I worked my brogans back on the next morning well before Pompeii had ceased the steady sawing of deepest sleep on the other side of the door. Outside, the city streets had yet to awaken. I headed for the boat works, as I hoped to catch Fields before F set off on some duty or errand. I didn’t yet know how exactly I would convince Draper of the need of a mission out to Nixonton, but I would, for this day or the next. We would save Riley and Lawrence from Llewelyn and continued bondage. We would not leave them behind. I needed Fields to feel assured of this.
I arrived at the boat works, which were quiet yet. Nights on the broad shop floor seemed little different from sleeping out in the field. The sharp cold blustered in through the loose-jointed board-and-batten walls, and troopers had wrapped themselves up in whatever clothes were available, their heads completely covered, mouths breathing out plumes of frost air. Backuss, Tynes, and I hadn’t considered this drawback when choosing the billet, nor had Backuss and Tynes seemed to care enough to move the company after it had been noticed.
I saw Stewart Bell descending the stairs—to rousen the men, I assumed. I crossed to him and asked where Corporal Midgett was.
“Sleeping when I got in last evening,” said Bell, “and already gone when I awoke a short time ago. I assumed on some official matter. Is this not so?”
I didn’t reply. I did not want to compromise Fields if he was doing what I feared he might be doing.
Miles Hews, who wore a second greatcoat overtop his own, rose from his place on the floor. “I saw the corporal leaving. He rode out on a horse, maybe . . .” He thought on it. “Not half an hour past.”
“Your map,” said I to Bell, who, as a corporal, should have one. Had I still been here with my men, as I should have been, my own would be at hand or nearby. Instead, it was at headquarters.
He handed his over. I felt fairly certain of being able to find Nixonton without the map but I wanted a fallback for my memory, as Fields and I would officially be deserters if found out before I could reach him and get us back to the city.
“Have you received orders for the day?” asked I of Bell.
“Only to report to the lieutenant up to Sentry Post G after reveille.”
“How many are you?”
“Forty-one,” said Bell, “less Corporal Midgett.”
“Thirty-one for the morning,” I corrected him, to which he nodded, consenting.
I turned to Hews. “Organize a detachment of ten and report back here, and on the quick. Make one of them Gaylord.” As always, I was supplied of my sergeant’s sword but no other weapon. So I added: “And find me an available musket.”
Then to Bell: “Report to Backuss as planned.” I leaned a little closer. “Unless he asks for an accounting of your roll-call, do not offer one.”
“Yes, sir,” said he without pause, which indicated to me that he understood.
Men were rising and mustering, from Hews’s prodding of them or just the general activity in the room. I took a sheet of stationery and my pen and inkwell from my haversack and squatted right there on the shop floor. After pondering what best to say, I settled on:
Colonel Draper,
Am detained on an urgent errand.
Respectfully,
Richard Etheridge, SGT
Simple and vague. Nothing that might offer clear indication of my movements.
I passed the note to Simon Gaylord and ordered that he deliver it to Colonel Draper at headquarters and to no one other. (Having left Bell undermanned, I wouldn’t also saddle him with one of our lesser soldiers.) I told Gaylord, “Do not linger upon completion of the mission, and if queried, do not offer any information that you don’t with absolute certitude know. Do you understand, Simon?”
He nodded.
I told him, “Wait until nine or thenabouts before setting off.”
“Yes, sir.”
The men before me, from Bell and his squad to Hews and our detachment, recognized that something was amiss. They didn’t know what, but I appreciated that they would follow me without question or pause whenever I called it urgent. They believed in me, as Fields had once. I must not let them down.
If we were to overtake Fields, we needed horses. There was a stable on Jones Street, one street over, that would have mounts enough for our group. I figured Fields to have procured his own from there, and the stablemaster confirmed my suspicion.
It hadn’t occurred to me to have Hews compose the detachment of men with experience with the great big beasts. He and Single Phillips and Josh Land turned out to be pretty good horsebackers, but the others, well . . . The rest were not cavalry and showed no disposition toward it. They rode unsteadily, managing the reins with two hands while barely keeping their rifles balanced across their laps. Along with Hews, Phillips, and Land were Harvey Hill and Zach Gregory, fine privates who I knew would one day rank, and also Briscoe Young, plus three more whose names I could not on the spot find.
I didn’t need to order my troops to maintain silence, as our susceptibility to attack was generally understood. Only the beat of our horses’ hooves made a sound. We endeavored to keep some semblance of military formation, with me at the head and two abreast, staggered five-deep behind, on the chance that we might encounter a guerrilla band—or worse, a large unit of Confederate regulars. A week into our foray, it wasn’t unreasonable to imagine that the regulars had organized to challenge the African Brigade’s incursion into the neighborhood and were out here somewhere.
A brush with Rebel irregulars wouldn’t portend much better for us, truth be told. Wild’s military escalation—sacking John Elliott’s camp; taking hostages, for that is what those women were, and holding them under colored guard, prominently, for all to see—was having the effect the general desired, that of rousening the bushwhackers to greater anger. Last night’s increase of enemy gunfire evidenced this. It wouldn’t play to my detachment’s favor, as Draper had forewarned. A modest-sized band of vengeful-minded men would wipe out the ten of us before support could arrive.
Crossing Trunks Bridge over Newbegun Creek, I recalled having come this way before, on an errand with John B. This gave some comfort, though there was no logic to it. We were no safer on the road for me recognizing it.
The more distance we gained from Elizabeth, the more my mind cleared. I realized that my object, once we overtook Fields, was not to stop him or attempt to turn him back. It had maybe begun thusly, but ceased to be so the farther we got from the city. No, Riley and Lawrence were out here, likely other Midgett colored, too. I would see them freed. But I wanted it done by a proper unit, not just one man run off, absent without the leave to be. If we were found out, punishment by Colonel Draper was guaranteed. I remembered bucked-and-gagged Leon Bember atop that scaffold on the parade ground at Fortress Freedom, imagined a similarly contorted Fields on display on the square in Elizabeth City, disgraced and humiliated. This way, if punishment was coming, it would fall on me. I hoped the rightness of our undertaking might take some of the edge off it, but if we were caught, it would be me who was in dereliction of duty.
A little ways up, we came upon a cluster of three homes being canvassed by Company B, Captain Frye’s unit, maybe fifty men total. It was a confused scene. The troopers, looking more sheepish than sure, were in the yard, keeping at gunpoint a batch of women, while Captain Frye stood on the porch in brash dispute with some gray-bearded rusty guts.
He wasn’t no “Officer of Geese” on this day. Frye was shouting, “Are you loyal or disloyal?” to which one of the old men shouted in response, “This is the grossest goddamned outrage!”
“We are loyalists,” cried another. “Loyal!”
“We took Phoebe Munden and Lizzie Weeks not far from here,” shouted Frye, “on account of the transgressions of their men. Do you think your own ladies immune from us?”
“The grossest goddamned outrage,” repeated the first. “They are but ladies and girls!”
The ladies and girls referred to numbered nine or ten. All were pale and looked as skittish as the skittish soldiers guarding them. Most held on to some other one nearby, save a youthful girl who, on her knees with arms outstretched, prayed skyward, the white skirt of her dress mud-streaked.
Two-score barn fowl, a couple of hogs, and a piebald pony with more hump than haunches were also under Company B’s supervision, yet nary a slave in sight.
My detachment had not the time for pause, but the scene struck me queerly. Spotting Mezzell among the guards, I signaled my group to sit their horses, then rode over. The usually jovial sergeant did not look so right then.
“Gil,” said I, dismounting.
A first-name greeting seemed most apt to the situation, though I couldn’t explain why. Perhaps in hopes that a show of familiarity might help calm things a touch—on our side, at least, if not among the locals.
Mezzell commenced to explaining without my having asked: “The first man there says that upon entering his home, we uttered insulting language and threatened foul treatment of his daughter and her girl.”
I peered over at Mezzell. “Did someone?”
“On neither count, no,” said he. He then scanned his men. “They all said they didn’t, anyway.”
Why Captain Frye didn’t just leave the porch and quit this chaos, I did not know. There appeared to be no slaves to emancipate and so, little advantage in lingering here.
Why I didn’t leave either, and on the spot, was equally a mystery, as Fields was still unknown lengths ahead of us. I supposed it was seeing Mezzell, discomfited as he was—an unease that looked to match a thing that had likewise been troubling me. I questioned these new tactics. The taking of women as hostages was maybe the new strategy of provocation, but it threw me.
For one, it didn’t fit. In all my life, I never knew of colored men hatching schemes of outrage toward Southern ladies. If anything, the rageful Negroes I knew were of the mind of old Nat Turner. He did not linger in any of the bedrooms he visited; he got on about the business at hand and moved along to the next farm.
And after all, were we not, in fighting this fight, aiming to disprove the terrible tales that were concocted about us? If the general intended to use this method of combat against the Rebels—menacing the men by the threat of terror to their women—it put us colored soldiers in a tight spot. For would we not be seen as the lustful brutes that Southern men already believed us to be in the first place?
On the porch, the screaming tangle took a strange turn. One of the old men was saying, “I purchased the damned horse legal, for his use!” to which Frye replied, “But if this son of yours is in the Confederate Army, then you’re abetting his service to their military. So how can you claim loyalty?”
“I have sworn my loyalty,” retorted the old man, “and signed the oath papers, too. Yet you call me a liar!”
Mezzell whispered at me, “I offered earlier that we ought to just confiscate the farm animals and leave off with the fractious argumentation.”
“It’s what I would do,” said I.
The focus was momentarily diverted from the women, at least—a minor victory in a needless battle. Or so I’d thought.
The girl who had been praying rose up then. “Even if Pawpaw won’t claim Secession, I sure as hell will!” said she, shouting it out, curse words and all. “I’m a Secessionist through and through like my brother Sam. And I wished I had forty brothers more just like him!”
She wasn’t but ten, maybe eleven years old. A woman—her ma’am?—took to pulling roughly at the girl’s sleeve to try to get her to shut it up. The girl would not.
“I expect you niggers will march back to Norfolk when you have done with your abuses here among my family. Well, by God, may you meet a Manassas on the way!”
It was a rich taunt, and I found myself liking the girl for it. Others of us, too, clearly, as here and there I heard chuckles. Even Captain Frye. He beamed a smile and moved in his limping way off the porch, ignoring now the protestations of the old men.
All would be right soon enough. I considered requesting escort from Frye to better assure the safety of my detachment’s passage through the enemy country. But his company would severely slow our progress, given that his troopers were a-foot. Plus, how was I to explain to him our unauthorized sortie without lying, which would only increase the offense?
I nodded to Mezzell, mounted, and heeled my horse’s ribs, proceeding up the road. My men followed.
The farms we passed over the next stretch were quiet, too much so. I had the men keep a keen eye on the tree line and moved us at a gallop, even though it spread out our line.
Hews and Phillips pulled abreast of me. Hews said, “The incident back yon, Sergeant. Some of us were wondering what to make of it. Is our mission now to be bullying women as a way to spook their men?”
He was a sharp one, Hews.
“We’ll do what we’re ordered to,” said I, not quite liking my response. So I added: “Yet and still, a good soldier will give some consideration to what is being asked of him.”
I’d made up this last bit and wondered if Draper would approve of it.
“I know some of them boys back there from B,” said Phillips. “They’re not the sort to commit outrages.”
“Sergeant Mezzell either,” said I, “nor to watch them being committed.”
“And Captain Frye?” said Hews.
“It is the reason for sergeants. We’re the go-betweens. Trust in us.”
Draper would approve of the latter response, this I knew for certain, as he’d previously instructed us non-comms this very thing.
We came to Meadstown, a hamlet of eight or ten houses. As we trotted down her center, the silence felt off. The lane seemed narrow and tight, all the windows dark and unmoving. Eerily so. I only then realized we should have bypassed it altogether, ridden the long way around. It was what any competent commander who was short on numbers would have done. I signaled the men to be attentive, peered from one window to the next for signs of movement, for the muzzle flash that would herald the ambuscade.
It did not come. Nothing stirred at our clomping passage.
A half mile or so beyond, the way forked onto the Nixtonton road. These environs were of a sudden very familiar. I knew that soon, to the left, we’d find the lane leading to the Midgett farm—Hollybrook, I now remembered it called.
Turning off the road onto the lane, I heard a pounding of object against wood, and Fields’s voice, raging, before the plantation was even properly in view through the trees. I spurred my mount. She’d been panting hard plumes of breath but promptly dashed forward. The property came into sight—Hollybrook Manor, the two-story colonnaded house of Leonidas Midgett, Llewelyn’s cousin (and John B.’s, too, once removed). Fields was at the great front doors, kicking at them.
I leaped from the saddle upon arrival and went and grabbed Fields. “What are you doing, man? Calm yourself!”
He pushed away from me harshly. “Mass Llewelyn might be in there, and they will not open the door.”
“Calm yourself, Fields,” said I, calmly myself, firmly holding his shoulders so that our eyes might meet.
The other men had gathered around, near, though not too near. If they’d not known it before, they by now surmised that this mission was personal and urgent, yet not properly assigned and maybe not even approved.
I said to Fields, “If Llewelyn is here, we will find him. If he’s gone, then we’ll interrogate whoever remains and get information on when he left and where he has left for. But we must do it soldierly. More flies with honey, right? With respect and a firm examination. Your way is failing to even get opened this door.”
And just then, it did open. Before us stood Leonidas Midgett. He was a portly man, his jacket straining tight over his shoulders and chest, and older than I remembered, with thick, grayed hair and sagging features. He leaned heavily on a cane, seeming completely unperturbed by the violence recently unleashed against his door.
“Ain’t you one of Cousin Lew’s niggers?” said he to Fields.
Fields stiffened but did not respond.
“And you, you’re Cousin John’s?”
“Was,” said I.
“Indeed,” said Midgett, sneering. “I suppose you’re right.”
All was still behind him, off in the house.
“We come after Riley and Lawrence,” Fields said. “My brothers. We have intelligence on them being out here. We have heard this.”
He seemed to struggle with how to address this man who’d been family to his master and thereby a legal master of him—and who, despite the circumstances, still behaved as though this were the order of things. This surprised me of Fields.
But Midgett appeared to enjoy Fields’s struggling. “Your intelligence was correct but has since lapsed.” He said it spiteful more than mocking, though with some measure of both.
The other troopers, in a semicircle behind us, looked to have noted it, too.
A wheat and flax farmer of some renown, Leonidas Midgett had once counted two-score colored as his property, but there was little noticeable activity on the grounds. The barn stood open, with a stillness inside, and there were no carts or livestock anywhere to be seen.
Holman’s column must have come by here, or some other unit. It was impossible to know if this boded well or ill for Riley and Lawrence, given the Midgett men’s excitable natures and proneness to rash action.
This one took our silence as a prompter for storytelling. “When your confrères besieged the farm yesterday morning, my people—pickaninnies as well as chambermaids—feared that niggers in uniform were an augur of the Apocalypse. Dear old Aunt Betsey threw her hands up and shrieked that it was Biblical end-times now set in upon us.”
He smiled at the memory of it. Then his smile passed from smirkly to wan.
“Every last one followed after them all the same,” said he. “And now you want more? I’ve got nothing more to give.”
A woman dressed in finery such as I’d rarely seen and young enough to be a daughter appeared in the doorway behind him, though she laid a hand on his shoulder in a way that no daughter would. “Dear, please, let them have whatever they’ve come for so that they might leave,” said she, spiteful like her age-lamed husband, only without the bonus of mockery.
I could sense Fields tensing up, an angry tensing. I jumped in: “Riley and Lawrence, then. Did they go off with the others?”
Midgett ignored me. “For all I know, it’s you they’ve come for, dear,” he said to his wife, truculently, defying us to act in any way that might confirm his words as true.
The woman leered at us. Contempt, when it’s pure and plain-worn, makes a fiend’s mask of even the most beautiful face. She took two steps forward and spat on the stretch of ground at my feet.
Fields shot forward in a blink, and I was just able to restrain his advance, the woman scurrying behind her husband, who’d raised his cane above his head in preparation of swinging it at us. Fields said with a venom I’d not known him to have, “You will tell me where my brothers are, or you will lose like I have lost.”
Midgett backed into the doorway, the cane still raised, but did not slacken his imperious, scornful air. “Cousin Lew had already departed well before my niggers quit me, and he took his dusky drove along with him.”
“But they were here,” said I, “Riley and Lawrence?”
“I don’t know Riley and Lawrence from Tambo and Bones. All I know is that Lew brought all his niggers with him, and he and his overseer carried them off from here as well.”
His overseer? Few were the Sand Bankers to employ an overseer, and typically only for temporary usage. Overseers were known to be the most base and cruel sorts of men. What cause would Llewelyn have for one?
“Where was they off to, then?” said Fields, no less riled than before.
I was in my mind devising the words to get from Midgett truthful particulars on how they were being treated, given the presence of this overseer, when from the far side of the house I heard the clop of hoofbeats. Around the corner appeared Revere, Golar, and several of the swamp men. I would have thought them farther afield than this, scouting out Confederate movements, but here they were.
They numbered some twenty and looked an awful sight for anybody who might prove of a contrary bent to their way of seeing things. Wrapped in their hide and Indian-blanket attire, the swamp men carried the rifles General Wild had outfitted them with, hanging over their backs from slings fashioned of braided hemp. Many had also come by revolvers. Some carried two or more, tucked into their belts or in pockets sewn into their outer garments.
Midgett and his wife looked particularly disquieted by their chance arrival. Where my men hadn’t rousened in the Midgetts fevered visions of bloodthirsty brutes come slinking unannounced from out behind the woodpile, these ghoulish smokes for certain did. Midgett stumbled hastily backward into her, all evidence of spunk drained from both of their faces.
Golar and his men hung back as Revere, who remained properly uniformed, ambled his horse forward. His imposing stoutness seemed to bow the creature’s back at the middle.
“Etheridge,” said he—notably equably, given our last encounter.
“Revere,” I replied. “What’s your business here?”
“Same as our business everywhere.” He nodded the bill of his forage cap toward the Old North State flag, hanging limply from a pole. “This is not a loyalist outpost. Clearly.”
Only Old Glory signaled loyalty. Most anything other, the opposite.
I said, “The mission is to confiscate the property of disloyal citizens. My men have matters in hand. You can move on.”
Revere took me in, eyes probing my own, his horse inching forward in small easy steps. “That’s your mission, sure.” He turned his gaze toward the porch, toward Midgett and his wife. “Ours is to suss out bushwhackers and their patrons, and to bring them to the general or to heel.”
The incident with Frye, from earlier, came into my mind—the new tactic of terrorizing the women—as did Revere’s hot words at the campfire the week before, on wanting all Secesh dead. Split-tail as well as the men, he’d said.
Split-tail?
I wondered at his intentions.
Likewise at those of these swamp men—armed as they were like outlaw marauders rather than proper soldiers, some dismounting now, moving out of sight around the side of the house. Two sidestepped me and pushed past Leonidas Midgett, blanketed over his quailing wife, and they strode indoors.
“We have things in hand here,” I said to Revere. “Move on!”
He moved nary a shiver. Quite the contrary. Golar clopped forward, his face framed by the Medusa hair but otherwise blank, saying nothing yet in complete collusion with Revere.
With me aground and them atop those horses, I felt small and at disadvantage.
Revere said, “Your man seems of a different mind.” He nodded toward Fields.
Had they been spying from the trees before making their presence known? And why show up now, when there was no need of it?
I strode up on Revere. “It doesn’t matter what my corporal feels on the issue. I’m in command here.”
Directly afore him now, I was even smaller by comparison. His horse bobbed its enormous head up and down at my aggressive advance, but then held it lazily there aside mine. It watched me with the one dull eye, then smacked its lips.
Revere’s hideous face did not shift. Golar’s either.
And the scene of a sudden paused, everything seemed to cease to move. I found myself puzzling over what it was precisely that I aimed to do. For whose benefit this confrontation? For Leonidas Midgett and his spite-eyed wife? Did they merit this attempt at defense from Revere, from Golar? Or was it Fields I was attempting to protect—from the course Revere would set him upon, toward the impulses of some lesser self? Maybe it was just the idea of right that needed safeguarding. How much would be too much?
It was as if Revere could read my thoughts. “You think me capable of this, Etheridge?”
He looked from me to Midgett’s wife, crumpled in a heap in the doorway, body jerking with the effort to suppress her tormented sobs.
Revere’s face then took on a look not at all expected from him. Something like hurt. “You worked the big house, didn’t you? Eating scraps still warm from Massa’s table and sleeping in the kitchen by night beside old Aunt Chloe. Tell me, were you given tails to wear when serving company?”
His horse capered right, but Revere did not quit me from his leer.
“You were told something shiny about yourself and you believed it, word for word. That you were the top-dog nigger. You took from this mostly just the ‘nigger’ part, that you were top among your breed but less than them, regardless. And so you think you have to prove something to good ol’ Massa. What will you not do to keep your place on top of the heap?”
His horse nickered, as though agreeing with his assessment of me.
“I pity you, Etheridge. You’re not fit to lead colored men. I ain’t sure you’re fit to breathe.”
He double-whistled then, sharp and sudden, and the swamp men came together, those gone inside the house and likewise the ones disappeared around the side. Without him or Golar saying a word, the band of them turned their mounts and set off at an easy pace, across the field, toward the trees.
I did not dare look at my men—into their faces. I couldn’t reckon what it was they saw of me, or would from then on see. What had Revere exposed, which even to my own ear registered a whisper of truth?
“Thank you, Sergeant,” I heard Leonidas Midgett say, “thank you for . . .”
“Shut it, goddammit,” said I, “and tell us the whereabouts of Llewelyn and his men, Riley and Lawrence.”
He was unaccustomed to being thusly addressed, but his chastened face appeared to allow that, from here on, such would be his lot. “Lew was only here two nights before setting sail again. Bound for Roanoke, I assumed, but did not ask.”
His wife fiercely sobbed, unabating. He took her in his arms and held her fast, as though this present show of protection might in some way blot her imaginings of things gone another way with the swamp men. He then pushed into the house and closed the door. I heard the metal on metal of locks securing into place.
Fields glared at me. “Why did you keep me off him?”
He wanted a repeat of Clapson’s farm: not just information, but retribution.
“I need cleansed, Richard. Working they vegetable plots and tending they beefs and cleaning up they shit and no choice but to do it. I need rinsed of the stink, man.”
He went to his horse and took the reins from Hews, who was holding them. He mounted, then faced me.
“But you?” He shook his head. “God damn, Richard,” he said.
I couldn’t distinguish Fields’s reproach from Revere’s earlier one. It all recalled pups and paps and pride in pedigree, and it felt shameful. Hide-your-face shameful.
Fields hawed and heeled his horse’s ribs and set off up the lane.
“Hews!” I called. “You, Phillips, and Land, catch up and keep apace with him. Make sure he gets back safely.”
They set off.
I mounted my horse and led the others, silent and uninviting of the least query.