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

by Donald McCaig

  At four o’clock, Captain Fessenden mustered the detail and promised the cargo master they’d be back tomorrow.

  A mile out of City Point, a cavalry vedette trotted down the road, shouting, “Make way,” and “Stand aside, there.”

  The men stood aside while a mounted escort clipped by, guidons fluttering.

  Next came generals: Porter, Warren, Parke, Burnside, Hancock—Jesse had never seen so many generals, and if Captain Fessenden hadn’t called everybody to attention and produced a salute, the 23rd USCT would have looked like fools.

  Following that glut of gold braid and blue came Meade and Grant, Meade half a length ahead of Grant, as if he were in a hurry.

  Abraham Lincoln rode alone behind them all. He wore a black suit and a black stovepipe, and his clothes were covered with fine dust so that he seemed a ghost.

  “Steady,” Captain Fessenden growled.

  Lincoln was no horseman—he bounced in the saddle. And his tall hat teetered on his head as though he might lose it momentarily.

  And the colored troops broke ranks and cried out, “Master Abraham,” and “Thank you, Master Abraham,” and “God bless Master Abraham,” and they stopped the President’s horse and caressed it as if the horse were the man, and tears cut through dust on the dusty man’s cheeks and he reached down and touched men on a shoulder or arm or their hand.

  BY THE DARK OF THE MOON

  EVEN IN FULL sun, the old woman wore her shawl. The trumpet creeper was in bloom, oversized red blossoms drooping from the vine. The garden was as quiet as yesteryear, Richmond’s street noises muffled by thick brick walls and heavy vegetation.

  The girl asked the old woman, “Did Silas Omohundru love you?”

  “I believe he did. But he didn’t love Jacob. Two good men wanted that child and the man who had him didn’t care about him.” She straightened in her wicker chair and coughed. “Did I tell you my family is coming to Richmond for my birthday? All my family is coming. They hope to see me one more time before my wits fail entirely.” Her snort was frail as dry leaves in the breeze. “Silas did not enjoy my Jacob, and I don’t recall one instance when he picked him up, or bent for a child’s good-night kiss. Having provided Jacob’s sustenance, Silas had done his entire duty, and Kizzy and I could provide whatever affection the boy required.”

  The girl said, “I am to start teaching in the fall.”

  The old woman’s face showed surprise. “The employment your father found doesn’t suit you?”

  The girl laughed. “I’ll take my courting outside the office. Probably my real job was falling in love, but I just couldn’t. Billy Dunster is so darned dull! I was to be the dutiful wife. Billy’d be the dutiful husband.” She shuddered. “It wouldn’t have got me anywhere.”

  “And where do you want to go?”

  “I know where I don’t want to go. I want to do something with my life.”

  The old woman nodded. “So you’ll become a schoolteacher.”

  “I’d like to tell the children some of what you’ve told me.”

  “How do you know I haven’t lied?”

  The girl faced the old woman’s mocking eyes in silence.

  “Will you tell them about the apples? How they were small and tart on the tongue?”

  The girl shrugged.

  “We had an English basement,” the old woman said. “I’ve not traveled to England and do not know if the English have them. These half-submerged basements were an economy measure. Ground-level windows let in light so the householder required less illuminating gas. In Wilmington, Silas, Jacob, and I occupied the first floor of our rented house. Kizzy and her husband, Mingo, lived in the English basement.” Her teacup rattled against the saucer. “It was humid in Wilmington,” she said distantly.

  “I never bore Silas’s child. I saw to that.” She set her teacup on the rattan table. “Silas Omohundru aspired to the one condition a man cannot achieve on merit—he yearned to be a gentleman. His knack—a knack he despised—was making money. And in 1864, Wilmington, North Carolina, was the best place in the world to make money. Every month, when the moon waned, cotton bales were drayed onto the wharves, speculators arrived from the countryside, prostitutes laid out ointments and powders, and the tavern keepers swept their keeping rooms and rolled casks from their cellars. When the moon shrank to a pale sliver, gaslights flared along Water Street and ruffians sharpened their knives and loaded their pistols. Wilmington was so dangerous that many of the better class had abandoned it and respectable men carried pistols when they went out at night. On those rare evenings Silas and I went to the theater, Mingo, our driver, was armed and Silas was too. After the yellow fever quarantine was lifted in ’63, we attended performances at the Thalian, but by the summer of ’64, the theater crowd was ruder and richer, and, as I’ve said, Silas had aspirations. If Wilmington’s better class noticed that we, like they, now shunned theatrical entertainments, they never remarked on it.

  “Speculation in luxury goods—bonnet boards, pins, needles, brandy, silks—was the order of the day, and men and women, some of the highest birth, turned speculator.

  “Silas Omohundru was uncommonly scrupulous. Let other shipowners auction luxury goods on the dock and accept payment only in gold or British government bonds; Silas never held an auction. His goods went straight from the ship into army warehouses. What luxuries he did import eased the Wild Darrell’s passage through port quarantine and achieved a first-class mooring for her, and Silas always remembered to send gifts to Fortt Fisher, whose guns held the Federal fleet at bay.

  “Other boats were captured offshore, sunk, or driven aground, but time after time the Wild Darrell slipped into Wilmington unscathed. The instant she was moored, Silas’s stevedores would spring on her, working around the clock to empty her cargo and replace it with bales of cotton. There are but five days of certain darkness every month, and within that period the Wild Darrell must arrive, unload, and sail once again.

  “The moment his ship disappeared down the Cape Fear River, Silas would board the Wilmington & Weldon for Richmond. The government so valued his advice they provided him a pass, and Silas could obtain rail transportation when most civilians could not. For the greater part of the month, he stayed at the Ballard Hotel in Richmond. He asked me to join him in the capital, but I rarely obliged.

  “The grandees who’d rented us their home had removed most of their furnishings, and our house was so empty it boomed. A few Windsor chairs, a bed, a pair of mismatched settees, an old table rescued from the attic above the carriage house—after two years we were still living out of trunks. The servants came and went discreetly. Food appeared on our table, the laundry was collected and returned, floors were scrubbed. Mingo and Kizzy were ‘on the town’: slaves who worked for whoever they pleased and remitted most of their wages to their masters. Though this practice was commonplace, it was illegal; consequently such servants were particularly discreet.

  “Little Jacob was my solace through that lonely time. For most hours in most days he and I were inseparable. The empty formal parlor was never used to entertain guests; its varnished heart-pine floors served Jacob’s pudgy feet and the two-wheeled cart he pulled behind him.

  “My sorrows and confusions were overwhelmed by Jacob’s sweet milky breath, his embraces soft as a bird wing’s underdown. Child, I tell you the greatest pleasure a woman can experience is not the marriage bed but its consequence: her own child, the delights of her child’s life and curious mind. I became a child with him—seeing everything through Jacob’s fresh eyes. I am a selfish woman, but I would have died for him.”

  “And you passed for white.”

  “Wilmington was the most cosmopolitan of southern cities, and after so many infusions of Caribbean blood the complexions of respectable folks were not so uniformly pale as Richmonders’. Silas’s money quashed any remaining doubts. Silas had no fear of exposure. I believe he would have welcomed a challenge on the field of honor. For Silas, you see, terrible violence could settle
matters.

  “As for me, I dreaded pointed fingers, sniggers as we passed. I hated to go out, didn’t trust the servants; I shunned those social gatherings where I might have been welcome.” The old woman cackled. “I was young and imagined that people believed their eyes.”

  WILMINGTON, NORTH CAROLINA

  JULY 11, 1864

  Silas Omohundru’s clerk dodged between carriages in that curious half trot, half walk men employ who fear losing their dignity.

  Although it was well past midnight, flaring gaslights and pitch-pine torches illumined Front and Water streets. An acquaintance clutched the clerk’s sleeve: “Is the Darrell in?”

  “Yes, yes!” He dodged along the boardwalk and knocked sharply at Silas’s office door: three sharp raps and, after a delay, a fourth.

  At his desk, panama on his head, revolver beside his money bag, Silas Omohundru unfolded calm hands in inquiry.

  “The Wild Darrell has crossed the bar. Fort Fisher telegraphed there was some trouble but didn’t say what.”

  Silas gave the heavy bag to the clerk and blew out the lamp. “Stick tight,” he advised.

  Though it was a half hour past midnight, the boardwalks were jammed with well-dressed men and workmen, both colored and white. Every second doorway framed some painted whore.

  Two other blockade runners, the Bat and the Banshee, had arrived earlier that night. A third boat had been harried into shoal waters, and apparently a party from Fort Fisher was trying to salvage her even while the Federal fleet tried to complete her destruction.

  Silas paused to put a match to his long thin cigar. His tan linen suit was impeccably cut, freshly clean. His shoes gleamed, his clean-shaven face was all planes and angles.

  Docks lined both banks of the murky Cape Fear River, but the moorings on the north bank, the Wilmington side, were most desirable. The wharves were still redolent of the turpentine and pine tar that had been Wilmington’s chief export before the war. Stacked in front of warehouses and cramming the alleyways were cotton bales, good middling grade.

  The Bat and the Banshee were tied up nose to stern. With their low freeboard and high semicircular side-wheel housings, blockade runners looked like elongated snails.

  Aboard the Bat an auction was already in progress. The auctioneer stood on the low pilothouse as his criers passed items from the hold.

  “Gold epaulets. Oh, all the officers must have their epaulets. Do I hear a thousand for a case of a hundred, left and right sides? You, sir! Do I hear eleven hundred? We accept Confederate scrip at this morning’s quoted discount. I have ten-fifty for the epaulets! Mrs. DeRossette, thank you. And here, ladies and gentlemen, we have the finest pomade.” He held up a jar. “Lavender scent! Six cases of forty-eight. Do I hear five hundred?”

  Silas and his clerk arrived at a brick warehouse guarded by two armed bullies.

  “She’s passed Fort Fisher,” Silas said quietly. “Knowing how MacGregor drives her, she’ll moor within the half hour. Our stevedores?”

  One bully nodded at the thick doors behind him. “Oh, they’re inside waitin’ for her, Mr. Silas. Just like you wanted. Some of ’em thought they’d find employment on the Banshee tonight. Christ, they was offered fifty dollars for a night’s work, but me and Mr. Remington here”—he tapped his revolver—“we showed ’em the error of their ways.”

  Mosquitoes feasted on men and horses, thousands of swooping bats feasted on mosquitoes, and oily plumes of torch smoke pushed into the moonless night. Although not a star showed in the sky, the river was ruddy from torches and fireboxes.

  A steam whistle’s scream announced the Wild Darrell’s approach again and again, bursting as if too long suppressed. Seaman crowded the low broad prow of the boat.

  The continuous hoot of the steam whistle made Silas wish—as he had often wished before—that MacGregor would leave his celebrating until he was ashore.

  In a trice, the seamen tied up the seventy-foot craft fore and aft, and as swiftly abandoned her.

  “Master Omohundru, sir!”

  “A swift passage, sir!

  Silas smiled and nodded and congratulated the young seamen and assured them that yes indeed, he would be along later.

  When the bullies opened the warehouse door, a score of Silas’s stevedores rushed the boat. “The usual bonuses if you empty her by first light,” Silas cried. “And a hundred gold to the best worker this night.”

  “Mr. Omohundru.”

  Silas touched his hat brim. “Mrs. DeRossette. We have a busy night tonight.”

  Mrs. DeRossette had the tight corsets, bunched-silk hoop skirts, and pale, pale complexion of a lady, but perhaps the poor light flattered her. “Have you any special goods? I am given to understand that the demand for brandy in Richmond is very great.”

  “As you know, ma’am, my cargoes are destined for the army.”

  “How commendably patriotic.” Mrs. DeRossette sniffed. “Didn’t you once fetch in cases of champagne for Mrs. Semmes?”

  “That was a special occasion, ma’am. She entreated me half a year in advance.”

  “And if I entreat you? I am told that cologne is worth, literally, its weight in gold.”

  “I am given to understand, ma’am, that the Banshee has already removed chloroform for our hospitals in favor of your shipment of cologne. Surely you cannot require more of it.”

  “Your people, sir. Are they the Piedmont Omohundrus?”

  “I am in Wilmington tonight.”

  “So I see. Congratulations, Mr. Omohundru, on crossing the bar.”

  Silas spun on her so angrily the woman recoiled, but her expression did not falter. “I’m afraid I shall have to beg you again, Mr. Omohundru, for another small contribution to our soldiers’ relief fund. I cannot tell you how it uplifts our poor wounded boys when Wilmington’s finer ladies greet them at the station with coffee and cakes.”

  Silas extracted several coins without examining them.

  “Oh, forty dollars. How generous, Mr. Omohundru. With a cargo worth tens of thousands, you find forty dollars for the brave men fighting for our new nation. You don’t know my husband, Mr. Omohundru? No, I suppose not. Colonel DeRossette says all the best gentlemen are in the army.”

  Silas bowed a deep mocking bow. “There is no need to thank me tonight, Mrs. DeRossette. No doubt I’ll be seeing you again on the morrow.”

  She flushed but withdrew with intact smile. Silas’s clerk breathed quietly through open mouth and wished he were elsewhere.

  MacGregor was the last man off the Wild Darrell. Deliberately, he uncorked a fresh bottle of whiskey and offered it to Silas before taking a pull. “After a dangerous voyage, that does taste good,” he said.

  When Silas didn’t reply, MacGregor beamed satisfaction. “Not that I’d touch a drop when I’m at the wheel. No sir. I’ve learned my lesson.” He watched the stevedores for a moment. “It’s good to see the boys hard at it. I’ll lift anchor Wednesday night with the tide. The Federals aren’t near so sharp in the middle of the dark moon. What war news?”

  “General Early’s approaching Washington,” the clerk said.

  “Well, maybe he’ll take the city and put us all out of business.” MacGregor smiled.

  “Fort Fisher’s telegraph reported you had trouble tonight.”

  MacGregor held his thumb and forefinger a quarter inch apart. “A bit. We were slipping into the New Inlet when some damn fool coughed, and one of their lookouts heard and fired a flare to fetch his pals. Now, several voyages past, in Nassau, I was talking to a whaler skipper who happened to have on board a full battery of the very same signal flares our Federal blockaders employ. So, what do you think? Soon as their lookout fires his flare, I start firing mine, only off to the south, you know, like I’m signaling that the rascal blockade runner is running out to sea. They believe my flares, and within minutes half the Federal fleet is steaming south after a will-o’-the-wisp.” He took another swallow. “May they continue until they strike Patagonia!”

  �
�Patagonia,” the clerk agreed.

  “You’ll be along?” MacGregor asked.

  Silas nodded. “As soon as I’m certain of the unloading.”

  “Don’t forget to bring our friend.” MacGregor pointed at the money bag.

  Every window glowed in the City Hotel, and on the second-floor landing, a seaman had a whore pressed against the wall, skirt above her waist. When Silas passed, the look she fired over the seaman’s hunched shoulder was so enraged Silas recoiled.

  Silas’s money bag deflated like an empty pig’s bladder. MacGregor got his three thousand and notioned that next voyage he’d want five hundred more. The clerk summoned up courage to ask Silas for a raise, noting that capable shipper’s clerks were much in demand. MacGregor was dancing with a fat young whore, whiskey bottle pressed against her back. Several sailors recounted the ruse with the flares. Silas sipped at his glass of rum, and when one of the British seamen started undressing his whore, he left quietly by the back stairs, where Mingo was waiting with his carriage.

  Outside the blazing penumbra of the riverfront, Wilmington was asleep, and the clip-clop of their hoof beats was the only sound. Silas’s rented mansion had been built four years earlier, only two blocks beyond the expanding city’s streetlamps.

  The house was enclosed by an elaborate ironwork fence. Silas clicked the gate open quietly.

  Marguerite and the child were asleep on a settee. The child lay with his face pressed against his mother’s neck. Silas could see so much of Marguerite in the boy. Her dimpled cheeks, her fine high forehead, her slightly pointed chin.

  He dimmed the lantern, drew the drapes, covered Marguerite with the wrap that had slid to her feet. In the basement, Kizzy had a kettle on the stove, and Silas made himself a cup of strong Jamaican coffee.

  He wound his watch. It would be light in an hour.

  Upstairs, he pulled a cushion into the window seat and stretched his legs out. He sipped the scalding-hot brew.

  “Silas?”

  “My dear, I did not mean to wake you.”

  “We waited for you, oh, forever. . . .”