Book Three: The Honest Silence Part Five: The Counting Characters
Chapter Twenty-four
The Quarters
Henry Ashton. Marlfield, in the United Kingdom of America. Monday, 26 September 1864.
The corridor between Richmond and the federal capital was fought across for two campaigning seasons and was left in a condition contemporaries compared to a famine.
My mother had asked me, in the spring of 1861, that if I was not coming home I should not write to tell her so. In September of 1864 I found that I could write to her at last, because for the first time in three years and a half I had something of my own to tell her that she had not forbidden. I wrote that I was coming home.
It was a short letter. I said that I had leave, and that I would come by the railway to Fredericksburg and down the Northern Neck road, and that I would be at Marlfield on the evening of Monday the twenty-sixth if the road allowed. I did not say anything else. I did not know what else could be said that she would want to read, and I had learned from her, a long time ago, that a thing which has not been said can still be found where it was left. I did not expect an answer, and none came. I went anyway.
I should tell Your Majesty about the country between, because nobody in London will have seen it, and it is the thing I find I cannot stop seeing.
The railway from the capital to Fredericksburg had been torn up and relaid and torn up again so many times in the war that the men who worked on it had stopped counting, and in the autumn of 1864 it had been relaid once more, by the army, to supply the garrisons, on new ties, over trestles of green timber; and the cars went down it at a walking pace, and stopped wherever there was a trestle, while a man went forward to look at it. I sat at the window for six hours. I had ridden that line a dozen times before the war, going home for Christmas, and I knew every farm along it, and every station, and the shape of every hill. I knew them still. There was nothing on them.
I do not mean that the country had been laid waste in the way that the march laid Georgia waste, deliberately, in a season. It had not been anybody’s purpose. It had simply been fought across, back and forth, by both armies, for two years, over the same roads and the same rivers and the same farms, until there was nothing left on any of it that an army could eat or burn or carry away. The fences were gone; they had been burned for firewood by one army or the other, every rail of them, for sixty miles. The fields had not been planted for two years, most of them, and had gone back to broom sedge and blackberry and little pines, so that the whole country from the Occoquan to the Rappahannock looked, from the window of the train, like a country that had been abandoned a long time ago by people who had never come back. There were houses with no roofs, and houses that were only chimneys, standing up out of the weeds the way the chimneys had stood in Atlanta; and there were houses that were whole, with nobody in them, and houses that were whole, with people in them, and those were the worst, because the people came to the doors when the train went by and looked at it, and they were thin. The women were thin and the children were thin and the old men were thin, and they stood in the doors of their houses in the middle of their empty fields and watched the train go past, and did not wave, and did not do anything. A man from the north who was going to the garrison at Fredericksburg, a quartermaster’s clerk, said to me that it was like the pictures of Ireland in the famine. I had seen Ireland from the deck of a ship, in 1861, very green. I did not answer him.
Fredericksburg I will not describe at length. It had changed hands, I was told, seven times; I believe it was more. The river street where the ironworks had its office was shuttered from end to end, and the office of the works was a doorway with no door in it, and the works themselves, below the town, were a roofless shed with the chimney fallen in. Nobody knew where Mr Coakley was. A man at the station told me that he had gone south with the works in 1862, when the rebels took the machinery to Richmond, and that nobody had heard of him since; and the bank where Mr Coakley had paid my money for Daniel was a garrison storehouse, with a sentry at the door. I stood in the river street for some time, in front of the doorway with no door. Then I went and hired a horse.
The Northern Neck road was a road again, more or less. I rode down it in the afternoon, the same twenty miles I had driven in the gig with Edmund in the December of 1859, with the river showing grey between the trees on my right hand, as it had then; and I passed the halfway house, which was empty, and the church where the county company had been blessed, which was not, and the courthouse, where there was a company of the Crown’s infantry in tents on the green where Edmund had drilled his forty men in green jackets, and a flag on the courthouse, and a sentry who looked at me and at my plain clothes and decided that I was nobody in particular.
I had come in plain clothes. I told myself that it was for my mother’s sake.
The county was governed, that autumn, as all the rebel country was governed after the collapse: by a magistrate whom the Crown had appointed, a man from Pennsylvania, I was told, who sat in the courthouse three days a week and heard whatever was brought to him under the ordinary law of Virginia, with the garrison on the green to see that his orders were obeyed and to do nothing else. There was no general over him. The soldiers were there, I was told, to keep the peace and to protect the freed people of the county, so far as their colonel thought it his business to; and the colonel was a sensible man, and thought it his business a good deal, and was hated for it by every white family on the river, and was civil to all of them, and did not care.
I came up the drive at Marlfield at dusk.
The drive was there, and the house was there at the top of it, square and plain, with the portico my grandfather had added; nobody had burned it. The lawn had not been cut that year and stood in long grass down to the cedars. And my mother was on the porch with a lamp.
I have told Your Majesty that she was on the porch with a lamp every time I came home from the time I was eighteen. She was on it that night. She had had my letter, then. She stood at the top of the steps, very straight, in black, holding the lamp, and she was older and smaller and greyer than she had been, and she did not come down the steps. I got off the horse and came up to the foot of them and stopped, and we looked at each other, she at the top and I at the bottom, for what seemed to me a long time.
Then she said, “Your brother is at the stables. You had better see to your horse.” And she turned and went in, and left the door open behind her, and the light from the lamp went away down the hall.
Edmund was at the stables.
He had come home in the spring, on his parole. The prisons in the north had been emptied of the officers of the rebel armies, rank by rank, all through the winter after the collapse, as the courts decided whom they wanted and whom they did not; and captains of county companies were not wanted, and in March they had let him go, with a paper that said he had given his word not to take up arms again against the Crown, and a railway warrant as far as Fredericksburg. He had walked from there. He was thinner than I had seen him even in the corridor on the Axis, and his right arm hung a little stiffly from the shoulder, and he had kept the beard that made him look like our father; and he had a fork in his left hand and was mucking out the stall of the only horse on the place, an old grey carriage horse that had been too old for either army to want.
He put the fork down when he saw me and came across the yard, and stopped, and then put out his left hand, as he had at the rail of the steamer, and I took it with mine. He said, “Harry.” He said, “She had your letter. She read it at breakfast, and put it in her pocket, and didn’t say a word all day, and then at five o’clock she went and filled the lamp.” He looked at me. “I thought you’d want to know that.”
I said that I did.
I stayed four days. I am going to tell Your Majesty what I saw, and not very much of what was said, because very little was.
The quarters were empty.
They ran along the lane from the stables towards the fields, as they had always run, a row of cabins of squared logs with clay chimneys, where twenty-six people had lived when I was a boy and my father owned them, and where they had lived when he died and I owned them; and there was nobody in them. I walked down the lane on the first morning, by myself. The doors stood open, some of them, and some were shut, and one had fallen off its hinges and lay in the yard in front of its cabin in the grass. There were chickens in one of the cabins, somebody’s chickens, gone wild. In another there was a bed frame, without a mattress, and a broken chair, and on the wall above the hearth a picture cut out of a newspaper and pasted there, so long ago that I could not tell what it had been a picture of. The gardens behind the cabins, where the people had grown their own corn and greens and kept their own pigs, had gone to weeds like the fields. It was very quiet. I had never in my life heard that lane quiet. There had always been somebody in it: children, or a woman at a door, or old Uncle Nat on his bench at the end, or somebody singing in the gardens, or a dog. There was nobody.
Edmund told me, when I asked, how they had gone. Some had gone with Daniel, in the April of 1862, in the night, the week the Crown’s army came to Falmouth; that was the time he had told me of on the floor of the corridor on the Axis, from Mother’s letter. More had gone that summer, one at a time, and in families, whenever the army’s patrols came near enough on the river road for a man to walk to them in a night. And the rest had gone in the winter after the collapse, when the garrison came to the courthouse and the colonel had it read from the courthouse steps that every person held as a slave in the county was free by order of the military authority, for so long as that authority was there. They had not needed to walk far, then. They had simply gone. Uncle Nat had died, the winter before, on his bench, of being old. And the last of them had gone away down the drive in the February of 1864 with their bundles on their backs, past the porch, and my mother had stood on the porch and watched them go and had not said anything, and neither had they.
He told me how many. He did not tell me who, and I did not ask him who. I have said that I will not ask about Rachel, and I did not; and I found, standing in that lane, that I could not have asked my mother either, in the kitchen where she was now cooking her own supper over Rachel’s fire, where the woman had gone who had kept it for thirty years. My mother did not tell me. She did not speak of any of them, the whole four days, by name or otherwise. It was as though they had never been there.
I went to the forge on the second day.
It was in its shed behind the stables, where it had always been, where I had heard Daniel’s stroke whenever I was at home in the years before he went to the works, and where he had worked again, I knew now, from the January of 1862 to the April, after Mr Coakley sent him home. The anvil was there. Nobody had taken it; it was too heavy, and an anvil is not a thing an army needs. It had rust on its face, and the bellows had rotted and fallen in on themselves, and the fire had been cold so long that there was grass growing in the hearth through the ashes. There was a hammer on the floor beside it. I picked it up and put it on the anvil, where a smith puts a hammer when he has finished a heat, and stood there.
I do not know how long I stood there. I know that I was trying to remember the stroke, the one I had known through two other hammers and a mill race at Falmouth at twenty yards, and that I could not hear it. I could remember that I had heard it. I could not hear it. I went back to the house.
My mother spoke to me once, alone, on the third evening, in the parlour, after Edmund had gone up.
She was sewing, by the lamp. I was reading, or pretending to. She had not asked me anything in three days: not about the war, nor the capital, nor Anne, nor the Colonel, nor what I had been doing for three years and a half, nor whether I was well. She had talked to Edmund about the county, at meals, in her ordinary voice, as though I were a guest who had come late and would go early, and I had answered when I was spoken to, which was not often.
She said, without looking up from her sewing, “Edmund tells me that you are to be paid for them.”
I said that I had made a claim. I said that there was a provision, for loyal subjects of the Crown whose property lay in a rebel polity, and that I came within it.
She sewed for a while. Then she said, “Your father left them to you. I kept them for you, as well as I could, for three years, with your brother in the army and then in a prison, and the county at war, and nobody to help me. I could not keep them. And now the Crown will pay you for them.” She bit off the thread. “There is not a family on this river that will be paid for anything. Not one. Not the Turners at Woodlawn, who lost two sons, nor your brother, who lost the use of his arm, nor I. Only you.” She looked at me then, for the first time in three days, over the lamp. “I suppose that is what loyalty is for.”
I did not answer her. I could not think of anything to say that was both true and of any use, as I had not been able to think of anything to say to the woman in her field on St Helena. She looked at me a moment longer, and then went back to her sewing, and after a while she said good night and took her lamp and went up, and I sat in the dark.
She did not speak of the letter I had written to her in the corridor on the Axis, in my own hand, in the August of 1862. I did not ask her whether she had read it. I do not know now.
The company’s flag was in the hall, folded, on the chest by the stairs, where Edmund had put it when he brought it home in his knapsack in March. I do not know how it had come to him, or where it had been kept, and he did not say. My mother had sewn it in the spring of 1861, as I have told Your Majesty, with the help of the women from the quarters, and it had been blessed in the church. I looked at it, on the chest, every time I passed through the hall. I did not unfold it. Nobody did. It lay there, folded, the whole of my four days, on the chest by the foot of the stairs, with the women who had helped to sew it gone from the lane and the men who had carried it under the ground at Arlington Heights, and the woman who had sewn it going up the stairs past it every night with her lamp.
Edmund drove me back to Fredericksburg on the Friday, in the gig, behind the old grey horse, with the river on our left hand this time. We did not say much. He told me that the men of the company who had come home came up to the house sometimes, of an evening, and sat on the porch with him and talked about the ditch, and Jackson, and the nine who were dead, and that it did them good, and that it did him good. He said that he did not know what else any of them were going to do with themselves now. He would not talk about Jackson to me. He said only that he had read it in a newspaper in the prison yard, that a guard had given him, and that he did not believe a word of what it said about how, and did not want to know.
At the station he said, “You won, Harry.” I said that I supposed we had. He said, “It isn’t the same thing, you know. As being right.” I said that I knew. He looked at me for a while, with the reins in his good hand. Then he said, “Come at Christmas, if you like. She won’t say so. But she’ll fill the lamp.”
I said that I would try. And the train came in, and I got into it, and it went back up the corridor at a walking pace through the empty fields and the chimneys, stopping at every trestle, while a man went forward to look.