Columbia is the story of Theodore Lomax, a nineteen-year-old Union solider in the American Civil War, who is as committed as any to the ideal of human freedom. After being assigned to the army of William Tecumseh Sherman, shortly after the general’s infamous March to the Sea, he willingly participates in the destruction of civilian property in Columbia, South Carolina, believing his acts are justified by Southern resistance to the Northern cause of emancipation. But when the destruction escalates into violence against the civilians themselves, he becomes disillusioned, and feels compelled to strike out in opposition to his own countrymen.
Private Enis Decker had never seen a woman naked before. He knew about their breasts. Even fully dressed you could tell a woman had breasts, but as to what they looked like uncovered, or what she had between her legs, Decker didn’t have any idea.
The novel is told from Lomax’s point of view, but there are ten other supporting characters, each with a story of his or her own. There was a time when I thought these stories, or these “Reflections in Broken Glass,” should alternate with the chapters in Columbia, presenting a richer but perhaps more tangled tapestry of the lives that painfully converge in the novel’s climactic scenes. But Columbia is clearly a more coherent narrative without them. Still, they were valuable to me as an author, and so I’ve decided to share them here.
“Decker,” centers on the character of Enis Decker, and describes his entry into the Union Army and his first encounter with a squad of “bummers.”
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He was from Kenosha, a small town in Wisconsin on the shores of Lake Michigan, and was brought up in a strict household. Although his parents were very religious, their faith and piety never truly rubbed off on little Enis, the volatile combination of his mother’s Bible lessons and his father’s savage beatings affecting him in ways neither of them had intended or would have predicted. Decker did not enjoy his life. He had, in fact, little understanding that life could be enjoyed, and so, after the war had been brewing for a few years, he joined the army without telling anybody back home. Just up and joined and left town without even saying goodbye. He was seventeen years old.
They sent him to a training camp north of Washington and attached him to a newly formed Wisconsin regiment scheduled to ship out for Savannah to reinforce William Tecumseh Sherman as the general regrouped to turn his victorious columns northward into South Carolina. Decker spent a grand total of three days in camp, the first settling in after his train ride from Chicago, the second forming and drilling with the regiment on the parade ground, and the third packing up and marching off for the transport ship that would take him and the others down the Atlantic coast. The voyage took two days and Decker was violently sick the entire time, the pitching and rolling of the deck beneath his feet unlike anything he had ever experienced before. One of the officers gave him something designed to settle his system, but Decker was unable to keep it or anything else down, spending most of the trip with his body draped over the ship’s railing, emptying the meager contents of his stomach into the troubled sea.
Upon their arrival in Savannah, Decker was temporarily separated from his regiment and placed with the others who hadn’t fared well on the journey in the field hospital set up just outside the Union encampment, where the doctors paid him almost no attention at all, even though there seemed to be a genuine lack of any battle casualties in the area. One man had just had his leg amputated, and another had been shot in the shoulder, but there was no one else there with any real injuries. At first, Decker was happy just to have a stationary cot on which to lie down, but as his nausea passed, he became more and more frustrated with the doctors who seemed to keep him there for no good purpose.
When finally released the next day, his regiment had already gone into camp, but no one had thought to leave word for Decker as to where it could be found. Given one misguided direction after the other from officers and soldiers in other regiments, Decker spent the entire day wandering up and down the gigantic Union camp, looking either for familiar faces or for his regimental flag. He found the flag about seven o’clock that evening, fastened tightly to the post of a tent requisitioned to the regimental color bearer, a broad and serious man, and one of the few men in the regiment who, primarily because of Decker’s inexperience and ineptitude with the drill five days previous, could match Decker’s name with his face.
“Decker!” the color bearer had said upon seeing the private come stumbling into view. “Where in blazes have you been?”
“At the hospital,” Decker said.
“The hospital?” he asked. “Have you been shot?”
“No, I haven’t been shot,” Decker said irritably. “They held me there all day yesterday on account of my seasickness. They released me this morning, but nobody could tell me where the regiment was. I’ve been looking for you all day.”
The color bearer eyed Decker suspiciously, as if he didn’t quite believe Decker’s story. “Well,” he said. “You better go report to the colonel. There’s been talk that you deserted.”
“Deserted!” Decker exclaimed. “I might as well have for all the attention anyone’s paid to me.”
“Watch your tongue, private,” the man told him. “Now, go report to the colonel.”
Decker went, reported as ordered, and was assigned to a tent with three other men, none of whom he had ever met before. Rations had already been distributed for the night and, as Decker arrived at the tent he would call home for the next three days, his tentmates sat around their campfire finishing off the food they had been issued. One of the men gave Decker his last few scraps of bread and Decker munched on them hungrily while no one bothered to make any room for him around the fire.
The orders to march came within a few days, and none too soon as far as Decker was concerned. The soldiers in his tent were all from the same town in Northern Wisconsin, two of them in fact brothers, all hailing from a logging community Decker had never heard of on the Minnesota border. While not downright rude to Decker, it was clear they did not wholly trust him, offering only a generous measure of the hostility people from small villages often reserve for those from places unknown to them. Decker got his full share of rations on each of the succeeding days, and although the soldiers allowed room for him around the warming fire and had no compunction about sleeping nearly on top of him in the crowded confines of the tent, Decker could not help but feel somewhat like an outsider among them. He would have gone wandering through the regimental camp, looking for friendlier comrades, had they all not received orders to stay with the squads assigned to them. Sherman’s army was getting ready to move, and when the orders came down, there wasn’t a colonel in the camp that wanted his regiment to be the one holding everyone else up.
The transformation from an army in camp to an army on the move was truly something wondrous to see, and its marvels were not lost on the inexperienced eyes of Private Enis Decker. It was the kind of thing young soldiers new to the ways of war wrote home about, but the idea never occurred to Decker. Now that he had escaped the life he had led before, he felt very much like every new experience he had was his and his alone. It seemed almost a betrayal of his new-found freedom to share such liberties with the very people from whom he had sought escape. His gruff mates showed him the proper way to strike their tent as well as roll his personal items in his blanket for transport. Everywhere he looked, Decker saw officers dashing about, seeing to the collection of tents, supervising the dispersal of rifles, and generally ordering the men to hurry in everything they did. There was so much activity going on around him that Decker paid special attention to make sure he was not again separated from the people familiar to him.
They marched out around midday, proceeding out of camp in two great columns, regiment pressed against regiment in an order that must have made sense to some great overseer above them. Decker had no idea what position their regiment held in the grand scheme, but he assumed it must have been somewhere in the middle. Once they got out of camp and into the open countryside, he was able to crane his neck and take a look around them. What he saw simply amazed him. In every direction, as far as the eye could see, it seemed, men in blue marched forward as if with one purpose. It was more men than Decker had ever seen before, more men than Decker had even dreamt there were.
The sight inspired him, supported him, encouraged him to keep moving forward with his regiment, to match his comrades stride for stride as if he were truly one of them and was meant to march among them. For those first few hours of marching, Decker knew a happiness and comfort he had never known before. He knew the complacency and confidence that comes with the knowledge that one is part of a community, that one is accepted as the equal of others. Before joining the army, Decker’s life had seemed like one of servitude and humility. His mother had taught him with her Bible to remain meek and subservient to the will of God, while his father had taught him with his belt to bear the same fear and respect for him. And while Decker could on some level understand the wickedness that was forbidden with the commandments of God -- killing and stealing and lying against your neighbor -- he had a much more difficult time with the wickedness his father’s commandments seemed designed to avoid.
Enis! How many times have I told you not to go snooping around in things that aren’t any of your goddamn business? A boy like you has got to learn his own place.
But, who is she, father? Why is she staying here when mother’s away?
Did you hear what I said, son? It’s not your place to question me. Honor your father. Didn’t your mother’s teaching get that far in the good book?
Yes, father. But--
No buts, son. Now, go get my belt, boy. Go get my belt.
Yes, father.
Decker’s strange new feelings of unity with the men around him did not last long. After only a few short hours, it became clear Decker had neither the training nor the stamina to keep pace with his new-found brethren. It took the direct attention of one of the sergeants, a man named Lomax only a few years older than him, to keep Decker in line until the evening halt, shouting and prodding at him every time he began to falter and fall away from the men with whom he was supposed to keep pace. Over the course of the march’s remaining few hours, Decker steadily slid down from his heights of camaraderie and belonging until he felt like little more than a prisoner in the Union column, forced to march past the limits of his endurance, and finally allowed by his captors to collapse in a heat of exhaustion at the end of a long and extremely trying day.
Decker didn’t eat his supper that night. He was too tired. Reveille was going to come much too early the following morning and he wanted to get as much rest as he could before they made him get up and start marching again. He practically had to beg one of the brothers from Northern Wisconsin to pitch their tent for him, something they had not yet showed him how to do, and when finally accomplished, Decker crawled inside and fell asleep almost immediately, only to be awoken a few hours later with the entry of his three tentmates. By that time, the muscles in his legs ached so badly, Decker found it next to impossible to drift back into slumber and spent most of the remaining night listening to the snores of those around him and weeping softly to himself.
The next day found Decker less eager to try to keep pace with his regiment. After catching a few blessed hours of sleep right before the dawn, Decker came awake with the suddenness of the bugle call, groaning and moaning in his despair from under the weight of one of his tentmates. For a time he refused to move, thinking in his sleepiness he could make the whole Union Army wait until he was good and ready, but was forced to face the coldness of his reality when dragged by the feet out of his refuge, the tent collapsed and folded before his bleary eyes.
“You better go draw some rations,” one of his tentmates told him unsympathetically. “Word is we need to make fifteen miles today.”
“Fifteen miles?” Decker asked, his voice deep with morning intonations. “How many did we do yesterday?”
“Seven,” the soldier said.
Seven. The number seemed ridiculous to Decker, as if someone was playing a joke on him. In half a day the army had moved seven miles, and it had almost killed him. Today, they needed to go fifteen. And what about tomorrow? Or the day after that? How long was this march going to be, anyway, and how much of it was Decker going to be able to take? How many more miles would it be before his legs just plain gave up and they shot him like some kind of lame animal? Laying there in the first few rays of the morning sun, Decker decided this army -- as glamorous as it had seemed to him compared to the goodness of his mother and the wickedness of his father, and as liberating as it had been for him for two or three hours yesterday -- this army was not for him. The idea of somehow getting away, of somehow leaving it all behind and moving on to some other kind of life -- it was the only thing that enabled him to push himself up onto his shaky legs and get moving.
How he was going to escape, Decker didn’t have any idea. Neither did he think of what he would do or where he would go if he did manage to separate himself from the Union column. All he knew was if he were forced to march like they had marched him the day before, Decker wasn’t going to survive to be with the army at its final destination. In his own innocent, naive, and inexperienced way, Decker really saw the challenge before him as a question of survival, as a matter of life and death. He had no way of knowing nearly every soldier in the army had initially reacted as he had to the rigors of marching. He had been with his regiment for such a short time and had been moved so quickly from place to place, he had not had the time to form any of the bonds or relationships that served to sustain his comrades and fellow soldiers. Now when Decker marched, he felt very much like he marched alone, and like there wasn’t anyone else in the column who shared in his difficulty in keeping up.
He thought about simply making a break for it, about just moving as quickly as he could through the camp before the regiments had time to form for the day’s march, but he had already slept too late and there was no opportunity for him to do so. He had no sooner decided on his course of action when the officers began calling the men into line and any unanticipated movements on his behalf would be immediately noticed by one of the sergeants working to carry out the orders.
And so Decker found himself marching as he had marched the day before, only this time there were no feelings of exhilaration or camaraderie to sustain him for the first few hours. From the very beginning, Decker found himself locked in a trial of his own resources and endurance, moving ever forward in a mechanical and almost unthinking fashion, without even the energy to keep his wits about him, to keep his eyes open for any opportunity of escape that might present itself. He marched, and marched, and marched some more, until the marching seemed to consume him totally, to take over his entire being, until there was nothing more to him than the throbbing of his swollen feet and the resistance of his aching legs.
They were brought to a halt around noon, the men given time to stretch themselves out on the cold ground and munch leisurely on the rations issued to them that day. Decker could do no more than collapse stiffly to the earth, thankful to his mother’s God for the brief respite in his agony, even while suspecting it was that same entity who had forced him to come so far, and who would make him get up in less than an hour and go even farther. Or maybe it was his father’s God who pushed him? Yes, that seemed to make more sense to his befuddled mind. It was his father’s God that drove him and his mother’s God that gave him rest.
“Hey, Decker,” one of the boys from Northern Wisconsin called over to him. “How you holding up?”
Decker slowly rolled his head over to bring the speaker into his vision. “I think I’m dying,” he said desperately.
“Yeah,” the soldier said, dismissing Decker’s serious tone. “You and me both. Nothing worse than marching in brand new boots. They’ll loosen up in a day or two.”
Decker looked at the man blankly, not understanding him, barely even hearing the words he used.
“They say there’s a town coming up over the next rise,” the soldier continued. “That’ll be something to stay on your feet for. With all the men off fighting Grant in Petersburg, there should be plenty of pretty, young women to look at.”
“Yeah,” one of the other soldiers broke in suddenly. “And looking is all we’ll be doing. There’s a reason why Uncle Billy give us our halt before we get to that town. I’ll bet he plans to march us straight through.”
“Well,” the first soldier said in reply. “Looking is enough ain’t it? You’re so dumb, you wouldn’t know what to do with a woman anyway.”
“Oh, yeah?” the second cried indignantly, launching into a defense of his own experience with women and prompting several others to join the argument, an argument that turned all their attentions away from Decker lying on the ground a few yards away.
Decker didn’t mind. He didn’t have much to contribute to the conversation anyway, and had truthfully lost all concept of it since the mention of the town located just over the next rise. A town. That was exactly what he needed to make his break from this army. There would be places to run to in a town, places where he could hide until the army passed on without him. He was sure of it. The soldiers, the sergeants, even the officers, they would all be distracted by the town, and that distraction was all the opportunity Decker would need to slip away unnoticed and hide himself until the army was gone. With a renewed energy born out of the confidence of his coming redemption, Decker pulled himself up into a sitting position and began rummaging through his haversack for his rations. He wanted to get some food in his belly to keep himself sharp for the escape.
With a strange sense of eagerness for that which he had so recently despised, Decker happily welcomed the call to reform ranks, almost leaping up onto his quivering legs in anticipation of the opportunity waiting for him over the next rise. In a matter of minutes they were moving again, marching steadily forward in the same order and precision they had maintained throughout the day. As he approached the top of the hill, Decker could not help but rise anxiously up onto his tiptoes, craning his neck in an attempt to see over the heads of the thousands of men in front of him to the small cluster of buildings he had by now convinced himself would be his salvation. His shorter-than-average stature proved quite an obstacle in his attempts to do so, but he knew there would come a time, a few, fleeting, blissful moments, when the order of the march would position him at the very top of the rise, and he would have a clear and unobstructed view of the village in which he planned to make his escape.
When the time came Decker was not disappointed. The town below him was of adequate size, not as large as his native Kenosha, but certainly large enough for him to hide himself from the army, even if his departure was noticed by one of the attentive sergeants. Whatever the name of this town was, it was no one-road affair, the cross-pattern of buildings clearly indicating a web of thirty or more streets, each intersection offering Decker one more corner to duck behind, each building containing one more attic in which to hide.
In a moment, his vision was gone, the slope of the ground beneath his feet leveling off again, bringing the heads and bodies of the countless men in front of him back into his line of sight. No matter, Decker told himself. The town was there, and in less than an hour he could leave all this misery behind. The very thought of it gave him the strength he had been lacking for the last day and a half, a joyous spring manifesting itself in nearly every step he took.
It wasn’t long before the orders began bouncing back through the Union column, passing from generals to colonels, from colonels to captains, from captains to lieutenants, from lieutenants to sergeants, and finally to the men, confirming the suspicions of the veterans who knew more about armies than many of the officers leading them. Close up. Keep together. Uncle Billy wants us to march straight through. There will be chances to rest at other towns along the way, but not this one. There’s too much daylight left. So step lively, and keep those feet moving forward.
Although Decker had no intention of following these orders, at least not the one about marching straight through town, he showed no outer signs of disobedience. In fact, the new-found spring in his step seemed to those around him to be evidence of his willingness to obey them. Some of them even strove to follow Decker’s example, forcing their equally tired legs forward with the same kind of eagerness, thinking they could prove themselves good soldiers by taking even the most mundane orders to heart. But unbeknownst to the majority of Decker’s newly-formed regiment, only a fraction of which had served in other campaigns before this one, there were some regiments in Sherman’s army that took very few of the orders handed down to them to heart. There were some regiments that took no concern in any orders relating to marching or formation or drill. These regiments concerned themselves only with Sherman’s original order to destroy anything they encountered which could still be of use to the floundering Confederacy, and these regiments had already been to the town the bulk of the army was now entering.
Decker could have seen signs of their destruction from his brief elevation on the top of the rise had he any desire to take note of it. Even from that distance a few fires were noticeable, although he would have been hard pressed to distinguish which buildings had been set ablaze. But now as he marched up the village’s main street, the passage of the free-ranging regiments was evident in nearly every building they passed. While it was clear only the public buildings had been fired -- the army at one point passing slowly in front of what had obviously been the town library still burning brightly in the afternoon sun -- many of the homes and businesses had been vandalized or broken into as well. In defiance of the prediction of pretty, young ladies lining the streets to watch them pass, Decker and his comrades would have found the streets of this Southern town completely deserted had it not been for a few and sporadic appearances of stray and abandoned dogs, slinking fearfully down the edges of the street in the opposite direction of the blue column, and dashing into the first alley or side street they happened upon.
Decker did not know what to make of it all. “Hey,” he said to one of the brothers from Northern Wisconsin. “What happened here?”
The look in the soldier’s eyes as he stared out at the black destruction was all Decker needed to see to know he had no more idea than Decker did as to what had happened here. “Beats me,” the man said absently.
“What happened here?” an older corporal interjected suddenly. “What do you think happened here? Uncle Billy’s bummers have been here ahead of us. Why do you think we’re marching right on through?”
Decker looked at the man blankly, not understanding much of what he had said. “Bummers?” he said with uncertainty, pronouncing the word for the first time. “What are bummers?”
“Regiments selected for foraging duty,” the corporal said simply, as if everyone had been in the army as long as he had. “This army has been supplying itself on the march ever since it left Atlanta. The bummers are the men out ahead of us, scouring the countryside for anything that can be eaten, worn, or shot, and burning everything else that can’t. We’re marching straight through this town because the bummers have been here before us and there ain’t nothing left for us to do. They’re the real secret to Uncle Billy’s success, they’re the ones leading the way, and I guess we’ll be following them straight to hell or Richmond, whichever comes first.”
Decker accepted the information blankly, nodding unwillfully both to himself and to the man who had provided it. The regiment came upon a row of blackened buildings, almost an entire city block burned so thoroughly that now only the stone foundations and chimney towers survived, the ash that had once been the roofs and the floors and the walls hissing and glowing angrily in clumpy piles. Decker had never seen anything like it before, and as his gaze wandered around from the devastation to the men surrounding him, he could tell these sights went beyond the experiences of a lot of the recruits in his regiment.
But as shocked as Decker was by the condition of the town, he forced himself to look at it in the manner he had anticipated, as a place he could escape into and hide himself from the Union Army. He had already positioned himself at the edge of the column, with nothing but thirty or forty feet of empty space between him and the battered buildings. It would take him only a few seconds to reach the safety of their shadows, where he could dash down alleys and dart around corners until he found a place secure enough to hide and the army unknowingly left him behind. The trick was going to be to make his break at a time when none of the sergeants or officers was watching him. Decker didn’t think he needed to worry about the privates. Their attention had been captured by the sights around them, but even if one did see Decker leave, he couldn’t imagine them raising any kind of ruckus or chasing after him. Some of them, Decker allowed himself to consider for the first time, might have been in the same boat he was, their feet throbbing and sore from the rigors of unpracticed marching. Surely if they did see Decker’s escape, they would inwardly cheer him for his courage, and perhaps try to imitate his daring at some other opportune moment.
But the sergeants and officers were a different story. It was their job to keep the men in line, to keep the men marching forward at the same pace and the same direction. They wouldn’t take Decker’s decision to drop away lightly, and would surely attempt to capture him if they saw him depart. Decker would have to pick his moment carefully. The closest sergeant was the one named Lomax, who walked a few paces ahead and to the left of Decker, the man’s own neck craning slowly from side to side to take in the damage the bummers had already done. Decker figured the bodies of the other soldiers screened him pretty well from the other sergeants, and all the nearby officers, although some of them were on horseback, had conveniently positioned themselves on the other side of the street. Trying not to draw any attention to himself, Decker turned casually and checked for any potential observers behind him. His height, however, in comparison to that of the men marching around him, prevented Decker from seeing more than a few ranks of privates.
Suddenly from the other side of the street came the angry shout of a woman, surely some thin and hungry but not yet defeated belle of the South, struggling desperately to keep a handful of small children behind the relative protection of her long and tattered skirt, while hurling the hatred of her neighbors and her kind at the faceless blue column that marched by her shattered home. Decker could not see the woman, shielded from his vision as so many other things were by the bodies of those around him, but as he heard the venom in her voice he imagined what she must look like.
“You lousy Yankee bastards!” the woman shouted, her voice carrying sporadically on the wind. “Why can’t you leave us be? Why can’t you just leave us be?”
Decker might have spent more time stewing on the words the woman chose, or on the image the tenor of her voice called to his mind, if he hadn’t already been so focused on escaping at the first opportunity presented to him. When the woman began her tirade, and every head within a hundred yards of him turned mechanically toward her, Decker had no time to worry himself over what his comrades in blue might have already done to her or to what fate their eventual departure would leave her. He only knew the distraction she caused was the best chance he was ever going to get and he wasted no time in moving toward the nearest side street.
“Get out!” the woman called distantly behind him, her voice cracking with the strain. “Get out of our country!” she cried, and under her desperation, another voice, one much closer to Decker and much more familiar.
“Hey! Where do you think you’re going?”
It was Lomax, and as soon as Decker recognized his voice, he forced his tired legs into a run without even looking back, dashing away from the main thoroughfare as quickly as he could, flying down one street, and turning into another at the first opportunity. Screened now from the army by a burned and blackened building, Decker took a moment to pause and peer back the way he had come. Lomax was running down the street after him.
“Get back here!” Lomax shouted as he ran. “You have to stay with the regiment!”
Cursing his rotten luck, Decker turned and fled again from his pursuer, hoping against hope Lomax wouldn’t bring any more of the army with him. One man he could elude, Decker was sure of that, but what if they formed search parties, and began looking for him house by house? He would have to run out into the countryside, and then where could he hide? Come to think of it, where was he going to hide in this town? The only buildings that hadn’t been burned down seemed to be private residences, and as the woman who had spurred him into action had shown, many of them still had people living in them. Southerners, the bulk of them no doubt hiding behind drawn shades and locked doors. Would any of them offer assistance to a runaway Union soldier, after what had just been done to their town?
Realizing grimly he had not given enough thought to his escape plan before acting on it, Decker did the only thing he now could do, run as fast as his aching legs would carry him. But it would not be enough. A dodge around another corner and a quick glance back over his shoulder was all Decker needed to know Lomax was gaining on him, and that the distance had already closed to a point where Decker could not even hide himself without taking to his hiding place right in front of Lomax’s eyes. His fear and anxiety aside, his feet were just too sore to propel him quickly enough to get away.
Risking the loss of the short lead he maintained on his pursuer, Decker randomly flung himself at the door of the closest home, not knowing if it would be locked or open, or if there was anything inside that could assist him in his escape. Fumbling with the doorknob for a few agonizing seconds, the door finally opened for him, and Decker rushed blindly into the building, Lomax so close behind him that Decker hadn’t even the chance to close the door between them.
The scene inside the home froze both men in their tracks, Lomax in the doorframe itself and Decker three steps inside. The room they had entered was obviously some kind of front parlor, with a fine rich carpet blanketing the floor and plush upholstered furniture set carefully about in a manner given to tea parties and other social engagements. Scattered amongst the furnishings were a total of four men, three of them dressed loosely in Union blue and the last an elderly sort dressed in a pressed civilian suit. Decker’s entrance into the room interrupted two of the Union soldiers in the middle of what appeared to be a rough search of the contents of the many drawers and cubbyholes that filled two large pieces of cabinetry sitting in the far corner. As they turned to face Decker and Lomax, Decker could see the open drawers behind them and a myriad of objects, some valuable and some not, scattered about at their feet. The other Union soldier, a sergeant by the stripes on the blue jacket he wore open to his waist and over a ruffled red shirt certainly not of army issue, stood near the center of the room with the left lapel of the elderly gentleman’s coat bunched tightly in his right fist, holding the man firmly under his control and lifting him up onto his very tip toes. For perhaps as many as ten seconds, they all, occupants and newcomers alike, stood looking at each other in silence, none of them moving an inch from where each of them stood.
“Who the hell are you?” the soldier holding the elderly man said eventually, clearly directing the question to Lomax and not Decker.
“I’m Sergeant Theodore Lomax,” Lomax said defensively. “I’m chasing this man who has just deserted from his regiment. Who are you?”
The soldier hesitated in answering Lomax’s question long enough to give Decker a quick once over, his deep black eyes passing over the younger man in one cautious movement, giving Decker the decided impression that here was a man not to be trifled with.
“Well, I’m Captain Bill Floyd, Teddy,” he said coarsely, turning back to Lomax. “So get the fuck out of here.”
Lomax looked carefully at the stripes on Floyd’s sleeve, knowing that unless he was wearing the wrong jacket, Floyd was no more a captain than he was. “This man is from my company,” Lomax said steadily. “He is my responsibility. I need to take him back to the column.”
“You’ll do nothing of the kind,” Floyd told him abruptly, the face of the elderly man he held shaking in helpless conjunction with Floyd’s fist. “I’m taking charge of him. You hear? He’ll be my responsibility from now on. So just turn your ass around and march yourself right back to your damned column.”
For a moment it looked like Lomax might do exactly as he was told. He seemed to waver in place for a second or two, eventually deciding something more had to be said. “What regiment are you from, Floyd?”
Instead of responding, Floyd turned his head to one of the privates standing behind him. “Kurt,” he said. “Kindly show Sergeant Lomax how to use the door.”
“Sure thing, Bill,” the man said, already moving forward.
Both Decker and Lomax watched the man approach, neither of them sure what he planned to do. The soldier passed Decker without acknowledgement and, just as he closed the final distance with Lomax, he raised a stiff arm and shoved the sergeant violently on the chest, forcing Lomax to stumble backwards down the three stone stairs and land roughly on his backside in the deserted street. With no further word or ceremony, he shut the door and Lomax disappeared from everyone’s sight.
“Kurt,” Floyd said. “Lock that damn door.”
“Sure thing, Bill,” the man said again.
Decker heard the soldier turn the bolt, locking Lomax and anyone else who might try to intervene out of both the house and any immediate concern. That crisis remedied, Decker watched silently as the man named Floyd turned and spoke to the elderly gentleman he still held by the lapel.
“Where were we?” Floyd asked kindly.
“I…I…I’m not sure,” the elderly man said, his voice grizzled and cracking as if he had recently screamed himself hoarse.
“Frank,” Floyd said to the private who still stood somewhat behind him, raising his voice but not taking his eyes off the Southerner he held captive and, if anything, only intensifying his study of the gentleman’s face and balding head. “Those two busting in here really threw me off track. Where the hell were we with this one?”
It was the first indication Decker had that the man named Floyd knew he was still there. He stood perfectly still, not sure if he was delivered or captured, and not wanting to do anything to tip the balance in the wrong direction. Lomax had not tried to re-enter the structure and, as far as Decker knew, was on his way back to the Union column.
The soldier called Frank coughed roughly into his hand. “He was trying to tell you he didn’t have anything valuable in the house. He was about to tell you he’s already donated everything of worth to the grand Southern cause and that if you knew what was good for you--”
“Yeah, yeah,” Floyd said hastily. “That’s right. Well, save your breath, old timer. We’ve all heard that speech a thousand times already. It don’t mean anything more now than it did the first time. You’ve got your goods stashed somewhere in this place, and the sooner you tell us where, the sooner this whole thing will be over for you.”
“R…R…Really, sir,” the elderly man said. “There’s nothing I can think of--”
“Frank,” Floyd said quickly, raising his voice again without looking away. “Take this old timer into the other room and make him tell you where the goods are. I want to have a talk with our newest recruit.”
Without acknowledging the request, the soldier named Frank dropped the items he had most immediately retrieved from the drawers and came over to stand at Floyd’s side. Floyd slowly eased the man back down onto the soles of his feet, disentangling his fingers from the cloth of the old man’s coat, and smoothing out the fabric as best he could with three or four gentle movements of his hand. The elderly man’s eyes bounced cautiously back and forth between the two Union soldiers as they stood facing him in silence for a few moments, the steady and growing appearance of a smile on the private’s face drawing his attention almost totally to that individual.
“Come on,” Frank said suddenly, reaching out with his left hand to grab a hank of the old man’s white hair and beginning to haul him out of the parlor by that appendage. “Let’s go find a place where you and I can come to an understanding.”
Both Floyd and Decker watched as the elderly gentleman stumbled awkwardly after his new tormentor, his back hunched over and his feet moving quickly to keep pace. The pair was out of the parlor in a moment, disappearing behind the flare of a curtained tapestry which separated one room from another. As Floyd turned to face Decker, the sound of the old man falling to the floor could be heard.
“What’s your name, kid?” Floyd asked him.
Decker didn’t answer, his attention held by the noises coming from the other room. The soldier was cursing at the man to get up, a series of scrapes and thumps indicating he was being dragged across the floor.
“Hey!” Floyd shouted, coming forward to place himself in Decker’s distracted line of sight. “I’m talking to you, kid. What’s your name?”
Decker was suddenly shaken out of the stupor that had possessed him since first entering the building. “Enis,” he said slowly. “Enis Decker. Captain.” The last word he put on as an afterthought, thinking it was something Floyd expected to hear.
Floyd’s face darkened at its introduction, however. As Decker listened to the sounds of the old man being hauled to his feet and shoved firmly against a wall, Floyd came three steps forward to stand directly before Decker, his expression betraying nothing but bitterness and resolve. Decker suddenly became aware of the third soldier, the one Floyd had called Kurt, standing very close behind him, and as he pivoted his head to take in both of their positions, he realized the two men had effectively boxed him in. Turning to face Floyd, he found himself being studied by the larger man, scrutinized, almost like he had observed Floyd studying the Southerner.
From the other room, “Okay, old timer. We can go easy or hard on this. It’s entirely up to you. Where have you got your stuff hid?”
“I…I…I’m sorry,” the old man’s voice came softly. “I don’t know what--” and then it was choked off by two sounds arriving in tandem, the first a painful groan expelled from the old man’s throat and the second the unmistakable thump of a swift punch delivered to his midsection.
Floyd suddenly turned and brought his left arm up so the stripes on his jacket sleeve were immediately available for Decker’s inspection. “You see these stripes, Enis?” Floyd said while pointing to them with his other hand, seemingly oblivious to the drama occurring in the adjacent room.
Decker tried to answer but found he could only nod his head.
“You know what they mean?”
Decker shook his head.
Floyd gave the young man a tempered look. “They mean I’m a sergeant, not a captain, Enis. And that means I work for a living. Never mind what I told that other guy; I told him what I did to get rid of him. I could tell just by looking at him that he wasn’t one of us, that he never could be.”
The sounds from the other room of another blow to the old man’s midsection, a sharp and painful inhalation, and then the spasms of a coughing fit which would last through the next few exchanges between Decker and Floyd.
“Us?” Decker asked with uncertainty, knowing only from the tone of Floyd’s voice that the word had a special meaning for the older man, but not understanding how it could apply to both him and Floyd, two men who had never met before.
Floyd nodded his head. “Us,” he said again with heightened intensity. “There’s no way for you to know it, Enis Decker, lost as you must be in your desperate flight from pain and fear, but this is a very momentous day for you. Today your life changes, and unlike whatever transitions you might have gone through before, today it changes for the better. When you first came into this world you belonged to your ma and your pa. Then one day you joined the army and you belonged to Honest Abe and his generals. And now you belong to me. There ain’t no turning back, but there also ain’t no one who’s going to take better care of you.”
Decker looked in Floyd’s eyes cautiously, neither understanding the words the sergeant offered him nor trusting the motivations that must lay beneath them, but at the same time responding instinctively to the tenor of emotion that drove them, accepting them on some visceral level he had neither the education nor the self-awareness to characterize with words. The soldier named Kurt stood in very close to him now, towering unseen behind Decker’s back like a protective shadow.
“Okay,” the old man’s voice came distantly but insistently from the other room, working desperately to make himself understood between his convulsions before the next blow fell. “Upstairs,” he coughed. “I’ll take you upstairs and show you where they are.”
Suddenly Floyd’s hand was on Decker’s shoulder, a large and powerful thing clutching at him like a bird of prey. “Just stick with me,” the older man said intimately to him, the way one brother speaks to another about the love they share for each other. “I know you can’t understand what I’m telling you now, but stick with me and do as I say, and I’ll have you living so high off the hog you won’t remember what life was like before your path crossed mine. I promise you that. Okay?”
“Okay,” Decker said slowly, and only after it became clear that the sergeant expected some form of commitment from him. He still wasn’t sure exactly what he was agreeing to, or even if he had truly been delivered from the rigors of army life, but something about Floyd’s manner and bearing reassured him, something that went far beyond the detached hostility and viciousness Decker had seen Floyd display only moments before, something that seemed capable of insulating him from the violence just perpetrated in the adjoining room. “Okay, sergeant.”
Floyd’s grip on Decker’s shoulder tightened. “Bill, Enis. It’s Bill. We don’t stand on formalities here.”
After these words, Decker found he could only nod his head.
Floyd smiled at him, sliding his powerful hand across the back of Decker’s neck and wrapping his arm around the younger man. “Well, come on then,” Floyd said. “Let’s go upstairs and see what the old man thinks is too precious to abandon.”
Floyd then led Decker from the room, his arm still cradling the private warmly, and the tall and silent Kurt tagging along unnoticed behind them. The next room was a kind of great hall, with a high, domed ceiling running down its length and a tremendous crystal chandelier hanging halfway to the floor. Along the right side, a magnificent staircase rose to the upper story of the dwelling. The area was dark, giving the place an aura of abandonment and quiet. As Floyd helped him mount the first step, Decker could just make out the forms of the old man and the other private ascending ahead of them.
There were three rooms leading off a short hallway at the top of the stairs, all of them bedrooms and all of them with sloped ceilings matching the angle of the outside roof. The old man took them into the largest one, opposite from the other two, moving into the chamber and stopping only after proceeding far enough to allow the other four men to enter. The bedroom still contained its furniture -- a great four-posted bed with a large chest at its foot, two gigantic wardrobes, and an elaborate dressing table with a small stool and vast, oval-shaped mirror -- but appeared as if it had been stripped of all other items. The bed’s canopy had been removed and its uncovered mattresses lay stark and empty in its frame. The dressing table had been cleared of the multitude of brushes and perfumes it must have once supported, and the hardwood floor revealed several highly-polished areas defining where accent rugs must have once lain. Even the curtains that had once adorned the windows were gone, allowing the particularly stark light of a February afternoon to wash the room unfavorably, adding to the feeling of abandonment and decay. The old man stood silently in the center of the room, his back turned to the Union men, looking to Decker for all the world like just another forgotten piece of the collection.
“This doesn’t look promising, old timer,” the private named Frank said. “Where you got the stuff hid?”
The old man kept his back facing them, making no indication he had even heard Frank. His clothes were still rumpled from the altercation he had suffered, the collar of his coat turned up at an awkward angle and brushing his cheek.
“Hey!” Frank said forcefully, stepping forward and shoving the man roughly on the shoulder. “Have you gone deaf? I’m talking to you.”
The old man stumbled forward, caught himself just before falling, and then slowly turned to face his tormentor. His face was flushed red and sweat stood out visibly on his forehead.
“Huh?” he said, his hand coming up to cup his ear in a practiced gesture. “What did you say?”
Both Kurt and Floyd stood slightly in front of Decker, the three of them forming a shallow wedge just inside the door, while Frank and the old Southern man stood toe to toe in the middle of the room, as close as boxers are when fighting each other.
“I said,” Frank said loudly and slowly, “where are you hiding your goods? You know, your loot, your precious cargo?”
Slowly and silently, the old man turned to his right and with a feeble and shaking hand gestured toward the large wooden chest resting at the foot of the bed. “There,” he said with some inner difficulty. “It’s in there. Everything is in there.”
Frank took no notice of the man’s hesitation and fell to the chest at once, fumbling roughly for a few seconds with the padlock hanging from the latch before turning back. “It’s locked, you old fool. Where’s the damn key?”
The old man shook his head almost as if being woken from a dream. “What?” he said. “What did you say?”
Moving more quickly than Decker would have thought possible, Kurt suddenly lurched towards the old man and slugged him in the face, the collision causing a sick and hollow sound to echo through the empty room and dropping the old man painfully to the hardwood floor.
“The key, goddammit!” Kurt shouted madly at the Southerner. “The key to your goddamn trunk! Where is it?”
The old man struggled to prop himself up on one elbow, the fabric of his trousers draped awkwardly over his bony pelvis and sapling-thin legs. His shoes had holes worn through their bottoms, revealing socks that had been darned before and needed to be darned again. As the old man brought himself up to as close to a sitting position as he could manage, Decker could see Kurt had clearly broken the man’s jaw with his powerful swipe, deep purple bruises already darkening half of the old man’s face. His bottom jaw was pushed jaggedly to one side and a spray of fresh red blood coughed out of his mouth with each exertion he made, staining the whiteness of both his whiskers and his shirtfront. Uncomfortable with the sight of such abuse, Decker turned momentarily away and found himself meeting Floyd’s frustrated gaze.
You see, his eyes initially seemed to say to Decker. You see what we have to deal with. But the eyes shifted suddenly, almost in reaction to the confusion evident on Decker’s face, and Floyd quickly turned to the crisis at hand and offered up a few words chosen to help clarify the situation.
“You’d better produce that key, old timer,” Floyd said, the tone of his voice both keeping Kurt at bay and commanding the old man’s wildly-fluctuating attention. “In case you can’t tell, you’re not quite out of the fire yet. Whatever it is you’re trying to hide from us, we’re going to get it. That’s a fact you need to start dealing with. Whatever it is you hold most dear, that’s precisely what we’ve come for, and we ain’t leaving until we got our hands on it. That’s just the way things are now. You see, I don’t know what you’ve heard or what they’ve been saying about him down here, but our Uncle Billy didn’t come to South Carolina to fight any proud army you might think the South still has. He came here to do one thing and one thing only. He came here to break you -- not your army, not your generals, not your government, not even your States rights, but you, you miserable old bastard -- and he sent me here to do it. Breaking your bones is just one of my methods, and we’re going to start breaking a lot more of them if you don’t produce that goddamn key.”
The old man was already fumbling with his vest pocket before Floyd had finished speaking, producing a slim silver key which he tossed angrily at Frank. He tried to say something, defiant-sounding but not understandable through a mouth full of blood and broken teeth. The key bounced twice on the hardwood floor and came to rest beside Frank’s foot.
Floyd turned back to face Decker. Do you see? his eyes seemed to say this time. Do you see what we’re doing here? Does it make any more sense for you now?
In response to Floyd’s unspoken questions, Decker could only shake his head. He wasn’t sure. He wasn’t sure about anything, least of all the chain of events that had brought him to stand in the spot he now stood and witness the things going on around him. That somehow seemed important now, understanding the forces that had brought him here and how much effect, if any, his own decisions had made on them. But even more important than the path he had traveled, he knew in a way he could not describe, was the vista that was now open before him. There was something going on here, something in this small bedroom on the second floor of a home in this Southern town, a place before now Decker could not have even dreamed existed, that would have a profound influence on him and the rest of his life. He didn’t know what it was but he could see it, or part of it anyway, in the things around him. In the lock on the trunk, for instance, and the blood in the old man’s beard. In the fierceness the Union men had shown as well as in the eyes of their leader. Decker could see it in a way he had never been able to see things before.
Floyd smiled at Decker, stepping forward to take the younger man by the arm, and led him over to the chest Frank was in the process of opening. Decker did not resist, although the voice of his mother was there in his mind, telling him to do so, telling him this was all sin and that he should flee at his first opportunity. But there was another voice deep inside him, a voice he had heard before but could not immediately recognize, urging him forward, whispering that the side of life he had just glimpsed really did exist, and was nothing to be afraid of.
Frank removed the padlock from its latch and threw it roughly across the room. Pressing his fingers into the gap below the lid he flipped the chest open, the lid bouncing off the empty mattress and nearly returning far enough to drop shut again before falling back and coming to rest. Frank’s hands were immediately busy, reaching into the trunk, removing items and tossing them aside, all of them flat and rectangular, cluttering up the floor around him. They were an odd assortment of letters and photographs; Decker saw that immediately. The papers in and out of envelopes, the photos framed or mounted on cardboard, some as large as dinner plates but most no bigger than slices of bread.
“What the hell?” Frank muttered to himself as he continued to toss item after item out onto the floor. “There’d better be more than family pictures in here, old man. After all the fuss you put up, there’d better be more than that.”
If the old man heard Frank’s words he showed no sign of understanding the threat they contained. Shuffling awkwardly across the floor on his knees, he worked feverishly to scoop up as many of the discarded items as he could, clutching them tightly to himself with one hand while the other stretched out to snag one after the other.
Decker, Floyd, and Kurt stood over all this activity, Decker and the sergeant on one side of the trunk and the private on the other. Although none of the items seemed to stay at rest for very long, Decker could easily see they were exactly what Frank had loosely described them as: family pictures and mementos, dating back through generations of the old man’s family. In his brief glance around, Decker saw letters written in many different hands, some on wrinkled and yellowed paper, others on stationery as clean and crisp as the day they had been penned. In the expanding collage his eyes were also drawn to the faces of people looking out from photographs, old people and young, women and men, groupings and portraits, each posed stiffly, some in uniform and others in civilian clothes, all looking out across the days, months, or years since the poses had been real, some now dead but surely some still alive.
“Oh, Jesus,” Frank said angrily. “That’s it, Bill. Pictures. Pictures and postcards. That’s all that’s in here.”
Kurt moved swiftly again, stooping over to grab the man by the lapels, dragging him across the floor and away from the remaining collection, spilling papers onto his legs and the floor, until his back was against the wardrobe on the far side of the room.
“We’re going to kill you, old man!” Kurt screamed in his ear. “Unless you tell us where you got your valuables, we’re going to string you up and gut you. Do you hear me?”
The old man lashed out roughly with his arms, dropping the remaining heirlooms he had gathered onto his lap and forcing Kurt back and off balance until he fell over. He tried to speak, coughing a great deal of blood out onto himself and his family memories before he could make himself understood.
“They’re all I have left,” the old man said, the tone of his voice already softening from its initial anger as he retrieved a photo from his lap and began absently wiping away his own blood with his sleeve. “Others have been here before you and they’ve already taken everything else. I tried to tell you before but you wouldn’t listen. You want my valuables? Well, these are all the valuables I have left.”
Kurt worked himself to his feet, rising until he towered over the old man. His feet firmly planted on some of the old man’s battered treasures, he seemed to look down on the old man with nothing but hatred and contempt.
“This one here,” the old man said, holding an engraving for the others to see, although clearly speaking more to himself than to anyone else, his voice distant and sheltered from the world around him, “is of my grandparents. They arrived here in 1803. They lived out on the plantation for years before building this house in town. That was largely due to my grandmother’s insistence. My grandfather always believed a landowner needed to manage his own affairs as closely as possible. He was right, of course, but grandmother had grown up in London, and wasn’t accustomed to the agrarian lifestyle.”
Kurt brought one of his feet up and kicked the old man roughly in the side. “Shut up, you old fart,” he said. “Nobody here gives a shit about your damn family.”
The old man winced as he accepted the toe of Kurt’s boot, his hands fumbling the printed engraving of his grandparents. Rather than retaliate, however, the old man drew another piece up from his lap and held it for Decker and the others to see. It was a photograph, taken recently, of two girls dressed in white, one about eleven, the other sixteen.
“And these are my granddaughters,” the old man said pointedly to Decker, the accumulating blood in his mouth beginning to make him difficult to understand again. “This was taken on Julia’s birthday. We hired Mister Perkins, the best photographer in town, and had all our pictures made. It was difficult getting the girls to…”
The old man began to gurgle so badly on the blood filling his mouth that Decker could not make out any more of his words, although he continued to speak as if he commanded everyone’s attention, spitting and drooling in the process. Decker could see Kurt was getting ready to kick the old man again, but Floyd stopped him with a few sudden words.
“Never mind,” Floyd said. “Leave the old man alone, Kurt. He’s going to be more trouble than help now. Go check the other bedrooms.”
Before leaving to do as he had been ordered, Kurt slapped the old man on the side of his head, causing him to teeter momentarily off balance before righting himself again in his sitting position. His talking turned inward and it continued, presumably about his granddaughters, throughout the experience as if it was of no more consequence than a fly buzzing around his head. As Kurt walked past Decker on his way across the hall, Decker could hear Kurt mumbling, “More trouble than help? Stupid old bastard’s been more trouble than help since we got here.”
“Go help him, Frank,” Floyd said once Kurt had left the room. “Enis and I will take care of the old man.”
At Floyd’s words, Frank looked hesitantly at Decker, his eyes clearly probing the young man in a way that made Decker uncomfortable.
“Well, go on,” Floyd said. “We can manage it from here.”
Frank rose from his position in front of the bedroom trunk and left the room without a word, his eyes darting up to give Decker a final look on his way. Why does he keep looking at me? Decker thought. I’m not the one giving orders around here. Far from it. I’m not even sure what’s going on. Decker carefully watched Frank leave the room, suspicious that he might launch some kind of attack, and then turned back only to find Floyd studying him in much the same way Frank had.
“What is it?” Decker asked.
Floyd’s response was to smile, a broad and dangerous thing that did more to worry Decker than to placate him. “Come on,” he said, gently taking Decker’s arm again. “Let’s go talk to the old man.”
Decker nervously let himself be led across the room, the two voices in his head arguing about what kind of action he should be taking, and seemingly leaving him bereft of any of the independent kind. The voice of his mother was strong like it always was, like it was singing hymns on Sunday, but the other voice, the one he recognized but could not identify, was even stronger, telling him not to worry, not to fear, to allow the man named Floyd to lead him as he saw fit, because this man knew something about life, something Decker had never been able to fully understand.
Together Floyd and Decker made their way over to the old man, Decker unconsciously imitating Floyd in every movement and motion, the two of them crouching down before the old man on the same knee with their elbow set on the joint in the same way. The old man continued his family narration blindly, his words still wet and incoherent. Without warning, Floyd reached out and snatched the old man’s photograph from him, ending his soliloquy in mid-gurgle and capturing the old man’s wavering attention.
“These are your granddaughters, eh?” Floyd asked him.
Silently, the man nodded his head, closing his lips over his broken teeth and breathing heavily through his nose, his eyes bouncing back and forth uncertainly between Floyd and Decker.
“Where are they now?” Floyd asked.
The old man seemed ready to answer the question, had in fact opened his mouth to do so, when some awful realization came clearly into his eyes and forced him to stop his reply. Drawing back the words he had almost released with a belabored breath, the old man began to choke on the blood that filled his mouth, and coughed forward violently, spraying Decker and Floyd some on the face and hands but dropping most of the discharge on his lap. He slowly brought the spasms under control and, still looking down at the photos and correspondence surrounding him, spat the last of his blood away.
“What do you want to know that for?” he asked, a small measure of honor and bravery creeping back into his voice.
Floyd was looking more at the picture than at the old man. “Never you mind, why,” he said. “You just tell me where they are.”
Decker tried to gauge the reason why Floyd was asking about the old man’s granddaughters. It was clear the old man had made his own guess at Floyd’s intent, and that he did not think it honorable. But what Floyd’s interest was, Decker didn’t have any idea. Did he want to beat them, too? Beat them like they had beaten the old man? Beat them and take their valuables?
“They’re not here,” the old man said suddenly. “They left town with their mother when it first became clear Sherman was heading this way. They’re miles away now, safe from you and your kind.”
“Two girls and their mother?” Floyd persisted, still looking more at the photograph than at the old man. “They fled and left you here to guard an empty house? I don’t think so, friend.”
The old man turned his head and spit a bundle of blood and mucous out onto the floor. “The house wasn’t empty when they left,” he said. “I said you weren’t the first Northern visitors I’ve had.”
“So you said,” Floyd said absently, handing the photo to Decker and pointing to the image of the older sister. “Pretty, isn’t she?”
Decker looked carefully at the image of the young woman. Yes, she was pretty. Tall with dark hair, buxom, with sleepy eyes and a spirited smile. She looked like what he had heard his father call a homewrecker, not fully understanding what that term meant but knowing what kind of woman his father usually applied it to. And knowing that, suddenly Decker knew whose voice he had been hearing in his head. It was his father, of course. His father’s voice battling against his mother’s, like it often had in real life. Sometimes late at night in secret on the other side of their bedroom door, other times in open confrontation before Decker himself, and still others through subtle and hidden actions, Decker seeing both but neither his mother nor father seeing the conduct of the other.
Fornication. That’s what it was. Decker didn’t know what fornication was, but that’s what the battles his parents fought were always about. It was something that existed between men and women, he knew that much, something they both wanted but neither of them had, something they each hoped could be a certain way but never was. Decker had heard people talk about it, but in his short life there had been no one who had trusted him enough to give him the straight truth, to tell him exactly what it was and the purpose it served. In Decker’s mind it was still a big secret, a mystery he had too few clues to unravel. But whatever it was Decker knew it was powerful, and it was something people treasured, lied about, and fought over. People like his father. Perhaps people like Floyd.
Was that it? Decker asked himself as he continued to look at the young woman in the photograph. Did Floyd want to fornicate with her? Is that why he was asking the old man where she was? Looking up into the face of Sergeant William Floyd, Decker saw the same look he had seen many times on the face of his father, the look he wore after his mother had gone to a church meeting and before one of his lady friends had arrived, and he knew Floyd had some of the same desires. Decker didn’t know what the desire was for, but he knew enough about the desire itself to recognize it when he saw it. He had felt it himself, before as well as now, the deep and heart-thumping need for something he could not have, something he had not been allowed to understand. He wished the granddaughter was here, too, not so he could fornicate with her as Floyd would, but just so he could see what fornication finally was. Decker, in fact, knew very little about this man Floyd, but he thought he already knew enough to know that when the time came, Floyd wouldn’t lock him in the pantry the way his father always had.
But the old man was scared. There was fear in his eyes, fear about this idea of Floyd and his granddaughter together. Decker did not understand it but, like Floyd’s desire, he could certainly see it was there. Why would the old man be afraid? Would fornication somehow harm his granddaughter? Would Floyd have to take something from her? Would he need to beat her in order to get it? Decker did not know the answers to these questions, but just thinking about them made him experience some small measure of the old man’s fear.
“Hey, Bill!” Kurt’s voice shouted suddenly from the other room. “Come look at this!”
At the sound of the voice, Floyd began to stand up, taking the old man’s photograph and tucking it carefully in the inside pocket of his sergeant’s jacket. The old man’s hands reached up helplessly for it, but Floyd slapped them angrily away.
“Just sit tight,” he told the old man. “We’re not done talking to you yet.”
Kicking at the old man’s legs a few times in an attempt to keep him stationary, Floyd grabbed Decker by the arm and began to lead him from the room. When they exited, Floyd shut the door behind him and began moving down the hall.
“Bill!” Kurt called again, his voice urgent and much closer. “Come here, you’ve got to see this!”
Floyd made no response but moments later turned into the room Kurt had been calling from, Decker stumbling forward at his side. It was a bedroom, similar to the one they had just left, but smaller and with fewer furnishings. It had been emptied much as the other one had, the sheets missing from the bed and the curtains missing from the windows, but this room contained a gigantic closet running along one of the walls, separated from the rest of the room by a series of sliding wooden doors. These doors now stood open, allowing all to see the tremendous amount of dresses, skirts, blouses, hat boxes, and shoes it contained. Kurt and Frank were standing on either side of the alcove and smiling as if they had just struck it rich.
“Can you believe it?” Kurt said. “Look at it all, Bill. Have you ever seen so much? Can we even carry it all?”
Floyd stood shaking his head slowly back and forth. “I don’t think so,” he said. “A real shame since it’s probably the only thing of value left in the whole house.”
“I’m going to take all I possibly can,” Frank said. “Let the old man keep his damn pictures. This is what I call real treasure.”
Floyd seemed to smile at the private’s enthusiasm, but Decker thought he could detect some latent pain or sadness in the sergeant’s eyes. Decker did not understand it, but then again, he hadn’t understood much since entering this house, least of all this excitement over finding a closet full of women’s clothes.
“Hey,” Floyd said candidly, assuming a tone unlike any he had so far used. “Pick out something nice for Enis, too. He may be the newest member of our crew, but he still has the right to enjoy some of the spoils.”
“Sure thing, Bill,” Kurt said, already turning to begin ransacking the closet. “We’ll take care of him.”
Floyd gently pushed Decker forward. “I’m going back to finish up with the old man. When I give a holler, you boys come on down. This one’s left kind of a sour taste in my mouth, you know? I don’t want to have to yell for you twice.”
“Don’t worry,” Frank said, tearing a great armful of dresses off the hangers and piling them on the empty mattress. “We won’t be long. You want us to pick something out for you, too?”
“Sure,” Floyd said. “Couple of those petticoats would be nice. Red ones, if she has any.”
“Sure thing, Bill,” Kurt said with his back to the sergeant, but Floyd had already left the room leaving Decker standing by himself halfway between the door and the closet. Turning momentarily to see if Floyd had heard him, Kurt saw no one but Decker standing there and encouraged him to come on over.
Although Decker didn’t have any idea what was going on, his curiosity was certainly piqued and he began to make his way over to the closet. For the life of him, he couldn’t imagine what a group of grown men would want with piles of women’s clothing. They didn’t plan on wearing any, did they?
“What’s this all about?” he asked as he arrived behind Kurt’s left shoulder.
Decker’s question went unanswered in the wake of a tremendous discovery. Pushing two enormous gowns to either side, Kurt had revealed a small chest of drawers hidden at the back of the closet. Pulling open the top drawer, the soldier let out a kind of howl, gleeful and happy, like those made by men who win money on prizefights.
“Look at this!” he shouted, pulling a brassiere out by one shoulder strap and holding it up like a dead pheasant for the others to see.
Decker turned away momentarily, the respectable embarrassment at seeing such an item driven so deeply into him he could not help himself, and saw Frank’s eyes go wide with a mixture of both amazement and jealousy.
“Here,” Kurt said loudly, tossing the garment to Decker. “Take it. You won’t do much better than that, and the drawer’s full of them. We’ll have enough to last us for weeks!”
The brassiere landed on Decker’s shoulder as he was turning back to Kurt. Surprised to see it moving so close, he jumped away as if it meant to bite him and it fell onto the floor.
“Pick it up, kid,” Kurt said to him, who must have seen the movement out of the corner of his eye. “Trust me, when we get back to camp, you’re going to want it.”
Following the private’s advice, who surely knew more about this new world he found himself in than Decker did, he bent over and scooped the brassiere up with his fingers, tossing it back and forth between his hands for a while as if it might burn him. It was black, with thick, heavy straps and curved wires inserted under the cups. Parts of it were cloth and other parts were lace and, as Decker experimentally stretched it out across his hands, he could see it had been made for a woman with large breasts. Like the girl in the photograph, Decker remembered. She had large breasts, he had seen their presence under the dress she had been wearing. He had no idea what they looked like, her breasts, having never seen any before, but they had been apparent enough.
This was hers, the thought suddenly rushed through Decker’s mind. This brassiere was hers. The girl in the photograph. And with that realization came another -- if the brassiere had belonged to the girl in the old man’s photograph, then she certainly must have worn it at one time or another. At some time in the past -- yesterday, Decker thought with something similar to a heart flutter, it might have even been yesterday -- the fabric of the undergarment he now held in his sweaty hands had covered the breasts of the young woman he had seen in the photograph, its wires lifting their mysterious weight and its black straps pulling them tightly together. Without realizing he was even doing it, Decker raised the brassiere up to his face and gently caressed his cheek with it, inhaling deeply the soft mixture of perfume and musk it still contained. It was dirty, the way it smelled, but not dirty in a bad way as if it had been stained or soiled. Dirty in a good way. Dirty in a way Decker didn’t yet realize dirty could be.
It was the pressure of his erection in his pants that brought him suddenly back to reality. Decker yanked the brassiere away from his face and looked wildly at Frank and Kurt to see if either of them had noticed what he had been doing. They hadn’t, Decker decided quickly, both of them still rummaging through the closet for the choicest pieces. Decker turned away from them to hide the bulge that he thought clearly showed in his trousers, walking quickly over to the room’s window and stuffing the brassiere frantically into his coat pocket.
At the window he looked out onto an empty street, all the houses up and down the avenue shut up tightly and no signs of life at any of them. From his vantage point he could see the Union column still marching two streets away on the main thoroughfare of the town, stretching in both directions as far as the limits of the window pane would allow him to see. He supposed for a moment that if he could see them, then one of their number could potentially see him, but he did not duck out of sight as he might have had he been hiding in the house alone. There was no need to. He wasn’t running any more. Minutes ago he had been a deserter, but now he was a bummer, more a part of Sherman’s army than he had ever been before. Decker had no way of knowing that, no way of knowing the battles fought on this campaign were different from any this army had fought before, different even from the battles that had been fought by any army during the whole war or, in some respects, any that had been fought in the long history of warfare itself. It was a new kind of army the man they called Uncle Billy had marched from Atlanta to the sea and up into South Carolina, and in that army, Decker and the bummers were not scouts, scavengers, or even vandals. They were the front line troops. Decker had no way of knowing that, but standing in front of that bedroom window with a Southern lady’s stolen brassiere in his coat pocket and an erection slowly dying in his pants, he could already sense some of it while he watched the mass of Sherman’s army march steadily past him.
Floyd’s call came a few minutes later, clearly from the lower level of the house and pulling Decker’s attention away from the window. Behind him, Kurt and Frank had spread out a gigantic quilt they had found hidden in the trunk at the foot of the bed, and they were in the process of piling all their fancy treasures in its center. When completed, they brought the quilt’s four corners up over the top of the clothes and, giving the entire package a few spins, turned the quilt into an enormous sack that Kurt tried to drape over his shoulder. The weight was initially too much for him, but with Frank lifting up from behind, the two of them managed to get the bundle off the floor. Instructing Decker to follow them, they began to make their way out of the room. It took a couple of violent shoves to get the package through the doorway, its girth initially catching on either side of the doorframe, but Frank surmounted that obstacle in the manner described and before long Decker was following two steps behind as the two privates teetered and rocked their way down the staircase.
They found Floyd and the old man back in the parlor, the elderly man sitting seemingly lifeless in one of the chairs, his back to Decker and the soldiers, and Floyd standing beside the fireplace, holding a flaming bedpost in one hand and an iron poker in the other. The fireplace blazed with a bright and powerful light. The sergeant ordered his troops out onto the street with their booty and the three of them slowly did as they were told, Kurt and Frank struggling with their bundle and Decker forced to move slowly behind them, his eyes cautiously surveying the scene in the parlor. It appeared as if Floyd had wrapped and tied some linens around the end of the bedpost, which he had clearly unscrewed from one of the bed frames upstairs, and it was these linens that had been set afire, their thick layers providing enough fuel to keep a hot and steady fire burning. The old man, blood still dripping from his broken jaw, sat in a chair on the other side of the room, his head drooped forward on his old neck, his eyes open and staring blindly at a spot on the floor six feet in front of him.
What did Floyd intend to do? Decker wondered. Given the facts before him and the insights that had flashed across his bewildered mind in front of the window upstairs he should have been able to figure it out. But the brassiere he kept trapped in his coat pocket had driven him to the point of distraction, not just his own lecherous experience with it, but what it and items like it seemed to represent to these strange men, men who otherwise seemed bent on theft and destruction. Rather than see the signs for what they were, Decker turned his eyes away from them and simply followed Frank and Kurt out onto the street.
There they waited in silence for perhaps as many as three or four minutes as Decker wondered if he should try to broach the subject of the women’s clothing with either Kurt or Frank again. He wanted desperately to know what it was all about but the soft sensation of the fabric against his fingers reminded him of his own difficulty which had forced him to turn away from them earlier. He was still much too embarrassed to talk about anything they had taken out of the granddaughter’s closet.
Eventually Floyd came out of the building, shutting the door quickly behind him and moving swiftly down the street away from the center of town. “Come on,” he called after the other men. “We’d better move farther away. This one’s going to burn big and fast.”
Kurt and Frank took the advice immediately to heart, struggling to get their load back off the ground and move it in the direction Floyd had gone. But Decker was still curious about what Floyd had done to the house and, pausing to take a closer look at it, he saw through the front window that the sofa, the curio cabinet, and several sets of drapes had been set ablaze, the flames from each already licking up and across a portion of the ceiling. Amidst the fire, Decker could see the old man still sitting in the chair as Decker had last seen him, his face white and apparently oblivious to the inferno surrounding him.
Decker ran down the street after the others, who had formed a small observation party about one hundred yards from the house. Looking back on the house from that distance, Decker could not yet see any effects of the fire inside, and he briefly wondered if he could have imagined the blaze, until he saw the smoke begin to filter out into the street through the cracks around the door.
Decker looked fearfully back and forth between the Southern home and Floyd’s calm face three full times before speaking. “Is he going to burn himself up?”
Floyd shook his head. “Don’t worry, Enis. He’ll come out before it gets much worse.”
“Are you sure?” Decker asked. “He looked almost dead to me.”
“Nah,” Floyd said. “The old timer’s still got plenty of life left in him. Wait and see. They all do.”
Decker lingered in painful silence beside Floyd for thirty seconds before the old man came rushing out of the house, his mother’s voice whispering insistently to him the whole while that the time had come for him to leave, that as long as he left before it was certain the old man was dead he would not have to carry the sin on his soul for the balance of eternity. But Decker withstood the force of her words with a force of his own, one that was newly-acquired, a force the voice of his father had shown him he had, the force of his own unspoken need to stand in the very spot where hell and damnation reigned, to stand before it without fear, without trepidation, without the instinctive response of entreaty and supplication. Because there was something there, something of enormous power, something his mother had taught him to fear, but something he now realized his father had sought out and taken for his own. As the old Southern man came bursting out of his ancestral home, a raw, vicious surge of flame leaping out after him, Decker began to get an inkling of what that power was and what it could potentially do for him.
“Look at him go!” Floyd shouted, practically in Decker’s ear, the other two soldiers doubling over with the howls of laughter escaping them. “Oh, boys, look at that old Rebel run! You’d think old Granny Lee himself needed a new recruit to hold his damn horse the way that old man moves! Run, old man!” he shouted out after the departing Southerner. “Run while you still can! You’re running out of places you can run to!”
Decker laughed with the others, the comedy of the situation base enough to come through the multiple layers of uncertainty and surrealism that seemed to surround him. When the old man was out of sight and their laughter had the chance to subside, Floyd gave the order to move out and Frank and Kurt struggled to lift their bundle into traveling position. Taking Decker once again by the arm, Floyd began to lead the small party out of town, in a direction at once away from both the marching Federal troops and any destination that army might have been given.
Once out of town, the packed dirt of the last street coming to an abrupt end and giving way to soft and swampy ground, it was only a short march over three small hills before they arrived at a rough and dirty campsite. Twenty or so tents sat pitched together in a haphazard fashion, a few of them garishly painted with streaks of yellow and red. Half a dozen carts with their horses still attached to them sat lined up on one side of the compound, the animals nibbling peacefully at whatever vegetation they could find between their front hooves. Smoke rose from a few smoldering campfires, while seven men, all of them wearing uniforms in varying stages of disarray, sat lazily around -- four of them playing cards, two of them actively engaged in an arm-wrestling contest, and the last sitting calmly on a broken stump picking his nose. Decker did not recognize any of them, but knew them and their habits all the same. Each was a man like either Frank or Kurt, soldiers who had long since lost any fear or respect for the roll or the drill, and who now felt they answered to some higher power that demanded no such frivolities from them. Although his perceptions of his new world and the people it contained would continue to evolve for some time to come, Decker at that time still thought a higher power was contained in the force and spirit of Sergeant William Floyd himself, and was therefore not surprised to see the men jump almost to attention as Floyd’s returned presence among them became evident.
“Where’s the others?” Floyd asked one of the men who had been playing cards, a tall and thin sort with a violent eruption of red hair on the top of his head.
“Still out bumming,” the man said. “We just got back a half an hour ago ourselves.”
“Did you get anything?”
The red-haired man shook his head. “Not much. Pickings were pretty slim. Seems everywhere we went Smiley and his boys had been there before us. We should move out if we’re going to beat him and the others to the next town.”
“Yeah,” Floyd agreed. “We’ll pack up as soon as the rest of the boys make it back.”
The red-haired man looked curiously at the bundle Frank and Kurt had carried from town. “Looks like you sure found something though, Bill.”
Floyd laughed as the other six men crowded forward to see what treasures the package might contain. “Well, we certainly didn’t come away with anything that’ll help bring the Confederacy to its knees, but this stuff should bring some enjoyment our way.”
The men let out a howl of triumph as Frank and Kurt opened the old quilt and revealed the assortment of fabric and lace they had collected from their expedition. Like greedy children they pushed their way forward and began to scoop up as many of the items as they could, stopping each time only briefly to determine the type of garment they had grabbed before reaching out for another.
“Now, hold it!” Floyd called out loudly, stopping most of the activity before him. “I meant what I said about moving out as soon as the others get back. Each of you, keep one thing and put the rest back in the pile. You’re not going to have time for anything more than that anyway.”
Most of the men did as Floyd instructed, but a few of them looked at him hesitantly, still clutching armfuls of the stolen finery.
“You heard me,” Floyd said severely. “Put it all back but one. Kurt, make sure no one cheats. Wrap the rest of it back up and put it in my cart. If the others were back I wouldn’t even give you all time for one. I intend to beat Smiley to the next town.”
Reluctantly, the soldiers did as they were ordered, each dropping all but one article back onto the pile and then each running off in the same direction away from camp. Decker, who had stood silently and, as far as he knew, unobserved, throughout the drama tried to gain some kind of understanding by watching where the men ran to, but one of the long, sloping hills of the terrain hid their final destination from his view.
“Kurt,” Floyd said quietly after the others had run off. “When you get that loaded in my cart, take Enis over there and let him have his turn, too. He’s one of us now, and I want him treated that way.”
“Sure thing, Bill,” Kurt said eternally, his intonations calm and practiced like it was all he ever said. “I’ll take care of him. Hell, I’ll even make the boys let him go first.”
Floyd smiled strangely at the private. “Better kick it in the ass if Enis is going to go first. The way those boys do it, you’ll need to fly over there to make it in time to be third.”
Kurt laughed but no more words passed between them, Floyd turning slowly away and making his way into one of the small tents that littered the compound. Decker watched him go and disappear, wondering what it was that waited for him on the other side of the hill and what power gave Kurt the authority to push him to the front of the line.
“Come on, kid,” Kurt said as he struggled to lift the repacked bundle. “Give me a hand with this so we can go.”
Decker didn’t ask any questions, dumbly helping Kurt with the burden. Once deposited in the cart Floyd had indicated, Kurt took a moment to slap his hands against each other, signifying the completion of their labor, and then began to lead the younger man off in the direction the others had run. Decker kept his mouth shut, all the curiosity in his head swirling too quickly to fall out of his mouth in any organized fashion.
They made the turn around the low-lying hill and Decker could see in the near distance what appeared to be an army mess wagon with a short line of men standing outside it. The white canvas that covered the top of the wagon had at some point been painted in broad strokes of color, somewhat like some of the tents in the compound, but to a much greater degree. The colors -- red, yellow, blue, and green -- spun and swam together in a frenzied mix, curving around each other but maintaining their own identities in the flow. Decker had never before seen anything like it in the army. The colors had completely covered whatever standard markings the canvas had once borne. The only clue he had that it was indeed a mess wagon was the odd iron pot or two that still hung from hooks around its exterior.
“Where you from, kid?”
“Huh?” Decker said. He had not been expecting Kurt’s question and it startled him.
“I said, where are you from?”
“Oh,” Decker said softly, quickly returning his attention to the wagon they continued to approach. “Kenosha.”
“Is that in Wisconsin?”
“Yeah,” Decker said absently. He could see the men standing in line outside the back gate of the wagon, each holding the article of clothing they had been permitted to take, some of them twisting the delicate fabric in their rough hands. There were seven of them in the line, and Frank was one, meaning one of the men who had returned to the camp before them was missing.
“I knew a girl from Kenosha once,” Kurt said. “Least I think it was Kenosha.”
What were they doing? Why were they standing in line behind an abandoned mess wagon? And what were they going to do with women’s clothing? Decker didn’t have any idea.
Suddenly, it seemed, Kurt and Decker were upon the others, Decker following obediently as Kurt marched him right to the front of the line.
“Wait a minute!” one of the soldiers shouted at Kurt, the indignation of the others roaring in the wind behind him. “Get to the end of the line, Kurt. No skipping allowed, you know that.”
“It ain’t for me,” Kurt protested. “It’s for Enis here. Bill said so.”
“The hell he did!” the man cried.
“He did so,” Kurt said. “Enis here is Bill’s newest recruit. We picked him up while we were in town. If it weren’t for him, we wouldn’t have found all them clothes you boys are clutching so tightly. Bill wants to reward him by letting him go first, now get out of the way!”
Decker knew Kurt was lying -- he didn’t have anything to do with them finding the clothes -- but he didn’t say anything, much too uncertain about the whole situation to risk speaking out loud. But the lie seemed to have power. Even Decker could feel the anger of the other soldiers dissipate as it was told and, before he even realized it, Decker found himself standing right beside the wagon in the very first place in line.
“Get’s to go first,” the man mumbled sourly behind Decker as Kurt properly made his way to the back of the line, leaving Decker alone for the first time on this uncharted horizon. “Hasn’t been here ten goddamn minutes and he gets to go first.”
With a start Decker remembered the black brassiere stuffed down in his coat pocket. He slipped a hand inside the jacket to wrap his fingers around its soft fabric, gaining some small measure of comfort in his difficult circumstance. He didn’t know what was going to happen next, that was bad enough. But worse, he didn’t even know what was expected of him. He was at the front of the line. The front. Those behind him would be waiting for him to do something, do it first so they could do it after him. Something, but what? What in God’s name had he gotten himself into?
There was some movement above him and Decker looked up to see a man emerging from the fabric covering the top of the wagon, the stranger’s hand parting the material exactly like a tent flap and his feet coming down the three steep steps that had been built in the wagon’s side for exactly that purpose. He was a large man with black hair, one of the men Decker had seen before in the compound, his shirt unbuttoned and hanging loose from his trousers, a rich carpet of fur covering his chest and belly. As his booted feet touched the soft ground he spoke in passing to Decker, his tone teasing and playful, the way men sometimes are when they feel content and connected.
“Your turn, kid. I think I left a little for you.”
Decker was so shocked by the man’s sudden appearance he didn’t hear, much less understand, his words. But his shock gave way to rapid relief when he realized, whatever the man had said to him, the stranger had been the actual first person in this line and had, therefore, given Decker an inkling of what it was he was expected to do. He was supposed to climb up into the mess wagon. His turn had come. Without pausing to look back at those who stood behind him, Decker did just that, the brassiere coming out of his pocket with his hand as he pulled himself up and inside, the tent-like fabric falling naturally closed behind him, sealing him in on whatever fate it was that awaited him.
The interior space was lit by a few low candles scattered about on wooden crates that had once held provisions and utensils, now emptied and turned over to stand as makeshift end tables. The floor of the wagon was blanketed with mattresses and quilts, forming something akin to a soft and lush burrow of comfort on what must underneath be hard clapboard. Everywhere Decker looked he saw women’s clothing -- gowns, dresses, skirts, blouses, slips, petticoats, bloomers, chemises, brassieres, panties -- most of them draped on hangers suspended from two great, long poles, one on either side of the complex wooden framework that gave the outer tent fabric its shape, but some of them scattered about singly or in piles on the floor. The smell of perfume assaulted him from the moment he entered the enclosure, its vapors seeming to hang in the air like a fog. And amidst all the finery and lace, lounging at the back of the wagon like a forgotten queen, was the dark and shadowy form of a woman.
“What you got for me, boy?” her voice came forth in an accent both Southern and uneducated. “Something you want me to try on?”
Decker stood frozen before it, the voice trapping him in place like some loathsome medusa. The brassiere he had taken from the old man’s house, the one that had belonged to his well-developed granddaughter, swung pendulously from a single strap hooked around his ring finger.
The sound and sensation of movement followed as the woman crept forward on her hands and knees, making her way into the candlelight and revealing both her dark brown skin and the wild tussle of her thick, nappy hair. Her knowing eyes caught sight of Decker’s offering and she stopped her cat-like procession, rising up into a kneeling position with her thin fingers resting on her wide hips. She wore a small and stained pair of white panties, a pair of diamond earrings, and not much else.
“What do you think, sugar?” she said, shaking her torso gently for Decker’s youthful appreciation. “That thing going to be my size?”
Not knowing which force within him allowed him to do so, Decker stepped forward.
+ + +
“Decker” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
Image Source
https://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/shermans-march
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