The Guns of the South

* VIII *

Mollie Bean’s eyes flashed when she saw Caudell. “You hear the latest of what that rascal Forrest done?”

“No. Tell me,” he said eagerly. Nathan Bedford Forrest’s exploits were usually worth hearing, and Mollie, being who she was, usually—as now—found out about them before most people.

She said, “When the telegraph for the armistice got to him, he made like it never did, and took his boys hell-for-leather up into Tennessee—wrecked a big long stretch of the railroad that was feedin’ General Sherman’s army. Some o’ them bluecoats is nearly starvin’, I hear tell.”

“After this past winter, I know more about starving than those Yankees are ever likely to,” Caudell said. “But what did Lincoln and the other Federal bigwigs have to say about him breaking the armistice that way?”

“Reckon they carried on some, but with us here where we are, what can they do but carry on?”

Mollie waved a hand. Along with a good part of the rest of A. P. Hill’s corps, the 47th North Carolina was encamped in the White Lot, the big empty space between the White House and the stump of the Washington Monument. The barracks they occupied had been intended for Pennsylvania regiments on the way south; now the shoe was on the other foot. What with those fine barracks and rations from the bottomless Federal depots, Caudell hadn’t lived so well since he joined the army, and seldom before.

Mollie went on, “They’re callin’ him Hit-’em-Again Forrest, ‘cause they say he wanted to hit the Yankees one more lick, to remind ‘em they was whipped.”

“Hit-’em-Again Forrest.” Caudell said it slowly, savoring the taste. “Yup, that does sound like him. And that’s about the best nickname I’ve heard this side of Stonewall Jackson.” With some dignity, he added, “Not that Nathan’s a bad name.”

“That’s right, it’s just about the same as yours.” Mollie laughed. “Too bad it ain’t your bankrolls that’s just about the same.”

Caudell laughed too, ruefully. “Too bad is right. But if he made his money dealing niggers the way I’ve heard, well, it’s not anything I’d feel easy about doing for myself.” He knew that was hypocritical. The Confederate constitution enshrined the right to own slaves and trade them within the nation’s borders. The Southern economy rested on the backs of its black labor force. But a lot of people who could never have stomached the butcher’s trade ate meat.

Mollie waved again. “Isn’t this grand? Here I am, a nobody from a nowhere town in North Carolina, and now I’ve seen Richmond and Washington City both. Who’d’ve figured I’d travel so far? Must be close to two hundred miles down to Rivington.”

Caudell nodded. The army had expanded his life. Before the war, outside of a couple of trips to Raleigh, he’d spent his whole life inside Nash County. Now he’d been in several different states and even—though recalling it still came hard sometimes—a foreign country: the United States.

Whether in a foreign country or not, Washington was still the source of traditions he held dear, as London once might have been to an early Carolina colonist. He’d spent most of his off-duty time wandering through the city rubbernecking, and was far from the only soldier in gray to go off and see what he could see. The White House secretaries had had to set up a regular tour, taking Confederates through the Presidential mansion in company-sized groups.

He’d also walked over to the Capitol. Federal senators and congressmen were beginning to return to Washington, though a fair number of the important-looking men he’d seen flinched from him and his comrades as if they were Satan’s spawn set loose on earth.

The ordinary folk of Washington City did better at taking their occupiers in stride. Their principal complaint against the rebels was that they had too little money, and that in Confederate currency. Lee had issued an order that made the locals take Southern money in exchange for goods and services, but he could not make them like it.

Caudell had bought himself a drink at Willard’s, a couple of blocks east of the White House, on the corner of Fourteenth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. Lincoln and Grant had each spent his first night in Washington City at Willard’s. Everyone who was anyone in Federal Washington frequented the hotel; its bars, sitting and dining rooms, and corridors had probably seen more war business done than any other place in the city, the White House not excepted. That was why Caudell went there; Willard’s fame—or notoriety—had spread south as well as north.

He found his shot overpriced and the whiskey villainous. “Is this what you served General Grant?” he asked indignantly.

The bartender, an Irishman of impressive size, glared down at him. “The very same, Johnny Reb, and I found himself not so particular as you.” Caudell shut up. From some of the stories he’d heard about Grant’s drinking, the fellow might even have been telling the truth.

Fighting Joe Hooker had also drunk at Willard’s, and given his name to the blocks south and east of it. Caudell stayed away from what the natives called Hooker’s Division. Confederates who did go in to visit such establishments as Mme. Russell’s Bake Oven, Headquarters U.S.A., and Gentle Annie Lyle’s place quickly learned to travel in pairs. Gamblers, pickpockets, flimflam men, and the girls themselves preyed on soldiers in gray as readily as they had on soldiers in blue. Plenty of men came back without a cent; a few did not come back at all.

Outside of the monuments, Washington City left Claudell disappointed. So had Richmond, outside of Capitol Square. They both seemed just towns intent on their own concerns, For the leading cities of great nations, somehow that was not enough. Rocky Mount and Nashville back in Nash County were towns intent on their own concerns. One day, maybe, he’d get back to Nash County and to his own concerns. Soon, he hoped.

The Confederate bands on the White House lawn struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner.” General Lee saluted the color-bearer, who marched before the party of high-ranking Federal officers coming to reclaim Washington from the Army of Northern Virginia. The flag of the United States had been his, not long ago, and still commanded his respect.

The Federals also had a band with them. It returned the compliment by playing “Dixie”—not the South’s official anthem, but the tune most closely associated with it. A short, slim man with a close-trimmed, light brown beard and three stars on each shoulder strap stepped out from among his comrades, strode briskly up to the waiting Confederate officers. He saluted. “General Lee?” His voice was quiet, his accent western.

Lee returned the salute. “General Grant,” he acknowledged formally, then went on, “We met once in Mexico, I believe, sir, though I confess to my embarrassment that your face does not seem perfectly familiar to me. Doubtless it is the beard.”

“I remember the day,” Grant said. “I recognized you at once, beard or no.”

“You’re too kind, when I’ve also gone all gray while you remain so brightly fledged,” Lee said. “Let me commend you on your excellent band.”

Grant shrugged. His long cigar waggled at one corner of his mouth. “I care nothing for music, I’m afraid. I know only two tunes: one’s ‘Yankee Doodle’ and the other isn’t.” He brought the small joke out pat, as if he’d used it many times before.

Lee laughed politely, then turned serious once more. “Please believe me when I express my sincere compliments on the skill with which you handled the Army of the Potomac, General Grant. Never in the course of the war did I face an abler opponent, nor one who put more of his men into the battle.”

Grant’s pale blue eyes met and held his. All at once, he realized how much the Federal commander still ached to fight. “Had it not been for your repeaters, General Lee, I maintain we should have been treading on the streets of Richmond rather than here.”

“That may be so, General,” Lee said. From what Andries Rhoodie had told him, it was so. But Ulysses Grant did not need to know that. And the South did have those repeaters.

Having Rhoodie pop up in his thoughts made Lee glance over to the Rivington men, who stood in a small group of their own on the White House lawn, a few paces from the assembled officers of the Army of Northern Virginia. Not all the men from out of time were there. Two had died in the fighting outside Washington, and another three were wounded. Confederate soldiers had carried one of them back to the surgeons, who amputated his shattered leg.

The Rivington men got their other two wounded fighters back to a physician of their own. From what Lee had heard, Confederate soldiers who saw their wounds thought they would lose limbs, too. Yet. here both of them stood with their comrades, bandaged but whole. Their eyes were clear of fever, too, and fever killed more men than bullets. The Rivington men had also reclaimed the man upon whom the Confederates had operated. Fever had already seized him; the surgeons were sure he could not last long. The doctor from out of time broke the septic fever, though. That Rivington man was not here, but by all accounts he would live.

All the Confederate surgeons were still scratching their heads; a few had already begged the Rivington physician for lessons. Lee’s hand went for a moment to the vial of white pills in his waistcoat pocket. In 2014, medicines did what they claimed to do.

Lee’s thoughts returned to the ceremony. “Shall we proceed, sir?”

But Grant still had the recent battle on his mind. “If your gunners hadn’t wrecked the Long Bridge, we would have driven you out of Washington City even after you penetrated our fortifications outside of town.”

“Your men crossing in large numbers from Virginia certainly would have made our task more difficult,” Lee said. “You have Brigadier General Alexander to blame for their inability to do so.” He gestured toward the artillery commander of Longstreet’s corps.

E. Porter Alexander was an enthusiastic-looking officer of about thirty, with sharp gray eyes and a full, rather pointed brown beard. He said, “Blame my pair of rifled Whitworth cannon, General Grant. Those two English guns were the only pieces I had with the range and accuracy to hit the bridge from my position.”

“Shall we proceed, sir?” Lee asked Grant again. This time the Federal commander gave a brusque nod. Lee turned to the Confederate musicians. “Gentlemen, if you please.”

The bandsmen struck up a brisk tattoo. The Confederate sentries who had patrolled the White House grounds since the Army of Northern Virginia: seized Washington now formed themselves in two neat ranks. Their leader, a lieutenant in a clean, well-pressed uniform, borrowed specially for the occasion, saluted Lee.

Lee returned the courtesy, then spoke formally to Grant: “In recognition of the armistice between our countries, and in recognition of the cooperation United States forces have shown in removing themselves from the territory of the Confederate States, it is my honor to return custody of the White House, and through it of all Washington, to the U.S.A.”

“I accept them back, General Lee, on behalf of the United States of America,” Grant said—hardly a fancy speech, but well done in a plain sort of way. The Southern musicians fell silent. After a moment, Grant remembered to signal to his own band. They took up the same tattoo the Confederates had abandoned; Lee wondered if Grant noticed it was the same. Federal sentries in blue marched onto the White House lawn to replace the sentries in gray who had come away from the mansion.

“May our two nations long enjoy peace and amicable dealings with each other,” Lee said.

“I also hope peace is maintained between us, General Lee,” Grant said.

Lee fought down a touch of pique. Even now, the Federal leaders remained reluctant to acknowledge the Confederacy as a country in its own right. Back to basics, then: “We shall return to Virginia tomorrow. My thanks to your engineers for having so quickly and competently repaired the Long Bridge.”

“We shan’t be sorry to see the Army of Virginia go immediately”—Grant said the word as if it were spelled immejetly—”and that is the truth, sir. We would have had you on your way sooner, but—”

“But you were busy wrecking the fortifications on the Virginia side of the Potomac and removing your guns from them so we should have no opportunity to turn them against you,” Lee finished when the commander of the Army of the Potomac ran down in the middle of his sentence. Grant nodded. Lee went on, “In your situation, I should have done the same.”

Lee glanced back toward the White House, wondering if President Lincoln would come out to take part in the ceremony. But Lincoln, as he’d done since the day when Washington fell, remained inside.

Rumor said his melancholia was at such a pitch that he spoke to no one, but stayed alone all day in a darkened room. Lee knew rumor lied. Federal messengers went in and out of the White House at all hours of the day and night. That was as well. No less than the Confederacy, the United States would need a strong hand to guide them through the aftermath of war. But for now, the pain of loss was simply too much to let Lincoln show himself in the Southern-held Federal capital.

“Good day to you, General Grant.” Lee held out his hand. Grant shook it. His grip was hard and firm; though small, he seemed strong. Lee nodded to the Confederate band. It began to pay “Dixie.” Grant turned toward the Confederate flag a color-bearer carried. He removed his black felt hat. “Thank you, sir,” Lee said, glad Grant at least would publicly salute the Stainless Banner.

“If it’s to be done, it should be done properly,” Grant said, echoing Lincoln. “I wish it weren’t being done.”

The Federal band swung into “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Lee immediately removed his own hat in salute to the flag that had once been his. Those Confederate officers who wore hats imitated their leader. Almost all of them had served in the old army under that flag. Many had fought in Mexico and against Indians alongside the Federal officers behind Grant. Those bonds were sundered forever now.

The music ended. Lee and Grant exchanged one last salute. The Confederate officers left the White House grounds to return to their quarters; many of them were staying at Willard’s: Lee and his aides still slept in their tents, which they’d set up near the State Department building. But even Lee did not deny himself Willard’s table. The oysters were monstrous good.

He turned to Walter Taylor. “We shall go home now. Let the tents be struck.”

The Yankees had built a fort to cover the southern end of the Long Bridge. Lee stood on the earthen walls and watched the soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia file past, bands playing, flags fluttering in the breeze, men singing and cheering the end of the war. Some of the soldiers tramped south to Alexandria, to take the Orange and Alexandria Railroad—or that portion of it still intact—toward Richmond. Others marched northwest along the road that paralleled the Potomac, headed for Fort Haggery across from Georgetown. Though armistice had come, Confederates and Federals still felt the need to take precautions against each other.

Lee walked over to the post to which Traveller was hitched. He let Walter Taylor untie the horse, then mounted. He rode northwest himself. His staff officers followed. They kept a careful distance—ahead, hardly more than a mile away, stood Arlington on its commanding hill. Arlington, the mansion in which he’d been married; Arlington, the great house in which his wife had lived, and he too, when duty brought him close to Washington; Arlington, from which Mary Custis Lee had fled a week before Virginia formally seceded…Arlington, which the Federals had captured and used as their own for the three years since.

Every minute brought Lee closer, every minute showed him more, clearly how harsh the Federals had been. Earthen forts scarred the grounds he had labored so hard to restore in the years just before the war. Endless stables for Federal cavalry had gone up between the mansion and the Potomac. The horses were out of them now, but the memory of their presence lingered still. Lee wished for Hercules to cleanse the row on row of wooden sheds, but even the demigod might have found it beyond his powers.

Also deserted were the cabins and huts south of the stables. No, not quite deserted: a black face peered out at Lee from behind a wall, then vanished again. But most of the free Negroes had fled their shantytown when Washington fell for fear of being reenslaved in the aftermath of Confederate victory. Irony there, Lee thought; he had manumitted all the estate’s nearly two hundred bondsmen on his father-in-law’s death.

The west wind blew the stables’ stench away from him. But a new miasma came from Arlington itself, a miasma compounded of sweat and filth and pus and suffering: the Federals had made his home into a hospital. Dwarfed by the heavy Doric columns of the porch, doctors in blue still hurried back and forth. Lee had exempted the place from the general Federal evacuation of Southern soil until the last wounded man could be moved without suffering.

Arlington’s lawns had been sadly neglected under the Northern occupation; they were uncut, unwatered, and unkempt. Here and there, not far from the mansion, fresh, raw upturnings of red Virginia earth further marred what had once been a smooth and lovely expanse. Under that freshly turned soil lay Federal soldiers slain in the Wilderness, at Bealeton, and, he supposed, in the fighting in and around Washington City. The Confederate repeaters had filled all Washington’s proper cemeteries to overflowing. Injured men who died here stayed here.

One of the hurrying Federal doctors at last caught sight of Lee. When the man recognized him, he stopped so short he almost stumbled. Then he came down the hill toward him at a trot. He saluted as if Lee commanded his own army. “Sir, I am Henry Brown, surgeon of the 1st New Jersey.” He wore captain’s bars and a haggard expression. “How may I help you? May I show you through—your home?”

“Wounded men yet remain inside, sir?” Lee asked.

“Yes, General, perhaps to the number of a hundred. The rest have either recovered sufficiently to be taken elsewhere or—” Brown jerked a thumb in the direction of the new graves.

“I cannot imagine your soldiers would wish to see me, when I am the author of their pain,” Lee said. “I would not inflict myself upon them.”

“Many of them, I think, would be pleased if you visited.” One of Brown’s eyebrows quirked upward. “As you may be aware, sir, you are held in considerable respect by the Army of the Potomac.” Lee shook his head. The surgeon persisted: “It truly would help restore their spirits, I believe.”

“Only if you are certain, sir,” Lee said, doubtful still. Brown nodded vigorously. Lee said, “Very well, then. I am relying upon your good judgment.”

He swung down from Traveller. When his staff officers saw him head for the mansion, they exclaimed and dismounted. too. They rushed after him. Charles Marshall drew his sword; Venable and Taylor took out pistols instead. “You mustn’t go alone into that nest of Yankees, sir,” Taylor protested.

“I thank you for taking thought of my safety, gentlemen, but I doubt I am thrusting myself into a desperadoes’ lair,” Lee said.

“No, indeed,” Henry Brown said indignantly.

Flanked by his aides and the surgeon, Lee strode between the two central columns up onto the porch of his old home. A startled Federal sentry at the door presented arms to him. He politely dipped his head to the man. Not long ago, the fellow would have been overjoyed to kill him. Now he remained on Confederate soil only because Lee declined to evict his wounded comrades.

The sickroom smell, almost palpable outside, grew thicker still when the sentry opened the door to let Lee go through. A surgeon probing a wound looked up in surprise. “Get on with it, goddam you,” his patient gasped. Then he too saw who stood in the doorway. “No. Wait.”

Lee looked at the thin men who lay on cots in what had been his front room. They stared back, many of them with fever-bright eyes, His name ran in a whisper from bed to bed. A young blond soldier, his right arm gone at the shoulder, heaved himself up to a sitting position. “You come to gloat?” he demanded.

Lee almost turned on his heel to walk out of Arlington then and there. But before he could move, another Federal, this one with only half a left leg, said, “Come on, Joe, you know he ain’t that way.”

“I came to see brave men,” Lee said quietly, “and to honor them for their bravery. The war is over now. We are countrymen no longer. But we need be enemies no longer, either. I would hope one day for us to be friends again, and hope that day comes speedily.”

He walked from bed to bed, chatting briefly with each man. Joe and a couple of others turned their heads away. But as Henry Brown had predicted, most of the men seemed eager to meet him, eager to talk with him. The question he heard oftenest was “Where’d you rebs get those damned repeaters?” Several men added, as Ulysses Grant had, “Wouldn’t’ve been for them, we’d’ve licked you.”

“The rifles come from North Carolina,” he said over and over, his usual answer, true but incomplete. As usual, the Federals found it hard to believe. As usual, they would have found the truth even harder.

One big, high-ceilinged room after another. Lee gave all his attention to the broken men on their canvas cots. They deserved it; they had fought as gallantly as any Southerner and kept up the fight as long as they could in the face of the AK-47s’ overwhelming firepower. Concentrating on the soldiers also kept him from noticing how Arlington itself had suffered. But the brutal fact struck home, no matter how he tried to avoid it. He’d never been good at self-deception.

The mansion—his mansion—had till recently held far more wounded Federals than now inhabited it. Their blood and other, less noble, bodily fluids stained rugs, floors, walls. Those floors and walls were also scarred and chipped from the rough use they’d taken since 1861. He’d expected nothing better.

He’d also expected much of the old furniture to be missing. Rich goods in the house of an enemy were fair game for soldiers. But he had not expected the vandalism of what remained, the destruction for destruction’s sake. Yankees had carved their initials into those bureaus and chests that were too heavy to carry off and had escaped being chopped up for firewood. Scrawls, some of them filthy, decorated the walls.

The sole relief Lee knew was that Mary was not at his side. Arlington had been her home before it was his; seeing it now would bring her only grief. The war had been cruel to her: forced from Arlington, then from White House, the family plantation on the Pamunkey—the plantation had ended up as McClellan’s base for his assault on Richmond, and White House itself burned to the ground. Now the South had victory, but at what price?

Only now did he think that he could have avenged the burning of one White House with the burning of another. He shook his head, rejecting the idea. Bandits and guerrillas made war that way; civilized nations did not.

“We must have a just and lasting peace, gentlemen,” he told the wounded Federals lying in the room where he and Mary had so often slept together. “We must.”

Maybe the vehemence in his usually gentle voice touched the soldiers. One of them said, “I expect we will, General Lee, with men like you around to help make it.”

Moved in spite of himself, Lee said, “God bless you, young man.”

“Out this door here,” Henry Brown said, pointing.

“I do know my way, doctor, I assure you,” Lee replied. Brown stammered in embarrassed confusion. Lee was embarrassed, too, at his own sarcasm. “Never mind, sir. Lead on.”

At last the ordeal was over. Lee and his staff officers walked out of Arlington to their horses, which were cropping the grass they could reach. The Federal surgeon said, “Thank you for your gracious kindness, General. The men will remember your visit for the rest of their lives, as shall I.”

“Thank you, doctor. I hope that, by your aid and that of your colleagues, those lives are long and healthy. A good afternoon to you, sir.”

Henry Brown hurried back into Arlington to resume his duties. Lee stood by Traveller for several minutes without mounting, his eyes never moving from the mansion. At last, Charles Venable asked hesitantly,” Are you all right, sir?”

Recalled to himself, Lee started slightly. His fist came down on Traveller’s saddle, hard enough that the horse let out a startled snort. His eyes were still on Arlington. “Too bad,” he said. “Too bad! Oh, too bad!”

He climbed aboard Traveller and rode away. He supposed his staff officers followed, for they were there when he needed them again. But he did not look back.

The train puffed into Manassas Junction, jerked to a noisy stop. The thick black smoke that blew back into every car smelled strange, wrong to Nate Caudell: the engine was a big, coal-burning brute, newly captured from the Yankees, not wood-fueled like the locomotives the Confederacy had been using.

“All out, boys,” Captain Lewis called. “We’ve got more marching to do.” The men of Company D rose, and part of Company E with them. After the fighting from the Wilderness to Washington City, a single passenger coach was more than enough to hold a company.

As she stepped down from the train, Mollie Bean said, “Smoothest railroading trip I ever took.”

“No wonder,” Caudell said, crunching down onto gravel beside her. “This stretch of the Orange and Alexandria stayed in Federal hands up till the very end of the war. They didn’t have to make their trains run on patches and prayers the way we did.” He stretched till something crackled in his back. His seat had been too hard and too upright: He supposed he should count himself lucky all the same. Some Confederates were coming south on freight cars.

“Don’t just stand there,” Captain Lewis said sharply. “Form by squads. I want you to look smart.”

The company lined up behind the Castalia Invincibles banner, which now more nearly resembled a lace doily than a proper flag, so many bullets and shell fragments having pierced it in the late campaign. Its polished mahogany staff was new, however, as was the gilded eagle atop that staff. The men had clubbed together to buy them in Washington. A Minié ball had snapped the old staff in the fighting near Fort Stevens.

Two squad leaders were also new. Edwin Powell had taken a fourth wound outside Washington City. From this one, unlike the others, he would not rejoin Confederate service; it cost him his left arm. And Otis Massey went into the trenches around the Federal capital, but he never came out again. Two veteran privates, Bill Griffin and Burton Winstead, took their places. For that matter, Captain Thorp of the Chicora Guards headed the regiment; a leg wound had laid up Colonel Faribault.

Bill Smith and Marcellus Joyner, the surviving regimental musicians, got the 47th North Carolina moving. Some people cheered as they marched through Manassas Junction. Some just stood and watched, their faces expressionless. The Yankees had held the town for most of the war; by the look of them, a good many local shopkeepers hadn’t let that stop them from getting fat. Almost everyone seemed better fed than the victorious soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia.

The men tramped southwest down the line of the railroad. They’d gone less than a mile before Caudell whistled softly. “When the Yankees set out to tear up a train track, they didn’t fool around, did they?” he said softly.

“Nope,” Dempsey Eure agreed, surveying the line with a critical eye. “That there’s what I call wreckin’ with a vengeance.”

Railroads were prime targets for soldiers North and South all through the war. Locomotives hauled more men and supplies faster than they could move any other way. Wrecking the enemy’s tracks was one of the best ways to keep him from doing what he wanted to do. Here the Federals had torn up a ten-mile stretch of their own track to keep the Confederates from using the line against them after the battle of Bealeton.

Burning ties, uprooting rails, heating them in the flames, and then bending them—that was all part of the game. But the Yankees had gone a step farther. Somehow they’d not just bent the rails they’d taken up, but twisted them into corkscrews that lay in the tall grass and shrubs as if discarded there by giants.

When Caudell spoke that conceit aloud, Dempsey Eure said, “Wish I had me the bottle them giants was openin’ with corkscrews that size. Reckon I could put walls inside an’ live like it was a plantation house. There’d be room and to spare, that’s certain.”

“I just wonder how long it’ll be till this stretch gets rebuilt,” Caudell said. “But for Tredegar Iron Works, the South doesn’t have any place that rolls track, and a godawful lot of it’s been ruined.”

Dempsey Eure worried less over the state of the Confederacy’s railroads than that Caudell hadn’t cared for his joke. Snapping his fingers in annoyance, he said, “Your fret tin’ over things bigger’n you ain’t gonna change ‘em none.”

Since that was true, Caudell didn’t answer. Neither did he stop worrying. Night was falling by the time the 47th North Carolina reached Catlett’s Station, where the railroad became functional once more. The regiment camped outside. the little town.

Not everything flammable had been burned. A tumbledown barn furnished wood for campfires. Caudell reflected that one day soon the army would have to give over its free and easy ways of destruction; that barn had undoubtedly belonged to a citizen of Virginia. Caudell hoped he was a Union man, but whether or no, his property was going up in flames.

Soldiers gathered round the fires, boiling coffee, toasting hardtacks, cooking up stews with salt pork and desiccated vegetables. Caudell ate till he was full, filled his tin coffee cup three times. He’d started getting used to a full belly again, after so long living on less. He suspected the vast supply dumps in and around Washington City could have fed the entire Confederate nation, not just the Army of Northern Virginia. The soldiers were still enjoying captured Yankee rations.

He stuck a twig into the flames, used its lighted end to get a cigar going. He held the flavorful smoke in his mouth a long time, savoring it; it went so well with real coffee. He tried to blow a smoke ring when he let it out, but it emerged in a ragged cloud. He lay back on his elbows with a smile. Failing usually annoyed him, but not tonight.

“Get you somethin’ more to eat, Nate?” Mollie Bean said, standing. “I could use a bit more myself.”

“No thanks…Melvin. I’ve had plenty. There was so much of everything up in Washington that I sometimes wonder why the North ever wanted us back. Seems they had a-plenty just by themselves.”

That drew mutters of agreement from everyone who heard it. Allison High said, “Without our new rifles, reckon the Yankees might’ve wore us down in the end. Like Nate says, they had them a heap more of everything else.”

“You always were a gloomy cuss, Allison,” William Winstead said. “We’d’ve licked ‘em no matter what kind of guns we was totin’. We’s tougher’n they are.”

“They were plenty tough enough, Bill,” Caudell put in, and again no one said no.” And there were always an awful lot more of them than there were of us. I’m just awfully happy I had myself a repeater.”

“That’s so, Nate; can’t argue it,” Winstead said. “I’m going to see if I can’t sneak mine back with me down to the farm. It’d make a better huntin’ gun than the one I got, so long as I can keep it in cartridges.”

“You got that straight, Bill,” said Kennel Tant, another farmer. “Ain’t lookin’ forward to a one-shot muzzle-loader again, no indeed.”

“The guns and cartridges come out of Rivington, for heaven’s sake,” Caudell said. “That’s not a long trip for any of us. I expect we’ll be able to buy more ammunition there.”

“That’ll take gettin’ used to, havin’ to buy cartridges again,” Allison High said. He paused, his long, gloomy features visibly souring further. “Wonder what them Rivington men’ll charge for ‘em.”

Silence—unhappy silence—reigned around the campfire. Prices all through the Confederacy had spiraled dizzily high. In the army, that did not matter so much: food, a little; shelter, of a sort; and clothing, sometimes, were provided. But when a man had to pay for them again…Caudell thought about laying down fifty or seventy-five dollars for a hat, when that was several months’ pay for a teacher. The farmers who made up the vast majority of the Castalia Invincibles were lucky. At least they would be able to feed themselves once they got home. He wondered how he would manage.

Someone else was thinking along with him: Dempsey Eure said, “Might could be I’ll stay in the army.”

“I only hope they’ll want to keep you,” Caudell said. That brought on another break in the talk. With peace at hand, the army would shrink drastically. Still, he doubted it would shrink to the tiny force the United States had had before the war—how could it, with such a long border to defend against those same United States? Men without prospects, men without families would want to stay in, and some might be able to.

“Wouldn’t mind another stretch myself,” Mollie Bean said. “Still and all, wouldn’t be so easy—” She let her voice trail away. Caudell understood her hesitation. Soldiering now would be garrison duty, most of it, and how could she hope to keep up her masquerade under such circumstances? On the other hand, having known the true comradeship of men, how could she go back to serving as a mere receptacle for their lusts? If she couldn’t stand that any longer, though, what could she do? All good questions, and he had answers for none of them.

Or was that so? “You know, Melvin,” he said, careful to respect her public façade of masculinity, “the better you read and cipher, the more choices you have with your life, the more different things you could do if you wanted to.”

“That’s so,” Alsie Hopkins said. “Me, I don’t know my letters from next week, so I can’t do much but farm. ‘Course, I never wanted to do much but farm, neither.”

Mollie looked thoughtful. “You’ve taught me some, Nate. I reckon I could do with more. You still carry a primer in your knapsack?”

“Two of ‘em, and a Testament, too,” he answered.

“Whip ‘em out,” she told him. Caudell dug in his knapsack, came out with a good Confederate primer: “If one Southern man can lick seven Yankees, how many Yankees can three Southern men lick?” was one of its arithmetic lessons.

“What’d she ask him to whip out?” Dempsey Eure asked. But he spoke softly, so Mollie would not hear and be hurt. Everyone in the Castalia Invincibles was fond of her. She walked over, sat down beside Caudell, and bent her head to the book.

The Orange and Alexandria Railroad was broken again north of Bealeton; the regiment had to detrain and march over the recent field of battle. The furrows plowed by shell and solid shot still tore the ground, though sprouting grass and wildflowers were beginning to repair those gashes on the green body of the earth.

“It’s like a different place now,” Rufus Daniel said. “A sight more peaceful without Yankees allover it, too.”

So many Yankees and Confederates would never leave Bealeton again. Humped-up dirt marked shallow common graves. Some of them had been dug too shallow; from one a fleshless arm protruded, the clawlike hand at the end of it reaching toward the sky. Dempsey Eure pointed. “Look at the old soldier, beggin’ for his pay!”

Caudell snorted. “And you want to stay in the army, Dempsey, so you can end up just like him?”

“We’ll all end up like him sooner or later, Nate,” Eure answered, unwontedly sober.

“There you are right, Sergeant,” Chaplain William Lacy said. “The questions that remain are the path one takes to reach that end and one’s fate thereafter.”

Eure could not stay serious long. “Preacher, if it’s all the same to you—I’d sooner take the railroad.”

A lot of chaplains would have swelled up in righteous wrath and thundered damnation at him for his flippancy. Lacy made as if to grab the AK-47 off a nearby soldier’s back and aim it at the sergeant. Laughing, Caudell said, “Go easy there, Chaplain, you’re a noncombatant.”

“A good thing you reminded me.” But Lacy was laughing, too. Laughing came easy on a bright summer’s day with the war well and truly won. No one had laughed around Bealeton back in May, no one at all.

The regiment boarded another train south of the little town. The wheezing locomotive that pulled it had served all through the war without much in the way of servicing. Nor had the rails seen enough repairs. Before the train got to Orange Court House, it went off those rails twice, dumping soldiers in wild confusion. In the second spill, one man broke an arm, another an ankle. “Hell of a thing, takin’ casualties after the fightin’s over,” Allison High said glumly.

“Could have been worse, as rickety as this line’s gotten,” Caudell answered. Both men were panting. Along with everyone else, they had shoved their car back onto the tracks by main force. Caudell contrasted this stretch of the Orange and Alexandria to the formerly Federal track and engine north of Manassas Junction. He shook his head: just another sign of the abundance of Northern resources. He wondered how long the Confederacy would need to rebuild and recover after three years of hard fighting.

The train rattled past Orange Court House, then past the 47th North Carolina’s winter quarters. Some of the huts had been burned; most of the others were torn down for their timber. Caudell watched the camp disappear behind him without regret. That had been the hungriest winter of his life.

At Gordonsville, the train swung onto the Virginia Central line for the trip down to Richmond. The roadbed was so rough that here and there Caudell’s teeth would click together as if winter’s cold had suddenly returned. “Anybody want to put some money down on how often we derail before we finally get there?” Rufus Daniel asked. The pool drew some lively action. Caudell bet on three times, and shared the pot for winning. An extra ten dollars Confederate didn’t hurt, though he would sooner have had a two-dollar Yankee greenback or, better still, two dollars in silver. He hadn’t heard the sweet jingle of coins in his pocket for a long time.

The train stopped for the night just past Atlee’s Station, a few miles north of the Confederate capital. Captain Lewis announce’d, “We’ll lay over for a day here, to let the whole Army of Northern Virginia gather. Before all the regiments head for their home states again, they’ll hold a grand review—we’ll all march through the streets and let the people cheer us.”

“I like that,” Allison High said. “Let ‘em have a good long look at the poor skinny devils who did the fightin’ for ‘em. Give ‘em somethin’ to remember, not that they will.”

Caudell waved his hand. “They may not remember us, but I expect they’ll remember our campfires glowing against the sky.” As far as the eye could see, fires flickered every few feet, thousands of fires. Caudell blinked, a bit bemused. Artists would paint this moment one day: the last bivouac of the Army of Northern Virginia.

“They should just be glad it’s our fires they’re seeing, ‘stead of the Yankees’,” Rufus Daniel said. Derisively, he hummed a few bars from the Northern “Battle Hymn of the Republic”—”I have seen Him in the watchfires of a hundred circling camps.” Daniel spat into the campfire. “And that for John Brown’s goddamned body, too.”

Again, the talk ran far into the night. The officers did not try to make the men go to bed. They were going home soon, too, and instead of captains and lieutenants would soon become farmers and clerks, friends and neighbors once more. No more battles lay ahead, only a triumphal parade. The discipline of the field was fading fast.

The next morning, the army woke, not to the bugle’s blare or the rattle of the snare, but to the wild bellow of steam whistles, calling the soldiers to their trains. Company by company, regiment ‘by regiment, they filed aboard. One by one, the trains puffed off toward Richmond. The one in which 47th North Carolina rode made the trip without incident, which cost Caudell the banknote he had won the day before.

Shouting officers in impossibly clean uniforms did their best to maintain order as the troops disembarked at the wooden shed which served as the Virginia Central depot. They pointed northwest up Broad Street: “Go on, go on! No, not you, sir! Wait’ your turn, if you please. Now go!”

“Come on, boys,” Captain Lewis yelled. “Just like we were back at old Camp Mangum—let’s show these Richmond ladies how we can march.” There was a stratagem nicely calculated to get the best from the Castalia Invincibles, Caudell thought—but then, Lewis had always had that knack.

Bands blared as the assembled soldiers marched up Broad Street, blasting out tunes like “The Battle Cry of Freedom,” “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” and “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp! The Boys Are Marching.” The sidewalks were packed with people wearing their holiday best, ladies in hoop skirts and bonnets and lace, men with stovepipe hats that interfered with the view of those behind them. Some waved small flags: the Stainless Banner, the earlier Stars and Bars, and Confederate battle flags of every description. Red, white, and blue bunting decorated every building, as did garlands of bright summer flowers.

The railroad tracks that ran down the center of Broad Street made Caudell careful about where he put his feet; the last thing he wanted was to stumble in front of such an enormous audience. A man who fell here might not live it down for the rest of his life, not with so many witnesses from his own county to keep bringing it up and reminding him about it.

Because he worried more about his marching than where he was, Caudell hardly looked up for the first several blocks of the grand review. When he did, the 47th North Carolina was tramping past the First African Baptist Church, at the northeast corner of Broad and College. The large, sprawling building had a slate roof, no spire, and a low iron fence and gate all around it.

Despite the church’s name, Caudell saw no Africans in front of it. The thought made him pay more attention to the crowd. Richmond had a good-sized Negro population, most slave, a few free, but he spied hardly any colored faces. A few grinning pickaninnies gaped at the parade; that was all. The black folk of Richmond, he suspected, would sooner have come out for a parade of blue coats through their city’s streets.

Across the street from the African Baptist Church was the Old Monumental Church, a two-story building in the classic style, surmounted by a low dome and fenced with stone below and iron bars above. Streamers ran from tree to tree in front of the fence; small boys perched in the trees and cheered the passing soldiers. Caudell reached up to wave his hat to them, then jerked down his hand, feeling foolish—he still hadn’t replaced that old felt he’d lost in the Wilderness.

Capitol Square was just a short block south of Broad Street, but the bulk first of the Powhatan Hotel and then of Richmond’s city hall kept Caudell from seeing as much of it as he would have liked. Across the street from the hotel stood the almost equally massive Greek Revival pile of the First Baptist Church.

“Eyes—left!” Captain Lewis said. Caudell’s head twisted as if on clockwork. Just past the city hall—a building as severely Hellenic as the church—was a reviewing stand. On it stood President Davis, tall and supremely erect. Beside him, in a coat much too large for his slim frame, was his Vice President, Alexander Stephens. Stephens, hardly bigger than a boy of fourteen, looked pale and unhealthy, and seemed to be holding himself upright by main force of will.

Other civilian dignitaries—congressmen, judges, Cabinet members, what have you—crowded the reviewing stand, but Caudell had eyes only for two gray suits in the midst of the black. Just below Jefferson Davis stood General Lee, his hat off in salute to the soldiers marching past. Another, older man in fancy uniform, a man with a high forehead, rather foxy features, side whiskers, and an elegant imperial of mixed brown and gray, was a couple of people away from Lee.

“That’s Joe Johnston,” Caudell exclaimed, pointing.

“By God, you’re right,” Rufus Daniel said. “Is the Army of Tennessee here, too, then?”

“Damned if I know,” Caudell answered. “There was so much confusion at the train station that the Army of the Potomac might be marching along behind us, and we’d never know it.”

All he could see of the parade was the couple of companies ahead of the Castalia Invincibles and, twisting his neck, the company right behind.

Rufus Daniel barked out a couple of syllables of laughter. “Reckon we’d find out right quick if there was bluebellies back there.” Just for a moment, his left hand slid to the sling of his AK-47. Caudell grinned and nodded. He was home from Washington City; the only Federal soldiers to have reached Richmond arrived as prisoners of war.

The 47th North Carolina passed the reviewing stand and the Broad Street Methodist Church with its immensely tall spire. On down Broad Street they marched. As Captain Lewis had asked of them, they did the memory of their Camp Mangum days proud, keeping their alignment and distance from one another with an ease that bespoke their two years of practice in the field. Their step was smooth and elastic, the swinging of their arms as steady as the beat of a pendulum.

A middle-aged woman threw a bunch of purple daisies. Caudell caught it out of the air. If he’d had a hat, he would have put it in the band; Dempsey Eure wore bright buttercups along with his turkey feather. Since he was bareheaded, Caudell reached over his shoulder and stuck the stems into the barrel of his rifle. The woman clapped her hands.

Thus ornamented, Caudell made his way past the depot of the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac Railroad and, a block farther on, the new and impressive Richmond Theater, with its pilasters reaching from the second floor almost to the top of the building. The railroad tracks continued down the middle of the street for close to another twenty blocks before they swung north toward the destinations the train line’s name promised.

The crowds began to thin out by the time the tracks left Broad Street: that was at the very edge of town. Provost marshals waved the men on. “Out to Camp Lee!” they shouted, pointing north and west. Caudell marched with a fresh will: where better to end the grand review than a camp named for the South’s grandest soldier?

The broad green expanse of Camp Lee lay about a mile beyond the point where Richmond’s buildings stopped. Another tall reviewing stand, its boards still white and new, stood at the western edge of the lawn. A big Confederate flag on an even taller pole flew beside it. In front of it were other banners mostly of red, white, and blue: captured Federal battle flags. Caudell puffed up with pride when he saw how many there were.

“Hill’s corps, Heth’s division?” a provost marshal said. “Y’all go this way.” Along with the other units in Henry Heth’s division, the 47th North Carolina went this way. Caudell found himself off to the left of the reviewing stand, but close enough to the front that he might be able to hear at least some of what a speaker on that stand had to say.

Before any speaker spoke, though, the grounds had to fill. Turning his head this way and that, Caudell saw the whole Army of Northern Virginia arrayed to the left of the reviewing stand, Hill’s corps, Ewell’s, and Longstreet’s, too. Then a provost marshal bellowed, “Bishop Polk’s corps? Over here.” Sure enough, the Army of Tennessee had also come to Richmond to join the review.

“Who cares?” Allison High said. “Just means we have to stand here twice as long while they get wherever they’re supposed to go.”

It wasn’t quite twice as long, for only part of the Army of Tennessee seemed to be here after all. The rest of it, Caudell supposed, was likely to be in Tennessee, reclaiming land that had been under the Federal thumb for most of the war. Even so, the sun had sunk low in the northwest—and, from where Caudell stood, almost directly behind the reviewing stand—when Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Joe Johnston rode down the aisle between the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of Tennessee. The two armies shouted themselves hoarse, each trying to outcheer the other. The Army of Northern Virginia outnumbered its rival and so had the better of that contest. The President and his generals waved from horseback, acknowledging the salute. The three men ascended the reviewing stand together.

Quiet came slowly and incompletely. The lean, hard soldiers who had done so much, endured so much behind their tattered battle flags, were not the sort from whom to expect perfect discipline or perfect courtesy. Lee and Johnston understood that. They had stopped a couple of steps below President Davis. Now they bowed, first to each other and then up to him. His answering bow, deeper than theirs, went not to them, but straight out to the soldiers they had led. The men raised another cheer. Their high, shrill war cries split the air.

“We shall hear the rebel yell no more,” Davis said, which brought fresh outcries and shouts of No! He held up a hand. “We shall hear the rebel yell no more, for we are not rebels, nor have we ever been. We are free and independent Southern men, with our native Southern yell—”

The President could not go on after that for some time. Caudell yelled at the top of his lungs but could not hear his own shout, for the cries of the two great Confederate armies rolled through his head, loud as the noise of the battlefield. His ears rang when the cheering finally faded away, and fresh yips and yowls kept breaking out somewhere in the assembled hosts every few minutes.

As a result, he heard Davis’s speech not as a complete and polished oration, but as a series of disjointed phrases, a sentence here, a paragraph there: “We showed ourselves worthy of the inheritance bequeathed us by the patriots of the Revolution; we emulated that heroic devotion which made reverse to them but the crucible in which their patriotism was refined.” “—our high-spirited and gallant soldiers’,” I congratulate you on the series of brilliant victories which, under the favor of Divine Providence, you have won, and, as the President of the Confederate States, do heartily tender to you the thanks of the country whose just cause you have so skillfully and heroically served.” “—driven the invader from your soil and wrung from an unscrupulous foe the recognition of your birthright, community independence. You have given assurance to the friends of constitutional liberty of our final triumph in the struggle against despotic usurpation.”

Repeated cheers rose as long as President Davis promised the soldiers before him. He did not content himself with that, however, but went on to speak of the Confederacy in the abstract: “After the war of the Revolution, the several states were each by name recognized to be independent. But the North willfully broke the compact between the independent states and claimed its government to be, not such a compact, but Set up over and above the states, perverting it into a machine for their control in domestic affairs. The creature was exalted above its creators, the principals made subordinate to the agent appointed by themselves. Thus our states dissolved their connections with the others, and thus our glorious Confederacy was born.”

Caudell heard that part clearly, for the men stood quiet through it. It was an appeal to the intellect, not to the passions; had he been standing in that place on this occasion, he thought he would have left it out. Every word of it was true, but it was not what the soldiers needed to hear now: Davis thought too much, felt too little.

He seemed to sense that himself, and why not?—he had been a soldier before he turned to politics. He did his best to reach a strong conclusion: “No one may successfully undertake the gigantic task of conquering a free people. This truth, always so patent to us, has now been forced upon the reluctant Northern mind. Mr. Lincoln discovered that no peace was attainable unless based upon the recognition of our indefeasible rights. For that, I have to thank the indomitable valor of our troops and the unquenchable spirit of our people. God bless you all.”

Again, Caudell cheered as loudly as anyone. Realizing the independence of the Confederate States was a heady moment, one he still sometimes had trouble believing had truly come. But in thanking soldiers and people, Jefferson Davis had omitted one factor that also played a major part in freeing the South: the Rivington men and their repeaters. Caudell wondered if they resented remaining unmentioned and unpraised.

The applause faded, died. The men of the armies of Northern Virginia and Tennessee stood in the deepening twilight, talking with their friends and comrades of what they’d done today. “Well, Nate, it’s all over now,” Mollie Bean said. “What the hell comes next?”

“I wish I knew,” he answered. For himself, he had a pretty fair idea: he would go home and do his best to put his life back together the way it had been before the war came. For Mollie, though, that choice looked grimmer.

Captain Lewis answered the question for the short term: “We’ll stay here at Camp Lee tonight. Rations are supposed to come tomorrow morning, and then they’ll start mustering us out.”

The captain, Caudell noticed, hadn’t said anything about rations for tonight. That failed to surprise him; once the Army of Northern Virginia got down below Bealeton again, it had returned to the care of the creaky Confederate commissary department. He shrugged. He wouldn’t go hungry, as he still had his last three or four hardtacks from Washington. They were stale by now, but he’d eaten much worse—and much less. Going back to worrying over how fresh his food was—as opposed to whether he’d have any—would be strange.

Mollie said, “When we get a fire goin’, Nate, will you spend some time with me by it with them books of yours?”

“Sure I will, Melvin,” he answered. “You’ve learned a lot since you took up your studies in earnest.” He meant every word of that. He wished his students who were half Mollie’s age showed half the intensity she displayed.

Her lips curled back in something that was not a smile. It pulled the skin tight against her bones, let him see for a moment how she would look when she was an old woman. She said, “I should’ve done more sooner. Now it’s about too late.”

“It’s never too late,” he said. She shook her head, apparently determined to be gloomy. He persisted: “You have the trick of reading now. To hold it, all you need to do is keep on reading and not let it lie fallow. It’s just like”—he groped for a comparison that would make sense to her—”like stripping and cleaning your AK-47. That was hard at first, but you kept practicing till you got the knack. Now you don’t even have to think about it anymore.”

“Maybe,” she said, anything but convinced.

“You’ll see.” Instead of a primer, he got out his pocket Testament that evening. Mollie protested, but he said, “Try it. See if I’m not right.” He opened the little book, pointed to a place. “Start right here.”

“I can’t do it.” But Mollie bent her head close to the tiny print of the Testament and began to read: “ ‘Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake’—why don’t it say broke?—‘it, and gave it to the…the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body. And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it; For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the re…uh…remission of sins.” Her face lit up in that special way she had; just for a moment, she outshone the campfire. “Goddam, I did it!”

“Yup,” Caudell said smugly, almost as pleased as she was. “You stumbled a couple of times on the harder words, but that can happen to anybody. It doesn’t matter anyhow. What matters is that you read it and you understood. You did, didn’t you?”

“I surely did,” she answered. “I surely did.” Caudell had been reading since he was a little boy; he took literacy for granted. Not for the first time since he’d joined the army, he saw how much it meant to someone who came to it late.

Once started now, Mollie did not want to stop, not even when the campfire died into red embers and Caudell yawned until he thought his jaw would break. Almost everyone else was asleep by then, some men wrapped in blankets, more simply lying on the grass under the stars. That was no hardship, not on a fair, warm night. Caudell thanked heaven the war had not lasted into another winter. The men would have been without blankets then, too.

Finally, he could hold his eyes open no more. “Melvin,” he said, “why don’t you just keep that little Testament? That way, you’ll always have something to read.”

“A book of my own? A Testament of my own? To keep?” In the faint firelight, Mollie’s eyes were enormous. She glanced this way and that. When she saw no one close by was paying any attention, she leaned over and gave Caudell a quick kiss. Her voice sank to a throaty whisper: “We weren’t right out here in the open, Nate, I’d do better’n that.”

Instead of rising to the occasion, he yawned again, even more gigantically than before. “Right about now, I think I’m too worn to do any woman any good, or myself either,” he said, whispering too.

Mollie laughed. “Not one man in ten’d admit as much, no matter how true it was. Most’d sooner try, and then blame you when it turned out they couldn’t.” She shook her head, as if at a bad memory, then kissed him again. “Might could be we’ll find us another chance before too long, Nate. I hope so. You sleep good now, you hear?”

“I will, Me—Mollie.” He risked her real name. “Thanks.” As he rolled himself in his blanket, he wondered if they would find another chance. They wouldn’t be thrown together anymore, not with the 47th North Carolina mustering out. He would go back to teaching, and she—he didn’t know what she’d do. He hoped it would be better than what she’d come from and that the letters he’d taught her would help make it so.

He wriggled to get comfortable. The grass was soft against his cheek, but his long-lost hat would have made a better pillow. He twisted again, turned his head back toward the fire. There sat Mollie Bean, stubbornly reading the Bible.

Just as troops had filled Broad Street in the grand review the day before, so now they filled Franklin Street. Then, marching out of Richmond, they had moved briskly. Now, coming back into the city, they advanced at a snail’s pace.

Nate Caudell’s stomach growled. The promised morning rations had never arrived at Camp Lee. Somehow that seemed fitting. The Army of Northern Virginia had always been able to fight. Staying fed was another matter altogether. Well, no matter, he thought. When his point on this long, slow line reached Mechanic’s Hall at last, some War Department clerk would officially sever his connection with the Confederate army.

“Maybe,” he said dreamily, “they’ll even pay us off as they let us out.”

Allison High snorted. “This here’s just getting-out day, Nate, not the Judgment Day. They ain’t paid us in so long, reckon they forgot they’re supposed to.”

“Besides, way prices are, what they owe us ain’t worth worryin’ over, anyhow,” Dempsey Eure added.

“They owe us more than money,” Caudell said.

“They won’t remember that either, not longer’n a few months,” High answered. Caudell wanted to contradict the cynical sergeant, but found he couldn’t. The guess seemed only too likely.

Slowly, slowly they inched toward Capitol Square. Some people came out to look at them, but only a handful compared to the day before. A teamster driving an immense wagon from the back of the near wheeler of his six-mule team had to pull to a stop when the soldiers blocked his path down Fifth Street. He swore loudly at them.

Allison High let out a grim chuckle. “Some of them bastards won’t remember longer’n a few minutes, let alone months.”

Rufus Daniel dealt with the foul-mouthed teamster more directly. He unslung his AK-47 and pointed it at the man. “You just want to be a little more careful who you’re cussin’ around, don’t you, friend?” he asked in a pleasant voice.

The teamster suddenly seemed to realize Daniel was far from the only man there with a rifle. He opened his mouth, closed it again. “S-s-sorry,” he managed at last. When the soldiers finally cleared the way, he snapped his whip over the mules’ backs, jerked the reins with unnecessary ferocity. The wagon rattled through. The Castalia Invincibles bayed laughter after it.

They crawled past Sixth Street, past Seventh. The sun climbed ever higher into the sky. Sweat poured down Caudell’s face. When he wiped his forehead with his sleeve, the wool turned a darker shade of gray. “I might not shoot a wagon-driver;” he said, “but I do believe I’d kill a man for a tall glass of beer.”

As if in answer to that irregular prayer, four ladies came out of one of the fine houses between Seventh and Eighth. A black woman pushed the oldest lady in a wheeled chair. That lady had on her lap, and the other white women carried, trays filled with glasses of water. They all came up to the cast-iron fence in front of their house. “You must be hot and thirsty, young men,” the woman in the wheeled chair said. “Come help yourselves.”

Soldiers crowded against the fence in the blink of an eye. Caudell was close enough and quick enough to get a glass. He downed it in three blissful swallows. “Thank you very kindly, ma’am,” he said to the woman from whose tray he’d taken it. She was not far from his own age, attractive if rather stern-featured, and wore a maroon satin dress that, like the house from which she’d come, said she was a person of consequence. Emboldened because he was sure he’d never see her again, Caudell plunged: “Do you mind if I ask whose kindness I’m thanking?”

The woman hesitated, then said, “My name is Mary Lee, First Sergeant.”

Caudell’s first thought was mild surprise that she’d read his chevrons. His second, when he really heard her name, was hardly a thought at all: he automatically stiffened to attention. Nor was he the only one; every man whose ears caught the name Lee straightened up at the mere sound of it. “Ma’am, thank you, ma’am,” he stammered.

“There, now you’ve gone and frightened them,” said the youngest Lee daughter—actually, she was hardly more than a girl.

“Oh, hush, Mildred,” Mary Lee said, sounding like every elder sister in the world. She turned back to Caudell. “After you brave men have done so much for your country, helping you now is our privilege, and the least return we can make.”

The woman in the wheeled chair nodded vigorously. “My husband never fails to marvel at the spirit the soldiers under his command showed an through the war, even when things looked blackest.” She turned her head so she could look up at me servant behind her. “Julia, fetch the tray of cakes now, if you please.”

“Yes, mist’iss,” the black woman said. She walked back to the house, vanished inside.

By then, the soldiers ahead of the Castalia Invincibles had advanced several yards. The men shouted for them to move up too. Where before Caudell had cursed the line for moving too slowly, now he cursed it for moving too fast. He had to go on. Company E enjoyed the Lee ladies’ cakes. Caudell tried to stay philosophical. He hadn’t expected to meet Marse Robert’s daughters, and did his best to be satisfied with that.

The line froze up again between Eighth and Ninth streets. Philosophy had trouble competing with an empty stomach; Caudell wished he’d gotten to eat one of those cakes. At last, though, he and his comrades snaked into Mechanic’s Hall, advanced toward the desks in the foyer. Signs above those desks read A-B, C-D, E-F, G-H, and I-K. Caudell got into the appropriate line.

“Name and company?” asked the clerk behind the C-D desk.

“Nathaniel Caudell, Mr., uh—” Caudell read the man’s nameplate. “—Jones.”

“Caudell, Nathaniel.” John Beauchamp Jones meticulously lined through his name. He reached over to a pile of paper, handed a sheet from it to Caudell. “This is your railroad pass home, to be used within five days’ time, You will be required to turn in your rifle and ammunition at the station before boarding your train.” He glanced at Caudell’s sleeve. “First sergeant, eh?” He took a paper from another stack, wrote a number on a blank line. “Here is a warrant for two months’ back pay, which will be honored at any bank in the Confederate States of America. Your nation is grateful for your service.” Unlike Mary Lee, Jones sounded as if he were parroting a memorized phrase. Even before Caudell turned to go, he called out, “Next!”

Caudell looked at the sum for which his pay warrant had been issued. Forty dollars Confederate wouldn’t go far. And he’d been owed four or five months’ pay (he couldn’t remember which), not two. Still, he supposed he was lucky to get any money (or even the promise of money) at all. He stuck the warrant in a trouser pocket, went back out onto Franklin Street.

The line of waiting men in gray still stretched northwest up the street as far as the eye could see. A couple of fellows in another uniform, the mottled green-brown of the Rivington men, sat on the steps of the building across from Mechanic’s Hall and watched the thick, slowly advancing column. Their red and white banner with its spiky black symbol flew atop that building alongside the Confederate flag. As Caudell started down the stairs of Mechanic’s Hall, the Rivington men solemnly shook hands.