Chickamauga and Other Civil War Stories

  On a hot July morning she was waxing the dining room table—a task she had always reserved for herself because it gave her a particular pleasure—when suddenly she paused and a peculiar expression came over her face, the expression of someone about to sneeze. Then she did; she sneezed loudly. “God bless me,” she said, automatically, and went on with her work, applying the wax in long, even strokes. Presently she raised one hand to her forehead, palm outward, fingers relaxed. “I feel so dizzy,” she said. She looked frightened. Isaac reached her just as she fell. He carried her to a couch in the living room and knelt beside her, patting her wrists. Her breath came in harsh stertorous groans.

  “Katy!” Isaac kept saying. “Katy, dont you know me?”

  She did not know him; she did not know anything. Foam kept forming on her lips and Isaac wiped it away with his handkerchief. Two Negroes stood in the background. There was nothing they could do. All the doctors were off to war, but that was just as well since there was nothing they could have done either. It was a cerebral hemorrhage and she died within four hours.

  Next day they buried her in the cedar grove, at the near end of the row of small, weathered crosses. Isaac was dry-eyed at the burial; he did not seem to understand what had happened. He was bewildered at last by mortality, by a world in which a person could sneeze and say, “God bless me: I feel dizzy,” and then be dead. He was eighty-six years old.

  3

  All but three of the slaves had left by then, gone on their own or as dish-washers and ditch-diggers with the Union armies which had roamed the district at will and without real opposition since early ’64. There was Edward, the butler, who was almost seventy, the last of the original ten who had come with Isaac in the Conestoga north from Natchez. He was stone deaf, a tall, straight-backed Negro, mute and inscrutable behind his wall of dignity and deafness. The other two were women; both were old, one lame (she did the cooking, what there was to cook) and the other half-witted. These three lived in one of the cabins that formed a double row, called the Quarters, half a mile behind the house. The other cabins were empty, beginning to dry rot from disuse, and the street between the rows, formerly grassless, polished by generations of bare feet until it was almost as smooth and shiny as a ballroom floor, was beginning to spring up in weeds. When Mrs Jameson died Edward moved into the house with Isaac. Five weeks later the two women joined them because a Federal platoon, out on patrol, burned the quarters.

  That was in August. Near sundown the platoon made bivouac in a pasture near the house. The cooks set up their kitchen and sent out a three-man detail for firewood. They were tearing up the floorboards in one of the cabins, the planks making sudden, ripping sounds like musketry, when one of the soldiers happened to glance up and see a tall yellow woman, her face pitted with old smallpox scars, standing in the doorway watching them. She clasped her wrists over her stomach and watched them gravely. It gave him a start, finding her there like that without having heard her approach.

  “Yawl bed not be doing that,” she said when the soldier looked at her.

  The others paused too, now. They stood leaning forward with half-ripped planks in their hands. Their uniforms were dusty, still sweaty from marching all that afternoon. “Why not, aunty?” the first said. His speech was Southern, though obviously from north of Mississippi.

  “I’ll tell Mars Ike and he’ll tell his boy: thats why. And the genril he’ll come back and git you, too, what time he hears you messing with his belongings like you doing.”

  They resumed their work, tearing up the floorboards with a splintering, ripping sound, and the sunlight slanting through the western window was filled with dust-motes. Then one of them said casually, “What general would that be, aunty?”

  “Genril Cli Jameson, Mars Ike’s boy. You see if I dont.”

  Again they paused, once more with the ends of half-ripped planks in their hands. But this time it was different. They looked at her, all three together, and something like joy was registered on their faces. “Does this belong to him, that house and all these shanties?”

  “Does indeed, and you best quit or I’ll tell him. I’m a mind to tell him anyhow, the way yawl acting.”

  “Well,” the first said, still not moving, still bent forward. “Well, well. What do you know.”

  Then he moved. He finished prizing up the plank he had hold of, took a jackknife from his pocket, one of the big horn-handled ones the suttlers sold in such volume every payday, and began to peel shavings from the edge of the plank. It was cypress, long since cured, and the shavings came off straight and clean, a rich pink almost red. The other two watched him for a moment, puzzled. Then they understood and began to do the same, taking out their knives and peeling shavings from other planks. They worked in silence, all three together. They were from a Tennessee Union regiment—what their enemies called home-made Yankees. All three had week-old beards.

  “That damned butcher,” the third said. He had not spoken until now. “Aint it funny what luck will sometimes throw your way?”

  The woman watched them without understanding, still with her hands crossed on the bulge of her stomach, while one of the soldiers scraped the shavings into a small pile in one corner of the room. He laid planks across it, first the split ones and then whole ones, building a tepee of lumber. When he had finished this he took a tinder box from the pocket of his blouse, then bent and struck it so that a shower of sparks fell into the heart of the little heaped-up pile of cypress shavings. At first it merely smoked and glowed. Suddenly a flame leaped up, bright yellow, then orange, then rose-colored, licking the wall of the cabin.

  “Yawl bed not be doing that,” the woman said again, her voice as flat, as inflectionless as at the start.

  The soldiers stood watching the fire. When it was burning nicely they gathered up the remainder of their ripped-up floorboards and started for the pasture where by now the cook had begun to beat with a big spoon against the bottom of a dishpan to hurry them along. One paused at the foot of the steps, turning with the bundle of planks on his shoulder. The others stopped beyond him, looking back and smiling as he spoke. “Tell him thats for Fort Pillow, aunty. Tell him it’s from the friend of a man who was there.”

  Fifteen minutes later Isaac and Edward and the lame cook, and presently the half-witted woman too, stood on the back gallery and watched the quarters burn. “I told um not to, plain as I’m standing here talking to you right now,” the woman said. There was no wind, not a breath; the flames went straight up with a sucking, roaring sound like the rush of something passing at great speed. Even deaf Edward, though he could not hear it, felt its deep murmuring whoosh against his face. He turned his head this way and that, as if he had recovered his hearing after all those years of silence.

  The Federal platoon, the men in collarless fatigue blouses and galluses, many of them smoking pipes while they waited for supper, gathered at the back of the pasture to watch the progress of the fire. They leaned their elbows on the top rail of the fence, and as the dusk came on and the flames spread from cabin to cabin along the double row, flickering brighter and brighter on their faces, they made jokes at one another up and down the line. Soon the cook beat again on the dishpan with the spoon and they lined up with messkits in their hands. The fire burned on. It burned steadily into the night, its red glow reflected against the underside of the pall of smoke hanging over the plantation. From time to time a roof fell in, occasionally two together, and a bright rush of sparks flew upward in a fiery column that stood steadily upright for a long moment, substantial as a glittering pillar of jeweled brass supporting the black overhang of smoke, before it paled and faded and was gone.

  Next morning when Isaac came out of the house he found the pasture empty, the soldiers gone, with only an unclosed latrine and a few charred sticks of the cook-fire to show they had been there at all. He walked down to where the quarters had been, and there were only the foundation stones and the toppled chimneys, the bricks still hot among the cooling ashes. The cabins had bee
n built during the ten-year bachelor period between his arrival and his marriage—sixteen cabins, two rows of eight, put up during the ten-year span by a five-man building team who snaked the big cypresses out of a slough, split them with axes and crosscut saws for timbers and planks and shingles and even pegs to save the cost of nails. They had been good cabins, snug in winter, cool in summer, built to last; they had seen forty years of living and dying, laughing and weeping, arrival and departure. Now they were gone, burned overnight, casualties of the war.

  As he turned at the end of the double row, starting back, a great weariness came over him. He stood there for a moment, arms loose at his sides, then returned to the house. He went up the steps and across the gallery. In the kitchen a strange thing happened to him.

  The cook was boiling something on the stove, stirring it with a long-handled spoon, and as he came past he intended to ask her, ‘Is breakfast ready?’ But that was not what he said. He said, “Is breck us riding?”

  “Sir?”

  He tried again. “Has bread abiding?”

  “Sir?” The cook looked at him. She had turned sideways, still bent forward over the pot, and the spoon dripped a thin white liquid. It was cornmeal mush; she would boil it to a thicker consistence, then cook it into cakes to be served with sorghum. With her crooked leg, bowed back, and lips collapsed about her toothless mouth so that her nose and chin were brought into near conjunction, she resembled a witch. “Sir?” she said.

  Isaac made a gesture of impatience and went on toward the front of the house. His arms and legs were trembling; there was a pulsing sensation in his head, immediately behind his eyes, a throbbing produced by pressure. Something is happening to me! he thought. He could think the words clearly: ‘Is breakfast ready?’ but when he tried to say them they came out wrong. Words came out that were not even in his mind as he spoke. Something has happened to me! he thought.

  These were the first signs of motor aphasia, the words coming wrong from his tongue. They were not always wrong; sometimes he could speak with no trouble at all. But sooner or later a word or a phrase, unconnected with what he intended to say, would substitute itself. Then the lame cook or the half-witted woman, who was supposed to be the housemaid but who actually did nothing, would look at him with puzzled eyes. “Sir?” they would say, feeling awkward. They did not know whether it was a mishap or a joke; they did not know whether to worry or to laugh. So Isaac avoided them, preferring the company of Edward, who did not hear him anyhow, whether the words were correct or wrong, accurate or garbled.

  Mostly, though, he kept to himself, avoiding any need for speech. His favorite pastime now was to walk eastward beyond the burnt-out quarters and on to where a Choctaw village had been, a pottery center with its clay deposit which he in his turn had used for making bricks. He remembered the Indians from fifty years ago, going north in their filthy blankets, braves and squaws, dispossessed by a race of men who were not only more cunning but who backed their cunning with gunpowder and whiskey. They were gone now, casualties not of war but of progress, obsolete, and had left no sign of their passing except the shards of pottery and arrowheads turned up by plowmen, the Indian mounds scattered at random about the land for archeologists to guess at, and an occasional lift to the cheekbones in a Negro face and a cocoa tint to the skin.

  Isaac had never been one for abstract thinking; but now, reft of his vocation by the war, of his wife by death, and of speech by whatever had gripped his brain and tongue, he asked himself certain questions. It was as if, now that he could no longer voice them, the words came to him with great clarity of mind. Remembering the Indian days, the exodus, he applied what he remembered to the present, to himself. Was it all for nothing, the distances, the ambition, and the labor? He and his kind, the pioneers, the land-grabbing hungry roughshod men who had had, like the flatboat river bullies before them, that curious combination of bravado and deadly earnestness, loving a fight for the sake of the fight itself and not the outcome—were they to disappear, having served their purpose, and leave no more trace than the Choctaws? If so, where was the dignity of man, to be thrown aside like this, a worn-out tool? He remembered the land as it was when he first came, a great endless green expanse of trees, motionless under the press of summer or tossing and groaning in the winds of spring and fall. He ringed them, felled them, dragged them out; he fired the stumps so that the air was hazed with the blue smoke of their burning, and then he had made his lakeside dream a reality; the plowmen came, the cotton sprouted, and he prospered; until now. The earth, he thought, the earth endures. He groped for the answer, dealing with such abstract simplicities for the first time since childhood, back before memory. The earth, he thought, and the earth goes back to the sun; that was where it began. There is no law, no reason except the sun, and the sun doesnt care. Its only concern is its brightness; we feed that brightness like straws dropped into its flame. Fire! he thought suddenly. It all goes back to fire!

  At last he gave up the walks and spent his days in a big armchair in the parlor, keeping the curtains drawn. He had nothing to do with anyone but the deaf butler, with whom speech was not only unnecessary but impossible. Edward brought him food on a tray, such as it was—mostly the cakes of boiled-down gruel, with sorghum and an occasional piece of sidemeat—but Isaac scarcely touched it. He lost weight; the flesh hung loose on his big frame; his temples were concave, his eyes far back in their sockets. Sometimes, alone in the darkened parlor, he tried to form words aloud, listening to what came out when he spoke. But it was worse than ever. Often, now, the sounds were not even words. I’m talking in the tongues, he thought, remembering the revivals and sanctifyings he had attended around Natchez as a young man, a scoffer on the lookout for excitement. He had seen and heard whole creekbanks full of people writhing and speaking gibberish—’the tongues’ they called it; they claimed to understand each other in such fits. God had touched them, they said.

  Maybe God had touched him too, he thought. He had never been religious, never having felt the need for it—not even now, when a general revival was spreading through the armies and the civilian population of the South—yet he knew nothing of aphasia, either by name or contact, and it seemed to him there must be some reason why he had been stricken like the fanatics on the creekbank; there must be some connection. But if it was God it was punishment, since it had not come through faith. He must be under judgment, just as maybe the whole nation was, having to suffer for the double sin of slavery and mistreatment of the land. Presently, however, this passed and he let it go; he stopped considering it at all, and he stopped trying to talk. He went back to his previous conviction. No, no, he thought, alone in the parlor with the curtains drawn. It’s the sun and we go back there, back to fire.

  In late October, a time of heat—the long hot summer of ’64 had held; dust was everywhere over the empty fields—he was sitting in the armchair and he heard footsteps on the driveway. There was a chink of spurs, then boot-heels coming hard up the front steps. They crossed the veranda. For a moment there was silence, then a rapping of knuckles against the door jamb. A voice: “Hello!” Another silence, somehow more pregnant than the one before. And then: “Hello in there!”

  To Isaac all this seemed so loud that even Edward must have heard it. But when he turned and looked at him he saw that the butler was still locked behind his wall of deafness; he stood beside Isaac’s chair, looking morosely at nothing at all. He had a toothache and the cook had put a wad of cotton soaked in camphor inside his cheek, binding the bulged jaw with a dinner napkin tied at the crown of his head. It was one of Mrs Jameson’s best pieces of linen, big and heavy, and the two corners of the folded napkin stood up stiffly from the knot.

  While Isaac watched, the Negro turned his face toward the door, his eyes coming suddenly wide with surprise. Then Isaac heard the voice again, the crisp Northern accent: “Didnt you hear me out there?” Footsteps approached and the voice began again, repeating the question, but was cut off by a surprised intake of breath. Then
Isaac saw him. A Federal officer, complete with sword and sash and buttons stamped US, stood on the hearth. They looked at one another.

  Isaac saw that the officer was a young man—rather hard-looking, however, as if the face had been baked in the same crucible that had hardened and glazed the face of his son Clive—and he thought: It’s something the war does to them; North and South, they get this way after a time because nowdays the wars go on too long. Then as they looked at each other, one on the hearth and the other in the chair, Isaac knew why the officer was there. He steadied himself to speak, intending to say, ‘Have you come to burn my house?’ But it did not come out that way; he spoke again in the tongues.

  The lieutenant, whose rank Isaac saw when he bent forward, listened to Edward’s explanation of the garbled language, then said carefully: “I have come to give you notice, notification.” He paused, cleared his throat, and continued. He spoke carefully, not as if he were choosing his words, but as if from a memorized speech. “In reprisal for sniping, by a party or parties unknown, against the gunboat Starlight at sundown yesterday, I inform you now, by order of Colonel Nathan Frisbie, United States Army, that this house has been selected to be burned. You have exactly twenty minutes.”

  Isaac sat watching the hard young face, the moving lips, the bars on the shoulders. The lips stopped, stern-set, but he still watched. “Fire,” he said or intended to say. “It all began and ends in fire.”

  Full in our faces the big low blood-red disk of the sun rested its rim on the levee, like a coin balanced lengthwise on a knife edge. We marched westward through a wilderness of briers and canebrakes, along a road that had been cleared by the planters in their palmy days to haul cotton to the steamboat landing for shipment to New Orleans. The column had rounded the head of the lake and turned toward the river where the gunboat waited. Four miles in our rear, beyond the lake, the reflection of the burning house was a rose-and-violet glow to match the sunset in our front.