The March (2 page)

And, as they watched, the brown cloud took on a reddish cast. It moved forward, thin as a hatchet blade in front and then widening like the furrow from the plow. It was moving across the sky to the south of them. When the sound of this cloud reached them, it was like nothing they had ever heard in their lives. It was not fearsomely heaven-made, like thunder or lightning or howling wind, but something felt through their feet, a resonance, as if the earth was humming. Then, carried on a gust of wind, the sound became for moments a rhythmic tromp that relieved them as the human reason for the great cloud of dust. And then, at the edges of this sound of a trompled-upon earth, they heard the voices of living men shouting, finally. And the lowing of cattle. And the creaking of wheels. But they saw nothing. Involuntarily, they walked down toward the road but still saw nothing. The symphonious clamor was everywhere, filling the sky like the cloud of red dust that arrowed past them to the south and left the sky dim, it was the great processional of the Union armies, but of no more substance than an army of ghosts.

CLARKE HAD IN
his foraging party a two-wagon train, a string of three extra mules, and twenty men mounted. General orders specified no fewer than fifty men. He was several miles off the column, and so, coming upon the plantation, he resolved to make quick work of it.

As they rode onto the grounds he immediately saw, and ignored, the slaves standing there. He shook his head. They had their old cracked drummers’ cases and cotton sacks tied up with their things on the ground beside them. He posted his pickets and set the men to work. In the yard behind the outbuildings, the fodder stack was a smoking pile, flakes of black ash blowing off in the breeze. There were three mules with their heads blown all to hell. His orders were to respond to acts of defiance commensurately. Nor was he less determined when the men marched out of the dairy with sacks of sugar, cornmeal, flour, and rice on their shoulders. In the smokehouse, the shelves sagged with crocks of honey and sorghum. Hanging from hooks were the sides of bacon and cured hams the Massah didn’t have time for the taking. And one of the bins was filled with a good two hundred pounds of sweet potatoes.

The men worked with a will. They slaughtered the sows, but somehow, from someone’s incompetence, the chickens flew the coop. There commenced a holy racket—enough to bring the Negro children running. They laughed and giggled and leapt around happily as the soldiers dived for shrieking hens and struggled to tie squawking geese by their legs. Everyone is having a good time, Clarke thought. It’s a happy war, this.

He was one of the few Easterners in the Army of the Tennessee. As such, he was not as easygoing and, to his mind, provincial, as most of the men. Even the junior officers were scarcely literate. Clarke, on duty at the White House, had carried a letter from the President to General Sherman’s headquarters in Allatoona. He arrived in the midst of battle. Afterward, the General had simply told him to stay on. Presumably, a wire had been sent to Washington, but still, it was all very casual, and quite humiliating to Clarke that his service could be determined in such an offhand manner.

Now something else was troubling him. Where was the stock? He went around to the front of the manse and spoke to the tall gray-haired Negro who said his name was Jacob Early. Early led him beyond the slave quarters into a woods and past a little graveyard, and then downhill, where the ground became soggy. Behind a stand of bamboo was a swamp where the Massah had thought to drown his cows. Five cows were still standing in scum up to their withers, impassive, uncomplaining. A calf had succumbed and was half floating, only its rump out of the water. It took several of the men hauling on ropes to get them out of there. And it took time. They butchered the calf. The cows were brought to the wagons and tied to clop along behind.

The takings were a good day’s work, but the hour was well past the meridian. The men now took it upon themselves to explore the house and see what they could find for their amusement. Impatient as he was to get moving, Clarke knew better than not to go along. This was an example of orders issued unspoken from the rank and file. It was not something for which he could give a coherent explanation in a letter home. In the great mass of men that was an army, strange currents of willfulness and self-expression flowed within the structure of military discipline. The best officers knew when to look aside. Even the generals issued orders for the sake of the record only. For Clarke, all of this was unsettling. He liked order. Discipline. He kept his own person neat and clean-shaven. His uniform brushed. His knapsack packed correctly. His writing paper secured in oilskin. But foraging was daring duty, and attracted free sprits. His bummers liked their independence. They liked to benefit themselves, and they could do so with impunity, because their takings were crucial to the success of an army designed by General Sherman to live, unencumbered, off the land.

A domed skylight lit the honey-colored hardwood floors of the front hall. A rather elegant curved staircase with trumpet balusters led to the second-floor landing. A window halfway up was stained glass. As a Bostonian, Clarke was continually shocked by the grandeur of these mansions risen up from the fields in the rural South. There was such wealth to be got from slave labor, it was no wonder these people were fighting to the death.

In the dining room, Privates Henry and Gullison had found in the sideboard a tray with cut-glass decanters of bourbon. They joined the others around the piano in the parlor, and when Clarke heard the first chords struck he considered what tactics he might employ to move his men out. The pianist was Private Toller. His plump hands ran over the keyboard with surprising authority. Clarke had not attributed to Pudge Toller any skills whatsoever beyond eating and drinking.

Sergeant Malone offered cigars from a humidor. The men sang:

Just before the battle, Mother

I was drinking mountain dew.

When I saw the Rebels marching,

To the rear I quickly flew!

Clarke accepted a cigar and let Sergeant Malone hold a match to it. Then he mounted the grand staircase, and in one room after another he gutted the upholstery and the mattresses and used the butt of his sword to smash the windows and the mirrors. All this was heard to effect, for in a few minutes several of the men were upstairs with him, taking axes to the furniture, tearing the curtains down, and soaking everything with kerosene.

There was an attic floor, and when Clarke went up there he was stunned to find a child—a girl, bare-legged—standing in front of a mirror and wrapping around her shoulders a beautiful red shawl with threads of gold as calmly as if the house weren’t being destroyed under her. Only when she raised her eyes and stared back at him in the mirror did he realize she was a white Negro, white like white chocolate. Her chin lifted, she regarded him as if she were the mistress of the house. She couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen, barefoot, in a plain frock to her knees, but caped by the shawl into a shockingly regal young woman. Before he could say anything, she darted past him and down the stairs. He caught a glimpse of smooth white calves, the shawl flying behind her.

THERE WAS NOTHING
else for it but to let the darkies find places for themselves and their belongings in the wagons, sitting amid the plunder or up beside the teamsters. They had come up with a pony cart for the old granny. Clarke was made somber by their joy. They could not be usefully conscripted. They were a hindrance. There would be no food for them, and no shelter. About a thousand blacks were following the army now. They would have to be sent back, but where? We do not leave a new civil government behind us. We burn the country and go on. They are as likely to be recaptured as not—or worse, with guerrillas riding in our wake.

The men had thrown their torches through the windows, and now the first smoke rose from the roof and licks of fire began to flash out of the siding. Clarke thought, We are burning the darkies’ livelihood. But everyone was merry, chattering and laughing. Sergeant Malone wore the Massah’s top hat and cutaways over his uniform. They had found some old colonial militia hats for the slave children. Private Toller had donned a flouncy dress, and each and every man, including the two old Negroes, was smoking a cigar. Christ, what am I leading here? Clarke said to no one in particular. He gave the signal to move out. The whips cracked, the wheels rolled, the horses were urged to a trot. Clarke, riding on, saw from the corner of his eye the white nigger girl. She had stood apart, not having joined the others aboard the train, and there she was now, in her bare feet with her grand red-and-gold shawl tied around her, watching them go. Later, Clarke would wonder why he didn’t think it ridiculous that she required a special invitation. He swung his mount around, cantered back, leaned over, and grabbed her hand. You’ll ride with me, missy, he said, and in a moment she was behind him in the saddle, with her arms wound tightly around his waist. He didn’t understand his feelings at this moment, except that the heavy responsibilities of his command had suddenly lifted from him. He felt the warmth of her arms and their tight grip. She rested her cheek on his shoulder, and after a while her tears came through his tunic.

And in this way, in the late afternoon of a still warm November, they moved out, whites and blacks, toward the column of sunlit dust pushing southeast in the Georgia sky.

II

A
T FIRST THE BOY, WILL, WOULDN’T EAT ANYTHING. HE
had been brought in thin as a rail, no flesh on his bony face, a pair of eyes on a stick as he held on to the bars and stared across the corridor. Arly, in the cell opposite, said, You got to eat, boy. They’re intending to kill you doesn’t mean you have to do it for ’em.

Arly kept up his chatter, conceiving it as a tonic. Supposing it happens we are reprieved? he said. Won’t do you no good if you’re too weak to march out the door. Me, I will eat their maggoty salt pork and beans and politely thank Prison Sergeant Baumgartner down the corridor there for the fine vittles, though in fact he is as deaf as a doorpost. What was your affront, young Will? Say what?

Deserting, the boy whispered. I just needed to go home.

Now, I didn’t know that is become a capital offense. So many of the boys are quitting this war I guess the C.S.A. needs to set an example. Me, I was found for sleeping on picket duty. But it could be worse. Raper John, who was up here until just last week? He got hisself hanged, but that was for affronting the civil law. You and I, as soldiers coming afoul of military legalisms of one sort or another, will only be put in front of a firing squad.

The boy didn’t smile but went to his pallet and lay on his back with his hands behind his head.

But don’t you worry, Arly continued, because General Hood, he likes to march a company in front and a company behind, and stand everyone out in their raiment with the flags flying and the drummers drumming and whoever is to be killed sitting on the edge of their coffins so as to drop right in them when the firing squad squeezes the trigger. But since every mother’s son was dispatched to the redoubts in Atlanta, there isn’t enough troops in Milledgeville to mount a fitting execution. There is cay-dets from the Military Institute up the street, but wiser heads must have thought as their being small boys it was no proper job for them. Are you for religion, young Will?

I never did countenance it.

Well, I look at it this way. God has raised his hand to give us respite. It could be he has something more in mind for us. With this time on our hands, we should try to figure what it is. Because he don’t do pointless acts of charity.

THE WARMTH OF
early November dropped off suddenly, and the two men wore their blankets around themselves day and night. The cell windows were without sashes. When it rained the walls turned damp, and then when it cleared and grew colder the stone coated up with ice. The bars were too cold to touch. The Milledgeville penitentiary was as moldy and cold as a crypt.

Sergeant Baumgartner, sir, you have that little fire pail at your feet, Arly shouted. Why don’t you move it up here, along with yourself, so as we don’t freeze to death before you shoot us.

The prison guard said nothing. He was a fat man who could be heard drawing every breath.

Sergeant Baumgartner, Arly shouted, I do prophesy the day is coming when you will unlock these doors and set us free.

Baumgartner sighed. I am too old to fight, he said, and so my service is to sit here with the likes of you. If that don’t deserve a medal I surely don’t know what does.

THEY WERE UP
before dawn, as usual, jumping up and down to get the blood moving, and lifting their knees high in a stationary walk. Will had watched Arly do this, and it became his own regimen. But on this morning at first light there was something else besides the chill in their bones and the sight of their expelled breaths. They heard the agitation of raised voices and the rattle of carriage wheels. Will went to his window and stood on tiptoe to look through the bars. He had a view down the hill.

What is it? Arly said.

One carriage after another. Like a parade, Will said. They are whipping their horses.

By God, then, it’s come!

Above all this clamor Will heard something from the sky—not so much a wind as like a pressure of the air, as if the sky was being pushed in on itself, and it had a murmur to it, or maybe a scent, like what you sometimes smelled after a bolt of lightning. He sensed the heaviness of a storm approaching, though as the sun rose the sky turned a cold blue and there was no approaching storm that he could see.

There was now a commotion inside the penitentiary. They were on the top floor and they could hear shouting on the floors below. The convicts had begun to rap their tin cups against the bars. Whistles blew.