by Ed Gorman
She raised up on one elbow and looked down at him. Her beauty was greater without the clothes, the way her neck rose out of her shoulders and collarbone, the way her torso tapered into a waist so small he could wrap his hand around it.
“I swear I don’t know why General Hooker trusts you as his attaché,” she said, that faint teasing look on her face, the one that had entranced him two years before. “Best hope you never have to lie for him, Nathaniel Garrison.”
“You know I’m not supposed to tell you,” he said, drawing her down.
But she put her other arm on his chest, keeping her face above his. His eyes had adjusted to the dark. He could almost see her expression, could imagine it even though it wasn’t completely clear.
“Who am I gonna tell?” she asked. “Evangeline? She disappeared a month ago. The other wives? They’re fearing a summer siege on Washington and have gone farther north. There’s no one, Nate, no one I’d trust to tell, not and risk your life.”
He pulled her down, kissed her, wished he could stay even one more night. “You don’t need to know.”
“Sure I do. If you die, how’ll I know? Silence for months and then a casualty list? At least—”
“You can watch the battle, see the number of dead, and worry that I’m in it?”
She pushed herself up again. “I do that anyway, only now I do that with all of them. Maybe if there was only one—”
“We’re trying for Richmond again,” he said. She could always get him to tell her; she said it eased her mind. And knowing that she knew eased his. “And this time, I think we’ll take it.”
“You have a plan.”
“I don’t.” he said. “General Hooker does.”
“Is he as good as they say?”
“Better.” Garrison liked working with Hooker. So different from the other generals who had led the Array of the Potomac. The men were fed properly and had decent camps. Hooker had worked with the calvary until Garrison believed they could take on Jeb Stuart, and he knew how to use the abundance of men. “He’s given us our confidence back.”
“Good.” She laid her head on him, her hair falling across his face. “Where will you be?”
“Chancellorsville, most likely,” he said, “although there’s a chance I might be in Fredericksburg.”
“You don’t know?”
“It’s part of the same maneuver,” he said. “It just depends on where Hooker puts me. He usually likes me to be in the thick of the action, so that means Chancellorsville.”
“You’re splitting the army?”
“And hoping Lee heads the wrong way.”
She let out a small sigh, and said nothing for the Longest time. He stroked her hair, memorizing it, knowing he would keep this memory with him through the worst of the battle—the waiting.
“Why can’t you stay here? You delivered your dispatch to the president. They don’t need you.”
But they did. There were men who relied on him. They listened to him, much to his surprise.
“If I did that, love,” he said, “I’d be hunted for a deserter.”
“We could live in Michigan, or maybe Canada. Far from all this. Maybe go west. No one would care.”
“Except me.”
She was silent for a moment, then she said, “It’s like a game to you all, isn’t it? Diverting Lee, trying to cross into Richmond, getting the capital, like the king in a game of chess.”
He hadn’t expected the outburst, although he should have. She had done it before. “Chess doesn’t cost lives,” he said.
He hadn’t meant to. He tried to keep most of the reality of the war from her. He put his arm around her and pulled her back close. “Let’s not fight. I have to leave in the morning.”
She held the rigid posture for another moment, then collapsed against him. And he held her like he always did, as if it was going to be the last time.
MAY 6, 1863
He wasn’t even sure where he was. Somewhere in Virginia, but nowhere he recognized. His head ached. He had a lump on his forehead the size of a walnut, according to the man he was chained to. They were tied together like plow-horses, expected to eat and move and shit together like animals. He didn’t exactly know how he’d been captured, only that it had happened.
His last memories were of his rifle, hot in his hands, the bayonet bloody from the man he’d just stabbed, the morning sun rising, sending light and heat on the battlefield somewhere outside Chancellorsville.
Lee hadn’t retreated as Hooker thought he would. Faced with an army of superior size, Lee had charged forward, with strength and courage and fury. Hooker had expected Lee to turn tail and, for some reason, Garrison had thought that would happen, too; even though now, three days after the worst of it, three days after he’d been captured, he had no idea why. Lee was no coward, although some were saying Hooker was. Inept, cowardly, stupid. His plan had backfired. Somehow Lee had seen through the ruse at Fredericksburg, dodged the trap laid over the Rappahanock, and had come to Chancellorsville ready to fight.
And fight he had.
Garrison had lost his horse in the middle of it, the beast screaming and falling beneath him, throwing him clear. He hadn’t had time to see if the horse was dead—the momentum of the battle had carried him forward and he’d stabbed and shot and fought hand to hand with more men than he could remember, most of them younger than he was, most of them bloody and thin and filled with a fighting frenzy that seemed almost crazy.
He’d been fighting with his own frenzy, thinking how angry Serena would be if he died, how she would check the casualty lists and see his name, and that had driven him forward, over bodies, dead men, dead horses, and blood slicker than water on the ground. Forward until he heard—felt—a crack so loud that it shook the entire world, and then he had wakened, a day later, chained to other men, men who said they were sure he would die or never wake up because of the lump on his head.
They fed him, shared water with him, happy that he was awake and they wouldn’t have to drag his dead weight to wherever it was their guards were taking them.
Right now they sat in the woods, near thin underbrush and a copse of trees, and waited, as they had done before. Their guards were scouting the path ahead, leaving a handful behind to watch the prisoners.
Garrison thought this might be an opportunity, but he wasn’t sure what kind of opportunity it was—a wise one, a foolish one. He was chained by the legs and arms to men he didn’t know, and he saw no way of escaping without dragging them all with him. That wouldn’t work for even the first mile, and even in his most hopeful state, he knew it.
One of the guards, a man nearer to forty than thirty, had been watching Garrison for the last day, a smirk on his face every time he caught Garrison’s eye. He was one of the ones left behind, and when he saw Garrison staring at him, he smiled.
“I can get you special favors if you like,” the guard said, strolling toward him as if they were at a lawn party instead of in the woods.
Garrison frowned, felt the tug against the bump on his forehead. “Me?”
“You’re Nathaniel Garrison, ain’t you?” The guard smiled, revealing a gold tooth. He had bars on his gray uniform, gold bars, and tassels, too. He was someone, then.
“What’s it to you?”
“Ain’t had a chance to thank you.”
The men stirred around him. The ones chained to him moved away as if he were tainted. “For what?”
“Our greatest victory. Heard you made it possible, letting General Lee know he was facing a trap.”
“Wha—?” the man next to him started, but Garrison raised his right hand, stopping him.
“I haven’t spoken to Lee.”
“I know that.” The guard’s smile grew. “You didn’t speak to anyone except your wife. She says you was one of the toughest. Most men, they take a bit of tail now and then, but you was all proper, almost like a Southern gentleman, insisting on courtship and love and marriage. And she was willing, seeing what a prize
a man like you was. Right-hand man in the Army of Potomac, not to one, but to all of its generals. They liked you, didn’t they, Lieutenant?”
He rose, felt the chains hold him, but he stumbled forward anyway, and fell.
“Didn’t know that about your wife, now did you? Little Serena Freneau, one of P. G. T. Beauregard’s special ladies, doing the work of Rose Greenhow, but doing it better. So much better, landing a prize like you. Do you think she done it so that she could be with Beau after the war? Or do you think it was the glory all along, like she said? The glory and the cause of it—”
Garrison lurched forward, dragging the others with him, reaching for the guard’s boots, but the guard stepped out of the way and laughed.
“Don’t like the way the lady took you by your testicles and—”
“That’s my wife you’re lying about.”
“Lying?” The guard crouched, just outside of arm’s reach. “Lying? Her aunt run to Richmond before they could put her in the Old Capital Prison, didn’t you hear? Mrs. Cunliffe’s in London now, making sure the English know we need them at our side.”
“Don’t listen,” one of the other prisoners said. “He’s just trying to make you do something stupid so that he can shoot you.”
But the guard was watching Garrison like he was enjoying the reaction. He didn’t look like a man bent on shooting anyone.
“You couldn’t know this,” Garrison said.
“I’m on Beau’s staff,” the man said. “I got the report direct from your wife’s contact, like I got the others. Then they told me you was here, and I was to come take care of you. Make you an offer, Lieutenant Garrison. You can join our side and stay with your wife, or you can become a prisoner of war like the rest. We could use someone like you, with the knowledge of the Yank force from the inside out.”
Garrison stared at him, at the gold tooth that caught the sunlight, dazzling the rest of the man’s mouth and making his tobacco-stained teeth seem even dingier by comparison.
“Think on it, Lieutenant. These men here know your traitorous bent. They’ll make sure you pay when you get to whatever camp they’re sending you to. You can die there or you can come to Richmond, see your wife, spend the rest of your life in relative luxury.”
“By becoming an agent for the Confederacy.”
The guard nodded. “Now you’re thinking.”
And he was thinking of it, for just a brief moment. An agent for the Confederacy, getting information and somehow sending it back to Washington. But he needed a network for that, and if the United States Government knew about Serena, they would never trust his information.
Serena. Her face rose in his mind, the foxlike intensity, the way Evangeline Cunliffe had introduced them, the way Serena had smiled at him when she hadn’t given time to any of the other men. A setup, even then?
All this time, the warm words, the loving, all a diversion to get information?
Where will you be? she would ask, her voice sleepy, and he would tell her, things he had sworn to tell no one, thinking her an extension of himself, his wife, loyal to him and to all he was loyal to, believing as he did. Living as he did.
His wife.
“No,” he said. “I’ll never help your cause.”
Only the words came out thick and angry, and he wasn’t sure if he was talking about the Confederacy or Serena—her cause, not his, taken at the price of his trust.
Why was he believing a greasy guard with a single gold tooth, over the gestures of his wife, the woman he’d pledged to before God?
Because the man knew too much, too many things, and it put all the questions in perspective.
Where will you be?
“Surely, Lieutenant, your life is worth more than that,” the guard said.
And Garrison stared at him, out of reach, the anger cold in his stomach. A killing anger that would have rampaged through this small section of woods if he were only free.
Here I was hoping for a measure of freedom, she had said on that first evening.
And he had replied, so blithely, almost flirting, That seems to be what everyone is hoping for these days.
“Lieutenant? Are you reconsidering?” the guard asked.
“I gave you my answer,” Garrison said.
The guard frowned. “She thought you would do it for her.”
Garrison looked up, that last more appalling than anything that had come before. Appalling perhaps because it held some truth. If he hadn’t known of the betrayal, he might have joined her in Richmond, might have found a way to continue his marriage without sacrificing too much of his soul.
The thought rocked him to his very essence.
“It seems,” he said slowly, “that my wife doesn’t know me as well as she thought she did.”
It was an affliction they both had suffered from, although it looked, from his new vantage, as if he would suffer more for it.
If he lived.
MAY 20, 1864
“I’m sorry, sir,” the boy was saying. “I didn’t know.”
Of course not. Garrison hadn’t known, either. She had been so good at playing parts, not thinking of the consequences.
At least his discussion with the guard so long ago had done one thing. It had saved him from the wrath of the other prisoners. They had seen his face; they had known his betrayal of his own troops had been involuntary.
But he learned in the year to come, through rumor and discussion and the general torment of the guards who had learned who he was, the cost of his midnight confession. Seventeen thousand lives lost, and just on his side. Seventeen thousand in a battle they should have won.
How many other lives, from Shiloh to Fredericksburg, could be laid directly on his love for his wife? How many?
He would never know.
“I didn’t bring him here to have him tell you that.” Winthrop had his hand on Garrison’s arm. He could feel the bones of Winthrop’s fingers, the unnatural scaliness of his skin. Winthrop was dying. They were all dying, slowly, and of more diseases than Garrison had thought imaginable. Disease exacerbated by starvation, heat, and the god-awful stench.
Garrison looked away. “He’s not the first to tell me he’s had her.”
It explained why she was so practiced, when he was so inexperienced that he thought her skill normal for a woman of eighteen years. It explained so much.
All those nights he had thought of it, of her, going over the words they exchanged, the secrets, the way she had wheedled things out of him, even while he was discussing, first with Scott, then with Burnside, then Hooker, how to stop the flow of intelligence from the North to the South, how to deal with disloyal women like Rose O’Neal Greenhow, a society woman just like Evangeline Cunliffe, who had created such a stir by being imprisoned early in the war.
“Why, then?” he asked the boy. “Why are you here?”
The boy looked at the log stockade, the men sitting outside it, the dead line. He apparently thought Garrison wanted to know why he had come to Andersonville.
Garrison clarified. “What do you know about my wife?”
The boy winced at the word, but answered. He had more courage than Garrison wanted to acknowledge—or wanted to see. In a place like this, courage could get a man killed.
“Only that she’s dead, sir.”
That caught him. He saw, for a brief moment, her vivid brown eyes, remembered how, when he had looked in them on his wedding night, he knew she would outlive him. Nothing, he had thought then, could extinguish a flame like hers.
“How?”
“Drowned, sir. Trying to get back into the Confederacy. She’d been in England, and their ship was being pursued near the Carolina shoreline.”
“How do you know this?”
The boy looked down, his red whiskers standing out like bristles against the pasty skin. “I saw her, sir.”
Garrison frowned, trying to make sense of this. “You’re Navy?” They usually didn’t house Navy here.
The boy shook his head. “
I was called to identify her.” He studied his hands. “It was known that I…”
Garrison studied his own hands. It would take little for them to wrap around the boy’s throat and throttle him. It would actually be merciful, more merciful than living here, or slowly dying here, as they all were.
Instead he clenched his fists, placed them at his side in the baked clay, and asked, “Did the ship go down?”
“There was a storm, sir. She took a lifeboat, afraid their ship would run aground. If they caught her on it, apparently, she was to be hanged.”
Winthrop looked at Garrison. Garrison said nothing. So someone had found her out, long before the boy. And the boy, then, had been under suspicion, to see if he sent secrets to the enemy. Perhaps he had. Perhaps he was here because he had betrayed the wrong person.
Garrison didn’t care.
He got up, staggered away from the dead line, trying to avoid the men sprawled like corpses in the dirt.
She was dead, then. The light in those eyes gone forever. That dry humor, the softness of her pressed against him in the night. Gone. He wouldn’t have to face her, wouldn’t have to face that moment he had been certain would come, the one in which he would have to choose between his loyalty for his country and that passion, whatever it was, that he had felt for her.
It had been so easy in the woods. He had just found out; she hadn’t been before him. He could still feel the hurt like an open wound.
But what if she had told him? What if she had leaned against him in the night, after their loving, and told him, then said, as she had that last night, We could live in Michigan, or maybe Canada. Far from all this. Maybe go west. No one would care.
Except him, he had said.
Except him.
JUNE 17, 1911
He had a choice, he knew. He could walk away, chalk it up to coincidence, his illness, the dazed feeling men sometimes got while at sea.
But he remembered her eyes, their vividness, the way they had held him when she had said her vows, his certainty that she had more life force than he did.
Nothing, not rime, not infirmity, not wishful thinking, could keep him away from that table.
