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

by Donald McCaig

  Having come so far, they could go no further. There was no official to grant permission for burial, so they decided to take Hill to the plantation where his wife, Dolly, had already gone. They would bury the general temporarily.

  A. P. Hill’s distraught cousins thanked Duncan volubly and shook his hand. They said when this dreadful war was over perhaps they would meet again, and Duncan said he was sure of it.

  Duncan was mounting his horse when an explosion slapped him. Window glass shattered over his head, papers shot into the air like frightened quail. Rockets soared from the heart of the explosion like lines of fire, red, yellow, red, white, red. Duncan lay against his horse’s neck, arm over his head, while glass rained onto the cobblestones.

  In Capitol Square convalescent soldiers turned toward the explosions, their faces ruddied by fire.

  Duncan’s horse shivered but stood stock-still. It was a good horse, a very good horse, and it was not its fault it wasn’t Gypsy. Duncan patted it and said soothing things as they trotted along Cary Street while rockets lit the sky.

  Gangs of men and women were in the streets, drunk, swearing, weeping. One woman carried a hatstand; one man’s trophy was an empty parrot cage. Columns of weary Confederate soldiers marched down the middle of the street toward Mayo bridge, ignoring the an anarchy on both sides of them.

  Militiamen broke into a warehouse to destroy the whiskey stored there. They stove in barrels and dropped cases of bottles from the second story, but men (and a few women) knelt to drink from the gutters. They scooped whiskey with pans, drank the dregs from broken bottles, and a crowd formed below a window where whiskey poured out and washed their upturned faces like rain.

  The Richmond & Petersburg depot was situated near the river, near the tobacco warehouses the militia had fired. Ambulances lined up outside the depot, and as soon as one was loaded, it hurried away. One of the convalescents at the door carried an old-fashioned horse pistol, the other a musket. The man with the musket said, “Everybody in Richmond is mad as a hatter tonight. We’ve turned away ruffians who thought they could steal something here.”

  The station platform was a mat of wounded soldiers. A dismounted door across waiting-room benches served for an operating table. When the surgeon finished sawing, his assistant kicked the amputated limb into the railyard.

  A young matron wiped a wounded man’s brow.

  “Sallie!”

  “Oh God, Duncan! How . . . ?”

  “My dearest heart. Please come with me!”

  “Oh, Duncan, I cannot abandon them. We are all they have.”

  In the shadows of a brick arch the couple embraced. Ruddy light from the burning city played over recumbent wounded. Richmond’s women, many in mourning clothes, provided what comfort they could. Another great explosion shook the ground. “Duncan, they are blowing up our navy. What shall we do, oh, what shall we do?”

  He said, “Hush now.” He said, “It will be all right.”

  “Is the war over?”

  “General Lee is retreating south to join with General Johnson in North Carolina. If our two armies combine, we may fight on.”

  She examined him gravely and steadily. She said, “Dear husband, is duty always so exacting a master?”

  On the riverbank, turpentine barrels flared under the Richmond & Petersburg Railroad bridge.

  Sallie shaded her eyes. “Thank God no more trains will come tonight. Duncan, I am so wearied of dying.”

  Another explosion. A shriek that went on and on. The staccato of exploding munitions. Along the riverfront, two-hundred-foot walls of flame made night bright as day.

  She took his face in her hands. “Must you go, my dear new husband? We have had so little time.”

  Duncan turned and kissed her hand, just where the web connects thumb to index finger.

  Though her eyes brimmed, Sallie smiled. “Of course you must. Yes, of course. Shall I ever see you again, my heart’s delight?”

  “Darling Sallie, I promise you shall. I promise. In this life or the next.”

  Out front, men slid wounded men into ambulances. Some of the ambulances dripped blood. Tobacco smoke rolled down the slope toward the river and clotted Duncan’s nostrils and made him dizzy. Fire had jumped from the burning warehouse to the depot, but no men fought the blaze.

  Cary and Main streets were impassable. A church steeple flowered like an aspirant candle. A well-dressed elderly woman sat upon a trunk, gloved hands in lap, portmanteau at her feet, watching intently as fire lit up the second story of a grand home across the street. Duncan touched his hat in a salute. “Madam, a dreadful night.”

  “Yes, Major,” the elderly woman said. “I comfort myself with the thought that I shall not live to see another like it. Do you ride to join General Lee?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Do give him Mrs. Stannard’s best regards.”

  Duncan got beyond the fire and fell in with a cavalry regiment. On the curbs, deserters, many still in uniform, watched in silence. The cavalrymen ignored them as if they were dead.

  Outside her shack a blowzy washerwoman howled: “Four years you been fightin’. And now you’re runnin’ like dawgs!

  “Dawgs,” she repeated wistfully.

  It was daybreak when Major Duncan Gatewood crossed Mayo Bridge after Robert E. Lee’s retreating army. A Georgia battalion marched at his heels. All Richmond’s waterfront was blazing, and the pale blue sky was punctuated with black pillars of smoke. The bridge was already afire. A flotilla of small boats sailed down the James River reach into the April sunrise. All the boats were burning.

  UNTIL DEATH OR DISTANCE

  US DO PART

  RICHMOND, VIRGINIA

  APRIL 4, 1865

  THE 23RD USCT fought fires all day and half the night, blowing up those buildings they couldn’t save. They were sore-eyed, coughing, and weary to the bone when they left Richmond across the pontoon bridge Federal engineers had thrown across the James.

  The regiment bivouacked in a cow pasture on the outskirts of Manchester, and most men slept where they halted.

  First Sergeant Jesse Burns’s back and shoulders ached; the bullwhip scars knotted and throbbed. Before he slept, Jesse brushed his uniform pants and blouse free of soot, blacked his boots, and polished his brass. Then he said a prayer for Maggie.

  At morning muster, the sun lay red and smoky on the eastern horizon and the air smelled burned.

  Five men overcome by smoke on the sick list, and four absent. “They’ve got family near,” Corporal Smallwood explained. “S’pose they figure Lee’s on the run, they can quit and go home.”

  “They’re absent without leave,” Jesse said.

  After breakfast, the regiment sent out working parties. Fifty men into Richmond to guard against looters. A hundred would report to the engineers to pull down ruins.

  Some of those picked to distribute rations to Confederate civilians balked at the job. Jesse said, “I believe you men were raised as Christians. You do as you’re told.” Special orders arrived for First Sergeant Burns. “I recognize that signature, sir,” Jesse said. “Sergeant Major Ratcliff is coming up in the world. General Weitzel’s headquarters, oh my.”

  It was nine o’clock before Jesse finished his paperwork and borrowed Lieutenant Seibel’s horse to ride into Richmond.

  If there were people living in the shacks Jesse passed, they kept indoors, away from the windows.

  Jesse had been imagining his future as a free man, but Maggie wouldn’t stand still in his mind. For a time she’d been his guiding star, literally all he had to live for. But before that time she’d been his reluctant wife who did her marital duty when she couldn’t avoid it. As a star, Maggie’d been beautiful, but his wife had been angry and plain.

  Were they still married? Did a slave marriage matter now they were free? If Jacob lived, he’d be five in August.

  Not far from the pontoon bridge, Jesse came on four boys, the eldest perhaps ten years old, chopping the hind leg off a dead mule
.

  The eldest, towheaded and pale, laid his hatchet on the mule’s rump and wiped hair out of his eyes. His eyes were flat blue. “My daddy’s with Genr’l Lee,” he said. “You done killed my brother, but Genr’l Lee’s gonna whup you yet.”

  Jesse dug into his saddlebags for his rations and tossed the parcel to the boy. “Maybe so,” he said, “but until he does, you’ve got to keep your strength up.” He sniffed. “That mule you’re whittlin’ on been dead for a time.”

  The other boys formed a circle when the towhead picked up the parcel, and one made to snatch it but the towhead held it out of reach. He deliberately emptied the parcel into the dirt and ground it under his foot. “It’s nigger food,” he explained. “Mule ain’t been dead but three days.”

  On the narrow pontoon bridge, blue-clad soldiers crossed into the city as ragged civilians passed silently out. Jesse wasn’t sure he remembered Maggie, not exactly. That skinny light-skinned pickaninny; she’d be older now, different. Time wouldn’t have stood still for Maggie either.

  No whole building stood along the riverbank. Corner walls, chimneys, nothing behind the window arches but air which smelled faintly of tobacco smoke. The clip-clop of Jesse’s horse’s hooves seemed the loudest sound in Richmond.

  Here and there Federal sentries stood guard over looted shops until their owners could board them up. The coloreds on the streets were as quiet as their former masters. Yesterday when Federal troops came into Richmond they’d been wild with joy, but today they were wondering what came next.

  Richmond was smaller than Washington City, and shabbier. How many months had they tried to take it? When General McClellan first marched up the Peninsula, Jesse had still lived at Stratford.

  Number 110 East Franklin was a narrow three-story brownstone with a tiny front lawn behind a wrought-iron fence. The fires had stopped on the other side of the street and an avenue of ruins stretched downtown, brick hulks smoldering as if campfires burned within. Directly across, the window arches had been the worshipful curves of a church.

  Sergeant Major Ratcliff uncoiled himself from the brownstone’s front steps. His uniform was new, but his brass was tarnished and his blouse hung carelessly outside his trousers. “First Sergeant Burns.”

  “Sergeant Major, I congratulate you on your assignment.”

  “Oh, I am one prime buck nigger,” Ratcliff said. “Anytime General Weitzel wants a nigger to show to some congressman, front and center Sergeant Major Ratcliff.” He spat. “Makes me yearn to serve under Grant. Nigger’s better off under generals what don’t like niggers.”

  Jesse grinned. “Nothing ever be right for you, will it?”

  Ratcliff shook his head. “Boy, once you’ve been whipped bad as I have, it crimps your jollitude. You ever think to see Richmond surrendered? And half of it burnt crispy? Ain’t it fetchin’?”

  Jesse tied his horse to the fence. “They’re starving, Sergeant Major.”

  “How long we been starving, First Sergeant? Since we first set our fettered feet in this land.” But he grinned and clapped Jesse on the shoulder. “Oh, hell, Burns. Why we fussin’?” He gestured at the broken walls across the street. “Ain’t this one beautiful day? Richmond in our hands and Lee on the run? You heard about my medal?”

  Jesse hadn’t.

  “That scrap on New Market Heights where I took over the regiment after Johnny killed all our officers—General Weitzel wants to give me a Congressional Medal for it. Day after tomorrow. Me and five other colored heroes, all at one time. Afterward we goin’ have us a grand celebration. You know Corporal Stuart? Stuart’s the best hand with greens and brown beans in the whole damn army, and our foragers found an unemancipated hog. Can you get a pass?”

  “I expect I can. I’d be proud . . .”

  Ratcliff cut him short. “It’s foolishness, but I mean to stay in the army, and that medal might help.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “This’s what you guard,” he said. “This house here. If looters come this way, put a bullet into them, white or black. And watch out for reporters. They comin’ round now the shooting has stopped, and they sneaky. Nobody can pester the family without they is kin or has a note from General Weitzel.”

  “Which family? Who am I guarding?

  Ratcliff grinned. “Family of Robert E. Lee.”

  For a time, Jesse sat on the stoop. Then he paced the tiny yard inspecting the borders where tulips were blossoming. Would the master of the house ever see them again? Jesse sat down. Directly he got up and inspected the window boxes hanging from the porch rails: more tulips. The front window curtain fluttered. Someone inside was looking Jesse over.

  Might be they’d let a few coloreds stay in the army. If so, they’d station them at the poorest, most remote post they had: Indian territory, probably. Jesse could bear it, but what would Maggie think? Jesse had a mental picture—a rough sketch—of himself courting Maggie again. They were sitting on a porch somewhere. Though the locale was outside the sketch’s outline, the two of them were seated in a porch swing talking and holding hands. He had no idea what they were saying.

  When they married again it’d be by a real preacher in a real church. No broomstick.

  A colored auntie came outdoors wielding a broom so vigorously that Jesse retreated first from the stoop, then down the walk, and finally beyond the front gate while she suppressed all sidewalk dirt. Auntie rattled the gate latch and engaged it with a click and marched back inside. Jesse came back, easing the latch closed behind him.

  Jesse was hungry. He recalled with regret the ration parcel that rebel boy had squashed.

  The crash/tinkle of breaking glass and a laughing shout. The coloreds coming down the street were attired in rags and finery. A silk hat, a homespun vest with more holes than cloth.

  “Oh, ain’t he pretty!” a blowzy female breathed. “Always did yearn to see a nigger with a gun.”

  Jesse stood at attention.

  “Ain’t this their place? Ain’t this the rebel general’s home?”

  An old colored man assured her, Adam’s apple bobbing, that yes, he’d seen General Lee at this house many a time, and other rebel generals too—Hill, Longstreet, Stuart, all the Confederate generals, he’d swear to it. “This the place all right,” the informant repeated. “Henry, you hoggin’ that bottle.” Henry passed a brown bottle and winked at Jesse. “Oh, we havin’ us a time today,” he said. “ ’Tis the day of Jubilo.”

  Jesse said, “We all been waitin’ for this day.”

  Henry waited until Jesse’s words completed the perilous journey into his brain before he groped for the gate latch.

  “You stay outside and we be all right,” Jesse said.

  “I never thought I’d live to see it,” the female observed. “A nigger with a gun.” She cupped her hands to shout at the house, “Master! Master! Come see what we got here!”

  Her shout alarmed her friends, and some looked over their shoulders.

  Pleased with this result, she cried louder, “General Lee! General Lee! There’s a nigger in your dooryard and he got a gun!”

  Jesse said, “That’s enough. People inside this house never done you no harm.”

  Instantly furious, the woman produced her hands, which were raw, cracked, and covered with sores. “No harm? I been rented out to the laundry of the Exchange Hotel since I was big enough to look into the tubs. I never said that’s how I wanted to spend my life. I never asked to wash white men’s dirty linen. Look at my hands!”

  “Auntie, you can’t come here. This isn’t your house. Might be you should go to your own place, take your friends, have a good time.”

  “Exchange Hotel it burned,” she said wistfully. “Nothing left but chimleys.”

  “Any of you fine folks gonna invite Auntie home?” Jesse asked.

  “I want to sit in the general’s parlor!” the woman wailed. “I am a free nigger woman and I want to sit in the general’s parlor. I don’t want to steal nothin’, I just want to take my ease!”

  Jesse
shook his head no, and when her hand snuck toward the gate latch he said no again.

  “I ain’t never gonna have nothing,” she said. “Woman live her whole life and work every day and never be any account and never have anything call her own.”

  The old man said, “Auntie, you can come with me. I got me a shack down by Tredegar’s, back in the weeds where nobody can see. It ain’t much, but it’s mine.”

  The woman dropped her eyes and her hand stole into the old man’s. Continuing their vague pilgrimage, the party weaved down the street.

  The sun had traversed more than half the sky. A smoky haze hung over the ruined city.

  The lady who came out of the house was big-boned and thoroughbred. Her eyes were red and her pleasant face was slack with fatigue. She looked down the street where the coloreds had vanished and in a not unfriendly voice asked, “Boy, who is your master?” The lady was Jesse’s age.

  “Twenty-third Regiment USCT, Miss.”

  She waved the past four years away. “I mean before all this, this . . .”

  Jesse said, “I was with Uther Botkin. And the Gatewoods. In the western mountains.”

  “I am Mary Custis Lee, General Lee’s eldest daughter.”

  “Yes, Missus. None of my white folks were fancy. I misdoubt you’d know ’em.”

  “I thank you for preventing that . . . unpleasantness. My mother is in poor health, and I would not have her distressed. Mother wishes you to go away. Your presence at our gate is . . . unacceptable.”

  “Missus, I can’t do what you say. I’m a soldier.”

  For the first time Mary Custis looked at Jesse, really looked at him. Now, she could have picked him out of a crowd. She blinked tired eyes. “I am not unacquainted with soldiers.” She gazed over the blackened ruins as if the calamity were an interesting curiosity that had little to do with her. “I believe that J.E.B. Stuart was the handsomest man ever turned a poor girl’s head. You killed him, of course. You people have killed everything that was fine or gentle or beautiful.”

  “Missus, I . . .”

  “At home, at Arlington, when our rose garden was blossoming the scent would quite take breath away. You people sowed our garden with corpses. You have made a necropolis of my childhood home.”