No Common War

by Salisbury, Luke;

  Your son,

  Moreau

  Merrick and I left at midday and didn’t have to be back till reveille. We walked, admiring all the ships flying the American flag on the Potomac. The wide river, basking in a hot, silver, late-summer sun, was full of warships, barges, and commercial vessels. The warships boasted the heavy, bottle-shaped, naval guns.

  “If Rebs invade Washington City,” said Merrick, “they best do it at night. Otherwise, they get the bejesus blown out of ‘em.”

  I nodded. On the Potomac and in the endless Federal camps one saw the strength of the Union. “How can we lose?”

  “How, my ass,” said Merrick.

  If the summer river was magnificent with ships and guns and stars and stripes, the streets of Washington City were awful. Dust rose from carts and wagons. We passed dead horses, stinking in the heat and covered with flies. Green flies crawled and ate the eyes of a dead mare. Everything for sale, everything a cheat, horses beaten by drunken teamsters, abandoned when dead, whores yelling from windows—prices, insults, come-ons. Half-dressed, drunken women sang “Bonnie Blue Flag,” the unofficial Confederate anthem.

  We saw the half-finished Capitol dome. Orators likened it to the Union and the war—unfinished, a work-in-progress, foundation strong and design revolutionary. The iron skeleton reminded me of Pandora’s box. We walked on the other side of the street from the Washington Canal, a 150-foot-wide ditch filled with garbage and sewage. Its color, odor, and floating items were a stew of corruption.

  I’d suffered constipation and dysentery, but the sight and stink of human waste and God knows what else was worse. I told Merrick the Washington Canal was the true picture of Washington City. We sauntered into thirteen blocks of dives, whores, gambling dens, pickpockets. Vice, with its dangerous and intriguing face for men away from home. My hardiness began to evaporate.

  “You need the cure for bad conscience,” said Merrick.

  “It ain’t my conscience, it’s my nose.”

  “Whisky’ll take care ‘a that.”

  “Does it cure the clap?”

  “Look at this,” said Merrick, and handed me a small package. “French letters.”

  I opened the tightly wrapped brown-paper package and found two condoms. “Lamb skin?”

  “Intestine, Ro. The best money can buy.”

  “Where did you get these?”

  “Ain’t nothin’ can’t be bought in this city.”

  I looked at the opaque, slippery-looking items. “I don’t have any use for them.”

  “It don’t count if you use one of these.”

  “My ass,” I said.

  Before crossing into the thirteen blocks that would be known as “Hooker’s Division” after General Hooker who, like Burnside, added a nonmilitary word to the language, Corporal and Private Salisbury got a lesson in rank. A barouche driven by a bored Negro carrying two pretty, well-dressed women slowed down to observe us.

  “Don’t waste your time, Belle. They ain’t officers.”

  The carriage didn’t stop, as if the Negro were afraid we might jump in. Up close the women weren’t so pretty. Their yellow satin dresses and red beaver hats were soiled and worn. They were heavily made-up. And drunk.

  “One of ‘em is cute,” said Belle, pointing a finger shiny with pinchbeck rings at me. “Young too.”

  “Young and cute don’t pay,” said the other.

  “Wait a minute,” Merrick told them.

  “Go to Nigger Hill, you dumb private. Apollo, get us out of here.”

  Belle waved and the other spat in the dust of unpaved Pennsylvania Avenue.

  I was flattered and disgusted. Merrick shook his head and said, “Stupid whores don’t know what they’re missin’.”

  “I’m afraid they do,” I said. “Cash.”

  “Take a look,” said Merrick, pointing at row upon row of low houses, shanties and alleys where soldiers stood smoking, passing bottles, rolling dice or being talked to by ratty-looking men not offering the word of God. Groups of hard-looking civilians prowled the dusty street, eyed soldiers, and kept their hands in the deep folds of long coats. Blue-coated men pissed in alleys. A sergeant pissed right in a rain barrel.

  “I’ve never seen a place so gone to the devil,” I said.

  Merrick shoved me aside as a wagon full of barrels damn near hit me. The teamster yelled, “No offense, boys!” We dodged a Negro on a mule and then two sutler wagons, one driven by a woman. I blinked, shaded my eyes, and looked in disbelief at the hardest thirteen blocks in the country.

  “What you think our fathers did here?” I said.

  “Same as we’re gonna do.”

  “They had a gun.”

  Merrick laughed. “Jesus, Ro.” He pulled out a .38 caliber pepperbox pistol and handed it to me.

  “Good God, where’d you get this?”

  “Don’t I always take care a you?”

  I might have argued, but instead studied the strange-looking gun. It had a curved wooden handle, filigreed etching on the hammer, and a six-shot revolving barrel. It felt heavy in my hand. “This thing works?”

  “By Gad, it better. Let’s get off the street.”

  We stepped out of the sun, away from the smell of the canal and the fish markets, went up pitchy planks, and entered a dark, smoky, low-ceilinged room. A cloud of cheap tobacco smoke cut the close, acrid, sweaty stink of men. I coughed and tried to get used to the dark. Before my eyes adjusted, Merrick put a bottle in my hand. “To the Union!” He raised his and clanked mine.

  “Drink.”

  Tears came. A dozen sounds assaulted my ears. The liquid was fire.

  “Welcome to Hell,” said a big man. The gouger. Merrick bought him a bottle and the big man elbowed his way to a table. There, he straightened up, toasted New York State, and fell on a stool that broke. The gouger slid to the floor, cussing. No one noticed. The din of toasts, gamblers’ oaths, shouts and hoots stimulated by tanglefoot covered the noise.

  “A good many men of the regiment are here,” said Merrick.

  “Not our finest hour,” I said.

  “We’re less likely to be killed.”

  “Maybe.” My brain clouded with tanglefoot.

  “I want a bit of Venus after every battle,” said Merrick. “And before too.”

  “I can’t, Cousin.”

  “Suit yourself,” said Merrick. “It’s good luck. Like bettin’ against death.”

  “We haven’t been in a battle yet,” I said.

  “Been near one.”

  “True.”

  “Any time we don’t sleep in a tent is a battle,” said Merrick.

  I saw rooms with curtains for doors. Men went in dressed and came out with unbuttoned shirts, missing coats, pockets turned inside out, even missing shoes.

  “If you don’t pay Venus, Mars will take you,” said Merrick. “Come on!”

  I shook my head and touched the tintype sewn over my heart.

  Merrick winked and joined a line outside a burlap curtain. It was the longest, so he thought it offered the most valuable prize. He rolled dice with two men and improved his position. I drank—the tanglefoot went down easier—and kept my back to the wall. Merrick went in and I was without Merrick and Merrick’s gun. I looked uneasily at the gouger, who was propped against the wall. He didn’t appear likely to rise.

  I watched the noisy, smoky room. A man dealing cards took his shirt off. Another followed suit. They sat at a rough wooden table, in rough pine chairs, in blue Federal trousers with white cloth suspenders and bare, sweaty chests. A pistol shot in a neighboring house brought a cheer from the men at the bar—a plank resting on two flour barrels. Soldiers three-deep slapped one another’s back, challenged each other to shots of tanglefoot, and loudly cussed their officers and Stonewall Jackson, who got his nickname and fearsome reputation at Bull Run.

  I hoped men from other regiments didn’t learn our Major Barney’s uncle, Dr. Lowry Barney, once convinced a Thomas Jackson to come to Henderson, New York
to take Dr. Barney’s famous cure for dyspepsia. For six weeks the quiet Virginian drank buttermilk, ate vegetables, and walked daily to Lake Ontario to drink the waters. He visited little Jackie Barney at Union Academy in Belleville. Unfortunately, Dr. Barney’s cure took, and the man with poor digestion was now “Stonewall.”

  I wondered if a place with no music and a plank on barrels was a saloon or whorehouse. Did it matter? My hardiness didn’t hold up well in the stink of sweat, cheap tobacco and cheaper whiskey. The drunker I got, the more I thought of Helen. The tingle of sin competed with memory and the aroma of men not wearing shirts. I wasn’t hardy, just hardened.

  A curtain moved. I saw a large black woman. Completely naked. I was disgusted. Was this the debt owed Gib? Was this the Union Army?

  This was the scum of the earth waiting in line to fornicate. Most didn’t know how to soldier, or even keep clean. They dug latrines between tents, hated “niggers,” blamed blacks for the war. Many officers were incompetent, if not cowardly. The capital was awash in whores, thieves and louts. And here I was, one of them. Aw Jesus. Are all armies like this? Swearing, gambling, whoring mobs? Are all capitals like this? Were the Rebs worse?

  I took another burning swig and thought of Gib, starved, scared, willing to suffer anything to get away from a country that wouldn’t let him be a man. Thank God he wasn’t here.

  “Your turn, Ro!”

  Merrick, David Hamer and David Crocker pulled me out of a chair and pushed me to an open door amidst howls and catcalls.

  “Fifty cents say he do!”

  “Fifty cents say he don’t!”

  “Ro!” “Ro!” “Ro!”

  “For the honor of the Twenty-fourth New York!”

  I was swept by something I couldn’t control into something I didn’t want. I was undressed, put on shoulders, slapped all over and hauled to a curtain. My cry, “I got a girl at home!” fetched howls of “Get some practice!” and “Be a man!” I struggled but my pants were at my ankles. My shirt was gone, money too.

  The curtain got pulled down and a wedge of 24th men bulled through a drunken cluster of Pennsylvanians, who were shouting encouragement to a hairy, bare-assed man rutting on top of the enormous black woman.

  “Billy’s a man now!”

  “Didn’t I tell ya niggers was worth fightin’ for?”

  “Tie a board to his ass ‘fore he fall in!”

  The chorus of laughter, advice, chortles and a stuttering corporal saying, “F-f-f-f-fuck her!” in a spray of wild, red-faced enthusiasm turned into singing “The Yellow Rose of Texas:”

  “The Yaller Rose of Texas

  “Done the balls of Pennsylvanee!”

  With a shout like Holy Spirit descending, the woman threw the Pennsylvanian off her. He landed on his pants at the foot of the bed and looked up drunken, dumb and furious.

  “Nobody watch while I works!” yelled the woman. “You gots to pay for that!”

  She was enormous. Her wet, pendulous breasts shook. Her whole body shook. She looked like a mountain and she was angry.

  “Keep fuckin’!” Billy’s shout was high-pitched, hysterical. He shook with rage, neglecting to cover his erect cock. He got up, looked at his mates who screeched with laughter, and socked the woman in the jaw.

  She stood her ground, big hands on massive hips. I stood, trousers down, drawers up. The woman didn’t flinch. Her bulging arm muscles looked like iron. The cords in her thick neck were hard rope. She had scars on her arms, the marks of a whip. She glared at Billy, me, all of us.

  “You don’t hit no better than you fuck!”

  “Nigger whore!” yelled the Pennsylvanian, and threw another punch, but the woman moved and the punch missed. He lost balance and landed on the mattress.

  “We just havin’ fun, woman!”

  “Think I’m havin’ fun?” yelled the woman. “Ya men is stupid as ya look!”

  Billy lunged at her, fists raised.

  A scream cut through the heavy, close air. Blood squirted from a cut from Billy’s ear to his neck. Splashed the wall, the floor, the bare mattress.

  Merrick pushed me back toward the door. I stumbled and pulled up my pants. Men ran outside; others jammed around Billy. Two big men with clubs slugged their way into the room.

  The woman shouted, “I free! I ain’t yo’ slave! I’s a Christian woman!”

  We shoved and pushed and got into the street. Cousin handed me my shirt and said, “We can lose this war.”

  17

  The winter of ‘61-‘62 was long. Lincoln wanted war. McClellan drilled, overestimated the size of the Confederate Army, and did nothing. Allan Pinkerton, the little detective who kept Lincoln alive by not underestimating assassination plots, didn’t underestimate anything else either, and as chief source of intelligence, was less spyglass than magnifying glass. If the Union was the colossus we kept hearing about, the colossus was bedeviled by unscrupulous contractors, radical Republicans, Peace Democrats, shrill reporters, and the stalling, exaggerating McClellan.

  The 24th remained on the grounds of Lee’s Arlington mansion. Washington City filled-up with profiteers, prostitutes and embalmers. Talent of all sorts flowed in. The city’s defense was Lincoln’s business and Lincoln made sure it was defended by two hundred thousand men, heavy fortifications, and naval guns on the Potomac. Washington City was never attacked, even by the audacious Army of Northern Virginia.

  We went into Virginia on scouting forays and skirmished with the Confederates. Sometimes a man was killed or wounded in the thick swamps or riverbeds. I thought I’d seen war. After all, I’d been shot at, carried wounded, seen friends die, and bedded down in enemy territory. Cousin didn’t agree. He said a big one was coming.

  “You can’t win a war scoutin’, and the Rebs don’t show no sign of quittin’,” he said.

  I made forays into Washington City and battled my conscience. Two weeks after the slashing incident, Merrick and I went to the thirteen blocks. We’d been in Virginia and Ollie Jenks had gotten killed. His father came from Sandy Creek and took the body so Ollie could be buried where “Ma can visit.” Private Jenks had walked into the woods to piss and got shot in the head. We found him twitching with a hole behind his ear, blood splattered on an oak, and his pecker out. It wasn’t sporting or brave, just bad, dumb luck. I’d just pissed on the other side of camp.

  After Ollie, I went to the thirteen blocks, got tempted, and gave myself over to the flesh. Merrick said, “I guess you ain’t a preacher,” and I said, “Guess not.” Merrick didn’t say anything else, which I appreciated. I gave in to the devil of lust and the devil of fear. I was scared of dying. I kept seeing Ollie Jenks with a hole in his skull, pecker out, his body shuddering in the woods.

  “Whoredom and wine and new wine take away the heart.” Hosea 4:11.

  Ollie’s death was no excuse, but recklessness came into me. It was followed by Jesus-awful guilt. The dark eyes in the tintype seemed to know I would fall. They almost forgave. I repeated Jeremiah 23:14: “I have seen also in the prophets an horrible thing: they commit adultery and walk in lies.” I knew sinners walked in lies. They walked nowhere else. I was no prophet, and I wasn’t married, but I was never before a liar. Now I was. I made a vow and broke it. I always thought Jeremiah too loud on guilt, till I got guilty.

  I tried the usual dodges. I was still a good person. I didn’t tell a lie, didn’t say I was drunk. Everybody does it, paying makes it different, away from home don’t count. I chose sin. I walked in it.

  “For nothing is secret.” Luke 8:17.

  I tried feeling extra guilty, as if guilt could burn away sin. I told myself I didn’t love the woman, didn’t abuse or cheat her, wore a French letter.

  “Lord, I have sinned greatly in that I have done.” 2 Samuel 24:10.

  I prayed, but praying didn’t feel right. Hell, the Lord already knew.

  It happened again. I thought about what I did. Truly thought about it. I decided: I am no better than other men, no more sincere. Less mean m
aybe, but no better.

  After failing to wash guilt away with more guilt, I tarnished the stain out of recognition. The moth went to the flame as often as possible. I was part of the army of sinners and publicans. I won’t say I didn’t enjoy it. I liked it best when the women laughed. If that compounds sin, hang it. Would I have been upset if Helen did the same?

  Yes.

  Did I tell her?

  No.

  Was I better than Dan Buck who said he wouldn’t tell his wife because “I can handle the guilt, but she can’t”?

  Mother often said, “Thou Hypocrite” to father, and father would reply, “Hypocrisy is the human condition. Only one Man I know wasn’t.” Well, I thought I was better than most; at least I tried to be. Thou hypocrite. Jesus was speaking to me. To all men, I guess.

  I had a qualm, a serious qualm. I took it up with me. Not Merrick. Not God. Should I think about Helen while doing my business in sweaty beds visited by other saviors of the Union? After hard debate, I decided yes, but if I told anyone, even Cousin, that would insult Helen. I always took my shirt off. When it went on, the tintype was against my heart. My lying heart.

  Merrick found a house devoted solely to Venus. No gambling, fights or stabbings, at least when we were there. I got fond of a woman named Betsey. She had a child I brought candy for. I preferred Betsey to Venus anonymous, even if she was “open to the public,” as Merrick said. Her room had a door, not a curtain. Betsey wasn’t like Helen. She was big and foul-mouthed. She told me if little Abraham’s father hadn’t been killed at Bull Run, she might not even be a whore. Betsey was voluptuous. A big woman. She had legs like a plow horse. She was muscular, lazy. Her eyes were dark as an animal’s, but lost, looking for things not there. I told her about milling and she told me about the farm she grew up on in Pennsylvania. Betsy was my woman in the woods. Part dream, part forbidden, part sentimental. I needed her. I paid her.

  I paid her, but I still pretended we were a family. I bought a purple rug for her room. I brought candy for Abe and the little cigars that Betsey liked. I found a picture of a mill and said it was the Salisbury mill. I pretended Betsey was my sweetheart. I wanted a place like home, even if it wasn’t home. Betsey resisted, at first. “There are others,” she said, and I said, “I know, but not when I’m here.” I started only going to her. She told me little Abe liked the presents, though I never got to see him. I wanted her to stop with the other men, but she told me it was “her business” and none of mine. I got hot about that, but we got over it and I kept bringing whiskey, which she had more than a taste for, and bottles of cheap perfume Merrick got for his whores. One Saturday night I procured a quart of Kentucky whiskey. Betsey drenched herself in perfume and we got drunk, and had the wildest time. Not long after, she started to change. She got serious. I thought she was beginning to love me, and felt flattered.