“COULDN’T BE ANY HOTTER IN hell, could it, Major?” Sergeant Moses Washington said.
“I hope not,” Major Stapleton said, with a wry grin.
The sergeant returned the grin. Did he know from the Gentry house servants that Janet Todd was coming to the Independence Day party? Did he suspect the major was thinking about the commandment he might soon be breaking with her? Paul hoped not. If anything happened between him and Janet Todd, he would not brag about it, Walter Yancey style. He hoped the sergeant assumed Major Stapleton was referring to past sins of the sort soldiers committed when a weekend pass and a woman of easy virtue coincided.
Captain Simeon Otis, riding on Paul’s right, gave them both a severe frown. He undoubtedly disapproved of what soldiers did on weekend passes as vehemently as he denounced slave owners and slavery. He had already hinted to Paul that he thought Colonel Henry Gentry was much too friendly with his slave-owning relatives and friends in Kentucky.
Behind them rode fifty troopers in Union blue. Major Stapleton had made good cavalrymen out of these unlikely candidates for glory. They were all proud of being men on horseback, contemptuous of infantry “creepers.” Paul had added to their confidence by arming them with seven-shot Spencer carbines, the gun of choice for sophisticated Union cavalrymen. He was sure he could depend on them in a fight—at least against the sort of ragtag resistance they usually met from deserters.
Moses Washington was the key to this success. He and Paul shared a New Jersey background. The sergeant had grown up in Monmouth County, not far from Kemble Manor, the Stapleton summer home. Washington had been locally famous as a prizefighter, winning matches against white and black opponents. For him to turn up in Indiana in a Union uniform seemed a good omen. It helped Paul accept this assignment.
Paul had made Washington his sergeant and partner in instilling pride and confidence in his fellow blacks, almost all ex-slaves recruited in Kentucky. Granted all this, why did the thought, the fact, of their blackness start a dull ache in his chest around the two-year-old wound he had received at the battle of Antietam?
Paul’s emancipation wound, his mother called it, mocking as usual every act of Lincoln’s administration. After the Union stand at Antietam forced Lee’s army to retreat into Virginia, Lincoln had issued his stunning proclamation, changing the goal of the war from saving the Union to freeing the slaves.
Major Stapleton thrust Caroline Kemble Stapleton out of his mind along with the politics of the war and concentrated on the military task confronting him. Like his friend George Armstrong Custer, he told himself that fighting a war was simpler and more satisfying than thinking about it.
Helpful in this mental maneuver was the western landscape. Although this part of southern Indiana was a series of rippling knolls and dales, each time they crested a rise Paul glimpsed the vastness of the American interior. It was easy to imagine the endless miles of prairie to the north and west, a kind of earthy inland sea stretching to the horizon. In its heartland, America was more than a country; it was a world. Somehow this immensity added an apocalyptic dimension to the war. It was too huge to comprehend, much less control.
In a half hour the red slope-roofed Fitzsimmons
farmhouse undulated in the heat waves rising from the scorched earth. The place looked deserted. There was not even a chicken moving in the yard. Major Stapleton raised his arm and the detachment clopped to a halt. Horses nickered and snorted. Hornets buzzed around a nest in a nearby bush.
“It looks too quiet,” Paul said.
“Maybe they knew we was comin’ and skedaddled,” Sergeant Washington said.
“We should have come by night,” Captain Simeon Otis said. “Keyport—the whole county—is infested with traitors.”
“Sergeant Washington and I will take twenty-five men in at a trot and surround the place,” Paul said. “If there’s no one in the house or barn, we’ll trample the crops. Captain Otis, take the rest of the troop and set up a blocking position at this end of the property.”
By now they were professionals in this dirty business. They knew if deserters heard a detachment of cavalry heading their way, they tried to hide in a farm’s surrounding corn or wheat fields. They seldom wanted to go too far from their refuge. They never knew who might betray them. Although these days, with most of the Democrats in Hunter County against the war, they had a lot more friends than enemies.
Captain Otis began stationing the troopers at intervals along the bottom of the field. Major Stapleton, Sergeant Washington and the other half of the detachment cantered up the dusty road to the farmhouse. Paul dismounted and rapped on the door. A tall thin once-pretty brunette opened it. “What do you want?” she asked.
“I’m afraid we have to search your house, Miss,” Paul said. “We’ve got a report that you’re harboring deserters.”
“Your reporter is a damn liar. Where’s your search warrant?”
“We don’t need one, Miss. Under the authority granted the military in time of war, we have the right to
search and if necessary seize anyone who’s interfering with the government’s efforts to suppress the rebellion.”
“There’s no one here but my mother and father and they’re both sick. Sick in body and soul since my brother got killed at Vicksburg. Sick of people like you takin’ over our country.” She glared from Paul to the black troopers. Kentucky Negroes were not popular in Indiana.
Paul sighed and wiped his streaming neck with his kerchief. “We’ll give the country back to you as soon as this war’s over, Miss.”
Paul turned to Sergeant Washington. “Take five men and search the house. Load your guns. I’ll take another five and search the barn.”
“Why should they load their guns?” the woman asked.
“We had a man almost killed last month by a fellow who fired through a door.”
“If I had a gun I’d kill you all,” the young woman snarled.
Washington draw his big Colt pistol and ordered five men to load their Spencer carbines. They clumped into the house. Paul led another five men into the dim barn. There was nothing there but two horses munching in feed bags.
Back at the house, Washington soon appeared with his squad. “Nothin’ here but what she says, Major,” the sergeant reported “Two old sick people upstairs. Cussed us worse than she did.”
“Are they in the wheat?” Paul asked the woman.
“I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about,” she said.
“I hate to ruin your crop.”
“Liar.”
“Begin the game, Sergeant.”
Washington told Little Eddie, their thirteen-year-old bugler, to sound squadrons left and right. The troopers split into squads and headed for the greenish brown
wheat. By now they could perform this routine in their sleep. They took up positions in two facing lines of seven horses each, forming a lane. The remaining eleven men and the sergeant went crunching down the lane between them, cutting a destructive swath but making it impossible for anyone hiding in the wheat to escape the methodical mass of men and horses coming at him.
Watching in the doorway, the young woman began to weep. “Bastards,” she said. “You Republicans are all bastards.”
“I’m a Democrat, Miss. Born and bred,” Major Stapleton said.
“That makes you even more despicable.”
Blam. A gunshot. At the far end of the field. Blam. Blam. Blam. They weren’t Spencer carbines. They were rifles. Crack went a carbine. Crack crack crack blam, blam. A dozen shots erupted and a swirl of gun-smoke rose in the humid air. The deserters were shooting it out.
“Sabers, Sergeant!” Paul shouted to Washington. “Bugler, sound charge!”
Little Eddie blasted the staccato patter of notes for a charge into the glaring sunshine. Paul leaped on his horse and pounded down the road toward Captain Simeon Otis and his detachment. Two-thirds of the way there he found four troopers riding up the road, their faces cartoons of terror.
“They’s ten, maybe twenty of ’em, Major!” one wailed. “They done shot the captain and two or three others of us—”
“Draw sabers and follow me!”
They wheeled their horses and galloped after Paul. He was not at all sure they would be any good in a fight, but he was fairly confident of the men following Sergeant Washington. Paul felt a rush of pleasure. It was his first action since Gettysburg, his first chance to be a soldier again.
Riding in the road, which dipped below the wheat field, he could only see the upper torsos of the troopers and the heads of their horses. Each had his saber ready. They looked as tough and confident as Washington.
“Give them a cavalry yell, Sergeant!” Paul shouted.
“Freedom!” the sergeant bellowed. “Here come the battle cry of freeeeeeedom!” ’
“Yeahhhhhhhhhhh!” shouted the troopers. “Yeahhhhhhhhh!”
Little Eddie managed to rip off another charge call. They surged through the wheat in two lines. The heat, the uncertain footing the horses found among the wheat stalks, slowed everything to a dreamlike pace, as if time itself had faltered in this rural inferno. Shots continued to resound in the fiery distance.
On the road Paul and his four horsemen neared the end of the field two or three hundred yards ahead of the troopers in the wheat. Four men in dust-covered homespun clothes emerged from the side road on horses that belonged to the black troopers. Two fired pistols at Paul and raced off down the road after their friends. The bullets hissed several feet over his head.
“Tell Sergeant Washington to follow me with the rest of the men!” Paul shouted and pounded down the road after the runaways.
The winding road dipped and twisted through the wheat fields, making it difficult to keep the fugitives in sight. Sergeant Washington caught up to Paul after about a mile of hard riding and shouted, “Captain Otis’s hurt bad!”
That’s good news, whispered the Gettysburg wound. “Anyone else?” Paul asked.
“Fred Clay, Luther Jenkins and Smiley Peters hit too.”
“Did we get any of them?”
“One. He’s dead.”
In another mile they reached a crossroads. Paul reined in his horse and signaled a stop. There was no
way to tell from the muddle of hoof tracks in the dust whether the fugitives had turned left or right. “Let’s go back and tend the wounded. We’ll catch these bastards some other day,” Paul said.
Back at the Fitzsimmons farm, they found Captain Simeon Otis slumped against a cottonwood tree, the front of his uniform drenched in blood. He had been hit in the shoulder. “They fired without warning,” he whispered. “We never had a chance.”
Nearby lay the three black troopers. One, Sam Peters, had been hit in the head. He was barely breathing. The other two, Fred Clay and Luther Jenkins, had leg wounds.
“Captain done run away; that’s what he done, Major!” called Jasper Jones, a short stocky trooper who had enlisted in New Jersey with Moses Washington. Jones had a big mouth in more ways than one. His lower lip extended a good inch beyond his upper lip. He jutted his narrow chin at Otis.
“I was wounded. I—” Otis began to weep. “He’s right. I ran away. We all ran away.”
“Not usn’,” said another Clay, whose name was Brutus. He was a brother of the wounded Clay.
Major Stapleton took charge. “Let’s not worry about who did what. Let’s get the wounded to a doctor. We’ll figure out tactics to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
Mentally, Major Stapleton rebuked himself. He should have sent Otis to the farmhouse and handled the blocking position himself. But he knew how obnoxious Otis would be to the Fitzsimmonses. Not that his own attempt at civility had made much difference.
He sent Sergeant Washington and two troopers back to the farmhouse to commandeer a horse and wagon for the wounded. They returned with a frightened-looking dark-haired kid in the straw-filled wagon.
“Found this guy hidin’ in the hay, Major,” Washington said.
“Are you a deserter?” Paul asked. The boy did not look old enough to be in the army.
“I got sick. I came home to see my mother,” he said. He began to blubber.
“You can explain it at your court-martial,” Paul said.
The deserter crouched in the back of the wagon while they loaded the wounded men onto the straw. They draped the body of the dead skirmisher over the empty saddle of one of the wounded troopers and rode slowly back to Keyport through the ferocious heat.
On July 21, 1864, they would celebrate the third anniversary of the first battle of Bull Run. Major Stapleton found himself remembering his brother, Jonathan Stapleton, confidently predicting that slavery had made the South soft and an army of 75,000 righteous northern men would suppress the secessionist rebellion in three months.
The last time Paul had seen brother Jonathan, he was recovering from a bullet in the knee that had left him with a permanent limp. His hair had turned snow-white, and he had an ugly scar on his right cheek where another southern bullet had struck him during the second battle of Bull Run, knocking out numerous teeth on that side of his mouth. Most of the New Jerseyans Jonathan had recruited for the regiment he raised in response to President Lincoln’s call for 75,000 volunteers were dead or wounded. Jonathan was now a major general in command of a division. He recently had confided to Paul that he feared the war might last another five years.
“You know what I think, Major?” Sergeant Washington said. “Them horse thieves wasn’t deserters. They was local Democrats. That thing was an ambush. They used this poor sucker we found in the straw as an excuse to shoot us up and steal some government horses.”
“I’m inclined to agree with you.”
“Could be a sign of big trouble ahead.”
Paul remembered Dr. Yancey’s warning that he might
soon need another hundred men. “You might be right about that too,” he said.
Major Stapleton’s agreement with Sergeant Washington was mostly a formality. He did not really think the trouble would be bigger than they could handle. As a professional soldier, he actually liked the idea of a local uprising. It would be an interesting opportunity to develop new tactics and strategies that might prove useful when the army occupied the conquered South. It might also be dangerous enough to impress Janet Todd with his daring, even if she disapproved of his politics.