by Tatjana Soli
What she cared for less was that every other girl in the room, unmarried and married, young and old, was also trying to catch his eye, and he played this up for all its worth. The center of attention, he basked in it. At this provincial fete, he had the air of a cosmopolitan, the fairy dust of the larger world clinging to his shoulders. Ladies jostled all around him, bumping his legs with their skirts. The men were not jealous but just as eager to approach him. What really irked, though, was how totally he ignored Libbie, as if he had forgotten her altogether.
Not for her his type, that was certain. Full of himself.
She was at the buffet table later, serving a gentleman and herself slices of cake, when she felt a burning on her neck and turned to find Autie standing behind her, staring.
“Libbie Bacon.”
Standing beside him, she noticed he was now considerably taller than her. His shoulders were broad, his body muscled, and his golden hair was handsome beyond words.
“Autie.”
“You have certainly filled out in the most pleasing of ways.”
She flushed.
“So have you.”
“We’ve both grown up.”
He laughed out loud and clapped his hands as if this were some bit of genius on their part. His gesture was so ridiculous she laughed too. She knew then without a doubt that he had staged his behavior that whole evening for her benefit, to build to that moment.
“Can I bring you a glass of punch?” he asked.
“She already has punch,” the gentleman at her side said, but neither of them paid him the slightest attention.
“I’d love some,” she said.
Her companion angrily crammed great forkfuls of cake into his mouth as they stood awaiting Autie’s return.
With great ceremony he carried a dainty glass of punch across the room, catching his finger in the delicate ring handle and spilling some on the floor in front of her. A man who had killed Rebels at the point end of a bayonet now blushed at his clumsiness. Drops of red punch had splashed up on her pale dress, and he kneeled, mortified, holding the hem in his hands, looking distressed out of all proportion to the offense. She kneeled down, too, collapsing her skirt, drowning in a pool of wilted silk. She forgave Autie, as she would forgive him over and over again through the years, for ever greater offenses.
That evening they danced and laughed, and there was no hope left for her.
SHENANDOAH VALLEY, 1864
Custer was returning late at night from reviewing the picket. The rain had fallen hard all day, pummeled the dirt roads until they were ground thick as tar, bogging down both camps in stasis, and he could think only of falling asleep in his tent, its rare patch of dryness. He’d wake Eliza and have her prepare a hot cup of coffee to warm his insides.
This made the presence of the Rebel soldier all the more galling. He stood under a clump of trees waiting out the rain, calm as if returning from a Sunday dance, holding the reins of a magnificent horse. Although it was pitch outside, Custer could make out a grizzled face, a body heavy and probably slow. He guessed he was an old man of at least forty years if not more. Had the Rebel drawn a weapon, he would have already been shot dead. Instead the man stood unmoved, barely acknowledging the intrusion. Custer gave the order of surrender and received no reaction. He wondered at the possibility of the man being deaf or mute. Next he threatened use of his gun. The Rebel turned away, dismissive, and made to mount his horse and continue his homeward journey.
George Armstrong Custer
The bullet penetrated the abdomen through the Rebel’s greatcoat although he seemed bent on ignoring its effect. A few blood pumps later, the man dropped the horse’s reins and walked from under the sheltering branches out into the storm as if the rain might provide some healing balm. Custer, acting the prig, demanded the prisoner not attempt escape and swiped his saber across the man’s coat front, slicing fabric and flesh. Even as he did it, he felt his action excessive, the man’s insolence angering him out of all proportion. If there was an emotion in the Rebel’s eyes, it was mere pique. Custer had yet found a man convinced of the surety of his own death.
—Ordered you to fucking surrender, he complained.
War wasn’t a game. Proximity to death was enough to knock out any such foolish notion, and yet there was protocol. Warfare should be conducted with honor and bravery by the best soldiers. The notion that one was set on killing men that one might just as easily be fighting alongside made gentlemen’s rules essential.
The man’s lips puckered as if to make a sharp reply. He sucked in breath and made a stuttering step forward as if he found being in Custer’s company a moment longer unseemly. Gently his hands cradled his stomach as it flooded out something unwinding, gelatinous, and black-red.
Already in his short career in the army Custer had killed men or had seen them be killed—bullet wounds, saber cuts, punctured chests, hands and legs disabled or lopped off entirely, heads split open—so that the idea of the sacrosanct body had been destroyed. Some men did not recover from the discovery. In each case the victim appeared shocked as if the reality of a body, his body, being so violated were a betrayal. Such thinking explained why so many men were willing to go to war: the belief that through intelligence or ability they were somehow exempt. Veteran soldiers realized the fallacy of such thinking, but even so the most hard-hearted, practical men regularly became mystical when the subject was their own corporeal survival. Custer had come through unscathed too many times. His men wanted to believe in a divine luck that maybe would shield them, too.
Carefully he rode around the man and fetched the horse, noting the fineness of the saddle and reins, the heft of the expensive sword that remained sheathed even as its owner writhed in his death throes. It exasperated him, the man’s contrariness in not allowing himself to be taken prisoner, or at least fighting back like a gentleman. Turning his back on the dying fool, Custer made ready to move out along the suck of road, mud fetlock-high on the horses, saying a quick prayer that the poor man’s eternal soul not be judged by distinctions such as the gray or blue of his uniform, but rather the quality of his cowardly soul.
A shattering rent the black night.
When Custer recovered he realized the Rebel had raised up and parted a last shot at his back. Quickly he spurred his horse to return and pumped a pincushion of holes into the Rebel’s body, experiencing not a moment’s more remorse. Providence shone on some and not on others, and whoever denied it was either a fool or liar.
* * *
WHEN CUSTER RETURNED to camp, blood somehow covered his hands though he had not been in near proximity to the man. He washed it away but could not rid himself of its stick that night. The horse, a magnificent thoroughbred much loved by Custer, accompanied him for years even as memory of its owner faded until he accidentally shot the animal in Kansas.
* * *
THE SUN BURNED against the tea-colored tent canvas. It was unheard of to be still lying asleep with the sun already up, and his body tensed into panic before he remembered the battle was over, victory assured, commendations and promotions accomplished.
There had been grumbling at his fast promotion, but during the last battle he’d stopped the Rebels in their tracks, turned them around, and made them run. The charge had been magnificent, fifty mounted cavalry racing down the gentle hill, sabers drawn. Soldiers petitioned to be under his command.
Custer sat up too quickly, black washing over his eyes. When he reached to rub sleep off his features he felt a tremoring in his hands that was new and yet not unfamiliar. It came as an expected penance, a rite of passage in its way no different than the coming of maturity in the sprouting of beard, the heat inspired by a pleasing female form. Sure that it would go away, he resolved to ignore it, and took soap, toothbrush, and powder to the river to bathe. Walking through the camp in his undershirt with his toiletries tucked under an arm, he nodded at men who stopped and saluted as he passed.
The trembling grew more pronounced as he scrubbed hi
s hands with the soap, unable to erase the shadow of rustblood stain on them. In exasperation he picked up the razor before the impossibility of using it without a major bloodletting became obvious. He surrendered the blade, laying it back down. The betrayal by his body troubled him. He refused to allow for any weakness.
The cavalry was the eyes and ears of the army yet his eyes and ears were poisoned. In his mind he tried to connect the carnage he’d witnessed—scores of bodies torn apart until the individual pieces lost meaning—with the fact that he was being praised and honored as a hero, for delivering thirteen captured Confederate flags, each signifying untold death on both sides. He’d buried soldiers younger than his brother Tom, each boy wrapped in his own blanket as if being put down for eternal slumber. Not even a coffin for these heroes, who were simply commended to the embrace of bare earth.
It was a devil’s bargain that, being a soldier, he could rise to prominence only by dealing out death, killing as many of the enemy while preserving his own forces as possible, but above all winning! Napoleon bragged that he could inspire men to fight for bits of colored ribbon. General Sheridan would have said the same if he’d thought of it first. The man reveled in brutality, yet it did not escape Custer’s notice that it won him power.
Custer had worshipped General McClellan, as had all the men under his command, but that great warrior had been mocked for walking the battlefield, crying over his dead soldiers. A perception grew that he had grown wary of attack, choosing the safety of his men instead of victory. Soon after, he was relieved of his duty. Custer would not make that same mistake.
Was victory delivered to Custer simply because he was left alive to claim it? Few understood that war became its own reward. The veterans called it “going to see the elephant,” the excitement and then desolation of battle unlike anything else in ordinary life. One paid dearly for the knowledge, but some went back for more. War was a hunger satisfied only by glutting on itself.
When the culmination of his ambitions arrived a scant two years from leaving West Point, promotion to brigadier, youngest in the army, he decided the poor farmer’s son needed an overhaul in appearance. He had been struck by the Rebel general Jeb Stuart’s attire—gilded braid, golden spurs, a black plume on his hat, anchored by a golden star. Sheridan disdained such theatrics, but they called to Custer. He scatted his boy to dig up a star while he bought himself a black velvet suit and enough gold lace to cover it. Eliza sewed the star on the sailor collar of his oversized dark shirt.
The first time he looked in the mirror, he was well pleased with the effect he made, complementing it with a red neckerchief and the Rebel hat he’d never discarded. Some soldiers, who didn’t understand that one wore something of the enemy’s to take his power, complained of the hat. He’d heard stories of Indians out on the frontier who painted color both on their bodies and their horses for protection, carried dead birds strapped to their heads for swiftness, wolf pelts on their shoulders for fierceness, buffalo skin shields for strength. The biggest effect was on the wearer’s belief in its power, the disequilibrium it created in the enemy.
He walked through the camp conscious of the glances and curling lips the impression created. So be it. After his victories they’d be scrambling for anything to match his successes. Ridicule of his appearance would, after victory, turn to emulation. What the eccentric uniform could assure was that he would be remembered. He would be seen both by those who could promote him and those that he would lead, forcing him to courage from both ends. One could not hide behind one’s men dressed in such manner.
One in four in his unit had died, the highest rate in the cavalry, yet the Michigan Brigade received the greatest glory. His men donned red kerchiefs to announce being under his command, part of his tribe. When he was transferred from the 1st to the 3rd Cavalry, many of the men were distraught. Others threatened to resign if not transferred with him. His men were thrilled to be under his command because he would lead them to glory, and they wrote of the honor they felt sacrificing themselves. The battles continued—Antietam, 24,000 casualties.
Every man killed now remained as an otherworldly afterimage. He stared in the mirror and thought, What a poor thing is man. What a poor thing am I.
* * *
HE CAME ACROSS Tom in camp, bawling like a baby over the death of a friend in battle the day before. Custer stood in silence until he looked up.
—Have you lost your heart, brother? Tom asked.
—The men rely on me to win and keep them from dying.
—You’ve grown hard.
—You can mourn your soldiers, or you can lead them. You will go mad trying to do both.
* * *
WHEN THEY ADVANCED through the Shenandoah Valley, Sheridan’s orders of scorched earth shook many of the volunteer soldiers, farm boys who understood the value of what they destroyed. The shame in setting a barn, a silo, on fire. Even professional soldiers rued the destruction of food when they lacked enough to eat, houses that could no longer be sheltered in. Eat out Virginia clear and clean … so that crows flying over it for the balance of the season will have to carry their provender with them.
It was not a new tactic. Kearny, the first general Custer had served under, taught him that success in battle alone did not guarantee victory unless there was also thorough devastation of the enemy’s support, no matter how distasteful the task. Mercy led to revenge. The enemy’s will must need be broken, and the best way to accomplish that was to strike at his home and livelihood.
Custer had studied history enough to know that carnage on such a scale could be found since the days of Genghis Khan and the Bible. Privately he thought this conflict too close, violence of brother against brother destroying both.
He rode past fields set on fire. Burning a man’s crops felt more disrespectful than taking him prisoner. Raised on a farm, he knew the hard labor it required. Humble shanties and great antebellum mansions alike were set ablaze, loss the great equalizer. The waste was an affront to a poor boy trained to frugality.
Down one country lane, Custer was overwhelmed by the rotting smell of dead cattle. Soldiers butchered the beef to feast on as much as they could, and laid out more for Union passersby, a regular carnivorous smorgasbord. Most of the meat went to spoil, which was preferred to feeding the enemy. The soldier in Custer was reconciled to the cost of war, but the man in him still shrank back.
Thin, underfed women wept to watch their homes destroyed, their faces twisted by want and the beginning lines of hate. Long, unkempt hair trailed down their backs like weeds. He choked at the thought of his Libbie brought to such low circumstance. Libbie with her dimples, her innocence, her plummy taste of wine.
He passed mothers who walked ghostlike past their bawling children, shamed at not being able to provide succor. Their land now dried-out dugs, no longer able to nourish.
His soldiers, at first shy, were now made bold. They broke into houses, ransacked cellars for alcohol, stole at will. It felt very much like the end times. Officers tried to rein them in, but reports came of women disrespected, their menfolk shot for protecting them. What were they destroying, and what would replace it?
One of his West Point friends came and asked for protection for his family. Custer stationed guards outside the home. When he rode by a day later, the guards were gone, commissioned to more important duty. Any leader worth his salt admitted that controlling one’s men was like riding a bull, one must know when to apply control and when to let go. In battle he knew his men would be brave wherever he led. In murky times such as they were going through, baser nature took over.
In the beginning he was not convinced in the wisdom of Sherman’s total war. It all changed when under the Gray Ghost, the infamous General Mosby, a band of Confederates acted as thugs. It was a new, unholy kind of bedouin warfare, comprised of small groups making strategic raids and then disappearing back into their surroundings. They dressed to blend in with the population, even wore Union uniforms to assassinate soldiers at close
range when off their guard. They shot them in the back, while eating, while taking a shit. They acted without honor. Custer would not again meet such tactics until he was sent out to the Territories to conquer the Indians. When Sheridan’s engineering officer was murdered in such fashion, the culprits melted away before they could be caught. Sheridan ordered Custer to burn all the houses in a five-mile radius to punish those harboring the fugitives.
—Are you willing?
—Look out for smoke, Custer answered.
He understood exactly Sheridan’s directive to act as judge, jury, and executioner. It was his appetite in carrying this out that earned him special notice. When he at last captured a group of Mosby’s men, four were shot while he had the band play on and then the other two were hanged, a note pinned to the toe of one:
This will be the fate of Mosby and all his men.
Mosby retaliated by hanging seven of Custer’s men taken as prisoner, although two managed to escape and tell of it. The War had grown personal and brutal, beyond the civilities he had studied at West Point.
Unable to gauge the change in himself, he saw it in his brother Tom. Poor Tom, good sport, had always followed in his big brother’s footsteps. An unspoken agreement between them held that although Tom was as good or better a soldier, he shunned the spotlight and would allow Custer the lion’s share. Tom in battle, though, was fearless. He captured two enemy flags and was still not ready to rest after he had been shot in the cheek. Custer had to order his arrest to get him to accept leaving the field to have the wound attended.
The War of the Rebellion was an education without parallel, and unlike at West Point, here Custer was an avid student. From Kearny he learned to be a strict disciplinarian with his men. With McClellan he learned the importance of being loved by them. If so, they would follow you to the most dangerous battlefield because you inspired something in them of which they were unsuspecting. They did not grudge you their death if it came to that. Sheridan, his final mentor, taught him the most valuable lesson: be ruthless and without mercy when necessary.
