The March (6 page)

Here she be, Pearl said.

Ifn you know yo Bible, Miss Porhl, you ’member ’bout dat Jez’bel. You bes cum wiv us, Jake Early said.

I ain’t no Jez’bel.

I see you wiv dese soljer. You got a white pap like to put you sinnin in a white skin. You bes come wiv yo gibn folks now, lest you be some Jez’bel fer de army like your mam been to der Mass’ Jameson.

Pearl put her plate down and got to her feet. My mama she a po slave lak you, Jacob Early. But wiv a warm, sweet soul, not de cold ice you got in yo heart. You never take no heed of Porhl, you Jacob, nor you, Jubal Samuels—no, non of youn. All dat time only dat Roscoe a frien to me. Lak he my pap. Gib me from de kitchen when I hongry. Watch out fer me. But you ain never be gibn folks to Porhl, no sir, not den and not now.

Clarke stood and addressed the two privates. Get these men back where they belong, he said.

Nobody doan never have touch Porhl! When I little, de brudder try. Oh yeah. I raise up dis bony knee hard in his what he got dere, and dat were dat and nobody since! You hear dis gul, Mr. free man Jacob Early? And nobody since! An I ain’t no Jez’bel, she screamed.

In this way was Pearl’s decision made, and by the time they were on the march through Milledgeville she was drummer for Clarke’s company. She just hit the drum once every other step and they kept the pace, some with smiles on their faces. She looked straight ahead and kept her shoulders squared against the shoulder straps, but she could tell that white folks watched from the windows. And none of them knew she wasn’t but the drummer boy they saw.

EAST OF MILLEDGEVILLE
the weather changed and the terrain grew swampy. A hard rain spattered on the palmettos and snapped in the muck. Pioneers had corduroyed the road with fence rails and saplings. Clarke, in the vanguard with his foragers, was the first to lead his wagons across the pontoon bridge at the Oconee. Thereafter the land rose and hardened, the rain slacked off, and they left the army behind as they rode toward Sandersonville. Clarke wanted to pick the town clean and wait there. He had thirty men mounted, six wagons, and as many pack mules.

Clarke knew from maps that the country played out east of Sandersonville and from then on, as far as Savannah, it would be progressively poorer takings, with the lowlands good only for growing rice. And how in God’s name would the army hull rice? His foraging detail had got much praise from the regiment, and he’d been running a kind of competition with Lieutenant Henley’s squad.

At a bend in the road a quarter mile west of the town, he called a halt. Sergeant Malone rode up to confer. This was more formidable than a plantation. They could see over the treetops a church steeple and the roof of a public building, probably a courthouse.

Evening was coming on. Clarke smelled no chimney smoke and saw no lights.

Sergeant, take two men with you. On foot and off the road. Tell me what’s going on there.

The patrol moved off, and Clarke waited. Behind him, softly in the dusk, the leather traces creaked, the animals breathed and snorted. Clarke rode back to the wagons and found Pearl the last in line, sitting up beside the driver. Her eyes gleamed out at him from the darkness, as if they had drunk up what light there was, invisible to him but imperially available to her.

He rode ahead to meet the patrol. Malone reported that the town was quiet, the streets empty, but there were lights in the houses. He did not look at Clarke as he spoke but at the ground, which meant, in Clarke’s interpretation, that he, Clarke, was acting as was only expected of a prissy New England Brahmin.

If that’s what Malone thought, so would the others. A fog was rolling in. Clarke ordered the men to unsheathe their rifles, and the company rode on into Sandersonville.

WHEN THE FIRING
started, the driver of the last wagon was in a crossroads at the town’s edge, so that, shouting and cursing, he was able to turn the panicked team around. Pearl left the box and clambered into the wagon and looked out the rear. Nobody was following. She heard screams. She saw men falling off their horses in the instant flashes of musket fire. The driver was whipping the mules and the wagon was rolling. Pearl jumped, landing on her hands and knees. She limped into the brush and cowered there.

Moments later two riderless horses galloped past. A minute later three or four of the Union men, and then two of them on one horse. She couldn’t count how many after that. She prayed that the Lieutenant would not leave her.

Clarke couldn’t have retreated even if he’d thought of it. He was not thinking, just trying to rein in his panicked rearing mount with one hand while, with his Enfield musketoon wedged in the crook of his arm, firing at every looming shape and shadow. The Rebs had ridden out of the side streets and come together as one charging line. In an instant, it seemed, they were riding past on both flanks. Sergeant Malone, standing in his stirrups to aim, was hacked by a passing sword. He looked at Clarke, his neck bleeding like a mouth widening in astonishment, as he toppled to the ground. The Rebel yells made of them screeching phantoms in the fog, unholy apparitions appearing and disappearing. Clarke was screaming as well. He felt no fear until his rifle stopped working. At that, he put his head down and bent over his horse like a jockey and tried to urge her forward—in what direction he had no idea. But his mount was stepping on bodies and then a wall of mounts and riders rose around him. As he straightened up he felt a pistol at the back of his head and heard the cock of the hammer. He sat quite still and it was as if he had given an order, as gradually the tumult subsided, and all he heard was the heavy breathing of horses and men.

PRIVATE TOLLER, PUDGE TOLLER,
the pianist, helped him out of his tunic and tore out the sleeve of his long john to make a tourniquet. That he was bleeding from a bullet wound in his arm he was hardly aware.

A dozen of Clarke’s men were in the jail cell with him. He didn’t know how many others had gotten away or how many were dead. He believed Pearl was dead. He had put her in harm’s way from the most selfish, immoral impulses. His throat filled with an anguish of self-castigation. He’d always believed in reason, that it was the controlling force in his life, and confident in that belief he had slipped into such an unnatural state of bewitchment that he hardly knew himself. And now she was dead.

Private Gullis every few minutes grabbed the window bars and chinned himself up. There were two guards outside, he reported. But now some men were standing around talking in groups. He couldn’t tell if they were Reb soldiers or not.

Toller said, Sir, what will they do with us?

We’re prisoners of war, Clarke said. They’ll ship us to one of their damn holding pens.

Clarke wanted to put the best face on things. We have word there’s one such in Millen, he said. That’ll be on the march. We’ll be sent to Millen and in a few days the armies will overrun it and we’ll be back on duty.

There are more of ’em now, Gullis said. They got rifles.

With difficulty, Clarke stood up. He realized that all the men in the cell were on their feet and listening. Them guards? Gullis said. I can’t see them no more. Something of a crowd out there now.

Clarke withdrew writing paper and a carbon pencil from his oilskin packet and, using the stone wall in lieu of a writing box, he spent the next few minutes composing a letter. He could hardly see what he was writing. He had just sealed the letter and addressed the envelope when the first battering jolt shuddered the jailhouse doors.

PEARL DIDN’T KNOW
what to do other than go on. She wanted to find the Lieutenant Clarke. She felt he couldn’t have been one of those who’d run away. But if he hadn’t where was he? If he had driven off the Rebels, why didn’t he come find her? She had watched the road, and once everything was quiet nobody had come by.

She kept to the woods except where the fog was gathered black and thick like smoke in the kitchens when wind blew down the draft. Then she followed the road. As she approached the outskirts of the village she heard a volley of rifle fire and darted behind a tree. She stood quite still while the sound echoed off into the woods. She waited for something else to happen, but nothing did. Still, she waited.

Underneath her uniform Pearl wore her frock tied around her waist. She removed her tunic and shook the frock down to her ankles, then rolled up her hat and tunic and hid them at the foot of the tree. When she entered the village, it was as a white Negro girl.

The fog had lifted and the sky was beginning to clear. She saw a few stars. She stepped in something wet and slippery. Blood was all over the road and it was like a trail, as blots and spots and strings of it led her to the street where the jailhouse was, and right up to the jailhouse doors. The doors were open. It was too dark to see inside, but she smelled the blood and sensed the emptiness.

Past the jail was an open field and as the clouds cleared there was moonlight to see by, and so she came upon the men’s bodies. Dear God Jesus that you made me see this, she said to herself. Ain’t I seen enough of this since I been born? She found Clarke in a twisted position on his side, one leg flung over the other. His left arm had a big bandage. She pressed his shoulder till he was faceup. He looked about to say something to her. His teeth shone. His eyes were far away. In his hand was a letter and he seemed to clutch it as she pulled it from his fingers.

VI

S
OPHIE PACKED A HAMPER WITH CORN BREAD, SALT
pork, boiled potatoes, sugar, and tea leaves. She put in candles, and soap, silver and table linens, his tobacco and a box of matches. His flask he could stash in his pocket. She packed his valise and then put some of her own things in a shawl, which she tied in a knot and slung from her elbow. She walked behind him through the village, the valise in one hand, the hamper in the other.

Come along, come along, he growled. He leaned on his cane and hopped right along for a lame old man. With her weight and all she was carrying, she found herself breathless.

The train was waiting at the station. She helped him up the steps. The car was empty. Nobody but Mr. Marcus Aurelius Thompson wanted to get in the way of this war.

The train lurched and tilted and stopped, jerked forward and crept along. After several miles the countryside looked flattened hard and scorched, as if a hot clothes iron had been taken to it. It was no longer the natural world God had made. Where houses had been were chimneys standing up from blackened mounds like gravestones.

In the next village they were told that was the terminus. He was outraged. He would not get off the train. The conductor came in and said, Mr. Thompson, sir, you’re welcome to stay aboard. Sit here ifn you like—we’ll be going back by and by.

They stood on the station platform, their luggage beside them. They were out in the open, under a clear sky. The depot had been burned to the ground. The village behind it was destroyed, houses and stores collapsed into piles of smoking rubbish. Tufts of cotton were stuck in the bushes. Up ahead, the rails had been torn up and put to fire and twisted around trees.

Sophie shook her head and sat herself down on a chunk of wall. The old man stood leaning on his cane, his shoulders hunched, and he kept turning his head this way and that in little jerking movements, like some perching bird. I s’pose you want to go back, don’t you? he said.

No, suh.

Well, you’re coming with me no matter if it’s to Hell. I have a few things to say to my brother afore he dies.

The sun was up toward noon before they saw a farmer in his wagon. He was looking at the ground on either side as his mule pulled along. The old man waggled his cane in the air.

You’ll take us to Milledgeville, he said. How much?

A thousand of Jeff Davis’s dollars, the man said. He laughed. He was sun-darkened and all hunched up in a gray army coat.

I’ll do better’n that, Mr. Thompson said. I’ll give you a two-dollar gold piece of the U.S. Treasury. How you going to get me up in the wagon is for you to decide.

The farmer rode off around the village and came back with a wing chair. Its upholstery was bulged out. Its skirt looked dipped in blood. He and Sophie lifted the old man up by the elbows and stood him in the wagon bed and he sat down in the chair. Sophie, after putting up the luggage, climbed laboriously aboard and sat on the side bench.

We never did get along, Mr. famous Chief Judge Thompson and I, the old man said. I could tell you things.

I s’pose.

No supposing. The man was an atheist—you know what that is?

Don’t believe in the hereafter.

That’s right. A blasphemer against the Lord God Jesus Christ.

The stench from the dead cattle lying beside the road was intolerable. The sun had caused their bellies to burst open. Sophie caught some cotton batting out of the air, and took a vial of cologne from her satchel and soaked the cotton and handed it over to him.

Where’d you get that? he said.

Fum the Mistress bureau.

You stole it?

She sighed. I keep her room like it was. Everything in its place, just like she still there. You want to keep breavin the stink it’s all the same to me.

All right, all right, he said, his face muffled in the cotton.

You ought to know better’n to say that.

All right, he said.

The dogged mule, head down, trotted on. What homes were still standing had been stripped bare, the windows shattered, the doors hanging by hinges. Outbuildings fallen in on themselves like playing cards. Corncribs bare, fodder blowing loose in the fields. By and by they were passing soldiers just sitting there beside the road and not even bothering to look up. Then one man staggering after them, begging for something to eat. Away, sir, said Mr. Thompson, waving his cane in the air. Away with you! Out in the fields people were on their knees culling. But what was there to cull? And the wagon bumping over dead dogs—every hound to be seen was shot through the head.

She saw one soldier picking oat grains from a pile of horse manure.

The bridge over the Oconee was down, and they took their place in the line waiting for the ferry. Behind them were the tramped-upon fields where the bluecoats had camped. Down below, across the river, was the destroyed state capital. Corkscrews of smoke arose from the burned buildings.