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Authors: Thomas Fleming

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“Liar or fool!” bellowed a half-dozen voices.
“Liar or fool!” the crowd chanted.
“You've let the Democrats destroy this rally, Major,” Captain Otis said. “That regiment won't get ten men now.”
Maybe that's ten more than they deserve to get,
the Gettysburg wound whispered in Major Stapleton's aching skull. “Then they'll have to go to the draft,” Paul said. “Worse things could happen.”
“Moreover!” Colonel Schreiber shouted above the din. “Through the generosity of our friend and neighbor, Colonel Henry Gentry, I'm prepared to add a hundred dollars to that bounty for every man who signs up today!”
“Tell Henry to shove his money up Lincoln's ass!” shouted another Democrat.
Working his way toward them through the crowd was Colonel Henry Gentry in the flesh. His big body swayed erratically, as if the arm he had lost at the battle of Shiloh in 1862 had forever unbalanced him. Those who knew him better were inclined to blame bourbon for his wobble. His once-handsome face, with a Roman nose that should have guaranteed dignity, was marred by the sagging cheeks, the jowls, of middle age, compounded by the protruding veins of the heavy drinker. Even now, when he was relatively sober, he had the slightly dazed manner of a man who had barely survived a carriage or railroad accident that had left him in a state of constant apprehension.
“Major Stapleton,” Gentry said, “I'm sorry to spoil your holiday. We've got a report that as many as five deserters are hiding out at the Fitzsimmons farm.”
Paul stifled an impulse to curse like an Irish sergeant. “We'll be on the road as soon as this meeting is over,” he said.
“Maybe when you drag them back in handcuffs you can persuade them to enlist in Lincoln's Own,” Dr. Yancey said.
“I wish that were possible, Walter,” Gentry said. “But the army doesn't give deserters a second chance.”
“What's the difference whether they get shot at sunrise by a firing squad or at moonrise by a rebel?” Andrew Conway said. “Ain't it cannon fodder your murderous friend Lincoln needs?”
“Now, Andy,” Gentry said. “You know in your heart Abe doesn't think that way.”
“I've engaged to meet your cousin, Miss Todd, at the ferry landing, Colonel,” Major Stapleton said. “I hope you can serve as my replacement and express appropriate regrets.”
“Now that's the sort of service I'm ready to volunteer for,” Dr. Yancey said.
“Precisely why I asked Colonel Gentry,” Stapleton said, smiling at the dissolute doctor.
In spite of his size—he was barely five feet—Yancey was known in more than one town along the river as a lothario. Before the war, he and fellow bachelors Gentry and Conway had made frequent trips to Louisville and Cincinnati, where they found ladies of the evening eager to assuage their unwed status.
“Are you aware that Miss Todd is more or less pledged to my nephew, Adam Jameson?” Andrew Conway said. “He's a colonel in Morgan's cavalry. If I were you, Major, I'd sleep with a loaded pistol on my night table. Those boys have crossed the Ohio once. They might do it again, anytime.”
“Risks are a soldier's stock in trade, Mr. Conway,” Paul said.
“I would say Janet Todd is worth more than a little risk,” Colonel Gentry said.
Paul was about to agree when Conway replied with a smile that was almost a sneer. “Come on, Henry. You above all should know what a Kentucky girl can do to a man.”
“They're very good at breaking hearts,” Gentry said. “I'm sure Major Stapleton knows that's part of the risk.”
Had a Kentucky woman broken Gentry's heart? For the first time Paul felt some respect—and even a little sympathy—for this mutilated man. Although Gentry had welcomed Paul into his home and been unfailingly cordial, he spent most of his time in a cellar office getting drunk. He had revealed little or nothing about his personal life, except a boyhood friendship with Abraham Lincoln.
“I like to think broken hearts are like battlefield
wounds,” Paul said. “Eventually they heal. And they leave behind a certain vibration of glory.”
“Glory!” Conway said. “You must be the last man in this war who believes in that old horse, Major.”
“Not at all,” Henry Gentry said. “I still believe in it. Especially the kind that's left behind by a broken heart.”
“Unbelievable,” Dr. Yancey said to Andrew Conway. “Amelia's still got her hooks into him.”
The recruiting rally was over. The crowd in the courthouse square had dwindled by half. No one seemed to be going anywhere near the Gentry store, just off the square on Main Street, where Colonel Schreiber waited to pay recruits $400 in federal greenbacks—more than a year's salary for a field hand. Although no shots had been fired, the Democrats had unquestionably won the battle.
It's not your fault.
Paul's Gettysburg wound whispered.
It's that idiot in the White House.
“Sergeant,” Paul said to Moses Washington. “Get the men back to camp on the double and saddle up fifty horses. We've got some deserters to catch before we can celebrate Independence Day.”
A shadow of uneasiness in the sergeant's eyes suggested he was aware of the incongruity of chasing deserters on the Fourth of July. Major Stapleton was more concerned about the mockery he was certain to hear in Janet Todd's sultry southern voice when she asked him about his latest adventure on behalf of the federal government's quest for victory in this apparently endless war.
IN THE DARK, DANK ICEHOUSE on Rose Hill, the next plantation down the Ohio from Hopemont, Janet Todd's body servant, Lucy, crouched beside Aunt Rachel, a wrinkled gray-haired slave who was reading aloud the letter to Colonel Adam Jameson by the light of a flickering candle. “Read it one more time,” Lucy said. “I wants to get it word for word.”
Aunt Rachel was shaking all over; whether from the cold or fear it was hard to tell. But she began reading the letter for the third time. “Faster,” Lucy said.
Lucy had asked Miss Janet to teach her to read. But Colonel Todd said no, no, no and no. Niggers who learned to read ran away. Aunt Rachel had learned to read thirty years ago. She was the last slave Mrs. Conway, the old mistress of Rose Hill, had taught to read so they could learn about Jesus in the Bible. Mrs. Conway got a letter from Virginia telling her that her brother had gotten his head chopped off by a slave named Nat Turner. He tried to start a revolution to put the black people on top and the white people on the bottom. If that didn't prove he was crazy, what did? But you could not blame black people for going crazy when you think of what happened to some of them.
Maybe Nat Turner had a sister like Maybelle. Too pretty to let in the house because the white men would be after her and too pretty to work in the fields because she was worth a lot more money working somewhere else. Slaves like Maybelle were a powerful temptation to owners like Colonel Todd. He had two wild sons.
Jack went off to some expensive northern college named Yale and got himself tamed down and married a rich girl in Alabama. But Andy, his younger brother, no one could tame him. He got thrown out of another northern college and ran up gambling debts in Lexington at the races and God knows where else and suddenly Colonel Todd needed money. That's when he took Maybelle to Lexington and let them sell her to a whorehouse in New Orleans.
That was just before the war started and people began thinking of running away because they heard President Abe Lincoln was going to free all the slaves and Colonel Todd said before that happened he'd sell them all to Brazil, they were his property and no damn government was going to touch his property. Before the war no one had run away because Colonel Todd told them white people in the North didn't want niggers in their backyards and he read them stories from newspapers about whites beating up niggers and Lucy asked Miss Janet if they were true and she said yes, that was why it was better to stay in Kentucky and live a quiet life as her body servant.
But every time Lucy thought of Maybelle in that whorehouse in New Orleans and Colonel Todd using the money to pay off Mr. Andy's gambling debts she was tempted to run away and when the war started she didn't want the slave owners to win no matter how much they spouted about lying Yankees and low-down Irish and Germans.
When Aunt Rachel finished reading the letter Lucy would take a dab of honey and seal it good enough to fool the woman who ran the Confederate Post Office in a cave near Hawesville. The Confederates had post offices all over Kentucky in caves and barns. They had riders who carried the mail to Virginia or Tennessee or wherever it was supposed to go, right under the noses of the Union men.
Lucy wished she had someone else to read Miss Janet's letters for her. Rose Hill was run by Rogers Jameson, Colonel Adam Jameson's father. He was the one who told Lucy that Maybelle had been sold to a whorehouse. He said that was always what happened to pretty niggers especially light-colored ones like Maybelle. Rogers Jameson looked forward to getting to New Orleans when the war ended so he could enjoy Maybelle. He said he tried to buy her from Colonel Todd but old Master was too scared of Mrs. Todd to say yes. So the colonel sold her way down south where Mrs. Todd wouldn't know nothing about it.
Whenever Lucy started thinking about that whorehouse she knew what Maybelle was liable to do: kill herself. They had seen their mother try to do it when Colonel Todd said he was going to sell two of their brothers, Luther and Tom, south to help pay the feed bills when the weevil got into the wheat crop. She cut her wrists with a paring knife and bled all over the kitchen. Lucy would never forget the day she came downstairs and found Maybelle mopping up the blood, screaming, “Momma! Momma!” There was blood everywhere. Lucy mopped it up too and Mrs. Todd poured hot wax in the slashes to stop the bleeding.
Colonel Todd changed his mind about selling Luther and Tom. A month later they ran away. No one at Hopemont ever heard from them again. Maybe by now they were in the Union Army, like those troopers in Keyport. A lot of the army's black soldiers were runaway slaves. Anyway, Colonel Todd couldn't get them back even though he tried and damned the Republicans because they wouldn't obey the laws of the United States as passed by Congress.
Sergeant Moses Washington told Lucy the Confederates were the lawbreakers. He was as dark as Lucy, but he could talk a streak about the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution like he was Abe Lincoln in
blackface. She had gotten to know the sergeant since Miss Janet started visiting Colonel Gentry's house every other weekend because she was sweet on that Yankee major named Stapleton.
From what Miss Janet just told Adam Jameson, there was more to it than being sweet. But Lucy could tell politics didn't really change what Miss Janet felt every time she looked at Major Stapleton. He was a lot handsomer than Adam Jameson, who always reminded everyone of a bear. That had been his school nickname because when he walked he rocked from side to side as if his legs couldn't carry all his weight. He was strong as a bear too, he could take a log as thick as a man's neck and bust it over his knee. But he wasn't much smarter than a bear, from things Miss Janet said about him walking home from school when they were kids.
Aunt Rachel finished mumbling out the letter through her toothless gums one more time. Lucy recited it back to her and Aunt Rachel sucked her lower lip halfway down her throat and said, “If they catch you they'll whip you silly. I think you's crazy to do this.”
“The whole world's crazy, Aunt Rachel,” Lucy said.
“COULDN'T BE ANY HOTTER IN hell, could it, Major?” Sergeant Moses Washington said.
“I hope not,” Major Stapleton said, with a wry grin.
The sergeant returned the grin. Did he know from the Gentry house servants that Janet Todd was coming to the Independence Day party? Did he suspect the major was thinking about the commandment he might soon be breaking with her? Paul hoped not. If anything happened between him and Janet Todd, he would not brag about it, Walter Yancey style. He hoped the sergeant assumed Major Stapleton was referring to past sins of the sort soldiers committed when a weekend pass and a woman of easy virtue coincided.
Captain Simeon Otis, riding on Paul's right, gave them both a severe frown. He undoubtedly disapproved of what soldiers did on weekend passes as vehemently as he denounced slave owners and slavery. He had already hinted to Paul that he thought Colonel Henry Gentry was much too friendly with his slave-owning relatives and friends in Kentucky.
Behind them rode fifty troopers in Union blue. Major Stapleton had made good cavalrymen out of these unlikely candidates for glory. They were all proud of being men on horseback, contemptuous of infantry “creepers.” Paul had added to their confidence by arming them with seven-shot Spencer carbines, the gun of choice for sophisticated Union cavalrymen. He was sure he could depend on them in a fight—at least against the sort of ragtag resistance they usually met from deserters.
Moses Washington was the key to this success. He and Paul shared a New Jersey background. The sergeant had grown up in Monmouth County, not far from Kemble Manor, the Stapleton summer home. Washington had been locally famous as a prizefighter, winning matches against white and black opponents. For him to turn up in Indiana in a Union uniform seemed a good omen. It helped Paul accept this assignment.
Paul had made Washington his sergeant and partner in instilling pride and confidence in his fellow blacks, almost all ex-slaves recruited in Kentucky. Granted all this, why did the thought, the fact, of their blackness start a dull ache in his chest around the two-year-old wound he had received at the battle of Antietam?
Paul's emancipation wound, his mother called it, mocking as usual every act of Lincoln's administration. After the Union stand at Antietam forced Lee's army to retreat into Virginia, Lincoln had issued his stunning proclamation, changing the goal of the war from saving the Union to freeing the slaves.
Major Stapleton thrust Caroline Kemble Stapleton out of his mind along with the politics of the war and concentrated on the military task confronting him. Like his friend George Armstrong Custer, he told himself that fighting a war was simpler and more satisfying than thinking about it.
Helpful in this mental maneuver was the western landscape. Although this part of southern Indiana was a series of rippling knolls and dales, each time they crested a rise Paul glimpsed the vastness of the American interior. It was easy to imagine the endless miles of prairie to the north and west, a kind of earthy inland sea stretching to the horizon. In its heartland, America was more than a country; it was a world. Somehow this immensity added an apocalyptic dimension to the war. It was too huge to comprehend, much less control.
In a half hour the red slope-roofed Fitzsimmons
farmhouse undulated in the heat waves rising from the scorched earth. The place looked deserted. There was not even a chicken moving in the yard. Major Stapleton raised his arm and the detachment clopped to a halt. Horses nickered and snorted. Hornets buzzed around a nest in a nearby bush.
“It looks too quiet,” Paul said.
“Maybe they knew we was comin' and skedaddled,” Sergeant Washington said.
“We should have come by night,” Captain Simeon Otis said. “Keyport—the whole county—is infested with traitors.”
“Sergeant Washington and I will take twenty-five men in at a trot and surround the place,” Paul said. “If there's no one in the house or barn, we'll trample the crops. Captain Otis, take the rest of the troop and set up a blocking position at this end of the property.”
By now they were professionals in this dirty business. They knew if deserters heard a detachment of cavalry heading their way, they tried to hide in a farm's surrounding corn or wheat fields. They seldom wanted to go too far from their refuge. They never knew who might betray them. Although these days, with most of the Democrats in Hunter County against the war, they had a lot more friends than enemies.
Captain Otis began stationing the troopers at intervals along the bottom of the field. Major Stapleton, Sergeant Washington and the other half of the detachment cantered up the dusty road to the farmhouse. Paul dismounted and rapped on the door. A tall thin once-pretty brunette opened it. “What do you want?” she asked.
“I'm afraid we have to search your house, Miss,” Paul said. “We've got a report that you're harboring deserters.”
“Your reporter is a damn liar. Where's your search warrant?”
“We don't need one, Miss. Under the authority granted the military in time of war, we have the right to
search and if necessary seize anyone who's interfering with the government's efforts to suppress the rebellion.”
“There's no one here but my mother and father and they're both sick. Sick in body and soul since my brother got killed at Vicksburg. Sick of people like you takin' over our country.” She glared from Paul to the black troopers. Kentucky Negroes were not popular in Indiana.
Paul sighed and wiped his streaming neck with his kerchief. “We'll give the country back to you as soon as this war's over, Miss.”
Paul turned to Sergeant Washington. “Take five men and search the house. Load your guns. I'll take another five and search the barn.”
“Why should they load their guns?” the woman asked.
“We had a man almost killed last month by a fellow who fired through a door.”
“If I had a gun I'd kill you all,” the young woman snarled.
Washington draw his big Colt pistol and ordered five men to load their Spencer carbines. They clumped into the house. Paul led another five men into the dim barn. There was nothing there but two horses munching in feed bags.
Back at the house, Washington soon appeared with his squad. “Nothin' here but what she says, Major,” the sergeant reported “Two old sick people upstairs. Cussed us worse than she did.”
“Are they in the wheat?” Paul asked the woman.
“I don't know what you're talkin' about,” she said.
“I hate to ruin your crop.”
“Liar.”
“Begin the game, Sergeant.”
Washington told Little Eddie, their thirteen-year-old bugler, to sound squadrons left and right. The troopers split into squads and headed for the greenish brown
wheat. By now they could perform this routine in their sleep. They took up positions in two facing lines of seven horses each, forming a lane. The remaining eleven men and the sergeant went crunching down the lane between them, cutting a destructive swath but making it impossible for anyone hiding in the wheat to escape the methodical mass of men and horses coming at him.
Watching in the doorway, the young woman began to weep. “Bastards,” she said. “You Republicans are all bastards.”
“I'm a Democrat, Miss. Born and bred,” Major Stapleton said.
“That makes you even more despicable.”
Blam.
A gunshot. At the far end of the field.
Blam. Blam. Blam.
They weren't Spencer carbines. They were rifles.
Crack
went a carbine.
Crack crack crack blam, blam.
A dozen shots erupted and a swirl of gun-smoke rose in the humid air. The deserters were shooting it out.
“Sabers, Sergeant!” Paul shouted to Washington. “Bugler, sound charge!”
Little Eddie blasted the staccato patter of notes for a charge into the glaring sunshine. Paul leaped on his horse and pounded down the road toward Captain Simeon Otis and his detachment. Two-thirds of the way there he found four troopers riding up the road, their faces cartoons of terror.
“They's ten, maybe twenty of 'em, Major!” one wailed. “They done shot the captain and two or three others of us—”
“Draw sabers and follow me!”
They wheeled their horses and galloped after Paul. He was not at all sure they would be any good in a fight, but he was fairly confident of the men following Sergeant Washington. Paul felt a rush of pleasure. It was his first action since Gettysburg, his first chance to be a soldier again.
Riding in the road, which dipped below the wheat field, he could only see the upper torsos of the troopers and the heads of their horses. Each had his saber ready. They looked as tough and confident as Washington.
“Give them a cavalry yell, Sergeant!” Paul shouted.
“Freedom!” the sergeant bellowed. “Here come the battle cry of freeeeeeedom!” '
“Yeahhhhhhhhhhh!” shouted the troopers. “Yeahhhhhhhhh!”
Little Eddie managed to rip off another charge call. They surged through the wheat in two lines. The heat, the uncertain footing the horses found among the wheat stalks, slowed everything to a dreamlike pace, as if time itself had faltered in this rural inferno. Shots continued to resound in the fiery distance.
On the road Paul and his four horsemen neared the end of the field two or three hundred yards ahead of the troopers in the wheat. Four men in dust-covered homespun clothes emerged from the side road on horses that belonged to the black troopers. Two fired pistols at Paul and raced off down the road after their friends. The bullets hissed several feet over his head.
“Tell Sergeant Washington to follow me with the rest of the men!” Paul shouted and pounded down the road after the runaways.
The winding road dipped and twisted through the wheat fields, making it difficult to keep the fugitives in sight. Sergeant Washington caught up to Paul after about a mile of hard riding and shouted, “Captain Otis's hurt bad!”
That's good news,
whispered the Gettysburg wound. “Anyone else?” Paul asked.
“Fred Clay, Luther Jenkins and Smiley Peters hit too.”
“Did we get any of them?”
“One. He's dead.”
In another mile they reached a crossroads. Paul reined in his horse and signaled a stop. There was no
way to tell from the muddle of hoof tracks in the dust whether the fugitives had turned left or right. “Let's go back and tend the wounded. We'll catch these bastards some other day,” Paul said.
Back at the Fitzsimmons farm, they found Captain Simeon Otis slumped against a cottonwood tree, the front of his uniform drenched in blood. He had been hit in the shoulder. “They fired without warning,” he whispered. “We never had a chance.”
Nearby lay the three black troopers. One, Sam Peters, had been hit in the head. He was barely breathing. The other two, Fred Clay and Luther Jenkins, had leg wounds.
“Captain done run away; that's what he done, Major!” called Jasper Jones, a short stocky trooper who had enlisted in New Jersey with Moses Washington. Jones had a big mouth in more ways than one. His lower lip extended a good inch beyond his upper lip. He jutted his narrow chin at Otis.
“I was wounded. I—” Otis began to weep. “He's right. I ran away. We all ran away.”
“Not usn',” said another Clay, whose name was Brutus. He was a brother of the wounded Clay.
Major Stapleton took charge. “Let's not worry about who did what. Let's get the wounded to a doctor. We'll figure out tactics to make sure this doesn't happen again.”
Mentally, Major Stapleton rebuked himself. He should have sent Otis to the farmhouse and handled the blocking position himself. But he knew how obnoxious Otis would be to the Fitzsimmonses. Not that his own attempt at civility had made much difference.
He sent Sergeant Washington and two troopers back to the farmhouse to commandeer a horse and wagon for the wounded. They returned with a frightened-looking dark-haired kid in the straw-filled wagon.
“Found this guy hidin' in the hay, Major,” Washington said.
“Are you a deserter?” Paul asked. The boy did not look old enough to be in the army.
“I got sick. I came home to see my mother,” he said. He began to blubber.
“You can explain it at your court-martial,” Paul said.
The deserter crouched in the back of the wagon while they loaded the wounded men onto the straw. They draped the body of the dead skirmisher over the empty saddle of one of the wounded troopers and rode slowly back to Keyport through the ferocious heat.
On July 21, 1864, they would celebrate the third anniversary of the first battle of Bull Run. Major Stapleton found himself remembering his brother, Jonathan Stapleton, confidently predicting that slavery had made the South soft and an army of 75,000 righteous northern men would suppress the secessionist rebellion in three months.

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