A Sound Among the Trees (33 page)

There is no garden for me to keep or uniforms for us all to sew or silver to polish, since it is all buried, or even cooking to do now that Tessie is here—she is a better cook than Grandmother, Eliza, and me put together—so I spend my days wondering and waiting to see what will become of us
.

14 December 1862
Holly Oak, Fredericksburg, Virginia

My dear Eleanor
,

I am glad you shall never see this letter. No one should have to read words as miserable as these will be. I would ask you to brace yourself, Eleanor, if I knew you would be reading this
.

Fredericksburg is decimated. Houses and stores lie in ruins, smoldering still, even as I write this. And among the shards of
devastation are the ruins of men. Blood, like the Rappahannock after too much rain, runs everywhere—in every frozen field, on every gray street, in every parlor of every house still standing in Fredericksburg. Our downstairs has been transformed into a hospital for dying Northern men. It is too much for the mind to make sense of. Hospitals are places to get well. But our odd hospital is a place to bleed and groan and die
.

How can I begin to record for you what has transpired here? We awoke three days ago to the warnings of gunfire and the sight of Union soldiers on the other side of the river lacing pontoon bridges together—bridges wide enough for many men to march across. On the banks, wagons and Union soldiers—as far as my eye could see—stood ready to cross. And if that weren’t appalling enough, in the ethereal morning mist, two giant orbs floated above the bridge builders—like strange, silent ghosts—balloons that carried armed Yankee surveyors. Every so often a Union cannon would boom and we would see the blink of its fiery charge. From my mother’s bedroom window I could see various bridge builders fall into the water as Confederate sharpshooters, crouched in the windows of nearby houses, picked them off. But others quickly took their places
.

When we first awoke, Eliza was nowhere in the house. But she soon returned and told us, with great intensity, that we must leave at once, that all the rest of Fredericksburg was also fleeing. Fleeing to where, I wondered? Where would we go? When Grandmother said she’d rather die than let a Yankee desecrate Holly Oak, Eliza grudgingly instructed us to take blankets and candles to the cellar and as much food from the pantry as we could carry. Tessie moved at once to obey. Her urgency compelled me to set about Eliza’s directions. But Grandmother chased after Eliza, demanding to be told what the Union soldiers were doing. As I raced up the stairs to gather my
blankets, I heard Eliza exclaim, “For heaven’s sake, Mother. Isn’t it obvious what the Union soldiers are doing? They are building a bridge!”

Mama was reluctant to leave her room. When I told her she could take all of Papa’s pictures and books with her to the cellar, she began to slowly gather her things. By late morning we had the cellar floor lined with jugs of water and blankets and candles. We came back into the house for a quick meal and soon learned our timing had been providential. Not long after the clock struck noon, the sporadic booming of guns became instead a piercing hailstorm of wrath. There are no words to describe the sound of it, Eleanor. It was as if God Himself were splitting the sky in two and raining down destruction on us. Only this was not of God. These were Union soldiers and their barrage of shells
.

Holly Oak shuddered against the assault, and we ran to the cellar. My mother, thinking it was the end for us, was actually smiling as we hurried her down the stairs. She believed she would be in heaven with Papa in a matter of minutes. And as I heard something wicked and demanding slam into the wall next to us, I nearly believed I would see him too
.

All afternoon we cowered in the cellar, the five of us, listening to the hostile roar and wondering if Holly Oak broke apart above us, would she entomb us or protect us? Would we die in her loving embrace or in the collapse of her furious ruin?

We huddled and prayed and waited for the nightmare to end. When at last there was quiet, we emerged from the cellar. Holly Oak still stood. We stepped outside onto our porch, and Grandmother nearly fell into my arms with the shock of what we saw. Columns of smoke, banners of dying flame, and shattered homes and buildings. Night had fallen. It was too dark to see the ruin in its entirety. My
grandmother began to cry, something I had never heard her do. Mama, moved by her mother’s tears of grief, took her inside. Tessie followed them
.

As Eliza and I stood on our steps and looked to the plumes of smoke coming from the direction of Princess Anne Street and the haberdashery, I asked her if we could sleep in our beds that night. Was it over?

And she said it was only beginning
.

We did sleep in our beds. I lay awake for a long time, and it was nearly dawn when I finally fell asleep. I was awakened midmorning by Eliza and other sounds. I heard a far-off yelling. And voices in our entry. She was sitting on my bed next to me. She had shaken me awake
.

“What is it? What’s going on?” I said
.

She hushed me. “Susannah. You must do exactly what I tell you. You must stay in your bed and pretend to be ill. Do you understand? Under no circumstances are you to get out of your bed. You are ill.”

The voices downstairs were male
.

“What is happening?” I asked. I started to get up, but she pushed me back onto my pillow. She placed a hot compress on my forehead. It burned
.

“The Yankees have crossed the bridges. They are in Fredericksburg. They are here. And they are downstairs.”

I heard footsteps on the stairs. The Yankees were outside my door. Grandmother was yelling at them. One of them yelled back at her. And then my door was thrust open
.

I gasped and Eliza pinched my arm. She held the compress to my head with her other hand
.

“Get out of my house!” Grandmother was yelling. I had no idea where Tessie and my mother were
.

One of the soldiers took a step inside. He looked young, and he was not an officer. “What have we here?” he said
.

“My niece is very ill. You risk contagion if you come any closer. I do not advise it.” Eliza said in that calm voice she has. The soldier stared at me. My chest was heaving—in fear, not illness—but to him it must have appeared that I was deathly sick. He took a step back out
.

“Keep this door closed then!” he barked, as though he were a pharaoh or a god. He turned to my grandmother. “We’d like breakfast. And tobacco. And some decent coffee.”

“You’ll not get a—,” she began, but Eliza stood and interrupted her. “Come sit with Susannah, Mother. I will make these scoundrels breakfast.” The soldiers laughed heartily and proceeded to tell Eliza they would also like hot baths and a shave. Grandmother looked as if she would spit daggers. Eliza gently guided her into the room to take her place at my bedside. Then she left with the soldiers, closing the door behind her
.

“What has happened?” I whispered to my grandmother. “Where is my mother?”

Grandmother sprang off the bed and began to pace the floor, surely to cool her anger. “Your mother is sitting in the parlor with a cup of tea as if it’s Easter Sunday. As if those damned Yankees haven’t plundered what is left of the city. They are looting every store they haven’t smashed to bits with their cannons, and they are dumping the contents of bureau drawers into the streets and tossing furniture out of windows. It is hell outside your window, Susannah.”

I rose from my bed and parted my curtains. In the sallow glow of a December sun, I saw the smoldering ruins of my street—timbers, stone, and glass—and the incongruous addition of beds and broken pianos and chairs and tea carts, all strewn about with plumed hats, hoops, and parasols, as if there had been a concert for
sick people in the street and a devil had come and scattered the musicians and spectators with a giant hammer. A couple of soldiers were laughing as they pretended to waltz, drunk and wearing hoop skirts and summer hats. A stray horse galloped past them, dodging debris. The stretch of destruction in the street had no end
.

Before, the Yankees had wanted what we had; now it appeared they wanted to destroy what we had. Eleanor, I do not understand what these Yankees hoped to gain by such senseless destruction. I think I might have whispered, “Why?” at the window
.

I turned back to my grandmother. She had stopped pacing. “Why does Eliza want you to stay in bed and pretend you are ill?”

I was about to say I didn’t know, but then I looked at the warm whiteness of my feather bed and remembered what lay hidden inside it. My grandmother didn’t know about the uniforms. And apparently Eliza did not want these Yankees to know about them either
.

“She didn’t tell me why,” I said as I climbed back into bed and replaced the compress
.

By late afternoon, Holly Oak was bursting with Yankees who were tired of sleeping in tents and eating camp stew. They wanted the warmth of our house and full bellies and every tin of tobacco my grandfather had. I stayed in my bed as Eliza had asked me to. Mama joined me in my room later and then Grandmother, and then finally at nightfall Eliza and Tessie joined us. Grandmother gave Eliza a grating look for bringing Tessie into my bedroom, but Eliza just said it was not safe for a woman of any color downstairs
.

The house was quiet when we awoke. Eliza went downstairs first. She came back within minutes and told us the Yankees who had slept in Holly Oak were gone but we were to prepare ourselves for how they had occupied themselves during the night. We dressed and then made our way downstairs. The rooms smelled of wood smoke and tobacco and men. Evidences of where they had eaten and slept
were everywhere, and they had burned nearly every chair and table in the fireplaces, obviously intoxicated with warmth after many nights sleeping in a tent. The larger tables were too big to burn, and the sofas and rugs were too convenient a place to sleep to have wanted to burn them. They had drunk all of Grandfather’s whiskey and port and the remains of glasses and decanters lay in sticky pieces across the parlor floor. The pantry was strewn about with the remnants of their meals. Every jar that we hadn’t brought down into the cellar with us was empty and broken. Every tin had been opened and scraped clean. On our back doorstep I found the heads of our two remaining chickens along with their feet and feathers. I found out later the soldiers had roasted them in the drawing room fireplace. And had relieved themselves wherever they pleased
.

We took it all in in stunned silence. Tessie was the first to find a broom and begin to clean up
.

I asked Eliza where the soldiers had gone. And then I heard gunfire and the booming of cannons, and I knew. They had gone to fight
.

We checked on our immediate neighbors, but they had fled during the night. After we had cleaned the worst of the filth, we again retreated back to the cellar. The battle was being waged where the Confederate army had dug their trenches on Marye’s Heights, a mile or so away from us. It was not safe for us to leave, and it was not safe to stay
.

By midafternoon the wounded started pouring back into the city. And the dead were carried in. Eleanor, I have never seen the human body treated this way. Were I to describe it to you, you would think I was a demon. These men, no doubt the same who had reveled in our streets the night before, were now half-men, crawling and being carried through our streets, some without arms, some without legs, some, if you could believe it, without faces
.

No one asked if they could bring the bleeding men into Holly Oak or any of the other houses still standing. They just began to bring them in. And the Yankee doctors did not ask us to help them with their horrific task; they just handed us a basin or towel or—God preserve me—a saw and told us to hold this or pull that or take this outside. And as we obeyed, we heard the soldiers talking, crying, pleading, cursing, and praying
.

As the cold day gave way to an even colder night and the ghastly work continued, we learned that the Confederate army had held the Yankees. The Union soldiers had not been able to gain the Heights. Most of the dead and wounded—hundreds of them—still lay in the field, where one soldier said you could not take a step without walking atop a dead or wounded man. He said he was able to be spirited away but many others could not even raise an arm to signal a stretcher bearer because Confederate riflemen on the Heights would shoot it clean off. This same man grabbed me with the one arm he had left and asked if I had a Bible. He was pale with blood loss and had a hole in his torso where something round and black had careened into him and then sped out the other side. I said we did, and as I left to go find it, I heard Eliza ask the man what unit he was from. He said the Twentieth Maine, and she straightaway asked if he knew John Towsley and Will Black. I hurried back to the man’s side. The soldier asked if they were the West Point cadets that joined up with them in October. And Eliza said yes, they were. She asked if John and Will were also out there on that field where he had been. And I sensed a rare thing in her voice. Dread. It matched the fear that had immediately sprung into my heart as well
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