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

by Donald McCaig

  Jack buckled Samuel Gatewood into the adapted harness. “It’ll be our legs what pushes and our shoulders what pulls, same as if we was horses,” he advised. “We got to step out like a team—smartly.” When Jack buckled himself in, the thick traces ran up his back and looped over his shoulders.

  “You ready, Jack?”

  “Ready.”

  “Madam?”

  “Yes, I am prepared.”

  “Then suppose we get this crop into the ground!”

  LOOKAWAY, DIXIELAND

  APPOMATTOX COURTHOUSE, VIRGINIA

  APRIL 12, 1865

  “I WILL NOT surrender to those people,” Thomas Byrd said. The campfire lit his dirty, determined face. “I’ll Indian through their lines and join General Johnson.”

  They’d been sitting by that fire all night. On the sedgy creek banks other fires burned and men stared into the coals. On the eastern horizon, a sullen red band beneath roiling black clouds.

  “It’ll be daylight soon,” Duncan observed. “All that Union beef I ate last night made me feel like hell. Damned if I don’t think my stomach’s ruined.”

  “Fellows in the Washington Artillery buried their guns in the woods. Just dug a pit and buried them.”

  “Did they say any words over them?” Duncan asked. “ ‘Rust you were and to rust you must return?’ ”

  “Don’t go funnin’ me,” the boy said sullenly. “I can’t stand it.”

  Patiently Duncan said, “General Longstreet says to surrender. And General Mahone agrees with him. General Lee says surrender, and our generals got together with the Union generals and worked it all out, so we quit fighting and go home. You see something wrong with that?”

  “We could still break through!”

  “We tried to break through and we couldn’t. Didn’t even come near to breaking through. We hadn’t had rations in four days and they outnumbered us two to one and they held the high ground. We were caught in a slaughter pen. At least that’s what Lee thought. He might have been wrong, but that’s what he thought.”

  “Then the Confederacy is dead!”

  “Likely so.”

  “My father died for this country!”

  “Yes, and so did General Jackson and J.E.B. Stuart and Pettigrew and Armistead and Pegram and Garnett, and A. P. Hill—Christ, I hope they found him a bigger coffin—and little Johnny Pelham—the gallant Pelham—what a wonder he was—and several hundred thousand other men who thought it’d be grand to live in their own new nation.”

  The boy was filthy: he’d lost the better part of his jacket, and a blood-blackened handkerchief was bound around his wrist. “Uncle Duncan, why are you mocking me?”

  “Because I don’t want to surrender either.”

  The sky was lightening but it was going to be a gray day.

  Duncan said softly, “You think General Lee wanted to surrender? You think that old man wouldn’t rather have died?”

  “Then it was all for nothing. We were fools to try. Stuart, Jackson, my father—they died for nothing.”

  Duncan sipped scalding hot coffee. The Union soldiers had brought coffee last night. It was good of them. From here on they’d be able to drink coffee anytime they wanted. They’d eat anytime they wanted. They’d wear shoes. It was unlikely they’d ever be so tired or so frightened again in their entire lives. “We’ve been some places,” Duncan said. “We’ve seen some things.”

  On the hill where the Union army camped, a bugle sounded reveille, and other bugles took it up.

  “Last time we’ll be hearing that particular tune,” Duncan said. “Can’t say I am overfond of it.”

  Men stood and stretched. Some made water or wandered down to the sinks.

  “We are General Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia!” the boy said. “God damn it, if we aren’t that, what are we?” He snuffled and wiped his nose on his sleeve. “God, how I miss him!”

  “In all the years I knew your father I never heard him say anything hard about another man. He could be hard on himself, but he was easy on everyone else. That sorry Alexander Kirkpatrick—one day I was carrying on about him and Catesby said, ‘Alexander has his own cross to bear.’ I never forgot that. A lot of fellows have taken to religion, but I misdoubt most will keep at it. Catesby would have. When he went for a thing he went for it whole hog.”

  “But he took his life . . .”

  “Thomas, you weren’t there. I saw that battlefield after the fighting was over and thanked God I hadn’t been in it.”

  “But what does that leave me and Pauline?”

  “Because your father is dead? Boy, look around this army and you’ll see thousands whose fathers and brothers and sons are dead as Catesby Byrd.”

  Breakfast fires sprang up, and Duncan could smell the bacon cooking. The rich greasy odor made his stomach jump. Maybe from now on he wouldn’t eat so much. “A man can get used to most anything,” he said.

  “What?”

  “When I was your age, if you’d told me I’d have starved as much as I have or fought so desperately or put myself so often in harm’s way, I’d have laughed at you.”

  Men were drawing water. Others went about camp duties in a lackadaisical manner. Duncan thought to say the Army of Northern Virginia wouldn’t die today, it had died three days ago when General Grant and General Lee sat down and talked surrender. Duncan thought to say something about that but instead said, “You want some of this coffee?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “Look, I don’t know,” Duncan tried. “I mean, I’ve been following General Lee for four years and he’s never led me wrong and he says we should quit and go home and be citizens of the United States. I suppose I’ll follow him one last time. You think the general wasn’t tempted to die? Before he went off to talk to Grant, Marse Robert said how easy it would be for him to ride along the lines and when the Union sharpshooters spotted him it’d be over. Marse Robert wanted to take that ride but didn’t. He said, ‘Our duty is to live.’ ”

  “Damn me if that ain’t a different song than he has been singing.” The boy’s face was ugly with anger.

  Some were striking their shelter tents. Some were feeding horses. The Union soldiers had provided fodder and corn too.

  “You seen to your horse?” Duncan asked.

  “That all you can think of, your damned horse?” The boy was snuffling and mad at himself for snuffling.

  Duncan grinned. “Well, I used to think about the glories of war and chivalric knights, but I haven’t thought about chivalry in some time. These days mostly I think about horses.”

  “I’m sorry, I . . .”

  “That’s all right, boy. It isn’t an easy thing. Those boys who buried their guns, the officers who broke their swords, the fellows who smashed their rifles against a tree—I know why they did it. We already signed our paroles, so now we’ll turn in our guns and cartridges and then we’ll go home. I believe I’ll march with the 44th. That’s where me and Catesby started. You’d better look after your horse. She won’t be getting any of General Grant’s corn tomorrow.”

  The boy shivered.

  Duncan’s horse was cropping streamside grasses. Most of the horses were starved; some could hardly lift their heads. But let a gun be fired or the drums start jabbering and they’d snort and flare their eyes: General Lee’s warhorses. Duncan rubbed the horse down with broom sedge and saddled her.

  Division after division, the Army of Northern Virginia would march before the Union ranks, stack their rifles, loop cartridge boxes over the rifles, and lay down their flags. After each division was disarmed, its weapons and flags would be hauled away in wagons, its cartridges dumped in heaps upon the ground.

  Duncan didn’t recognize many of the twelve men who were what remained of the 44th Virginia Infantry Regiment. A bald-headed private with a wispy gray beard was color bearer. “I’m Johnson, Major. Samuel Ryals’s uncle, sir. That boy which was took by the cholera.”

  Duncan remembered the boy he’d shown how to load
a rifle. You didn’t tousle a soldier’s hair, not even a fourteen-year-old soldier’s hair.

  “His mother never got over it,” the man said. “She pined away.”

  “It’s been a hard war. You’ll carry the colors?”

  “I been carryin’ ’em since John Lilly fell at Fort Stedman.”

  “Then you’ll carry them today. Some men are tearing up their flags or hiding them, but you won’t do that.”

  “Oh hell,” the man said. “I got no regrets puttin’ her down. She was a good old flag, but she’s a mite heavy and when them Union boys see her coming they always try to shoot whoever’s carrying her. Color sergeants got less chance of living than you officers do.”

  Duncan grinned. “Well, you seem to have survived.”

  “Yes, sir, I have. And better men’n me are buried beside the road. I got some Union whiskey in my canteen if you’d like a taste.”

  Gordon’s division fell into marching order, General Gordon himself in the van. There were many flags for so few men. The turnpike bristled with Confederate battle flags.

  “Division! Forward!” They’d never marched smarter, and Duncan’s horse picked up her feet and snorted against the bit thinking she was heading for a fight.

  They passed the village courthouse and the house where the surrender had been signed, and swung along before the Union ranks. Blue soldiers, neatly dressed, neatly groomed, some of them plump.

  Suddenly, on a command from their general, the Union soldiers snapped to attention and presented arms, and the sudden salute, so unexpected, startled the Confederates. General Gordon stood in his stirrups, drew his saber and touched it to his boot tip, and ordered a return salute. The men of Gordon’s division snapped their hands to their rifle stocks.

  Eyes left, Duncan passed rows of anonymous blue-clad men saluting, and Duncan could scarcely see through his tears.

  “Division! . . .”

  “Brigade! . . .”

  “Regiment! . . .”

  “Halt!”

  Their officers dressed the ranks as if on parade, two armies, gray and blue, twelve feet apart, the width of a country road.

  When the barefoot ranks were correct, every bit as straight as the Union divisions facing them, Confederate officers gave the command to fix bayonets before each regiment stacked its bright weapons and one at a time, each regiment laid down its flag.

  Some color bearers wept. Some acted as if it was nothing to them. Some prayed.

  And when they were done they stood for a time, no longer in ranks, each man lost in his own privacy, becoming the man he would be for the rest of his life.

  A little later, Thomas Byrd and Duncan Gatewood started toward home.

  ADVERTISEMENT IN THE

  RICHMOND WHIG

  RICHMOND, VIRGINIA

  SEPTEMBER 12, 1865

  MAGGIE BURNS FORMERLY MITCHELL. Any person having information of the whereabouts or fate of my wife, Maggie Burns, formerly a slave on the Gatewood Plantation near SunRise, Virginia, is urged to communicate with 1st Sergeant Jesse Burns, 23rd USCT, Camp Sam Houston, Galveston, Texas. Maggie Burns was sold south in the winter of 1861. She is a comely light-skinned mulatto of slight stature, twenty or twenty-one years of age, and, with God’s mercy, Maggie has a male child at her side.

  REUNION

  “AND DID YOU reply?” the girl asked.

  Marguerite replaced the disintegrating clipping in her scrapbook. “I’d had my fill of being a nigger. No matter what I’d asked Jesse—begged him—Jesse would have come to Richmond to see me and Baby Jacob, and that would have ruined everything. I never loved Jesse, never promised him a thing. What right had he to ruin our life? When the government disbanded the U.S. Colored Troops, a few coloreds were allowed to enlist in the regular army. Perhaps Jesse was among them.”

  “He had such high hopes.”

  “Am I to be shackled to another’s hopes?” In a softer voice she added, “The history of colored people in America is the history of hopes. Jesse wished to head a black family. Do you have any notion what powerful hope that requires?”

  Outside the old woman’s bedroom it was early summer; inside was last century’s furniture, expensive, carelessly polished, musty. The girl could not think how anyone ever thought this stuff attractive.

  A timid rap at the door. “We’re ready for you to come out, Grannie M!”—a child’s voice.

  “I’ll be with you in a minute, honey.”

  An older voice, a woman’s: “Do you need help, Grannie M? We’re all anxious to see you.”

  In a whisper, “All morning they’ve been shopping Thallmeier’s, and they’re dining at the Jefferson Hotel tonight. Let them stew.” The old woman was so light she scarcely indented the bed she sat on. “I knew Catesby’s son, Thomas, when he became senator. Thomas Byrd inherited his father’s brains but his mother’s nerves. He wasn’t a notable senator.

  “It didn’t take the ex-soldiers long to restore order in the countryside. They terrified or hung every black man who stood up to them. Night riders shot that fool Pompey dead. Pompey had been Samuel Gatewood’s houseman so long he thought he was somebody.”

  “Grannie M!”

  “Yes, sweetheart. I’m coming.” To the girl: “The gentry were whispering about Sallie, and ‘convict’ was the nicest name they called her. Virginians never forget. You may think they’ve forgotten but they’ve just put it out of their mind for courtesy’s sake, and they’ll recollect everything soon as they need to. Duncan and Sallie Gatewood hitched up Stratford’s best wagon and headed west. Did I tell you about their advertisement?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Well, it must have been twenty years later, ’84 or ’85, I can’t recall. I was at a garden party, one of the river plantations. They were a horsey set, and if you didn’t talk horses, they didn’t have much to say. Of course I’d been invited because of the bank. The horsey people were chattering away on the lawn and I was reading periodicals on the veranda and came across an advertisement for a SunRise Ranch. Duncan and Sallie Gatewood’s Wyoming plantation offered stud service and colts and could outfit eastern sportsmen. ’SunRise Ranch’—can you imagine? At the bottom of the ad were Duncan’s and Sallie’s names and three children—Samuel was one child, the others’ names escape me. Aunt Opal was identified as ‘Chief Horse Wrangler’—an honorific title, I assume.

  “When Richmond resumed commercial activities, I found a white man willing to act as my president and opened my bank’s doors. I was now and forever Mrs. Silas Omohundru, and it did me no harm to be a Confederate widow, particularly one whose husband died as Silas did. People argued whether Fort Gregg saved Lee’s army or whether it was another useless sacrifice. They are arguing today. I only believe Silas died a happy man. I pray he did.” Marguerite tottered to her feet. “Now, child, let us enter the lion’s den.”

  The garden room was full of sun, and a jumble of kinfolk greeted Grannie M and hugged her and asked blessings for children large and small. Dressed in her Sunday best, Kizzy dozed at the end of the couch.

  The girl had expected more negritude. Hair was brown and light blond—only one woman’s was dark straight black. Some skins were brown, tanned by the California sun. Noses were aquiline or fat, lips thick or thin. The girl could not distinguish Marguerite’s blood kin from her in-laws.

  The man who approached was more casually dressed than a Virginian would have been. Though his linen sport coat was unexceptionable, his shirt was unbuttoned and he wore no tie. “I’m Josh Omohundru. So you’re the girl Kizzy has been telling us about.” He winked at the snoring old woman. “We spent every summer in this old house, me, brother Bill, and my sister, Selah—the pack of us. What a tyrant Kizzy was! We swore she had eyes in the back of her head. Grannie M was always downtown at the bank and what ‘raisin’ we got, Kizzy gave us. You’re with the WPA?”

  “For a time I was, yes.” The girl couldn’t determine if the hair that fringed Josh’s balding pate was kinky or curly.

&nb
sp; “Kizzy says you are interviewing ex-slaves. Fascinating, just fascinating. Kizzy was Grannie’s house slave in Wilmington. Get Kizzy in the right mood and she’ll talk your ear off.”

  Leading a parade of children, a thin handsome woman brought in a candle-bedecked cake. “Birthday-cake time, everyone. Children, it’s apple cake, Grannie’s favorite!”

  “Hurrah for Grannie M!” a fair youth of eleven or twelve called.

  “Bill’s wife, Evelyn,” Josh identified the woman. “Selah’s boy, Jacob.”

  “What a handsome child! He’s like a faun.”

  When Marguerite sat beside her ancient servitor, Kizzy woke and mumbled and rubbed her eyes. With his aunt’s cigarette lighter, the fair youth cautiously lit the candles.

  “That’s a fine job, son, thank you.” Marguerite eyed the blazing candles skeptically. “It’s discomfiting to celebrate my birthday without knowing the exact date or, for that matter, the year. I was born . . .”

  “Oh, Grannie M,” Evelyn burst out. “Please don’t tell us about Cox’s snow.”

  The old woman stiffened. “I have not told you everything about Cox’s snow,” she snapped.

  “Happy birthday, Grandmother.” A plump beaming man hurried into the breach. “And many many more.”

  “That’s Bill Omohundru,” Josh identified his brother. “When the Volstead Act was repealed, Bill went on a tear, and I’m afraid he’s still on it. Right now he’s with MGM Pictures. The business end.” Josh put his hand to his heart and struck an exaggerated pose, “All true Omohundrus have a theatrical bent. Bill’s met Gable and Lombard—all of them.”

  “Your father, Jacob—that boy is his namesake?”

  Sorrow creased Josh’s face. “Yes. I suppose we all thought Father would go on forever. Jacob Omohundru died last August. Heart attack.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I miss him terribly. He was Harvard Law, you know—clerked for Justice Holmes. Has Grannie M told you about fleeing Wilmington with Jacob? It’s a wonderful yarn. She’d sewn her husband’s money—in English bearer bonds—into her skirt. Six months later, the war ended, she exchanged the bonds, and voilà!—a national bank is born!”