Refiner's Fire (30 page)

One of many miniature rotund Sicilians in blue work uniforms, employed by Harvard to sit on steps and smoke cheap cigars, or lean for hours against the handles of rakes, was opening the great door. Sunlight washed through the hall as if a dam had broken, and was met from the other end, where another maintenance man, rake in hand, opened the facing doors. They met in the middle and disappeared through some swinging panels which led to a staircase going down. Marshall heard one of them say: “Just anothah weahdo...”

Marshall stood and felt his balance as sure and strong as if he had had a gyroscope in him. He went to a high railing and mounted it. Standing on one foot, he exercised as if on a balance beam. Though he leaned out seemingly beyond grace, he remained true to center as if he were bolted on. He jumped down and began to walk through the hall, upright and steady.

There, were engraved the names of those Harvard men who had fallen in the Civil War. They were many, and the dates were overwhelmingly burdened with the feeling of seasons a hundred years past. The inscribed Mays and Julys were billowing with early summer and midsummer; the March was windy and full of crows; the January crystalline and numb. The names were so charged and breveted beyond simple designations for town or field that they seemed sunken into the marble-like eyes on an old, old man—Antietam, Manassas, Second Bull Run, Vicksburg, Cold Harbor, Wilderness, Malvern Hill, Chickamauga, Kelleys Ford, Spotsylvania, Brandy Station, Gaines's Mill, Port Royal, and a dozen others. Marshall had spent weeks in the endless stacks of Widener, lying on the floor, imprisoned by
Official Records of the War of Rebellion,
a hundred strong, aligned like troops, dusty and unused. But when he opened the covers the war came flooding out in startling prose. To his surprise, he read in those volumes as if he were reading his own past. This was surely a mystery, since he knew that he was the first of his line in America. It seemed unlikely that he was descended from a Civil War trooper who had somehow cast his seed back to the Old World. But as he read the dispatches he was certain that he had been there; he knew the names; at mention of some places he found himself shaking his head as if in knowing confirmation of a severe battle, or delightful recollection of a starry night, camping by a cedar fire. And once, in leafing through a book of photographs, he had come across a young Union cavalryman gaunt and thin from fighting and fatigue, in what was obviously early summer. The young man appeared to know that Marshall was looking at him. To Marshall's amazement, their faces were the same.

He feared the angels, and the soldiers of the past, for connections were too solid and fluent. There were too many memories where there should have been none, too many messages, a disturbing unreliability of time. He ran from it. Thinking to burn it all out, he ran for miles and miles, hot and deep-breathing, feeling clean and muscular. He ran along the river, vaulting bicycle racks and trash barrels, and he ran through parks and streets. After several hours he loped into the cemetery which overlooks the Mount Auburn bend in the Charles. There he passed the grave of Colonel Higginson, commander of the First South Carolina Volunteers (black troops fighting for the North), the grave of William Dean Howells, and the graves of Henry and William James. He came to rest in a yard for the Union dead and lay down in the shadow of crossed cannon, against the worn headstone of one Nims Burros, who had died in Virginia more than a hundred years before. The government markers were fading, but on Nims Burros's Marshall could make out:
Gone into the world of light.
After his seizures, Marshall always ached as if he had been on a succession of mounts for several days without rest. Exhausted from his running, he lay back in the strong sun and slept, only to dream.

The line of wagons groaning southward with Lee's wounded from Gettysburg had been seventeen miles long. On July second in that battle, the First Minnesota Volunteers lost eighty-two percent of their number after fifteen minutes of fighting; the fighting was as quick as a hardwood fire on a summers day, the gunfire crackling faster than shingles being nailed down. At Gettysburg alone 51,000 were reported dead, wounded, or missing, and at a simple country church where the wounded lay, they drilled holes in the floor to drain the blood. Marshall recollected these facts in his dream as though his memory of them were real, as though they were true. Lees lines had been so long stretching northward that Lincoln had said, “The animal must be very slim somewhere ... break him,” and they had.

Wars had been common. The Florida War, the Mexican War, and the wars with the Indians had made soldiers of many, so that “the animal” had hard experience upon which to develop. The Rebels in South Carolina took lead weights off fishing nets and melted them down for bullets, and a lot of Yankees rode out of New York and Washington wearing sheet-metal “invulnerable vests” soon discarded with a fatigued curse. Marshall saw streams of soldiers descending on the Potomac and Rappahannock from country farms in the Berkshires and from the Mohawk Valley, from the light-colored ash woods of Ohio, from Alabama, from West Texas, and from the Blue Ridge Mountains. One of them said, “The old blue Northerns gonna blow.” Another said that when the war would end, “Silence and night will once more be united.” And they had had something good about them, something young perhaps because they were mostly young, but even the older men and the generals were mysteriously benevolent. “You have to get it out in the open,” one had said, “and then everyone gets calm and kind. Wars make for kindness, cept of course to the other side.” And yet at Vicksburg during the siege there was a neutral place where relations and those who had been friends could meet and exchange news of family and home. Two young soldiers sat for several hours as if there had never been a war, as if that night there would not be the crack and mitre of star shells; when they left they were overcome by genuine affection and regard, and they surprised one another by saying simultaneously, “You take care of yourself now,” only to vanish into woods with two fleeting armies bivouacked briefly among oceans of small lean trees. In his dream, Marshall was moved and could not find his place there, but only pieces, as if his sleeping eyes were the flue for buried spirits and they had been dreaming voluptuously of summer battles and the Union Navy off the Carolinas or on the western rivers. There was Jennie Wade, the only civilian to die at Gettysburg. A girl of twenty, she had been making bread in her kitchen when a bullet passed through two doors and felled her. Marshall saw the freshened white wood in the doors where the bullet had torn, and was uncontrollably sad for her, and yet he sensed redemption among the flat fields and lowly rising hillocks.

And then his own tinder began to catch, and his own memories began to come alight, allied to physical pain. First it was deft touching, an incomplete picture, a lighthouse on Chesapeake Bay, a white frame building on piles in the water, a boat full of young soldiers, theater in the capital, candles burning in tin shields, inflated acting, a winter when snow whistled through the cracks of a lean-to, night fires leading to spring, and June, when everything fell into place as clearly as a view from high mountains. He was in cavalry, a trooper, and his horse was named Secesh, a little brown Virginia with alert ears and love above all for fresh corn and cresting the top of a hill. He was there, happy to be with Secesh.

His family had lived next to John Worden, an officer in the Navy, and by means of Worden's influence he had become (strangely enough) a cavalryman. He sailed down to New York and took the train for Baltimore. They went into eastern Maryland and got horses, among them Secesh, and crossed the Chesapeake in a dozen boats. His had twenty men in it, and just for their pleasure they stopped at a lighthouse. An old man greeted them. Inside was a sullen young boy. They had lunch there. The floors were shining and spotless, the room breezy in the autumn, and the table held a steaming cauldron of crab soup. There were loaves of bread, and a cask of red wine in the corner. Throughout the lunch and the cold voyage afterward when the sun was low, he had thought of the horse and how much he loved it, especially since he had just left everyone and everything he had ever known and felt as empty, cold, and purposeless as a detached soldier in his first days of service. But the next morning he rode to Washington, and the warm brown shoulders of the horse were a comfort to him.

Cavalry was stationed throughout the Potomac to protect the capital and converging supply routes often disrupted by partisan raiders of the Confederacy. Led by Turner Ashby, Morgan, Mosby, and Forrest, they rode all night and day deep into the Union and struck like hunters. When intercepted by Union detachments they split up and scattered over the countryside, or sometimes stood their ground, making for the sad sight of dead horses, and the unbearable sight of dead men littered on the fields, toppling over stone walls, weapons discarded beside them, hats off, mouths open.

The Union cavalrymen were more restless than their horses, and they craved speed on the roads and the crack of bullets. In the beginning of June they prayed that Mosby would whip his forces north and wade into a supply train, tearing up the track bed and laying the steel on bonfires of ties, so that the rail would bend of its own weight over a sunlit, face-drying fire. They knew that if
they
were restless, Mosby would be thrashing. Their commander—a major who rode with them—was no fool, and moved them early to the south. When Mosby raided they would hear by telegraph and leap to cut him off. The Major was a Bostonian who sat insanely straight on his horse, studied maps and countryside all day, and said: “Mosby's gonna go in and eat 'til he's fat. And then when he's cruising south with women in his eyes we will ride him down from where he heads for shelter. The only way to stop a raider is to raid. The best way to counter his daring is to outdare him. Who wants to come with me as I burst out of the woods on Mosby and his troop?” They cheered their acceptance.

In their redoubt dangerously close to Confederate lines May passed like a wave, peacefully, though they had sentries out all night and day and slept with their rifles by their sides. They camped around the Majors headquarters in a church—a hundred horses and a hundred men clustered about, the church straight and boxlike, echoing inside, upper windows open, tall trees like white columns, pennants and guidon flags wounding the stillness of the ashen deep-set wood. Then on 5 June a man on a sleek distance mount galloped past the cooking fires. He hurried into the church. The Major came running out buckling on his pistol and sword, and he screamed: “Let's go!” The hair on the back of his neck was stiff and his eyes looked as if he had just had a vision. “Let's go!” he said, legs apart, standing firmly to keep himself up in his excitement. “Mount and ride after Mosby!” He was the first on his horse and sprinted back and forth through the trees to get them clear. It was midday, and birds swarmed high in the branches. Secesh was mounted, and when he and his rider moved off, galloping down the road and turning onto a meadow to cut across country, they felt the day and they smelled the last of the pines. His rifle banged on his shoulder. The dark wood, which had been stained by much handling and too much gun oil getting all over the place, was frightening and comforting at the same time. They rode eastward, since close in that direction Mosby was chasing a panicked supply train. Cavalry was coming from the north: Mosby probably assumed so and was prepared. But he undoubtedly thought the south tranquil.

Galloping on Secesh was easy, and it was easy for the horses to run. The rush of the troop, a hundred thundering in blue with weapons and flags, made them stretch and bound effortlessly. He expected to come up on a rise and look past fields revealing a long civil prospect to the sea, but instead they turned north and followed the railroad. They galloped for two hours, then walked quietly, and were fresh by the time they came to a knoll over the top of which smoke was rising. The Major spread them out and they proceeded up the hill. They crested it and looked down.

An overturned locomotive hissed a steady cloud of steam vapor. Scores of freight cars were smashed or burning. The Confederates were dismounted, all except for Mosby himself, who wore a wide plume in his hat. He was scanning up and down the tracks while his men gathered the best of the looted supplies—lobster salad, sardines, Rhenish wine, new repeaters, bolts of smooth blue cloth, jangling hardware. The Major said: “I want him to see me first.” They drew their short sabres. A hundred silver unsheathings, a smooth ringing sound, turned Mosbys head like a bird's. They charged down the hill without a word, breathing hard, falling upon their capable enemy, who mounted dismayingly fast, but who were at a disadvantage. Thumping up and over the rails and ties, the attacking cavalry cut many of them down and chased others. The Confederates used their pistols, firing just as often at the horses, who toppled screaming and cracked their ribs on the rails. There was smoke all over from the burning cars. Two officers sat on skittering horses, banging their swords together with no effect. Then they smiled and disengaged. A young Rebel was deeply slashed in the neck and, the wound horrendously open, he staggered toward the wood, certain that he would die.

Secesh was felled and he stumbled into the cinders, rolling over his rider. Everyone went past them. Each step forward was taken with difficulty, as if the fighters stood against breakers or an undertow. They could be heard stepping hard for position. Secesh made no sound. When the rest of the troop lit out after the remnants of Mosbys band and Mosby himself, Secesh lay still on his rider, whose lungs held a bullet.

Breathing was nearly impossible. They took him by train all the way to Armory Square Hospital in Washington. Days later in a trance of white wood and beams in a sunny air-filled room, they told him that the Major had died, that Mosby had gotten away unscathed, that his horse, left for dead, had been discovered grazing quietly by the tracks, and had been taken to a cavalry depot to recover. “Give him fresh corn,” he said. A hemp carpet ran through the wide room, which was as clean and well-proportioned as the lighthouse on the Chesapeake. But the lung wound only got worse.