May the Road Rise Up to Meet You: A Novel

by Peter Troy

  Ah, dear sweet, Catherine.

  ETHAN

  WASHINGTON

  1861–62

  In reading Sir Isaac Newton’s laws of the universe, Ethan’d always believed what was understood to be at the center of them, namely that time and space were constant: a minute was always a minute, a mile always a mile. But the more time he spent in the army, the more opportunity he had to question Sir Isaac’s premises entirely.

  A typical day might begin with the bugle call before dawn and some time to chow before morning drills. They’d punch their bayonets through countless effigies of dirty Reb bastards, then learn to turn about-face and quarter-left, then quarter-right and half-left and half-right and about-face again, until they’d dug half-foot holes with their feet right where they stood. They’d simulate marching in columns of four and stepping into columns of two for battle, then have another go at the Reb effigies, in case they hadn’t taught the bastards enough of a lesson on the first go-round. In the afternoons they’d pack up their gear and tents and march in step, left-right, left-right, with a drill sergeant marching alongside calling out the same, in case anyone forgot which foot they were on. Five or seven or ten miles they’d cover, marching from point A to point who cares, where they’d stop and set up their tents, only to take them down again and pack up and march back to point A, left-right, left-right, all the while with the sergeant there to remind them lest anyone forget. Of course there was to be no talking along the way, what with the concentration necessary to not march left-right, left-left. And time and space seemed to alter in ways Newton’d never imagined possible, a minute becoming an hour, a mile becoming ten.

  Having all re-enlisted together after that disastrous first ninety-day hitch, with the Fightin’ Sixty-Ninth now part of the newly formed Irish Brigade, Ethan and Harry and Finny and Smitty at least had each other to help pass the time. But after a month or two in Washington, time having faded from such puny units of measurement by then, Ethan wrote to Mr. Hadley back at the photography studio in Brooklyn, telling him that he’d be better off taking pictures than bothering with all the drilling and the marching. He’d meant it as a joke of course, but Mr. Hadley promptly sent a box camera and all the necessities with a letter explaining that he was sure he could make more than that investment back with whatever pictures Ethan could take of The Front. Harry and Finny and Smitty laughed as much as Ethan did to hear the training fields of Washington described as The Front, but he purchased as many glass-plate negatives and developing chemicals as he could find and started taking pictures around the camp during the evenings and on Sundays. Harry and Finny and Smitty found their way into most of the early pictures, but they eventually figured out that they could charge as much as a dollar apiece for soldiers to have their portraits taken, and thus came the business side of the venture.

  Harry began offering a small cut to an artillery sergeant, and soon the boys got to stand beside one of the big siege guns to have their pictures taken, which was even more impressive, and would cost just a little bit more, of course. It wasn’t long before a few officers got wind of it, and some paid the dollar and a half for a portrait, though most simply took it as a matter of privilege, the way officers were inclined to do. Ethan sent the first pictures back to Mr. Hadley around Christmastime, and Mr. Hadley responded with fifty dollars in a letter telling him to keep them coming. Word traveled up the chain of command, with Lieutenants soon pushed aside by Captains and Majors and Colonels in turn, and eventually the Division Commander, a Major General at that, was sitting for a portrait in full battle regalia. Ethan sent the fifty dollars back to Mr. Hadley, telling him that the enterprise had become profitable in its own right down here on The Front, and Mr. Hadley wrote back telling him that the camera was his and he’d put the fifty in a bank account for Ethan, with all future profits to be similarly split down the middle.

  Then February brought news that would’ve been quite well received just a few months earlier. The Army would soon be on the move, bound for the Virginia Peninsula aboard an armada of transport ships, to land not far from where the first English settlers did in Jamestown, and from there head north to Richmond.

  That’ll be the enda th’picture crew Perfessor, Harry said when they got the news. Just when we was havin’ some fun in this godforsaken army.

  But two days before they were about to disembark, Ethan was called in by the Captain, who told him that the higher-ups decided it’d be good to have someone recording the march on Richmond for posterity. Ethan was promoted to Sergeant, and placed in immediate command of just three men, Harry and Finny and Smitty, who were now to be his photography crew until further notice. Of course, there’d be none of the marching and the drilling for them, not so long as there were pictures to be taken, but they’d still be amongst the ranks and get to fight with the Sixty-Ninth whenever there was action. The Captain asked Ethan, Sergeant McOwen that was, if he thought there’d be any problems with that, and Ethan had to bite his bottom lip to keep from laughing.

  No sir, he answered. I believe we can do just that.

  THE VIRGINIA PENINSULA

  SPRING 1862

  George McClellan’s the name of the Commanding General this time around. He’d won some ground out in western Virginia at the start of the war and that was enough, seeing how it was more than any other Union general’d done, to get him promoted to command the biggest army this side of the Atlantic. He’s taken to calling it The Grand Army of the Potomac by way of washing clean the shame of Bull Run, and most all the boys love him, what with how he’s kept them well fed and well supplied and safely camped in Washington for the last six months or so. The boys call him Little Mac and the press has taken to calling him the Young Napoleon, though there’s word that Lincoln’s not too thrilled with the last six months of the marching and the drilling and the Grand Army not a foot closer to Richmond.

  But they land on the Virginia Peninsula in late February and even a skeptic worse than Harry’d have a hard time not being impressed by it all. There’s a hundred and thirty thousand Boys in Blue, plus hundreds of cannons, thousands of supply wagons, and ten thousand horses to carry it all. Then there’s the cavalry, with thousands more horses, and the Navy to carry everyone and everything right to Virginia and then follow the Grand Army up the James River until the water runs shallow, their big guns covering every move as far as Harrison’s Landing. It’s easy going at the start as the boys pass Jamestown and then continue on to Yorktown, where Washington whipped the Redcoats once and for all eighty years earlier. And the Grand Army, seeming to be as invincible as Little Mac said it’d be, is headed for a victory every bit as significant as Washington’s. But then they stop. Stop cold. And wait.

  Nobody’s quite sure why, since the Rebs couldn’t possibly have half the men the Grand Army has, but stop they do all the same. There aren’t too many new pictures to take once three weeks pass, but then Ethan’s told to report to the rear of the column with his camera and crew. There’s a Brigadier back there who wants his portrait taken and it’s strange that the Grand Army would go to the trouble of having a supply wagon sent to carry them all the way back there, but who are any of them to ask why? It makes more sense when they get there and see that the Brigadier in question is practically commanding the supply lines of the entire Grand Army. He’s not much older than Ethan and the boys, and they can’t imagine how he’s risen so far so fast even if he’d finished top of his class at West Point. Then a sergeant tells them that the Brigadier never even went to West Point, that he’s a Harvard man just like his Daddy the Senator, and then it all makes sense. When Harry hears the story, it’s all Ethan can do to keep him from crossing the line and saying the wrong thing in front of the Brigadier, though Harry does put on his mock English accent for the duration of their time there.

  After they’ve taken a dozen portraits of the Brigadier standing beside all manner of cannons he’ll never actually see fired in combat, it’s time for Ethan and crew to head back to their regiment. Harry
starts with his full-blown imitation of the Brigadier, combining a Hah-vahd accent with his fake English-gent mannerisms, and Finny and Smitty are in stitches. Ethan is too, until he sees something eerily familiar just thirty yards away on the fringes of the column.

  Beneath a grove of shade trees is a makeshift camp, overcrowded with at least a hundred runaway slaves, probably more. He’d heard about how they clung to the Union column, thousands of them run off from Norfolk and Newport News and all the way down the Peninsula, but this is the first time he’s been so close to the rear of the column that he can actually see them. It’s a sight that sends a shiver down his spine. Except for the color of their skin and their straw field hats to replace woolen caps, they’re the very image of the crowds he saw gathered back in Newry waiting for the ferry, then huddled together on the boat, then gathered on the docks at Liverpool. Their faces are gaunt, their eyes haunted, just like the folks back in the Old Country, yet there’s the same determination in their gaze, clinging to freedom the way the skin-draped skeletons back in Ireland clung to life itself. And Ethan is frozen for a moment, overwhelmed by a sight he never thought … he hoped, he’d never see again.

  Come on Perfessor, Harry calls out to him.

  Harry and Finny and Smitty are twenty steps ahead, placing the glass-plate negatives on the supply wagon.

  Hold on a minute, Ethan says, compelled by an idea, then giving as much of an order as he’ll ever give. Bring everything over here, I wanna take a few more pictures.

  We gotta get back fer the game, Perfessor, Smitty says, and Ethan remembers that a few of the lads from the Eighty-Eighth have challenged them to a baseball game with a case of the good stuff on the line.

  I wanna take a few more pictures first, Ethan says, and they walk over next to him without bringing the equipment.

  Come on Perfessor, Harry says, why you wanna take pictures of a buncha darkies? You think the Colonel gives a rat’s ass about this lot?

  But Ethan looks at Harry square in the eyes and says, They remind me of th’folks at Newry … th’ones on th’docks … an’ th’ones dat never got outta dere … wit’ da bones pokin’ from dere skin an’ da green lips from eatin’ da …

  And then he stops, collecting himself a little, wondering how his old manner of speaking came back with the memory. Ethan’s never told Harry and Finny and Smitty about The Hunger, but they’ve heard plenty of stories from relatives and other refugees. And they know Ethan was there for so much of the worst of it. They know about Aislinn and the long walk to Newry and the Coffin Ship even, secondhand of course, since it was Aunt Em who’d told them about it, one time just before the war when Ethan was late coming home from Mr. Hadley’s studio and they’d all come by to fetch him on their way to Feeny’s on a Saturday night. Aunt Em was there, joining the lads on the stoop while they waited, telling them more about Ethan than they’d ever heard him speak of himself in all the years they’d known him before, or since. So now Harry, hearing Ethan make even that vague reference to what he’d seen in the Old Country, responds like a greenhorn listening to a battle veteran tell him about war.

  Okay Perfessor, he says, and then shouts at Smitty and Finny to come with him to the wagon to get the camera and equipment while Ethan walks to the runaways’ camp and sets up the tripod.

  The runaways don’t trust him much straight off, but they’re willing to have their pictures taken, so Ethan uses the dozen remaining negatives he has, wishing he hadn’t wasted so many on the damn Hah-vahd Brigadier. He sees a pot of boiling water not far away, with leaves and tree bark floating on top, and he remembers the green mouths back home. The Brigadier gave him and the others two Virginia cigars each from the giant supply he had, and Ethan hands them to one of the runaways now, saying he can trade them with the pickets for some food. Finny quickly gives up his cigars too, and then Ethan looks at Harry and Smitty, who shake their heads a little, then reach into their pockets to hand them out as well.

  Jesus, Perfessor, Harry says as they make their way back for the ball game. Didja hafta go an’ give up them cigars?

  Awww Harry, Finny says, that fella needed ’em a whole lot more’n we do. Plus we wouldn’t never’ve had ’em if it wasn’t fer th’Perfessor an’ his camera anyways.

  Who asked you, Finny? Harry barks. An’ I know we wouldn’ta had ’em if it wasn’t fer th’Perfessor. I’m just exercising my right as a soldier to complain, by God.

  And they banter that way for most of the ride back to camp, drawing a few laughs from Ethan and pressing down the haunting memories back to where they’ve been stored all along. The game gets under way in the midafternoon, a makeshift field marked off in the clearing by the woods south of town. It starts as a friendly contest between lads who’d played for teams back home, mostly the product of Harry’s boasting about the Excelsiors to a couple of men from the Eighty-Eighth who were of a mind to show him that they played a fine brand of baseball up in Albany, too. Then Harry teased them some more, asking why, if things were so grand up in Albany, they’d come all the way down to New York to sign up for the Irish Brigade? And so on. Of course, with maybe a hundred lads from the Eighty-Eighth and at least as many there from the Sixty-Ninth to watch along the base lines, it isn’t a completely friendly game for very long.

  It’s nothing like the contests back at the Elysian Fields, with a tattered ball made from strips of cotton wrapped around a .69-caliber musket ball, and the field covered in rocks and tiny patches of grass scattered everywhere. There are errors and bad hops practically every time the ball is struck, and the frustration only adds to the competition. At the start of the sixth inning the score is tied at fifteen, and Finny leads off with a cleanly struck single. Then Ethan comes up, striking a line drive that lands just in front of the right fielder, a fella named Ferguson. The ball hits a rock or a tuft of grass or some other obstacle that litters the field, and it bounces over Ferguson’s shoulder toward a grove of trees in the distance. Ferguson takes off after it as Ethan dashes around the bases amidst shouts from his teammates, until they are all silenced by the sound of a rifle shot. Ferguson freezes, but then a few seconds later another shot kicks up a cloud of dust just a few feet away from him, and he quickly turns and runs back toward the infield, with the other fielders following his lead and the crowd of men, confident they are out of range, laughing hysterically at the spectacle.

  By nightfall, half a dozen Confederate snipers have been cleared out of the woods, and the men of the Sixty-Ninth sit around the campfires, with Harry and Smitty and Finny taking turns telling the story of when Ethan ended a game at the Elysian Fields by hitting the ball into the Hudson River, the grandeur of the occasion and the distance of the blast growing with each retelling. And there are the usual songs around the campfires, “Sweet Lorena” and “Just Before the Battle Mother,” and for those fleeting moments the whole damn thing seems more tolerable than ever.

  THE GRAND ARMY FINALLY MOVES forward into the Reb lines two days later, only to find that the Rebs aren’t there, skee-daddled th’night befo’, a slave who was with them tells one of the officers. This fella skee-daddled too in all the confusion, he tells them, and the Lieutenant thinks the man might provide some valuable intelligence, until he tells him that the Rebs had only about eleven thousand men all together on the other side. That’s when the Lieutenant thinks the runaway’s a crazy man, since there’s no way eleven thousand men could scare a Grand Army of a hundred thirty thousand into stopping in their tracks for a whole month. But Ethan and Harry and Finny and Smitty know it’s possible when a Grand Army’s got a Commanding General scared of his own farts, and that’s the way it’s starting to look with General McClellan. The night after they storm into the empty Reb camps, there’s plenty of soldiers exercising their right to complain, by God, as they sit around the campfires and wonder if they’ll ever see Richmond.

  It’s another month of creeping their way north until at last Finny climbs a tree and can see the church steeples of the Confederate capital. It won�
�t be long now, they all figure, until Little Mac issues the order to stop and wait for the big guns to be brought up from the back of the lines, and Ethan and Harry and Finny and Smitty joke that at least the Hah-vahd Brigadier’ll have to get off his arse and do something now. A week passes getting the guns up, and another week passes getting them into place, and then a third passes for God knows why, until finally it seems that McClellan is ready to act. But by then the Rebs’ve got a new Commander themselves, a fella named Bobby Lee, and it turns out he’s not such a hospitable host after all.

  Ol’ Bobby sends his boys at the Grand Army every day for six days straight, and though the Boys in Blue hold the field at the end of each of those days, Little Mac issues the order for what he calls a “tactical repositioning,” but all his soldiers know full well is a retreat. Every day they fight and hold the field. Every night they back up, farther away from Richmond and closer to the Union Navy at Harrison’s Landing. By the seventh day they’re farther from Richmond than they’ve been in a month and there’s not a man in the Irish Brigade that isn’t fed up with all this skee-daddlin’ they’ve been doing, especially since the Rebs haven’t whipped them once this entire campaign.

  The fighting starts again on the seventh day at a place called Malvern Hill, and it’s a whole morning of sitting on their arses waiting for the call to join the fight. The Irish Brigade’s boiling mad when they finally get ordered up. They’re supposed to simply hold the line protecting the flank of the entire Corps, but there’s no holding back the fury that’s built up by now. The Sixty-Ninth Regiment presses forward, firing a volley, reloading on the move, and firing again. Ten then twelve then fifteen volleys later, and they’ve pushed the Rebs back on their heels. But their muskets are overheating, burning the flesh of their palms and misfiring, so the Eighty-Eighth Regiment switches places with the Sixty-Ninth and takes the lead for a time. They press forward the same way ’til their muskets are hot as Dante’s seventh circle, and now it’s the Sixty-Ninth’s turn again. Back and forth, back and forth it goes, once, twice, and a third time, and by the time the Sixty-Ninth is ready to take the lead for a fourth go-round, the Rebs’ve already given up all the ground they’d gained that whole afternoon, every inch of it lost back to the Irish Brigade.