VI

As they’d followed after the army, Calvin Harper had come to think of his traveling companion as an interesting crazy man. He allowed himself this reflection because the balance of their interests—each needing the other—made for reasonably stable progress on the road. He’d been taking pictures as he wanted, and he’d felt he could continue to take his pictures until the opportunity arose to disentangle himself. Until then, it was a matter of maintaining his dignity and exercising his will without endangering himself. He seemed so far to have done this successfully. It was not always comfortable from day to day, but nothing so far had made him feel that he was in imminent danger.

What was interesting was how the man wore disguises. He put on something and pretended to be that person. He was like an actor in the theater where the costume you wear is the person you are. He had appeared back in Barnwell as a Union soldier though he was a Southern white-trash Reb. Both of them were, the dead friend, too, who had to be dressed as the Reb he really was before Mr. Culp could take the picture. And then after the picture was developed, and Mr. Josiah Culp was dead, he decided to be him, Mr. Culp, in his own suit and coat and hat. Calvin had gone along with all of this with a degree of fascination despite himself. At times, in public, he’d seen this pretend Mr. Culp who knew nothing about photography as more the photographer than the real Mr. Culp. And that was because the man really seemed to believe he was Mr. Culp. All of that was clearly interesting and also clearly mad. For only a madman would have conversations with a picture in his pocket, as that was what had become of his dead friend in his mind, not a body in a grave but a picture in his pocket. And he talked to it almost as much as he talked to Calvin. And so nothing was what it seemed, and all of it was crazy. And that gave Calvin some confidence in his ability to control things. There was some errant spirit in the man that made him maybe not so single-minded a menace as he first appeared.

Now, as they came along on the road to Goldsboro, they stopped for the night at an abandoned farmhouse. Though the sun had set, they could still hear the sounds of battle in the dusk: cannonading carried by the east wind over the fields and rivers.

You see, Calvin, why I said this road? We’d be up to our necks in hellfire, we gone after the other column. That is some damn battle they’re having, like they have finally run into an army equal to theirselves.

Some moldy fodder for Bert in the barn, Calvin said. But nothing for us in this pantry. Whoever these people, they been gone awhile. Place is picked clean.

I know my Gen’ral Sherman, Arly said. That is his feint to Raleigh we’re hearing. I ’spect it’s more’n he bargained for. But anyways he’s not there. He’s up ahead enjoying hisself thinking of Goldsboro where he means to alight like the eagle on the flagpole.

We’re down to the last bag of cornmeal and ’bout a spoonful of lard if I can get this stove to fire up, Calvin said. How you know where he is?

Gen’ral Sherman and me have the same quality of mind, Arly said. I need only think of myself as him and I know what he will do.

And you of such a low rank, Calvin said. Don’t seem fair, somehow.

Arly took another swig from Mr. Culp’s last jar of sour-mash whiskey. Calvin, he said, were I not pleased with our progress I might take offense at your freeman’s talk, but you’d best not try me.

What are you going to do with your photograph of the General? What then?

Why, it will be a recognition on my part of him, and on his part of me. It will be a meeting of the minds. It will not be just an ordinary photo like you have been gathering. This will mark an occasion to make history. This will be a photograph the likes of which the other Mr. Josiah Culp couldn’t have dreamed of. I am an inspired soul, which means it will be not just me taking that photo but God as he instructs me.

You and God know the lens to use? The exposure time? How to coat the plates and where to set the camera?

We leave you to attend to those small matters, son. That is the kind of menial work your race is fitted to.

This night Arly decided to make his bed on the floor in the empty upstairs. The laths showed where pieces of the wall had crumpled away, and he had to find a spot to lay the blankets down where the floorboards weren’t broken. There was a rot smell of old wood, and it was colder than downstairs by the stove where Calvin was, but it behoved a man to keep to the natural order of things.

He lay down with his arm around Calvin’s box of lenses. This was an extra measure of caution, because Calvin knew that without Arly riding with him as his Mr. Culp he would not live five minutes as an independent nigger businessman in God’s own country. Guerrillas still rode and took care of what had to be taken care of. Calvin could hitch up Bert and run away, but without being able to take another photo how could he fancy himself Mr. Culp’s chosen boy? It may be the slavery of the future, tying down a free black by his white airs. And I have devised it.

Arly was not aware, in the midst of his thoughts, of having fallen asleep. But when he found himself awake some time had clearly passed. It was not just that the light was different, the moon casting a milky sheen everywhere in the room including on him. No, but the sound. A peculiar whispering chuffing sound, and a clinking, but mostly the sound of human presence you can sense even though no sound was made. He went to the window and looked out on a sight he could hardly believe: it was a whole army on the road passing by at a quick pace, a ghost army it looked like, though real enough in its blocks of companies and the guidons and the occasional officer cantering by. Every mother’s son of them leaning forward under their packs and looking at the road. And no one was talking for the effort of making a night march, and if there was a gap the following companies came along at a trot. What is this, Arly thought, these Yankees are going the wrong way! He pulled on his boots and ran downstairs. From a back window he saw they were coming across the fields too, streaming around the house front and back like a river overflowed of its banks. He lamented what he saw—Yankees tromping over these lowlands in the arrogance of their numbers. But then it dawned on him: of course, this is General Sherman returning to the fray back there where our boys have put the scare of God into his other column—damn! Yes, that’s what this is about. Well, Gen’ral, ’pears you have made a mistake to have to go backwards like this, who was already practically wining and dining yourself in Goldsboro. Will, Will, I am truly sorry you can’t see this, we got an army still raising hell yonder in Bentonville, we are putting the great Sherman to the test, and there’s to be many a dead Union boy before it’s over.

Then Arly thought he saw the General himself in a cavalry contingent riding past in the field—maybe fifty men on horses, and someone at their head flinging the reins to his left and right who he thought was Sherman, all right, like a mad rider under the moon making for the battle. Arly had seen only that photo of General Sherman, he had never seen him in the flesh, but he was convinced, as the horsemen disappeared over a rise, that it had been Sherman without a doubt. Don’t you worry none, Will, he said, smiling there in the dark, it’s all right, it’s all right. You and me will just go on to Goldsboro while he cleans up his mess back here, and we’ll be waiting for him to take his portrait picture, assuming a course no one has kilt him in the meantime.

Calvin, wrapped in a blanket behind the stove, had heard the entire conversation. Arly went back upstairs, and soon enough he was snoring away. And then after another twenty or thirty minutes the last of the marchers had passed and everything was quiet again, but Calvin could not go back to sleep.

If I was a Rebel soldier given to disguises what would my purpose be? It would be to get out from behind Union lines, to get back to my own to fight again or to get out of the war altogether and go home. But that’s not his thinking. He couldn’t have planned to costume himself as Mr. Culp. As we came along he did it as the opportunity arose—it was an idea that had popped into his crazy head. So what was the idea? From all of his constant chatter day after day, it is nothing but to catch up to General Sherman on his march and take a photograph of him. Why? To make his mark in the photography business? That don’t seem likely given how little he cares for the art of it. He started out knowing nothing and he knows no more now than he did then.

In this war every man is on one side or another. Even a crazy man. If I am crazy, I am still for the Union. If he is crazy, he is still a white-trash Johnny Reb.

Calvin felt a chill remembering that back in Georgia, at the camp in the pine trees, where General Sherman had his headquarters, Mr. Culp did not need but a minute to persuade the General to pose for his picture who even called his entire staff to pose with him. Mr. Culp had said to Calvin, As a photographer you get to know human nature, and one thing about human nature is that it is the most famous people who think they are not getting enough of the world’s attention. So they want their picture taken and put on display, or their portrait painted or books written about them, and no matter how much of this is done it is never enough for some of these people, except maybe for President Abraham Lincoln, who is an exception in this as in just about everything. Because Mr. Culp had taken his picture, too, before leaving Washington, and it had been an effort to get the President to sit down for it, and he wouldn’t have, had Mrs. Lincoln not insisted.

By now Calvin was pacing back and forth with the blanket wrapped around him. His train of thought left him terribly unsettled. He had been too forbearing. This madman had sent Mr. Culp to his grave. He had taken that pistol and pointed it at them and stolen Mr. Culp’s clothes and his name. And now he is become a madman in a contest in his mind with the General of the Union armies, William T. Sherman, whose picture is to be taken.

But his opportunity, if it comes, will be mine, too. I will tell them of that carte de visite in his pocket that proves him as a Reb before he can do whatever it is he intends, or what he intends by way of carrying out God’s intentions. Whatever it is, it must not be allowed. Even if it is just what he says it is. Even if he wants to take a picture of General Sherman because it is just his simple craziness, he must not be allowed to take it. I am the photographer, not him. Making photographs is sacred work. It is fixing time in its moments and making memory for the future, as Mr. Culp has told me. Nobody in history before now has ever been able to do that. There is no higher calling than to make pictures that show you the true world.

Mr. Culp had put him in his will, and now when he got back to Baltimore the studio would say on the window: Culp and Harper, Photographers. It angered Calvin that his camera now could be used for the purposes of someone who didn’t know any better, someone like this crazy smart-talking white-trash Reb. Calvin said to himself, If Mr. Josiah Culp and me had come through Barnwell a day earlier, or a day later, we would not have met up with this madman. And Mr. Culp would be alive and we would still be going about our work just as always. Oh Lord, and now this is where I am and there is no way out of it.

Calvin heard the beginnings of a whimper rising in him, but he cleared his throat and squared his shoulders. I’ve got my side, too, he thought.

VII

Two days after it began, the bloody battle at Bentonville was over. Having doubled back on the Goldsboro road to bolster Slocum’s column, both corps of Howard’s right wing were methodically deployed and the Confederate general, Joseph Johnston, was persuaded the initiative was no longer his. Finding his forces outnumbered and fighting furiously just to maintain position, he prepared to withdraw. In this he might have been encouraged by the aggressive flanking maneuver of General Joe Mower, who without orders led a division of his troops through a swampy woods and threatened to cut off Johnston’s means of retreat, a bridge over the Mill Creek. Sherman learned of the attack in his field headquarters some distance from the front lines and, fearing that Mower was overextended, ordered the daring General to return to Union lines. This weakness Joe Mower has for swamps, Sherman said. Show him a swamp and he wades right in. He’s a great fighter, as you’d expect of someone descended from crocodiles.

It was raining heavily the night the Rebel forces pulled back and made their way north. Sherman’s army was given no orders to pursue and so it encamped where it was, the soldiers wrapping themselves in their blankets and canvas half-tents and lying down in the mud.

Under the incessant pounding of the rain, the Medical Department continued its work. Led by the moans and cries for help, volunteer details roamed through the woods picking up the wounded, loading them into ambulances and wagons, and distributing them among farmhouses and plantations commandeered for surgeries on the road back to Averasboro. Wrede’s surgery was set up in a small Catholic church. A rubber sheet was laid over the altar table. The wounded lay in the aisles or sat slumped in the pews. Candles and smoking torches threw the scene into flaring or waning light. Some of the men had been lying out there unattended for two days. Their wounds were already purulent. The nurses tried to deal with the stench with masks made of bandages. When men no longer able to withstand the pain of their wounds begged to be shot, and Wrede concurred that the case was hopeless, they were taken out in the darkness and accommodated. The attending priest, an elderly man, had appeared, and he knelt in the last pew near the door and prayed. Later, whenever he saw a man in the throes of death he rushed over to give last rites, not bothering to ask for an affiliation any more than Wrede asked whether the patient was Union or Confederate. The old priest wrung his hands and wept, and by midnight an exhausted Pearl, too, could not stop crying. She finally sank to the ground and sat beside a soldier and held his hand as he breathed his last. She kept holding his hand after he was dead, until Stephen Walsh gently lifted her to her feet and took her to the rectory house, where the boy David and Albion Simms had been put to bed, and the priest’s housekeeper showed her to a room and put a blanket over her when she fell asleep.

David had become fascinated with Albion Simms and in the morning, once the wagon trains were under way, he sat beside the framework box and listened to the song:

Oh the coo coo

Is a pretty bird

And she wobbles as she flies

But she never sings her coo coo …

Oh she never sings her coo coo …

Till the fourth day a July, David reminded him.

Till the fourth day of July, Albion said. Are you a good boy?

Yassuh.

Are you a good boy?

Yassuh.

Are you—

I done tole you I is.

What is that in the window?

That not a window, that the sun comin in the wagon.

The sun?

Yassuh.

It’s always there.

Not in the night, not if it rainin, David said.

It’s always there. See? It’s there now, and it’s always now. Are you a good boy?

Yassuh.

What did I just say?

Am you a good boy.

Yes. And what do you answer?

Yassuh. Why your hands tied to this bar here?

Are they tied? Untie them.

But they tied.

Yes, untie them. Aren’t you a big boy?

Yassuh.

I don’t like my hands tied. I am in misery. What did I say I am?

You in misery.

I am. Yes. David, what is your name?

You done said it, the boy giggled.

What?

David.

Is that your name?

You done said it yousel’!

Are my hands untied yet?

Naw. This a big knot goes round an over an under.

Around and around?

Yassuh.

Oh, the coo coo is a pretty bird … I’ll show you a trick. What will I show you?

A trick. There, that your right hand now. What kind of trick?

Watch, Albion Simms said, smiling. And raising his free hand he touched with his forefinger the spike embedded in his skull. What’s this?

It the iron stuck in your haid. Do it hurt?

No. Watch this, Albion said, and lightly tapped the spike with his index finger.

That no trick, David said.

Roll the drums, Albion said. Slowly he extended his arm. Are you watching?

I is.

With the heel of his hand Albion drove the spike into his brain.

Three days after the battle at Bentonville the sun was shining and Sherman’s troops were encamped and recovering in the hills and pine groves around Goldsboro. The junction had been made with Schofield’s thirty-thousand-man army, as planned, and with uniforms and supplies and mail due imminently from the coast by railroad, and the entire Georgia and Carolinas campaigns having gone just as Sherman had designed them, he should have been somewhat satisfied with his situation. But he couldn’t get it out of his mind that the Reb General Joe Johnston had caught him by surprise. Yes, in the face of the numerically overwhelming force finally deployed against him Johnston had retired from the field, and, yes, the books would record Bentonville a Union victory. But Sherman had let his columns diverge to the extent that Johnston was able to bring his entire army against Slocum’s column, isolated back there, and hard pressed to defend itself. Sherman, encamped a dozen miles away, had to be awakened in the middle of the night to be told what had happened. It had required that backbreaking night march with Howard’s wing to secure the lines and force Johnston to give up the fight. And hundreds of Union men had died and a thousand more were wounded.

Colonel Teack intuited from the General’s moods, by turns brooding or agitated, that it was exactly this line of thought that was eating away at him. Yesterday morning Sherman and his staff had stood on parade in the Goldsboro town square as his bedraggled troops came in from Bentonville. There was no hailing Uncle Billy this time, and the salutes were indifferent at best. The men were hungry and exhausted, and so worn with months of marches and skirmishes and battles that there was nothing left of them but sinew and muscle. They were angry as only exhausted men can be. The clothes on their backs were not to be dignified as rags, and their shoeless feet were bloodied and swollen. There were no drummer boys to keep the pace. There was no pace. Look at them, Sherman said to Teack as they sat their horses in review. Have you ever seen a finer army than this? They have given me everything I’ve asked for and then some. When this damned war is over, I would have them march down Pennsylvania Avenue in just this disreputable state, so that the people can see what it takes to fight a war, how it strips away everything inconsequential from a man and leaves a hardened fighter with guts of iron and the stout heart of a hero.

Teack believed that Sherman had made more than one mistake in the past week. It is not unusual for the loyal adjutant to entertain the thought that his tactical skills are a cut above his superior’s. To the degree that Colonel Teack worshipped his General and stood ready to die for him, he nevertheless knew that he, Teack, would not have pulled General Mower back from that flanking movement in the swamps. Johnston was virtually pinned and about to be deprived of his one avenue of retreat, the bridge at Mill Creek. Instead of ordering Mower’s division to fall back, Sherman should have sent in massive support. Johnston would have lost his army, and that would have been the end of all opposition in the Carolinas.

It was uncanny that almost at the same moment Teack was thinking these thoughts, Sherman began speaking of the matter. They were dining well in the mansion of an obliging tobacco merchant who had retired to a farm he owned, leaving everything under his roof—including his servants and his pantry, cellar, and humidor—for the use of the occupation. What would you have done in my place, Teack? Was I wrong to pull Mower back? Was it a mistake? I thought his position was vulnerable. I suppose I could have backed him up. But in any event it would have been bloody. Johnston would have fought to the last man. He’s the best they have, Joe Johnston. He’s better than Lee. They pulled him off back at Atlanta and gave his command to that stupid Frenchman Beauregard. That was our good fortune, let me tell you. Johnston wouldn’t have defended the cities as Beauregard did. How stupid and ineffective. Augusta, Charleston. And never an army united enough to do anything to stop me. Johnston would have used the land, as a good soldier would. He’d have held us at every river, at every crossing, at every hill and swamp and given ground only for our precious blood in return. We would be where we are now, but with more losses to show for it. By the time Johnston took over again he had only dribs and drabs to work with. But he pulled them together into an army and put them in the right place, and for a moment he had me. So send in Mower? I still say no. I saved lives. What can Johnston do now against this ninety-thousand-man army? I saved lives, and not just our own. Father Abraham wants those Southern boys alive so they can go back to their farms and put some food on their tables. And I? I will simply march on, as I have, with men now so honed to hardship and battle that they are almost superhuman. This war is over, Teack, whatever any miserable little band of skirmishers think they can do about it. We have won, and everyone knows it. The South is mine, and Joe Johnston knew it the day I came marching down the lowlands from Atlanta.

Teack was relieved that he was not required to say anything.

Sherman looked bad—tired, green around the gills. He had a cigar going constantly and drank more than he ate. When he wasn’t running on at the mouth, rehashing the same issues compulsively, or raving about his rank and file, he exhausted himself with details that ordinarily would be left to his subordinates. He dressed down the chief mail agent when the mails did not come up from the coast on time. He examined samples of the new uniforms and shoes ordered for his men, actually feeling the materials and hefting the boots like a customer at the haberdasher’s while the embarrassed Quartermaster General Meigs looked on. He ordered inspections and canceled them, he called for a parade and rescinded the order even as the men were gathering. These men deserve their rest and we’ll give it them, he told Teack. At the same time, he was anxious to get on with it, and the sense of a dissolution of purpose and the loss of his spirit-army that he had felt in every city, with the troops encamped and wandering about drinking more than was good for them, assailed him now. He wanted to be on the march, he wanted the ranks to fall in, he did not like city governance and dealing endlessly with whining civilians, and to simulate the good, hard earth in a tent under a tall pine tree he threw his blankets on the floor of his bedroom and slept by the hearth under a pup tent set up for him by Sergeant Moses Brown.

Teack conferred with Brown. Fatten him up a bit, Sergeant, and get him into a hot bath. He’s overworked and overtired. The stoic Brown nodded. He had also watered the decanters of the General’s wine. He didn’t need to be told what his General needed.

Sherman felt better busying himself with a reorganization of his army. Now that he had Schofield’s troops, he planned a three-column march so that no one column would ever find itself without immediate support. The central column corps would be under Schofield. He had Slocum and Howard, of course, for his flanking-wing commanders. And General Joe Mower, Teack noted, had now been promoted to command of the Twentieth Corps under Slocum. Three columns, Teack, ninety thousand strong. If I were Johnston I would throw down my arms and run like hell. This is a trident I’ve made here, three sharp prongs to draw blood. Teack said, The trident was Poseidon’s weapon, General. The god of the sea. Well, Sherman said, there’s been enough damn rain these last months to turn me into a Poseidon.

The morning he learned that Willie Hardee, the sixteen-year-old son of the Confederate General Hardee, had died fighting at Bentonville, Sherman retired to his rooms and wept. Apparently Willie Hardee had pleaded with his father to join the fray though he was not officially under arms. Sherman sat down to compose a letter to Hardee, whose division, according to the latest intelligence, was encamped at Smithfield with Johnston’s forces. And now, General, he wrote, we have both lost our sons of the same name. Though my Willie was too young to ride, it was the war that killed him just as surely as the war has killed yours. How unnatural is this age when, in violation of God’s grand stratagem, the young are unbodied of their souls before the old. In Ecclesiastes it is said (as I blunder to remember it), “As some leaves fall and others grow in their place, so too with the generations of flesh and blood, one dies and another is born.” I can imagine you wishing in your grief that God had spared your Willie and taken you instead, for that is what I wished—I mean, when I lost my Willie. I curse our inverted time, when so many thousands of us, fathers and mothers, have given our children to this damned war of the insurrection. I look forward to the day this nation is again united and the natural order is restored and our generations die once again appropriate to their God-given ranks. At that time, my dear General, I hope we may meet and commiserate as fellow soldiers and survivors. Desiring that you accept my sincere condolences. I am, sir, your humble obedient servant William Tecumseh Sherman, Major General.

Still restless, Sherman decided there was nothing for it but to make a quick trip up to Virginia to meet General Grant. He called his wing and corps commanders together to advise them of this and to propose the order of march when he should return. They were met in a large conference room on the ground floor of the state courthouse. Outside, the trees in the town square were in early leaf. Sherman’s maps were spread out on a walnut table that had been polished to a shine. The sun shone through the floor-to-ceiling windows, and the generals, but for Kilpatrick, were cleaned up for the occasion in their midnight-blue dress tunics, the buttons gleaming. It was almost grand. Sherman sighed. He himself, he knew, was no sartorial model, but, really, Kilpatrick was an egregious slob, with his stained jacket, his beard stubble, the dried manure on his boots, and damn it, the man did have a kind of hump, but why couldn’t he stand straighter as befit his rank?

With his pointer, Sherman illustrated his thinking as his generals hovered over the table. Heretofore we have marched into their cities and towns. We have torn up their railroads, destroyed their armories and manufactories, deprived them of their currency, helped ourselves to their cotton. Now the situation is changed. We want just to destroy Joe Johnston’s army. We met him last week on his terms, now we want to meet him on ours. Conceivably Lee can choose to pull out of Virginia and make a junction with Johnston down here. Yes, though he might break his heart by doing so, he could do that by traveling light, divested of wagon trains, coming through here, and here, Sherman said, moving the pointer southwest from Richmond. He should. He commands a tired worn-out army, his desertion rates increasing by the day. Grant will cut the last link to Danville, and what then can Lee do but stand and fight till he dies of attrition? So even with Grant on his tail a march to North Carolina is his best move, and I wish he’d make it, because with my ninety thousand I don’t even need the Army of the Potomac. We can end the war right here, and the honor is all ours.

At this, the generals turned to one another with grins and expressions of approbation. An exultant flush rose upon some faces.

But my guess, Sherman said, is that Lee will do the gallant stupid thing and hold his position. So what does that mean for us? Johnston has, at most, thirty-five thousand troops. If we could handle his and Lee’s combined, what then is so difficult about Joe Johnston alone? Well, I’ll tell you. The man is a master of retreat. You remember how deft he was at Atlanta. He understands retreat as the powerful military move it is. We will hope he defends Raleigh, but if not, if he runs, our task complicates. He runs, turns vindictive, scatters his troops in western North Carolina, Tennessee, he fights a guerrilla war and it can go on for years. Years, gentlemen. Knowing as well as we the art of foraging, and with a civilian population prepared, however secretly, to furnish him with what he needs—no, this is the last thing we want him to do. We’ve got to turn his flanks, box him in, and if he doesn’t surrender grind him to dust.

General Kilpatrick’s attention at this moment was diverted by the two young black women coming into the room with silver platters of cups of coffee and decanters of brandy. They were handsome young things, smiling like the free girls they were—free to smile, free to do anything their hearts pleased.

General? Sherman said.

Yessir, Kilpatrick said in a hoarse voice. He almost snapped to attention.

I asked you if you are shoeing up your cavalry.

Absolutely, General. The mounts will be fresh shod and ready to ride.

Because I will depend on you to seal off the roads west, and hold there until my columns come round, Sherman said.

The conference over, the generals relaxed, enjoying one another’s company and sipping their coffee from tiny china cups with all the elegance they could muster. The sun shone into the room like the promise of final victory. Every one of them had reason to feel competitive, as officers inevitably do in military bureaucracies, but the long campaign behind them and what they knew so well of it—the terrain they had trod, the rivers crossed, the obstacles surmounted, the organization they maintained, each in his own realm but in the grand cooperative adventure of a noble cause—made them companionable and appreciative of one another’s qualities. The daring swamp-wading Mower, when not in battle, was soft-spoken and diffident. Slocum, in firm command of the left wing, had the droopy eyelids and prim, calculating mind of an actuary. Howard, of the right wing, was a truly paternal presence, a large thoughtful man, given to talking of his family and inquiring with genuine interest of the families of the others. And, moving among them, in a better mood than he had been in for days, Sherman laughed and joked, and felt their admiration as he expressed, in slantwise remarks, grunts, and nods, his appreciation of them.

This is an important part of leadership, noted Colonel Teack, who was in attendance and standing by one of the windows. Knowing when to be human, knowing how, without embarrassing yourself or your men, to represent your faith in them. So that, when the time comes, if necessary, they will die for you.

In the midst of these reflections, Teack happened to glance out the window. One of those U.S. photography outfits had pulled up in the street and a man in a long coat and derby was standing with his hands on his hips and looking up at him. Sherman, passing by Teack and lighting a cigar, caught sight of the fellow down in the street and, understanding instantly the opportunity this afforded, turned to the room. Gentlemen, he said, the world is calling. Let us go and get our picture took. We’ll sit for it out there in the sun, with the flag of these United States flying above the city of Goldsboro, so the citizenry will, ever after, know the glorious brotherhood of the Army of the West.

As they had approached the courthouse, with the guards standing about, Arly said to Calvin, All right, he is in there, son, and now we are going to make history. I am going to shoot Gen’ral Sherman’s picture. But if you do anything to make it harder for me—

Why would I do that? Calvin said.

Because you are a wily free nigger. Tell me, was you ever not free?

No.

More’s the pity. ’Cause then you don’t know the things that can happen to your kind when they don’t do right.

I think I do know.

I hope you do. God has looked down upon this war and in his usual mysterious manner he has put us to the test. He is testing our mettle, burning us out and shooting us down and setting our black folks to thinking they better than they are. But none of that means your Pres’dent Lincoln is going to win his war. All it means is that we are consumed by fire so as we can rise from the ashes, new and reborn. All it means! Amn’t I right, Will? Why else would God put you in jail for desertion and me for sleeping on duty except greater and grander things were intended for us out of our disgrace?

All together there were eleven generals. Chairs were brought out and set in the plaza in front of the courthouse steps. One grand armchair for Sherman, four straight-backed chairs for the two generals seated on either side of him. The rest stood in a row behind the chairs. Sherman, of course, directed who should sit and who should stand and where.

As the preparations were being made, a crowd of passersby began to collect. Colonel Teack added to the guard detail and troops, with their arms at the ready, stood between the generals and the street.

A light breeze was blowing and the morning air was cool. The Colonel was the person to talk to. But how? Calvin needed time. He fussed with the equipment, running back and forth to the wagon to get this or that, whatever he could think of. He kept changing the position of the camera, moving it closer or farther back, slightly to the right or left. He knew that eventually the generals would become impatient. Sherman sat with his legs crossed and his arms folded, assuming the pose he wanted to be recorded for posterity and waiting for the photographers to do their job.

Arly muttered, Any time Calvin, any time at all—it’s just all the generals of the Yew-nited States waitin on you. For answer, Calvin dropped the photographic plate he was carrying. It shattered on the ground. Then he had to pick up the pieces and run back to the wagon for another. This caused Arly the same embarrassment as it would have Mr. Culp. He responded by deciding the generals needed instruction on their various poses. He indicated who among the standees should show his profile and who was to face forward. He pulled down the corners of his mouth to indicate that there should be no smiling. How did he know that? Calvin wondered.

Anyway, Calvin thought, if Arly intended to do harm, he would have done so by now. He’d certainly had the chance, being this near to Sherman. Calvin glanced at the generals posed in their solemnity, with the white columns of the courthouse rising behind them, and he thought it would make a fine historic photo if it were actually going to be taken. But he had done some things. The plate he slipped into the camera was not coated—it would not record the image. To make doubly sure, the lens he screwed into the box was the wrong one for the distance between the camera and the subject. He felt peculiar, subverting his own craft, denying history its rights. But he was determined. Whatever was going to happen, whatever this crazy Reb intended, no picture would be taken by him.

As the generals obeyed his instructions, Arly began to enjoy himself. His coattails flapping, he strode back and forth, yanking Mr. Culp’s derby down on his ears and praising the sight before him. This is a moment for the ages, he announced, and the Josiah Culp U.S. Photography Salon is honored to take its picture.

Sherman was becoming impatient now, turning his head to mutter something, scratching his beard, changing which leg to cross over the other. Now, gen’men, Arly said, you know at the time the camera is exposing you cannot move a muscle, lest the photo be spoiled. He seemed only then to notice something not right with General Sherman. Sir, he said, would you consider accustoming yourself to a temporary head brace? For with all this preparation you may become restless in your chair, and without absolute stillness your image will not be clearly drawn. Sherman frowned but nodded in agreement, and Arly sent Calvin back to the wagon for the brace, a calipered bar attached to a stand. Calvin knew that in this morning sunlight, which required only ten seconds of exposure, no head brace was necessary. But this was his opportunity. He stood behind Sherman and affixed it and whispered, hardly able to catch his breath, Sir, that man is not a U.S. photographer. He is a crazy Rebel. And he ran off. Sherman couldn’t turn his head. What? he said. What’s that the Negro said?

Seeing Arly diverting himself with the camera, Calvin moved quickly to Colonel Teack, who stood in the shade at the side of the terrace. Sir, he said, Mr. Josiah Culp is dead. This man in his clothes is a crazy Rebel soldier.

What are you talking about, Teack said. What Rebel soldier?

The Colonel grabbed him by the shoulder, but at this moment Calvin was stunned to see Arly unscrewing the lens from the box. Did Arly know it was the wrong lens? But how could he? Tearing himself from the Colonel’s grasp, Calvin ran toward his camera with a sense that something terribly wrong was being done to it. Arly had ducked his head under the black cloth. His muffled voice was heard. Hold still now, Gen’ral Sherman, the moment of exposure has come! Then Arly’s face rose into view contorted to a rapturous expression that Calvin would remember for the rest of his life. Poking through the socket where a lens should have been, and what Calvin did not in time realize, was the barrel of Mr. Culp’s pistol. The first shot, like a bolt of heat, tore past Calvin’s eyes and blinded him. But he had lunged at the camera, tilting it awry, and the second shot had found Colonel Teack in the chest, knocking him to the ground, though Calvin could not have known it. He was down on his knees, bright lights flashing through his head, and when he put his hand to his eyes they were wet. He didn’t know what the wetness was until he found himself swallowing it. All around him men were shouting. He heard running footsteps, he heard Bert the mule braying. On his hands and knees, and with blood coursing down his throat, he felt the sharp point of a bayonet at his back.

After Arly pulled the trigger for the second time, jumping out of the way to avoid the toppling camera, he cursed at Calvin, stood back and, as several troopers advanced on him, threw off Mr. Culp’s coat and hat and stood waiting for his capture in a neatly buttoned gray tunic taken from Mr. Culp’s store of uniforms. He was knocked down with the butt of a rifle, pressed to the ground under someone’s boot, and then dragged roughly to his feet, while complaining loudly of the ill treatment: Damn, that ain’t right, you near to have broken my shoulder! As he was being hustled away he demanded to be imprisoned with his fellow soldiers of the C.S. of A. This was a honorable act of war, he shouted. I am a soldier!

In the excitement and confusion a guard detail had quickly formed around the eleven generals. Sherman, somewhat shaken, ordered Teack carried back into the conference room. The generals, after determining that Sherman was unhurt, were all asking one another if they were hurt. It turned out none of them were. But they agreed it would be best to go back inside the courthouse and settle themselves with more brandy and coffee. Maybe forget the coffee, Kilpatrick said, loping up the steps. The others followed in dignified fashion, careful to avoid unseemly haste, though one or two looked back at the crowd standing beyond the plaza, lest anyone else was out there pointing a gun. Isn’t it odd, one of them said, that accustomed as we are to being under fire we should find this situation unnatural.

Sherman stood on the steps for a moment and looked out at the crowd that had appeared in the street. How did the damn fool get so close? he said to no one in particular.

The coffee cups were swept away and the Colonel was laid upon the table with Sherman’s own tunic folded up for pillow. Though white with pain, Teack was more concerned about the damage to his uniform. And it seemed to him unfitting that he should lie there in the presence of general officers. He tried to get up. Nonsense, Teack, Sherman said, and pressed him to the table.

Wrede Sartorius was one of three surgeons to arrive. He was immediately deferred to by the others. He offered the Colonel an anesthetic. It was refused. The bullet had cracked a rib but lay shallow enough to be extracted without complication. Bone splinters were removed. Two small bleeding arteries were ligated. Wrede percussed the chest and was satisfied the lung had not collapsed. He sutured and put lint over the wound but did not bandage it. He called for orderlies and a stretcher, and told Colonel Teack that he would be required to rest in a regimental hospital tent.

All the while, the generals had stood watching like students in a medical college. General Sherman kept asking questions—what is this for? why do you do that?—and Wrede kept not answering, which impressed Sherman greatly.

Wrede gave postoperative instructions to his assistant surgeon and left to attend to the black man who still lay outside in the courthouse plaza. Sherman turned to one of his staff and said, Who is that colonel? What’s his name? He carries himself like a soldier, unlike most of the Medical Department.

At dawn the next morning Arly Wilcox was executed by firing squad, a ceremonial event complete with mounted officers, a military band, a pine coffin, and a detachment of Confederate prisoners taken at Bentonville who were present for purposes of instruction. Arly, having argued he was a bona fide prisoner of war, had been assured by his amused guards that that was why he was going to be shot rather than hanged. Well, Will, he said to the picture in his pocket, so we’re back where we were there in Milledgeville. But leastwise it’s the damn Unions doing the executin rather than my own army, which suggests to me God’s continued mercy and maybe future recognition of my martyrdom.

Required to dig his own grave, Arly had squared off the sides with the shovel’s edge. This gonna be my new home I want it nice, he had said.

Calvin had not been executed along with Arly Wilcox because of his injury and because the extent of his complicity was not clear. There was some question as to why a Negro would assist in such an enterprise. Wrede Sartorius was to decide when Calvin Harper would be fit to appear for the administrative hearing that would determine his fate.

But now orders were delivered to Wrede assigning him provisionally to General Sherman’s staff. He was to accompany Sherman to the Army of the Potomac headquarters at City Point, Virginia. He could not imagine for what purpose, or how he could be more useful to the army than as a regimental surgeon.

Not knowing the duration of his provisional transfer, he believed it likely that he would be back before the Negro’s recovery could be vouchsafed. The nose was broken at the bridge and both corneas had been seared. The blindness might be partial or total. It was too early to tell. He left instructions regarding the patient’s care, packed a few things, picked up his field-instrument case, and left without advising his staff where he was going.

Wrede was still angry about the loss of Albion Simms. The brown child should never have been left alone with him. Of course, it is my own fault for having taken on people who have no medical training, he thought. Stephen Walsh and his Miss Jameson are children themselves. They are well meaning, but look what I have lost. When I return, I will send Walsh back to his regiment. The girl will have to fend for herself.

VIII

A locomotive had taken them to Morehead City, and there they boarded a coastal steamer for the overnight trip to City Point. The sea was like glass but Sherman said, What can you do for seasickness? Wrede prescribed tincture of laudanum and Sherman drank it greedily.

Among the things I have to talk to Grant about is this business of executing a Negro, Sherman said. The Southern papers would go to town with that. And I want you to look at Grant when we get there. Tell me if his liver is intact. I hope so. I would prefer he kept drinking—he thinks better when he’s drunk. I can tell when his letters are written under the influence—they’re precise, to the point, clear, and beautiful to read.

After Sherman fell asleep Wrede stood on the foredeck and looked out to sea. Army life demanded a self-submission that did not come easily to him. Here he was, aboard this steamer with his medical instrument bag for luggage and the obligation to attend a general like some factotum.

It was difficult on this overcast night to see where sea and sky were different. Wrede Sartorius saw, as if reflected, his inherently bleak state of being. He smiled, a man who lived alone, his own mind his only companion. He had been in America for almost twenty years, but he felt no more settled here than he had in Europe. He was contemptuous of the army’s Medical Department and no longer saw any reason to share his findings. The war was almost over. He was ready to resign his commission.

General Grant’s residence was not elaborate but well situated on the bank of the James River, with a view of the harbor. It was a place. It stood still. Sartorius found himself sitting in a tufted parlor chair with his knees together and his hands in his lap while Mrs. Grant sat opposite him and gallantly attempted to deal with his silences. Somewhere along the march, he supposed he had lost the talent for polite conversation. She was a charmingly homely woman, Mrs. Grant, a thoughtful hostess, and he appreciated her effort to entertain him while her husband and General Sherman were secluded. But she did ask him his advice about Ulysses, who was having some trouble with his back. Then she herself admitted to some difficulty breathing when walking up a stairs.

Grant, when he appeared with Sherman, was almost shockingly unprepossessing—rather short, stocky, brown beard of a thick texture, a quiet man clearly not interested in making any kind of impression, unlike Sherman, who didn’t seem to be able to stop talking. Grant’s color was good, and his eyes only slightly bloodshot.

Wrede was included in the luncheon, an affair of about twelve, mostly Army of the Potomac staff, with Mrs. Grant at one end of the table and the General at the other. His tunic unbuttoned, Grant sat slumped in his chair, not eating very much, nor drinking anything but water. Uley, Mrs. Grant called to him, Dr. Sartorius has a liniment for your back, if you would consider it. I think that is so very kind of him, don’t you?

After lunch everyone stood up from the table and Wrede didn’t know what to do when Grant and Sherman walked out of the room and made to leave the house, but Sherman came back and beckoned to him, and he joined the two generals as they strode down to the wharf and went aboard the River Queen, a large white steamer with an American flag flying at the stern. After the bright light of day, Wrede needed a moment to acclimate himself to the dim light of the aftercabin, where a tall man had risen from his chair to receive them. He had the weak, hopeful smile of the sick, a head of wildly unmanageable hair, he wore a shawl over his shoulders and house slippers, and Wrede Sartorius realized with a shock, this was not the resolute, visionary leader of the country whose portrait photographs were seen everywhere in the Union. This was someone eaten away by life, with eyes pained and a physiognomy almost sepulchral, but nevertheless, still unmistakably, the President of the United States.

After these many months of nomadic life in the Southern lowlands, Wrede could not quite accept his proximity to Abraham Lincoln. The real presence and the mythic office did not converge. The one was here in a small space, the other unlocatable anywhere save in one’s own mind. Lincoln’s conversation was deferential, too much so. You could not imagine any European leader appearing this self-deprecatory before underlings. The President at moments had about him the quality of an elderly woman, fearful of war and despairing of its ever ending. General Sherman, he said, are you sure your army is in good hands while you’re away? Why, Mr. President, General Schofield is in command while I’m gone who is a most able officer. Yes, Lincoln said, I’m sure he is. But we’ll have our little talk and we won’t keep you.

Sherman was ready to speak of the war as if it were over. He thought that, for the peacetime regular army, new regiments should not be commissioned but, rather, that existing regiments should be replenished from the ranks. Ah, General Sherman, Lincoln said with a faint smile, so you think we have a future? Sherman, humorless in this situation, replied, General Grant will agree with me that with one more good battle the war will be won. One more battle, said Lincoln. How many would that make, now? I think I have lost count, he said, bowing his head and closing his eyes.

General Grant asked after Mrs. Lincoln, and the President excused himself for a moment to summon her, at which point Grant came over to Sartorius. The President appears to me to have grown older by ten years. What do you have in the nature of a nostrum to brighten him up? Do you have anything? It is hard for all of us, but we are in the field. He can only wait on our news, sitting in Washington without the hell-may-care that comes from a good battle.

Before Wrede could reply, the President returned and announced that Mrs. Lincoln was not feeling well and had asked to be excused. The President’s heavy-lidded eyes suddenly widened with an alarmingly self-revealing glance directed at Sartorius. An embarrassed silence ensued.

At this point the President and his generals retired to another cabin. Sartorius paced about and tried not to interpret the sound of their conversation as it drifted through the wall. He did not hear the actual words but the voices—the baritone murmurs of the President, the occasional gruff utterance of Grant, and the louder exclamations of Sherman, who sounded the upstart assuring his elders that he had everything in hand.

Finally the cabin door opened and Sartorius, standing upon their return, was able to see now how tall the President was. His head almost brushed the cabin ceiling. He had enormous hands and large, ungainly feet, and the wrist where his shirtsleeve was pulled back showed curled black hair. The long head was in proportion to the size of the man, but intensifying of his features, so that there was a sort of ugly beauty to him, with his wide mouth, deeply lined at the corners, a prominent nose, long ears, and eyes that seemed any moment about to disappear under his drooping eyelids. Sartorius thought the President’s physiognomy could suggest some sort of hereditary condition, a syndrome of overdeveloped extremities and rude features. Premature aging might also be a characteristic. That would explain the terribly careworn appearance, the sorrows of office amplified by the disease.

What is most important, the President was saying, by way of conclusion, is that we not confront them with terms so severe that the war will continue in their hearts. We want the insurgents to regain themselves as Americans.

At this moment Mrs. Lincoln appeared, after all, a stout woman with her hair tightly bound to frame a round face, and eyes filled with undifferentiated suspicion. She seemed barely conscious of the visiting generals, to say nothing of Wrede, but went right to her husband and spoke to him of some later plan for the day as if nobody else were present. Then, frowning in response to some invisible disturbance, she departed as suddenly as she had arrived, the cabin door left open behind her, which Lincoln moved to close.

The generals, who had risen to greet her, could only think to resume their conversation.

Wrede was startled to find the President looming up. The odd exhilaration one felt in being directly addressed by Mr. Lincoln made it almost impossible actually to attend to what he was saying. One had to not look at him in order to listen. General Sherman tells me you are the best he has, the President said. You know, Colonel, this war has been as hard on Mrs. Lincoln as on the longest-serving battle-worn soldier. I do worry about her nerves. I sometimes wish she could have the advantage of the latest medical thinking, the same that is available to any wounded private in our military hospitals.

It was only a few minutes later, as Wrede Sartorius accompanied General Sherman to the steamer waiting for the return voyage, that he was made to understand of what a presidential wish consisted. I’m sorry, Colonel, Sherman said, but you’re off the march. You are reassigned to the Surgeon General’s office in Washington. You will embark with the President’s party.

Sherman made to go aboard but turned back. There can be tragic incongruities in a man’s life, he said. And so a great national leader suffers marriage to a disagreeable neurasthenic. They did lose a son. But so did I, so did General Hardee. All our Willies are gone. Yet my wife, Ellen, is steady as a rock. She does not plague me with her fears and suspicions while I attend to the national crisis. I will have your things sent to you. Good luck, Sherman said, and ran up the gangplank.

In City Point, Sartorius bought some clothes and a bag to put them in and repaired to the River Queen for the trip to Washington. He had to accept his situation, there was nothing else for it. Mr. Lincoln may be under an illusion about the quality of care in army hospitals, he thought. If so, it is his only illusion.

I have no nostrums—none. I have a few herbs, and potions, and a saw to cut off limbs.

He could not stop thinking of the President. Something of his feeling was turning to awe. In retrospect, Mr. Lincoln’s humility, which Wrede had descried as weakness, now seemed to have been like a favor to his guests, that they would not see the darkling plain where he dwelled. Perhaps his agony was where his public and private beings converged. Wrede lingered on the dock. The moral capacity of the President made it difficult to be in his company. To explain how bad he looked, the public care on his brow, you would have to account for more than an inherited syndrome. A proper diagnosis was not in the realm of science. His affliction might, after all, be the wounds of the war he’d gathered into himself, the amassed miseries of this torn-apart country made incarnate.

Wrede, who had attended every kind of battle death, could not recall having ever before felt this sad for another human being. He stood on the dock, not wanting to go on board. Life seemed to him terribly ominous at this moment.

IX

When the locomotives screeched into the Goldsboro junction railroad yards, the earsplitting sounds were heard as a fanfare. Lines formed before the commands were given. Soon the soldiers were showing one another their sparkling new blue tunics and trousers. They marveled at the repeater rifles that came out of the crates oiled and gleaming. They clumped around delightedly in their thick-soled boots. Their rags and worn shoes were everywhere consigned to little celebratory fires. The bandsmen had new skins for their drums, new reeds for their clarinets, and the Quartermaster General was everywhere praised as the finest officer in the army. Mail had arrived, too, and allotments from the paymaster, and with the weeks of camp rest, and the refitting, and the mail from home, and their pay in their pockets, the ninety thousand men who moved out of Goldsboro punctually on April 10th were refreshed, replenished, and ready to end the war.

Unwinding from its encampments, the army slowly extended itself in a forty-mile-wide swath along the Neuse River, and on roads that cut through rich acres of young green corn. Down the line to the lumbering wagon trains came the news that Lee had been driven from Petersburg and Richmond. That would account for the cheers that Stephen and Pearl had heard floating back to them over the hills. Now the intent of the march was simplicity itself. There would be no great wheel to the northeast and Richmond. It was on to Raleigh and the Reb army of General Johnston.

Stephen and Pearl were too unsettled to share the prevailing mood. When Dr. Sartorius had not returned, another colonel from the Medical Department had merged the surgery with his own. Stephen having no credential as an army nurse, was ordered to return to his original regiment. Pearl being a civilian volunteer, was told she was not needed and to go home, wherever that was supposed to be. Pearl was frightened, but Stephen said to sit tight, and so they had ignored the orders. Stephen knew about the army as she did not. He knew that, given the turmoil of the refitting of the troops and the administrative reorganization General Sherman had implemented, there would be enough confusion for them to wait things out and find a place for themselves in the march. This was particularly necessary, because Calvin Harper was in their charge. When a detail from the Medical Department removed the two ambulances and one supply wagon assigned to Sartorius, Stephen had asked the lieutenant in command what to do about the black man standing there with his eyes bandaged. He’s all yours, son, the lieutenant said. That was hardly enough to relax their vigil. Another lieutenant, or captain or general, might come by with a different idea. Of course Calvin had told them the whole story. Pearl nearly wept that this man who so loved taking picture photos might never see again. Dr. Sartorius had said that was possible. And not an hour passed when Calvin Harper didn’t lift up the bottom of his bandage to find out if his eyes were any better. I can see light, is all. Not anything but light. The boy David watched him closely, and it was his own idea to hold Calvin’s hand so that he could move about without hurting himself.

While it was true that Calvin Harper had warned General Sherman and, more coherently, Colonel Teack, that the man behind the camera was a Rebel soldier, he knew the top general of the army, with everything he had to do, would never be bothered to depose, and that the Colonel, with a wound of his own, was unlikely to be a sympathetic witness. My only chance, Calvin said to them, is that I am a Negro and with everything else going on they will forget about such small potatoes. That’s my only chance.

Stephen thought that was probably right. It was a multitude, this army, and its war was winding down fast in a way that loosened military discipline. The generals, in anticipation, had built themselves a new bureaucracy in hopes of controlling things. The right wing was now the Army of the Tennessee, the left the Army of Georgia, and that new column from the coast was the Army of Ohio. What did it all mean? There were corps, divisions, brigades, detachments, now battle flagged and distinguished from one another for administrative purposes that escaped the ordinary foot soldier plodding along under the sun. Stephen didn’t even know if his old regiment was still the 102nd New York. You could go for miles without seeing an end to the procession of troops and horses and wagons. An eagle aloft in the April winds high over the landscape would only see something iridescently blue and side-winding that looked like the floodplain of a river. Stephen proposed to float on this the Josiah Culp U.S. Photography wagon and hope that as he sat up on the driver’s box his fresh blue uniform would be all the credential needed.

The only problem was Bert.

They had taken a place toward the rear of the wagon train, so many miles behind the advance corps that they couldn’t hear the usual sound of skirmishing as the Rebel cavalry pecked away and fell back and pecked away. There was only the April breeze and the creak of the wagons and the steady clopping of the hoofs on the hard dirt road. But Bert the mule did not like walking directly behind one wagon and in front of another. He kept balking and holding things up behind him. He kept trying to get out of the procession and into the cornfields. When cavalry galloped by too close alongside the road, Bert raised his head and showed his teeth and brayed.

This mule of yours, Stephen called back to the wagon tent. He is not enjoying the trip.

That’s Bert for you, Calvin said. He always did have a mind of his own. He is like an old friend to me. You let me talk to him a minute and see what I can do.

That is not a good idea, Stephen said. I think you’d better stay under wraps there.

A while later, they came to a stream where the bridge was blown and the engineers had had to put down their pontoons. The current was swift and the pontoons sashayed a bit, and Bert, not liking the hollow sound of his own hoofs, almost directed himself and the Josiah Culp U.S. Photography contingent into the water.

Stephen got him across but immediately took the wagon out of the line and stood with Bert under a pine tree.

Pearl hopped down from the wagon. What we going to do?

We’ll wait. They’ll have their led horses and mules coming along. We’ll trade this creature for an army mule.

Who would want him?

Then I’ll try to cadge one however I can.

You need to buy it, Pearl said. No one make you a gift of a good army mule.

They looked at each other. Stephen had not gone to collect his pay. It was the sure way to end up back in his regiment.

Pearl took her knotted handkerchief with the double eagle out of her pocket.

No, listen, Stephen said. You gave away the other one.

Don’t matter. Calvin, she called, where you say you live?

Baltimore, came the reply.

We gettin a new mule, Calvin. This one of yours won’t ever see Baltimore.

There was a long silence. O.K., Calvin said.

Bobby Brasil, with the advance in the town of Smithfield, found himself under fire from Rebs. Muzzle flashes came from warehouses and second-story windows. One Reb was firing from the bell tower of a church. Brasil turned a corner and down the street saw a barricade and ducked back just in time. A shell burst right where he’d been, and when the smoke cleared the street was cratered. He’d been made a sergeant for having outlived two predecessors. His platoon were upstate farm boys. They crouched down in the shelter of an alley in complete bewilderment. War was supposed to be fought from dirt pits and behind trees, across rivers, and in swamps. Not down streets. Not from building to building. You yokels are lucky, he assured them. Bobby J. Brasil has been a street fighter since the day he first walked. He is a terror of the Five Points, and the scourge of Centre Street. It’s about time this war became civilized.

Leading his men down the alley, he brought them into an area of trash yards and outhouses. They climbed over wood fences, broke open the back door of an empty hardware store, and came out the front door, having turned the barricade. They flung themselves down on the porch and commenced firing. Before the Rebs knew what was happening they were shot down, a good half dozen of them, including the two artillerymen manning the Parrot gun. The barricade taken, Brasil and his men received the salutes of cavalrymen riding past.

By the time they had advanced to the town square, bluecoats were pouring in from all directions. Smithfield was taken. The men gave a cheer, and after twenty minutes of milling about they fell in again to continue the march.

At the west end of town the Rebs had burned the bridge across the Neuse River. The march was halted, and the men sat down on the hillside. The upstate yokels smoked their pipes, and Brasil lay with his hands behind his head and stared at the sky while the engineers brought up their pontoons. Brasil was beginning to enjoy his command even if it was this hapless bunch of nine Dutchmen as he suffered now. This truth might have embarrassed him even a month ago, but he had to acknowledge that he had become a good soldier. From nowhere, it seemed, he had developed a sense of responsibility. His idea of army life was no longer entirely personal, no longer just a matter of looking out for himself in any and all situations. He chuckled, thinking what his da’ would say or his uncles, the Brasils being a family of pure spitting copperheads. But an army was an interesting thing and he was beginning to take pride in it, as if it in some way belonged to him, or he to it. He thought he could do well enough running a company or even a regiment. He knew that only West Pointers became generals, but there was a lot more to an army than its generals.

When the bridge was across, the marchers continued down the road to Raleigh. They passed burned-out farmhouses, crops that had been trampled. Children barefoot and half dressed, with their thumbs in their mouths, stared at the soldiers from porch shacks. In the fields well back from the road was the occasional plantation, shuttered and with no sign of life. All along the march, black people came down to the road to walk along with the troops and dance and shout and praise God.

Brasil realized that he was happy. He felt accomplished—never before in life had his rebellious nature rewarded him with that feeling.

An early camp was made in the meadows about ten miles east of Raleigh. The rifles were stacked, the tents pegged, and cook fires started. Some of the men went down to the river to cool their feet. Brasil was sitting before his pup tent thinking he might do the same when he heard a noise that he couldn’t identify. It definitely wasn’t gunfire, it was a harsh but smallish sound, like wind blowing through a window that was opened a crack. But then he did hear muskets going off, and he grabbed his rifle and stood up because it was louder now, and he could hear voices shouting, and some of the sound was almost in distinct shrieks, and it was getting closer, coming from the east back toward Smithfield where most of the army still sat. All the troops in his company were on their feet. Some came running up from the river, and everyone was asking everyone else what in hell was going on. And then they heard horns blowing, the regimental band tubas humphing and the trumpets pealing, and it was nothing like music, everything was going crazy, those were tin cups beating against tin plates, and it seemed everyone in the army knew what had happened except Bobby Brasil, until a cavalry officer came riding through, waving his hat, rearing his horse, circling, and yelling Hazoo! like a maniac, and then a couple more just like him, completely lacking in the dignity of their rank, Brasil thought, until he heard the actual words, or put them together from all the yelps and hats flying into the air, and idiot soldiers dancing with one another, and it was now become like a great hoarse male chorus echoing over the hills, with muskets shooting into the sky like firecrackers and the whole Army of the West in voice sounding the ground up through his feet like a cathedral organ in deep basso tones as if it was even God joining in celebrating the surrender. Because that’s what it was: Lee had surrendered, and it was over, the damn war was over! The roar was enough to scare the birds out of the trees, it was enough to scare the rabbits into their holes, the foxes into their dens, and the Rebs into their cups. Brasil sank to the ground in the cross-legged Indian fashion and put his hands over his ears so he could hear himself thanking God for letting him survive. I thank you, God, for allowing this city lad to survive, he prayed, and, yes, he was joyful, of course, and someone came along and picked him up off the ground and soon he was yelping and dancing around with the rest of them, and joining his company commander, who was serving drinks out of his tent, and he lifted his tin cup to Father Abraham and again to Uncle Billy Sherman and again to the Grand Army of the Republic, while thinking under his grin that it was just his luck for the war to end when he had finally found something for himself that he could believe in.

Sherman’s Special Field Order announcing that General Lee had surrendered his entire army to General Grant on the 9th instant, at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, did not mean that there wasn’t still work to be done. It remained to be seen if Joe Johnston would scatter his forces and bring on a protracted campaign—an endless march, as it were, to make this of Georgia and the Carolinas a mere prelude, with more and more of the country to be ravaged and left desolate. Glory to God and our country, Sherman had said in his message to the troops, and all honor to our comrades in arms. But he ordered Kilpatrick’s cavalry to advance on Raleigh, and planned a southerly course for his infantry corps to prevent Johnston’s run in that direction. While still in Smithfield, he received a trepidatious civilian delegation entrained from Raleigh to ask for the protection of their city. They were four shaken city fathers who had had to endure the brute obstructionism of Kilpatrick before he let them through. It was left to Sherman to comfort them and assure them that, as the war was all but over, the occupation of their city would be peaceful and the civil government would continue to discharge its duties. What the deuce is the matter with Kilpatrick? Sherman said afterward to his adjutant, Major Dayton. You’d think Kil doesn’t want the war to end. But he laughed and rubbed his hands. And if the city fathers come out under a white flag, can Joe Johnston be far behind?

On April 13th, Sherman entered Raleigh and, moving into the Governor’s Mansion, wrote orders for column movements toward Asheville via Salisbury and Charlotte. Then he sat back and waited. Sure enough, the next day he received via Kilpatrick, encamped twenty-five miles to the west, a letter from General Johnston delivered under a flag of truce. Johnston wanted to discuss a cessation of hostilities. Sherman asked Moses Brown for a schooner of brandy, lit a cigar, and dictated a reply to Major Dayton that gave him what he later said was the most pleasurable letter-writing experience of his life.

The agreement was to suspend all military movements, the armies to remain in place, while the two generals met on the road between the Union advance at Durham and the Confederate rear at Hillsboro. Sherman undertook to spiff up for the occasion, brushing himself off and allowing Moses Brown to polish his boots and supply him with a fresh shirt. On April 17th, at eight o’clock in the morning, as he was about to board his private train to Durham, the telegraph operator ran down from his office above the depot with a wire from Secretary Stanton, in Washington. It was still nothing but dots and dashes, but if the General held the train for a few minutes he could have it in English.

Sherman paced back and forth in the waiting room, his elation waning with every passing moment. He hadn’t liked the look on the operator’s face. By the time the telegram was handed to him, his mood had darkened into a presentiment. I somehow knew, he later wrote his wife. Stanton was always the bearer of bad tidings.

President Lincoln had been murdered. An assassin had come up behind him in his box at the theater and fired a pistol ball into his brain. Secretary of State Seward had been badly injured in a separate attack. The conspirators were of unknown number, and presumably General Grant and himself were also designated for assassination. I beseech you, Stanton wrote, to be more heedful than Mr. Lincoln of such knowledge.

Sherman folded the pages and slipped them into his pocket. Too late, Stanton, he thought. They’ve already made their attempt on me. They missed. Better if they hadn’t. Better if they had missed the President and gotten Sherman.

The telegraph operator was still standing there. Sherman said, Has anyone seen this besides yourself? No, sir, the man said. On no account, said Sherman, are you to speak of this or allude to it or even look as if you knew of its contents—to anyone, do you understand? I do, yes, the operator said. You are a resident of this city, are you not? If the word gets out before I get back, if the army learns of it, the consequences to this city are not to be imagined. I understand, General, the operator said. You don’t have to draw a picture.

At Durham Station Sherman was met by Kilpatrick, given a horse, and with a platoon of cavalry in escort, and following a single rider with a white flag, he proceeded down the road toward Hillsboro. It had rained the night before and the fields were fresh-smelling and the roadside grass was dappled with raindrops that shone and sparkled in the sun. Lilacs were in bloom, and the scent of pine trees proposed a land cleansed of blood and war. Sherman saw approaching down the road a mirror image of his own party, the two white flags bobbing toward each other. And there was Joe Johnston, lifting his hat, and so I will as well.

The two generals sat alone in a small farmhouse while their officers remained outside and the owner retreated to his barn, assuring his anxious wife and their four small children that someday their house would be a museum and tourists would flock in to see where the end of the war was negotiated.

Johnston, an older man with a silver-white mustache and goatee and an impeccably fitted smart gray uniform, was clearly shocked when Sherman handed him the telegram. Beads of sweat appeared on his forehead. Surely, he muttered, you do not charge this heinous crime to the Confederate government. Never to you, sir, Sherman said, nor to General Lee. But of Jefferson Davis, and men of that stripe, I would not say as much. This is a disgrace to the age, Johnston said. I have always recognized in President Lincoln a man of compassion and forbearance. That if the war ended badly for us, he would mete out terms that were just and charitable.

The two generals sat for a while in silence. This makes everything so much more difficult for you, Johnston said. For both of us, Sherman replied. At that moment he recognized in Joe Johnston the West Point training that he felt as well brimming in himself, and that had been in him all along after these many years in the army without his having given it a thought. The way the man sat a chair, his diction, the gravity of bearing instilled only in those whose responsibilities will be of a general officer—all of it harked back to the lectures, the precision marching, the courses in tactics, the studies of foreign wars, and the memorization of Homeric verses. Suddenly, Sherman felt a great sympathy for his enemy, this wily old bird with the small bright eyes and a nose like a grosbeak’s. There was a bond of recognition here, they were of the same school. They were both damned fine soldiers. He felt more trusting of this general, an enemy, than he was of his superiors in Washington—Stanton, Andrew Johnson the presumed new president, the whole cabal of Washington politicians who aroused in him, at best, a wariness of their intentions.

Now that Lee has surrendered, Sherman said with as much gentleness as he could muster, you can do the same with honor and propriety. The other course is not feasible, is it? You do not have that much left with which to oppose my army.

Johnston passed his hand over his eyes. Yes, he said, to continue would be not war but murder.

They were still to get down to business. But Sherman was exultant, full of the generosity of the victor. He took up the late President’s charity and forbearance as if it had been deeded in a will. He’d always said that as relentless as he had to be in war, he would be that assiduous a friend when the South laid down its arms. And so, little by little, during this conversation and the ones that followed, he would be not quite aware, in his exhilaration, of giving more to Johnston than Grant had given to Lee. The agreement hashed out would be angrily rescinded in Washington, and Grant himself would have to come to North Carolina to put things right. Now, however, Sherman was made only rapt by the negotiations. The issues were many. What other Southern armies deployed in Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas could be included in Johnston’s surrender? What weapons would officers and men be allowed to keep? What warranties were required for the restoration of citizenship? What would be the legal property rights of the surrendering insurgents? What rations could be offered the Confederate veterans so that they would not ravage the countryside on their way home? And Jefferson Davis and his cabinet? Would they be given amnesty?

And so the war had come down to words. It was fought now in terminology across a table. It was contested in sentences. Entrenchments and assaults, drum taps and bugle calls, marches, ambushes, burnings, and pitched battles were transmogrified into nouns and verbs. It is all turned very quiet, Sherman said to Johnston, who, not quite understanding, lifted his head to listen.

No cannonball or canister but has become the language here spoken, the words written down, Sherman thought. Language is war by other means.

Only afterward, in the late night, as Sherman sat by the hearth in the billet provided him, did he feel a peculiar envy for Joe Johnston and the South he represented. How unsettling. In one hand Sherman held his cigar, in the other his schooner of brandy. He stared into the fire. There was this about the end of a war, that once the cheering was over, you were of two minds. Yes, your cause was just. Yes, you could drink your flagon of pride. But victory was a shadowed, ambiguous thing. I will go on wondering about my actions. Whereas General Johnston and his colleagues of the unjust cause, now embittered and awash in defeat, will have sublimed to a righteously aggrieved state that would empower them for a century.

After informing his generals of the death of the President, and ordering certain precautionary measures, Sherman let the word out in a Special Field Order to the troops: The general commanding announces with pain and sorrow that on the evening of the 14th instant, at the theater in Washington City, his Excellency the President of the United States, Mr. Lincoln, was assassinated by one who uttered the state motto of Virginia. As he had anticipated, a great cry of grief and anger arose in their camps. Soon thousands of men, undirected, and raging in their disorder, not an army now but in the technical state of an uprising, advanced on Raleigh with the intent of burning it to the ground. They found themselves a rabble confronted by the lines of the Fifteenth Corps under General John Logan, the streets blocked with artillery, and the rows of bayonets of their own comrades fixed and pointing at them. Logan himself, riding a great stallion, roamed in front of the lines. Again and again, he ordered the men to return to their camps. He was not killed in Raleigh, Logan shouted. Our President was not murdered by anyone living in this city. No one here did this, return now to camp! Turn around, turn around, I say!

As quickly as the mass mind had changed from jubilation at Lee’s surrender to grief and a roaring anger, it now dissolved almost as quickly into a muttering and shamed calm, as the men slowly dispersed and turned back. The situation still tense, Sherman had guards posted about the camps and patrolling the streets of the city.

When he reached Washington, Wrede Sartorius had reported to the Surgeon General’s office and was assigned to the U.S. Army General Hospital. Installed in his own operating room and ward, with an assistant surgeon and a staff of army nurses, he was soon engaged in the same work he’d performed as a regimental surgeon in the field. Here, though, a greater number of the crises were postoperative, where additional surgery had to be performed in the cutting away of gangrenous tissue, or the removal of limbs that had failed of resection. And proportionately more of the patients, veterans of Grant’s Army of the Potomac, were suffering miasmatic disorders, eruptive fevers, or degenerative social diseases than he had seen in Sherman’s army.

For almost two weeks Sartorius did not hear a word from the White House, and he was rather relieved. Then, in the early evening of April 14th, he received a visit from a White House aide: Would Colonel Sartorius join the President and Mrs. Lincoln at the theater this evening. That very afternoon there had been an influx of patients transferred from one of Grant’s field hospitals. These were men wounded, sadly, in the last skirmishes with Lee’s army. Many of them had been ill served in the field hospitals and Sartorius, overwhelmed with work, and standing before the aide in his rubber apron smeared with blood, declined the invitation. The aide, a young lieutenant, confided that several people had already turned the President down, including the Grants, Secretary Stanton and his wife, and two or three other couples. I’m sorry, Sartorius said. Perhaps because it is Good Friday, the aide said as he left.

Later that night, while Sartorius was still at work, word came that the President had been shot. Sartorius and another doctor on duty quickly found a hansom and rushed to the scene. The President had been removed to a house across the street from the theater. He was lying diagonally across a bed that was too short for him, in a small bedroom and with several doctors, including the Surgeon General, already in attendance. One flickering gas lamp was all the light. Sartorius pushed his way in somewhat rudely and knelt to examine the wound, a small hole behind the left ear. Mrs. Lincoln sat at the side of the bed, holding the President’s hands and weeping. A hand reached past Sartorius and lifted away a blood clot, not the first, that had formed at the wound. This and the mistaken application of brandy to the President’s lips, causing him almost to choke, and the placing of hot-water bottles at his feet, and the keeping of charts recording his vital signs, were all that these many doctors in attendance were able to do.

The President’s shirt had been removed. As Wrede knelt there, he observed spasmodic pectoral contractions causing pronation of the forearms, a cessation of breath, and then a forcible expiration immediately after. One pupil was concised to a pinpoint, the other widely dilated. Wrede stood and was suddenly enraged at the numbers of doctors in the small room. The President’s breathing was becoming more labored. Mrs. Lincoln, hearing the rasp, screamed, Oh Abe, Abe, and she fell across the bed. Wrede said loudly to the hushed assemblage, He is finished, he will not last the hour. Your medicine is useless. You should all get out. Leave him alone—he does not need an audience for his death. And, unhearing of the shocked responses of his colleagues, Wrede pushed his way past them down the hall to the front door, and strode off down the street. He had no idea where he was going. The night air was wet, the gas lamps flaring and dimming in the fog.

When Colonel Teack learned of the death of the President, he decided it could be nothing less than a conspiracy if both Mr. Lincoln and General Sherman were in the same brief time tracked for assassination. The Reb had not been interrogated before he was put before a firing squad, and that was another mistake of the General’s. You find out everything you can when something like that happens. You want to know if it’s just some Rebel maniac or if there are orders behind him. It had been a shrewd thing, his coming in as a certified photographer.

Teack got up out of his bed, and though still in pain, and with a late-developing weakness in one of his arms, he met with the captain of the provost guard and ordered the darkie who worked for the photographer to be brought before him.

We don’t know where the darkie is, the provost captain said. We never had our hands on him. He was given to Medical.

Why?

His own man shot him, sir. The doctor has to release him before we can put him before a board.

Well, find the doctor!

I wish we could. Colonel Sartorius is gone. His surgery is reassigned.

I don’t like this, Teack said. I don’t like this at all. The darkie has to be somewhere. And they had a damn wagon—where’s that at?

Sir, in all the confusion—

He said something to me, he knew what was happening, Colonel Teack said. I’ll find him. You say he’s wounded. How far could he have gotten? I’ll ride out myself if I have to.

As the negotiations went on, with General Grant now quietly arrived in Raleigh to redraft the too generous terms Sherman had written up—there was nothing, for example, requiring the Rebs to abide by Emancipation—it was apparent that the truce might expire before an agreement could be hammered out, and so the troops of both sides drifted into a peace of their own making. Nobody wanted to march back into the South, and the Confederate rank and file had long since been aware that their cause was lost. Discipline became slack, and in some of the camps between Raleigh and Durham Station the combatants actually began to fraternize, ragged Reb soldiers drifting in, unarmed, and sitting about the campfires with their Union counterparts. Rations were meager in the Johnston army and the Reb boys were hungry, and many of the Union soldiers shared their dinners. It was possible also for blue and gray to talk about the battles they had fought as something they had done together, something shared.

Stephen Walsh saw all this as advantageous to the plan he and Pearl and Calvin had worked out. In preparation for their trip north, he’d become something of a forager, riding the new mule bareback every day the miles into the advance camps and drawing rations, as if entitled, from the various commissary tents. Nobody asked questions, such was the mass state of mind as it was slowly losing its military pinnings. The warm weather helped, too. Desertion was casual and out in the open on the Confederate side, where the boys were not that far from home. There was a constant trickle of them along the roads. Some Unions, too, in anticipation of a glorious, triumphal march in the nation’s capital, had taken it upon themselves quietly to begin the trek there, the word having gotten out which corps were to be so honored and which were to stay to garrison what was now called the Department of North Carolina. All of this seemed to be almost complicit with the ordinary daily routines of parade and drill, even the field officers yawning at the habitual duties. There was, overall, a lassitude creeping up from the bottom ranks—though it had not yet reached the level of the general officers or their staffs, where the planning continued as if the war would, and the back-and-forth between the ungrateful sentiments of Washington and the put-upon feelings of Sherman loyalists were a source of tension not unlike that of actual combat.

Over several days Stephen was able to bring back to the wagon sacks of cornmeal, rice, coffee, dried peas, boxes of hardtack, cans of sorghum, and packs of salt pork, but also the trash he found on the road that he thought would be useful—discarded tent sides, a shovel, eating utensils, blankets, and even an old Springfield rifle that he found half buried in a ditch.

It was Pearl who had one evening seen an officer she recognized from when she was traveling as General Sherman’s drummer boy. That was that tall colonel of his, cantering his horse along the wagon train as if looking for something. So they were now being especially careful. The half-tents were tied to hang over the wagon sides so that the Josiah Culp sign could not be seen. Stephen took a position toward the back end of the wagon train in sight of the Negro refugees camped there. It was not as big a community as once followed the march, but it was large enough for Calvin Harper to get lost in.

Each morning Pearl in her nurse’s uniform went to Calvin and washed and redressed his eyes with the salve Dr. Sartorius had prescribed. He was hunkering down with a group of women and children who attended to every move Pearl made. The first day or two the women held themselves aloof from the white lady but they were finally impressed by her daily visit and the care with which she was treating Calvin Harper. She brought rations, too, for them to share, and they thanked her kindly.

And how are y’all this morning, Pearl would say, and everyone would affirm their well-being. And, Calvin, how you farin? Calvin, blinking in the light with the bandage off, would say, I think a little better thank you, Miss Pearl.

The only thing Pearl didn’t like was that little David had chosen to stay with Calvin. The two were inseparable. For reasons she didn’t analyze, she was put out by the boy’s having attached himself in this way, though she supposed it was good there were other children here for him to play with. Well, David, she said one morning, I see you got you some friends. Yes’m, David said. Not yes’m, Pearl scolded, not yes’m, David. Just yes. Say it. And when he did, slightly puzzled, she said, And from now on that’s what you say to answer a question. Not yes’m or no’m but yes or no—two clear words like that, you hear? Yes’m, David replied, and everyone laughed, even Pearl. She was embarrassed that she had suddenly flared up so.

Stephen was going about the preparations so patiently, in his fashion, that Pearl thought they would never be on their way. But he was refitting the struts that held up the canvas over the wagon bed and making the canvas taut, so that there would be more room inside for everything and everyone, and so that it would look like a well-maintained means of travel. For Calvin thought en route they could take pictures again and make a little money that way.

He can’t see to make a picture, Pearl said as she watched Stephen work.

He can teach us, if it comes to that. Everything it needs is here. All his trays and plates and chemicals. The camera is nicked a bit, is all.

Calvin says it was our Colonel-doctor who stowed it back in the wagon when he treated him out by the statehouse steps. He was kind underneath, wasn’t he? Though he never said much. Do this, hold that. But we did. And then he leaves without sayin a word. He just sets off.

Reassignment, Stephen said.

Yes, reassignment, but what does that mean ’cept he’s gone. I felt safe with him, didn’t you?

You are safe with me, Stephen said, and that was the end of that conversation. She knew how much he looked up to the doctor. But it wasn’t something he cared to talk about.

Pearl was silent for a while. She was listening to the birds in the field. She watched the red-wing blackbirds skimming along the furrows, lighting on the bushes.

That David, she said. He don’t care for me no more. It’s Calvin he likes. Takes him by the hand everywhere, won’t leave his side. Don’t a child need mothering?

Stephen jumped down from the wagon bed. Calvin is a Negro.

I’m a Negro!

Stephen shook his head. No, Pearl, with skin as white as a carnation, not in that boy’s eyes.

He touched her face and brushed the tears. Nothing stays the same, he said. Not David, not Sartorius, not the army on the march, not the land it trods, not the living, and not even the dead. It’s always now, Stephen said with a sad smile for poor Albion Simms.

And then a few days later it was time to leave. Stephen came riding back from Raleigh. The end of the war was official and Generals Grant and Sherman were reviewing the troops. Pearl could hear the band music faintly even at this distance. They will be occupied for a while with the peace, Stephen said. He took off his tunic and cap and put on a plain jacket he had found in Mr. Josiah Culp’s costume pile.

They turned out of the road, and Stephen directed the mule to the campsite of the black folks and they picked up Calvin and the boy, and said their goodbyes. We will have at least a day’s start, Stephen said to Pearl. We are going due east, back through Goldsboro and to the coast. They will march the straight line to Richmond and Washington. We will be out of their way, and they out of ours.

Sherman, standing beside Grant on a platform with the American flag, felt the presence of the man. Grant was shorter than he was, but perhaps sturdier on his feet for that. He seemed to see something in the parade marchers of the Seventeenth Corps that made you look to see what it was. And they were Sherman’s men!

He had secret thoughts, Grant, you always felt that about him. Such private feelings of presumed depth that an ordinary mortal could only aspire to. Sherman had a respect for Grant akin to worship, but there was that assured thing about the man, that his private mind harbored no ill intent. He had no guile and no self-interest in this war, and that’s what was so unsettling.

The men seemed to know of this goodness as well, of this steady state of the man’s mind, and they marched by with a serious face, and even somewhat less proud than usual of their shabby grooming and dusty uniforms. What rose up from their ranks was awe.

And the terms of surrender after Grant had arrived to define them were simplicity itself. All acts of war by soldiers under Johnston’s command were to cease. All arms to be delivered to ordnance officers of the U.S. Army. Rolls to be entered of officers and men, and each one to obligate himself in writing not to take up arms against the Government of the United States. Side arms of officers and their private horses and baggage to be retained by them. Their written obligations done, all officers and men permitted to return to their homes. And Johnston and he had signed it, and with that penmanship the four-year war was over.

My not having rested my own perhaps overreaching negotiations with those clear, simple points has got me into trouble, given my leg to that political dog Stanton, who has published intimations that by my generosity to the Southies I may have been intending myself to overthrow the United States government with my army. Such is the thanks I get for my lifelong service to this republic. And now everything of the past four years has come down to a parade, as it will in Washington. We have been but marching to a politician’s parade.

Before I go up there, I want to find a cool grove of pine trees one more time. Sherman’s Special Field Order to himself: You are to go into the forest and pitch your tent, and light your fire and cook your dinner and go to sleep on the hard ground under the stars and wake at dawn with the silly birds in time to hear reveille. Then you may journey to Washington and stand for the parade.

Though this march is done, and well accomplished, I think of it now, God help me, with longing—not for its blood and death but for the bestowal of meaning to the very ground trod upon, how it made every field and swamp and river and road into something of moral consequence, whereas now, as the march dissolves so does the meaning, the army strewing itself into the isolated intentions of diffuse private life, and the terrain thereby left blank and also diffuse, and ineffable, a thing once again, and victoriously, without reason, and, whether diurnally lit and darkened, or sere or fruitful, or raging or calm, completely insensible and without any purpose of its own.

And why is Grant so solemn today upon our great achievement, except he knows this unmeaning inhuman planet will need our warring imprint to give it value, and that our civil war, the devastating manufacture of the bones of our sons, is but a war after a war, a war before a war.

On the way, there was a discussion about the army mule, who as yet had no name. Calvin was loath to name him Bert. This one clopping along smartly is no Bert, Calvin said. He does what you ask. He has no character. Now, Bert he was smart. He wanted the good life for a mule, which was not necessarily what you wanted. He thought for himself, and if he did what you asked you knew it was by his leave or that he was going along for his own purposes.

Well, if we give this young one the name, Stephen said, maybe it will be inspiration for him, something to live up to. Bert the Second.

I hope not before we reach Baltimore, Calvin said.

They were making good time without trying to. The road was dry and beaten down hard by those thousands of army feet. At midday they turned off the road and went down the gentle slope of an untilled field, and found there a clear slow-moving stream, where the water divided on the rocks and boulders and met itself again in a determined way, like something with a mind. There was good shade under an oak tree, and Pearl put down a blanket for the midday meal of hardtack and salt pork and water from their canteens.

I am happy to be going home, Calvin said. He lifted the bandage over his eyes and said, You know, I really can see a little now—it is very much like a photograph beginning to come out in the developing tray. I see you in a grainy way, Miss Pearl. I see you, Corporal Walsh. And you, David, he said to the boy nestled in his lap, you are the easiest to see. He laughed.

Pearl took off her shoes and lay back in the grass and stretched. I feel free like never before, she said.

Calvin said, Culp and Harper, U.S. Army Photographers, has here in this wagon a precious store of army pictures. Mr. Josiah Culp and me, we were on the road for a good year. The pictures will bring in money besides being valuable in themselves for their history. And I am sure I will be busy taking portraits and carte de visites of the returning soldiers who will want one more picture of themselves in uniform before they take it off. I hope to make a good living. You are all welcome to join with me, he said after a moment. There could be enough for all of us.

Pearl had sat up. Stephen looked at her and cleared his throat, about to say something, but Calvin had pressed on. You have saved my life, he said. Your doctor was the one who used this wagon for an ambulance to take me back to his surgery. He saved my camera and Mr. Culp’s store of photos, and all I told him was my name and that I had tried to stop the shooting. And all of you have saved my life. I know you mean to go to New York City. But that is a long way from Baltimore and Baltimore is a long way from here, so maybe you would think again. Or maybe stay awhile with us, earn some money enough to ride the train up to New York and not worry about fodder for it.

Who is us? Pearl said.

Well, David and me and Jessie. She will love this boy.

David got up now and went to where the mule was grazing and patted its neck. Pearl watched him. Something on the ground caught his attention and he squatted down to look at it and then, with a twig, poke at it.

Jessie is your wife?

I am not the marrying kind. Jessie’s my sister. She is a maiden lady who has no children of her own. But she sews up quilts that she sells, and teaches the Sunday school in our church. The children love Jessie.

Calvin and the boy both napped after lunch, and Pearl and Stephen walked downstream and found some stepping-stones to a big, wide rock in the center, and there they sat, Pearl with her skirt hiked up to her knees and her feet in the water.

Truth is, she said to Stephen, once I take that letter to the Lieutenant Clarke’s mama and daddy at the Number 12 Washing-ton Square I will come out their door, and which way I go, the left or to the right, or down this street or down that street, it don’t really matter ’cause I won’t know where I am or what I want to do with my free life.

You will come with me, Stephen said.

And if I be white until I have my black baby? Then what will you do?

I will be its father, if I am its father.

She looked at him, startled, until she saw the grin on his face. Naturally you are its father—who else would I have for a husband? Pearl said. You bein silly now—this a serious matter.

I have the three hundred dollars in the bank from my enlistment, Stephen said. I have thought about this. I want to read the law.

And what will I do?

You will go to the public school and catch up quick as a flash with your mind. And later will go to medical college.

You work that out for me?

I saw you in the surgery. You are a natural at doctoring. Don’t tell me you never thought of it.

I did until I ’membered I’m a nigger girl. You have a passel of plans for your three hundred dollars.

If they don’t let girls in medical college you will be the first, because I will argue the case in court. Pearl looked at him and shook her head. All at once her tears began to flow. Stephen Walsh could bear it no longer. He wrapped her in his arms and kissed her on the lips and on the cheeks and on the eyes. Pearl was kissing him back and crying at the same time. They held each other.

If you want to take David with us, that is all right with me, Stephen whispered. He kissed her ear.

It different up there?

No.

You a crazy man, Stephen. You a soldier from the war but you don’t know the fearful life.

I think I do, he said, Irish as I am.

They sat quietly, looking at the water. Birds flew past them, following the path of the stream.

If I live white, how free am I?

Freer than the other.

Free everywhere ’cept in my heart. Is that freer than my mama Nancy Wilkins?

You will have to let the world catch up to you.

When’s that?

It may take some time.

She stood, and brushed her skirt. No, she said. He should go with Calvin and Jessie. Calvin didn’t bother to ask, but that’s the best thing for the chile. And we will write each other letters soon as he learns reading and writing.

Later, back on the road, the shadows began to lengthen as the afternoon wore on. The green of the land grew softer, and the road, in a slow descent, passed into a valley. And then there was a dark, thick grove of pine where some of the war had passed through. A boot lay in the pine needles, and the shreds of a discolored uniform. Behind a fallen log, a small pile of cartridge shells. There was still a scent of gunfire in the trees, and they were glad to come out into the sun again.