” Doc Cowin said, in that voice that spoke ever of good whiskey sipped on a front porch, “that our good General Rodes was, of late, a professor at the same noble institution as our General Jackson … who might be deemed the first useful Presbyterian in three hundred years.”

  “I’m still asking what poker trick put all of them Virginians over Alabamians,” Price told them all.

  “Pass me those stockings, Bob,” Pickens said. “They dry yet?”

  “I ain’t touching them. Volunteer for burying detail first. Jesus healed the lepers, but he ain’t here.”

  “Sam,” Doc Cowin said, “I told you to report yourself sick, you’re halfway on to gangrene. If blood poisoning doesn’t strike first.”

  Pickens gave a shrug, sheepish. “After the fight. Not going to hide on a sick list with a fight coming.”

  “I had your feet,” Price said, “I’d be first in line.”

  Cannon fire lifted chins and eyebrows. Faces turned northward.

  “Been at it since yesterday,” Corporal Hutchinson explained to Grigg, who’d been off on his failed detail. “Don’t know who’s got the jumps worse, our generals or theirs.”

  With a shake of his head, Bob Price tossed Pickens his stockings.

  They still weren’t dry.

  Seven p.m.

  Second Corps headquarters, Army of Northern Virginia

  Near Hamilton’s Crossing

  The change in Jackson astonished Sandie Pendleton, so much that he’d slipped off to ponder miracles, along with a visit to the field latrine. When the general had ridden off to Lee’s headquarters, Jackson had been as hard of mien as Joshua. Then he had reappeared, almost giddy, as if about to dance a jig of delight. It was hardly the general’s usual behavior, even before the battles that he craved.

  Orders went out as swiftly as they could be copied: The corps would march west at dawn, with Rodes’ division followed by Colston’s and Hill’s, while Early’s boys, plus one brigade, remained to cover ten miles of front at Fredericksburg. It was the sort of risk that Jackson thrived upon, but this night he seemed to be almost enraptured. As if he had just learned a wondrous secret.

  Well, Jackson was indeed a man of secrets, to the great frustration of subordinates, who often were left with no inkling of his plans. He’d driven General Ewell to the brink of fury before his wounding. And he and Powell Hill hadn’t patched things up, not below the surface. Even relatives felt his unbending ire.

  Yes, if that great and good man had a flaw, in Pendleton’s judgment, it was his unforgiving character. He jailed generals and shot deserters without a wince of doubt, without remorse or mercy. He fit the Old Testament better than the New, a John Knox Presbyterian, not a mild Virginia Episcopalian.

  When next he got home, Pendleton hoped to speak with his father about rigor versus mercy, about the theology of it. A part of him still felt called to the cloth, to follow the family tradition, and he needed to believe that Jackson was right, that his triumphs were godly, his harshest actions justified.

  In any case, Jackson kept a Christian headquarters, overseen by the Reverend Doctor Lacy, who prayed more than most but still prayed less than Jackson. There was no shameful behavior, no foulness, no untoward language or tolerance of drunkards, and all men near to Jackson were properly churched.

  Still, there were comic moments when even Pendleton had to bite back laughter. Just the day before, he’d overheard a soldier remarking on Jackson’s habit of thrusting his right arm heavenward. The private had said: “Looks like Old Jack means to grab the Lord by the seat of his pants and set him to doing.”

  And then there was the way the human telegraph worked in camp, how the wildfire warnings of Jackson’s approach made decks of cards disappear amid instantly purified language. The general was convinced that his soldiers were paragons of godliness, holy warriors, unaware that worship attendance in the brigades and regiments suddenly swelled when “Old Stonewall” decided to pay a visit. The staff, of course, was not above hinting a warning to the right colonel in plenty of time.

  Not least among Jackson’s virtues, Pendleton found, was his calm acceptance of mockery and taunts, whether from the cadets at VMI, who had christened him “Tom Fool” for his eccentricities, or over the Negro Sunday school in Lexington. The people, from the best sort down to the trash, had been set against the latter. Even Pendleton’s father had been doubtful, despite his otherwise generous views. But Jackson had marched ahead anyway, defying Virginia law by teaching even slaves to read the Bible, leading the coloreds in prayer, and joining them in hymns in his off-key voice. The front-pew citizens had laughed, but Jackson had persevered, and the Sunday school had become an institution—even now, in the midst of war, Jackson sent home his monthly contributions, Pendleton knew.

  Perseverance, that was the thing the Lord asked of the faithful, from Job to Paul. And Jackson just would not quit. He had no step-back in him.

  And now he meant to go forward.

  Boswell appeared in the freshened night.

  “If I knew a good prank, I’d pull it,” the captain said. “Hardly expected such levity today.”

  Pendleton shook his head in enduring wonder. “Surpr
ise to me, too, Bossie.”

  “Well, glad I’m not Jed. We’ll see how the general’s mood holds up if the maps aren’t done on time.” He smiled, a friend and mock rival. “Any news from Miss Corbin, you old dog?”

  Pendleton felt a blush rise. Kate was his darling, newly betrothed, won through the winter while the staff camped at Moss Neck. He was not a handsome man, he knew, not dashing like Bossie Boswell or Kyd Douglas. But Kate, who had a brain in her pretty head, had chosen him above other would-be swains.

  “I expect she’s fine, thank you. Doing her best to look after things, with all the servants run off. Hoping the Yankees spare the house, if things turn in that direction.”

  “I reckoned the ladies had all gone to Richmond by now.”

  “Not Kate. Not yet.” And he was proud of it.

  “Well, bully for you, anyway. You swept up the prize.”

  Yes. It amazed him still.

  “When the war is over,” Major Sandie Pendleton said, “you’ll have to come visit us.”

  “Surely. And bounce a squad of young Pendletons on my knee.”

  Pendleton blushed again. There were thoughts he did not wish to have in another man’s presence.

  And no, Kate was not so old, that was wicked gossip. Nor was she plain, as declared by jealous tongues.

  She was going to make him the happiest man on earth.

  Laughter bloomed from the nearest tent, centered on Jackson’s bray.

  It was, Pendleton reflected, an age of wonders.

  Nine p.m.

  Field headquarters, Army of the Potomac

  Chancellorsville

  Sorry to keep you waiting, Swinton,” Hooker told his favorite newspaperman. Grinning, he continued, “You understand, of course. Duty comes first.”

  William Swinton waved a hand at the noisy, merry commotion beyond the walls, the brass bands and the cheering. “The army seems in good form.”

  “Shouldn’t it be? Masterful, that’s what this is. Lee and his minions have never faced a campaign remotely like this.” Hooker smiled generously. “Just took proper leadership.”