The sound of raised voices in the hall brought David Strong hurrying from his study. As he came down the curving staircase he saw his manservant, Moses, arms outstretched, trying to prevent a young Confederate officer from going into the library.
‘Nosuh!’ Moses was saying as he barred the high doorway. ‘You cain go in there, nosuh, you cain!’
‘Get out of the way, nigger!’ the soldier snapped, his hand falling to the hilt of his sword.
‘Captain!’
David’s voice brought the young soldier’s head around. His face was flushed. He had a wispy blond moustache and his uniform was streaked with mud. Just a boy, David thought, but already a captain.
‘Are you the owner of this house, sir?’ the soldier asked, turning to face David and releasing his grip on the sword.
‘I am. My name is David Strong.’
‘Montgomery Paterson, sir. Captain, Second Virginia,’ the young man said. ‘Would you be kind enough to tell your slave to stand aside, please? I have orders to requisition this house.’
‘Have you, indeed?’ David said, coming down the last three stairs and crossing the hall. ‘All right, Moses, leave this to me.’
‘Yassuh,’ Moses said. He gave the Confederate captain a scornful look. ‘Ain’t no slave, neither!’ he said tartly.
‘Perhaps you’ll tell me what all this is about, Captain?’ David continued, concealing his amusement at the soldier’s startled reaction to Moses’ Parthian shot.
‘I have orders—’
‘Yes, yes, I know all that. Whose orders?’
‘They’re from General Joseph E. Johnston’s headquarters, sir,’ Paterson said. ‘The army is falling back from Manassas, and will be headquartered here in Culpeper.’
‘Well, Captain Paterson, I’m afraid I’ll have to refuse General Johnston’s request.’
Paterson looked up, surprise in his eyes. ‘It’s not a request, Mr. Strong,’ he said abruptly.
‘Whatever,’ David said agreeably.
‘I don’t think you understand me, Mr. Strong, and I regret the necessity of having to put it so brutally. You have no choice in the matter. I have my orders, and I intend to carry them out.’
‘Over my dead body!’ David snapped.
‘If necessary, Mr. Strong,’ the soldier said with an impatient shrug. He turned towards the door. ‘Sergeant!’ he shouted. The door was flung open and a burly sergeant came running into the hall. Behind him came two soldiers carrying muskets. Their boots left muddy tracks on the floor.
‘Sergeant, place this gentleman under close arrest!’ Paterson said, in the weary manner of someone who has done the same thing many, many times. ‘If he resists, shoot him!’
The sergeant pulled out a big pistol and pointed it at David. David looked into the soldier’s eyes. They were quite empty. It did not matter to him whether David Strong lived or died.
‘All right,’ David sighed.
‘Thank you, sir,’ Captain Paterson said equably. ‘I’m glad you see it our way.’
‘You, captain, may go straight to Hell!’ said David. The young soldier nodded, as though he had heard that a lot of times as well.
‘You’re probably right,’ he said. ‘Carry on, sergeant.’
The sergeant put the pistol back into his holster. He looked at David without expression. All the same to me, his face said. The two soldiers ported their muskets. Paterson turned to David.
‘Would you like to show me around the house, sir?’ he said.
‘No, I would not,’ David said. ‘But I expect I will.’
And so the soldiers came to Washington Farm. The rolling pastures blossomed with row after row of dog-tents, a village, a town springing to life and spreading as far as the eye could see, a town with a life and a sound and a smell all its own. Artillery caissons dug deep gouges into the rich earth; wagons and ambulances cut muddy swathes across the green meadows where, as a boy, David Strong had learned to ride.
David could not bear to remain in the house, filled as it was morning and night with cavalry officers who tramped unthinkingly through the lovely rooms in mud-caked boots, who left cigars burning on the furniture as they sang around the piano in the evening. David and Jo had never seen eye to eye on the way she always put little doilies beneath cold drinks on the polished table or mats beneath hot plates. Made no difference to a hundred-year-old table if you scratched it a mite more, he would grumble. And spiritedly would toss her head and say, maybe it makes no difference to the table, David Strong, but it makes a difference to me. Now, to his surprise, David found it made a difference to him too.
He moved into a little cottage in the servants’ quarters next to the one Moses and Aunt Betty lived in and left the big house to the soldiers. He did not even want to know who was quartered there. That way his anger could have no focus. You could hardly be angry with a whole damned army.
After a while, he got used to the noise and smell and the constant hither-thither of couriers and wagons and marching lines of men, the blare of bugles, the sweet, sharp smell of wood smoke everywhere, the shouts of drill sergeants, the tramp of marching feet. He knew he would never smell bacon cooking without again half hearing the rattle of reveille drums, nor watch night fall without recalling the shouted cadences of the pickets.
He found himself continually amazed by the soldiers. So many of them were little more than boys and not a few of them unable to read or write. Yet they all shared a devotion to their cause all the more remarkable because they were mostly unpaid and usually self-equipped. He wandered among them, watching, listening. They learned to recognize him and found out who he was, and they gave him a nickname: ‘Pops’. From them he heard the news, two parts fact to eight parts rumor, of what was happening elsewhere in this war. The word was that old Stonewall Jackson was giving Billy Yank hell in the Shenandoah Valley. The word was that an ironclad called the Virginia had sunk two steam frigates in Hampton Roads. The word was that handsome George Brinton McLellan, ‘Little Mac’, had landed an army on the Virginia peninsula at Fortress Monroe, not much more than fifty miles from Richmond. The word was that they would soon be marching out to fight him.
Could ragged farm lads such as these meet and defeat the Federal Army? David did not know how they could, but they all seemed certain that they would. Hell, they said, ain’t we beat Billy Yank ever’ time we come up against him? We got better gin’rals, don’t we? We kin march better, shoot better, an’ fight better, can’t we? Hell, Pops, sure we’ll win. We’ll win in a canter an’ mebbe we’ll all be home in time for the harvest! They had so much faith in themselves, in victory’. You could not understand how, but neither could you doubt its existence.
‘I never talk to them but what I think of Jed, Jo,’ he said as he sat early one morning beside his wife’s grave. The tall grass was wet; birds flitted through the trees as though loth to break the silence. Down below row upon row of tents covered the meadows like strange mushrooms. Horses stood hipshot beneath the great oaks lining the long drive. Wood smoke from the cook fires wisped between the trees. Someone was playing ‘Home, Sweet Home’ on a harmonica. The melody was drowned by rough male laughter. ‘And Andrew,’ he added, guiltily.
He always worried more about Jed. Being the oldest, they’d made more mistakes with Jed. Been harder on him, expected more. Andrew got it easier, because by the time he came along David and Joanna were less strict, less demanding. Less likely to wear my ‘tyrant’ face, David thought with a smile: that was what Jed called it. You got your tyrant face on, Pa, he’d say. It’s always bad news when you look like that. And David would see a picture of himself, finger raised, jaw jutting, eyes angry – the dominating father, the unbudging parent. He’d kind of come to the conclusion that your children didn’t hear a damned thing you said until they were over twenty-five; and, by and large, you didn’t hear a damned thing they said till then either. Now they were both grown men. They know men and I know them as well as any of us ever gets to know another man. And yet, I don’t know whether they love me, he thought.
‘It’s hard for men to talk about love to other men,’ he said to his wife. ‘You always said that, Jo. You said it was funny how we always try to turn it into some kind of rough joke, and you were right. We all say our loving things to women. There doesn’t seem to be any way to say them to another man.’
He looked down towards the house. There was a flurry of activity in the driveway in front of the house. He was too far away to see clearly what was happening, and anyway, it didn’t matter a good wholesome Goddamn to him, one way or the other. Nothing that happened around here mattered much anymore. Apart from Moses and Betty, everyone who had worked on the farm was gone. The few horses that had been left had been quickly requisitioned. They had tried to pay David in Confederate scrip. He refused it, telling them that giving him worthless scrip didn’t make what they were doing any less stealing.
He felt abandoned, isolated from the world. It was almost impossible to get a letter through from the North, so he had no idea what was happening to Sam. Business ought to be better: if Lincoln got his volunteers he’d have to give them guns to fight with. The Federal troops had taken Fort Henry and Fort Donelson. The papers said that more than four hundred Federal soldiers had been killed at Donelson, seventeen hundred wounded, a hundred and fifty missing. Any one of those could be your son. Every one of them was someone’s son. Andrew was a member of Grant’s staff, but first and foremost he was an artillery officer. And that would mean he would have been where the shooting was. He could be dead, David thought, I would not know.
Yet somehow, something inside him told him that if one of his boys had been hurt he would know. Some instinct, some osmosis, some message through the unseen waves of telepathic thought would reach him. And Jed.
Jed who had ridden bravely away to join Lee in Richmond. He was with ‘ Jeb’ Stuart’s cavalry, he wrote, in Stonewall Jackson’s army. And where was that army and who were they fighting now? He took out the battered letter from his son, the one Jed had written to him just before Christmas. He had been at the battle of Manassas, or Bull Run as some were calling it. He was healthy, he was strong and was expecting to be transfer-, red to Jackson’s staff in the spring, when the new offensive began.
Jed, boy, where are you? David thought. I wish you’d come home.