The March (4 page)

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

T
HEY 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.