Authors: Shelby Foote
Chickamauga (15 page)
“So now you’ve got to it,” Granny said. “Well what, Mr. Forrest?”
“Why, just have done with this foolishness. I told
you I’ve got that boy, in close arrest, with a guard with a bayonet. But there won’t be any trouble there. I figured even yesterday morning that he had already lost his mind. But I reckon he’s recovered enough of it since the Provost took him last night to comprehend that I still consider myself his commander even if he don’t. So all that’s necessary now is for you to put your foot down. Put it down hard. Now. You’re her grandma. She lives in your home. And it looks like she is going to live in it a good while yet before she gets back to Memphis to that uncle or whoever it is that calls himself her guardian. So just put your foot down. Make her. Mr. Millard would have already done that if he had been here. And I know when. It would have been two days ago by now.”
Granny waited until he got done. She stood with her arms crossed, holding each elbow in the other. “Is that all I’m to do?” she said.
“Yes,” General Forrest said. “If she don’t want to listen to you right at first, maybe as his commander—”
Granny didn’t even say “Hah.” She didn’t even send me. She didn’t even stop in the hall and call. She went upstairs herself and we stood there and I thought maybe she was going to bring the dulcimer too and I thought how if I was General Forrest I would go back and get Cousin Philip and make him sit in the library until about supper-time while Cousin Melisandre played the dulcimer and sang. Then he could take Cousin Philip on back and then he could finish the war without worrying.
She didn’t have the dulcimer. She just had Cousin Melisandre. They came in and Granny stood to one side again with her arms crossed, holding her elbows. “Here she is,” she said. “Say it—This is Mr. Bedford Forrest,”
she told Cousin Melisandre. “Say it,” she told General Forrest.
He didn’t have time. When Cousin Melisandre first came, she tried to read aloud to Ringo and me. It wasn’t much. That is, what she insisted on reading to us wasn’t so bad, even if it was mostly about ladies looking out windows and playing on something (maybe they were dulcimers too) while somebody else was off somewhere fighting. It was the way she read it. When Granny said this is Mister Forrest, Cousin Melisandre’s face looked exactly like her voice would sound when she read to us. She took two steps into the library and curtsied, spreading her hoops back, and stood up. “General Forrest,” she said. “I am acquainted with an associate of his. Will the General please give him the sincerest wishes for triumph in war and success in love, from one who will never see him again?” Then she curtsied again and spread her hoops backward and stood up and took two steps backward and turned and went out.
After a while Granny said, “Well, Mr. Forrest?”
General Forrest began to cough. He lifted his coat-tail with one hand and reached the other into his hip pocket like he was going to pull at least a musket out of it and got his handkerchief and coughed into it a while. It wasn’t very clean. It looked about like the one Cousin Philip was trying to wipe his coat off with in the summer house day before yesterday. Then he put the handkerchief back. He didn’t say “Hah” either. “Can I reach the Holly Branch road without having to go through Jefferson?” he said.
Then Granny moved. “Open the desk,” she said. “Lay out a sheet of note-paper.” I did. And I remember how I stood at one side of the desk and General Forrest at the other, and watched Granny’s hand move the pen steady and not very slow and not very long across the
paper because it never did take her very long to say anything, no matter what it was, whether she was talking it or writing it. Though I didn’t see it then, but only later, when it hung framed under glass above Cousin Melisandre’s and Cousin Philip’s mantel: the fine steady slant of Granny’s hand and General Forrest’s sprawling signatures below it that looked itself a good deal like a charge of massed calvary:
Lieutenant P. S. Backhouse, Company D, Tennessee Cavalry, was this day raised to the honorary rank of Brevet Major General and killed while engaging the enemy. Vice whom Philip St-Just Backus is hereby appointed Lieutenant, Company D, Tennessee Cavalry.
N. B. Forrest Geni
I didn’t see it then. General Forrest picked it up. “Now I’ve got to have a battle,” he said. “Another sheet, son.” I laid that one out on the desk.
“A battle?” Granny said.
“To give Johnston,” he said. “Confound it, Miss Rosie, can’t you understand either than I’m just a fallible mortal man trying to run a military command according to certain fixed and inviolable rules, no matter how foolish the business looks to superior outside folks?”
“All right,” Granny said. “You had one. I was looking at it.”
“So I did,” General Forrest said. “Hah,” he said. “The battle of Sartoris.”
“No,” Granny said. “Not at my house.”
“They did all the shooting down at the creek,” I said.
“What creek?” he said.
So I told him. It ran through the pasture. Its name
was Hurricane Creek but not even the white people called it hurricane except Granny. General Forrest didn’t either when he sat down at the desk and wrote the report to General Johnston at Jackson:
A unit of my command on detached duty engaged a body of the enemy and drove him from the field and dispersed him this day 28th ult. April 1863 at Harrykin Creek. With loss of one man.
N. B. Forrest Genl
I saw that. I watched him write it. Then he got up and folded the sheets into his pocket and was already going toward the table where his hat was.
“Wait,” Granny said. “Lay out another sheet,” she said. “Come back here.”
General Forrest stopped and turned. “Another one?”
“Yes!” Granny said. “A furlough, pass—whatever you busy military establishments call them! So John Sartoris can come home long enough to—” and she said it herself, she looked straight at me and even backed up and said some of it over as though to make sure there wouldn’t be any mistake: “—can come back home and give away that damn bride!”
And that was all. The day came and Granny waked Ringo and me before sunup and we ate what breakfast we had from two plates on the back steps. And we dug up the trunk and brought it into the house and polished the silver and Ringo and I brought dogwood and red-bud branches from the pasture and Granny cut the flowers, all of them, cutting them herself with Cousin
Melisandre and Philadelphia just carrying the baskets; so many of them until the house was so full that Ringo and I would believe we smelled them even across the pasture each time we came up. Though of course we couldn’t—it was just the food—the last ham from the smokehouse and the chickens and the flour which she had been saving along with the bottle of champagne for the day when the North surrendered—which Louvinia had been cooking for two days now, to remind us each time we approached the house of what was going on and that the flowers were there. As if we could have forgotten about the food. And they dressed Cousin Melisandre and, Ringo in his new blue pants and I in my gray ones which were not so new, we stood in the late afternoon on the gallery—Granny and Cousin Melisandre and Louvinia and Philadelphia and Ringo and I—and watched them enter the gate. General Forrest was not one. Ringo and I had thought maybe he might be, if only to bring Cousin Philip. Then we thought that maybe, since Father was coming anyway, General Forrest would let Father bring him, with Cousin Philip maybe handcuffed to Father and the soldier with the bayonet following, or maybe still just handcuffed to the soldier until he and Cousin Melisandre were married and Father unlocked him.
But General Forrest wasn’t one, and Cousin Philip wasn’t handcuffed to anybody and there was no bayonet and not even a soldier because these were all officers too. And we stood in the parlor while the home-made candles burnt in the last of sunset in the bright candlesticks which Philadelphia and Ringo and I had polished with the rest of the silver because Granny and Louvinia were both busy cooking and even Cousin Melisandre polished a little of it although Louvinia could pick out the ones she polished without hardly looking
and hand them to Philadelphia to polish again:—Cousin Melisandre in the dress which hadn’t needed to be altered for her at all because Mother wasn’t much older than Cousin Melisandre even when she died, and which would still button on Granny too just like it did the day she married in it, and the chaplain and Father and Cousin Philip and the four others in their gray and braid and sabres and Cousin Melisandre’s face was all right now and Cousin Philip’s was too because it just had the beautiful-girl look on it and none of us had ever seen him look any other way. Then we ate, and Ringo and I anyway had been waiting on that for three days and then we did it and then it was over too, fading just a little each day until the palate no longer remembered and only our mouths would run a little water as we would name the dishes aloud to one another, until even the water would run less and less and less and it would take something we just hoped to eat some day if they ever got done fighting, to make it run at all.
And that was all. The last sound of wheel and hoof died away, Philadelphia came in from the parlor carrying the candlesticks and blowing out the candles as she came, and Louvinia set the kitchen clock on the table and gathered the last of soiled silver from supper into the dishpan and it might never have even been. “Well,” Granny said. She didn’t move, leaning her forearms on the table a little and we had never seen that before. She spoke to Ringo without turning her head: “Go call Joby and Lucius.” And even when we brought the trunk in and set it against the wall and opened back the lid, she didn’t move. She didn’t even look at Louvinia either. “Put the clock in too,” she said. “I don’t think we’ll bother to time ourselves tonight.”
STEPHEN VINCENT BENET
Two months have passed since Jackson died in the woods
And they brought his body back to the Richmond State House
To lie there, heaped with flowers, while the bells tolled,
Two months of feints and waiting. And now, at length,
The South goes north again in a second raid,
In the last cast for fortune. A two-edged chance
And yet a chance that may burnish a failing star;
For now, on the wide expanse of the Western board,
Strong pieces that fought for the South have been swept away
Or penned up in hollow Vicksburg. One cool Spring night
Porter’s ironclads run the shore-batteries
Through a velvet stabbed with hot flashes. Grant lands his men,
Drives the relieving force of Johnston away
And sits at last in front of the hollow town
Like a huge brown bear on its haunches, terribly wai ting.
His guns begin to peck at the pillared porches,
The sleepy, sun-spattered streets. His siege has begun.
Forty-eight days that siege and those guns go on
Like a slow hand closing around a hungry throat,
Ever more hungry. The hunger of the hollow towns,
The hunger of sieges, the hunger of lost hope.
As day goes by after day and the shells still whine
Till the town is a great mole-burrow of pits and caves
Where the thin women hide their children, where the tired men
Burrow away from the death that falls from the air
And the common sky turned hostile—and still no hope,
Still no sight in the sky when the morning breaks
But the brown bear there on his haunches, steadfastly waiting,
Waiting like Time for the honey-tree to fall.
The news creeps back to the watchers oversea.
They ponder on it, aloof and irresolute.
The balance they watch is dipping against the South.
It will take great strokes to redress that balance again.
There will be one more moment of shaken scales
When the Laird rams almost alter the scheme of things,
But it is distant. The watchers stare at the board
Waiting a surer omen than Chancellorsville
Or any battle won on a Southern ground.
Lee sees that dip of the balance and so prepares
His cast for the surer omen and his last stroke
At the steel-bossed Northern shield. Once before he tried
That spear-rush North and was halted. It was a chance.
This is a chance. He weighs the chance in his hand
Like a stone, reflecting. Four years from Harper’s Ferry,
Two years since the First Manassas—and this last year
Stroke after stroke successful—but still no end.
He is a man with a knotty club in his hand
Beating off bulls from the breaks in the pasture fence
And he has beaten them back at each fresh assault,
McClellan—Burnside—Hooker at Chancellorsville—
Pope at the Second Manassas—Banks in the Valley—
But the pasture is trampled; his army needs new pas ture.
An army moves like a locust, eating the grain,
And this grain is well-nigh eaten. He cannot mend
The breaks in his fence with famine or starving hands,
And if he waits the wheel of another year
The bulls will come back full-fed, shaking sharper horns
While he faces them empty, armed with a hunger- cracked
Unmagic stick. There is only this thing to do.
To strike at the shield with the strength that he still can use
Hoping to burst it asunder with one stiff blow
And carry the war up North, to the untouched fields
Where his tattered men can feed on the bull’s own grain,
Get shoes and clothes, take Washington if they can,
Holding the fighting-gauge in any event. He weighs
The chance in his hand. I think that he weighed it well
And felt a high-tide risen up in his heart
And in his men a high tide.
They were veterans,
They had never been beaten wholly and blocked but once,
He had driven four Union armies within a year
And broken three blue commanders from their com mand.
Even now they were fresh from triumph. He cast his stone
Clanging at fortune, and set his fate on the odds.
Lincoln hears the rumor in Washington.
They are moving North. The Pennsylvania cities
Hear it and shake, they are loose, they are moving North.
Call up your shotgun-militia, bury your silver,
Shoulder a gun or run away from the State,
They are loose, they are moving. Fighting Joe Hooker has heard it.
He swings his army back across the Potomac,
Rapidly planning, while Lee still visions him South.
Stuart’s horse should have brought the news of that move
But Stuart is off on a last and luckless raid
Far to the East, and the grey host moves without eyes
Through crucial days. They are in the Cumberland now,
Taking minor towns, feeding fat for a little while,
Pressing horses and shoes, paying out Confederate bills
To slow Dutch storekeepers who groan at the money.
They are loose, they are in the North, they are here and there.
Halleck rubs his elbows and wonders where,
Lincoln is sleepless, the telegraph-sounders click
In the War Office day and night. There are lies and rumors,
They are only a mile from Philadelphia now,
They are burning York:—they are marching on Balti more—