The Colonel's Lady (5 page)

I thought back for a moment, recalling whole pigs roasted with unbearable slowness for days, turned on spits above hickory coals in pits and basted with honey and fine old amontillado until they were crackling brown. And the guests that would come, arriving in their glittering Victorian carriages and staying for days, eating, drinking eight-year-old bourbon saved for the occasion, and dancing in the evenings to the music of Captain Fitzhugh Dunham's brass and string orchestra, brought all the way from Birmingham. They knew how to have parties in those days.

I remembered one in particular—not at Sweetbriar this time, but one that the Blackwelders gave in Caroline's honor. I could look back and imagine the way it was, the way it must have been, but somehow it didn't seem real now. Still, I could recall old Rowel Blackwelder looking vaguely ridiculous in his skin-tight pants and velvet jacket, bowing low—and painfully, for he was in his seventies—and saying, “Matthew, I have the honor to present our lovely niece from the great state of Virginia.”

I must have fallen in love with Caroline that very night, as Captain Fitzhugh Dunham's brass and string orchestra played “Annie Laurie” in three-quarter time, and we danced.

What year was that? I wondered now, with Caroline still studying me from behind the shutters of her eyes. The year of grace 1859, that had been the year, and both of us were very young. I had never even heard of a place called Fort Sumter then.

But before long we began hearing the warning rumblings around us and Caroline's father wrote for her to come home. And then a soldier's hand pulled a lanyard in Charleston....

“Don't forget me, Matt,” Caroline said. And she meant it, too, I think, at the time. I made the trip from Sweetbriar to Birmingham, with the Blackwelders, to see Caroline on the train that would take her back to Virginia. How could I forget her, I thought, when I was already so in love with her? But I couldn't say it there, with her cousins and uncles looking on.

“There won't be time, Caroline,” I said. “Likely we'll all be in Virginia before long, to finish up this war. I'll be sure to see you there.”

We were already organizing a company of cavalry, the young men from the plantations along the Black Warrior River. We got together four times a week and rode up and down Oak Grove Road in what we took to be military formation, and on Sunday afternoons we practiced with our hunting muskets until we ran out of powder and ball. There was a great excitement in those days, for the South had already won a spectacular battle at Bull Run, and we all had uniforms made of the finest gray flannel and we began to think of ourselves as soldiers.

There was a great to-do about us at all the parties. The girls presented us with enormous black ostrich plumes to adorn our wide-brimmed hats, and they tied brilliant silken sashes around our waists, and we all cut gallant figures as we rode from one party to another. Then at last, with a great many tears and kisses and promises, we rode bravely off to Birmingham to become part of the Thirty-sixth Alabama Horse.

Now, as I thought back on it, it was almost amusing to remember the way we rode into the war. It was a lark, like being on our way to an extra-big barbecue, the biggest barbecue the South had ever seen, and the most exciting. We brought our Negro houseboys with us to keep our uniforms neatly cleaned and pressed and to do our cooking and to serve us. We brought wagons full of clothing and bedding and a great quantity of delicacies such as smoked hams and chicken and dozens of jars of strawberry and watermelon preserves. We had also two full kegs of Monongahela whisky and one keg of Kentucky rye, to sip on, I suppose, while we whipped the Yankees in a strange sort of bloodless war where there was no discomfort of any kind, only glory. But we learned soon that war was not the way we had imagined it.

I visited Caroline at her own house in Virginia that spring. It was a great white house, larger even than Sweetbriar, and there was a large gay party of officers and their ladies when I got there. I was uncomfortable at first, partly because I was the only lieutenant present, and partly because I had never imagined a house grander and richer than our place at Sweetbriar. But Caroline's house was all of that.

“Matt,” she said, smiling, “I'm so glad you finally got to Virginia!”

I held myself stiffly erect, in what I took to be the correct posture of a soldier. “I got here as soon as I could. I'm with the Thirty-sixth Alabama, you know.”

“I know, Matt. You look very handsome in your uniform!” Then she lowered her voice and looked directly at me with those clear blue eyes of hers. “I've missed you, Matt.”

“I've missed you, too,” I said. “I've missed you so much... Well...”

“I know, Matt.” Then she smiled. “Let me introduce you to the other guests.”

I kissed her that night for the first time. She was supposed to be dancing with a major from some Virginia regiment or other—the Richmond Cannons, I think, but she came outside with me, out on the wide, pillared porch where the night was heavy with honeysuckle. Then, for no reason at all, seemingly, she began to cry.

“Caroline...” I shrank inside for fear that I had offended her. I was young then, and inexperienced, and I didn't know what to do.

“Matt, I'm sorry,” she said. “It's not because of you, it's just that everything is so perfect now, so gay and exciting, and the men are all so proud. It will never be this way again.”

I didn't know what she was talking about. I didn't realize then that she was wiser than most people in the Confederacy in those days, and already she was beginning to see the end of things. Or at least glimpse it, in some dark part of her woman's mind. '

“Matt,” she said, “hold me close. I'm afraid.”

We stood there for a long while, in the shadows, listening to the orchestra playing “Maryland! My Maryland!”—Virginia should not call in vain, Maryland!— to the tune of “O Tannenbaum,” and I felt very close to Caroline that night.

“Matt,” she said.

“Yes, Caroline.”

“You should be very glad that Sweetbriar is in Alabama and not in Virginia.”

It was a strange thing to say, I thought.

“Because the war is going to be fought in Virginia,” she said. “The Shenandoah will be wreckage and ashes before it's finished. Everything in the valley will be lost, including this very house where there is so much gaiety tonight. This very same beautiful house, Matt, along with everything else in Virginia, will be lost forever.”

“Caroline, don't talk like that!” I said in dismay. “The Southern forces are victorious on every hand. How could the North invade the Shenandoah?”

“I don't know, Matt. But I know they will.” Caroline was wiser than most, but not even she could imagine the ruin that was to come in the next three years of war.

I said, forcing myself to laugh, “There's always Sweetbriar, Caroline. Surely you aren't expecting the Yankees to raid into Alabama?”

That possibility was remote, even to Caroline. Then, with some new-found courage, I heard myself saying, “Sweetbriar could be your house, Caroline.”

She was silent for a long while.

“Do you mean that, Matt?”

“I love you. I'm asking you to marry me.”

It was not the way things were normally done, no formalities, no announcements. But those were not normal times. So that was the way it happened, as we stood there in the night, and the orchestra played that sad new song for the thousands of men yet to die:

“Hold me close, Matt. You're everything to me now. You're all I have,” she had said.

I didn't understand the meaning behind the words that night, but I could understand the softness of her mouth as I kissed her, the warmness of her young body as I held her against me.

“Matt, I'm afraid,” she said. “I wouldn't know what to do without you.”

We said a lot of things. I don't remember what, but they must have been similar to things lovers always say. Suddenly Caroline began shivering in my arms.

“The spring nights have a chill,” I said awkwardly. “Do you want to go back inside, Caroline?”

“Not to the ballroom. I don't feel like dancing.” I could hear fear in her voice and it disturbed me, for Caroline was not one to show such emotions. “Matt, don't ever leave me!”

“I won't, Caroline. Never.”

But she began to shake again and I started to take off my jacket to put around her bare shoulders. But she shrugged it off, impatiently, it seemed, and said she would go to her room and get a wrap.

“Shall I wait for you here?” I asked.

“Come with me, Matt.”

I knew what she meant, I suppose, but a great many generations of gentlemanly breeding attempted to cloak the words and give them new meaning. But there was a sudden hammering in my chest, and an excitement that I had never known before. I took her hand. “All right,” I said.

That night comes back to me now, still unreal in many ways. I can still hear the muted confusion in the front of the house as the officers and their ladies danced on and on, and I can feel over and over the new excitement of Caroline's nearness to me. And there was danger too, I suppose, but I didn't think of that.

We went up the servants' stairway in the deserted part of the house and emerged into a richly carpeted hallway where dark, disapproving family portraits stared down on us from their high places on the wall. Caroline turned a knob, opened a door. The darkness of the room seemed to leap at us and swallow us. I found her in the darkness and there was a new warmness to her mouth, a new eagerness in her body.

I had not known that there was a passion so strong that it could take you up and bend you and twist you and mold you and make you over again in its own shape. I had not known that there was so much animal in man, until that night.

We lit no lamps. There was just Caroline and me, and the rest of the world was darkness. I was glad for the darkness, for I could feel my face burning at my clumsiness. I cursed my hands for shaking, my voice for being paralyzed. But Caroline's heritage was the wisdom of Eve. I was young, and very much in love, and Caroline crooned to me and I could feel the touch of her fingers on my face, and the warmth of her breath on my neck. Her hands went behind my head and pulled me down. And, at last, she calmed me against the softness of herself.

I remember the awakening now. How, after a long while, a whitish moon appeared and sifted pale light through the windows of Caroline's room. I could hear the orchestra still playing below us, and the scuffing sounds of the dancers. And the bright, muffled laughter. All foreign and insignificant and having nothing to do with us.

I looked at Caroline and she was even more beautiful than before. And I loved her even more, if that were possible. I touched her gently and she opened her eyes. In the milky light of the moon I saw that her eyes were wide and filled with terror.

“Matt!”

“I'm here, Caroline.”

The terror dissolved itself. She smiled and reached her white arms up for me and clung to me. “Matt, I'm not afraid any more. Nothing can separate us now. Nothing!”

But I came back to Caroline's house many times, between campaigns. I watched her beautiful old house change along with the rest of the South and become shabby, and a little ridiculous too, because it was still proud. I watched her father become aged and dead-eyed, and it seemed only a matter of formality two years later when we buried him. All the South seemed to be dying. And Jackson's weary troops marched bloodily up and down Caroline's beautiful valley of the Shenandoah, and the doom she had prophesied had come to pass. And more.

With a great surge and with new life the Union armies began to crush Beauregard and Johnson and even the fierce-eyed, fanatical Jackson, and push deep into the heart of the Confederacy. Even to Sweetbriar, which had seemed to me as permanent as the mountains. Not only Virginia, but the entire South lay dying.

Now, sitting with Caroline again, in Caroline's house, I poured another glass of her fine old oloroso and listened with half a mind to the sounds of Larrymoor coming to life. It was difficult to imagine Caroline in a place like Larrymoor, but it was more difficult to imagine her standing helpless in the midst of the ashes and ruins that were now her valley. Here, at least, she had her paintings and a few pieces of silver and a certain authority and social position to remind her of better things and better times. Not many Southern ladies had as much.

“Do you want to tell me about it, Caroline?” I said.

She looked at me blankly. “About Three Fork Road,” I explained.

She said nothing.

I hadn't expected her to, because that was where she met Weyland, at her fine white house near Three Fork Road, while her South lay drawing its last breath. Gettysburg then was already history, and so were Chickamauga and Chattanooga, and the Wilderness. The lemon-sucking, evangelistic Jackson was dead, and Jube Early, a good man and a good general, tried to take his place, but Phil Sheridan was not to be denied. The year was 1864, and the blue armies marched into the valley.

They took Caroline's beautiful old house, which was now shabby, and established their brigade headquarters there. There were brigathers and colonels and majors, and of course the young and promising captains, and for a little while it must have seemed to Caroline as if the past had been regained. There was gaiety again, and fine uniformed officers and gentlemen. And, of course, the excitement that always goes with military success.

The soldiers this time were dressed in blue, but that was a small matter. And besides, the South was dead.

Three Fork Road was where the plank road to New Market crossed a narrow dirt trail near Martin's Run, and that is where the battle was. If “battle” is the name for it.

I was almost crazy when I learned that Caroline had stayed in the house while the blue armies swept over that particular part of Virginia. When I heard about it I went through the lines, against orders and at night, to find her and bring her out. I remember lying in a wild plum thicket behind the plantation's outbuildings most of that night; then toward dawn I managed to awaken one of Caroline's darkies and got him to tell her where I was. I lay there filthy with the dirt of war, suffering a thousand agonies while I waited. But at last she came. And she said:

“Matt, you shouldn't have come here!”

I don't remember what I said. To look at her was enough for a while.

“Matt, Yankee soldiers are everywhere. They have set up brigade headquarters in the house.”

I said, “I came to take you across the lines, maybe to Richmond. You can stay there with friends until the war's over.”

But she wouldn't leave. She pointed out to me that it would be foolish to leave the house in the hands of soldiers, with no one to look out for things. And she wasn't afraid of being harmed. The Yankees were gentlemen, she said. More gentlemanly than the Johnny Rebs, maybe. The Southern men were all so shabby....

“Do you mean you prefer to remain their prisoner?” I couldn't believe that she was serious.

“I am
not
a prisoner, Matt. Can't you get that through your head?”

She had changed somehow. I should have guessed, I suppose, but how is a man to think such things when he's in love?

“Matt, how did you get through the Yankee lines?”

“My whole company is through the lines,” I said. “Anyway, beyond their pickets. We've been coming up at nights, a few men at a time, along Martin's Run. Pretty soon we'll have another company up.”

“Where, Matt?”

“Three Fork Road. That's where we're gathering. As soon as we're strong enough we're attacking Sheridan's headquarters in the rear.”

“When, Matt?”

“Two nights from now, at midnight. Jube Early has cavalry and infantry massed to hit Sheridan's left flank at the same time. It would never work, though, unless we disrupt Yankee communications by an attack on their headquarters.”

“Do you mean General Lee is to begin an offensive in the valley?”

“Not exactly. But, by throwing the Union armies into confusion, Lee gains time to regroup his scattered forces around Petersburg.” Then I said, vainly and foolishly, “I'm a captain now, Caroline. Our commander was killed on the James last month.”

“Two nights from now...” she said thoughtfully.

“You've got to come with me, Caroline.”

“I'm safe here, Matt. Safer than I would be trying to get through the Yankee lines.”

She wouldn't come. She said again that it would be foolish to leave all her fine china and silver and linens for the soldiers to ruin or steal.

“Matt, if General Early's attack is a success, this land will be in Confederate hands again.”

“Yes, that's possible.”

“Then, don't you see, it would be better for me to stay.”