Jacob's Ladder (36 page)

“We've Monopole champagne in the house,” Johnny said. “The
Banshee
docked at Wilmington Thursday.”

“Thanks, Johnny. Too early for me. Coffee, Samuel?”

The coffee was hot and black and good. The buffet presented two turkeys and roasts of beef and ham, as well as bread, butter, and condiments. Catesby created a large sandwich and Samuel a more modest one.

“Do take more,” Catesby said. “You're accustomed to hearty fare.”

“At home,” Samuel said. “Where I know its provenance.”

“Only the finest blockade runners supply Johnny's table. I think I will try a glass of champagne.”

“You are a familiar here, I take it,” Samuel said.

“It is the gayest spot in Richmond.”

“I should think it one of the most dangerous,” Samuel said gently.

“Lively gentlemen come to Johnny's for an evening of pleasant conversation, wagers, and a better supper than they'd get elsewhere in Richmond. Judah Benjamin, President Davis's confidant, is a regular.” He put his napkin to his mouth. “On a less contentious topic, I met Sallie Kirkpatrick at Camp Winder the other day.”

The murmur of voices, the clink of money, the whisk of cards. Samuel chewed his sandwich more doggedly than it deserved. “I am not satisfied that we did our best for that child. I am sure I did not. Apparently she and her husband are . . . estranged.”

Catesby described Alexander Kirkpatrick's arrival at Fredericksburg and his subsequent disappearance. “He may have been killed, but he probably deserted. I do think he tried. When I spoke to Sallie the other day she said she would not have Kirkpatrick back under any circumstances. She presumes him dead.”

Samuel shook his head. “These times. What times!” He set his sandwich remains on his plate. “Look here, Catesby . . .”

Catesby shook his head with a smile. “Esteemed father-in-law, I will not ‘look here.' If I am willing to gamble everything in this war, I will take my relaxation as I choose.”

“But you cannot afford to gamble. You are not wealthy.”

Catesby's smile grew more charming. “Like General Lee, sir, I can afford it until I lose.”

FAMILY HAPPINESS

N
EAR
M
T
. J
ACKSON
, V
IRGINIA
M
AY
23, 1863

THE LAMB PRESSED
its seeking head into the crevice of its mother's leg and nibbled on a tuft of wool.

“No, idiot.” Alexander Kirkpatrick pushed the lamb to better align it with the teat. The ewe stood quietly eating the hay Alexander had laid down, undisturbed by either the baby creature seeking her milk or the clumsy man kneeling at her side. Seth, the eldest Danzinger boy, stood outside the perimeter of the ewe's concern, keeping an eye on things.

Early-morning light filtered through cracks between the barn boards. The door, left open when they'd led the ewe inside, was a rectangle of pale light, and along the south wall, windows opened to the new day. The dewy grass gave off a cold rich smell, the farmhouse puffed woodsmoke like a steamboat, and smoke tendrils drifted down to the barn. Alexander was very hungry. He thought he could smell bacon frying.

The lamb connected with its mother's teat.

“Tickle its behind,” Seth advised. “Pretend you are a mother sheep.”

When Alexander hesitated, Seth chided him, “You are too fastidious, Alex. You will never be a stockman if you are fastidious.”

When Alexander tickled the top of the lamb's tail, the tail vibrated furiously and the lamb grew so enthused it butted the udder and lost the teat and searched frantically until the tail started wagging again.

“Good,” Seth said. “The lamb will live. Even old Delilah here has enough milk for one lamb.”

Alexander brushed straw off his trousers. “Sheep are so stupid,” he said.

“So? Yet a lamb who has never nursed before can find its way to its mother's milk and eat and grow. It is a gift of God. Of course,” the boy added solemnly, “this morning, you have given God a hand.”

Alexander didn't say anything. The Danzingers talked all the time but never expected him to say anything. The old grandmother spoke only German and the family often spoke that language among themselves. At dinner table sometimes, conversation flowed around Alexander as if he were a bird in soft air.

“I was joking,” Seth said. “I was pulling your leg.”

Alexander and Seth wore the dark wool trousers and overshirt prescribed by the Brethren. Both wore stiff straw hats.

At fourteen, Seth was the oldest male Danzinger, and sometimes—assuming his murdered father's place—he seemed full-grown. But with Alexander he frequently acted younger, just a boy enjoying a fine May morning in one of God's gardens: the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Now, with self-conscious importance, Seth consulted his father's watch. “I have slopped the hogs and the girls have milked and Willem will have fed the horses and my stomach is growling. Come, my friend, can you smell bacon frying?”

Alexander had arrived at this small farm three months ago, not so long after Henry Danzinger's murder that the man's place had been filled nor the injury healed.

That night, Alexander had walked down the Valley Pike and slid into a haystack before dawn and was awakened after an hour's slumber by pitchfork tines and the hungry moos of cattle waiting to be fed. He crawled out backward on hands and knees, hoping those tines wouldn't poke him again, and found two puzzled boys who waited while he brushed himself.

“Are you a soldier?” Willem Danzinger had asked.

“No,” Alexander said. “I am a scholar of antiquities.”

The boys inspected him for a long moment before Seth Danzinger said, “The cattle must be fed,” and forked a thatch of hay over the rail fence that kept the beasts from devouring this haystack at will.

“We also do not fight,” Willem said with the complacent solemnity of the very young. “God forbids it. Are you hungry? Can you work?”

So the boys brought him into the house and their mother, Gretchen, promptly filled a bowl of oatmeal and set molasses beside the pitcher of fresh cream and when he had emptied the bowl scooped him another. When Alexander was finished he thanked her and she said, “We all work for our food here. There is firewood to be split. For the oven. This size.” With hands apart she indicated the length, and Alexander went outside and split wood, splitting until nearly noon, reducing the mound by two-thirds, and when she came out she said, “That is good. Dinner is ready.”

The wooden table had an empty seat at the head and the grandmother said grace in German, and that afternoon they set Alexander to loading the wagon with manure from the horse barn and forking it onto the wheat ground.

That evening while he washed up at the pump, Seth came to fetch him. “Pretend you are useful,” he whispered. “Do not mention the antiquities.”

The family was waiting in the kitchen. In her rocker nearest the fire the grandmother wasn't missing a thing.

Gretchen Danzinger coughed into her hand. She said, “We have discussed you. You have run from the army, yes?”

“I never wanted to fight. . . .”

“But you have run.”

“Yes.”

“We are in need of man's hands here. We will feed you and you may wear Henry's clothing. I am Henry's wife on earth and in heaven, but we need a man on this farm.”

So Alexander stayed. The work took enough attention so he didn't get lost in his mind. Though all the Brethren community knew a deserter was living with the Danzinger family, no outsiders were told.

It seemed to Alexander that he had been looking all his life to find a place like this. The only books in the house were religious meditations in German and the heavy German Bible on the parlor table. Alexander had nearly forgotten his brief service with the army, nearly forgotten the penitentiary. Since it hurt him to think about such things, why think about them?

One day, shoveling corn into the hammermill, Alexander removed his shirt and young Willem saw his flogging scars and asked, “Were you a slave? I thought only the negroes were slaves.”

Alexander reached behind but couldn't quite touch his old injuries. “Perhaps I was,” he said.

“We do not believe in slaves,” Willem said, sturdily.

Early in the war, Confederate officialdom had been outraged by Brethren pacifism and had imprisoned some of their leaders at Libby Prison, but these good farmers were too important to the war effort to stand on principle. From rich Valley farms came the salt pork, beeves, and wheat that fed the army. When slaves started running away in large numbers, the Brethren, who did not hold with slavery and whose sons were laboring at home, were less affected than the “English” farmers, and Confederate quartermasters who came to Strasburg and Edinburg Mill and Harrisonburg never left empty-handed. Some of the Brethren refused the new currency and insisted on gold (even at a discount), but they sold everything they brought.

Alas, the Shenandoah Valley was no longer the oasis of prosperous farms and tranquil prayer it had been before the war. Each of Stonewall's brilliant victories shattered humble farmers. Bivouacking soldiers pulled down rail fences for their campfires, and no chicken was safe when foragers were in the neighborhood. Partisan rangers prowled the roads by night. Henry Danzinger had gone out to speak at a meeting and was found the next morning with his throat cut, horse and coin purse taken. His new nickel-plated watch lay beside his body. “To murder a man for his few possessions . . .” Henry's widow would wonder and weep. “And to throw away his good watch as if it was nothing. . . .” Near Thornton Gap a farmhouse went up in smoke and in the ruins neighbors found the farmer, his wife, and their two daughters shot to death. Saturday evening, after he had closed his mill gate for the Sabbath, partisan rangers robbed a mill owner near Luray of the week's receipts.

“It is a wicked time,” Gretchen Danzinger said. “We must pray that this scourge be lifted.”

The Danzinger farm was seventy acres along the Shenandoah River, below the richer Burkeholders, above the shaley hardscrabble farms where the farmers were not Brethren.

The Danzingers owned two brood sows (when he was required, they borrowed the Burkeholders' boar), four milk cows (Gretchen Danzinger was a noted cheesemaker), twenty beehives, and a dozen ewes. They planted ten acres in wheat.

Alexander Kirkpatrick was partial to garden work, hoeing between the emerging vegetables, and when they shelled the first peas he sat with the women extracting the tiny green morsels.

Nine-year-old Lisle Danzinger was full of questions, so Alexander told her about ancient Rome, Romulus and Remus, Caesar and Scipio Africanus, while he popped new peas into a bowl. The other female Danzingers listened politely and when he paused resumed their conversation in German.

“Is this true?” Lisle demanded. “Or is it only a story?”

“I don't really know,” Alexander said.

The next morning, after chores, they inspected the ripening timothy. At Seth's suggestion, Alexander knelt to inspect the tiny seed head slumbering in the boot at the base of the plant

“When it comes out of the boot, it comes all at once,” Seth warned. “Then we will be glad for your help. The Burkeholders would help us, but they have their own hay to cut and Mama doesn't wish to trouble them.”

Alexander's arms strengthened and his hands hardened, and in the morning the wet dew-soaked grass wet his trousers to the knee. Breakfast they ate just at daybreak, the noon meal was enormous, and there were always oatmeal or bachelor button cookies in the kitchen.

Each Sunday, when the family dressed for church, Alexander readied the buggy, curried the black horse until it shone, and hitched it to the front gate. One day he might be invited to attend worship but not yet.

After services, the Danzingers paid calls on their neighbors or received visitors at home. Alexander sat on the porch, blank-faced, as the Danzinger's friends rattled on in German. For all he knew they were discussing him! Sometimes Alexander took long walks along the river, shunning the turnpike and better-traveled roads in favor of field edges and the dark woods where wild creatures rear their young. One restless Sunday he came into the kitchen where the women were preparing the Sunday dinner and offered to help, but the discomfort on Gretchen Danzinger's face pushed Alexander out in a cloudburst of apologies.

When they sat to eat, Katrina, the eldest daughter, turned to Alexander with a smile. “Mother said you wish to become a hausfrau. It is more difficult to be a hausfrau than most men think!” The women and girls giggled while Seth and Willem pretended to find the whole business beneath their notice.

The next morning they greased hay-cart axles and sharpened scythes, and the Danzinger boys left the heaviest, dirtiest work to Alexander and weren't satisfied until he was entirely filthy and reeking of masculine sweat.

When the seed heads came out of the boot, the Danzingers cut timothy. They started as soon as the dew dried, quit for dinner (cold chicken, potato salad, buttermilk) at noon. With the sun directly overhead, they began afresh and worked without pause until the evening dew settled. They cut two acres that day. Two days later they raked and stacked the hay. Although Seth had helped his father, he'd never made haystacks himself, and instead of bright green monuments to Brethren industry and God-fearing pride, Danzinger haystacks slumped dejectedly against the poles that skewered them. That night after supper, Alexander collapsed onto his pallet in the harness room with a groan.

By the third day, his hands were calloused, he'd found a working rhythm, and near noon—Gretchen Danzinger and her mother-in-law were laying out the meal under the shade of an old elm tree—Alexander wiped sweat from his forehead and imagined the men who had harvested since ancient days. While emperors reclined sulkily, bored with the rarest wines, in their fields men toiled and drank cool water, and who was to say which was the better portion?

Alexander kept this thought close to him, turning it over and over in his mind, because it was a different sort of thought from those he had had when he was in Yale's cool library reading what scholars proposed. Could he be different? Do men change? How he hoped so!

The next day while he and Seth were honing their scythes, Alexander asked, “This work—how do the other Valley farmers do it?”

Seth was puzzled. “If they are Brethren,” he said, “they work as we do. If they are rich English, their slaves do it.”

“Don't they miss it? The work?”

“Oh, they are much too busy. Rich English are busy making governments and making war.”

“But this is better,” Alexander said.

“Why yes,” Seth said, a trifle smugly. “Yes, it is.”

In the evenings, they sat on the porch, and sometimes Grandmother read meditations aloud from her German prayer book. Seth whittled and Willem daydreamed. He was a dreamy boy. Alexander thought to warn the boy against dreaming, warn him that he should hold fast this world, that the distance between the self and the world should not grow too wide, that a man can lose his way and not be able to find his way back. He said nothing of this, however, because his tongue had thickened from disuse, and he spoke no more than he needed to get through each day. Alexander Kirkpatrick almost felt safe, almost happy.