Libbie
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Mortification was truly his this time, for Autie was apparently alarmed by my anger and answered that he had not meant to scold and of course he treasured my letters. But, he added, he did hope I would be more circumspect in the future.
Autie got his revenge on the Rebs within months, when he defeated forces led by Tom Rosser, a West Point comrade of his. Autie captured Rosser's wagon with many private papers and his trunk of clothes, and in the process retrieved his own papers, which had somehow fallen into Rosser's hands, and which the Confederate general, out of loyalty to Autie, was protecting. Autie laughed about wearing Rosser's coat throughout camp, for the southerner was a much bigger man than Autie, and the coat hung ridiculously on him.
"But," he wrote, "recovering your letters is the most important thing, and now we will never talk of that incident again." Typically Autie closed a subject when he had the last word, and I was left fuming.
Chapter 5
That spring Autie lost the enemy he'd chased and challenged throughout the war when, at the Battle of Yellow Tavern near Richmond, one of his own Wolverines fired the shot that brought down General Jeb Stuart. Instead of being elated, Autie was heartsick. He had respected and admired Stuart, and he foresaw that the southern cavalry would fall apart after Stuart's death. "The war," he wrote, "is grinding to an end."
Autie soon found another worthy enemy—General Jubal Early, who decided to threaten Washington. Grant had settled troops, including Autie's Michigan Brigade, into what would be the winter-long siege of Petersburg near Richmond, and Early thought to divert attention to the protection of Washington. The entire city went into a panic when Early swept through Maryland and began to harass the city's northern defenses.
"I would be safer in camp with you," I wrote to Autie. "Please say that I may come." Even in the best of circum-stances, I preferred to be in camp with Autie, and I was always looking for a way, an excuse, to get there.
I did not, of course, get to visit Autie while those fierce battles raged. Sheridan's troops attacked Early near Winchester, Virginia, and Autie and his saber-swinging Wolverines were so brilliant on the battlefield—and the Union victory so complete—that Autie received the promotion he had wanted so badly in the spring. He was breveted major general and given charge of the Third Division—it meant he could wear two stars on his shoulder straps instead of one and arrange his buttons in rows of three instead of two. Eliza was kept busy making the necessary changes.
* * *
In the late spring battle at Cold Harbor, Jim Christiancy from Monroe, a lieutenant on Autie's staff, was badly wounded with shrapnel in the thigh and hip. Autie immediately notified me that Jim was in a hospital in Washington, and I went at once to see him.
The hospital, a converted public building, appalled me. Wounded men, in all states of desperation, lay in rows of cots in large, open hall-like rooms. Some moaned in pain, a few cried aloud, and others looked to me as if they were already dead. People hurried everywhere—the pitifully few nurses, trying to succor every patient and finding their chore impossible, the two lone physicians, their eyes exhausted and hopeless. And above it all was a horrible stench—the smell of wounds, and decaying flesh, and death. With a hand over my mouth, I sought Jim.
"Jim?" I asked doubtfully when I was pointed to a specific cot. The pale and unshaven man on the cot bore no resemblance to the laughing young boy I remembered. "Is that you?"
His dull eyes lifted a little and he stared at me, almost confused. "Libbie? Libbie Bacon?"
"Libbie Custer," I reminded him. "Autie particularly wanted me to come see you, since he cannot himself."
"He's a great leader, Libbie," Jim said faintly, "a great leader."
Alarmed by his apparent weakness, I sought out a harried and overworked doctor. When I complained that Jim didn't seem to be getting enough care and asked if he was eating, the doctor merely shrugged and motioned around the huge barrackslike room, where men lay on cots and some on the floor, in endless row after row. "We do what we can," he said, and then a loud cry of pain sent him hurtling down a row of bodies. Over his shoulder he said, "He'd be better off somewhere else. I can tell you that."
I had Jim transferred to Mrs. Hyatt's boardinghouse. Unwittingly, I had let myself in for a nasty nursing chore. As fragments of cloth and dirt worked their way out of Jim's wound, it had to be cleaned, and there was no one else at Miss Hyatt's to take on that chore.
Resolutely, I would turn the patient on his side, scrub my hands, and then raise his gown and clean the wound, as the doctor had shown me. When he was most ill, Jim protested only feebly, but as he began to improve, his protests became louder.
"Libbie, it's not fitting for you to be doing this for me."
"Hush, Jim Christiancy. I'm a married woman now, and fitting isn't the question here. We've got to save the use of your hip."
"You're an angel of mercy," he declared. "I thought to die in that hospital."
I remembered the time Autie had "thought to die" in battle and shuddered.
When Jim was better, I sat for long hours reading to him, often from the poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson, which he particularly enjoyed. Autie had given me a copy of Enoch Arden, which I read aloud. And we talked for hours on end, Jim lying in his bed and me sitting in a chair that I had pulled close to the bed.
Jim was a charmer, a ladies' man, who drank far too much, loved all the women, and always had a good time, but he had a good soul. "Libbie," he'd say, "if Armstrong hadn't beaten me to it, you'd be Mrs. Christiancy."
"La, Jim, not unless you changed your ways," I said, laughing.
"You can't tell me Armstrong is a paragon of virtue," he protested.
"He doesn't drink," I replied solemnly.
"And he's given up his eye for the ladies?" he asked.
"Of course he has. He wouldn't dare look at another woman," I said defiantly. The tone behind Jim's words was beginning to make me nervous, as though he found me incredibly naive.
"And you?" The seriousness to Jim's tone sent a chill through me, and when I raised my eyes to his, he was staring intently at me. His hand reached for mine.
"I have no need to look at another man, Jim. Autie makes me happy."
He sighed. "So be it. But let me know if things change."
"Jim Christiancy," I laughed, trying to change the mood, "you're incorrigible."
"That's what my father tells me all the time," he said.
I knew even before that talk that Jim had fallen a little bit in love with me, and I didn't do much to discourage it. Autie was far away, I was lonely, and Jim was charming—I saw no harm in the flirtation.
Autie regarded it otherwise. He appeared at the boardinghouse in one of his surprise visits and barely greeted me before he demanded, "Where's Christiancy?"
"In his room," I said. "Oh, Autie, he can walk ever so slightly on crutches now, and he's getting so much better. You'll be pleased." I was a little slow to catch on to Autie's mood.
"I'll bet," he said grimly, brushing past me to head for Jim's room. "Soldier," he said, "I'm sending you home on extended sick leave. You'll go to Monroe by tomorrow's train."
"Autie," I protested, "he's not well enough to travel."
"He damn well will travel," Autie said, banging out of the room and dragging me with him.
We had a tremendous battle once we reached our room, and though Autie carefully closed the door—without slamming it, which took great forbearance on his part—I know the whole house, and especially Jim Christiancy, heard every word of it, at least every word of Autie's.
"You will not compromise me by being so friendly with a man who serves under me. Not only friendly, you've been intimate with him," Autie said loudly.
"Intimate?" I echoed in disbelief. "Changing his bandages? Hardly a chore to inspire romance, Autie. I suggest you change some bandages yourself. It might change your view of war."
"You should have left him in the hospital! You had no right to bring him here without consulting me."
"You should have had my permission," he repeated.
Permission? I was stunned. Autie sounded like my father. I could feel my face flame as I repeated, "Autie, you weren't here for me to ask. I just did what I thought was right."
"Well, it sure as hell wasn't right," he roared.
"Autie," I said as calmly as I could, "I've asked you not to swear before."
"And I have asked you to be a model for the officers of the troops. How do you think I feel when I find they're all talking about the man my wife's nursing?"
"Jim's a friend of yours," I answered, my voice growing weak as I realized that I could not win this argument.
"Not close enough that I'd share my wife with him," he hollered.
Autie was riding over me, just as he'd ridden over Confederate troops. And the truth, I saw, was two-pronged: Autie was not jealous of Jim, but he feared that he had been embarrassed in front of his troops and that he had somehow lost his right to dictate what I did, as his wife. Realizing all this did not make me, still a young bride, any better equipped to deal with Autie's anger, and I quailed before it.
Thinking to quiet his voice, I moved closer to him and touched my finger to his lips. Instantly he gathered me in his arms and crushed me to him. "I could not bear to lose you," he said.
Later I would count this as a battle lost on my part.
We had a quiet dinner together, and Autie returned to his troops without even spending the night and without rescinding his orders to Christiancy. Jim, though barely able to move about, left for Monroe the next day, and I saw him off. On the way to the rail station, Jim never mentioned the argument between Autie and me, nor did any glance or word on his part indicate that anything might be less than idyllic in my marriage. In view of the fight he'd heard, I thought him a true gentleman.
Just before he boarded the train, he balanced on his crutches and reached an awkward arm for me. I moved into his embrace, kissing him affectionately.
"Libbie," he said, "I don't think I'd have made it without you." He was still pale, and his uniform hung on his thin bones, but, his eyes now alive, he looked worlds better than he had when I'd found him in the hospital.
"That," I said sincerely, "is reward enough. Go to Monroe and heal, and we'll see you there after the war. Autie will be so looking forward to a visit with you."
Only then did he cock an eyebrow at me, but the look quickly passed from his face. "I'll count on it," he said, kissed me again, and hobbled onto the train with the help of a curious conductor who eyed me once or twice and then shrugged meaninglessly. I hoped the conductor was not somehow in touch with Autie, who would have started the row all over again if he'd seen Jim kiss me.
* * *
Autie and I had yet another one-sided argument weeks later when I surprised him near his camp during the heaviest fighting in the Shenandoah Valley.
Autie's camp was some few miles from Harper's Ferry, and I contrived to surprise him by appearing at that small town. Autie was grim-faced when he met me. "You had no right," he stormed, "to come here without my permission."
That word again! "I thought to surprise you."
"You did that," he said grimly, "and nearly scared me half to death to boot. There are guerrillas all around this town—they could have captured you, and don't think that wouldn't have delighted them! As it was, they had a perfect chance to take potshots at me—and they did." Ruefully, he took off the battered Rebel hat he always wore and showed me a bullet hole in the brim.
"Custer's Luck," I murmured, hoping to hide my fear. Had Autie died that day, I would have been responsible.
"Either that or I was meant to spend this day with you," he said, drawing me tightly into his arms and kissing me with a demanding strength.
"Autie," I said, backing away, "it's daytime."
He looked disconcerted for just a moment, and then he said, "We'll pull the drapes and pretend it's night."
We spent the day locked in the privacy of my hotel quarters, and Autie's orderly knew to rouse him only if the tide of the war turned irrevocably. It didn't in that twenty-four hours.
And Autie was never again reluctant to make love in the daytime.
* * *
In the late fall Autie sent for me, and I took the train to Martinsburg, Virginia, to join him at his headquarters in a big, old farmhouse. He met me at the train, and we drove the few miles to his headquarters, passing rows and rows of army tents, where men lounged about, some working at small tasks I couldn't identify. When they saw Autie, without exception, the men hailed him heartily, and I felt a thrill of pride in him. To think that all these men—there were hundreds—went to battle under Autie's command!
The tents were in much better shape than Autie's farmhouse-headquarters, which was shabby and rundown—it might have been freshly painted four years earlier when the war started, but now the white paint was peeling and gray. Around it were unfilled, weed-infested fields. I found it depressing.
"I have a surprise for you," Autie said, sweeping me into his arms once we were inside the house.
"What is it?" I could not imagine what he had gotten hold of on the front that would intrigue me, and I loosened myself from his hold to look around for some hidden object.
"You'll see," he smiled. "It's not what you expect."
It certainly wasn't. The surprise was his younger brother, Tom, who'd resigned from the Ohio Infantry to join the Michigan Cavalry. Once that was done, Autie simply requested he be assigned to his troop.
Tom's presence meant a life of practical jokes and little privacy. Autie and his brother often teamed up to tease me. One of their favorite jokes was to ask if I minded if they smoked. When I, trying to be agreeable, said of course not, they would seal all the windows and puff furiously until I was reduced to coughing and wiping my eyes. "Smoke bothering you?" Tom would ask, and Autie would merely nod, though I looked daggers at him.
Once they returned from a skirmish to announce they had a new name for me. They'd stopped at a farmhouse, meaning to use it for temporary headquarters, but the farmer, an old Dutchman, had said no. "The old lady," he said, "is agin it." Autie and Tom had a good laugh over the name, and from that day on, whenever I opposed them, I too was "the old lady."
When I rode my pony—a gentle but short-legged creature that Autie had confiscated for me—they asked if I'd gotten my horseback experience with the infantry. The pony had a choppy little canter, and I could have made better time walking. Autie and Tom would make a great show of holding back their sleek and snorting horses to wait for me to catch up.
I was game about the teasing, as Autie predicted, and occasionally I gave as good as I got. But the lack of privacy bothered me more, for Tom would often rush into our quarters unannounced.
"He's my brother," Autie said, shrugging when I mentioned it.
I said no more for the moment, but our occasional stolen daytime moments of passion were no more, and, still a bride, I missed them sorely. Autie remained a passionate lover at night, no matter how long the battle he'd been in that day. Once the lights were out and our privacy assured, he would sweep me into bed. Gone were the demure days of my making a toilette and Autie donning a huge white nightshirt. Now morning often found our clothes scattered on the floor where we'd left them in our urgency, though I always picked them up neatly before Eliza came in.
"Come back to bed a moment," Autie invited one morning as he uncharacteristically lingered in the bed. Usually he burst up well before dawn, ready, even eager, for the day's battle, while I sleepily clung to the night.
"I must pick up these clothes. Eliza will be here any moment with coffee."
"Eliza would understand," he said, but I pushed away his inviting arms and dressed myself in a wrapper.
"Don't you have a war to go to today?" I asked impertinently. It always struck me as strange that he went away to war in the mornings a
nd came home to me at night, much like Papa had gone to his law offices.
Eliza and I spent long days together while Autie was off at his war. "That Mistah Tom bothering you some?" she asked one day while I sat lazily writing letters and she stirred a kettle on the fire.
"Some," I said noncommittally, thinking it not proper to discuss family affairs, even with Eliza, who was herself as close as family.
"He's a wild one," she said, "and someday he's gonna get the ginnel in trouble. You mark my words." She stirred the pot even more vigorously, splashing some broth onto her apron. Eliza always wore clean white aprons, and it puzzled me some how she kept them so neat under conditions that were difficult, to say the least. But, then, she kept Autie's clothes in spit-polish condition, too.
"Oh, Eliza, I'm sure they're good for each other," I said, trying to be reassuring. Eliza, I knew, depended on Autie for her security as much as I did—and often feared for him in battle more than I did, for she didn't have much faith in Custer's Luck and had once scoffed loudly when it was mentioned. Autie silenced her with a dark look, but she continued to brood, as she was now.
Her turbaned head bobbed up and down. "That Tom and the ginnel are good for each other in wildness. They do things together neither one ever do alone.... My mammy, she had the sight, and sometimes I think she passed it on to me. I don't like what I see."
A cold shiver of fear went through me, and I was frantic to change the subject. "What's for supper, Eliza?" I asked inanely.
In spite of the war that had brought us there and in spite of Tom, Winchester was a bit of heaven to me, with comfortable quarters and a constant round of dinners and dances, even a lively, galloping dance that everyone insisted on calling "Custer's Charge." I may not have tasted much wine, but Papa would have been dismayed to see how gaily I danced every dance, each with a different partner, but always saving the last dance for Autie.