Jacob's Ladder: A Story of Virginia During the War

by Donald McCaig

She whispered, “I came here for the quiet. Maybe you don’t want people finding you either?”

  Silas’s body lost tension and sank back into the cushions. “I sometimes think . . .” he murmured tiredly.

  A smile in her voice. “Sometimes I think that way too.”

  She was well-spoken, a lady, but no lady ever crossed the lintel of the Captain’s House, only girls. “It is the war, this . . .” Silas swallowed his curse. “This unfortunate war. Why did they invade us? Why did we go out? We cannot hope to win. Already they are too strong for us in the west and soon they will be too strong in the east. I am an ordinary man of business . . .”

  “Silas Omohundru, ‘ordinary’? You’re reputed the most successful cotton broker in Memphis.”

  “I am as good as my word.”

  “Oh, I meant no offense. I never heard criticism of you. Not like some other traders. I do believe the Federals aren’t overly fond of you.”

  The girl was partly concealed in a wingback chair. Silas could see she was slight, but nothing more. He closed his eyes. “We make our market of necessity, not affection. The Federals treat us with contempt and we cut them socially. No doubt Federal officers with whom I do business are in Mrs. Davis’s parlor, but should I go in, we would not speak. Confederates and Federals find opposite corners, and excepting those inevitable occasions when they dispute a girl’s affections, we ignore one another. Gold for cotton: that is our entire relationship.”

  “How did you come to the cotton business?”

  Silas shrugged. “Only blockade running offers a better return. Although it does not always gratify me, I am a trader. I find it easy to assess a man’s fears and greed, his concupiscence and conscience. Today I shipped chloroform, horseshoes, and shoe leather for our armies. And how do you come here?”

  “My son will sleep the night through, thank God. There is a linen room, no more than a closet, where I set his bed. My Jacob may wake during the night—from time to time he must—but he never cries out.”

  “I don’t understand children. I am quite confirmed in the bachelor’s ways.”

  “Many of the men who come to this house are married, I think.”

  “Won’t you be missed . . . in there?”

  “Mrs. Davis despairs of me. She says if I don’t try harder, I’ll have to go. She threatens one of those riverfront places. I try to act gay and carefree, but I’ve been a married woman and I’ve been a mother and I’ve seen some things. Did you ever meet Lieutenant Malone, that Irishman? A little fellow, no bigger than I, stabbed Lieutenant Malone with a knife, and our carpet was ruined and Paulie—he’s the houseman—scrubbed and scrubbed to get the stain out of the flooring. The murderer escaped through the window, and I don’t know what they did with Lieutenant Malone’s body, but Paulie said his family was told he was killed in action.”

  Mrs. Davis stuck her head in. “Here you are, dear. Some gentlemen were asking after you.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” The girl got to her feet, a lithe shadow.

  Silas squinted. “She will remain with me, Mrs. Davis, if you please.”

  The woman’s irritation was poorly concealed. “Of course, Mr. Silas. Should I have Paulie fetch champagne?”

  Silas winced. The light framing Mrs. Davis in the doorway was painfully bright. “Some cool water. A pitcher of cool water, please.”

  He didn’t open his eyes when Paulie brought his water, nor did he overhear what the houseman said to the girl. She laid a cool damp cloth over his forehead and eyes. It was delicious.

  He licked his lips. “I didn’t have these headaches before the war. The cannonade at Fort Sumter brought them on.” He smiled thinly. “I understand that President Davis suffers too.”

  “You take a drink of this water. They’ve good water here: well water. I hate that smelly cistern water.”

  “What did he say to you?”

  “Paulie? He wanted to know if you were drunk.”

  “And?”

  “Patience has her time of the month, Minette’s sulky. Baby Bear’s favorite, Captain Olsen, wants her to himself. Paulie says I should finish you quick.”

  He smiled. “I believe this cool cloth has finished me. How long have you been in this house?”

  “When I came to Memphis, I stayed with James Shelby, the banker. He wanted me to keep to my little room downtown. I said I’ve got to go out sometime, but he was jealous, thought I was seeing a younger man. One afternoon I wasn’t home when he came by—I was promenading Baby Jacob along the riverside—and when I got home he hit me as hard as he could, which wasn’t as hard as he’d intended, but I pretended great distress, so he fled. That night a big blond-headed fellow came and threw me down on the coverlet, in front of Baby. Then he brought me here.”

  “Have you nowhere else to go?”

  Her fingertips rubbed his forehead. Delicious.

  “You don’t know who I am, do you?”

  Silas’s head throbbed. Had she been last week’s girl? The girl from the week before? Most times he came to the Captain’s House, he didn’t feel quite so low. “Did I . . . ?”

  “No, Master Silas Omohundru, you’ve never been with me that way.”

  He plucked the cloth from his eyes. She had skin the color of almonds, a long aquiline nose, long slanted Mediterranean eyes. Her smile was calm and kind. “Yes, you seem familiar,” he said. “Where . . . ?

  She replaced the cloth. “Never you mind,” she said. “I don’t want to get you too stirred up.”

  “I didn’t mean . . .”

  “I know you didn’t, honey. When you came in, what was bothering you?”

  Thumps on the door. Turnbull’s voice. “Silas, you got more stayin’ power than I gave you credit for. You comin’ out of her anytime soon?” Laughter.

  “Well,” Silas drawled falsely, “I believe I’m set for the night. You tell Mrs. Davis her girl . . . has as much as she can handle. Tell her I’ll settle in the morning.”

  “I thought you were feeling poorly.”

  “I was!” Silas’s guffaw shamed him as he uttered it. In a whisper he began an apology to the girl, “Please don’t think . . .”

  “Hush now. I am greatly pleased to have you spend the night.” She stroked his temples gently and drew an afghan over his chest.

  Silas’s voice tiptoed through the dimness. “Confederates think me a traitor for profiting from the enemy—though they must have the medicines and weapons I buy here in Memphis. I swear there are times I wish I’d been born a Yankee. They do not despise traders!

  “Southerners of the better sort snub me. Yes, I speculated in slaves, but when I gave up that business nothing changed. Nathan Bedford Forrest was the greatest damn slave dealer in Memphis, and there is no bigger market in the west. Today Forrest is the great cavalry commander, his name on every man’s tongue!”

  She patted his hand, stroked his wrist.

  “Forrest is legitimate. His parents may have been backwoods bumpkins, but he is legitimate.”

  She said, “I hear you’re awfully rich.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “I always wondered if there was anything a rich man couldn’t buy.”

  There was an edge in her voice that hadn’t been there before, but he was too weary to ask about it. “I’m a bastard and you’re a nigger wench,” he said. “Money seems like everything, until you’ve got it.”

  He didn’t know when she fetched him a coverlet, but when he woke, he was warm and early summer’s dawn light slashed a vertical gap in the heavy drapes and on the opposite wall framed a lithograph of a bird, one of Mr. Audubon’s birds. The wallpaper was in the French mode, pale green stripes with regular white borders. The woman had slept sitting on the floor, her head resting against his thigh. His hand happened on her head, stroked her hair.

  She stretched then, lifted her long arms, and his hand fell naturally upon her breast.

  “I know who you are,” he murmured. After a long minute, he said, “Jesus Christ, I’m sorry.”

/>   “It wasn’t you caused my troubles,” she said. She nestled herself into his hand.

  When Silas Omohundru departed Memphis for Wilmington, North Carolina, most of Omohundru’s cotton trade accrued to Turnbull, and because he knew his enhanced prosperity was due less to his own efforts than to the withdrawal of a better man, Turnbull joked that Omohundru had got out while the getting was good. And when word came that Omohundru had purchased a blockade runner and had married a strikingly beautiful Bahamian girl, Turnbull joked about that too: “They call them girls ‘conks,’ you know, on account of they been conked by that ol’ tar brush. . . .” Shrewder men thought Silas had judged it right, got his money out when the markets were at their peak. U. S. Grant took over Federal command in Memphis, and though his factors kept on buying Confederate cotton, they paid for it in scrip.

  THE GRANARY OF THE

  CONFEDERACY

  STRATFORD PLANTATION JULY 12, 1862

  THE CRADLERS SPREAD along a golden wall of wheat like skirmishers. A step forward and whiss the sharp blade slices the standing grain; on the backswing, twist the cradle so it deposits it in the swath: step and cut, an easy motion that let a man enjoy the small clouds scudding overhead, the trickle of sweat down his brow, his hickory snathe smoothed by other hands, other harvests. Step and cut. The Jackson river bounded this field, and over the whiss of his blade, a man could dream of that water’s sweetness.

  The field was ten acres: longer than deep. The wheat was the newfangled Mediterranean variety. The field was the last the gang would cut, the farthest upstream, highest elevation, last to ripen and dry. They’d worked Hidden Valley and Warwick Plantation and Stratford’s lower fields and the sun had stayed bright and the courteous rains came on Sundays when they wouldn’t interrupt the work and the harvest promised to be bountiful.

  It had been hard on the older men, and every morning they rose stiff from their beds and toppled gratefully into them at nightfall. But the work peeled years away, and as their muscles lengthened and suppled, they joked more and grew easy with each other.

  A man could dream fantastical dreams while the wall of wheat receded before him. Duncan Gatewood dreamed of horses: fast horses, sleek-sided mares, foals dancing in the pasture.

  Beside Duncan, Rufus watched barn swallows wheeling after insects dislodged by the cradles and the ground-dwelling insects exposed when their wheat roof was suddenly removed. The swallows were conducting their own harvest.

  Cradling alongside Rufus, Samuel Gatewood was calculating profits. A barrel of prime flour was bringing forty dollars at Richmond, and since there were ready buyers at the Millboro Springs railhead, a man didn’t have to wait for his money. Private buyers bid against the government, and some paid in gold.

  Samuel was working tasks he hadn’t since he was Duncan’s age.

  Beside Samuel, a colored man from Warwick Plantation; next Thomas Byrd, his first year with the fulltask hands; and finally, at the verge of the plowed ground, big, pleasant, simple Joe Dinwiddie. People worried what would happen to Joe if he was conscripted.

  The rakers followed the cradlers. Pauline Byrd, Franky and Dinah Williams, and four children from Warwick Plantation who never spoke except to one another.

  Pompey veered from swath to swath, binding sheaves. He’d strip wheat into cords, knot it, loop it around a fat sheave, and knot again. When Jack the Driver called “Shock!” the children dropped their rakes and fetched armloads of sheaves. Since the shocks must defy the weather for weeks, only Jack built them. Eight sheaves formed a shock’s walls, and Jack flattened two sheaves for the roof. “A good hudder makes a good shock,” Jack frequently remarked.

  Day after day each cradler cut his bushels, and day after day, over rough ground and smooth, the rakers raked their swaths, Pompey bound his sheaves and Jack cried “Shock!” They started as soon as the dew was off the wheat. Same sun every day: it felt fine in the cool of the morning but turned cruel before noon. Waves of grain receded before the skirmish line of cradlers, and the barn swallows swirled and cried overhead.

  When the sun stood directly overhead, Samuel Gatewood lodged his cradle, wiped his forehead with his kerchief, called out, “Take your ease!” and excepting Jack and the children, who were finishing a shock, everyone shouldered tools and ambled to the riverbank where the great elms distributed shade. Rufus found a low spot on the grassy bank and lay flat on his belly and splashed cool water on his head and neck and ducked his face under the water and drank that way. He shook his head like a dog. Sweaty, chaff-covered, Duncan slumped against a tree. Although new skin closed his wound, pallor was just beneath Duncan’s tan; he worked awkwardly, disjointedly, and his swaths were no broader than young Thomas Byrd’s. Samuel Gatewood uncorked his flask, swallowed, and offered it to his son, who shook his head no.

  Rufus looked at the ground as Gatewood pocketed the flask.

  “Jesse Burns the best cradler I ever seed,” Rufus said. “Jesse cut seventy bushels at Warwick barn field last year and day’s end he was still rarin’ to go. Jack, you recall when Preacher Todd broke a wheel fording Strait Creek? That water was over my waist, and Lord! Cold? Jesse lift that whole wagon and hold it up while we pry the old wheel off the hub and hammer a new wheel on. I wish we had Jesse on the cradle. That man make short work of a field of wheat.”

  “He not much help in leg irons,” Franky Williams giggled.

  A wagon bumped across the field where yesterday no wagon could have passed, rattling over ground that had been hidden by tall golden grain. In a cool calico dress, her face shaded by an oversized bonnet, Miss Abigail rode beside old Uther. Feet dangling over the tailgate, Aunt Opal was in back.

  Young Thomas Byrd brought a water dipper to his uncle. “Duncan, when they were comin’ at you, the Federals I mean, were you scared?”

  The water tasted fine, and Duncan knew he would cherish such memories after he returned to his regiment. “If you get to thinking about it, sure you’re scared. Thing is—mostly you’re too busy to think. Fighting a battle is hot work.”

  Samuel Gatewood accepted the dipper from his son. “The post rider reports that when our army fought that fearful battle at Malvern Hill, Reverend MacDonald of Mint Springs could hear cannon fire from the direction of Richmond, and others attest to the phenomenon. My God, sir. Richmond is more than a hundred miles from Mint Springs.”

  “My father wrote,” Thomas added, “that G’nrl Lee whipped the pants off ’em. I wish I could have seen it.”

  “Thank God Catesby is spared,” Samuel said.

  Thomas refilled the dipper for Jack, who rested against the back of Duncan’s tree, feet stuck out straight.

  “Thank you, son. I gettin’ too old for real work.”

  “How old are you, Jack?”

  “Don’t rightly know. My mother was servant to Robert Obenchain outside Harrisonburg. Cattle he reared, and hogs. When the drought took his crops I was sold to Reverend Mitchell in Warm Springs. That was the year after Nat Turner got to killin’ planter folks.”

  “Jack . . .”

  “Uncle Jack,” Duncan corrected.

  “Uncle Jack, why’d he do such a thing? Was Nat Turner one of John Brown’s men?”

  “Before Mr. Brown’s time, I ’spect,” Jack said. “I believe we shocked a mess of wheat this morning.”

  “Was he a madman, Uncle Jack? Why’d Nat Turner want to kill planters? What’d they ever do to him?”

  “Thomas,” Duncan said, “go and help your grandmother unpack our dinner. Looks like she brought that blueberry shrub you’re so partial to.”

  Supported on Aunt Opal’s arm, Uther Botkin came near. “Good day, Duncan. You seem much improved.”

  “Considerable, sir. I have another month furlough before returning to duty. I can’t leave Catesby to fend for himself amongst those Tidewater men. They think we mountaineers talk funny!”

  Samuel asked, “May I offer you brandy, sir? Or would you rather Abigail’s shrub? Most refreshing.” He turned to his son. �
��Duncan, have you been reading my Tom Paine? I couldn’t find it the other night.” Perplexity troubled Samuel’s face. “I’d swear someone is rearranging my books. Twice this week I searched for a volume only to have it turn up the next day.”

  “Maybe Pompey gettin’ himself some education,” Rufus joked.

  Thomas set the basket (cornbread, ham, roast beef, piccalilli, mustard, pickled horseradish) on a broad stump where all the workers could help themselves. Everybody ate the same food. Excepting Jack, the coloreds sat farther down the riverbank.

  Infant Willie Byrd was sick with fever again, and the crisis was upon him. All through the night, Abigail and Sister Kate took turns bathing his tiny body and Mother Gatewood prayed ceaselessly. The infant’s mother, Leona, was beside herself with worry.

  “It is hopeless then?” Samuel asked his wife.

  “The issue rests with God.”

  In previous summers Stratford had had a dozen fulltask hands for the wheat harvest. These days Samuel was lucky to find five. The Richmond government had conscripted fifteen of his servants (“rented” was their word) from the plantation. Others had run away.

  Most of the runaways were returned after Samuel Gatewood put out the advertisement and offered the reward. West Virginia was seceding from Virginia, but that didn’t make it a haven for runaways. West Virginians might not care for the Confederacy but that didn’t mean they embraced the negro.

  The ones brought back were the lucky ones. Yellow Billy and Pompey were heading north and Billy had been fording the Cheat River when a couple white boys on the bank shot him to pieces for the hell of it. Hidden in the brush on the riverbank, while Billy begged for his life, Pompey had a change of heart and came directly home. Master Samuel told Pompey he could continue as houseman but he’d help with the field work too. Jack the Driver asked Pompey why he’d run.

  “I run because Billy run,” Pompey said. “And Billy run ’cause he was foolin’ with buckra’s woman and buckra found out about it and was gonna kill Billy. Billy said when we get north, Master Lincoln give us a pillowsack full of gold.”

  “And you believe him?”