Hell or Richmond (10 page)

Barlow was anxious to remove his own boots and bathe his feet. In the excitement of the day, his feet had behaved themselves, no more than a sneaking bother lurking in ambush. But as soon as his division coiled in, the itching had flared unbearably.

He wriggled his toes, loosening their sweat-grip on one another. It only made matters worse. The feeling that his toes and feet were trapped was maddening. It took all the self-control that he could muster not to stop and scratch right through his boots.

The itching faded again as his hackles went up. And not because of the pale litter of bones. No matter what the cavalry and his own patrols reported, he could feel the Confederates out there. How near, he couldn’t say with useful precision. But he sensed their vitality, their menace.

He expected fighting the next day, whether the grand plan called for it or not, and whatever Humphreys, Meade, or Hancock told themselves. It had the inevitability of a physical law, of chemical combinations in a laboratory: Lee would fight.

He could almost see gray columns in the dark.

And here he was, with his division halted in a poisoned spot where the stink of old defeat lingered all around. The thickets and scrub trees seemed to have grown even denser than they had been the previous year, fertilized with the blood and meat of the fallen. It was no place to fight, a worthless expanse of near jungle his division could have marched through to open ground. He understood the need to keep the army compact, the need for each corps to be in position to support the others, but some risks were worth taking, and seizing good terrain topped the list of reasons. God help the men who had to fight in these brambles.

As Barlow understood the order of march, the Rebels would strike Warren’s corps initially, since Lee’s men would be marching from the west and Warren would be smack in front of them—and watching his flank, Barlow hoped. Tonight, though, the threat arose from Stuart’s cavalry, who would love to pin the tail on a Union donkey again. Barlow did not mean to be that ass. And Fitz Lee’s horsemen had been spotted outside of Fredericksburg, which raised a nice proposition: If Robert E. Lee’s nephew attempted some dashing
coup,
it would be charming to take the fellow captive. Or kill him.

That was a pleasant fantasy and no more, Barlow understood. The twilight hours fostered that sort of musing. But tomorrow would be a very different story. Brigadier General Francis Channing Barlow had no doubt that he and his men would be drawn in, if the armies clashed in the Wilderness.

And if it came to a fight, he was damned well ready.

Challenged by a picket, he gave the parole and steered his mount between the Irish Brigade’s campfires. As ever, Smyth’s tenors wailed. Drunk or sober, the Irish were always singing about their abandoned paradise. If it was such a bloody heaven, Barlow wondered, why had they left in the first place? Ireland had to be madder than Rhode Island.

A dark shape in the purple night, Colonel Smyth appeared.

“General Barlow, me fine man,” Smyth called out, “all’s well from County Cork to Donegal. What can we do for ye on this fine May evening, sir?”

“Have you been drinking?” Barlow asked.

Late evening
New Verdiersville

Lee’s hand quivered as he sipped the buttermilk. He had been fond of the beverage since childhood, but the richness did not always agree with him these days. It would have been poor manners, however, to decline the offering from the Widow Rhodes. She had delivered the drink in a cut-glass goblet that was, he was certain, the pride of her household goods. Approaching him directly, she had presumed to renew their acquaintance of the past autumn, when the grounds of her house had harbored his headquarters tents in another desperate hour.

As the widow watched him drink, awe shone in her fire-lit eyes, the same near reverence he met too often now, a look akin to idolatrous love and the expectation of miracles. But Lee knew that he could not give them miracles, no more than he could digest this yellow poison.

“Be good for you, that will,” the widow told him. “You drink that up and you keep healthy for us’n.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Lee answered dutifully. “It’s a kindness. And I am grateful.”

She smiled, and motherly interest tangled with something less selfless. He thanked the good Lord that he was known to be married; otherwise, who knew what the endless parade of widows and aging maidens might expect?

“Well now,” Widow Rhodes picked up again, “there’ll be more of that in the morning, start you off right. And I told that Colonel Taylor how our Heraclea’s fetching a nice smoked ham for y’all. Just takes a mite of digging, Yankees coming and all.”

The poor woman froze, alarmed at the prospect that she had offended by implying that she expected those people to come, that she lacked faith in his protection.

“I’m glad, Mrs. Rhodes,” Lee told her, “that the brave women of Virginia show such foresight. We must conserve what we have and shun needless risks. Now … if you’ll allow me, I must tend to the army’s affairs.” He held up the barely touched glass of buttermilk. “I will take this delight slowly, the better to savor it.” He turned with the crispness of the young officer he once had been. “Colonel Marshall! My cup, if you please. I dare not expose Mrs. Rhodes’ fine glass to the hazards of war.”

Taking off his spectacles, Marshall moved with haste. The secretary knew as much about his general’s ailments as Lee revealed to any man but his surgeon. Steeling himself, Lee sipped a last time from the tinted glass. His hand trembled anew as he passed on the goblet to Marshall to transfer its contents. The show of frailty embarrassed him, but he did not attempt to mask it. The South, he now believed, had hidden too much from itself, for too many years. The time for truth-telling loomed.

But truth, as Mary had pointed out shortly after their wedding, is never an excuse for unsound manners. He let Marshall pour the buttermilk into a tin cup, but when the colonel moved to return the glass to the widow, Lee intervened and took it from his hand. With a delicate flourish, he passed it back to the widow.

“The generosity of our Virginia ladies,” he told her, “never fails to stimulate our courage.”

As she accepted the goblet, their fingertips touched. He feared that she would make too much of that, take unwarranted pride in it. They all had lifted him too high, and he worried not only that such an elevation offended the Lord, who asked of his children humility, but that he took too much satisfaction in it himself.

War endangered body and soul. And the threat to the soul was graver.

Sensing, as lonely women learn to do, that her welcome had expired, the widow trailed off across her untended lawns, heading back to the house she shared with a Negro girl.

Surprising Lee, the widow turned a last time, calling from a distance, her voice raised above the level of good breeding.

“Now don’t you forget that ham,” she ordered.

He would not forget the ham, but he would forgo it. Let the members of his staff enjoy a treat. Ham—seductive, salt-cured Virginia ham—was yet another of the pleasures denied him now. His stomach did best with chicken, sometimes eggs, and, on occasion, fresh beef, if it was cut finely. He worried that the end of the war, when it came, would find him as much an invalid as his wife, imprisoned in that house on East Franklin Street, where the variety of her days was but the shift from a bed to a wheelchair. The first time he had seen her walk on crutches, he had wept.

How could he doubt that he loved her? Or believe he loved this faithful army more? There were so many varieties of love. It would not be measured or weighed like tobacco or cotton, nor would it hold still. Certainly, what he felt for the tiny woman brought low by rheumatism and a medical roster of additional ailments differed from what he had felt toward the round-faced beauty with oiled hair and the mischievous look that had taken his heart by storm. But it was, indisputably, love. Was it not?

Poor Mary. She was younger than him.

As for
his
mortal coil, the decay was plain. His fifty-seven years had become a punishment. How long would he have the strength to lead the army, with no man he could trust as his replacement? His heart pains threatened betrayal, as if the organ wished to desert his chest, and his digestion was traitorous always. Nor had the outward man been spared. In three years of war, gently graying hair had turned the color of ashes and his beard had grizzled. As a youth, he had been vain, if quietly so. Now his only pride lay in his skill at commanding men on their way to their deaths.

He had sacrificed much for the South, for his Virginia. He had betrayed the oath he had sworn to the country and the army he had abandoned. Ennoble it as men might with splendid words, he had conspired in butchery. Yet, he felt a sinful degree of pride, clinging to it, unable to relinquish this last passion, this all-consuming, unquenchable mistress, War. He feared that his final sacrifice would be his immortal soul.

He prayed with all the humility and propriety he could muster, struggling to suppress the thoughts that plagued him, the guilt no man could see. He sought to lead a righteous life, but worried that he shared the pride of Lucifer. Were Mary’s pains a curse upon
his
head? Even his recent readings in the Book of Job seemed prideful now, any mental comparison a sacrilege. And what had become of Job’s daughters, after their father’s death? The daughters who tended the old man in his dotage? Had they married? Or had they squandered their lives on a selfish father?

Surrender took as many forms as love.

Lee stopped himself. He had to concentrate on the impending battle. As for the fate of his soul, God would decide.

“Colonel Marshall,” he said, “I would be grateful if you would see that Mrs. Rhodes’ buttermilk does not go to waste.” His smile struggled and faltered, but, as always, he drove on. “You might share it with Venable, if he’s still about. He has an abiding affection for the beverage.”

Glad of a hint of humor after a grueling day, Marshall answered, “Mrs. Rhodes hasn’t forgotten Charlie’s predilections, sir. She’s been pouring that stuff down his gullet since we got here. A fellow could begin to suspect her intentions.”

The witticism did not sit well with Lee. No better than did the buttermilk. A gentleman did not mock a widow’s conduct.

Marshall read Lee’s face and dropped the matter. He sipped the buttermilk, though.

The evening was warm for May, yet Lee felt the impulse to walk over to the fire the men had got up. Walter Taylor approached before he could move.

The assistant adjutant general said, “No further word from Stuart, sir, but Fitz Lee confirms Union cavalry moving east. It’s still a muddle, at least to me. We have reports of infantry moving south, away from us, and of infantry moving west, almost toward us. Other dispatches suggest Fredericksburg as Grant’s objective.”

“General Grant will have grander things in mind. He’ll want a fight, not a stroll into a town that’s his for the taking.”

“Yes, sir.”

Lee turned to look past the paleness of the four tents that sheltered his headquarters, staring into the dark and toward the east, in the direction where those people must be encamped.

“I do so want to hear more from General Stuart,” he continued. “Do Grant and Meade foresee a race to Richmond? Or do they covet the Mine Run line even now? I cannot refresh my orders to General Longstreet until I have a better sense of things.”

“Well, they’ve already lost the race to Mine Run, sir. If that’s their purpose. General Ewell has Early’s Division beyond it. And General Hill’s just a stretch from the old entrenchments, with cavalry out.”

Lee shuddered from a chill unfelt by others. “Those people moved well today. General Meade must be pleased with his army. And Grant with Meade, I should think.”

Taylor paused a few seconds, then pushed on with his summary of developments: “Generals Ewell and Hill have their amended orders, sir. Both corps move forward at dawn.”

“And they understand that I want them to
annoy
those people, if they find them still in the Wilderness? But that they must avoid decisive engagement?”

“Yes, sir. I put the order in General Ewell’s hand myself and watched him read it. And General Hill had no questions when he was here.”

Lee crossed his arms. “There are times when I prefer that General Hill
does
ask questions. Go on.”

“During their marches, Generals Hill and Ewell will coordinate with each other, with Ewell’s advance regulated by Hill’s. If the Federals move in strength against either wing, both corps are to withdraw to the Mine Run entrenchments. Then we—”

“I
want
those people to come on,” Lee interrupted. His plan had been developing through the day and he was thinking aloud now, something he permitted himself to do only in the presence of intimate members of his staff. “General Grant will have high expectations of himself, after his successes in the west. He will be confident, eager to prove himself here. We must make use of that. I expect Generals Ewell and Hill to tease those people, if the word is not too frivolous. We must lure them back to Mine Run and give General Longstreet an opening to flank them. As General Jackson did. Do we know if General Burnside is still above the Rappahannock?”

“Mosby’s people report Ninth Corps troops leaving Warrenton around noon. So General Burnside could have a division across the Rappahannock tonight, if he pushes hard. That would put the Ninth Corps south of the Rapidan late tomorrow.”

Lee looked toward the fire. The flames outlined familiar silhouettes. “General Burnside is a deliberate man by nature, made more so by experience. He will move slowly.” Lee permitted himself a temperate smile. “He will not be to General Grant’s taste, I fear.”

Burnside’s corps would not be up to support Meade’s three corps before the following night, Lee was convinced of it. And Burnside’s corps would be weary from the march when it arrived. Those thirty thousand troops could not influence the battle until the day after tomorrow, at the earliest. There was opportunity in that delay.