The Bride of Texas, page 8
11
The fact is, Ambrose was born too late. He should have come into this world when kings still rode off to battle on armoured horses at the heads of slow processions of mounted warriors in coats of mail. In those days a general could be a simple soul. He only had to be brave. And he could never have found himself in the situation Ambrose got into in Chicago, soon after Fredericksburg, when he capped a military débâcle with a political one.
On that morning of December 14, they finally dissuaded him from leading a new attack on Marye’s Heights. He executed the final manoeuvre of the Battle of Fredericksburg — a complex retreat — and he did it magnificently. It was straight out of the textbook; Ambrose had always done his homework. Late that morning, when the fog lifted and General Longstreet looked down from his position on top of the heights, there wasn’t a living federal soldier in sight. In my parlour in Cincinnati, perspiring as though he were living it all over again, he told me why he hadn’t joined his fallen troops back in Fredericksburg.
“Later, some people claimed I’d wanted to commit suicide,” he said. “Perhaps I had, but it wasn’t a conscious thought. I kept seeing those soldiers, Lorraine, those dead soldiers, and I had sent them out there to die. I still see them now, at night, often at night. Back then, I felt that the only place left for me was among them, among the dead. But then —”
He fell silent and stared into the distance. His eyes were probably seeing that hillside again.
“But what?”
“Then I — simply —” He paused, and his eyes returned to the room. He smiled sadly at me. “At least I conquered my own arrogance.”
“You were never arrogant, Ambrose,” I said.
“Maybe I was, maybe I wasn’t,” he said bitterly. He placed his finger on his temple. “Thirteen thousand men had to die before the light went on inside this foolish skull. It was a terrible price, Lorraine, a terrible price to pay just so a man could come to his senses. But then I realized that this gesture — dying at the head of my troops — would have cost — what? Another thousand? Another five thousand? So I called off the attack.”
“Oh, Ambrose, dear Ambrose,” I said, because there was nothing else I could say.
“I could always have used my pistol,” said Ambrose. “But that would have been too easy an escape — from the troops and from the responsibility. It would, in fact, have been a cowardly act, Lorraine. And I’m not a coward. I may be a fool, but —”
“Ambrose!”
“— I’d rather be a fool than a coward and a traitor. So I took it all upon myself. I was in command. I was responsible for everything.”
After that disaster and its complicated aftermath, the president sent Ambrose to the Midwest to organize an army to pull a thorn out of Grant’s paw, for Grant was stranded at Vicksburg. In addition, he was given the job of maintaining order in the civilian sector of Ohio, for it was bubbling with discontent with the war and dissatisfaction with Lincoln, and there were dozens of newspapermen clamouring for peace at any price.
He came like a bull in a china shop, and that afternoon in my parlour he started to say, “Halleck thinks —” and then stopped himself.
12
“What does Halleck think?” I asked, when Ambrose had remained quiet for too long.
“What I meant to say,” he said awkwardly, apparently realizing the indiscretion of divulging to a woman what one general thought of another general. I didn’t press him. I was sure I could piece together what Halleck thought from Ambrose’s clumsy questions. “What I meant to ask was — do you know Congressman, or rather ex-Congressman, Vallandigham?”
“Comely Clem?” I did indeed. He was a charmer, and among women the most popular Ohio congressman. Women may not have the vote but, once charmed, they can certainly influence their husbands.
“Comely Clem?”
“That’s what they sometimes call him here. He’s a handsome man.”
“He’s critical of the government,” Ambrose said. “Sometimes, in a way, that amounts to aiding and abetting the rebels.”
“That’s natural. He’s angry at the government,” I said. “He lost the October election because the Republicans ran General Schenck against him. Clem was a general in the militia before the war, besides holding many other functions. After Fort Sumter, he pretty much lost interest in military matters and threw himself into politics.”
“You say he was in the volunteer militia? A general?” Ambrose mused with interest.
“You can be sure they brought it up,” I said. “But he still didn’t have a chance against Schenck. Schenck was a hero. In the second battle of Bull Run, a piece of iron from an exploding canister nearly sliced his hand off at the wrist; he dropped his sword, but he got his aide to improvise a bandage, picked up his sword with his left hand, and charged the rebels at the head of his troops. Clem’s babbling in Congress didn’t amount to much beside that.”
“That explains a lot,” remarked Ambrose, stroking his sideburns with satisfaction. “Did you hear about the speech he made last week in Hamilton?”
I shook my head. “I’m not particularly interested in Vallandigham,” I said, “though I probably should be. He wouldn’t make a bad —” “character in a novel” was what I’d started to say, but I suddenly remembered that Ambrose didn’t know about this other part of me, or at least he hadn’t asked about it yet. Either my pen-name had protected my secret, or he had forgotten what I’d said at the Connersville station. It also struck me that Ambrose would make a far better character for a novel than Vallandigham. Fortunately, he was so preoccupied with framing his questions discreetly that he never noticed my sudden silence.
“In that speech he denounced General Carrington’s order prohibiting civilians from carrying weapons.”
“Ah,” I said, “so Clem invoked the Constitution.”
“How did you know?”
“I inferred as much,” I said. “Thanks to Miss Wright, the Constitution is one of the few things I remember from school: ‘the right of the people,’ ” I recited solemnly, “ ‘to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.’ ”
Ambrose gave me a look that may have been one of admiration. I had the feeling he was measuring the circumference of my head with his eyes, which of course would deceive him, for I was wearing a fashionable hairpiece.
“Precisely,” he said. “Of course, Carrington had a damn — a darned good reason for issuing that order. Besides, he’d talked it over with Ollie Morton. He got a report from Sergeant Perkins, who was in charge of an eight-man detail that was supposed to arrest deserters in Franklin. When word got out that Perkins and his men were there, a mob of at least two hundred horsemen gathered in the town square, all of them armed, and not only did they stop Perkins from carrying out his orders, they even cheered, ‘Long live Jefferson Davis!’ That traitor and leader of traitors, Lorraine!”
“Are you sure it happened?” I said. “Don’t forget, Carrington’s notorious for his vivid imagination — especially after he’s had a few too many.”
“Ollie confirmed it. And it wasn’t an isolated instance. The day before, another armed mob stopped them arresting some deserters in Putnam County.”
“But that’s —”
“Treason!” he said, looking straight at me. It suddenly dawned on me that my friend was rushing headlong into a new catastrophe.
“It could hardly be called anything else,” I said.
“In the face of treason, all available means must be used. That was why General Carrington issued the order,” he said stiffly.
And I could see where the rub was. “But there’s the Constitution,” I said.
“Well — yes, there is,” admitted Ambrose. “Of course —”
“Didn’t General Carrington declare martial law?” I interrupted.
“Well — no, he didn’t.”
“That was a mistake.”
“Maybe so,” said Ambrose. “No! It was a mistake. But treason was committed, and treason is treason!”
“But the Constitution is the Constitution.”
Ambrose’s brow furrowed. He crossed his legs — his shiny boots and the gold tassel of his sword glinted in the afternoon sunlight, the scabbard rang against the Chinese vase beside the armchair. I imagined him running along the hill at Marye’s Heights in those polished boots, his sword drawn, the boots spattered with blood.
He recited, “‘On the orders of the United States and the people of the United States, George Washington, Commander.’ Now, whom do we obey: Carrington or Washington?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“That was the question Vallandigham posed at the town meeting in Hamilton.” He was looking straight into my eyes.
There was a long pause, then I said, “What do you think, Ambrose?”
“What do you think, Lorraine?” He looked at my sizeable coiffure.
“I don’t know.” Outside the window, a cool spring rain had begun to fall. Raindrops trickled down the windowpane, picking up the occasional ray of sunlight. “But I do wonder,” I said slowly. “Suppose George Washington had found himself in a situation like that of the sergeant who was sent out to arrest deserters, and a mob of armed men had started cheering General Cornwallis —”
“Precisely, Lorraine,” said Ambrose gratefully.
Not precisely. Analogies like that can be dangerous.
But they needn’t be.
Not if they’re applied by someone like Ambrose.
It wasn’t precise, but there was something to it.
“What else do you know about Vallandigham, Lorraine?”
Columbia
IT WAS SNOWING on the Congaree River. In this war, anything is possible, the sergeant thought. A sharp north wind was swirling snowflakes at the far end of the pontoon bridge, but they hadn’t reached his end yet. They soon would, though. The staff officers were riding onto the bridge almost at a gallop, to keep up with Sherman’s mount, Sam. A strange creature, that horse. Its natural pace was so fast that Howard, Logan, and Colonel Ewing kept falling behind and had to spur their horses on to keep up, so they moved across the bridge to Columbia in surges, falling back, catching up, falling back.
Then the Fifteenth Army Group thundered onto the bridge. The sergeant looked back and he saw the first four men, four bearded soldiers in Sherman’s great army, which had broken stride so as not to rock the bridge — but being out of step was hardly unusual for them — and ahead of them, striding beside his horse, was Captain Baxter Warren II, under the banner of the Ninety-second Iowa, carried by Sergeant Waleski. Sergeant Waleski had no ears. He’d lost one in the Battle of Warsaw, in Poland, and the other at Fort Donelson. Kapsa looked back again. The Fifteenth Army Group wound across the countryside like a snake with quills, grey bayonets aimed at grey clouds overhead. An unfinished fortress dominated the landscape. Yesterday, they had watched from its tower as Negroes from Columbia helped themselves to sacks of corn and hams piled neatly by the railroad depot. Just below the fortress, Captain DeGress had unlimbered a battery of twenty-pound Parrot guns and was lobbing shot into the town as clusters of Butler’s Cavalry appeared and reappeared in the streets. Sherman had put down his field-glasses and ordered the captain to stop firing, and to put the fear of God into the black looters instead; those hams and that corn were the property of his army. South Carolina, drenched, grey, the unfinished fortress standing there like an old Roman ruin under clouds that ran from grey all the way to black. But there were no signs of a snowstorm anywhere. A strange war. The sergeant turned, spurred his horse, and saw a swirl of snow envelop the general. Everything was topsy-turvy. The white flakes were not falling from the sky but rising from the ground like feathers, as the north wind swirled them into tiny cyclones. Then they fell onto the Congaree River.
Soon the sergeant was caught in the snowflakes too. For a moment they made it hard for him to see the generals cantering away, Sherman’s sweaty hat in the lead and, farther off, the unfinished Confederate government building in the centre of town. A snowflake got up his nose and he sneezed.
King Cotton. Someone had torn the king’s ermine robe into shreds and tatters. A foul smell hit him, and he saw smoke rising from the town. A flash of flame burst through the wall of smoke. Burning cotton fell on the Congaree River.
By night-time, the air was alive with sparks swirling and falling towards the dark waters.
Zinkule believed in ghosts — and in premonitions, prophetic dreams, telepathy, and miracles. He had come to this state after an act of heroism at Kennesaw Mountain, important enough to have been mentioned in the colonel’s report. “Although lying on the ground, semi-immobilized by a canister exploding nearby,” the colonel had written, “Corporal Zinkule brought down a Rebel flag-bearer with his bayonet and took possession of the banner.” Shake maintained that the report was essentially true, except that Zinkule had been stunned not by an exploding canister but rather by a Minnie that ricocheted off a rock, hit him on the head, and knocked him down. Yes, Zinkule had been on the ground, and yes, the Rebel sergeant had ended up on his bayonet, but the Rebel had actually skewered himself. It had happened like this: Shake, lying unhurt beside Zinkule and merely scared out of his wits, had decided to flee the field of glory, but as he was getting to his knees the standard-bearer, thinking him dead, stepped over him and tripped over his rising behind. He fell and impaled himself on Zinkule’s bayonet. The Rebel flag fluttered down on top of Zinkule and, when he recovered enough to stand up, he got tangled up in it, lost his bearings, and set out towards where he thought the enemy was. Shake tagged along because he saw that in fact they were heading back towards the reserves. Shortly thereafter, the rest of the unit arrived running. Nobody noticed anything amiss, and Zinkule got the glory for capturing the flag. Shake maintained that he himself should have got the credit, since he had set the action in motion, or his behind had. But he couldn’t be bothered making the effort to get his name in the report.
Zinkule, meanwhile, took the incident as a sign and started believing in his dreams, in which he was always dying a hero’s death, and he recounted them at great length around the campfire. Finally Salek got so fed up that he told him, “If you don’t watch out, you’ll wind up like the village idiot in Brnives. Remember him?” Zinkule shook his head. “Surely, you old fool, you remember the petrified devils in the chapel under Saint Prokop’s church in Sazava?” Zinkule shook his head again, so Salek went ahead with the story: “Once Saint Prokop was serving mass there, and these two devils come in and start tempting him, so Saint Prokop makes the sign of the cross over them and they turn into stone. They’re still there today. They look more like bears, but in fact they’re devils. One time —”
When they ushered the lady in to see Sherman, the sergeant suddenly felt that maybe Zinkule was on to something. Was this a sign? A vision? He knew he’d seen her before, but he couldn’t remember where. He cast his mind back through the confusion of his life. When had he met her? A long time ago, that was for sure, but where? Then she spoke to the general.
“I am surprised and indignant, general,” she said, “that your army should behave so towards a conquered people who have surrendered their city and do not resist. I have always told people we had nothing to fear except the accidents of war — but I do not consider the deliberate burning of a city an accident.” Her tone was haughty, her accent heavy. What sort of accent was it? He couldn’t put his finger on that, either.
The general looked at the lady. He was exhausted and had to force himself to remain calm. Dawn was coming and the sky was red, but it wasn’t just the sunrise, it was the fires that the fire brigades hadn’t managed to put out yet. The general’s face was like a desert gullied with dry river-beds. Outside, they could hear the crackle of burning beams.
“I have told my friends,” the lady went on, “private property and women would be protected when you came. But no, instead of this —”
He knew the general was sensitive to criticism, but deep in his heart he also knew the general was right. It was a different war now. Even the Southern officers, who used to consider digging trenches cowardly and undignified, now dug in when canned hell started exploding overhead. There had never been anything as horrifying as Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg, when the neat ranks of Georgians were mown into huge bloody heaps by canisters at short range and volley after volley from repeating rifles, when musket balls and shrapnel ripped into corpses and the wounded alike. The general was determined to end that horror once and for all, and he had a single recipe. The sergeant agreed with him.
“Instead of this, you have waged warfare,” the lady continued contemptuously, “that is a disgrace to our history.”
“What do you mean by that, madam?” the general growled finally, with barely suppressed anger.
“I mean exactly what I have said.”
The general was silent. He was always civil with women, and it wasn’t just because he had spent long years in the South. The general really liked women — not the way Kilpatrick did, but the way most of his soldiers did. Gentle female beauty was a light beyond the black smoke of the barking Parrot guns.
The general looked at the cigar smouldering in the ashtray, and killed it. The air in the room was already hazy, and the smoke hung over the table like mist over the pond in far-away Roznice. The general had probably never set foot outside America, the sergeant thought, or seen a country where churches were made of stone, not wood, where black cathedrals stretched to touch the sky in mountain valleys. But in fact he had, as a young man. Around the campfire once, while chewing on hardtack and smoked meat, Sherman had told a tale about eating in a fancy restaurant called Faroux, at the foot of a mountain called Sugar Loaf, in Rio de Janeiro. They had been rookie officers, fresh out of West Point and sailing round Cape Horn to join their garrisons in the backwoods of California. Until this point, their idea of the height of elegance had been the Willard Hotel in Washington, with its brass spittoons. Now their dreams of a new world, hovering above the fruit on the table, were interrupted by the arrival of the bill, worked out in a foreign currency and presented to them on a small silver tray by a dark-skinned waiter. The general’s eyes had twinkled in the light of the campfire at Kennesaw Mountain. He was describing the panic that came over the young officers as they looked at the size of the bill and dug deep into their pockets. All they could come up with were a few gold coins, adding up to less than a couple of saw-bucks. The general laughed, took a bite of meat, and puffed on his cigar. The dark-skinned waiter had come back with a mountain of copper and gold coins on the silver tray. “There was almost seven thousand rei in change!” In the firelight the general’s face looked haggard and gaunt, like the face of a hungry beggar. “A dollar was worth about a thousand rei in those days,” he laughed, gazing off into the distance. It was the only time he’d ever been away from his beloved America. Their guide had taken them to the nearby Rua da Ouvadar to see a local speciality: artificial flowers made of brightly coloured parrot plumes. “But it was the sight of those lovely girls making the flowers,” mused the general, “those beautiful Brazilian girls, so clever with their hands, that ebony hair” — a sharp glance from General Howard, who had just joined the campfire, reminded him that he was a married man. General Howard was the kind of fellow who would skip the parts of the Bible that a good Christian could only read as allegory; he would not have understood that his commanding officer was reminiscing about an aesthetic, not a carnal, experience. He would not have understood that in the twilight of memory, mulatto girls weaving flowers out of parrot plumes glowed like a bright beacon beyond the ugly confusion of battle. Like the beacon — no longer carnal — named Ursula.
