[What Might Have Been 02] Alternate Heroes

by Anthology

  Harvey Hill, he thought, seething. Send Harvey Hill to tell me what to do.

  Sextus brought Colonel Sorrel his horse and helped the young man mount. “Thank you for speaking to Gregg and Law,” Poe said. “Use their forces as you see fit,” Sorrel said.

  “This division has had hard fighting,” Poe said. “I will be sparing in my use of them.”

  “We’ve all had hard fighting, sir,” Sorrel said. A gentle reproach. “But with God’s help we will save Richmond again this next day.”

  Poe gave a swift, reflexive glance to the ravens, anticipating another “Nevermore,” but saw they were still asleep. No more omens tonight.

  Sorrel saluted, Poe returned it, and the Georgian trotted off into the night.

  Poe looked out at the Yankee campfires burning low off on his left. How many times, he wondered, would this army have to save Richmond? McDowell had come for Richmond, and McClellan, and Pope, Burnside, Hooker, Meade, and Butler. Now there was Grant, who had seized hold of Lee’s army in the Wilderness and declined to let it go, even though he’d probably lost more men than the others put together.

  Maybe Lee would turn tomorrow into another Chancellorsville.

  But even if he did, Poe knew, one day this or another Yank general would come, and Richmond would not be saved. Even Lee could only fight history for so long.

  The politicians were counting on the Northern elections to save them, but Poe had no more confidence in George McClellan as a candidate than as a general—Lincoln could outmaneuver him at the polls as handily as Lee had in the Seven Days’ Battle.

  No, the South was doomed, its Cause lost. That was obvious to anyone with any ratiocinative faculty whatever. But there was nothing else to do but fight on, and hope the North kept giving armies to the likes of Ben Butler.

  “Massa Poe?” Sextus was at his elbow. “Will we be sleeping outside tonight?”

  Poe cocked an eye at the sky. There was a heavy dew on the ground, but the few clouds in sight were high and moving fast. There should be no rain.

  “Yes,” Poe said. “Set up the beds.”

  “Whatever you say, massa.”

  Sextus was used to it, poor fellow. Poe hadn’t been able to sleep alone since Virginia died, and he had always disliked confined spaces. Sleeping out of doors, under a heavy buffalo cloak, with Sextus wrapped in another robe nearby, was the ideal solution. Poe loved to look up at the sweep of brilliant stars, each an eye of God, to feel his soul rising beyond the atmosphere, through the luminiferous ether to merge with the Eternal, the Sublime….

  How he came to the gutter in Baltimore he would never know. He had apparently given a lecture there a few nights before, but he couldn’t remember it. Perhaps he would have died there, had not a passing widow recognized him, drunk and incapable, and brought him into her carriage. She had talked with him after his lecture, she told him, and found his conversation brilliant. He couldn’t remember her either.

  Her name was Mrs. Forster. Her late husband had been addicted to alcohol, and she had cured him; she would apply her cure as well to Mr. Poe.

  Her plantation, within a half day’s journey of Baltimore, was called Shepherd’s Rest; she owned close to two thousand slaves and the better part of a county. She loved poetry and philosophy, read French and German, and had a passing knowledge of Latin.

  She had a daughter named Evania, a green-eyed girl of fourteen. When Poe first saw her, sitting in the east parlor with the French wallpaper only a shade darker than her eyes, Evania was playing the guitar, her long fingers caressing the strings as if they were a lover’s hair. Her long tresses, falling down her neck, seemed to possess the mutable spectrum of a summer sunrise.

  Once before Poe, at the end of his wits and with the black hand of self-slaughter clutching at his throat, had been rescued by a widow with a daughter. In Mrs. Forster Poe could almost see Mrs. Clemmbut Mrs. Clemm idealized, perfected, somehow rarified, her poverty replaced by abundance, her sadness by energy, inspiration, and hope. How could he help but see Virginia in her sparkling daughter? How could he help but give her his love, his troth, his ring—He was not being faithless to Virginia, he thought; his second marriage was a fulfillment of the first. Did Evania and Virginia not possess, through some miracle of transubstantiation, the same soul, the same perfection of spirit? Were they not earthly shades of the same pure, angelic lady, differing only in color, one dark, one bright?

  Were they not blessings bestowed by Providence, a just compensation for poor Poe, who had been driven nearly mad by soaring, like Icarus, too near the divine spark?

  For a moment, after Poe opened his eyes, he saw her floating above him—a woman, dark-tressed, pale-featured, crowned with stars. He could hear her voice, though distantly; he could not make sense of her speech, hearing only a murmur of long vowel sounds….

  And then she was gone, faded away, and Poe felt a knife of sorrow enter his heart. He realized he was weeping. He threw off his buffalo robe and rolled upright.

  The Starker house loomed above him, black against the Milky Way. The candles’ glow still softly illuminated the parlor window.

  Poe bent over, touching his forehead to his knees until he could master himself. He had seen the woman often in his dreams, sometimes in waking moments. He remembered her vividly, the female form rising over the streets of Richmond, during some barely-sane moments after Virginia’s death, the prelude to that last spree in Baltimore. Always he had felt comforted by her presence, confirmed in his dreams, his visions. When she appeared it was to confer a blessing.

  He did not remember seeing her since his war service started. But then, his war service was not blessed.

  Poe straightened, and looked at the soft candlelight in the Starker windows. He looked at the foot of his cot, and saw Sextus wrapped in blankets, asleep and oblivious to his master’s movements. Sometimes Poe thought he would give half his worth for a single night of sleep as deep and dreamless as that of his body-servant.

  He put his stockinged feet in the carpet slippers that waited where Sextus had put them, then rose and stepped out into the camp in his dressing gown. The slippers were wet with dew inside and out. Poe didn’t care. A gentle, warm wind was flitting up from the south. With this heavy dew, Poe thought, the wind would raise a mist before dawn. Maybe it would postpone Lee’s offensive.

  He remembered hiking in New York with Virginia, spending days wandering down hilly lanes, spending their nights in country inns or, when the weather was fine and Virginia’s health permitted, wrapped in blankets beneath the open sky. His friends had thought his interest in nature morbid. Buried in the life of the city and the life of the mind, they could not understand how his soul was drawn skyward by the experience of the outdoors, how close he felt to the Creator when he and Virginia shared a soft bank of moist timothy and kissed and caressed one another beneath the infinite range of fiery stars….

  Poe realized he was weeping again. He looked about and saw he had wandered far from his tent, amid his soldiers’ dying campfires.

  Nothing like this had happened to him in years. The sight of that dead girl had brought back things he thought he’d forgotten.

  He mastered himself once more and walked on. The rising southern wind stirred the gray ashes of campfires, brought little sparks winking across his path. He followed them, heading north.

  Eventually he struck his entrenchments, a deep line of the kind of prepared works this army could now throw up in a few hours, complete with head log, communications trenches, firing step, and parapet. Soldiers huddled like potato sacks in the trenches, or on the grass just behind the line. An officer’s mare dozed over its picket. Beyond, Poe could hear the footsteps of the sentries patrolling.

  Once, just after the war had first started, Robert Lee had tried to get this army to dig trenches—and the soldiers had mocked him, called him “The King of Spades,” and refused to do the work. Digging was no fit work for a white man, they insisted, and besides, only a coward would fight from entrenchm
ents.

  Now the army entrenched at every halt. Three years’ killing had made them lose their stupid pride.

  Poe stepped onto the firing step, and peered out beneath the head log as he tried to scan his front. Beyond the vague impression of gentle rolling hills beyond, he could see little. Then he lifted his head as he heard the challenging scream of a stallion. The sound came from away north, well past the entrenchments.

  The mare picketed behind the entrenchments raised its head at the sound. The stallion challenged again. Then another horse screamed, off to the right, and another. The mare flicked its ears and gave an answer.

  The mare was in heat, Poe realized. And she was flirting with Yankee horses. None of his men could be out that far.

  The wind had carried the mare’s scent north, to the nose of one northern stallion. Other stallions that hadn’t scented the mare nevertheless answered the first horse’s challenge.

  Poe’s head moved left to right as one horse after another screamed into the night. Sorrel’s map hadn’t shown the Yankee line stretching that far, well south of the tributary, beyond Clingman’s brigade to where Fitz Lee’s cavalry was supposed to be, out on his right flank.

  He listened as the horses called to one another like bugles before a battle, and he thought: The Yankees are moving, and they’re moving along my front.

  Suddenly the warm south wind turned chill.

  How many? he thought.

  Sobbing in the mist like men in the extremes of agony, the crying horses offered no answer.

  He became a child again, living with Evania in her perfect kingdom, that winding blue river valley west of Baltimore. Never before had he known rest; but there he found it, a cease from the despairing, agonized wanderings that had driven him, like a leaf before a black autumn storm, from Richmond to Boston and every city between.

  At last he knew what it was to be a gentleman. He had thought he had achieved that title before, through education and natural dignity and inclination—but now he knew that before he had only aspired to the name. Mr. Allan fancied himself a gentleman; but his money was tainted with trade, with commerce and usury. Now Poe understood that the highest type of gentleman was produced only through ease and leisure—not laziness, but rather the freedom from material cares that allowed a man to cultivate himself endlessly, to refine his thought and intellect through study and application of the highest forms of human aspiration.

  He was not lazy. He occupied himself in many ways. He moved Mrs. Clemm to Baltimore, bought her a house, arranged for her an annuity. He added to the mansion, creating a new facade of Italian marble that reflected the colors of the westering sun; he employed the servants to move tons of earth in order to create a landscape garden of fully forty acres that featured, in the midst of a wide artificial lake, an arabesque castle, a lacy wedding-cake gift to his bride.

  He had always thought landscape gardening fully an equal of poetry in its ability to invoke the sublime and reveal the face of the deity. In this he was a disciple of de Carbonnieres, Piranesi, and Shenstone: The garden was nature perfected, as it had been in the mind of God, a human attempt to restore the divine, Edenic sublimity. He crafted his effects carefully—the long, winding streams through which one approached Poe’s demiparadise in swan-shaped boats, the low banks crowded with moss imported from Japan, natural-seeming outcroppings of uniquely colored and textured rock. At the end was a deep, black chasm through which the water rushed alarmingly, as if to Hades—but then the boat was swept into the dazzling wide lake, the sun sparkling on the white sand banks, the blue waters—and then, as the visitor’s eyes adjusted from blackness to brightness, one perceived in the midst of a blue-green island the white castle with its lofty, eyelike windows, the symbol of purest Mind in the midst of Nature.

  Nothing was suffered to spoil the effects that had taken a full six years to create. Not a stray leaf, not a twig, not a cattail was permitted to sully the ground or taint the water—fully thirty Africans were I constantly employed to make certain that Poe’s domain was swept clean.

  It cost money—but money Poe had, and if not there was always more to be obtained at three and one half percent. His days of penny-counting were over, and he spent with a lavish hand.

  He fulfilled another ambition: he started a literary magazine, the Southern Gentleman, with its offices in Baltimore. For it he wrote essays, criticism, occasional stories, once or twice a poem.

  Only once or twice.

  Somehow, he discovered, the poetry had fled his soul.

  And he began to feel, to his growing horror, that his loss of poetry was nothing but a just punishment. True poetry, he knew, could not reside in the breast of a man as faithless as he.

  The Starker house on its small eminence stood hard-edged and black against a background of shifting mist, like an isolated tor rising above the clouds. It was a little after four. The sun had not yet risen, but already the eastern horizon was beginning to turn gray. The ravens, coming awake, crackled and muttered to one another as they shook dew from their feathers.

  Poe leaned on his stick before a half-circle of his brigadiers and their mingled staffs. Hugin and Munin sat on their perch behind him. Poe was in his uniform of somber gray, a new paper collar, a black cravat, the black doeskin gloves. Over his shoulders he wore a redlined black cloak with a high collar, an old gift from Jeb Stuart who had said it made him look like a proper raven.

  Most of his life Poe had dressed all in black. The uniform was a concession to his new profession, but for sake of consistency with his earlier mode of dress he had chosen the darkest possible gray fabric, so dark it was almost blue.

  There was the sound of galloping; riders rose out of the mist. Poe recognized the man in the lead: Fitzhugh Lee, Robert Lee’s nephew and the commander of the cavalry division on his right. He was a short man, about Poe’s height, a bandy-legged cavalryman with a huge spade-shaped beard and bright, twinkling eyes. Poe was surprised to see him—he had asked only that Lee send him a staff officer.

  He and Poe exchanged salutes. “Decided to come myself, General.” He dropped from his horse. “Your messenger made it seem mighty important.”

  “I thank you, sir.” Fitz Lee, Poe realized, outranked him. He could take command here if he so desired.

  He would not dare, Poe thought. A cold anger burned through him for a moment before he recollected that Fitz Lee had as yet done nothing to make him angry.

  Still, Poe was uneasy. He could be superceded so easily.

  “I think the Yankees are moving across my front,” he said. He straightened his stiff leg, felt a twinge of pain. “I think Grant is moving to his left again.”

  The cavalryman considered this. “If he wants Richmond,” he said, “he’ll go to his right. The distance is shorter.”

  “I would like to submit, apropos, that Grant may not want Richmond so much as to defeat us in the field.”

  Fitz Lee puzzled his way through this. “He’s been fighting us nonstop, that’s the truth. Hasn’t broken off so much as a day.”

  “Nevermore,” said one of the ravens. Fitz Lee looked startled. Poe’s men, used to it, shared grins. Poe’s train of thought continued uninterrupted.

  “Moreover, if Grant takes Hanover Junction, he will be astride both the Virginia Central and the Richmond and Fredericksburg. That will cut us off from the capital and our sources of supply. We’ll have to either attack him there or fall back on Richmond.”

  “Mebbe that’s so.”

  “All that, of course, is speculation—a mere exercise of the intuition, if you like. Nevertheless, whatever his intent, it is still an observed fact that Grant is moving across my front. Quod erat demonstrandum.”

  Lee’s eyes twinkled. “Quod libet, I think, rather.” Not quite convinced.

  “I have heard their horses. They are well south of where they are supposed to be.”

  Lee smiled through his big beard and dug a heel into the turf. “If he’s moving past you, he’ll run into my two brigades
. I’m planted right in his path.”

  There was a saying in the army, Who ever saw a dead cavalryman? Poe thought of it as he looked at Lee. “Can you hold him?” he asked. “Nevermore,” said a raven.

  Lee’s smile turned to steel. “With all respect to your pets, General, I held Grant at Spotsylvania.”

  Gravely, Poe gave the cavalryman an elaborate, complimentary bow, and Lee returned it. Poe straightened and hobbled to face his brigade commanders.

  Perhaps he had Fitz Lee convinced, perhaps not. But he knew—and the knowledge grated on his bones—that Robert Lee would not be convinced. Not with Poe’s reputation for hysteria, for seeing Yankees everywhere he looked. The army commander would just assume his high-strung imagination crested illusory armies behind every swirl of mist. As much as Poe hated it, he had to acknowledge this.

  “General Lee has made his plans for today,” he said. “He will attack to the west, where he conceives General Grant to be. He may not choose to believe any message from his other wing that the Yanks are moving.”

  Poe waited for a moment for a reply from the cavalryman. Fitz Lee was the commanding general’s nephew; perhaps he could trade on the family connection somehow. But the bearded man remained silent.

  “They are going to strike us, that is obvious,” Poe said. “Grant has his back to the bend of the river, and he’ll have to fight his way into the clear. But his men will have to struggle through the woods, and get across that swamp and the little creek, and they’re doing it at night, with a heavy mist. They will not be in position to attack at first light. I suggest, therefore, that we attack him as soon as the mist clears, if not before. It may throw him off balance and provide the evidence we need to convince the high command that Mr. Grant has stolen a march upon us.”

  “Nevermore,” said the ravens. “Nevermore.”

  Poe looked at Sextus, who was standing respectfully behind the half-circle of officers. “Feed the birds,” he said. “It may keep them quiet.”

  “Yes, massa.”

  “General Poe.” Fitz Lee was speaking. “There are two bridges across that creek—small, but they’ll take the Yankees across. The water won’t hold up the Yanks as long as you might think.”