“Oh, no. He made me abhor that. Take to your good sleep, my man. We surprise the railroad tomorrow.”
“Our raids still entertain you?” I asked.
“Not so much. But I believe our course has been written. We’ll kill ten and lose two. Our old Bobbie Lee will smile when we send the nigger back to him with the message. I’ll do hell for Lee’s smile.”
The nigger came in the tent about then. He was highfalutin, never hardly glanced at me. They had a magnificent bay waiting for the letters. Two soldiers came in and took an armload of missives from General Stuart’s trunk, pressing them into the saddlebags. The nigger, in civilian clothes, finally looked at me.
“Who dis?” he said.
“Corporal Deed Ainsworth; shake hands,” said General Stuart.
I have a glass shop in Biloxi. I never shook hands with any nigger. Yet the moment constrained me to. He was Jeb’s best minstrel. He played the guitar better than anything one might want to hear, and the banjo. His voice singing “All Hail the Power” was the only feeling I ever had to fall on my knees and pray. But now he was going back down South as a rider with the messages.
“Ain’t shaking hands with no nancy,” said the nigger. “They say he lay down with a Choctaw chief in Mississip, say he lick a heathen all over his feathers.”
“You’re getting opinions for a nigger, George,” said Jeb, standing. “I don’t believe Our Lord has room for another nigger’s thoughts. You are tiring God when you use your mouth, George.”
“Yessuh,” said George.
“Do you want to apologize to Corporal Ainsworth?”
“I real sorry. I don’t know what I say,” the nigger said to me. “General Jeb taught me how to talk and sometimes I justs go on talking to try it out.”
“Ah, my brother George,” Jeb suddenly erupted.
He rushed to the nigger and threw his arms around him. His eyes were full of tears. He embraced the black man in the manner of my dreams of how he might embrace me.
“My chap, my chum. Don’t get yourself killed,” said Jeb to George. “Try to look ignorant when you get near the road pickets, same as when I found you and saved you from drink.”
“I loves you too, General Jeb. I ain’t touched nothing since you saved me. Promise. I gon look ignorant like you say, tills I get to Richmond. Then I might have me a beer.”
“Even Christ wouldn’t deny you that. Ah, my George, there’s a heaven where we’ll all prosper together. Even this sissy, Corporal Ainsworth.”
They both looked at me benevolently. I felt below the nigger.
George got on the horse and took off South.
At five the next morning we came out of a stand of birches and all of us flew high over the railroad, shooting down the men. I had two stolen repeaters on my hip in the middle of the rout and let myself off Pardon Me. A poor torn Yank, driven out of the attack, with no arm but a kitchen fork, straggled up to me. We’d burned and killed almost everything else.
Stuart rode by me screaming in his rich bass to mount. The blue cavalry was coming across the fire toward us. The wounded man was stabbing me in the chest with his fork. Jeb took his saber out in the old grand style to cleave the man from me. I drew the pistol on my right hip and put it almost against Jeb’s nose when he leaned to me.
“You kill him, I kill you, General,” I said.
There was no time for a puzzled look, but he boomed out: “Are you happy, Corporal Ainsworth? Are you satisfied, my good man Deed?”
I nodded.
“Go with your nature and remember our Savior!” he shouted, last in the retreat.
I have seen it many times, but there is no glory like Jeb Stuart putting spurs in his sorrel and escaping the Minié balls.
They captured me and sent me to Albany prison, where I write this.
I am well fed and wretched.
A gleeful little floorwipe came in the other day to say they’d killed Jeb in Virginia. I don’t think there’s much reservoir of self left to me now.
This earth will never see his kind again.
Behold the Husband in His Perfect Agony
IN THE ALLEYS THERE WERE SIGHS AND DERISIONS AND THE SLIDE OF dice in the brick dust. His vision was impaired. One of his eyes had been destroyed in the field near Atlanta as he stood there with his binoculars.
Now he was in Richmond.
His remaining eye saw clearly but itched him incessantly, and his head turned, in necessity, this way and that. A clod of dirt struck him, thrown by scrambling children in the mouth of the alley he had just passed. False Corn turned around.
He thanked God it wasn’t a bullet.
In the next street there was a group of shoulders in butternut and gray jabbering about the Richmond defenses. He strolled in and listened. A lieutenant in his cups told False Corn what he wanted to hear. He took a cup of acorn coffee from a vendor.
A lovely woman hurried into a house, clicking her heels as she took the steps. He thought of his wife and infant son. They lived in a house in Baltimore. His wife was lively and charming. His son was half Indian, because he, False Corn, was an Indian himself, of the old Huron tribe, though he looked mostly Caucasian.
Now he wore a maroon overcoat that hit him at midknee. In his right pocket were the notes that would have got him killed if discovered by the law or the soldiers.
He turned and went uptown, climbing the hill from the railroad.
False Corn’s contact was a Negro who pretended, days, to be mad on the streets. At nights he poisoned the bourbon in the remaining officers’ saloons, where colonels and majors drank from the few remaining barrels. Then he loped into a spastic dance — the black forgettable fool — while home-front leaders gasped and collapsed. Apparently the Negro never slept, unless sleep came to him in the day and was overlooked as a phase of his lunacy by passersby, who would rather not have looked at all.
Isaacs False Corn, the Indian, the spy, saw Edison, the Negro, the contact, on the column of an inn. His coat was made of stitched newspapers. Near his bare feet, two dogs failed earnestly at mating. Pigeons snatched at the pieces of things in the rushing gutter. The rains had been hard.
False Corn leaned on the column. He lifted from his pocket, from amongst the notes, a half-smoked and frayed cheroot. He began chewing on the butt. He did not care for a match at this time. His cheroot was a small joy, cool and tasteless.
“Can you read?” False Corn asked Edison.
“Naw,” said Edison.
“Can you remember?”
“Not too good, Captain.”
“I’m going to have to give you the notes, then. Goddamn it.”
“I can run fast. I can hide. I can get through.”
“Why didn’t you run out of Virginia a long time ago?”
“I seen I could do more good at home.”
“I want you to stop using the arsenic. That’s unmanly and entirely heinous. That’s not what we want at all.”
“I thought what you did in war was kill, Captain.”
“Not during a man’s pleasure. These crimes will land you in a place beyond hell.”
“Where’s that? Ain’t I already been there?”
“The disapproval of President Lincoln. He freed you. Quit acting like an Italian.”
“I do anything for Abe,” Edison said.
“All you have to do is filter the lines. I mean, get through.”
“That ain’t no trouble. I been getting through long time. Get through to who?”
“General Phil Sheridan, or Custer. Here’s the news: Jeb Stuart is dead. If you can’t remember anything else, just tell them Stuart is dead. In the grave. Finished. Can you remember?”
“Who Jeb Stuart be?” asked Edison, who slobbered, pretending or real.