The arsenal was a great depot for the Quartermaster’s Department and our primary warehouse for uniforms. Twas the very place that had promised me one delivery after another, only to send me thin air. Now I get into a state when I am made a fool, and I dwelt on my difficulties with the arsenal as we approached it. I did not come up short of anger, though I knew it was unchristian. My visit to Havisham House had not left me in perfect balance.
No sooner had we turned down the ferry road, than I saw a wagon loaded to the extreme of possibility with bundles of blue. Now I would have let it pass, glad to see a shipment of uniforms underway at last, had I not spotted the lettering on the side of the vehicle.
CAWBER STEEL & IRON WORKS, it said. PHILADELPHIA, PENNA.
“Halt,” I shouted, grabbing the reins from Mr. Lee. I gave them a deathly yank and the horses whinnied. I hardly knew myself. “You, there. Hold up. Stop that wagon, man.”
I do not pretend to be the cleverest of men, and the greater part of my schooling come by lamplight in my regiment, but it did not require Mr. Carlyle to realize that any wagon belonging to a foundry should have been delivering guns or shot to the arsenal, and not carrying fifty-score of uniforms away from it. I scented graft and corruption at its lowest.
I leapt down from the trap in such a rage I did not feel the hurt to my leg, and I went for the driver of the wagon with my cane. He had pulled up on command. Now he looked at me in wonderment, shying in fear of a blow.
“You’ll turn that wagon around,” I told him. “And quick.”
It took him a brace of seconds to respond. “Captain, I got a delivery to make, and I—”
“You’ll turn around, and no more talk on it. On the authority of Captain Jones of the War Department.” Then I added, “And on the authority of General McClellan.”
“Yes, sir. But there’s a train leaving and these here uniforms—”
“No backtalk, man. You’ll turn around.” I pointed to a rutted field. “Follow my carriage, or I’ll have you put in jail.” I gave my cane a good wave in his direction.
He followed us as bidden. When we got to the loading yard at the arsenal, I roared past the sentry, bellowing like Glyndwr on the field of battle.
“Duty sergeant to me,” I called, for I knew no officers would be about so late in the afternoon. “Duty sergeant to me at the double-quick.”
A three-striper come toward me, settling down his cap. A corporal followed him.
“Thievery,” I called. “Oh, I have you now, I do. That Oriental gentleman on the coach is my witness. It’s thievery and corruption…”
The sergeant and his assistant saluted, feigning bewilderment.
“What is it, sir? What’s the matter?” The sergeant had fear aplenty in his eyes. You would have thought the Confederates had just crossed the Schuylkill.
“That wagon. There, man. Loaded to the moon with Army uniforms. Brazen as brass, with the very foundry lettering on it. Theft, I call it. Larceny it is.”
The sergeant and the corporal exchanged looks. The corporal was young and clean of feature, and it shocked me to find such a one mired so deep in dishonesty.
That wicked young corporal stepped forward.
“Begging your pardon, Captain. That man there had a drawing order. All regulation, signed by district headquarters.”
I whacked my cane into the earth and leaned forward upon it. “Oh, I’m certain it was drawn up fine. And a bloody, crimson forgery. I’ll have the names of all involved. Of every man. And I’ll have that wagon unloaded before a man in this arsenal has his dinner.”
Along with my sense of outrage, I must admit I felt a certain satisfaction as Mr. Lee carried me back toward the railroad depot. I had caught them all with their fingers in the honeypot, and I intended to pursue it. If I could not give General McClellan much satisfaction in the matter of Anthony Fowler, I could at least see to it that the shipment and distribution of uniforms was put on a proper footing.
The autumn darkness fell upon us, and the coachman lit his lamps and detoured around the Irish settlement. I noticed little this time, deep in my calculations of crime and punishment, and when I woke to the world again we were back in streets with crowded sidewalks and gas lighting and busy shops.
“Have you additional requirements, sir?” Mr. Lee asked me, “Or will it be the station?”
“To the train,” I told him. “And thank you, sir. You have been invaluable.”
He could not take me the entire way, for a regiment was marching over from the docks to the depot and the carriages before us had halted to let them pass. I thanked my companion again and began to climb down. Then I decided it did not much matter whether he perceived me as a gentleman—and a coachman knows almost as much as a valet. So I clung to the side of the carriage and asked him a question.
“Mr. Lee… what was your personal opinion of Captain Fowler? I ask it as an agent of our government, and not from unseemly curiosity.”
He looked at me for a moment before settling his eyes back on his team. He was a man of great dignity and pride, that half-breed fellow.
“Captain Fowler,” he said calmly, “was his father’s son.”
The light was poor and the street a chaos, but I thought I saw a smile flit over his lips.
Twas a Maine regiment of boys tall enough for the grenadiers. They made a great singing show for the public as they marched, for they did not know what lay before them. They formed up nicely at the halt before the depot, but their company officers were baffled as to the proper commands to file them into the station yard. A few months before, a different Abel Jones would have stepped up and put them to rights. Now I inched behind the crowd of gawkers and slipped inside to guarantee my place.
A woman in a gray cloak and black bonnet waited with a basket of New Testaments for the soldiers. In her anxiety to begin her work, she offered one to me. I accepted it and pressed a dime upon her for her charity. She wished to refuse the donation, and I am not one to throw money to the winds, but I made her take it. For I knew my Mary Myfanwy would have approved.
My beloved wife was hard upon my mind. It was but four hours on a good-running train from Philadelphia to Pottsville, and I longed to see her. And the child, too, our little John. But I would not be an honest man were I not to say that my Mary Myfanwy come first to mind, and last. To come as close to her as this and not be able to take her in my arms, that was a deadly miserable thing. I ached to see those smart eyes quicken and hear her gasp at the unexpected sight of me.
Oh, I considered turning from my duty. For if anything could have turned me, it was the thought of my sweet love. And of the little boy I had not seen since April. My Mary Myfanwy had come thrice to see me in hospital, put up by the good ladies of the Wesley Chapel, and I wept like a babe at the sight of her, and she wept, too, saying only, “You’re alive, my love, my darling…” By the third visit it was unbearable to get the scent of her by my bed, and to hear her whispering voice, and us surrounded by men caught in the twilight between life and death, and all of it public as a theater.
I longed to toss my cane and run through the streets from the Pennsylvania Railroad yard to the Reading depot, to cling to the side of a locomotive, if need be, and then to climb the little hill to our house and hold my Mary Myfanwy till my arms ached. I thought of a dozen excuses for such a detour, and told myself the loss of a day of my service could not much matter to the Union. My heart was wild within me. I could see her standing there, beckoning me to come…
I bought a stock of provisions from the railyard sutler and sat down on a bench, waiting for the train to Washington to be given free for boarding. The little Testament was a comfort to me, for I have often pondered the loneliness of Jesus.
Chapter 4
Now how was I to report to General McClellan? When all I had to say was that poor Mrs. Fowler believed her son murdered because he rose from the dead to tell her so? And that she would like the general to set the army on the march to capture the Rebels responsible
and hang them. Or that she seemed exactly the ferocious crusader he feared? No, I did not think that would content our new general-in-chief.
My train reached Washington in light the color of gunpowder. I had jostled away the night, thinking about generals, the dead lad, and the time in India when Private Molloy made off with the regimental silver. It had been no grand murder inquiry, but I had managed things properly, and the officers had not been distracted from their pig-sticking. The proper method had been to go to the spot where the theft occurred, then march outward. There had been no extravagant journeys to the likes of Philadelphia, and Molloy had gotten no farther than the native quarter where the unhappiest of women made their homes.
If this Fowler matter would be clarified, it only made sense to visit the camp where the body had been discovered, and I felt I had better do it before reporting to Little Mac. I wanted so to please the man, and had no wish to stand before him a failure.
And my curiosity was up now. For the loss of the boy moved me. There is too little goodness in this world, and we must sorrow when any goes out of it. But an orderly man does things in an orderly manner, and the world works the better for it.
I trudged from the depot to Mrs. Schutzengel’s for a wash and a change of linen. I had taken my bath on Saturday evening, but a journey by rail is a dirtying thing. Nor was I about to waste a nickel on another barber when I could very well shave myself.
“Oooch, Captain Jones,” Mrs. Schutzengel said when I come in, looking me over and counting my limbs, “da sind Sie! I am afraid you are hit over the head and stolen by them Rebels, when you are not coming home for your Sunday Mittagsessen. How I am worrying, und now you are here! Eat, eat!”
I took my morning victuals on the quick, going light on the sausages and hurrying through the last evening’s paper, which my hostess had kindly saved for me. The first page bore its usual advertisements for unlikely cures for unmentionable diseases—and a shame on the army they were—but the second side was given over to descriptions of the progress of Anthony Fowler’s funeral train toward Philadelphia. Twas as if the boy had already risen from the grave to carry his nation’s flag into battle, such were the calls for vengeance. The South got the blame of it, which still seemed the logical thing to me, despite the general’s reservations. But I did not like the passion in those accounts of the boy’s journey to his burying—scribbling and howling of the sort you would not get from any fellow who had seen war for himself. Twas the rage of the stay-at-home hero. The worst are ever ready to avenge the best.
And I believed that Anthony Fowler had been of the best. Had his own mother’s coachman not said he was his father’s son, and that father lost ministering to the heathen in far China? And if words of hatred against him had come to a barber’s ear, it is the sad business of humanity that those who stand up to right a great wrong will make enemies. Was not John Wesley himself the object of infamous slander?
I must confess my belief that slavery was a great wrong. For I had seen the shape and squalor of it among brown men, if not black, and did not like it. Twas my duty to be impartial as I examined Anthony Fowler’s death, and so I sought to be. I marked the general’s words. Yet I could bear no love for the man who put his whip to another human creature’s back to gain his labor, no more than I could admire the pumped-up citizen willing to fight to the last drop of the neighbor-boy’s blood. Myself, I would not have made a war over the emancipation business, but now war was upon us and I saw no going back. But let that bide.
I had half a wash at the backyard pump while Mrs. Schutzengel heated shaving water for the household. A raw morning it was, with chimney smoke bitter in the air and no lingering as the other boarders filed past to empty their night pots. Mr. Mager threw me a sullen look, for your German holds a long grudge when he thinks he has come up short at table, but I gave him good morning. I was gone into my thoughts, shivering and scrubbing. I remembered the heat of India. India was far too much with me these days, and I did not like such resurrections. Then, with a splash of water, I thought of the boys in their tents all around us, of the cold boredom of camp life. They had the heart out of me, for if there is little enough glory on the battlefield, there is still less in winter quarters. It is a drab, dour life. War disappoints long before it kills.
The least I could do for our boys was see to the getting of trousers. Before going out to the camp where Fowler’s body was found, I walked down to the War Department. There was a great hullabaloo, with General McClellan establishing himself in his additional offices. I slipped in to my desk to record the matter of the wagonload of uniforms I had intercepted on the road from the arsenal.
A crucial point of the matter, and one that troubled me, was the lettering on the side of the rig: CAWBER STEEL AND IRON WORKS. Even in Pottsville, we knew of Mr. Matthew Cawber. The man owned not only foundries on the Delaware, but collieries, shipping, and shares in the railroads. He was rich and mighty and famous as Patti—surely not unknown to Mr. Cameron, his fellow Pennsylvanian and our Secretary of War. I wondered if he were not known to General McClellan, too, as a fellow Philadelphian. For all its vastnesses, our America can be a thick little world.
I loved my new country, and believed in it surely. Yet I could not help but ask myself if justice could reach so lofty a man as Mr. Cawber. I wondered, too, at the state of such a fellow’s soul. It is a marvelous thing about greed, how a man with money enough to buy himself a county or two will still bend down to steal uniforms from his nation’s defenders to add a few pennies to his pile. It left me raw to think on it.
I feared my report might come to nought, but a man must do his duty as it comes to him and not ponder. I wrote the matter down, then repaired the weakness in my language before sending a fair copy upward. I was so mad into the business that I put off Evans the Telegraph when he stopped by to discuss the way of the world.
With that duty done but the anger still on me, I footed it over to the Quartermaster’s yard to see if any uniforms had arrived. They had not. The place was afluster, for General Meigs had come out for a surprise inspection, which he had broken off in a fury.
When I pressed him, the yard officer told me a number of shipments lay down at the depot, waiting for wagons. He believed he had heard something about woolen goods. So I walked the long walk to the depot to save the omnibus fare, but nothing was waiting at all. At that point, I gave up on trousers for the day. The morning was going and it was high time to pursue the Fowler business. I passed over the canal below the Capitol, heading for Virginia. On Maryland Avenue, a kind fellow hailed me and took me along in his trap to the head of the Long Bridge.
There is goodness in men, see.
I waited at the bridgehead for a wagon going my way. To study the greatness of General McClellan’s army, you had only to stand there on the Potomac’s bank and watch the procession of quartermaster vehicles coming and going, their trains interspersed with detachments of cavalry, all the horses steaming like mechanical engines, and the men’s faces red with the cold. There was no end to it, only a mighty stopping and starting as sentries at the bridgehead inspected passes. I joined half a dozen other soldiers looking for transportation. We called out our brigade and regimental destinations to the teamsters. After a bit, I found a place on a Studebaker taking tents forward.
The Virginia shore was crowded as Judgement Day with soldiers and their camps. Companies of infantry suffered out their morning drill, while boys even more unlucky went about the camp work. Batteries jangled down the road, gunners in their greatcoats cursing the mud as it splashed over their fieldpieces. We passed the first line of fortifications, outgrown now, and the driver let me down where a military road veered toward a ridge. I walked up through the ruts, singing hymns for the joy and the practice, and asking my way to the New Yorkers. A brigade headquarters, where cigars seemed an indispensible part of strategy, pointed me onward.
As I approached the camp where Fowler’s body had been discovered, I looked over the ground, imagining that, so
mehow, I would recognize the spot where he had been killed. Perhaps I was only weary, or maybe the befuddlement of the dead man’s mother had infected my brain, but I really believed I might sense the place of death.
I saw nothing but mud and tree stumps and the dawdling smoke of campfires. Despite the chill, the air breathed heavy with the smells of kettles and latrines. A drummer practiced his signals, stumbling over the call to advance, and a sentry transferred his rifle from one shoulder to the other so he might warm a hand in a pocket. I was back in a world I thought I had left forever.
A staff officer galloped by. His horse kicked mud in my face.
The colonel’s name was Goodman, and he was thin of hair and thick of waist. He invited me into his tent, although it was clear my arrival was a shock to him. I had no papers from General McClellan charging me with the responsibility for the inquiry, only my word. The colonel dismissed his orderly, pulled down the flap of his tent, and sat down in his camp chair to weigh my worth. It did not help that he was drunk at noon.
“Terrible,” he said. “Slaughtered like a holy martyr. My regiment to bear the shame of it. And not a man of us so much as shook his hand. Never even seen him. How was we to know he was roaming about? What can a fellow do, I ask you? Join me for a drink?”
“I have long since signed the Pledge, sir.”
He grunted and poured whisky into two glasses anyway. He downed his, then knocked back mine. “Now we’re even,” he said. His red eyes clouded with sentiment. “Died like a dog. With his crown of gold. Like a Vested Virgin. Like the nymph Adonis. Slaughtered like Caesar at the walls of Troy. My regiment to blame… never outlive the shame of it. Never even shook the fellow’s hand… didn’t even know he was there…”
Faded Coat of Blue Page 6
