Yankee in Atlanta

by Jocelyn Green

  “As you say.” She paused, gauging his mood before forging ahead. “But have you no other family to care for Ana?”

  “I hired you to care for Ana.” He leaned back again in his rocking chair, breathing deeply as pine-scented wind swept through the porch. “Have you forgotten so quickly how you came into your good fortune?”

  He smiled, but Caitlin did not return it. “That is not what I meant. In the event—”

  “I know what you meant!” His voice was restrained, but only as a bridle keeps a stallion in check. He pushed himself out of his chair and began pacing the length of the porch. “I know what you meant,” he said again, quieter this time. “Do you suppose I have not considered all the possible outcomes of my decision? Do you think I have not imagined my precious child as an orphan forced upon the charity of those who would see her as a mere duty?” His footsteps fell heavier upon the floorboards, thudding like a distant drum. Caitlin’s chair stilled as his agony drilled into her with every word, every step.

  “Then … must you go?”

  He gripped the back of his rocking chair with both hands and expelled a sigh. “How many men do you see in this city?” He shook his head. “Let me rephrase that. How many men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five do you see here, other than the five hundred soldiers stationed in Atlanta?”

  It wasn’t many. Not since last fall, when the Confederacy had broadened the age range of those eligible for the draft in the second Conscription Act. Some men were exempt. Physicians with more than five years of experience, for example. Railroad and foundry workers, salt laborers who produced twenty bushels of salt per day, telegraph operators. City government officials and ministers. Professors and teachers with more than twenty pupils—Oh.

  “You’re eligible for conscription now that the institute closed, aren’t you?”

  “I’ll be hanged first rather than be forced into it. If I’m going to fight, I’ll go of my own accord, with my honor intact.”

  Caitlin turned her gaze heavenward. A deep blue curtain had lowered in the sky, banking the blazing sunset. If only its beauty could also extinguish the dismay now kindling within her. Enlistment would separate Noah and Ana for three years, or until the end of the war. Unless of course, he did not survive. Caitlin’s heart buckled at the thought of Ana losing her adoring father, as Caitlin had lost hers. Mourning clothes fade. Grief doesn’t. The sharp edges might dull with time, but the ache never disappeared. There had to be another way for them. It could cost up to two thousand dollars, likely a few years’ wages. But if he had the means, he could legally be exempted from service to a dying cause.

  She rose from her rocking chair and edged closer to Noah. “Have you considered a substi—”

  “No, no, I would never pay another man to take my place.” His eyes glinted like steel in the twilight. “My conscience would not permit it. If he were killed, or if his family suffered in his absence …”

  His unyielding eyes were the flint to Caitlin’s fear for this tiny family, sparking a burning anger in her gut. She was angry that she, a Union veteran, had taken pity on this Rebel recruit. She was angry that her pity had compelled her to suggest a route that was less than honorable, even in her own estimation. And she was angry that even though honor cost him everything, he was willing to pay the price. And for what?

  “Your family will suffer in your absence, Noah Becker, you stubborn mule of a man!” Her words flew roughshod ahead of her. “As a matter of fact, I tend to hate draft dodgers, deserters, and anyone else who would shirk their duty because it does not suit them to be inconvenienced. But in your case, I’d think you might feel some duty to your own daughter, considering you’re the only kin she has in this world.” She had plowed ahead too far. She knew it.

  Noah walked away from her, then circled back. “My duty to Ana includes being the kind of man a father should be. A man who chooses to sacrifice, a man who gives himself to the greater good.”

  “What greater good? The Confederacy is crum—” She caught herself, looked around, cut her voice low. “It’s crumbling, Mr. Becker. I know it isn’t popular to say it, but surely you know, surely everyone knows it, the way everyone knew the emperor in your story was walking around naked but refused to speak the truth. With the defeats in Vicksburg and Gettysburg, we are as exposed as that arrogant emperor. Yet no one speaks the truth. The House of Dixie is falling.”

  Breath pulsing against her corset, she awaited his rebuttal. Then she remembered she could be arrested for the speech she had just made. Nausea wormed through her middle. Noah knew the law. Would he prosecute? Surely he cannot support all the South stands for, not if he “operated under the law” without agreeing with it.

  Moments moved like molasses. But he did not deny her treasonous words. Instead, “I’d rather die for something I believe in, than live as a coward for the rest of my life.”

  “And just what is it you believe in, that is worth the cost of your life?”

  “My family, Miss McKae. My home.” A wry smile bent his lips. “This is why I need to fight, and now, more than ever. You’re right. Most of Tennessee has been lost to Rosecrans, and if General Bragg cannot hold Chattanooga, the bluecoats will pour into Georgia.” He slacked a hip against a column and looked out into the darkness. “I must help defend our state from the ravages of war. Our city. And yes, our home. When I fight, it will not be for the sake of slavery. It will be to protect all I hold dear.” He turned and faced her then, though night masked his expression. “That is my duty to Analiese.” His voice cracked on his daughter’s name.

  Caitlin’s throat ached as she wiped the tears from her face. “I will do my utmost for her in your absence.”

  “I am indebted.”

  “You will come home.”

  His silence lashed her heart.

  Noah’s head throbbed. Lately, he felt so much older than his thirty-one years, especially in the oppressive solitude of night. It was here, caught between sunset and the coming dawn, that he found himself tangled in the web of his own convictions.

  Caitlin had retired to her bedroom upstairs hours ago, and here he sat at his desk in the office, bathed in the eerie halo of a “Confederate” candle. At least this particular version didn’t require the use of any precious matches. Sweet gum globes Saul had gathered from the woods, floating in a shallow bowl of melted lard, glowed when saturated, without being lit. The candles that gave off brighter light—twisted rags soaked in beeswax and twined around a bottle—Noah reserved for winter’s shorter days.

  Not that I will be here. He leaned down and stroked Rascal’s fading red coat, the old dog’s snoring barely penetrating Noah’s thoughts. His reasons for enlisting were sound. The timing was right. Everything he had said to Caitlin was true.

  At least in some interpretation. When I fight, it will not be for the sake of slavery, he had said. It will be to protect all I hold dear. Noah dropped his hands to the armrests. No, he was not fighting for the sake of slavery. But he was fighting with and for the Confederacy. It was only natural. This was his country now. The land for which he had left his family and the Rhineland.

  “No, not this,” he muttered to himself.

  He did not immigrate to a confederation, but to the United States of America, the best example of democracy in the world. The Germany in which he had grown up was a conglomeration of large and small principalities, many of them ruled by absolute sovereigns. The land seethed with territorial rivalries. There was an aristocracy, and there were masses of downtrodden peasants. At sixteen years of age, Noah and his older brother, Wilhelm, dropped their university textbooks and took up the tricolor flag—black, red, and gold—that had been so long prohibited. They proudly became revolutionaries in 1848, for the unification of Germany into one nation-state, and equal rights for all citizens before the law.

  And now, a mere fifteen years later, Noah would volunteer to fight for the right of the United States to disunite. Perhaps he had already aligned himself with slavery by prosper
ing in a state that prospered by slave labor, and in a city that did not trust its colored people. The few free blacks in the city had a nine o’clock curfew. They were not allowed to carry canes or pipes. There was even a law against vagrancy, loosely defined as wandering or strolling about or leading an idle or immoral life. The first offense resulted in two years of slavery. The second offense: permanent reenslavement.

  If Wilhelm could see him now … During the Revolution, they and the other revolutionaries had been so zealous for equal rights, they did not even want to use formal titles, like “Professor” or “Doctor.” Instead, they would simply call each other “Citizen,” an attempt to break down a class system that divided them so sharply.

  Ridiculous idea. But the principle of equal rights for all people was not. It was fundamental.

  According to the Confederacy’s vice president, Georgia native Alexander Stephens, however, it was slavery that was fundamental. Stephens had said so right here in Atlanta on March 21, 1861. Several thousand people heard him outside the Atlanta Hotel, and two weeks later he gave the same speech—his “Cornerstone Speech”—in Savannah. The transcript had been printed and reprinted in newspapers across the South.

  Eyebrows knitting together, Noah rifled through some papers until he found the edition of the Southern Confederacy he was looking for. The print was difficult to read by the glow of sweet gum globes, but his memory aided him well. Speaking of the Confederacy’s new government, Stephens had said:

  … its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth …

  Those at the North … assume that the negro is equal, and hence conclude that he is entitled to equal privileges and rights with the white man. If their premises were correct, their conclusions would be logical and just—but their premise being wrong, their whole argument fails…. They were attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal.

  Noah slammed the paper down and pinched the bridge of his nose. His lawyer-trained mind could argue both sides of the debate between states’ rights and federal power. He also disdained Lincoln’s political angle in exempting four border states and parts of Louisiana and Virginia from the Emancipation Proclamation—not that the rest of the South paid any credence to what was considered a toothless document of a “foreign government,” anyway. But he could not stomach that the Confederate White House had proclaimed slavery as its cornerstone.

  His bitter abhorrence for it was flavored with hypocrisy. Before he rented his own slaves for his own household, before he had been a revolutionary and an academic, he had known what it meant to work another man’s land and give him half the proceeds. He had been born into a family of tenant-farmers, working on an estate in a castle, not as slaves, but like serfs.

  It was why he and Wilhelm and thousands of others rose up against the class system.

  And now here he was, participating in it all over again. Only this time, he was in the master class. Did reaching the upper echelon of society squelch the fire behind his former principles?

  I did not come here to become rich, he reminded himself. I came here for asylum! If he had wanted wealth, he would have planted cotton and tobacco. If he wanted status, he would have purchased slaves, dozens of them, rather than just renting two.

  Hypocrite. Pain twinging behind his eyes, Noah tucked the Southern Confederacy on a shelf behind a volume of Christopher Marlowe. Now, Faustus, must thou needs be damned? And canst thou not be saved? The haunting lines hissed in his soul. Noah Becker loved law and order. But this time, whether he followed his fledgling government’s laws or not, he felt doomed.

  His spirit dimmed like the spiky sweet gum balls barely gleaming in the bowl. Soon their light would be out completely.

  Rising, he took up the crude candle and used it as a guiding light as he padded upstairs, Rascal following behind him. Quietly, he nudged open the door to Ana’s room and peeked in. Just as I thought. She had wrapped herself in her sheet like a cocoon. With one hand, he loosened it. Her cheek was damp with perspiration, but he kissed it anyway before stepping out of the room.

  The weight of his love for her crushed all doubt that there could be any other choice but to fight for her protection.

  Forgive me, Brother.

  Heavily, Noah entered his own chamber across the hall. He’d be exhausted in the morning, again. And yet, it could not come soon enough.

  New York City

  Friday, July 17, 1863

  Eyebrows plunged downward, Edward Goodrich fastened the last of his uniform’s brass buttons into place. He was running ten minutes behind in getting to work and more than a couple of decades behind in meeting the rest of his family. If, he reminded himself, the woman he met and brought home with him two nights ago could be trusted.

  He had peppered the woman, Vivian, with questions. She’d known almost everything about his father, George, right down to his bulldog frown and knuckle-cracking habit. She had known that Edward had grown up without a mother, but with a succession of nannies. She knew that Edward’s grandparents had been killed together in a carriage accident near their home in Buffalo, New York, and that George had sold everything and moved to New York City at the age of twenty. She claimed she had come with him. In any case, Vivian knew as much about George as Edward did.

  “No. More,” Edward growled as he brushed the lint off his jacket. Now Vivian was staying in a bedroom on the second floor while her son, Jack, remained with his regiment somewhere in New York City.

  Six thousand troops now filled the ravaged metropolis. Third Avenue was lined with Seventh Regiment pickets. The Eighth Regiment Artillery Troop had their mountain howitzers trained on the streets around Gramercy Park. The 152nd New York Volunteers bivouacked in Stuyvesant Square.

  Edward should be relieved he and Ruby and Aiden had survived the draft riots—“the largest single incident of civil disorder in the history of the United States,” the paper had said. Death toll estimates varied wildly, from less than four hundred up to one thousand.

  The staggering loss was not all that churned his belly. How could George keep family a secret? Why would he let his sister live in need? Edward had taken George off his laudanum so he could emerge back into coherency. All day yesterday he had been confined to his chamber as the effects of the drug wore off. If he didn’t feel inclined to come out today, Edward would personally escort him. He needed some answers. Now.

  Edward’s lips pressed together as he left his dressing room and headed downstairs. Lord, help me not judge him yet. Please bring him back so he can explain himself.

  The clinking of silverware on china trickled down the hall. Edward cleared his throat before stepping into the dining room. Sunlight bounced off the crystal chandelier and danced between the candlesticks on the rosewood table.

  “Good morning.” He smiled at the brittle-looking woman in front of him. Judging by the nearly empty Wedgewood plate in front of her, Cook’s eggs and toast had been to her liking.

  “Oh my!” Vivian drew her hand to her mouth for a moment, her chocolate-colored eyes round. “Don’t you look grand! Oh! You must forgive me, Edward. It’s just that you look so much the way I remember George the last time I saw him. Of course, he didn’t see me. It was at the harbor, and he was in his uniform, shipping out for the Mexican War. The uniform is different of course, but other than that …” She trailed off. “It’s just so good to see you again.”

  “Vivian?”

  Edward swiveled. His father was in his wheelchair in the doorway, with a wide-eyed Mr. Schaefer right behind him.

  Recognition flickered over George’s face. “Is it really you?” His voice was gruff.

  Tears glazed Vivian’s sunken cheeks. She stood. “It’s me, George. Your sister is here.”

 
; “How?” George finally said, and the confirmation lit a fire under Edward’s collar.

  “It was Edward.”

  “Edward!” George snarled. “What have you done, boy?”

  “What have I done? Aside from coming home to care for you, you mean? Aside from watching out for our neighbors during the worst mob uprising in our history?”

  “You know exactly what I mean. Now out with it.”

  “I heard cannons firing on civilians Wednesday night and went out to see what I could do about it.”

  “You always did think of yourself as such a hero. Did you fire a weapon while you were there?”

  “Of course not.”

  George laughed darkly. “Whoever heard of a hero who wouldn’t stand up and fight like a man?”

  “George!” Vivian gasped.

  “Milksop.”

  Edward grit his teeth and prayed for composure. “The troops were shooting into the building. They charged with bayonets, with the aim to root out all the insurrectionists.”

  George grunted. “Rightfully so. Hope they dispatched them to Lucifer, too.”

  “Your sister was in the building, in mortal danger. I brought her out. She said I resemble you.”

  “In appearance only. This boy is so unlike me, sometimes I wonder if he is my son at all.”

  “George, George!” Vivian twisted her hands together. “What has happened, brother, for you to speak so unkindly?”

  George glared at her then, his silence charged. “You shouldn’t have to ask.”

  Vivian circled the table and took Edward’s hand. “You shouldn’t have to find out this way.”

  “He wasn’t supposed to find out at all! There was no reason to! You chose your path, woman, and it led you away from me when you married that dirt-poor common Irish bloke. I told you what would happen! Now get out!”

  “She stays.” Edward’s voice was edged with steel. “Unless of course, she can’t stand sharing a roof with you. We have room. She is family.”