I

AT FIVE IN THE MORNING SOMEONE BANGING ON THE door and shouting, her husband, John, leaping out of bed, grabbing his rifle, and Roscoe at the same time roused from the backhouse, his bare feet pounding: Mattie hurriedly pulled on her robe, her mind prepared for the alarm of war, but the heart stricken that it would finally have come, and down the stairs she flew to see through the open door in the lamplight, at the steps of the portico, the two horses, steam rising from their flanks, their heads lifting, their eyes wild, the driver a young darkie with rounded shoulders, showing stolid patience even in this, and the woman standing in her carriage no one but her aunt Letitia Pettibone of McDonough, her elderly face drawn in anguish, her hair a straggled mess, this woman of such fine grooming, this dowager who practically ruled the season in Atlanta standing up in the equipage like some hag of doom, which indeed she would prove to be. The carriage was piled with luggage and tied bundles, and as she stood some silver fell to the ground, knives and forks and a silver candelabra, catching in the clatter the few gleams of light from the torch that Roscoe held. Mattie, still tying her robe, ran down the steps thinking stupidly, as she later reflected, only of the embarrassment to this woman, whom to tell the truth she had respected more than loved, and picking up and pressing back upon her the heavy silver, as if this was not something Roscoe should be doing, nor her husband, John Jameson, neither.

Letitia would not come down from her carriage, there was no time, she said. She was a badly frightened woman with no concern for her horses, as John saw and quickly ordered buckets to be brought around, as the woman cried, Get out, get out, take what you can and leave, and seemed to be roused to anger as they only stood listening, with some of the field hands appearing now around the side of the house with the first light, as if drawn into existence by it. And I know him! she cried. He has dined in my home. He has lived among us. He burns where he has ridden to lunch, he fires the city in whose clubs he once gave toasts, oh yes, someone of the educated class, or so we thought, though I never was impressed! No, I was never impressed, he was too spidery, too weak in his conversation, and badly composed in his dress, careless of his appearance, but for all that I thought quite civilized in having so little gift to dissemble or pretend what he did not feel. And what a bitter gall is in my throat for what I believed was a domesticated man with a clear love for wife and children, who is no more than a savage with not a drop of mercy in his cold heart.

It was difficult to get the information from her, she ranted so. John did not try to, he began giving orders and ran back in the house. It was she, Mattie, who listened. Her aunt’s hysteria, formulated oddly in terms of the drawing room, moved her to her own urgent attention. She had for the moment even forgotten her boys upstairs.

They are coming, Mattie, they are marching. It is an army of wild dogs led by this apostate, this hideous wretch, this devil who will drink your tea and bow before he takes everything from you.

And now, her message delivered, her aunt slumped back in her seat, and gave her order to be off. Where Letitia Pettibone was going Mattie could not get the answer. Nor how much time there was, in fact, before the scourge arrived at her own door. Not that she doubted the woman. She looked into the sky slowly lightening to its gray beginnings of the day. She heard nothing but the cock crowing and, as she turned, suddenly angry, the whisperings of the slaves gathered now at the corner of the house. And then with the team away, the carriage rolling down the gravel path, Mattie turned, lifting the hem of her robe, and mounted the steps only to see that horrible child Pearl, insolent as ever, standing, arms folded, against the pillar as if the plantation was her own.

JOHN JAMESON was not unprepared. As far back as September, when the news had come that Hood had pulled out and the Union armies had Atlanta, he sat Mattie down and told her what had to be done. The rugs were rolled, the art was taken down from the walls, her needlepoint chairs—whatever she valued, he told her—her English fabrics, the china, even her family Bible: it was all to be packed up and carted to Milledgeville and thence put on the train to Savannah, where John’s cotton broker had agreed to store their things in his warehouse. Not my piano, she’d said, that will stay. It would rot in the dampness of that place. As you wish, John had said, having no feeling for music in any case.

Mattie was dismayed to see her home so depleted. Through the bare windows the sun shone, lighting up the floors as if her life were going backward and she was again a young bride in a new-built unfurnished manse and with a somewhat frightening husband twice her age. She wondered how John knew the war would touch them directly. In fact he didn’t, but he was a man whose success gave him reason to suppose he was smarter than most people. He had a presence, with his voluminous chest and large head of wild white hair. Don’t argue with me, Mattie. They lost twenty or thirty thousand men taking that city. There’s hell to pay. You’re a general, with a President who’s a madman. Would you just sit there? So where? To Augusta? To Macon? And how will he ride, if not through these hills? And don’t expect that poor excuse for a Rebel army to do anything about it. But if I’m wrong, and I pray God I am, what will I have lost, tell me?

Mattie was not allowed to disagree in such matters. She felt even more dismayed and said not a thing when, with the crops in, John arranged to sell away his dozen prime field hands. They were bound, all of them, to a dealer in Columbia, South Carolina. When the day came and they were put in shackles into the wagon, she had to run upstairs and cover her ears so as not to hear the families wailing down in the shacks. All John had said was No buck nigger of mine will wear a Federal uniform, I’ll promise you that.

But for all his warning and preparation she could not believe the moment had come to leave Fieldstone. The fear made her legs weak. She could not imagine how to live except in her own home, with her own things, and the Georgian world arranged to provide her and her family what their station demanded. And though Aunt Letitia was gone, she had infected them with her panic. For all his foresight, John was running around this way and that, red-faced, shouting and giving orders. The boys, roused out of bed and still only half dressed, came down the stairs with their rifles and ran out through the back.

Mattie went to her bedroom and stood not knowing where to start. She heard herself whimpering. Somehow she dressed and grabbed whatever she could from her armoire and bath and threw everything into two portmanteaus. She heard a gunshot and, looking out the back window, saw one of the mules go down on its knees. Roscoe was leading another from the stable, while her older boy, John Junior, primed his rifle. It seemed only minutes later, with the sun barely on the treetops, that the carriages were waiting out front. Where were they to seat themselves? Both carriages were loaded with luggage and food hampers and sacks of sugar and flour. And now the morning breeze brought the smoke around from the stacks where John had set the fodder alight. And Mattie felt it was her own sooty life drifting away in the sky.

WHEN THE JAMESONS were gone, Pearl stood in the gravel path still holding her satchel. The Massah had only glanced at her before laying his whip on the horses. Roscoe, driving the second carriage, had come past her and, without looking, dropped at her feet something knotted in a handkerchief. She made no move to retrieve it. She waited in the peace and silence of their having gone. She felt the cool breeze on her legs. Then the air grew still and warm and, after a moment in which the earth seemed to draw its breath, the morning sun spread in a rush over the plantation.

Only then did she pick up what Roscoe had dropped. She knew immediately what it was through the cloth: the same two gold coins he had showed her once when she was little. His life savings. Dey real, Miss Porhl, he had said. You putem ’tween yer teeth you taste how real dey is. You see dem eagles? You git a passel of dese an you c’n fly lak de eagles high, high ober de eart—das what de eagles mean on dese monies.

Pearl felt the hot tears in her throat. She went around the big house, past the outbuildings and the smoking fodder and the dead mules, and past the slave quarters where they were busy singing and putting their things together, and down along the trail through the woods to where the Massah had given leave to lay out a graveyard.

There were by now six graves in this damp clearing, each marked by a wood shingle with the person’s name scratched in. The older grave mounds, like her mother’s, were covered with moss. Pearl squatted and read the name aloud: Nancy Wilkins. Mama, she said. I free. You tole me, Mah chile, my darlin Porhl, you will be free. So dey gone and I is. I free, I free like no one else in de whole worl but me. Das how free. Did Massah have on his face any look for his true-made chile? Uh-uh. Lak I hant his marigol eyes an high cheeks an more his likeness dan de runts what his wife ma’m made with the brudders one and two. I, with skin white as a cahnation flow’r.

Pearl fell forward to her knees and clasped her hands. Dear God Jesus, she whispered, make a place fer dis good woman beside you. An me, yore Porhl, teach me to be free.

SLOWLY, THE SLAVES, with their belongings wrapped in bundles or carried in old carpetbags, walked up to the main house and distributed themselves out front under the cypresses. They looked into the sky as if whatever it was they were told was coming would be from that direction. They wore their Sunday clothes. There were seven adults—two men, the elder Jake Early and Jubal Samuels, who had but one eye, and five women, including the old granny who could not walk very well—and three small children. The children were unusually quiet. They stayed close by and made bouquets of weeds or pressed round stones and pebbles in the earth.

Jake Early did not have to counsel patience. The fear they had all seen in the eyes of the fleeing Massah and Mistress told them that deliverance had come. But the sky was cloudless, and as the sun rose everyone settled down and some even nodded off, which Jake Early regretted, feeling that when the Union soldiers came they should find black folk not at their ease but smartly arrayed as a welcoming company of free men and women.

He himself stood in the middle of the road with his staff and did not move. He listened. For the longest while there was nothing but the mild stirring of the air, like a whispering in his ear or the rustle of woodland. But then he did hear something. Or did he? It wasn’t exactly a sound, it was more like a sense of something transformed in his own expectation. And then, almost as if what he held was a divining rod, the staff in his hand pointed to the sky westerly. At this, all the others stood up and came away from the trees: what they saw in the distance was smoke spouting from different points in the landscape, first here, then there. But in the middle of all this was a change in the sky color itself that gradually clarified as an upward-streaming brown cloud risen from the earth, as if the world was turned upside down.

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

AT 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.

Arly had a big grin on his face: You had best gather your belongings, young Will. We are leaving our dear home.

Sergeant Baumgartner, alarmed by the ruckus, had roused himself and stood facing the oaken door, his musket at the ready.

Oh now, Mr. Baumgartner, sir, Arly called, be careful with that thing lest you hurt yourself.

As if agreeing, the poor man sat back down to catch his breath.

They heard footsteps on the stone floors, the clanging of cell gates. For a moment, Will worried that in their little aerie, too far away from everything, they would be overlooked. But then came a pounding on the door. Baumgartner, startled out of his wits, had all he could do to find the right latchkey.

Arly and Will met outside their cells and shook hands for the first time in their friendship. They joined the procession of convicts down the iron flights and came out into the prison yard in the cold sun, amid maybe a hundred and fifty others also in their shoes without laces and their blankets wrapped around them.

They stood there shivering. This ain’t the prettiest picture in the world, Arly said, looking around at the weathered bearded faces and the hunched shoulders in their blankets and the guards and gray stone walls and the packed, hard earth under their feet. But it’s God-created, Will my man, it is his mysterious work, all right.

A lieutenant and four enlisted men with rifles escorted a senior officer in handsome gray attire into the yard. He was clearly important, with a plume in his hat and a maroon sash around his belly. They helped him to stand on a box. The convicts murmured among themselves when they saw his epaulets. He waited until they were quiet, then he cupped his hands around his mouth. I am Major General Nathaniel Wayne, he said. With the full agreement of Governor Brown, I am authorized to declare your sentence served, every damn one of you, providing you accept induction into the militia and swear to defend our great state of Georgia under my command!

Behind him, guards had brought out a table and a chair.

You have three minutes. I’ll give you three minutes to raise your right hand to be sworn and signed up, with all the rights and privileges of this service. If not, back to your cage you go, and may you sit there until Hell freezes over.

Everyone was astir at that. Some of the convicts were for it, and some, who were close to parole, against. Arly shook his head. It was a debate as if by a legislature in session. A felon shouted, I’d rather rot here than have my balls shot off!

Everyone was talking at once. These men ain’t no fools, Arly said. Atlanta is burned and the war is coming in this direction. If the militia is so shorthanded as to put guns in the hands of common criminals, you know what the odds are for any one of us coming out alive?

Piss poor? Will said.

That’s about right. I don’t know about you, Willie boy, said Arly, raising his hand high. But it’s all the same to me how I am to be killed.

HOURS LATER, AS militiamen, they found themselves in the contingent deployed to defend a wooden trestle across the Oconee River about fifteen miles south of the city. They were hunkered down in the swamp mud under hanging moss on the east bank. They had muskets and cartridge boxes, hardtack in their pockets, shoes with no socks, and worn, blood-rusted tunics buttoned over their prison pajamas. They wore their blankets as capes. It was cold enough so that when they stepped in the mud their shoes left a broken imprint in a thin pane of ice.

The train that had brought them here sat on the tracks behind them, with a fieldpiece mounted on a flatbed. On the west bank, the boys from the Georgia Military Institute who had been given the honor of bearing the brunt of an attack were entrenched behind works improvised from the forest floor.

Arly said, I would have thought to make our stand back in the city to protect the women and children there, but seemingly they are of no military importance. He looked over at Will. Even chewing his hardtack the boy was given to a mournful facial expression.

You are not one to kick your heels up about anything, are you, young Will?

What does that mean?

It means we’re out of those cells. It means you are a gloomy son of a bitch, for a man just removed from the valley of the shadow of death.

Sitting here under this tree, with ice water dripping down my neck and I’m waiting to be stomped on by an army? It’s not much different that I can see.

Well, you might find some satisfaction at least in taking a Yank or two with you as you go. Besides which I been thinking. The paper we signed said our sentences were declared served. How can you have already served a death sentence? One way is by being executed and coming back from the dead.

I don’t remember doing that.

I neither. The other way to have served a death sentence is by dispensation from God. I mean, no general can decide that. Not even the Governor has the authority to do that. The inspiration for it has to come from God, because it is such a serious supernatural matter, turning death into life. Do you agree?

I suppose.

And so why would God reprieve us from the firing squad if he only intended for us to die in the muck by a railroad trestle? And the answer is, He wouldn’t. So try to put a proper face on things.

At that moment they caught their first sight of the enemy, a cluster of blue cavalry through the trees beyond the opposite bank, pulling up their reins as their horses reared in the cracking of gunfire. Will found himself relieved to see they were just human beings. But after that his mind was stripped of thought, as if thinking was an indulgence. He would later reflect that although a deserter he had proved himself no coward, but at the moment he was simply assistant to a musket. He knelt and fired and reloaded and fired again. He was no longer cold. It was as if the air had heated up from the friction of shot and shell. The cannonade behind them was deafening. As the fieldpiece fired, his ears felt the concussion, and everything for seconds afterward was silence. Treetops across the river fell away in the silence, convicts on his line clutched their chests and fell, in silence. Then, all at once, the racket returned. Beside him Arly was coolly blowing the smoke off his musket barrel. Shatterings of tree ice collapsed on their heads. The bullets whistled. They got them new repeating rifles, Arly shouted as he raised his musket for firing. One of the bluecoat riders reached the bank, where he took a ball, the force of which wrenched him half out of the saddle, overturning his steed, and they both fell into the river.

Will couldn’t tell if he had shot anyone. All at once the bluecoats withdrew and faded back into the woods. An officer shouted, Hold your fire! And in the ear-ringing peace some of the men began to cheer. Arly said, The cheers’ll stick in their throats come the next foray. Will was breathing as hard as if he had been running. The woods were hung with smoke.

And then the Yanks were back, but with no more tactics on their part than the first time. It was as if they had to learn that the trestle was defended. Will seemed to sink farther into the mud each time he fired. The rifles snapped and the shells exploded, and the pungency of the battle seeped into his nostrils. He heard the shouts and cries of boys, and the screams of horses, until the Union force in its superior numbers withdrew once more. Now the silence seemed menacing. Smoke drifted through the trees.

That wasn’t the full army we heard from, Arly said. That was the cavalry out to poke into places and see what happens. Now they will bring up the armaments, and while we are busy with that they will send around a flanking movement upstream, with their pontoons, and we will be overrun.

Will was sweating, his hair was damp. He made to brush the sweat from his forehead and his hand came away with blood. I’m shot, he muttered.

Well damn, so you are.

I’m bleeding.

You got a nice little furrow in your scalp, that’s all, Arly said. As I told you, God has his eye out for us. But that don’t mean he can’t play around a little. Look.

To their right and left, the convict militia were rising from their positions, throwing their weapons down and turning tail. An officer shouted and fired his pistol into the air.

They have the right idea but the wrong direction, Arly said. Follow me. Before Will knew it, Arly had scrambled down the embankment onto the bridge. He turned and beckoned.

They ran across the bridge, which was on fire in places. Men were throwing blankets down and stomping on the flames. Arly and Will donated their blankets and kept running. Over on the other side the terrain was less swampy, and in the mossy glades Milledgeville cadets lay dead or wounded behind their logs and mounds of earth. Boys without a scratch on them wandered in a daze. Some were crying. Cadet officers went among them, pushing them back to their positions, slapping them to make them obey.

Arly led Will forward past their lines. They stumbled on some Union dead along the railroad tracks. Also fallen mounts groaning like men, some struggling to raise their heads off the ground.

They heard voices echoing in the forest ahead, and the crashing of caissons through the brush. Hurry, Arly said. He began stripping the uniform off one of the dead Yankees.

What are you doing? Will said.

Find something that fits you, boy!

Will looked around and pulled the tunic off a fellow who, as he lay with legs splayed, seemed about his height. He’d had his eye shot out. Will tugged off the trousers and the boots. His stomach turned with the resistance he felt from the dead body. What are we doing? he muttered, availing himself of the rolled poncho and the hat in the grass, though there was blood on it. Then he noticed that the dead man held one of the new repeating rifles, so he threw his weapon away, bent the clenched fingers back, and took up the rifle. Then the cartridge box and his tin drinking cup.

With their bundles in their arms they ran along in a crouch parallel to the river. They came upon a riderless horse, its nose in yellowing grass, and, leading it by the bridle, pressed on until they were a good mile downriver. There they halted and dressed themselves as Union soldiers.

Will shivered in the cold, damp uniform. His face was smeared with his own blood. He walked in circles, trying not to feel the tunic as it pressed across his back and dug under his arms. He tried to remember what the word was for the next thing down from a deserter.

Arly sat cross-legged, with his back against a tree. We are rich men with that horse, he said. Patting his tunic, he found a flask of bourbon in the pocket. He unscrewed the cap and took a swig. Whooee! Taste this, young Will. Go on. If you had any doubts God meant us to survive, just you have a taste of this.

III

EMILY THOMPSON SENT WILMA UPSTAIRS TO SIT WITH him in his bedroom. I have the steam kettle on the hearth so the Judge will breathe easier, she said. If he wakes, call me.

Yes’m.

She’d done all she could—hidden coffee, sugar, cornmeal, lard, and two hams in the hope chest under two embroidered pillows and her mother’s wedding gown. She’d left enough of the staples in the pantry so that they might not think she had hidden anything. Then she threw on a shawl and stood outside at the top of the steps, with the front door closed behind her. She was Georgia Supreme Court Justice Horace Thompson’s daughter, and she posed herself with her hands clasped at her waist to indicate as much, though her heartbeat was tremulous as a rabbit’s.

The street, the entire neighborhood, was unnaturally quiet as the first of them appeared. Mounted or on foot, they were not exactly shy, but they weren’t arrogant, either. And they were so young. Few were the age of Foster Thompson when he fell. A lieutenant dismounted, opened the cast-iron gate, and came up the walk. Standing at the foot of the steps, he saluted her and said she had nothing to fear. General Sherman does not war against women and children, he said.

He was apparently to present these sentiments to whomever he saw still in Milledgeville. In front of each house, as he rode on, he left behind a standing guard. The private stationed out by the gate glanced back at her and smiled, and touched his forefinger to his hat brim. At that she nodded and withdrew, closing the door behind her and locking it.

By the time she got upstairs and looked out the library window, the street was filled with them. Drummer boys kept the beat, but the soldiers walked in a careless manner, chatting and laughing and looking anything but military. A deep misgiving arose in her. Sure enough, the guard so nobly assigned to her saw chums of his in the passing crowd and joined them without even looking back.

And then there were so many that they overflowed the street and spread themselves through the yards like a river widening its banks. White canvas wagons pulled by teams of mules appeared, the mule skinners with their sleeves rolled, and behind them caissons, the gun barrels catching the late-afternoon sun with sudden, sharp shards of light that suggested their propulsive murderousness. She pulled the curtains tight and stood with her back to the window and closed her eyes. She heard the lowing of cattle, shouting, the crack of whips. This was not an army, it was an infestation.

She was a churchgoer only from obligation, but she thought of praying. What should she pray for? What should she hope for? It could be no more of a practical hope than to see Foster Thompson ride up, waving his hat and with a broad smile on his face, to tell her he was no ghost.

I’m gone to fight tyranny, he had said, his last words to her as he kissed her cheek. He’d looked so gallantly cocksure in his uniform, the emblem of their way of life, their freedom, their honor.

Now, what she heard was men not in their marching but in their vacillating movement, as if they were more personally in an eddying awareness of where they were. A bugle sounded at some distance. She heard individual voices, as of visitors at the gate. She could not help herself, and looked out again. Everywhere, they were setting themselves out to make camp. In the yards, in the town square at the end of the street. And now someone pounded at the door. She went to the landing. Wilma had come out of the Judge’s room, fear in her eyes. The Judge had awakened. What! What is happening? he called in his weak voice. Nothing, Father, nothing at all! And then, going downstairs, softly, angrily, she said behind her to Wilma, I don’t need you to worry about—go back in there as you were told.

She unlocked the front door and stepped back as a swarm of bluecoats shouldered past her and made the house their own.

SHE WOULD NOT sleep that night. She and Wilma were remanded to the Judge’s bedroom. It was all the residence allotted to her. She lay curled on the sofa. Places in the city were on fire. She saw this recorded in the looming and flickering light on the ceiling. She supposed she was fortunate that her home was the chosen bivouac for staff officers. They had advised her in a gentlemanly way to go upstairs and stay there, so that she could hope that when they left—and God let it be soon—the house would not have suffered from their presence. But she heard laughter and a coming and going all through the evening. The pitcher on the end table beside her head shook as their boots trod the floor below. There was traffic to the outbuildings. Tobacco smoke drifted under the door.

The oppressive maleness of them all unnerved her. She realized this was a familiar feeling—a revulsion for their gender, its animality, all the more offensive because they were so unconscious of it. They existed and left the sensibility of it to her. She had felt this way even when as a young girl her brother Foster brought his friends home. Even Foster, dear Foster, would somehow be shouldering her off her own life. He seemed to take up more room than he had to. His appetites were prominent, all of their appetites. It was like living with jungle creatures, the look in their eyes as they professed their gentlemanly courtesies. And it was they who made war. Women did not make war—they did not gallop off waving their swords and screaming about honor and freedom.

But she had not believed this war would destroy the life she had known and consign her to a permanent state of dereliction until, rising suddenly from the sofa, she was convinced of it. What had frightened her? It was now perhaps two or three in the morning. The hearth fire was out, there was no movement in the downstairs. Only moonlight lit the chilled room. She went over to her father’s bedside. He lay quiet on his back. But his jaw was dropped and both hands were clenched into fists above his coverlet. She touched his cheek and it was dry and cold to the touch.

Wilma, Wilma, she whispered insanely, as if not wanting to disturb her father. The girl was asleep on the floor at the foot of the bed. Emily shook her. Wake up, wake up!

Emily ran down the stairs and out of the house into a city she did not recognize. Fly tents in every yard, on every green, were like a crop of teeth sprung up from the earth. The embers of cooking fires cast their red glow into the moonlight. Horses were tethered to lampposts. She heard a strange music, and coming into the Capitol Square saw there a dance going on by the light of torches. It was military bandsmen, their uniform coats unbuttoned, who supplied the merry tune, from a clarinet, a tuba, a fife. And it was slave women and children holding hands and dancing in a circle. A Yankee flag flew from the dome of the capitol. Confederate notes of tender blew in swirls and scuttled along the ground like autumn leaves. Books flew out the windows of the Georgia state library to soldiers catching them below. She heard the screams of a woman coming from the darkness at the end of an alley.

Dr. Stephens’s house was dark. She rattled the doorknob, peered in the windows. She ran to the back. The stable was empty. There was no more Dr. Stephens. There was no more Milledgeville. She didn’t know what to do. She ran. She saw bright light and ran toward it. Behind one of the stately city mansions, the yard was lit with torches. A line of white canvased wagons stood there, the mules with their muzzles in feedbags. She heard groans and slipped between two wagons to their rear. Nurses had lifted out a soldier on a pallet. The soldier raised himself on one elbow and grinned at her. His tunic was soaked in blood.

On the ground outside the open barn doors was something from which she couldn’t in time avert her eyes. She didn’t want to believe she was looking at a slimed heap of severed human arms and legs.

The light inside was as bright with many lanterns as if the barn were on fire. An army surgeon stood beside a table, his team of nurses around him. He turned to look at her, frowned, and muttered something. At this fearful moment he was recorded indelibly in Emily’s mind. He was a short, neatly put-together man who seemed inviolate in the carnage around him. He wore a rubber apron over his tunic. A bloodied saw was in his hand. He had thick eyebrows, and the eyes that had peered from under them were a pale blue. It seemed to her they were filled with an anguish that reflected her own. A nurse ran toward her. You shouldn’t be here, miss, he said, turning her to the door. We must have a doctor, Emily said. My father is Judge Thompson, and something is terribly wrong.

Saying this, she gasped. What was wrong, she knew, was that her father was dead.

WREDE SARTORIUS, AS a colonel, was the superior of the young officers who’d billeted themselves in the Thompson home. He ordered them out.

The old man had indeed given up the ghost. It was almost odd to see death in an old person. The face on the pillow stared blindly upward, as if the journey to Heaven had begun. With the eyes closed, the nose seemed to grow.

He could supply a coffin, Wrede told Miss Thompson. He smiled sadly. We have everything. We meet every need.

Emily was terribly moved by the surgeon’s kindness. At the same time, it confirmed her expectation of what was due her.

When Wilma was sent to summon Father McKee, she found him almost too stunned to come back with her. St. Thomas had been vandalized, he reported to Emily. They tore out the pews for their campfires. They befouled the altar. Do they call themselves Christians who did this? the Father said to Emily. And she, the bereft, found herself comforting him.

By morning troops were on the march, moving through the town in endless procession. The penitentiary had been set afire. Muffled explosions came from the city arsenal. Milledgeville was devastated—windows broken, gardens stomped on, stores stripped of their goods.

Wrede urged an immediate burial. He supplied a mounted guard. And so a single carriage bore the casket through the traffic and up the hill to the cemetery, where the eminent Judge Thompson was laid to rest. Emily wept at the tragically brief obsequies. Her father should have been lying in state. He was a great man, she told Wrede, on the way home. She dabbed the corners of her eyes with her handkerchief. His opinions made legal history. If you all were not here the church bells would be tolling all over Georgia, and everyone in town would be lining up to pay their respects. And, yes, the Negroes too, because he was a kind man, and a generous man.

Wrede said nothing. He felt Emily Thompson had known all along that her father was going to die, another casualty of war. She had not seen in another part of the cemetery that Union gravediggers were busy interring those wounded at the Oconee River whom the medical service had not been able to save. She seemed not aware, either, of the extended attention he was paying to her. Wrede was a naturalized citizen, a German. His courtliness was European. He had recognized a kind of backwoods aristocracy in the deportment of this young woman. She was a trim little thing, with a bosom bound tightly to her and a prim mouth that he was sure had never been kissed. Yet there was a fire in her eyes, a spirit not gutted by her sorrow.

The army was on the march out of Milledgeville. Wrede took his leave. He identified his brigade and suggested that if it happened to pass by the house he would stop in again for a moment. He expressed his condolences and closed the door behind him.

THE NORTH AND south wings of Sherman’s army had converged at Milledgeville. All day, troops following those who had bivouacked in the city moved through it and kept going. Emily stood at the window. Endless files of them, and caissons, commissary wagon trains, ambulances, herds of cattle. Drummer boys beating the pace with each company. She tried to make out the numbers on the regimental pennants.

Her street was lined with young shade trees. Troops and wagons made detours away through the gardens and alleys while black pioneers with two-man saws felled the trees. Other black men stripped off the branches, and still others loaded trunks and limbs aboard drays pulled by teams of six and eight mules. It was all very efficient, a matter seemingly of a few moments in which to flatten the city. Emily had loved this concourse of saplings, and stood now too stunned to feel anything except that the light in her house had changed. She heard a regimental band at some distance. It seemed to be celebrating her sorrow. She decided not to wait anymore for the reappearance of the surgeon with the impeccable manners and the strange name: Wrede Sartorius.

Wilma had removed the bedding in the Judge’s room. She had opened the windows to the cold sun and swept, and dusted, and packed the Judge’s medicines in a box. Only when she had put his slippers and shawl in his closet, among his suits and cutaways and his stovepipe hat, did she begin to weep. Downstairs she was like a cyclone, sweeping away the dirt and tobacco ash and general mess left by the army men. Wilma worked with a servant’s possessiveness. When Emily Thompson thought to turn around, the house was as it should have been but for a few scars and broken chair legs.

The two women draped black bunting from the second-floor windows. Emily, her hair loosened and fallen about her face, sat dry-eyed in the kitchen, staring at nothing, while Wilma made tea. The tea was cold and still in her cup when Emily became aware that Wilma stood beside her, dressed for travel and with a carpetbag in her hand. Emily studied the brown face, feeling that she had never seen it before. Familiar were the dark eyes, and the slightly Oriental cornering of them. But now they stared back. The broad rounded forehead and the firm mouth and high cheekbones suggested a girl no longer but a fine-looking woman. There was nothing deferential about her. I’ll be going now, Miss Emily, Wilma said. The two had grown up together, Wilma perhaps a year or two the younger. Where will you be going? Emily asked. With everyone, Wilma said. Emily ran after her. Wait, wait! she called. Wilma, please wait. Emily raced upstairs to the bedroom, where sat her mother’s hope chest. She removed the burlap sack of foodstuffs she had hidden, and after withdrawing a few items for herself she retied the sack and brought it down. Please take this. Wilma shook her head. Take it, it is my last instruction to you, Emily said. For God’s sake take it!

By now the last of the troops were straggling by, and behind them the parade of black folks who had chosen to follow the army. There were hundreds—men, women, and children—walking, riding in wagons, some limping along, and the sound of them was different from the sound of army men. No drumbeats here, no rumble of caissons, no military blare. It was a rhythmless festive sound that came up from them, a celebratory chatter almost like birds in a tree, from which laughter emerged or bits of song. It was the sound of a collective excitement, as if these people were on some sort of holiday and on their way to a church meeting or a picnic. Children, with their high, piping voices, were skipping along or pretending to be soldiers, or running ahead and then running back. As Emily stood at the door and watched, Wilma slipped into the crowd and, looking over her shoulder, smiled and gave a shy little wave, and was gone.

AND THEN THE town of Milledgeville, empty and quiet, sat in its dishevelment, gusts of wind flying paper and brush against the sides of buildings and the leavings of coal fires scuttering in the street. The air was acrid. When the war began, Emily had not understood what war meant. It meant the death of everyone in her family. It meant the death of the Thompsons. She felt hollowed out, as if there was nothing left of her to mourn them. The power of war and what it had done seemed to wipe away her past until this moment. She wandered through the house she had lived in all her life. One room after another seemed to confront her. She stood in the door of her father’s bedroom. The historic vigorous father, the way he looked and acted, his dignity, the respect he commanded, the handsome ruddy face and the full head of thick white hair, all devolved in her mind to the pathetic sepulchral end of the man, frail and whining, and then frozen dead with his clenched fists in the air. She could not forget his face in death. She thought of him now in his coffin underground, what were called the remains. And her mother’s remains. And her brother Foster’s remains buried somewhere in Tennessee. She shivered and pulled her shawl about her. How awful. How hideously awful. And was she remains as well? Was this house her tomb?

In the wake of the Union armies, a squad of General Hood’s cavalry now appeared. People came out in the street to greet them. The guerrillas had captured three Union stragglers, including a boy drummer. The prisoners, lassoed like cattle with their hands behind their backs, were jeered at as they stumbled along. Emily watched from the window as her neighbors, having hidden themselves like mice, came out now to cheer the troops as heroes. And so here was another parade, a scraggly one, a few citizens following a ragtag bunch on horse, looking proud and victorious in their intention to execute two men and a boy. This was the secessionist answer. She was appalled.

Emily packed some things in a portmanteau, and her small store of food in another. Putting on her winter coat, and taking with her a blanket against the cold, she went to the stable and hitched the Judge’s dobbin to the buggy. It was another gift of the army surgeon Wrede Sartorius, who had seen to it that their horse was not trotted away for the Union. She did not even look back as she rode out of town. She flicked the reins. The wind blew her tears dry. She knew the direction the armies had taken. You just followed the roads that were beaten down, and before long you would hear a sound not natural to the countryside. And then you would smell them.

IV

THEY HAD TAKEN THE TROUBLE TO APPLY MUD TO their unit insignia. But they needn’t have. It was dark when they found themselves back in the city. Milledgeville was a big party. The Governor’s Mansion was filled with Union officers. Will saw them through the windows. Officers in the legislature, too—you could hear them shouting and singing. Oh yes, there had to be considerable drinking and putting their feet up on desks. Stiff and sweating and cold at the same time in his corporal’s uniform, Will worried that he would be recognized by a prison official, or one of the penitentiary guards. He imagined himself protesting—hadn’t he been pardoned? But what was he thinking—there were no guards. There were no prison officials. Everyone from the Governor on down was gone. He was so tired and hungry that he wasn’t thinking straight.

It was Arly’s turn to be in the saddle, Will walking alongside.

Will, boy, you are too quiet. I expect whatever is in your mind right now ain’t helping our cause any.

Well, it’s cautionary hard being a damn turncoat.

Is that what you are? You might put a better face on things. As a loyal son of the South behind enemy lines, frinstance, you might be a spy.

Whatever I am maybe I don’t even know anymore, standing in for a dead man.

Well, you know you’re hungry and that’s a start. Here, down this street looks about right. You smell that? Come on.

He had seen a campfire in the front yard of a house where they had piled up the picket fence for a nice blaze. An old man and his woman were standing on their porch. Troopers marched past them going in, and others were coming out with their arms full. The woman cursed while the man patted her hand.

Just march right in like that, Arly said from the side of his mouth. Like you belong.

And what about dobbin here?

We’ll tend to her feed later. Right now we want a good, safe tether so someone don’t steal her away.

At that, Arly rode the horse up the porch steps and through the front door into the entry hall and hitched her to the newel post at the foot of the stairs. This was just the thing to get the Union boys laughing and the old woman shrieking.

And so Arly and Will were in the game, rummaging in the pantry and then the root cellar, where they found sacks of sweet potatoes. Will was wary that they wouldn’t have a Christian welcome from this victory party of revelers all from the same company, but when he and Arly came out and dumped their contribution by the fire that was entry enough, given that most of the men were half drunk anyways.

Tears came to Will’s eyes. There were chickens on spits and potatoes on the coals and pans frying with bacon and cabbages. There were jars of put-up summer fruits and vegetables, and loaves of real bread. A sergeant poured generously from his bottle into Will’s tin cup. Will sat down cross-legged in the grass and set about the best meal he had had since leaving home. His mouth full, his chin dripping with grease, he considered the possibility that all men are brothers.

Later, as the moon came up, Arly smoked a cigar, and recounted with some modesty his heroism at the Oconee River, for which he was attended with respect by his listeners, though his lieutenant’s cockade might have had something to do with it.

But Arly didn’t just talk, he listened, too. After he and Will said good night and they had found fodder and a stall for the horse in a barn behind an abandoned house, and they were getting comfortable in the house, up on the second floor, in a sitting room, Arly told Will that the army was moving out at dawn. The cavalry will feint to Augusta, but it is to Savannah the army will go, he said.

Does Gen’ral Sherman know that? Maybe you ought to tell him.

Son, this general he’s almost too smart to be a general, and if there is a force waiting in Augusta, as is the impression of everone I talked to, why go there? Besides which there is a Union navy, as I understan it, and in those ships waiting off Savannah, as they are sure to, will be the mail and ordnance and new shoes and soldier’s pay we ain’t had since Hector was a pup.

We? We ain’t had? I thought we was Reb spies.

Well, so what? Their money is good. In fact a damn sight better than the paper Jeff Davis thrown at us.

They broke up some chairs and desk drawers and made a nice, warm fire in the hearth. Arly took the sofa and Will the floor, with the cushion from an upholstered chair for a pillow. For blankets they sliced up some rugs with their bayonets.

Outside, some Union men were singing:

The years creep slowly by, Lorena,

The snow is on the grass again;

The sun’s low down the sky, Lorena,

The frost gleams where the flowers have been . . .

There was still occasional shouting in the streets as indication the troops were settling in for the night. Will thought what a strange thing it was, an army, making its camp always the same whether in some woods by a stream or amidst homes and public buildings. The rifles are stacked, the pickets are sent out, and the bugler plays taps no matter if you are in a forest grove or a metropolis of civilization.

No need to get up with them at dawn, Arly said. We’ll wait for the commissary wagons and the ambulances and such. That’ll be a while. You want to hang back where the army is comprised of doctors and cooks and clerks who know no more of soldiering than ladies in a tea room. They won’t take roll calls back there.

WILL STARTED AWAKE long after he had heard reveille. He roused himself up on his elbows to listen for the rattle of the wagon trains or the brigade drums as the long end of the Twentieth Corps trailed after the regiments. He heard nothing. The sun shone all over the floor. It was like high noon in this place. He crawled to the window. The street was empty.

The army was gone.

He woke Arly, and moments later they were rushing down the stairs and out the back door to the barn.

Someone was leading their horse by the bridle. A Johnny Reb in his grays. Will’s heart leapt up. He might in that instant of his confusion have hailed the boy. But Arly rushed to the attack. As the two of them went down, the Reb didn’t let go of the bridle and the horse, twisted down by the head, planted her forelegs to keep from going over. But she was screaming.

Will slowly realized there was more of a racket than there should be if Hood’s men were in town on the heels of the Union army. He looked down at his uniform.

Now the Reb had let go of dobbin so as to have both hands available for fighting. He was a heavier boy than Arly, if not as fit, and so they went rolling over each other, rolling, punching, and grunting, as the dust rose. Will! Arly shouted. Will! He meant the horse, who nearly knocked Will over as she reared and cantered away around the side of the house to the street.

Will, off in pursuit, noticed the bed of chrysanthemums planted along the side of the house, a society of modest yellow and white blooms crowned with ash and shuddering in the breeze. He thought what blessedness there was in the immobility and unthinkingness of plant life, that there might be something to say for it, as in the street now, beyond the front yard, two Rebel cavalry were a-gallop after the free running creature and another three horsemen had turned their mounts toward him, one with his sword drawn, another with his pistol cocked, and a third with a big smile and a couple of front teeth missing on his unshaven face.

Will stopped in his tracks. He held out his arms in what he might have thought of as a welcoming recognition, a kind of embrace in the air, but which these guerrillas preferred to take as surrender. They laughed, and the wielder of the pistol joyfully shot a ball into the ground at his feet.

People came into the street from the homes where they had been hiding. They were ecstatic to see their own troops arrived to save them. Will stood immobilized, his gesture frozen. The wind pasted a newspaper sheet to his legs. Ash settled in his open mouth. Up in the blue sky, the smoke from the smoldering ruins of the penitentiary scurried off like the departing army that he had been depending on. One of the riders trotted past him back to the barn. Will prayed that Arly would have lost his encounter. For if he had not, if he’d killed the Reb, then they would be executed, after all, here in Milledgeville, though perhaps with less ceremony than he’d expected as a deserter. But he didn’t want Arly to have perished, either, Arly being the flickering if not entirely gutted hope Will had for his unhappy life other than his wish, in this latest wretched moment of his nineteen years, to have it end entirely.

A FEW MINUTES later Will, Arly, and some straggling drummer boy the Rebs had found were being marched through the street with their arms roped to their bodies. A growing crowd followed them. Every once in a while one of the horse soldiers looked down from his saddle and spit. Someone threw a rock, and it hit the drummer boy in the back. The boy stumbled along, tears streaming down his face.

Arly said something and had to repeat it, because Will couldn’t understand the words. Arly’s cheek was puffed out, an eye was half closed, his lower lip was swollen, and he’d lost a few teeth. Also, he was limping because, as he had gotten up off his opponent with his hands raised, he’d received a kick in the ribs. Your own kind, is what Will made out.

My own kind? Is that what you’re saying?

Arly nodded. He gestured with his head to people running alongside, laughing and jeering. Folks you come fum, he said.

V

CLARKE KNEW THAT HIS ATTENTIONS TO PEARL WERE a source of cynical amusement to the men. Pearl wasn’t the first freed black girl to get special treatment. The lighter-colored, especially, were being picked up all along the march and ensconced in the wagons. They were given choice edibles and clothes pillaged from the plantations. This was a different situation entirely, but he knew better than to try to explain. He couldn’t even make sense of it himself. He was terribly moved by this child in a way that took him completely by surprise. He wanted to do things for her. He wanted to take care of her. Yet, at the same time, he knew he was attracted inappropriately. He noticed the way she carried herself, with a kind of head-high grace that was unlearned and entirely natural. He found himself comparing her to women of his generation back in Boston. Everything they did and said was learned comportment. They were unoriginal girls, argued by propriety out of whatever genius they might have had. They practiced the arts as inducements to marriage.

He thought that perhaps Pearl had some royal African blood, or else how would that angry intelligence, so commanding, have come to her. She missed nothing with those cat-pale eyes of hers. She was suspicious of him. She was critical of the men. She thought they were filthy and told him so: You white mens smell like de cow barn back at Massah’s. No worse, dat how bad.

That, he said.

That how bad, she said. Lord! Even stinky brudders one an two back home more tolable dan dis.

Than this, he said.

Than this. Dese mens doan never wash off demselves in no netherpart, jus shit in de groun and move on like dumb animal do.

Animals. Dumb animals, he said.

Thas right. An de gun grease gone sour in dere hair, and God know what else grown fum dere hide and dere feet dat stink so. Phewy! Dint dey hab mothers to teach’m?

Didn’t, he said.

I ’spect not.

Pearl bathed herself with hard soap and a basin of cold water every evening in Clarke’s tent while he stood guard outside. Then she went to sleep in a fly tent he’d put up next to his own. He wanted the men to know that she was under his protection but that his behavior was honorable. After the first few days of snickering and talking among themselves, they seemed to understand and accept the situation at face value. They, too, became protective. It was Sergeant Malone who came up with a drummer-boy uniform for her. At first she was pleased. They were camped in a pine grove at the time, and she came out of her tent, having wriggled into the tunic and trousers, and stood for all of them to admire her, though everything was just a mite too big. There was a hat too, and silver buttons that she rubbed to a shine. But then she grew thoughtful.

I ain’t never played no drum, she said.

Nothing to it, Malone said. We’ll show you how.

Sompun wrong bein a white drum boy, she said to Clarke.

What?

I too pretty fer a drum boy. I not white, neither, if white I be.

Clarke said, By and by, Pearl, the black folks will have to go back. Those are the standing orders of General Sherman. You don’t want to go back, do you?

You burned de house, took de vittles. Back to what?

Exactly. When the war is won, the authorities will work out the legalities for freed slaves to own their own land. But now if they trail along they are too many mouths to feed. The young men we can enlist, but the women and children and old men, they will fall by the wayside and then where will they be? So it’s best this way.

Well, a gul chile not much good fer shootin neither.

Clarke was astonished at the aplomb with which he was subverting orders. You can beat the drum when we’re marching, he said. And you can ride in the wagons when we’re foraging.

Pearl was not persuaded. She began to feel that staying with Jake Early and the others was what she should do. The prospect was unsettling, and she didn’t know why she felt that way. They had never been kind to her, but there was something wrong in their being sent back while she went on. She enjoyed having a fuss made over her. She had never had that—it came of being free—but she thought now of the plantation, where she loved the fields and the stands of trees. She knew every inch of that place she had lived on all her life. She knew every stream, every rock, every shrub. But, most of all, she worried that if she was not there her mother’s grave would be forgotten, with nobody to care about it or tend to it. The slave quarters were still standing. And if she was free, wasn’t she free to go back if that’s what she wanted? To starve, if she wanted to? To be John Jameson’s slave chile again, if she wanted to?

In this state of mind Pearl sat down near the fire in her new uniform and joined the men for supper. She was given a tin plate with a roasted chicken leg and sweet potatoes and corn bread with sorghum. This in itself might have been persuasive, but at that moment Jake Early appeared out of the darkness along with Jubal Samuels, he of the one eye. They were under escort, two privates with rifles at the ready.

Sergeant Malone said, Jesus! What’s this?

Should be plain we ain’t Johnnies, Jubal Samuels said.

We been lookin fer dat chile, Jake Early said, pointing at Pearl.

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

SOPHIE 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.

What’s taking so long! Old Thompson stood up from his chair and addressed the wagons in front of theirs: What is your business here? He could not bear the wait. He had things to say to Horace before the Devil took him.

You best not tire yourself with all this frettin, Sophie said.

She was right. He sat back down, closed his eyes, and said a prayer to calm himself. With his eyes closed, he smelled a dead country.

Sophie, he said, am I the Pharaoh?

She shook her head. She never knew what would come out of that mouth. You jes yerself, she said.

Because if I’m the Pharaoh I’m convinced. I don’t need no frogs, nor no locusts, I’m letting you go. You want your freedom, I grant it to you. And this, he said, waving his hand about, is what goes along with it. This is what you get with your nigger freedom.

Tears came to his eyes. The wretched war had destroyed not only their country but all their presumptions of human self-regard. What a scant, foolish pretense was a family, a culture, a place in history, when it was all so easily defamed. And God was behind this. It was God who did this, with the Union as his instrument.

In fact, he loved and admired his brother as much as he hated him. He saw them together as young men in their competition and he dreaded how old and suffering he might find Horace now at the end of life. And as long as he dreaded what he might find, there was resistance in that, resistance to the God who had taken every presumption from them. Even love aghast was love, and God could not destroy that.

VII

WREDE’S SURGERY WAGONS WERE WITH THE DIVISION sent up the road to Waynesboro to rescue the embattled cavalry of General Kilpatrick. Sherman had deployed the cavalry as a feint, and the Rebels, thinking he was preparing to move on Augusta, put up a stiff resistance. The strategy worked, but the losses were heavy. With Waynesboro finally secured, Wrede established his field hospital in the railroad depot. There were so many wounded in the hand-to-hand fighting that orderlies had to leave them on canvas stretchers outside on the station platform. They lay there moaning, calling for water. Emily Thompson moved among them with soft words to ease their suffering if she could. She’d discovered, and Wrede had concurred, that a woman’s nursing meant something more to the men in the way of reassurance. His army nurses, too, had noticed the quieting balm of her presence. And she had learned quickly. You did not give men with stomach or chest wounds more than a sip of water. For those whose pain was unendurable, she gently held her hand under their heads and put tincture of opium to their lips. To others she dispensed cups of brandy. The men made weak self-deprecating jokes, or thanked her for her ministrations with tears in their eyes. For some, she wrote their letters as they lay dying.

Emily was astonished at herself. That she had like a brazen hussy found Wrede Sartorius on the march and joined him. That she had proved able to look upon hideous sights. That she could live in the open as men did, with none of the soft fluff and appurtenances of grooming that women were supposed to find essential to living.

She felt no pangs of guilt for betraying her Southern loyalties. It all had to do with this Union doctor. She was absolved by his transcendent attentions to the war wounded. North or South, military or civilian—he made no distinctions. Even now, some gray uniforms were among the bluecoats lying on their pallets. He seemed above the warring factions, Wrede Sartorius. He was like some god trying to staunch the flow of human disaster. She had lost her entire family in this war, yet she felt that his comprehension of its tragedy was beyond her own. It was characteristic of him to have come to her home to see about her poor father. She felt privileged when he talked to her or inquired after her comfort. He spoke with something not quite like a foreign accent, it was more an intonation that might have come of his formal way of talking. She did not detect in him any of the signs she had been getting from men since she was a child. Of course his responsibilities were enormous but she felt that even in ordinary social circumstances he would not be given to social stratagems. There would be none of the practiced gallantry of Southern boys who at the same time, she knew, would not think twice if given the opportunity to take advantage of her.

Yet she received from him a manly acknowledgment of her person, some subtle acceptance of her presence that was not entirely official.

It was late into the night by the time the work was done. Emily stood in the door of the railroad station watching as, by torchlight, nurses loaded the amputees into ambulances. A few yards into the woods, men dug the pit for the severed limbs. A burial squad arrived with their wagon of coffins to remove the dead to a graveyard. Corpses were searched for personal items—the letters, rings, diaries, and enlistment papers that would identify them. Company commanders were required to write official condolences to the families of the dead men.

Emily was exhausted. She had as yet no indication of where she was supposed to sleep this night. Inside the depot, nurses were scrubbing the floor and operating tables with sand. Sartorius sat at the stationmaster’s desk writing his notes in the light of a kerosene lamp. For this task he wore wire-rim spectacles that she found charming. He was rendered boyish by them, a student at his studies. And he had the most beautiful hands, squared and strong but with long, slender white fingers. How skillful those hands were. One of the nurses told her, because she still couldn’t manage to watch the surgical procedures, that the doctor was renowned in the corps for removing a leg in twelve seconds. An arm took only nine. The field hospitals always ran short of soporifics. There was never enough chloroform to go around, and so given only a slug of brandy a soldier would have reason to bless the doctor who did the job as quickly as possible.

WREDE’S MEN FOUND billets for them—a house on the main street that was still reasonably intact, though windows were shattered and grapeshot had pocked and splintered the siding. The owner, an elderly widow woman, met them at the door weeping. I’ve nothing left, she cried, I’m plumb cleaned out. What more do you want of me? She was a wailing supplicant, clasping her hands over her heart. But when she saw Emily she squared her shoulders, threw her head back, and assumed an imperious expression. You run my slaves off, stole my provisions. I thought there was no more you could do to befoul this house, she said to Wrede. Emily looked away, too embarrassed to say anything. But Wrede didn’t seem to be listening. He ordered a private to bring the woman some rations and escorted Emily upstairs.

They stood for a moment on the landing.

We return-march to the corps before dawn, Wrede said. He looked at his pocket watch. I’m sorry, I should have released you hours ago.

I’ve done nothing to compare with what has been required of you this day.

He smiled and shook his head. We know so little. Our medical service is no less barbarous than the war that requires it. Someday we will have other means. We will have found botanical molds to reverse infection. We will replace lost blood. We will photograph through the body to the bones. And so on.

Wrede chose a room, nodded, and closed the door behind him.

Emily stood thinking of what he had said. She didn’t know if she had heard him correctly.

She went to her room, closed the door, undressed, and lay down in a soft bed for the first time in many nights. Yet she was far from sleep. She had never before known a man whose thoughts could startle her so. She was an educated woman. She had taken first prizes in Essays and French at St. Mary’s Junior College for Episcopal Young Women. After her mother’s death she sat as hostess at her father’s dinners. Distinguished jurists dined at their table. She’d always acquitted herself well in the conversation which was often philosophical. Yet it was as if this doctor put into her mind images of another world, one she could see only from afar, appearing and disappearing as through drifting clouds.

She lay staring into the darkness. The bed was cold. She shivered under the blankets. She did not like their smell. In time of war men in uniform could occupy a home with impunity. She herself had suffered such an invasion, had she not? But for a woman it was different. The old lady had simply assumed I was a trollop, Emily thought. I would have made the same assumption in her place. I have compromised myself. Never before in my life have I given anyone reason to question my respectability.

She sat up in bed. What would Father say? A wave of cold fear, like nausea, passed through her. What could have been in her mind, what had possessed her? To have chosen this vagabondage! She was truly frightened now, shaking and on the verge of tears. She lay back down and pulled the covers to her chin. In the morning, she must somehow find a way to get back home. Yes, that is exactly what she must do. She belonged nowhere else but home.

Her resolution had the effect of calming her. She thought of the man in the next room. She listened for any sound that might have suggested Wrede Sartorius was awake. She could believe of him that he did not require sleep. But she heard nothing. Nor was any light coming from his room or she would have seen it through her window, where she saw only the shadow of a large tree.

WREDE HAD PROCURED a mount for her, and on the march she rode beside him. The sun rose as they were passing through a forest of towering pines, straight as a rule and greened out only at the tops. Emily felt herself in a hallowed place, the footfalls of the horses and mules and even the creak of the rolling wagons hushed by the thick bed of brown pine needles covering the forest floor. As the day came on she could see, on either side of them off in the woods, the covering infantry drifting among the trees, disappearing and reappearing as if with discretion.

She found in the steady peaceful march through the pine forest a reason to admire men. As Northerners these soldiers were far from their homes and families. Yet they persisted and walked the earth as if the earth were their home. She became aware that Wrede was speaking and didn’t know if she had transferred his words into her own thoughts or if he had been reading her mind.

I confess I no longer find it strange to have no habitation, to wake up each morning in a different place, he said. To march and camp and march again. To meet resistance at a river or a hamlet and engage in combat. And then to bury our dead and resume the march.

You carry your world with you, Emily said.

Yes, we have everything that defines a civilization, Wrede said. We have engineers, quartermaster, commissary, cooks, musicians, doctors, carpenters, servants, and guns. You are impressed?

I don’t know what to think. I’ve lost everything to this war. And I see steadfastness not in the rooted mansions of a city but in what has no roots, what is itinerant. A floating world.

It dominates, Wrede said.

Yes.

And in its midst you are secure.

Yes, Emily whispered, feeling at this moment that she had revealed something terribly intimate about herself.

But supposing we are more a nonhuman form of life. Imagine a great segmented body moving in contractions and dilations at a rate of twelve or fifteen miles a day, a creature of a hundred thousand feet. It is tubular in its being and tentacled to the roads and bridges over which it travels. It sends out as antennae its men on horses. It consumes everything in its path. It is an immense organism, this army, with a small brain. That would be General Sherman, whom I have never seen.

I am not sure the General would be pleased to hear himself described so, Emily said in all solemnity. And then she laughed.

But Wrede clearly liked this train of thought. All the orders for our vast movements issue forth from that brain, he said. They are carried via the generals and colonels and field officers for distribution to the body of us. This is the creature’s nervous system. And any one of the sixty thousand of us has no identity but as a cell in the body of this giant creature’s function, which is to move forward and consume all before it.

Then how do you explain the surgeons, whose job it is to heal and to save lives?

That the creature is self-healing. And where the healing fails, the deaths are of no more consequence than the death of cells in any organism, always to be replaced by new cells.

Again that word cells. She looked over at him, her expression an inquiry.

Wrede guided his mount alongside hers. That is what our bodies are composed of, he said. Cells. They are the elemental composition, to be seen only under a microscope. Different cells with different functions comprise tissues, or organs, or bone, or skin. When one cell dies, a new cell grows in its place. He took her hand in his and studied it. Even the integument of Miss Thompson’s hand has a cellular structure, he said.

He glanced at her with those alarmingly ice-blue eyes, as if to see that she understood. Emily blushed and, after a moment, withdrew her hand.

They rode on. She was extraordinarily happy.

VIII

THEY STOOD IN THE STOCKADE TOWER, WET AND MISerable as the cold rain pelted their shoulders and dripped off their caps and down their necks.

Will said, I was ready to tell them who I was.

Yes, Arly said, that we was hiding out in disguise just waitin for ’em. Sure, that would’ve been the thing, all right.

Well, look where you have got us? Can you say we are more better off than these poor Yankees here we are supposed to be guarding? We eat the same slop they get. We stand without a roof over our heads in this damn rain just like them. So where is anything different?

Will, son, you just don’t think.

And then to have a pistol put to my head till I swear an oath of allegiance to my own side! Like I wasn’t who I am! No wonder they couldn’t trust us no more than to send us up here to this miserable duty. What would you do in their place? Because you can’t ever trust no man who swears the oath because you put a pistol to his head.

Well, you are back on your own side even so. That was what you wanted—you never did cotton to the blue coat you was wearing.

Captain, I should have said, I am as much secesh as you. I am Private Will B. Kirkland from the Twenty-ninth Infantry Regiment out of North Carolina. I don’t need no pistol to my head.

And that would have been that.

That’s right. And a grand welcome and good duty.

He wouldn’t have asked any questions such as traced you right into the Milledgeville prison for deserting your Twenty-ninth Regiment. Or that found me for sleeping on guard duty in a combat situation.

We was pardoned by that general.

Sure, and you had the papers to prove it. Can you hear me in this rain, God? I am standing with this boy here who thinks an army at war is a reasonable thing. He thinks a soldier is something more than the uniform he is wearing. He thinks we live in a sane life and time, which you know as well as I is not what you designed for us sinners.

Well, anyways, you said God had his intentions for us, and it don’t seem like this is what they were.

We are alive, Will my boy. And why? Because we didn’t claim to be but what we appeared to be. We didn’t stretch some dumb Reb captain’s brain all out of shape. We didn’t tell no story to get him so fussed he would shoot us for lyin dogs. We looked like Union, and that’s what he understood. And that’s what we were. And what we ain’t anymore.

I’ll vouch for that.

Yes, we are wet and cold and hungry on this dark November night, but alive, which is a sight better than the dead falling to the ground every minute in every state of the Confederacy. And that we are alive by shifting our way about from one side t’other as the situation demands shows we already have something gifted about us. I feel the intention, all right, and I am sorry you don’t. And I will pray He don’t task you for being ungrateful. Or take it out on me.

THEIR DUTY WAS two on and four off, but with the first paling of the sky they still hadn’t been relieved. The rain let up and the wind blew as if that was what was bringing up the light. Below them the camp appeared, sodden and bare of any vegetation, and with rivulets of swamp water trickling through the stockade walls. Prisoners who had no huts for their shelter stood up from the watery holes in the ground where they had slept. With the first rays of a cold sun, everyone was up and out on the grounds, hunched over shivering, or dancing up and down. The hacks and coughs crackling from this mass of men sounded to Will like rifle fire. Everyone turned toward the kitchen sheds, but there was no smoke from the chimneys.

Beyond the far walls of the stockade and through the pine trees, he could see the river flowing high and fast from the heavy rains.

The smell was particularly bad this morning, the open latrines brackish and the burial trench just under their guard post having lost topsoil in the rains. Here and there, a body had emerged. Will turned his back on the sight and tried to draw in some scent of the surrounding pine forest. It was then that he saw the guards running along with their bloodhounds and torches.

Not long after that, the Union prisoners—wet, bedraggled, skeletal—were being herded down the road through the village of Millen to the railroad yard. There were more than a thousand of them still, and few had the spirit or the strength to question why they were leaving the pens at Millen. Every twenty yards on either side of the prisoner column, guards with rifles at the ready, and some with guard dogs, policed the march. Arly drifted back till he was abreast of Will. We will not be riding any damn railroad, he said. Can you hear me?

I hear you.

There’s even less grub where they’re going. Watch me and do what I do, Arly said.

I should have known, Will said.

At the depot a long train of boxcars was attached to two engines, smokestacks chuffing black, boilers hissing. As each car was filled, the door was slid shut and bolted. Some of the prisoners, who could no longer walk, were carried on the backs of their companions. Arly, with Will following, walked backward as if to double the guard at each car as it was loaded. Will noticed how conscientious Arly looked, his rifle at the ready, his eyes alert to any escape attempt. In this manner, they reached the last car, and at the moment when nearby officers had dismounted and were conferring over their maps, Arly and Will slipped around the last car and took cover behind the depot.

Here they had another view of the Ogeechee River. On the far banks a line of Union cavalry watched helplessly as the whistles blew and the train jerked into motion.

Someday, Will said, I am going to see one of them head doctors—what d’ye call them?

Phreenologists, Arly said.

That’s it. And I will ask him—I mean, if by some strange chance I am still alive—what was wrong with my head that I went along no matter what misery you thought up for us.

Nothing wrong with your head, Arly said. You recognize good sense and artful cunning when it is explained properly to you.

They were back in the pens, empty now but for a few dying prisoners in the stocks and several more who had died during the night. Arly stripped, tied the wet Confederate uniform into a ball and threw it in the latrine trench. In a kind of instructional performance for Will, he rolled his naked body in the mud and slopped handfuls of mud in his hair. Then he dressed himself in the rags he had taken from one of the corpses. Then he jumped up and down, and raced around whooping and hollering.

What’s that for? Will said.

I’m cold, you damned idiot! Arly shouted.

An hour later Union infantry were everywhere in Millen. In the stockade, a detachment of black pioneers set about burying the dead and shoveling mounds of earth into the open burial trench. Officers inspected the kitchen and hospital sheds, and the wooden stocks. Peering from the back of an ambulance wagon, Will saw how angry these Union men were. They made fists and cursed and swore. They walked around shaking their heads. He shivered under the thick wool blanket given to him. Arly’s teeth were chattering, but the expression on his face was one of serene satisfaction.

Preparations were made to burn everything in sight. Men ran along the stockade walls putting them to the torch. Soon the sheds were burning with a heavy black smoke and fitful licks of flame. As the ambulance rode off and came up over a knoll, Will and Arly looked back and saw smoke rising from the village, too. The Yankees were burning down everything with the name of Millen.

As they rode along at a good mule trot, Arly noted how soft the ride was. These ambulance wagons are fitted with springs, he said. Damn, we got to get us one of these. They were taken to a hospital tent in the pine grove where the army camped. They lay on cots under wool blankets and with real pillows under their heads. After a while the flap lifted and Will was stunned to see a woman in a white frock coat. She wore a Union cap pinned to her hair. Good morning, gentlemen, she said, and at that moment the tent walls lit up with the rising sun. She knelt beside Will’s cot and lifted his head and held a cup of broth to his lips. He looked into her blue eyes and she smiled at him. He had never seen a more beautiful girl in his entire life. He felt her warm hand on the back of his neck. Tears of gratitude brimmed in his eyes just as if he had really been a prisoner at the infamous camp.

On the adjoining cot, Arly leaned on his elbow to observe the scene, a big grin on his face.

IX

WILMA JONES WAS SO USED TO TAKING CARE OF PEOple that even on the march to freedom she found herself being useful. The old man who called her Daughter was stone deaf and shouted everything at her. A cane held him up on his right side, and she propped him up on his left. He had on a threadbare coat with no sleeves, and his skinny old arm was all muscle, long and stringy. His hand clutched hers with the strength of ten. He limped badly, this old slave, but there was no getting away from him. He was bald, all skull under his wool cap, and toothless, and with an ancient brand burned into his cheek. But he was going! He would not falter! And like so many old people he would not care who saw him do his business. She had to shake her head and smile. Old Uncle here reminded her of the Judge. He’d been just as demanding, expecting everything of her as if she had no life of her own. Only Judge Thompson never called her Daughter, having Miss Emily for that.

The people had stopped singing and the women held the children to them tightly. The causeway was narrow and on both sides swamp water lay thick and still, with trees poking up every which way from the muck. The air was fetid, and wisps of fog blew across their path.

When they came to the creek they were ordered to move aside along the bank while the soldiers trotted past them and crossed over on the pontoon bridge. Wilma looked around: more and more of the freed slaves were arriving to be kept waiting while the army moved through. From the far side, several officers on horses watched the maneuver. They sat astride their horses, unmoving. There was a general among them, because he wore a lot of gold braid such as the high and mighty affect. Wilma had a premonition. She had heard the stories. The Rebs were always behind them. They overran Negro stragglers and shot them or took them back into slavery.

The creek was at high water and running fast. It was a whole army going across. Division after division ran and rode past them, pulling their gun carriages and whipping their mules. Daughter, the old man shouted, why ain’t we crossing! Wilma ran to the side of the causeway and stopped an officer. Mammy, he said, we are fighting a damn war for you. Alls we ask is you don’t get in the way.

Some of the women and children were crying now. It was clear something had changed, as if with the sky, which had gotten darker. Fewer and fewer soldiers were coming along now, and finally the last of them were on the bridge. Wilma took the old man’s arm as the crowd surged forward. And then she couldn’t see over their heads, but a great wail went up among them: the ropes had been cut and the pontoon bridge swung away from the bank. Soldiers across the river were pulling it up behind them.

People didn’t know what to do. Someone shouted that the Rebs were coming. Wilma tried to hold her ground but the old man was pulling her down the bank. Ise a free man! he shouted. Ise a free man! And then she couldn’t hold him any longer and he jumped into the stream. Around her people were screaming, praying, importuning God. They slid into the water and started swimming across. She saw on the other bank that some black pioneer soldiers were throwing logs and brush into the water for people to hold on to. But the old man couldn’t swim. He was waving his cane in the air and twisting around in the current and going under and coming up with the cane waving in the air.

Women holding their babies over their heads tried to breast the current. Somehow the men tied a raft together out of some logs and strips of tarpaulin, and women’s skirts and blankets. The pioneers threw a line over, and a semblance of order set in as people were pulled across four and five at a time on the raft. But those huddled on the bank looked behind them with fear. They thought they heard Rebs coming down the causeway and couldn’t wait their turn. Holding their bundles and satchels, they jumped into the river.

Wilma found herself on the raft. Almost across, it dipped under the current and capsized. She came up sputtering and felt a hand holding her by the arm. She was lifted onto the bank, water streaming from her. A strong black man had lifted her entirely out of the water with one hand. She sat on the ground shivering. Those who had gotten across were running after the army. And, back on the other shore, there were maybe a hundred or more folks still crowding the bank, afraid to move. Women and crying children. She heard gunshots and thought she saw some men on horses coming down the causeway.

Here, missy, the man who had rescued her said. He put a blanket around her. Best not to linger. God will give those folks their freedom, jes not now is all. Come on. He was tall and wore a uniform tunic unbuttoned and ragged trousers and he was shoeless. He took Wilma’s hand and got her standing, and led her down the road. She kept turning, looking back, until she couldn’t see the creek anymore. But the cries came across the water and seemed to float above her in the trees.

X

PEARL COULD NOT FORGET THAT NIGHT OF THE MURdered soldiers. They lay about on the hard ground lit blue by the moonlight. Twelve of them like fallen statues. And Lieutenant Clarke staring up at nothing and so surprised, so surprised. She hid at the edge of the field and watched townsfolk come out with their wagon. Some white men, and two Negroes to do the work. They slung the bodies onto the wagon as if they were handling sides of beef. She followed them to the cemetery and watched from the underbrush as they took up their spades. Often they looked up to see if they were being observed. It was near dawn before they got them all buried.

Pearl couldn’t stop her shivering. Her teeth chattered. She looked at her hand and saw that she was holding his letter. It was now that first light had dimmed the moon and shown its own gray self up over the field, and she knew she’d better get away from there. She skirted the town, going through the woods to the road they came on and to the tree beside the road where she had hidden her tunic and cap. And so, once again, she hiked her frock up and tucked it under the waist of her trousers and put her drummer-boy uniform back on. And then she had a pocket in which to keep his letter.

Not knowing what else to do, Pearl slid down with her back against the tree and waited.

She awakened to the lowing of cows. It was broad daylight and the army was going by, men driving cattle and goats, teamsters crying out to their mule teams, soldiers with rifles on their shoulders marching in file along the side of the road, and a great rising of dust from all the clamor.

She stood up and made herself visible. Sometimes they grinned and said something as they went by, the men, or occasionally an officer on his horse would glance down at her, but nobody seemed inclined to stop. She kept looking for the wagon driver from her company who had turned back when the shooting started. Two bummers all decked out in claw-hammer coats and stovepipe hats came along in a four-wheeler filled with their pillage. But they were not anyone she recognized. They were laughing. They saw her, and one of them reached into a sack and tossed her a sweet potato.

She knew the Lieutenant Clarke and the others had not fallen in battle. If they had fallen in battle, why were the townsfolk in such a hurry to hide their bodies. No, she had heard that volley of rifle fire, clear in the silence. She had seen the blood going right up to the jailhouse doors, and she had seen the men lying in the field where they had been shot down in a row. They were unarmed.

She had to tell someone. But she was still unsure of her white talk, and if she spoke naturally they would hear she weren’t no white drummer boy. Where was her teacher the Lieutenant now she needed him? At the moment she decided she dasn’t say a thing she bolted into the road in front of an officer with gold shoulder straps and saluted. His big bay horse snorted, tossing its head and rearing and turning in circles. What in hell! the officer shouted while Pearl stood there with her hand at her cap.

His horse quieted, the officer looked down at Pearl. Don’t you know better’n that, boy? Why are you not with your company?

Dead.

Say what?

Dey . . . is. I means . . . they . . . is.

Speak up, lad!

They is. I means they . . . are.

Are what?

Dead.

Don’t you know how to address an officer?

I do.

I do, SIR!

Yes, me too, sir.

Put your hand down and stand at attention! Goddamn it, the officer said to one of the men who had stopped beside him. Now he’s crying! Is this what we’re fighting a war with?

At this moment another officer came along on a mount not much taller than a pony, so that his feet practically touched the ground. He was not at all military-looking, with his tunic covered with dust and half unbuttoned, and a handkerchief tied at his neck, an old beaten-up cap, and a cigar stub in his mouth, and a red beard with streaks of gray. Pearl would remember that first impression she had of General Sherman, that he wasn’t an officer in deportment or dress, and she wouldn’t have thought of him as such except for the deference paid him by the high and mighty fellow who towered over him on his fine bay mount.

The General on his little horse was practically at her eye level. Well, here’s a handsome young Union man, he said. Are you a good drummer, son?

Pearl nodded.

A fellow has to be brave to join the army and fight for his country. Drummer boys come under fire like the rest of us, don’t they?

Yessir.

Sometimes I want to cry, too.

Yessir.

And what seems to be the problem? he said to the officer on the bay horse.

General, he says he’s lost his company. He believes they are casualties.

Were they in the vanguard, son? They came through last night?

Yes sir, Gen’ral.

That would be Wheeler again, the General said to the officer. I imagine we took some losses.

No, Gen’ral sir, Pearl said. It were no battle when they murdered my Lieutenant Clarke.

Pearl couldn’t help herself. She wept copiously, the tears streaming down her face as she held the reins of the General’s little horse, and led him and his staff through the town to the cemetery and pointed to the fresh-dug trench.

XI

SHERMAN AFFECTED THE SLOPPY UNIFORM, AND SHARED the hardships, of the enlisted man. He slept in a fly tent, when he slept at all. Only one servant attended him and his string of mounts consisted of exactly one, and that one plug hardly befitting a man of his rank. Of course, having issued orders for an army stripped down to essentials, it was right that he should serve as an example. But to Morrison, a West Pointer on the General’s staff, it was all somehow unseemly. Morrison saw no reason why a general officer, especially one not holding a political appointment but a true West Point professional like Sherman, should not distinguish himself from the men under his command. Perhaps some smartness of attire and a measure of remoteness would put some starch into the army he led. The men could fight, all right, they had proved that, but a firm and formal observance of rank and its attendant privileges engendered respect. Respect, not affection, was what a commanding officer depended on—it was a surer thing and lasted longer, and through such ordeals of the march that affection might not survive.

Besides all that, Morrison felt demeaned. He was a loyal aide-de-camp and did his job as signal officer impeccably, with not so much as the expression on his face to indicate anything but his complete devotion to duty. But he liked his comforts and privileges. Sherman had made a point of depriving his staff of their wall tents and all but two mounts per man. Morrison had to leave behind his trunk, his books, and his cook. He had only his body servant. He said nothing, of course, but could not help feeling that the General secretly took a malicious glee in imposing hardships that he by nature was disposed to, knowing full well that others were not.

Stiff and proper though he was, a burly red-faced young man already balding, Morrison was a good student of human nature, first of all his own. He could perceive his taste for field luxuries as a kind of weakness, or lack of assurance that his own person imprinted on the world. In fact, he tended to be self-effacing and believed Sherman tolerated him without liking him very much. They were too different as men. But Morrison knew of himself that he would not pretend to a style of leadership that was so cynical as to greet and talk like a comrade with enlisted men on the march but feel nothing when twenty-five hundred of them were lost at Kennesaw Mountain. He had seen the General’s reaction then—a moment’s disappointment in the outcome and a consideration of the next stratagem.

After Atlanta was theirs the General pretended not to take seriously the mail that came in, the plaudits, the expressions of gratitude akin to worship. His correspondence, which Morrison took down, displayed a calm rectitude, a modesty that was in direct contrast to the joy of triumphal vindication in his soul and his obvious feelings of superiority to all those, including the President, who had sent their congratulations. How did Morrison know this except by the tone of the dictating voice, the sly self-satisfied laughter after a particularly elegant self-deprecating phrase, or the impatient pacing of a general so happy to be who he was that he could not contain himself for the tremors of excitement that ran through him before he assumed his sober mien and went from his study to receive the latest politician come to praise him.

And now here, this latest example of a general’s prerogative—that he would simply by whim attach this drummer boy to his staff, and a strange child, too, who did not speak very much or do very much but sit by his side and listen in on the most confidential military discussions. It was unfortunate that Lieutenant Clarke had been killed, but did that mean his company drummer could not be reassigned?

Morrison confided his feelings to Colonel Teack, who had been with Sherman since Shiloh.

Well, you see, Morrison, Teack said, drawing on his meerschaum, the General wouldn’t permit himself a leave two summers ago, and so his family came down from Ohio for a visit. Miz Sherman and the children, including his son Willie, Teack said, as if this explained everything.

Morrison was immediately sorry he had begun the conversation.

At the time we were in Vicksburg, Teack said. There is no worse place to suffer the heat of summer than Vicksburg.

Morrison waited.

And the son Willie, a Northern boy, he succumbed to it, Teack said. It was very sad, because he was not a party to the war.

What, he died?

Like that, from the typhoid, Teack said. Now, this drummer boy—something is not right. He’s a strange one, I grant you. But if he does nothing else he is good for the solace of a grieving father. You don’t have to go to Harvard to see he is standing in for the poor dead son in General Sherman’s mind. And we want that mind to be sound, don’t we, Morrison?

Of course.

Because it hasn’t always been, Teack said, and turned away.

IT WAS COLONEL Teack, though, who quietly made some inquiries. No drummer boy was assigned to the late Lieutenant Clarke’s foraging company. His regiment had lost one around Milledgeville, but in that case the boy was attached to an infantry company. Perhaps Teack would have attempted to find and speak to one of the survivors of the skirmish at Sandersonville, but he thought he saw the answer to the mystery in Pearl’s hazel eyes, which, when he caught their attention, flashed with a defiance not at all typical of the humblest of all the enlisted.

In any event, Pearl could not keep her secret very long, conditions in the field being what they were. Soon enough Teack and the other members of Sherman’s staff had reason to be satisfied that this strange boy of few words and moody disposition was, in fact, a girl. And circumstances being what they were in this war, they knew that, white as she was, she had to be Negro. At this point their protective feelings for General Sherman prevailed. With scant discussion, hardly more than an exchange of looks, the officers came to the consensus that kept Pearl’s secret from their commander. Sherman’s manservant, Sergeant Moses Brown, was delegated to see to it that neither the General nor anybody else in the army would know the truth, and he did his job well. He made sure the girl’s privacy was maintained when she saw to herself. In camp one day he built a sort of shebang from the underbrush beside a brook so that Pearl could bathe without being seen.

In all of this, Pearl accepted the arrangement as her due. Moses Brown was very formal, and gave no indication that he had any opinions about her or the orders he had to look after her. He was good at his work, protective and forbearing. For this she was grateful. She came to have for him some of the same regard she had had for Roscoe back home. But she felt no particular gratitude to these officers that had conspired to protect her. She was still grieving for Lieutenant Clarke. She kept the letter he had written in her breast pocket. She kept the two gold coins Roscoe had given her in her trouser pocket. She wore her red shawl with the gold thread under her tunic. These items were her estate. As for the General, she quickly learned that she had less to fear from him than from any of the others. He enjoyed seeing her eat well and supposed she didn’t speak much as a result of the terrible sights she had seen in the engagement at Sandersonville. Won’t you tell me your name, son? he would say. And she would shake her head. At night she lay in her fly tent and heard him walking about the grounds, unable to sleep. She smelled his cigar smoke and listened to his back-and-forth patrol among the tents. She surmised that he did his thinking at night. And in the daytime, when it was possible, she listened to his conversation with his men and mouthed the words silently as she strove to train herself to speak white speech. On the march, the General liked to ride forward of his headquarters wagon, then back again toward the rear of the march. Everywhere, the men knew him and called out to him as he waved. They called him Uncle Billy, and she delighted him one morning when he asked how she was feeling and she said, Thank you, Uncle Billy, I are quite well.

XII

A DAY’S MARCH OUT OF SAVANNAH, THE FIFTEENTH Corps found themselves on a road that the Rebels had mined. There were two or three muffled explosions that were unlike anything the men had ever heard. Infantrymen took cover. Everything halted. A rider came at a gallop to bring Wrede’s hospital unit forward.

It was a warm day for December. Arly and Will followed the Colonel in Ambulance Two. The going was slow, the wagon train slow to move aside, the teamsters reluctant to take their wheels onto the soft ground off the road.

At the head of the column the road was cratered. Men and horses had been blown into the fields. Wrede’s nurses brought out the stretchers and went about collecting those who were still alive. Emily Thompson tended a boy whose leg was gone at the knee. She applied a tourniquet at the thigh. Just over the fence rail lay a decapitated body. It was an awful carnage here on this warm December day.

Wrede had to ask an officer who was comforting one of the wounded to step aside. Please, he said. The officer stepped back, saying to Wrede, Now we see these Rebels for the murderers they are. They are not soldiers. Soldiers stand and fight, they don’t do this. He turned and shouted, Provost guard! Bring me prisoners, get some damn prisoners up here! Emily realized, as Wrede had not, that this was General Sherman.

About a half mile away off to the left was a woods before which stood a house and barn. That will be our hospital, Wrede said.

Several prisoners were brought forward. They were given picks and spades and commanded to march in close order down the road. You will find every mine planted there, Sherman said, or be blown up in the process. Jesus! General, have mercy, one of them said, it wasn’t us did this. Forward march! Sherman said, and gave the man a kick. He then raised his arms and pushed the air to indicate that everyone was to move back.

Whimpering and trembling with fear, the prisoners after a few stumbling steps abandoned their tools, dropped to their knees, and with their fingers began to search for the land mines. They crawled forward, feeling with their outstretched hands like blind men. Each time they uncovered something they cried out. Sherman’s engineers studied the first device, figured out how it was constructed, and disabled it. Six mines were found, all of the same design. They were pressure-sensitive via friction matches, housed in copper cylinders, and with the detonating power of a howitzer shell.

Arly and Will loaded their ambulance with groaning, bleeding men. Two tiers of racks ran lengthwise under the tarpaulin. They saw a drummer boy standing in the middle of the road looking down at his bare foot, which had blood on it. You don’t look too bad, sonny, Arly said, but we’ll fix you up anyways. Get away! the boy shouted. Arly took him by the shoulders and Will by the knees, and they brought the screaming, squirming boy to the wagon.

Only when he saw Emily looking down at him from the rear of the ambulance did the drummer boy go quiet and consent to be put aboard. But tears brimmed in his eyes and Emily thought how oddly beautiful his face was.

Will, for his part, stood a moment gazing up at Nurse Thompson while Arly, waiting not one moment, took his place on the box and got the mules moving. Will had to hurry forward and leap on at a run. To a chorus of moans and curses and cries, the mules trotted down the road toward the house by the woods. Mounted troops cantered past them in the same direction and Emily saw Wrede, too, riding past.

Each rut or ravel in the road brought forth screams. Up front Will, his shoulders hunched, said, One man’s suffering is pitiable. But when it’s a howling chorus it can only be you’re in Hell.

Why, Will, son, I only got us this amblance duty so as you could moon over that Miz Thompson.

Never mind that. I could never aspire to a woman of her degree.

How can you know a woman’s degree till you put it to the test?

She just don’t see me now that I am a recovered Union on his feet again.

Well, then, think on Savannah. We will have Christmas in Savannah. The ladies there will see you. They will pucker up under the mistletoe. We will have ourselves Christmas goose and figgy puddin. And when we’re through with all that we’ll get back on the march.

I ain’t getting back. This is not me wearing this blue. To where? Will said after a moment.

To all the way to Richmond, maybe, and I wouldn’t mind if to the North Pole. On the march is the new way to live. Well, it ain’t exactly that new. You take what you need from where you happen to be, like a lion on the plains, like a hawk in the mountains, who are also creatures of God’s making, you do remember. We may have dominion over them, but it don’t hurt to pick up a pointer or two. I never was much good for settling down with the same view out the window every morning and the same woman in bed every night. It is only the dead in their graves who should live like that, Arly said to the gasps and urgent prayers and implorings for water rising into the warm December morning.

THE SMALL HOUSE Wrede had chosen for his field hospital was unoccupied. The front door swung on its hinges. The glass panes were shattered. It was just two rooms on the ground floor, a parlor and a kitchen. The two upstairs bedrooms were small, with little headroom under the slanting roof, and they were baked hot from the sun.

Wrede indicated the parlor for his surgery. His nurses carried the furniture outside and within minutes they had set up the two tables, brought out the sheets, drawn water from the well, opened the medicinal case, and laid out the surgical instruments.

Outside, the ambulances were unburdened of their riders. The wounded were arranged on pallets outside the front door, in the shade of an oak tree. The dozen or so cavalry rode about to check the surroundings, especially the woods behind the house, and set themselves out as pickets.

Emily stayed outside with the wounded, trying to keep them comfortable until they were brought in for surgery. When it was the drummer boy’s turn, she went with him, walking beside the stretcher and holding his hand. It was a soft, small hand. He was quiet enough, though his eyes showed fear, but when he was placed on a table and Wrede’s nurses took a pair of shears to the bottom of his trousers he hollered, struggling to raise himself, squirming and shouting, twisting like a bronco, as one of the men said with a laugh.

Emily at this moment understood the boy’s reaction as the same she would have had under the circumstance. Soldiers about to undergo surgery often struggled, but for some reason it was the fact of the nurses intending to enforce their will that was to her the essential meaning of what was happening here. Was it only a matter of the boy’s age? The nurses were doing their duty, but, without knowing why, she felt that she had to stop them. And then all at once, as she read the look of anguish the child flashed at her, her intuition named itself. No no, wait, stop, she said, and moved to stand between the nurses and the table.

On the other side of the room Wrede, doing a procedure, and his attendants waiting upon him, were in such poses of intense concentration as to release her to her own authority. She had by now a respect from the medical detachment that was only partly due to her serious accommodation to the work. It was Wrede’s attentions to her that gave her the credential she assumed this moment as she ordered the men to carry the patient upstairs. And bring me towels and a basin of water, she said.

Alone with Pearl, Emily Thompson removed her trousers and washed the blood from her leg.

You know what this is?

Yes’m.

Is it the first time?

Uh-huh.

Are you hurting?

Naw.

It’s nothing to be scared of, is it?

Take more’n this put a scare into Pearl.

I do believe that, Emily said, looking into her eyes.

And the two women smiled at each other.

XIII

SHERMAN’S GLASSES WERE TURNED ON FORT MCALLISTER, which guarded Savannah from the south, a formidably risen, parapeted earthwork with a ravine before it and obstructions of abatis made of felled oak trees, and chevaux-de-frise whose stripped branches had been honed into sharp spikes. It was late in the afternoon. He stood with Morrison, his signal officer, atop a mill roof on the left bank of the Ogeechee a mile or two distant. Above them on a crow’s nest hurriedly constructed by the engineers was Morrison’s signalman, who was in communication with one of Admiral Dahlgren’s squadron laying at anchor in Ossabaw Sound. So the navy was there with the clothing and shoes, provisions, and mail that the men had been yearning for these many weeks. But it could not come in up the river till the fort was taken.

Entrenched in a great arc of siege in the swampland south and west of the city, Sherman’s Fourteenth, Twentieth, Seventeenth, and Fifteenth Corps were hunkered down in the pooling sumps of canal water and sand. His men were cold and miserable and hungry, having marched through a barren sandy territory that devolved into waterlogged rice plantations where there was no forage to be had. They could not light fires to warm themselves lest they invite grapeshot from the Rebel guns. Miles behind them was the wagon train with its hardtack and coffee and its beef on the hoof, but nothing could move forward into this chilled watery lowland until the city was taken.

Your division will storm Fort McAllister, Sherman had told General Hazen. I won’t fuddle about. I’ve come this far and my army wants its prize. We take Fort McAllister and we’ll have Savannah.

Now, he saw Hazen’s regiments moving into position through a woods and halting at its edge. Signal Admiral Dahlgren the assault is about to begin, Sherman said. Then order Hazen to begin. Yes, let it begin, let it begin, Sherman said.

Within moments the blue lines appeared in parade at the edge of the open land and began their advance—a quick trot, arms at the ready, through the fields in the late-afternoon sun toward the fort some eight hundred yards away. Rebel Napoleons immediately boomed forth their round shot. The lines, he saw now, were converging from three directions—north, south, and along the capital—colors flying. My God, they are magnificent, Sherman cried. Within moments the smoke of the big guns enveloped the scene like fog drift, and the wind brought to Sherman the pungency of blown powder. And now only the caprices of the wind would let him see discrete moments of the action, tantalizing glimpses as if, he thought, the smoke were the diaphanous dance veil of the war goddess. And I’m seduced, Sherman said, aloud, to a startled Morrison.

Yet even from these glimpses Sherman saw things that assured him the assault would succeed. The Rebels had left fallen trees in the field where his men could take cover and return fire. And the big guns were without embrasures: his sharpshooters would kill the artillerists. And as he listened the tempo of shot and shell seemed to slow. The white smoke of the battle began to lift, and now he could see his men clambering up the glacis from the ravine, some of them blown into the air by torpedo mines embanked there. But the blue lines came on, more and more of them, and the parapet was gained. He could see the fighting hand to hand. Sherman had to lower his glass, too overcome to watch. He loved a brave man. Regiments of them brought sobs of joy.

How many minutes later was it when Captain Morrison called out, It’s ours, sir, I see the colors! And it was true. All at once the firing ceased, and they heard a great shout over the field. And through his glass Sherman saw his men waving their fists, and firing their muskets into the sky.

IT WAS DARK when Sherman arrived at the fort. He made his inspection and complimented the defending commander, a young major who admitted that he had not expected an attack so late in the day.

The moon had risen, throwing a chill white light over the dead, who lay where they had fallen. But among them lay his own sleeping soldiers. Sherman’s men had found foodstuffs and wine in the cellars, and now they slept.

Sitting with crossed legs on a barrel, a cigar in one hand and a cup of wine in the other, Sherman contemplated how matter-of-factly his men accepted the dead that they could lie down, so casually, beside them. All of them asleep, though some forever. He barely noticed the coat thrown around his shoulders by his servant, Moses Brown. His thoughts ran this way: What if the dead man dreams as the sleeper dreams? How do we know there is not a posthumous mind? Or that death is not a dream state from which the dead can’t awaken? And so they are trapped in the hideous universe of such looming terrors as I have known in my nightmares.

The only reason to fear death is that it is not a true, insensible end of consciousness. That is the only reason I fear death. In fact, we don’t know what it is other than a profound humiliation. We are not made to appreciate it. As a general officer I consider the death of one of my soldiers, first and foremost, a numerical disadvantage, an entry in the liability column. That is all my description of it. It is a utilitarian idea of death—that I am reduced by one in my ability to fight a war. When we lost so many men in the first years of the war, the President simply called for the recruitment of three hundred thousand more. So how could he, the President, understand death, truly?

Each man has a life and a spirit and the habits of thought and person that define him, but en masse he is uniformed over. And whatever he may think of himself, I think of him as a weapon. And perhaps we call a private a private, for whatever he is to himself it is private to him and of no use to the General. And so a generalship diminishes the imagination of the General.

But these troops, too, who have battled and eaten and drunk and fallen asleep with some justifiable self-satisfaction: what is their imagination of death who can lie down with it? They are no more appreciative of its meaning than I.

AND SO WHO is left but the ladies? Perhaps they know. They bring life into being, perhaps they know what it is as afterlife. But often they talk of Heaven or Hell. I take no stock in such ideas as Heaven or Hell. And fate? In war a fate is altogether incidental. In fact, it is nothing as awesome as fate if you happen to raise your head in the path of a cannonball. That nigger who was killed the other day by the railroad track not ten yards from me—I saw the ball coming, a thirty-two-pound round shot, and I shouted, but as he turned it bounced up from the ground and took off his head. That was not fate. There are too many missiles in the air for it to be your fate to be killed by one of them. Just as the number of men set to fighting deem any of their deaths of no great moment.

In this war among the states, why should the reason for the fighting count for anything? For if death doesn’t matter, why should life matter?

But of course I can’t believe this or I will lose my mind. Willie, my son Willie, oh my son, my son, shall I say his life didn’t matter to me? And the thought of his body lying in its grave terrifies me no less to think he is not imprisoned in his dreams as he is in his coffin. It is insupportable, in any event.

It is in fear of my own death, whatever it is, that I would wrest immortality from the killing war I wage. I would live forever down the generations.

And so the world in its beliefs snaps back into place. Yes. There is now Savannah to see to. I will invest it and call for its surrender. I have a cause. I have a command. And what I do I do well. And, God help me, but I am thrilled to be praised by my peers and revered by my countrymen. There are men and nations, there is right and wrong. There is this Union. And it must not fall.

Sherman drank off his wine and flung the cup over the entrenchment. He lurched to his feet and peered every which way in the moonlight. But where is my drummer boy? he said.

XIV

PEARL’S FIRST CITY SHE HAD EVER SEEN WAS MILLEDGEville, but it was not a city so grand as this Savannah, with its little parks everywhere with fountains and iron railings and the big old live oaks dripping with moss, and with the grand courthouse and customshouse and the ships in the harbor. And it’s true that some of the cobblestoned streets had been dug up and the stones piled at the corners for the Confederate soldiers to stand behind, but that didn’t happen. They had fled across the Savannah River to fight another day. Along the waterfront were shops and open warehouses where the Union troops were unloading comestibles. The sun was out, and she was riding in a carriage just like the Jamesons’, with Miz Emily and those two ambulance drivers up front escorting them for their tour. Every day it seemed there was another parade, and now they were held at the corner while one went by. She stood up to see it, and grabbed Miz Emily’s hand till she got to her feet to see it too. What mighty music this was, the drums spattering better than she could ever manage with her one-two thump, and the brass horns shooting out the rays of the sun like to their blare, and flutes and piccolos peeping from the top of the music like birds lighting on it, and the big tubas pumping away under it, and at the very back the two big bass drums announcing the appearance of the blocks of bluecoats in dress parade behind them. And all their Union flags!

She heard below the music the sound of the soldiers’ footsteps all in rhythm, a soft sound, and after the band had gone down the street and the bluecoat companies kept coming all she heard now was the soft-shoe whisper of their footsteps marching, it was almost a hush, and if not for the cries of the sergeants at the side, and their pennants in the air to remind her, she would think it was so sad, these men with their rifles on their shoulders making a show of their victory but looking to her eyes like they was indentured as she once was, though maybe not born into it.

CROWDS HAD GATHERED on both sides of the thoroughfare to watch the parade. Across the street, Wilma pulled Coalhouse Walker by the hand back through a wrought-iron gate and into the front yard of a house with a mansard roof and stood with him behind the hedges.

What is it, Miss Wilma, he said in his deep voice.

She could not answer but stood with her eyes closed, shaking her head and holding her fist to her mouth.

Tell me, he said.

It’s Miz Emily, she said finally. Judge Thompson’s who I was bound to. Look, but don’t let her see. She’s in a carriage driven by army men, and with another white girl. You see her?

He peered over the top of the hedge. No, ma’m. Parade’s over, he said, everyone’s moving on. He turned and smiled at her. ’Sides which, he said, you free, you disremember that?

Wilma burst into tears. He took her in his arms. Now, now. We come this far. You a fine strong woman that marched in the rain and cold and nothing to eat some days, and I never seen a tear in your eye. An here, with the worst behind us, in this free city with the sun shinin, ain’t you jes like a ordinary woman cries at the leastmost thing. He laughed.

I’m sorry, Wilma said, and she laughed, though the tears were still brimming.

At this moment a woman with a hound on the leash came out on the porch and stared at them.

They left, closing the gate behind them, and walked on hand in hand.

He was right, of course, this good man. He had lifted her out of the river and taken her for his responsibility. She had never seen a man as strong as this. He was enlisted as a pioneer, as the army moved forward he cut down trees and laid the logs across the road when it rained. She had seen him pry railroad track up from its ties, she had seen the fine, beautiful skin of his chest glistening with his effort under the sun, the muscle moving in his arms and shoulders—and then his back was turned and she saw the thick scars there and gasped, though it was as nothing to him. He was a beautiful man, his blackness of a rich purpled hue in the sunlight.

By the grace of God they had met and all through the march he had managed to acquit himself at his duties and see after her as well, finding dry clothes for her and an army coat against the cold, sharing his rations when he had them, keeping her with him when that was possible and, if not, seeing that she was safe among the black folks. They were the same age, twenty-two, but he was inclined to make the best of things and with all sorts of grand ideas for their future together, and so she felt older by comparison but instructed by him, too, in the ways of hope.

Yet the city that made him so cheerful filled her with misgiving. They were still black in a white world. Coalhouse had drawn his few dollars of army pay, but the merchants in the stores put out prices as if it was Confederate tender. He wanted to buy some sweet potatoes. Don’t buy, she urged him, I’d rather go without. And another thing was she knew Coalhouse’s company was camped outside the city in a rice plantation, but here he was roaming the streets with her like a man free of everything, including the army, and without the pass he was supposed to have from the officers. So there was something reckless about him too, and all that good cheer had a wild edge to it that caused her to look behind them where they walked and up ahead to see where the danger might lay.

And now what was he up to as he took up an empty bushel basket from an alley behind a shop and led her to the river? Miss Wilma, he said, we are going to have a fine lunch. But what was he doing, getting out of his shoes and jacket and rolling up his trousers to his knees and walking onto the flat rocks and hunkering down there? And then before she knew it he had eased himself into that cold river water.

And so this was how Wilma Jones, who grew up in the hills, learned about oysters. Coalhouse Walker came back with almost a bushel of them. He was sopping wet, and shivering and smiling broadly. They sat there in the sun on a flat rock and he shucked the oysters with his knife and swallowed them down raw, with his head thrown back. But she had no taste for any of that, and so they moved on in the lanes between the houses and the stables and found a kitchen with some black folks there, where she was welcome to use the stove.

Wilma was now in a role that was familiar to her. She pan-fried the oysters with a bit of cornmeal and in their own juices, and it turned from a day full of worry for her to a good time with people she wouldn’t have known but for the holiday season and the freeing of Savannah. Everyone ate what she cooked, and there was real bread to go with it.

Coalhouse surprised her, picking up a banjo and strumming it and singing some old song in his deep voice. She hadn’t known he could do that. People clapped in time, and a boy stood up and danced. She was among these new friends whose names she barely knew and would probably never see again, some still working where they’d been slaves, but they had a way about them now, and she supposed she was getting to it too, of celebrating off to the side just beyond the ken of the white folks. And somehow in her mind it all came from the spirit of Coalhouse Walker, like he had this way of making the people around him glad to be alive.

Say, Miz Mary, what that on the pillow where my head orter be

For sakes, it jes a mush melon, can’t you plainly see

A mush melon on de pillow, oh yes I do agree

But why it got a mustache an two eyes a-lookin at me

There were young girls there from the kitchen and she could see what they were thinking, so she didn’t let him from her sight. And maybe from her serious mien, and her upbringing in the Judge’s house that taught her how to do most anything that needed to be done, Wilma knew that she was good-looking enough but that what made Coalhouse Walker take to her was just that soundness of her—that and because she knew how to read and write and would not lie down with him until they were properly wed. He honored that, and in her heart she knew she had nothing to worry about because she was the one he’d been looking for.

They slept in a hayloft that night after some kisses and hugs that were not entirely pious, and in the morning she told him her idea. He went down to the river and by noon, in one of the town squares, with the troops everywhere and the sky bright with sun, she stood behind a makeshift stand and pan-fried oysters over a fire Coalhouse had built in a steel drum. Coalhouse made newspaper sheets into cones, and kept up a smart patter. Miz Wilma’s very best fresh roasted oysters! he called, and they sold the catch to folks by the paper cone—soldiers and even officers, and finally some of the secesh townspeople themselves, who couldn’t abide the fate of their city but found the oysters as she roasted them too good not to partake of. And in this way she and Coalhouse sold off three bushels and found themselves at the end of the afternoon with thirteen real Union dollars.

I will hold these, Wilma said, and turning her back, she lifted the hem of her skirt and tucked the folded bills under the waistband of her pantaloons.

ARLY AND WILL had no trouble getting their new shoes—they just stood a while on a line, and when they got to the quartermaster they had only to show their feet. But drawing pay was different, it was done by name and regiment. You were checked off against the paymaster’s book.

Well, what does God say to do now? Will said, looking down at his stiff shoes. They felt tight against his toes and the backs were already rubbing up into his ankles.

He’s telling me to be patient and it will come to me, Arly said.

They had leave from Colonel Sartorius only to get themselves outfitted, but they were in no hurry to return to the Savannah military hospital where his surgery was. The city having fallen without a fight, there was not much call for ambulance driving now, so they had been made over into nurses there in the army sick ward, emptying bedpans and doing other lovely chores.

Clumping along in their unaccustomed footwear they had reason to feel sorry for themselves. Every bluecoat but them, it seemed like, had a day pass and money in his pocket. And then there was that great to-do about the mail. Tons of it came off the ships, and for one whole day everyone sat around reading letters from home. Arly said it was a pathetic sight to see grown men carrying on so. But Will thought he wouldn’t mind a letter from someone. That he and Arly had no letters was because who they were, or where they were, was now a matter of total indifference to the universe.

They were almost swept off the sidewalk by a throng of grizzled troops, some of them happily drunk, chattering away and half running, half walking, in a great hurry to get where they were going. Hey! Will shouted. But Arly was curious. He motioned to Will and they tagged along. They followed the soldiers to the waterfront, where, on Charleston Street, in a row of connected two-story redbrick houses, a woman stood smiling in each window.

Armed soldiers stood guard at the doors. But the men ignored them and they had the good sense to stand aside as the troops poured through the several doors. Looking at one another, and then carefully up and down the street, the guards themselves stepped inside and the doors closed behind them.

As Arly and Will watched, the women, one by one, disappeared from the windows. This is cruelty beyond name, Arly said. A particularly fair maid in a second-floor window looked down into his eyes and motioned invitingly with her head before she, too, disappeared. And, sadly for that poor girl, she’s fallen in love with me, Arly said.

The two men stood in the empty street as the sounds of revelry rose in volume through the brickwork.

Will was secretly relieved to have no money. Seeing the women in the windows he had felt uneasy, as if just standing there and thinking what he was thinking was to sully the shining image in his mind of Nurse Thompson. It didn’t matter that she had no idea who he was, let alone what his feelings were, he felt that just looking at those whores was to betray her. Well, that’s that, he said. Let’s go.

Arly took a stogy out of his pocket and lit it. God gave me something else beside my natural abilities, Will my boy. He gave me spirit. He gave me the juices of a man. He made me someone who rises to a challenge, be it a firing squad or a army that divests me of my natural rights of personal expression.

They walked back through the city. I am a champion of survival, Arly said. It won’t take but a drop of my talent for surviving an entire war to come up with a Federal dollar or two.

It’s just a damn whore, Will said.

No, sir, you are wrong. When I was in the field with the grapeshot whizzing past my head I thought of nothing but staying alive. I was consumed, I had a survival compunction and it brought me through. And now I am consumed with this. You put me in a trench, that’s one thing, you put me in a city with women everywhere you look and that’s another. But the powerful need to satisfy a life instinct is the same. They are both a matter of survival.

With a whore it’s less likely, Will said. I seen in the ward just today some of what a whore can do. You seen it, too, where the mercury has ate away half that poor man’s face.

You ain’t never been with a woman, have you?

Will was silent.

Come on, it ain’t no shame—you’re but a boy yet, though I have to admit I was not thirteen years when a kind lady took me out to the barn. And how old are you now? But that’s all right, I don’t need to ask where you was raised or how you live. It is clear enough you was overprotected and pro’ly some preacher messed with your mind and it’s because you been held back and ain’t been with a woman that you speak in ignorance of the soft, sacred vessel they carry ’tween their legs. My God, just thinking of it—let us sit down on this bench a moment.

Will watched the setting sun glimmer through the moss hanging off an oak tree. Arly said: If there is any good reason for war, it ain’t to save Unions, and it certainly ain’t to free niggers, it ain’t to do anything but to have you a woman of your own, or even of another’s, in a bed with you at your behest. You are talking the highest kind of survival, young Will, the survival you achieve after you are gone to your God that by the issue of your loins has created them that look like you and sound like you and think like you and are you through the generations of descendants. And you know how He fixed it: so that we turn our swords into plowshares and at the end of a day go into our houses and after a good, hot dinner we take them upstairs, these blessed creatures of God who are given to us, and pull off their dresses and their shifts and their corsets and whatever damn else they use to cover themselves till just the legs and breasts and bellies and behinds of them are in presentation to our wonderment . . . oh Lord. And when we go inside them, plum into their beings, and they cry out in our ear and we feel there is nothing softer, warmer, or more honeyed up in God’s world than what embraces our stiff tool, and we are made by God to shiver into them the issue of our loins, well, boy, don’t talk to me about what you don’t know. And if the bordello ladies you slander are not half of what I am telling you, please to remember they are as much our glorious Southern womanhood as whatever you been dreaming about that Miz Nurse Thompson, who, I can promise you, would taste no sweeter when put to the test than the uglymost whore in those houses by the waterfront.

AS HE SAT there in contemplation of his slander of Southern womanhood, Will became aware of the unmistakable sound of hymn singing. Arly heard it, too. He leapt up: God said it would come to me. It has!

Grabbing Will by the elbow, Arly hurried them through the streets till they found the church. It was a First Baptist, towering in lordly granite over a town square. The front doors were open and the hymn poured forth so as to seem to fill the live oaks abounding in the park. They climbed the steps and found themselves in the overflow of soldiers standing just inside. Pardon me, Arly said, pushing his way forward. Pardon, ’scuse me, pardon. I hope we’re not too late, he said to Will, who was pushing along right behind him, though not knowing why. Maybe halfway down the aisle, Arly saw some small space in the middle of a pew. Pardon us, brother, ’scuse us, I do beg pardon, he murmured, flashing hallowed smiles at the men whose toes he was stepping on with his new shoes.

And then they were standing in place like everyone else, and with hymnals in their hands. The congregation was in color a uniform blue, though some civilians could be seen here and there. But the rich chorale was of soldierly voices, strong and not entirely on key but powerfully fervent in calling upon one another to go down to the river to pray.

Churches had always made Will nervous, perhaps beginning when he was just a tad and saw his mama and papa become completely different people in church from the drunk and the shrew they were the rest of the week. He didn’t know what churchgoing was for except for people to pretend to be better than they were, and it was that pretense that frightened him. From this his idea grew along with him and now, looking around, he saw the same open mouths and glazed eyes of singers but knew they not only pretended but wanted to be better people than they were. But this was a no more comforting insight, given the war that was going on which meant no matter what people wanted, or thought they wanted, they would still go and do what they had always done, finding different ways to sin against their Lord and then going to church to buy some repentance that would clear them for a while and then building up the sin again and coming back for another installment of repentance, and so on. By that measure, Will thought, there ought to be their own church for this Yankee army to take along on their backs, for how does anyone know when they’re supposed to burn one to the ground or pray in it? God help me, Will thought, with no sense of the contradiction in him, because I can’t give myself to the nigger-keeping side I was born to neither. I don’t know nothing or no one to give myself to with my whole heart except maybe Miss Emily Thompson.

When the hymn singing was done a pipe organ murmured softly as the basket was sent around. Will worried that he hadn’t even a penny to offer so as not to look bad. But glancing over to where the usher was handing the basket to the first man on the aisle, and then watching as the coins and even Federal dollars dropped into it, and the basket advanced toward him, he turned his mind to the fact that not he but Arly had put them in the middle of this pew, and in the very moment the basket was placed on his fingertips he knew it would happen that Arly would punch it up from the bottom and it and the money would fly into the air, and they would be on their hands and knees, banging their heads on the back of the pew in front of them while picking up the coins and bills and putting almost all the money back where it belonged and then risen to their feet—the usher glowering down at the end of the aisle, the soldiers on either side shaking their heads—the bumbling oafs smiling sheepishly, which was true in his case, and plain cunning in Arly’s, and with the sacrament of giving now running smoothly again, and the organ playing softly its deferential piping to the hallowed name, their standing and facing forward, just two red faced with embarrassment worshipers hardly able to wait on the end of the service before taking themselves with someone else’s pay in their pockets back to the whores on Charleston Street.

WREDE SARTORIUS WAS given the ground-floor ward and operating room of the Military Hospital, a luxury that he relished after all this time in the field. But Emily couldn’t see it that way. Of the twenty beds on the ward, half were filled with soldiers of the Confederate army. They were men dying of their wounds or wasting away with disease. The smell was awful even after she had the windows opened to air the place out. And because of the Union blockade, the hospital lacked even such things as rolled bandages. There was no calomel, no chloroform. There were no emetics, rubefacients, or narcotics. So it was a matter of supplying the hospital from the surgical field cases. Besides that, the army at rest in Savannah hardly meant a falling off of patients. Men were reporting with fevers and bronchial congestions acquired during the siege of the city: sitting out in the swampy terrain around Savannah, living in wet clothes, hungry and unable to light fires, they were coming in sick and hardly able to stand. And now that there was a general relaxation of military discipline the enlisted men were on the town drinking and fighting and knocking one another about and showing up, the worse for wear, in the early hours of the morning. This hospital in the genteel city of Savannah was more like a madhouse. To make matters worse, they were understaffed. Sartorius was without an assistant surgeon. Three of the regimental nurses were down—two with pneumonia, the other with a recurrence of swamp fever. So not only Emily and the pair from Millen were doing hospital duty but also little Pearl, who was stationed in the supply room folding towels and rolling bandages.

But where were those two men now? They had a way of not being there when you needed them.

Wrede had told her that the moment he examined them back at Millen he knew they were not what they said they were. They could not have spent any time at all in that mud hole. They were not starved. Their eyes were clear. Their skin was healthy, their fingernails were pink, and their beards were not long.

I suspect they are spies, Wrede had said.

Spies? She was shocked. She thought one of them, Will, was rather a sweet boy. How could someone like that be a spy?

Such scoundrels abound in the chaos of war. I don’t know if the regimental affiliations they professed are real or not, and I don’t care. If they decided to attach themselves to my medical company because it was less apt to follow military protocol, they reasoned correctly. Whatever they might be after—perhaps my procedures for resections?—they are welcome to. He laughed. In the meantime, they will scrub the floors and clean up after the dysentery patients.

Wrede Sartorius didn’t usually speak of his past, so she was surprised when he said that as a boy he’d been sent by his father to a military academy in Göttingen. The experience had taught him to detest drilling and saluting and all the other hierarchical warrior nonsense. That was the phrase he used—she smiled—hierarchical warrior nonsense.

A CIVILIAN WAS brought in, a man with a depressed skull fracture. He arrived in the arms of a Negro. He did not belong in a military hospital, as one of the guards had insisted, but the victim’s wife said, The likes of you did this to him, and we are not leaving. On Wrede’s orders the man was brought to the surgery. His head was shaved. Emily came in with a cloth moistened with bromine and washed the bare skull. Gently, she patted the skin dry. The patient was perhaps sixty. He was muscular and deep-chested, but his chest hairs were gray. The face was ashen. The eyes were closed. The jaw was slack and the breathing barely perceptible. The skull was caved in an ellipse on the right side just above the forehead. She stepped back, her eyes fixed on the operating table. She would not flinch.

Wrede made an incision front to back through the length of the injury and two lateral incisions at either end of that, and folded the flaps back to reveal the damaged skull. A male nurse sponged the area. The loose fragments and splinters Wrede removed one by one with a forceps. The depressed bone was four centimeters in length. Taking up a trephine, he locked its perforator pin into the fracture line. This is to prevent cutting into the membrane under the bone, the dura mater, he said to Emily. He had lately found himself instructing her as if she were a medical student. Emily was no less aware of this. She’d discovered that his medical terminology, and the Apollonian calm with which he attended to the most awful matters, enabled her to find her courage. She looked on and learned.

He tightened the pin with a screw positioned halfway up the shaft of the trephine. Like that, he said. Emily nodded, though Wrede, bent over the patient, could not see her. Now he rotated the handle of the trephine and the circular cutting head ground into the bony plate until the disk of bone was all but cut through. He loosened the perforator pin, retracted it, and locked it and passed the trephine off. Then he inserted a flattened blade under the bone and slowly levered the disk away from the skull.

Under the cerebral membrane was an enormous blood blister purple in color. To Emily, it looked like the head of a toadstool. Hematoma, Wrede said. He chose a small scalpel with a curved blade and incised the membrane to set the hematoma draining. Linen dressings were applied to take up the blood. There should be no pressure now, he said. Until the discharge ended, the wound would be lightly covered with linen dressings and lint. If he survives, Wrede said, he will wear a lead plaster until eventually something like bone will grow back.

The patient was moved to the ward. They had not yet taken the trouble to know his name. Emily was prepared to sit by the bed and attend to the dressings. No, Wrede said, we will have the widow sit by him. You will come out with me and comfort her.

Emily said, The widow?

Wrede washed his hands in a basin of water. He looked at her and smiled. It was a sorrowful smile, with those ice-blue eyes of his suggesting the pain of his own limitations. We will find out how much time passed before I attended him. You cannot remove the pressure too soon. He is not a young man. The concussive shock is severe. He may never awaken. Even if he does, there is almost always infection. There is not much to be done with an infected brain. Come, Wrede said, you will help me not to leave the woman hopeless.

As they walked to the anteroom, Wrede asked Emily if she’d remembered that tonight was Christmas Eve. She hadn’t. It surprised her that the holidays of life were still applicable. He took her arm. We will dine this evening with the officers at the Pulaski Hotel. And then would you like to see the Negroes dancing?

When they came into the anteroom, Mattie Jameson stood and, seeing Emily, blurted out the first thought that flashed through her mind. Aren’t you Judge Thompson’s daughter from over in Milledgeville? she said.

FROM THE DAY they arrived in Savannah, Mattie did not recall a moment in which John was not enraged, shouting at everybody, cursing the powers that be. In the first place the army would not have him. They enlisted the boys readily enough, and now where were they? Gone to God knows where, to South Carolina, her sons, her babies, fifteen and fourteen years old, gone for soldiers. But not their father. John had actually accosted General Hardee, who had looked at him and said he was too old to march as an enlisted man and could not be commissioned an officer unless he brought in a regiment of his own. I’ll do that then, by God, Hardee, John had said, and reported that the General had smiled, as of course he would, the entire state having been scraped bare of able-bodied men and his so-called army a hapless assemblage of militias and cadets.

And then John had found it intolerable that, there being no decent houses available in Savannah, they had to board on Green Street with her older sister Cissie, whom he had never liked for her officiousness. And it was true that Cissie had a way about her of knowing better than anyone else, in any given situation, what must be done and how it should be done and giving orders accordingly. That was surely the reason she never found a husband. She had been that way even as a child, as Mattie well knew—the games they played always Cissie’s games, with Cissie’s rules—and even though there was but a year and a half separating them, she seemed to have been born knowing everything and pronouncing errorless judgments so that Mattie had always to give in, to revise her opinions, to gainsay her own judgments, just as she did living with John Jameson who had not a little of the same overbearing nature, which is why he probably found his sister-in-law so intolerable. They were two peas in a pod. Cissie wore a perpetual frown—it had been grooved into her face from so many years of it and now, with her lips pressed together and her eyes narrowed, her simplest remark, however well meant, had a knife edge to it. The meals in her dining room were cold and silent. Her menus reflected the wartime shortages and the darkies were somewhat slower in serving than they should have been, as if, in anticipation of Sherman’s advancing armies, they were practicing their independence. And she, Mattie, was strung taut between her sister and her husband, deferential to one and placatory of the other. Cissie had inherited the family manse, and above all, without her saying a thing, like a miasma in the house, was the fact of their imposition. It had been not even a month, but it seemed like forever.

Of course John was out of the house as much as possible, God knows what he was doing all day in the streets of Savannah, with the army stationed behind entrenchments everywhere you looked. But removed from his land he was a lost soul. And one day, without her knowledge, he went out with our Roscoe and when he came back he was alone and dear Roscoe was gone, as if he’d never existed after all those years with them and never a bit of trouble. But all John would say was he’d got the best out of Roscoe and what was left wasn’t worth providing for.

Mattie didn’t know how, when they got back to Fieldstone, the place would get up and running again, John having sold off all the working hands. She knew, of course, that there might never again be slaves but she couldn’t quite see how anything could be done without them. And so when she imagined the war over and a return to their home, as often as not in her imagination the slaves would still be there. She would read in the papers the bad tidings for the Confederacy but somehow she couldn’t connect it to a whole change of Southern life. She would, for a moment, and then the connection would dissolve and the war would seem to her, however horrible, a temporary thing, an interruption only, without any great consequences. She worried about her sons going off to battle, but at the same time she couldn’t imagine them not coming back or, when they did come back, being any older or different from when they went away.

And then it pained her terribly when she one day expressed hope for the future and John called her an idiot. It was hard to forget that, such a cruel thing it was to say. She was no idiot. She was a very capable person, a loyal wife, and a smart and insightful mother, she was good with accounts and knew how to run a household. It was her educated taste in fabrics and furnishings that created their beautiful home. He had been too strict with their sons when they were but little boys, and she had explained to him why that was wrong and he had listened. He had come to her for advice on many an occasion, and she had given good advice. And, finally, she was bearing up under these circumstances with more grace and dignity than he was. It was not she who was running around madly all over Savannah and telling the military what they were doing wrong. The boys had confided in her—he had done that to the point of embarrassing them when he followed them to their picket-duty posts and had to be shooed away by their officers.

But she didn’t begin to think that perhaps John had gone mad and that everything he’d done, selling off his good working slaves, rushing the family to Savannah to live like indigents—for even if he and the boys rode off she could have remained and not come to harm, just as she saw now in Savannah how women kept their homes whose husbands and sons were fighting for the South, and the Union army might have passed through and left them without food or stock, but she would still be mistress of Fieldstone in their own home among their own things, and making do until their return—she didn’t begin to ask herself if everything John had done, and that she had deferred to, was in fact the judgment of an unstable mind until the night of the retreat, when General Hardee’s troops fell back and made their way across the Savannah River to South Carolina. John had stood there on Broad Street as the soldiers waited in formation to cross the pontoon bridge, and he called them cowards. These poor boys—I saw them myself—looking cold and miserable standing there in the street and waiting for their turn across. It was after midnight and so windy and cold—why, some of them were barefoot and some had their feet in women’s shoes, that’s how ill equipped these soldiers were. And I looked for John Junior and little Jamie, and walked up and down the ranks trying to find them, but to no avail, while in the meantime John stood there shouting, with his hair sticking up and his face red and the veins in his neck popping out, he was ordering them all to turn back and man the trenches and act like men and not miserable damn cowards—till an officer rode up and said, Sir, I’ll thank you to remove yourself from sight or I’ll have you shot for treason.

It was such a windy night, and in fact the retreat was well managed, and spared the city the destruction it would have suffered if we had fought, as I heard people say who might have been just as fearful of losing our troops as anyone. The big fires were kept up as if the army was still in place, and all night the cannon fired toward the Union lines outside of town just to fool them into thinking they dare not attack while in fact the troops and their wagons and supplies, and my two sons, were spiriting themselves away, thank God, instead of lying dead like so many others under the boots of General Sherman.

And from that night—when was it, just a few nights ago—he, John, did not talk, he did not say a word, this man of such rage, such fist-shaking rage, he became so calm, so silent, that that was even more frightening to me, the way he stared at whoever spoke to him and didn’t reply: my husband. Can a man age so in just a few days? Or was it that he was always this old but that his vigor had suddenly deserted him that hid just how old he was? And why did he have to go to the warehouse where our things were, where our furniture and art and our rugs were stored for safekeeping? Perhaps to talk with his friend the cotton broker, Mr. Feinstein, who had been so kind as to accommodate us and who was always so patient listening to John. It was more than just a business connection, such an odd friendship for my husband to have, Mr. Feinstein being a Jewish gentleman, but maybe John had to talk to someone if not to me. I followed him. I was so frightened for his state of mind, I didn’t know what he might do. Two Union soldiers stood guard at the warehouse doors with their rifles held in front of them. And there out in the street was Mr. Feinstein with one of his workers, and he was locked out of his own building. John, he said, my business has been taken from me. I have this piece of paper with the order signed by General Sherman. He says my warehouse and all the cotton it holds is the property of the Union army. And Mr. Feinstein held his hands up to Heaven.

And of course John Jameson being who he is, he could not abide this. A more reasonable man might have gone to see the General or someone on his staff to explain the situation, just to explain that our personal things were stored in there with the cotton bales and, granted, cotton was a prized spoil of war, but of what use, for instance, would my needlepoint chairs or my English fabrics be to the Union army? Or my Persian rugs? Or my white leather-bound family Bible, with its steel-engraved illustrations and its own claw-foot oak stand? But John was now beyond reason. He argued with the soldiers to let him in—why? Was he going to carry off our things by himself? He became bellicose and threatened them, and he took up a paving stone from the pile in the street and came back to where the soldiers stood. Oh, I tried to hold him but his arm tore out of my grip, and Mr. Feinstein shouted, Wait, Jameson! One of the soldiers raised his rifle and I screamed. What was so hateful is that he said nothing in warning he did not say anything, this soldier—and I never want to hear such a sound again—when he brought the rifle butt down upon John Jameson’s head. And I watched my husband of nineteen years, who married me when I was a girl and took me to live on his plantation, drop like a tree felled, all the sense blown from him on the blood sprung from his poor head.

WHEN PEARL CAME into the ward a woman was sitting by one of the beds, and from the back she looked like the wife ma’m. Pearl didn’t want to believe it. She moved closer, sidling, ready to run. And then over the woman’s head she saw the patient with the bandage on his head, and it was her pap.

At this moment Mattie Jameson turned and found herself looking up at the child who had haunted her life. Pearl wore the sky-blue Union trousers under her skirt and a uniform sash around her waist, and held a stack of white towels in her arms. Her hair had grown longer and she wore it pulled back and tied in a bun. Mattie had not shed a tear, sitting beside her unconscious husband. Now the tears filled her eyes.

Her life had collapsed, come to pieces, and here stood this child of her husband’s sin to announce to her such upheavals of fortune as only God in his vengeance could design.

How many times during the years did she want to touch this beautiful child, how many times she had wanted to make her life easier. But John wanted nothing to do with her and it was easy enough to comply. When Nancy Wilkins died, Mattie was relieved. She thought that would be the end of the shadow that lay daily upon her own life in the form of such an extremely beautiful slave woman as Nancy Wilkins. She thought that would be the end of the humiliation of an entire plantation of slaves knowing that her own bed was not sufficient for the Massah. But there was still Pearl. And if she, Mattie, had any instinct of kindness, or made any gesture of conciliation, it was Pearl herself who discouraged her, making it easy to dislike her by the insolence of her manner and the glances of contempt that flashed from her. And the older she grew the worse she became. It was Pearl’s own fault that she found no place for herself at Fieldstone, accepted neither in the house nor in the quarters, too sassy for one and disdainful of the other, with only old Roscoe to guide her, putting her to work in the kitchen and the laundry, or sending her out to the field when she was needed there. But Mattie, knowing herself a good Christian woman, saw herself now as something else as she remembered her last glimpse of Pearl standing with her satchel and waiting for John to tell her to get up in the carriage and come with them, and how glad Mattie was that he didn’t, thinking good riddance, and that maybe there was something to be said for this war after all. And all these thoughts overwhelmed Mattie now as the tears burst from her and she sat bowed and sobbing beside her comatose husband.

Pearl, disdainful of the woman’s tears, turned her attention to her pap. How peaceful and handsome he looked with his eyes closed, as if thinking worthy thoughts in the calmness of his being. But this ain’t like you, she said, hardly aware that she was speaking. I never remember you layin abed, Pap. Always up and about ridin down the field hands, shoutin an stompin ever’where, I could hear your footsteps all through the house. Won’t you open your eyes, Pap? This is Pearl, your own born chile here. Never christened ’cept by my mama. She name me Pearl for my white skin. Your skin, Massah Jameson my pap. Your fine white skin. What happened that you layin here? I never seen you so quiet. I wish you was to wake up so I could tell you I am free. And by the laws of the Bible that you can’t do nothin about I carry your name. This is Pearl Wilkins Jameson speakin in your ear, Pap. Your Pearl, as I hope you will rise up and live long to remember. Come, Pap, open your eyes and look on the daughter of your flesh and blood. Your eyes is closed, but I know you listenin. I know you hear me. And if you worryin about me I can promise no man will ever treat me like you did my mama, nosir. So you needn’t worry ’bout your Pearl. She here in Savannah now an thas just to begin. She goin far, your Pearl. She will take your name to glory. Scrub it up of the shame and shit you put upon it. Make it nice and clean again for peoples to remember.

XV

IN THE FIRST TRIUMPHANT DAYS OF THE OCCUPATION, Sherman had sent a telegram to the President: I beg to present to you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah, with one hundred and fifty heavy guns and plenty of ammunition. Also about twenty-five thousand bales of cotton.

He held in his hands Lincoln’s letter of humble thanks. An adoring note from Grant. A copy of the congressional resolution in his honor. Editorials fulsome in their acclaim.

The country had gone wild. The General whom nobody had heard from in months had buried an ax in the Southern heart.

Sherman’s billet was the mansion of a cotton broker. Its many rooms were hushed by thick rugs and heavy draperies. There were potted palms and busts of Roman senators on pedestals. The walls were hung with paintings of pink-nippled harem women lolling under the eyes of Negro eunuchs. He slept little. In his apartments upstairs he sat in his bath and smoked his cigar and read of his greatness. Letters of adulation were coming in by the bundle. He called for Moses Brown to add to the hot water, for that was the only thing that could calm him now, national recognition working in him as a nervous excitement. Also, the steam eased his breathing—his asthma was acting up. Not only the rain but the sea wind was having its effect. Sherman came from Ohio. Even to be near the sea unsettled him, and whenever he had to be on it all he could think of was the perversity of God in composing something that only heaved and wallowed and slopped about.

He wrote to his wife: I will not trust this acclaim to last. Are these not the newspapers that, after Shiloh, announced to the world that I was crazy? It is the verso of the same coin. Yet, day and night, crowds of blacks stood outside the house waiting for a glimpse of him. By eight every morning petitioners were lined up in the parlor. Periodically he went downstairs to receive them. Among his visitors were the wives of Confederate generals. They brought letters from their husbands asking that they be given safe passage. He readily complied. He affected gallantry. He wanted the people of Savannah to know that he was, despite all reports, human. The women were the hardest to convince. The older they were, the more likely they were to let him know what they thought of him. In a way, he found this salutary. A Mrs. Letitia Pettibone appeared whom he vaguely remembered from his days as a young officer stationed in Atlanta. What she said he couldn’t later recall, for she carried a beaded purse looped to her wrist, and when she swung it at him, had he not with his quick reflexes stepped back he was a certain casualty of war. After the woman was escorted from the room, he took a puff of his cigar and said to his adjutant, A new Field Order, Morrison: Ladies will please check their handbags at the door.

Christmas morning the rain poured from a black sky. Sherman had called for a review of the troops. His remarks for the occasion were written out for company commanders to read to their men. While they stood on parade the troops heard that they would be remembered in the military history of the world. Sherman, on a reviewing platform, listened to his words coming dis-synchronously from all directions and as if through water. The tarpaulin roof over his head billowed and snapped in the wind. Two regimental bands combined played a march. It sounded as if every note was played twice.

Sherman considered again the measures he had taken: The Ogeechee and the Sound cleared of mines, secesh coastal guns dismounted. Slocum’s corps deployed from the Savannah River to the seven-mile post on the canal, Howard’s to the sea, Kilpatrick’s cavalry by the King’s Bridge and the roads leading north and west. Shops open, streets cleared, fire companies intact. All public buildings, abandoned plantations, etc., the property of the Federal government.

He’d missed nothing. Then what was wrong? The national praise heaped on him in the past several days seemed as cold and wet as the rain on his face. Is that all it is, this damn weather in my lungs? He left the platform and was ridden to his rooms.

Sitting facing a warm hearth, his feet in their damp socks held before the fire, Sherman began to work it out: None of this of Savannah was war. It was governance. Warring in the field was pure, clear of purpose, it had a form. But governance was conferring with civil authorities, it was dealing with Northern recruiting agents who wanted to conscript blacks as army substitutes. It was dodging ladies’ handbags. The local population was swollen with whites who’d fled here along with the freed slaves who had trailed after the columns. He was feeding them all, white and black. The port was thick with packets and steamers and cutters. The city was rife with unattached and bereft women of childbearing age. His soldiers were gambling, and those who were not in the whorehouses were filling the churches. He’d ordered drills and installed curfews, but none of it could staunch the drip by drip depletion of their war blood. It was as if his fighting force had melted and spread over Savannah like some viscid pool of humanity. Somewhere in all this there must still be an army, Sherman said to himself. Where are they when I need them? Until I get out of here I’m a sitting duck for Washington.

At this moment Major Morrison entered the room with the message that Secretary of War Edwin Stanton was arrived in port on a revenue cutter.

SO DOES THE LAUREL wither, Sherman thought. What will Stanton say: that I let a Confederate force of ten thousand men slip away into South Carolina? The human capacity for gratitude is limited. Inside the gratitude is envy. Inside the envy is the indifference of a heedless world. The Secretary’s carriage rolling to a stop under the porte cochere, the honor guard presented arms. Stanton was second only to the President in authority, but in Sherman’s eyes the man stepping down was a portly figure whose soft face, with its plump cheeks, bespoke a constitution that would not survive a day’s march.

General, he said, and gave Sherman a limp hand. That concluded the amenities. Stanton began speaking even before they were in the door. He had a lot on his mind. His stiff forked beard rose and fell with his words. Sherman, entranced by the brandished beard, missed a good deal. Something about how the blacks had been treated. So that was it.

I would meet with your general officers, Stanton said. At dinner Sherman produced his wing and corps commanders. They were an imposing sight, decked out in their ceremonial swords, gauntlets, and sash. But they sat as stiffly as schoolchildren while Stanton walked around the table as if conducting a lesson. I am not sure, gentlemen, of your armies’ appropriate conduct regarding the freed slaves, he said. My understanding is that they were discouraged from accompanying the forces, that they were sent back to their masters, or left as prey to guerrillas. The men looked at Sherman slouched in his chair with a severe frown on his brow. Mr. Secretary, Sherman said, how do you expect me to march sixty thousand fighting men through enemy country with the weight of the entire slave population of Georgia on their backs? As it is, the darkies seem to be here, as you will see if you look out the window.

You have refused to enlist them in your army except as menial laborers.

As laborers is the way they are best used.

There is one report of an incident at Ebeneezer Creek, was it? Your General Davis, who pulled up the bridge and left hundreds behind to die. Some of them drowned, some of them were slaughtered by guerrillas. Where is he? Why is he not here?

He is on duty. I will have him summoned.

I will hear from him his explanation.

And you will be satisfied of the military necessity of his action.

In the morning the cavalry had to be brought in for parade. The Secretary stood with his belly pressed against the cast-iron railing of the balcony outside Sherman’s apartments and watched, unsmiling, as the horsemen passed in the street below him. Kil Kilpatrick rode at their head, a Beau Brummel in his gold sash and braid, peeking from under his plumed hat with a sly smile, his slight figure seeming to post with some insolence, Sherman thought—or was it his bobbing hunchback that conveyed his attitude? Kil is a reckless fool, he enjoys war too much, he makes camp in women’s bedrooms, but I wouldn’t trade him for anything.

By the third day of the visit Sherman wondered how much longer he would be able to hold his temper. The Secretary didn’t talk, he fulminated. He was like a spoiled child, and was always in need of something—a drink, a hot water bottle, a telegrapher. Behind everything the Secretary said or did was a desire for attention. Sherman had wanted the captured cotton for the army exchequer. Stanton countermanded it for the Treasury. He had strong views on who should garrison the city. He presumed to advise Sherman on strictly military matters.

And then came his demand to meet with some Negro elders. He was impatient until they were rounded up from the black churches. When they were gathered in the parlor he asked them what they understood by slavery.

The black men looked at one another and smiled. Slavery is receiving by irresistible power the work of another man and not by his consent, one of them said. The others nodded their agreement.

And what, said Stanton, do you understand of the freedom that was to be given by the proclamation of President Lincoln?

The freedom promised by the proclamation is taking us from under the yoke of bondage and placing us where we can reap the fruits of our own labor and take care of ourselves and assist the government in maintaining our freedom.

Sherman hid his astonishment at how well spoken these blacks were. At that moment Stanton turned to him. General, he said, I will now confer with these freedmen regarding the colored people’s feelings toward yourself. Would you mind leaving the room for a moment?

Sherman was livid. He paced the hallway, muttering to himself. To catechize these blacks regarding my character! How would any of them be here if not for me? Ten thousand are free and fed and clothed by my orders! That they are not fighting is my best military judgment. Nor have I had the leisure to train them. I have marched an army intact for four hundred miles. I have gutted Johnny Reb’s railroads. I have burned his cities, his forges, his armories, his machine shops, his cotton gins. I have eaten out his crops, I have consumed his livestock and appropriated ten thousand of his horses and mules. He is left ravaged and destitute, and even if not another battle is fought his forces must wither and die of attrition. And that is not enough for the Secretary of War. I must abase myself to the slaves. Damn this Stanton—I am sworn to destroy the treasonous insurrection and preserve the Union. That is all. And that is everything.

Sherman was hardly mollified to hear that he was held in high favor by the black elders. Late that night he called in Morrison. The fellow had been sleeping.

Your pen, Major. Get this down. Field Order whatever it is.

It would be Number 15, sir.

Number 15, he said. The Sea Islands from Charleston south, and all the abandoned plantation acreage along the rivers for thirty miles inland in South Carolina, and I’ll throw in parts of Georgia, and the country bordering on the St. John’s River in Florida, are reserved for black resettlement. Have you got that? Black resettlement. Every free Negro head of family is to be given title to forty acres of tillable ground. Yes, and the seed and equipment to farm them. All boundaries to be determined and possessory titles issued by a general officer of the U.S. Army as—call him—Inspector of Settlements and Plantations. And tidy it up for my signature, with a copy for Mr. Stanton.

I am no abolitionist, Sherman thought. But with this enticement I both shut up Edwin Stanton and disengage the niggers, who will stay here to plant their forty acres, and God help them.

TO CELEBRATE THE Secretary’s departure, Sherman had a dinner for his generals. It was as if they all needed to regain their dignity. Everyone was jolly. They were themselves again. Sherman sat at the head of a long table while the black waiters marched in with the pillage of the city: platters of oysters, roasted turkeys, baked hams, steaming mounds of seasoned rice, platters of sweet potatoes, loaves of warm bread and salvers of real butter, hampers of red wine. Sherman ate and drank and offered toasts. But he wanted to be on the march again where nobody could tell him what to do. He wanted to be back in the field. What could be better than lying on the hard ground each night and gazing up at the stars? What could be better than setting out each morning to run your war the way it ought to be run? The issues were unambiguous. The demands were clear. He had had enough of Savannah and its glory. The real glory was in the uncommunicable joy of doing well what God had deemed for you. There was no envy there, no praise to explode in your face.

Gentlemen, Sherman announced, we have had enough of these fleshpots. Tomorrow we begin preparations for the new campaign. You all know what it is. We have Grant’s leave to take the Carolinas. It will be hard, no mistake. Georgia was no more than a hayride. We must divest ourselves of surplus horses, mules, and Negroes. We must pare ourselves down to our fighting essence. The terrain is forbidding, the march will be arduous. But I assure you the infamous state of South Carolina, as instigator of our war, will have never known the meaning of devastation until it feels the terrible swift sword of this army.

Hear! Hear! The generals raised their glasses.

At the end of the evening Sherman went to his rooms mellow with wine and feeling more relaxed than he had in days. He was humming “The Ride of the Valkyries.” Some newspapers were newly arrived from Ohio. He lit a cigar and, expecting to amuse himself with the local gossip, sat back and read in the Columbus, Ohio, Times that Charles Sherman, the six-month-old son of General and Mrs. William Tecumseh Sherman, had died of the croup.

His hands dropped to his sides. Oh Lord, he cried, is the envy yours as well?

XVI

ON THIS COLD, DARK DAY, WITH THE CLOUDS SAILING in low from the Sound, Savannah was alive with the movement of men and animals, so that it seemed as if the streets themselves were moving, that the city in its dimensions had come apart from the land and was fluttering loose in the blow. The wind piped its music to the rattle of the wagons on the cobblestone and the cries of the teamsters and the cadence calls of the platoon sergeants. Columns of troops were marching to the bridge over the Savannah River, and others stood in their mass along the docks waiting to board the fleet of navy gunships, cutters, and packets while seamen stood in the yardarms looking down on the scene like roosting birds. Among civilians, too, a sense of urgency was attached to their comings and goings, as if the departure of the army was in its way as frightening as its arrival had been. Only the soldiers who were to garrison the city were unmoving at their posts. All else was hectic intention, with the wind blowing tufts of cotton through the alleys and even the live oaks in the squares bending and swaying to the wind.

In all of this Wilma Jones felt the smallness and insignificance of her own purposes on this morning. But that is the slave still in me, she thought. I must watch my own thinking—I must be as free in my soul as I am by law. She glanced at Coalhouse Walker who clearly had no such problems standing beside her with his shoulders squared and a kind of solemn joy on his face. He held her hand. Slowly the line moved forward and they came around the corner. Some of the people ahead of them were singing. Not loudly—they were singing for themselves, a prayerful hymn, so that this blessed thing that was happening would continue to happen. Up ahead, in front of the steps to the city hall, a table had been set up right there on the sidewalk, and a Union officer sat behind it with two enlisted men standing with their rifles at the ready on either side. Because of the wind they had put big stones over the sheaves of paper on the table. Wilma didn’t know why the whole business couldn’t have been right there up the steps inside of the city hall.

It was a very slow process. Some of the black folks thought they would be given a deed right then and there along with a map to get to their property. But these were applications only, and that had to be explained over and over again, apparently. And then of course most of the men couldn’t write and the officer had to write their names in for them and let them sign with a mark and then the mark had to be attested to by the officer. And then, every once in a while, the officer got up and went into the building for one reason or another while everyone stood there waiting and singing and the wind blew wet along the ground, darkening the hem of Wilma’s skirt and chilling her ankles.

When it was finally their turn, Wilma read the application and explained it to Coalhouse. He nodded and looked at the officer and smiled. But there was a problem. Resettlement deeds were exclusively for the heads of families. Is this Mrs. Walker? the officer asked, indicating Wilma. Coalhouse, frowning, shook his head no. Is there a Mrs. Walker even so? the officer said with a sly smile.

Coalhouse grew deadly still and stared at the man. Wilma grabbed his forearm, feeling the muscles tense. Give me that paper, she said. We’ll bring it back to you and everything that we require we will have.

Whatever you say, Auntie, the officer said.

I expect you will recognize us, Wilma said. We will come directly to the front here, you will not have us start tomorrow at the end of the line, as we have done that today.

In a nearby town square they found a bench sheltered from the weather by a weeping willow. Yet it was chilly here too, and dark. Coalhouse put his arm around Wilma’s shoulders. She leaned away from him, sitting hunched over with her hands in her lap. Let’s talk about this again, she said.

I know to farm the land, Miss Wilma. That’s what I know.

You saw that man’s mind. Whoever they are, these are white folks first and foremost.

For forty acres around, we won’t have to see a white face.

What they give they can take away.

That the Lord you talking about who can do that. No man will take what is mine.

Wilma shook her head.

Aw now, Coalhouse said, where is that spirit? It was there telling that officer man what would be. You will see us tomorrow right here! Yes! That was my Wilma. But where is it now, the spirit? Don’t see it anywhere, Coalhouse said, looking into her eyes.

For a while they were silent. They listened to the city astir. On the street behind them a procession of mule-drawn field guns clattered by.

My Judge Thompson? Wilma said. He used to go up to New York or to St. Louis or Chicago. Went to all those places. Take the trains hither and yon. And he’d come back and have his dinner and talk about it. I made sure to stand behind the door and listen to him tell Miz Emily about these big cities up North. How fine they were. Each of them a whole world, with all kinds of wonders that you wouldn’t expect in your lifetime. Of course, he was there to talk to other judges and such, and staying in the fancy hotels as a man of the world. But it made me think. I would like to live in a big city. I could do that. Nobody bother you there, everyone too busy with theirselves to bother with you. And you make your life. You’re free.

The only way north in this war is walking with the army. Is that what you mean?

Yes. Like before. If we are going, we ought to go.

Live in the swamps, snakes bite you, guerrillas chase you. Shoot at your head.

You got us this far.

Oh, lady, don’t tell me you know what’s coming. Six, eight hundred mile before you even see your city.

He had stood and was pacing now, disturbed, agitated. So you heard your damn judge. A course. The fine things of the big city is made for the likes of the Judge. Is that the same city you expect, woman? Make your life? How? What can you do?

I can work at something. In cities they have jobs.

Yes, slaving. Wash the Judge’s underwear, wash the underwear of ten judges, a hundred judges.

I can read and write.

Well, damn it, I can’t. You understand, Miss Wilma? I can’t. What job do you think to be givin me to do in your fine city?

You know music. You play music. Got a fine voice. I heard you. You made those people happy, picking on that banjo.

Oh Lord, oh Lord. Coalhouse paced back and forth, wringing his hands. I thought she had more sense than Coalhouse, this good woman. But her mind is afflicted. Listen, he said, and got down on his knees before the bench. I am a loving man, Miss Wilma. I have no bitterness in my heart for what has been done to me all my life until now. I have the whip marks of that life forever after across my back to testify that I have endured. I am strong. But I can only give you what I have in me, and what I have is I know how to work the land. This paper in your hand is Mr. Lincoln presenting me with what I am owed—forty acres of good loam and a plow and a mule and some seed. And with that I will make a life for us. A man who owns his own land is a free man. Works for himself, not for nobody else. Sings and dances for himself, not nobody else. Puts the food on his table that he has brought from the earth. And you tell me what is better than that? At night, we will sit by the fire and you can teach me to read and write. Then we will go to sleep and wake up when the cock crows and do the very same thing tomorrow we did yesterday, under God’s warm sun. And if you don’t see the blessedness of that then I will go down to the river right now and drown myself.

You won’t.

I swear.

Wilma leaned forward, put her hand to his neck, and pulled him to her and kissed him. You very handsome, she said.

I know.

Shame to put an end to all those good looks.

He shrugged.

How about instead we find us a preacher, she said. You know any?

He raised his head and smiled. Can’t turn a corner and not meet one.

Come get up from there and sit beside me, Wilma said. Now, look here, you see on this paper there’s two lines to write in our names—one for you as head of family and one for me as real head of family.

Oh, how they laughed!

And so their course was chosen. They left the park square and hurried toward one of the black encampments. They were startled anew by the military movement through the city. Streets were clotted with wagon trains and marching troops. They waited at a corner.

What about your service? Wilma said.

When I threw off the tunic it was over, Coalhouse said. White officer can’t tell who’s gone when we all look alike, can he?

This is my man, she thought. He is brave and smart. And he’s right-thinking. Staking a claim, you stake out your freedom. After all, how had the whites lorded over everything all these years but by owning the land?

There was no doubt in her mind that he would give his life for her. But, Lord, what if it came to that? She knew what happened to stubborn, strong-willed slaves. But then, foolish Wilma girl, we are not slaves anymore, are we? Coalhouse is younger than me, but stronger in his convictions. He doesn’t think about things till he don’t know what to think. I will simply stop troubling myself. We have made our decision and I will stand by it.

But at the same time she knew that living the rest of her life in Georgia she would never be without misgivings.

After the parade had passed they continued on their way. How you want to be called? Wilma said. On the application I will have to write it in for you.

Say Coalhouse Walker, Sr.

Oh? She looked right and left. I don’t see no Junior hereabouts.

Miss Wilma ma’am, Coalhouse said with a big, wide smile. Just come along to the preacher, if you please, and I promise you before you know it there will be a Coalhouse Walker, Jr.

XVII

ARLY AND WILL HAD NOT BEEN OUTDOORS FOR SEVERAL days. They stood on Waterfront Street blinking in the gloom of the dark, cloudy afternoon as if the sun were shining in their eyes.

This is a strangely quiet city all of a sudden, Arly said.

Will ran to the end of the street. They’re gone, he said.

Who?

The ships.

Savannah was ghostly in the grayness of the day. They hurried along through streets that had not been swept. Many of the houses and shops were dark. The city looked devastated, though there was no visible damage. This town’s like a dog with its tail between its legs, Arly said.

Sherman was here, Will said.

Appears so.

At one point, a patrol appearing up the street, they hid in a park square behind some bushes. A few woeful stragglers were being marched along under guard.

The hospital gates were open. The courtyard was empty but for a Rucker ambulance wagon, its trace poles angled to the ground. The ward where they had worked was almost empty. A few of the hopelessly wounded were still there, gazing at them with the eyes of the dying, but the only doctor to be seen was a civilian.

Colonel Sartorius’s surgery was bare.

Now we’re in for it, Will said. While we been debauching ourselves the whole damn army has gone.

Don’t speak ill of debauching, Arly said. It is no mean feat to make camp for a whole week running in a whorehouse.

I told you yesterday something was going on when we were the only ones left with those women.

You did. But I was too happy being like the last man on earth to worry about it. Arly sat himself on the operating table. I don’t think you ’preciate that when we walked in there we had just enough for one tipple each until I discovered the poker game in the back parlor.

Well, you have the black eye for a medal.

He caught me one on the side of the nose, too. Some folks don’t understand pure luck. It is a endowment, and those not blessed with it think something untoward is going on. But for that fellow, the Union boys was mostly good sports about it.

Why not? You had that Ruby feed them liquor till they was cross-eyed.

Ah, yes, Ruby, speaking of endowments.

I didn’t like her laugh.

Her laugh, her laugh? Arly said, staring at Will in disbelief. I think I have wasted my time with you. You did understand what we were about in that house?

Of course. I went with that Lucille. She told me all about herself.

The skinny one with the buck teeth?

Well, I didn’t mind. She was a nice girl. She liked to cuddle.

Arly saw come over Will’s face a beatific gaze of recollection directed at the ground and, for once, he was at a loss for words. He found himself looking out the window at the ambulance in the courtyard. Hold on, he said. Just wait a minute. God has given me the answer, he said, and got down from the table.

What?

That hospital wagon out there. Go on and find us a mule and we will hightail it after the army.

How’m I to do that?

Jesus, man. Just find one and take it. This is a captured city. Are you not of the military authority that is running things?

And what do you do in the meantime?

I’m to think further on this plan. Arly looked back into the ward. We will need some wounded to take along for appearances.

IN THE COURTYARD Will buttoned his tunic, brushed himself off, and set his hat on straight. At the gate he looked both ways down the street. I could just walk around till they pick me up, he thought. Maybe even turn myself in. What if I’m made for a straggler. I don’t care. Let them hang me, even. I’m owed that anyways. At least I won’t have Arly Wilcox telling me what to do day and night. But there were no patrols to be seen. He came upon a livery stable just a few blocks away. In the dimness it smelled used enough, but all the stalls were empty. Then he heard a nicker. Down at the end of the row was a small bay mare with a braided mane. She looked him in the eye. A sudden rush of happiness came upon Will. Hey, pretty one, he said. However did the troops miss you?

He led the creature out of its stall. The tail was braided as well. He took a harness down from the wall and, talking to her in a soft croon, put the collar on, the belly band, the crupper, the bridle. Draping the traces over her back, he led her out the stable doors. Confronting him there with a cocked pistol was an old man with a wrinkled face and sparse gray hairs poking out of his chin in the name of a beard.

You’ll have to get by me, son, he said.

This horse is now military property, Will said. Stand aside.

You’re just a thief far as I can see. That’s the Miz Lily Gaylord’s carriage mare, given a by from your Gen’ral Sherman hisself, which she has placed in my charge until she returns.

Well, the Gen’ral has countermanded that order, Will said. Now get out of the way or you will be put on trial for disputing the Federal gov’ment.

The old man raised his pistol. It was one of those old long-barreled pieces with a curved wooden grip and a tinderbox. He could hardly hold it still. Will laughed and moved forward. There was a sizzling sound and then a loud report. Will’s ears rang, and in the next moment he was trying to control a rearing horse and did not realize he’d been hit until, raising his arm to grab hold of the bridle, he noticed the hole in his sleeve. In the next moment his own bright blood pulsed forth with what he thought was something like a greeting.

The old man seemed surprised by what he had done. Will did not feel any pain, but a nausea rose in him and his legs threatened to buckle. It seemed to him absolutely necessary to show no alarm. All right, he said, you’ve shot at a Union soldier after the city has surrendered. That’s treason, old man, that’s a hanging offense.

The mare, skittish now, snorting and pawing the ground, Will led her by the throatlatch as he walked up to the old man and took the pistol out of his hand. It was a heavy piece, and he examined it as one would any antique. In the next moment the pain of his wound tore through his arm and, feeling a rage so great that he almost choked on it, he drew back and with all his might felled the old man with a blow of the pistol barrel to the head. He stood there a moment looking at the still form. Stupid old man, he said, dying for Miz Lily Gaylord.

A WHILE LATER Arly was driving them across the bridge over the Savannah River. Will, lying on his back in the wagon, strained to hear him over the clatter of the wheels. His arm hurt terrible. Arly had said they shouldn’t linger.

We’ll find a surgeon on the march, Arly shouted as he snapped the reins across the mare’s back. Maybe even our own man. You’ll be fine.

Will was cold. His teeth were chattering. He couldn’t tell if he was shivering or accounting the ripples in the road. His sleeve was soaked. He held the arm upright as he lay on the side bench, and with his other hand pressed a finger into the wound to try to hold the blood in.

The shanks on this little horse is like toothpicks, Arly shouted. She ain’t made to pull four wheels. You would of done better to get us a mule, like I asked you. On the other hand, it makes things easier with you laying back there considering the trouble I ran into intending to load up a couple of those dying Rebs. Where would I be taking them, and for what? So you’re more like what someone would expect, Willie. And what with one thing and another we have to take the bad with the good and trust the Lord to guide us as he has done so far, even if he had to bleed you a little to get us past the guard posts.