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

by Donald McCaig

  “Sir, perhaps I . . .” Duncan began.

  “A man on foot will get through that tangle quicker than a horseman. Go! For God’s sake, go!”

  Alexander Kirkpatrick went bounding down the hill as fast as he could run, leaping shattered timber and toppled trees, the residue of battle. Alexander’s heart was in the place his brain usually occupied. No one had remarked on his stained trousers! They had asked for his help! Perhaps he would be a brave Confederate soldier!

  Alexander’s right foot tripped on an oak staub and his left leg stretched to outrace his stumble, but he landed flat on his chest and his face slid into a blackberry thicket. His eyes went white, his breath sucked like a man shot in the chest, and he pushed his hand toward his face only to recoil from the sight. His hand was filled with thorns, a dozen of them, tips black beneath his flesh. They were so deep! He’d never had thorns so deep! When he lifted his head, more thorns scratched his pate, and in a panic Alexander writhed backward, though thorns clung as if they knew and hated him personally. He sat back on his heels staring at his hands. Tears streamed down Alexander’s cheeks. He had not sought riches, or power or dominion over other men. Just a quiet corner in a library where a pale sun streamed onto oak tables in the late afternoon.

  Alexander Kirkpatrick leaned sobbing against a hickory tree. For the first time in months, he missed Sallie. Sallie would have known what to do. Sallie always knew what to do. Why wasn’t Sallie here?

  Whimpering, sucking at his hand, Alexander watched blue-clad soldiers advancing across the plain. Confederate musketry stopped many at the railroad, but some regiments slipped sideways and entered the woods.

  Those blue-clad figures would cheerfully kill Alexander. He sucked on his trembling hand. Anonymous men were coming up this hill to destroy a mechanism so intricate it could never be reconstructed. These men, flailing and cursing and fighting—they knew nothing. They fought because they knew nothing. These men, many of them, did not even know how to read! How could they comprehend a man like him?

  Sallie had only pretended to understand him. The very day they arrived at her father’s hovel, Sallie showed her true self: “Carry the firewood, Alexander! What will the horse do for fodder after this hay is gone?” Such questions! Such drumming, unanswerable questions!

  Alexander Kirkpatrick’s mind whirled like a top as he picked his way back up the hill he had so hopefully descended.

  Maxcy Gregg’s North Carolinians believed they were in reserve behind a full regiment of Tennessee troops, and their rifles were stacked. When bullets started whizzing through the underbrush, they ran to reclaim their weapons, but old General Gregg forbade them, cursing. “Those are our men out there, boys! Tennesseans!”

  Gregg was wrong. They were Pennsylvanians, Ohioans, and New Yorkers, and although they were green regiments, they knew enough to pour fire on the flank and rear of weaponless Confederates. While exhorting his men to hold their fire, General Gregg was shot off his horse.

  “The woods are swarming with Federals.” Colonel Walker lowered his glass. “They have broken our line, and I fear for General Gregg.”

  A weaponless soldier crossed the ridgetop and started down the backside. “What regiment?” the colonel bellowed.

  “Nineteenth Georgia. Ain’t none of us left.”

  Other soldiers streamed out of the woods, some wounded, some white-faced and speechless.

  A captain begged Colonel Walker to help reorganize his shattered regiment. “Thirty-seventh North Carolina. We could have whipped them, but we had no more bullets.” Tears cut streaks through the powder smudges on his face.

  General Early and his aides arrived just as an artillery officer lunged up the hill, his horse spewing blood from its nostrils. “Sir, there is an awful gulf before you, swarming with Federals. They will capture our guns in short order.”

  General Early was a dyspeptic man, a man of easy and violent temper. He exploded. “The hell with General Jackson’s plans,” he cried. “Colonel Atkinson, you will send your brigade forward. Colonel Walker, your brigade will follow!”

  The ridgetop was transformed—officers shouted orders, the quick clattering of Atkinson’s drums called his men into line of battle, and they were going forward even as they formed.

  Somebody hollered, “Let’s drive them hogs out of that thicket.”

  Hastily, Catesby Byrd finished his letter: “As I write this, dearest Leona, the brigade is forming for battle. I cannot know whether I will survive. If I post this myself, you will know the outcome. If I cannot, remember always my love for you. Catesby.”

  He pressed his missive on an ambulance driver, a one-armed veteran with dozens of similar letters stored in a biscuit tin under his seat.

  “I hope you retrieve this yourself, Lieutenant,” the driver said. “But if you have bad luck, I’ll see it gets to your people. Yes, Jimmy,” he said, “you too,” as he tucked a gaunt young private’s letter in with the rest.

  “Looks pretty bad,” the private said. “When will this war be over?”

  “When we are all dead,” Catesby said, and was shocked to realize that he meant it.

  Inside the column of defeated men drifting to the rear, Alexander Kirkpatrick felt safe and anonymous. Anecdotes of ancient wars flitted through his mind: the defeat of the legions at Smyrna, the Helvetians’ final desperate charge against Caesar. There is nothing new under the sun.

  When they came out of the woods, they had encountered a reserve brigade, at ease, smoking and talking quietly. Officers ignored the stragglers dribbling past, but the men called out, “Getting too hot for you, boys?”

  “Oh looky yonder! Is that a coward I see?”

  Whistles, catcalls. A whiskered second lieutenant stepped into the road and cried, “Men, your comrades are still fighting. Nothing lies ahead but disgrace!” Though he brandished his pistol, the stragglers quietly broke around him.

  A wounded man crumpled to his knees, and the soldier beside Alexander said, “Come on, friend. We’re better than beasts! Take his other arm, will you?”

  Their burden was just a boy, couldn’t have weighed 130 pounds and touched his feet to the ground in a stumble, keeping his weight off them. “Oh, God,” he said.

  “You’ll be all right. We get you back to the field hospital, you’ll be all right.”

  “No. No I won’t. I won’t see the sun rise tomorrow.” So much blood. The boy had been shot in the neck, and every time he laid his head to the right, he pumped blood over Alexander’s shoulder.

  The blood was briny and pungent. It smelled like the Manhattan wharves where the clerk Alexander had walked, on Sundays, so many lifetimes ago.

  “I’m from Charles Town,” the boy gasped. “My family has the Mercantile, not so far from the courthouse where Brown was tried. My father is Edwin Mackey, my mother is Lizbeth. I have a sister, Clara, and a brother, William. The others died as babies and are in heaven.”

  For a few minutes he was silent, and when he spoke again, his blood started pumping. “Did you see our napoleon?”

  Alexander’s helper was a grizzled, gap-toothed mountaineer. “Which napoleon was that, soldier? There was right many napoleons bangin’ away.”

  “Pelham’s. We waited until the Federals were past us, past us, the only gun out there, and then Major Pelham gave the order to fire, and we mowed ’em down like they was shocks of corn. . . .”

  “Be careful how you hold him,” the mountaineer warned Alexander. “Every time he flops toward me, he bleeds worse.”

  “I am wearied too,” Alexander replied.

  “We’re all wearied. We’re shot at and shot out and wearied. Can’t you ease your brother’s way?”

  There was just this road, unwounded men passing on the left, wounded men on makeshift crutches moving slowly on the right. Sometimes a man stepped out of the column and lay down. An ammunition wagon hurtled toward them and they parted. The driver lashed his foaming horses through the column of broken soldiers.

  “Oh, there w
asn’t anybody more gallant than us,” the wounded boy chattered. “Didn’t we plague those yankees? They were searching for us with their long arm—that’s what we call artillery, you know, the long arm—and we’d shift position while they were hitting the place we’d been. And Major Pelham, oh he was jigging like a wooden puppet on a string. I couldn’t help laughing, looking at him. It was the grandest fun I ever had.”

  “You shot?” the mountaineer asked Alexander.

  “I don’t know,” he answered truthfully.

  “I wish I could see my dear mama’s face one more time,” the boy said. “I have a letter for Mama in my pocket. Will you see she gets it?”

  “No need for that, son. We’ll get you to the field hospital and they’ll patch you up and you can give your ma your letter yourself. This war’s over for you, son. Don’t you know it.”

  “My sister Clara—she’s to be married next month,” . . . the boy said and sagged. He became dead weight.

  They laid the boy beside the road and the mountaineer pressed his thumbs over his eyes and took the bloodstained letter. “He’ll fight no more,” the mountaineer said. “I never wanted to be in the artillery. Every time you get in a scrap the artillery horses get killed. Me, I never could abide that. Poor beasts never ask for war. Nary one horse ever signed up to go to war. How they scream when they’re hit. Many nights after a battle I stayed awake on account of their screamin’. Where you from, soldier?”

  Alexander had to think. “SunRise,” he finally said. “Over in the mountains.”

  “Powerful lot of mountains in the Confederacy.”

  “Western Virginia. To the west of Staunton.”

  “Wasn’t General Jackson born in that country?”

  “I wouldn’t know. Sorry.” Alexander stretched. Relieved of the weight of the dying boy, his body was light and free. His side was covered in gore, the boy’s blood had matted his hair and plugged his ear, and his skin tautened as it dried.

  “I’m Maxwell. Pine Bluff, Tennessee. After they did for Gregg’s Carolinians they snuck behind our position and poured it to us. We never had no chance at all. Oh, we’ll take a ribbing for that tomorrow.”

  “But we’re going to the rear.”

  “Sure we are. Sure we are. Don’t go thinking we’ll be staying. Provost’s men will send us back. We’re whipped now, but we won’t be whipped tomorrow.”

  “I’m whipped for good.”

  “If you ain’t killed, you can fight again, and maybe this time it’ll be you doing the whipping. How you called?”

  “Alexander Kirkpatrick.”

  “I knew an Alexander once. Smallpox killed him. Only Alexander I ever knew personal. ’Course there’s Alexanders aplenty, but he’s the only one I knew.”

  “My mother hoped I would conquer all.” Alexander chuckled at the notion.

  “Way you talk you’re educated. Me, I never got educated. All my life I worked in the fields. Oh, I’d kill a deer or a bear to keep us through the cold months, but mostly I lived by the sweat of my brow, like the Bible says. When this war started, I thought I’d see the world, and by God I have. I been to Vicksburg until we was shot out of there, and I been to Maryland, and before it’s over, I expect I’ll get to Richmond. We passed through Richmond on the railroad, but it was night and I couldn’t see a blessed thing. How’d you come to be a soldier?”

  “It was no choice of mine.”

  “Conscript, eh? We ’uns separated from the Union ’cause we wouldn’t be told what to do, and now our Confederate government goes to conscriptin’ soldiers who never asked for any part in the fight. Conscripted man ain’t any better off than artillery horses, and I said so many a time.”

  “Full indeed is earth of woes, and full the sea . . .”

  “That from the Bible?”

  “Hesiod. One of the ancients.”

  “I never did know anything about those fellows. I can write my name, but schoolmaster quit and there never was another come to my part of the country. Always believed I’d be luckier had I got my education. Folks got respect for a man with education.”

  “I am expected to know what I do not know. How I wish—I wish I could be just like everyone else!”

  The rough Tennessean shook his head. “Damned if that ain’t somethin’. Get shot at all morning and in the afternoon meet a man who says I’m better off ignorant.”

  The column limped through a road cut and the sound of battle was swallowed by the shuffle of feet, the moan of wounded men, a man quietly begging to be killed.

  “You got a wife?” the mountaineer asked.

  “No. I thought I had one, but I did not.”

  “She take up with somebody else? Die on you?”

  “When my Sallie wanted me, she didn’t hesitate a moment, and when she was finished with me, she discarded me without regret.”

  “Hark that poor feller there on the roadside. Some woman’ll be weepin’ for him, I’ll wager.”

  “Sallie, she never ever showed any pity for me.”

  “I s’pose I’m blessed. My woman’s so homely nobody else’d lie with her. I ain’t much maybe, but I’m what she’s got.”

  “My Sallie was beautiful.”

  “Them beautiful women got the upper hand over us ordinary fellows. They can do better’n us and they know it. A homely woman like my Alice is grateful for what she’s got. Never see no homely woman runnin’ off.”

  “Do you care for her?”

  The man shot him a strange look. “’Course I do. ’Course I do. It’s just my manner of talkin’. I didn’t know what to say when you told how your wife had left you, so I said the first thing came into my head. That’s where education comes in. Educated man never says the first thing comes into his head.”

  “Often he doesn’t know what to say.”

  “That’s when you can say what some other educated feller said already! You got it memorized what that other feller said and can use it for your own.”

  “When I quote Cicero or Homer it’s never appropriate and everyone stares at me and I keep smiling as if they were in the wrong.”

  “Well, you fought today, didn’t you? Live through this scrap and you’ll have something to talk about. You at Sharpsburg?”

  “No.”

  “Father Death had his work cut out for him at Sharpsburg.”

  “I can’t imagine worse than today.”

  “This wasn’t so bad. Weren’t for them Yankees getting around behind us today, we’d have whipped ’em.” He offered a dark plug of lint-covered tobacco to Alexander.

  Alexander refused the plug, and the Tennessean bit off a chew and shut his eyes in pleasure.

  A vedette of cavalrymen waited where the road crossed a broader turnpike. As the defeated men arrived they were winnowed into two groups.

  “Them’s the provost men. They’ll sort us into shot fellows and them which ain’t and bring us back to the line. Way them yankees was coming at us, this scrap could go on for days. Was you at the Seven Days?”

  Alexander shook his head no.

  “Scrap every day of the week. See that bunch on the left? They’s fellers from the 1st Tennessee. Seventh Tennessee’ll be nearby. See, there’s a quartermaster’s wagon. I guess they’ll feed us. I lost my canteen, blanket, tin cup, everything.”

  “I dropped my haversack. . . .”

  “When you skedaddle, you got to skedaddle. Which regiment you with? You see any your people up there?”

  Alexander said quietly, “I won’t return. I’ll not go back.”

  The Tennessean’s jaw dropped. “But you got to go back. Just because you run don’t mean you’ve done quit. All them boys there’ve run. I run myself. But you don’t go back, the provost, he’s gonna shoot you. Old Stonewall’s provosts right keen to shoot fellows don’t want to fight no more.”

  The line slowed to a shuffle. Officers distinguished the quick from the shot.

  “It’s not my fight,” Alexander said.

  “Why of course it is. Ain’t
these your people?” The Tennessean’s wave encompassed unwounded and wounded men alike.

  “I wish I were like other men.”

  “I’ll be damned. Might be you have more education than a man can naturally stand. I’d be right pleased to read the newspapers and write my own letters home. But if losin’ your people is the price of education, by God, I wouldn’t pay it.”

  “I won’t go back. I’ll run again.”

  A hundred yards ahead the column divided. The Tennessean looked Alexander over as if he were one of the world’s natural wonders. “Say, you ain’t a coward, are you?”

  “I don’t know what I am. Call me coward if you must.”

  The Tennessean screwed up his face. “Where I come from, a man calls another man a coward, he goin’ to face that man over a pistol come sunrise. Can’t call a man a coward where I come from. He won’t stand for it.”

  “Well, I don’t care,” Alexander said with a spark of defiance. “I just don’t care! Coward, abolitionist, rebel, atheist: all the same to me. Words. Words to frighten and . . . Christ, I’m hungry. I’ve never been so hungry in my life.”

  “You . . . you ain’t right. I don’t mean to hurt your feelin’s and such, Alexander, but you ain’t right.”

  Alexander’s shoes scuffled through the dust.

  “I ain’t one to tell another man what to do,” the Tennessean said. “But might be this war could make you right. No offense, but there’s some fellers wasn’t much before this war and now they’re havin’ a big time. You bein’ an educated man, ain’t nothin’ to keep you from bein’ an officer. War’s a mighty force for changin’ a man.”

  “But it’s crazy.”

  “Well of course it’s crazy! Everybody knows that! But that don’t mean you don’t do it. If we was sensible all the time, where would we be? I don’t own no niggers nor care to, but I’m fightin’. Bluebelly don’t own no niggers either and don’t care to, but he’s fightin’ too. Now you make sense of that!”

  The provost’s men were directing healthy stragglers to the left. “Lean against me, close your eyes, keep ’em closed,” the Tennessean hissed. He fumbled at Alexander’s breast pocket. “This here’s that poor dead boy’s letter. You post it from the hospital. Be a terrible letter for his folks, but they’d rather have it than not. Do what I say now and you’ll be all right.”