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

by Donald McCaig

  Pompey hung his head.

  Stratford quit sawing timber. Women could milk cows and shock hay and women could bring the hogs out of the woods and tend to the horses. But women couldn’t fell and limb sawlogs.

  Samuel Gatewood complained to Abigail, “Government rents my servants whether I wish to rent or no. And the Lynchburg Fire and Hose Company won’t insure them because they’re on public duty. Thus if my servants are injured or fall ill through neglectful treatment it is my duty to restore them to health, and should they die it is my loss.”

  Auntie Opal removed the basket from the stump, sat old Uther down, and stood before Samuel Gatewood. “Master, they after our cows,” she said. “Government after our cows. Already took six.”

  “You sold willingly?”

  “Us? Them? Hah!” Aunt Opal spat. “They took half what we got, said they’d be back for the others. What we gonna do, Master Samuel, without those cows? Where we gonna get money from?”

  Uther cleared his throat. “They mentioned . . . my daughter and her husband. They said that we of all people should be glad to contribute to the Confederate effort.”

  “Specie,” Opal snapped. “They pay us in specie. Those cows was in calf, due in September, and now they be slaughtered for beef, and we never took specie for a cow before, never once.”

  Samuel Gatewood pinched the bridge of his nose. “When next I’m at the courthouse, I’ll speak to the commissioners. I can’t restore your cows but may prevent future takings.”

  Uther said, “The Confederate government conscripts men as the Federal government does. The Confederate government confiscates what it needs from its citizens as the Federal government does. Tell me, Samuel, what are our people fighting for?”

  Duncan said, “Because we never asked the Federals to come here and tell us what to do and we’re gonna make ’em go back north where they came from.”

  For a moment, the old man contemplated rebuttal, but a softer light came into his eyes. “I beg your pardon, sirs. I did not come to Stratford today to dispute but to offer you, Samuel, and dear Abigail, my profoundest gratitude. My Sallie has written me, sir.” He extracted a much-read letter from his breast pocket and handed it to Abigail. “It is to your offices Sallie owes her freedom from . . . that place. My daughter is conditionally pardoned, Samuel. . . .” The old gentleman did not conceal his tears nor his trembling when he touched his neighbor’s hand. “Samuel . . .”

  Samuel nodded, “My wife’s cousin Molly wrote us of her regard for your daughter and her intent to ask Governor Letcher to intervene. I do not doubt that practical considerations have influenced the governor’s decision. If we will fight wars, we must have those to care for our wounded. Letcher is no fool, he . . .”

  “Sallie does not mention Alexander,” Abigail returned the letter.

  Old Uther stowed it in pocket and patted the bulge. “That my daughter is impetuous, I’ll allow, but from her dear mother she has inherited her heart. My Sallie is a good girl.”

  “Once Molly’s mind is made up, not much deters her.” Abigail smiled. “You remember, Samuel, that summer we were courting? At Warm Springs, all the young people, oh what a gay time we had! It was the time I remember most fondly from my youth. Mischievously, we brought silly people into Molly’s company to see what she would make of them. One Baptist preacher—a man from Georgia, I believe—was particularly aggravating. Every evening he took a central place on the veranda, lecturing those who were scarcely acquaintances about the evils of cards and drink and the all too numerous flaws of the younger generation. Finally, Cousin Molly had had enough. ‘Sir, complaints of elders about the young are not unknown in the Bible. As I recall, the philistines made a dreadful fuss about young Jesus.’ ”

  Uther tried to smile, but he was thinking about his daughter; tears spilled again, and he faced away. Aunt Opal stared at the sky as if something novel might occur in that firmament.

  Thomas and the younger boys were inspecting the rock circles of last spring’s fish nests in the diminished river. His mouth open, arms spread, Joe Dinwiddie dozed in the shade. Aunt Opal and Miss Abigail gathered the food, offered a last glass of shrub. Samuel took a thoughtful pull on his flask, and his face grew slightly redder. The wagon horse’s foot was tucked under Rufus’s arm while he picked at its hoof. Rufus constantly practiced his horseshoeing.

  Duncan laid his cradle blade on a pocket anvil and hammered an edge into the soft metal.

  Directly, other cradlers got to their feet and the ching, ching, ching of their hammers marked the sleepy afternoon. Ten minutes later, the skirmish line was athwart the wheat, and by four that afternoon, the last wheat was in shocks and the workers were finished.

  Samuel Gatewood and his son went directly to the barn and saddled their horses. They had resumed their familiar twilight ride, with altered details. Previously they had ridden side by side while Samuel explained fine points of plantation management—grasses, livestock health, negro care, the training of a first-rate driver—while his son asked respectful questions. Nowadays Duncan showed no interest in these matters, so they rode single-file.

  Gatewood followed the trail his timber gangs had created. Already the track was grown up in grass, the wagon ruts nearly invisible. There were more deer in the woods since the timber cutters weren’t hunting them. The horses climbed above the hot still valley. The wheat fields were as bare as a bearded man fresh-shaven. Along the track, butterflies darted among purple thistle flowers. Wherever man disturbs the earth, thistles remark it.

  Duncan came beside Samuel’s stirrup. “Father, let’s ride to the Blue Hole and bathe.”

  The Blue Hole was a deep pool where the jackson River slowed and swirled beneath a brow of limestone cliffs. It was shady on the riverbank and the water ran cold. Duncan tied Gypsy to a skimpy redbud and stripped off his shirt and trousers. His wound was a pucker on his right thigh with a broader pucker behind, where the bullet had exited.

  His son glowed in Samuel’s eyes—young and fragile and precious.

  When Samuel folded his clothing, Duncan avoided staring at his father’s graying pelt and poorly fleshed body. He is not the man he was. Duncan dove from the thought, the water a green shock sluicing over his body, and went deep enough that he was glad to return to the warmer layers near the surface. When Duncan shook his head he flung sparkles in the dappling sunlight.

  The current was swift under the cliffs. Duncan jackknifed and dove, his white buttocks flagging the air.

  As Samuel tired the water seemed colder, and he picked his way to shore across sharp stones. Duncan climbed a smooth limestone slab familiarly and eased onto the bank. Samuel pulled his shirt over his shoulders and sat on his folded trousers while his son dried himself, oblivious to his father’s gaze. He was here with Maggie, Samuel Gatewood thought. This is where they came, and this is where he made love to her.

  Almost, Samuel Gatewood could picture Maggie. Almost, he could see her lithe, laughing figure.

  Duncan stretched his arms over his head as a cat stretches, pleasured by the day.

  My seed became him, Samuel thought. His seed is my seed.

  Our servants are always with us. They take up habitation in our intimacies, collect our dirty undergarments; they wash bedding still damp from our lovemaking. We have no secrets from them.

  A breeze shivered the leaves. Above the cliffs somewhere, a woodpecker battered away.

  Duncan said, “Beautiful, isn’t it.”

  And his father said, “Yes,” including the river, the limestone cliff, Snowy Mountain, his son, the whole of Stratford Plantation. “This is what we are fighting for.”

  CAN YOU RUN?

  TRANS-ALLEGHENY VIRGINIA

  AUGUST 21–SEPTEMBER 18, 1862

  TEN MINUTES AFTER Jack the Driver made his bedtime check, Rufus removed the boards he’d previously loosened from the root cellar and burrowed through the sawdust that insulated the ceiling, about two feet of it, and set his prybar to the ceiling planks, jerking ba
ck and forth until tongues broke and grooves split and the boards tore longwise to make a ragged hole.

  “Jesse, you here?”

  “Been in Memphis earlier this evening but I back now.”

  “This ain’t no time for foolin’.” Rufus dropped down. “Don’t you ever wash?”

  “How we gonna get these shackles off me?”

  “First we gonna get on out of here. You climb up on my back and pull yourself through.”

  A stream of sawdust funneled through the hole onto Rufus’s neck and shoulders when Jesse wriggled upward.

  Outside, Rufus had a five-pound hammer, a cold chisel, and a steel plate he’d stolen from the forge.

  Rufus hadn’t counted on Jesse getting tangled in every fox grape and vine. He hadn’t thought how Jesse’s muffled fool’s bell wouldn’t pass under low branches.

  Jesse perched on one stump and dragged his chain atop another, positioned the chisel on a link, and smacked it sharply.

  “Damn Driver done too good a job,” Jesse said. Jack had used a steel chain from kindness, steel is lighter than wrought iron, but it is stouter too, and by the time Jesse finally got the link opened, pinkness glowed on the horizon. “We fix my bell tomorrow night,” Jesse said, standing and stretching. “Can you run?”

  And they ran. Up Snowy Mountain until the cattle trails became sheep trails and the sheep trails became hog trails and the hog trails deer trails and the blurry hot sun’s circle was peeping over the Blue Ridge. Jesse flopped down, sucking air like a winded dog. Rufus didn’t have enough breath for speech. They’d made eight miles, most of it uphill, making no attempt at evasion. When they planned this escape, Jesse prophesied, “Master Gatewood not gonna hunt us. Won’t have heart for it since his son is home.”

  Now Jesse pointed at a screen of red maples at the foot of a ledge. “Mama bear use that hole in the wintertime, but she gone out of there now. We sleep there.”

  The den was half as tall as a man, just enough to crouch in. Floored with leafmold, it smelled powerfully of animal wastes.

  “Master put dogs on our trail he’ll have us by noon,” Rufus said.

  “Driver, he don’t like to whip a man,” Jesse said solemnly. “If you cry out loud he might give it up.”

  Maybe Jesse was right. Maybe Samuel Gatewood had lost the will to pursue; certainly no patrollers came up the mountain after dogs straining at their leads. They slept until nightfall.

  In his bindle Rufus had beef jerky and fishing line and hook. Rufus had two rasps, shoeing hammer, clippers, and hoof knife. He also had two dollars and twenty-five cents in silver, a two-blade Barlow knife, a tin cup, rawhide laces for snares, needle and thread, and a wool hat in case it got cold.

  Uncle Agamemnon had fashioned Rufus’s amulet. It contained a tiny rock crystal to catch a spirit eye and grave dirt from Thomas Gatewood’s grave, because Samuel Gatewood’s father had been powerful and to possess a man’s grave is to possess the man.

  Though Pompey couldn’t read, he’d searched the master’s books for a map for the fugitives.

  “Map be what?” Pompey had asked Jesse.

  So every night before he locked up the house, Pompey stole books from the master’s shelves and passed them to Rufus, who slipped them to Jesse. Most nights, the books were back before morning, but Pompey removed Notes on Virginia from Master’s desk while Master was reading it, and Master turned the house upside down searching. When Mr. Jefferson’s treatise mysteriously reappeared, Master worried he was losing his wits.

  No map in that book. “Look to see where Master puts Jefferson’s book on his shelf,” Jesse said, “and fetch the books on either side of it.”

  Jesse’d guessed right. Samuel Gatewood’s systematic mind placed Jefferson’s commentary next to Mason’s Traveler’s Map of Virginia (complete with a glossary of manufactures).

  “We goin’ up the Cheat River?” Rufus asked.

  “That’s where they catch coloreds that runs.” Jesse pushed his finger across the map. “We climbin’ out of the Cheat Valley, over the mountain. Tygart River’s on yonder side.”

  Rufus wanted to cut away Jesse’s fool’s bell, but Jesse thought no, they’d better put distance between themselves and the plantation before slave hunters learned about their flight. Master Gatewood might not come himself, but he’d offer a reward.

  “You been studyin’ the white man’s mind,” Rufus said.

  Jesse said. “Can you run?”

  Despite severed chains which flailed against Jesse’s ankles and the fool’s bell rod which dipped and swayed like a bad joke, they half jogged, half trotted until at dawn they crossed a thigh-deep stream and red blood billowed away from Jesse’s ankles. Jesse led them to a cave, another animal den, damper and colder than yesterday’s.

  “This was as far as I come last time I run,” Jesse said. “Yonder is new country to me.”

  Rufus lay flat on his back sucking air and watched the sky spin overhead.

  By nightfall, they’d cut the rivets out of the fool’s bell harness, broken the shackles, bathed Jesse’s sores in the creek, and wrapped his ankles with Rufus’s shirtsleeves.

  “Can you run?” Jesse asked.

  That night they ran more easily, jogging through the woods, pausing like spooky deer at every trail broad enough to accommodate a man on horseback.

  Near midnight they crossed a broad valley of crops and hayfields. Using every fence row and hay stook for concealment, they scooted across. Once, they laid flat and still as mounted men passed silently, masked lanterns hanging from their saddles.

  They couldn’t chance the Cheat River fords, so they wallowed across hip-deep rapids, clinging to slick lichen-covered river rocks. Safe on the far side, Rufus shivered and vomited. “I can’t swim,” he explained.

  By dawn they were through the cultivated land and climbing another unfamiliar mountain. Rufus pointed back at the quiet valley. “Got a jail at Marlinton big enough for a hundred runaways, and fortnightly they make up a coffle and march ’em back to Virginia. If they ain’t got rewards out for them, they sell them in Staunton. Better money than farming.”

  The hayfields were lovely in the dew, smoke lifting in straight columns from the farmhouses, cattle grazing in the fields they had crossed so furtively. A rooster crowed and another accepted the challenge.

  “You ever wonder what it’d be like to be white?” Rufus asked.

  “I know what it’s like,” Jesse said. “It’d be like me—the meanest part of me.”

  “Those people down there: they risin’ up, eatin’ they corncakes and fatback, thinkin’ on the day’s work. Youngest ones blinkin’ sleep out of they eyes.”

  “Don’t get on like that. We ain’t got no home until we make us one.”

  Cheat Mountain lifted into the clouds, the trees crouched to bush size, the deer trails narrowed on slopes of sharp, sliding shale. To spare the soles, Rufus carried his shoes. Jesse didn’t have shoes. They ate the last two cobs of the field corn they’d picked that morning. They traveled in broad daylight and saw half a dozen chipmunks and some big rabbits and once a pair of hawks climbing high above them. Rufus envied those hawks.

  They didn’t dally at the summit but pressed on through the night and by dawn were down where trees grew taller and birds sang. Farmers had cleared these pastures a fair way up the mountain and fenced them with chestnut rails. The cows were not, Rufus noted, near so fine as Stratford cows.

  “Some white folks poor too,” Jesse said.

  “Yeah, but they got cornbread to eat. Jesse, what was the best cornbread you ever ate? Remember Franky’s cornbread, you ever eat behind that woman?”

  “I never did nothin’ with her.”

  Rufus laughed. “Well, you missed out there, too. Spend the night with Miss Williams, and in the mornin’, Sunday mornin’, you take your ease while she fixes cornbread. When I get to heaven, that’s how it’s gonna be.”

  “How you know you gettin’ to heaven?”

  “Because I already do
ne my sufferin’.”

  “Lookee there.”

  A rickety milk cow with her new calf eyed them from locust trees along the fence line. The ground was pounded hard and dotted with cow droppings. Despite his mother’s anxious shufflings, the calf paid the men no mind.

  “Look at her bag,” Jesse said.

  “Oh, she’s right. Calf just born. She got plenty of extra.”

  Jesse angled on down the hill so the cow couldn’t bolt that way. Rufus eased along the fence line and mama cow dropped her head and pawed the earth.

  “Ain’t nothin’ gonna hurt you, honey,” Rufus said. “We just want what you ain’t got no use for anyway.”

  She stepped left, ready to dodge, but Jesse blocked her. Again she pawed, again she dropped her head, and Rufus flipped his neckerchief in her face and she backed up, exposing her calf, and Rufus pounced. He tried for the calf’s neck but it ducked and Rufus wrapped long arms around its middle and the calf bucked and Rufus’s grasp slipped down the ham to the hock and the calf let out a bleat and lunged after Mama. That calf was dragging Rufus and the back foot Rufus didn’t have hold of was peppering his head and Jesse was laughing so hard he almost missed his catch.

  “Weren’t nothin’ funny about that,” Rufus said, when the calf was flat on its side and bawling.

  “ ’Course not,” Jesse snickered.

  Mama cow circled worriedly until she got near enough for Jesse to grab her neck. When Rufus loosed the calf it scrambled to its feet, darted to Mama’s offside, smacked Mama’s udder with its head, and sucked. “Easy,” Jesse said.

  Rufus was busy on the other side, squeezing spurts of hot milk into his tin cup, and as soon as he had it filled he drank it; the blood-temperature liquid was powerfully scented as new earth.

  “She’s been in the wild onions,” Rufus said, not missing a squirt.

  The calf was slobbering the teats on its side, and when it tried for Rufus’s teats, Rufus smacked its hard rubbery nose and the calf pulled back bewildered. Again it butted Mama’s bag.

  Second cup, Rufus handed to Jesse. They took turns until Rufus announced, “That’s what there is. We could kill the calf, carry hams with us.”