Encounter at Cold Harbor (4 page)

At headquarters they were greeted by Gen. A. P. Hill himself. The general was delighted with Esther. “She’s the finest young’un I’ve ever seen, Colonel!” he said when Esther allowed him to pick her up.

“Thank you, General,” Colonel Majors said. “I believe you know my son, Tom.”

“Why, indeed I do. You’ve spoken enough of him,” Hill said. He took Tom’s salute, then stuck his hand out. “Glad you’re back, Sergeant. Will you be coming back on active duty?”

“No, sir, unless you can find a place for a one-legged man.”

“Why, I expect we can do that! General Hood lost an arm
and
a leg, and he’s still commanding like he always was.” He nodded at Tom’s father. “See if you can’t find a place for him. I know you’d like that, Colonel.”

After the general left, Tom said, “Where’s Jeff, Pa—I mean, Colonel?”

“He would have been here himself, but we didn’t know exactly when you were getting in,” his father said. “There’s some kind of a traveling show in town.” He grinned. “Jeff thought he had to see it.”

“What kind of a show?”

“I don’t know! Some sort of minstrel show, I suppose. He pestered me until I let him go.” He glanced at Leah, and a thought seemed to come to him. “Why don’t you go down and find him, Leah? Then he can bring you out to Silas’s place. I’ll see that he gets a wagon from the quartermaster.”

“Oh, that would be nice!”

“We’ll drop you off downtown, then. Come along!”

Leah climbed back into the wagon, and soon they were making their way through the streets of Richmond. She noticed that the city had become shabby and dilapidated. With no new supplies coming in for repairs, and no time or effort available for paint or cleanup, the city looked stark and ragged, like an old beggar who had no one to care for him.

“Place looks pretty run-down, sir,” Tom said as they rumbled along.

“I guess it does, but it’s still here. The Union’s done everything they could to take it.”

Tom smiled at this. “I heard another story about Lincoln. Somebody came in and wanted a pass for Richmond, and he said, ‘Well, I gave passes to Richmond to General McClellan, and he hasn’t been able to get there with a hundred thousand men, but maybe you can do it by yourself.’”

Colonel Majors laughed. “I wish our president had a sense of humor like Lincoln’s.” He pointed. “There’s the theater, Leah, and the show’s probably already started. Maybe you just want to wait until it lets out, and then you can see Jeff.”

“I think I’ll do that.” Leah got to the ground and waved good-bye, then took up a waiting place beside the theater. She asked once how long the show would be, and the ticket taker said, “Won’t be more
than ten minutes more. Another show will be starting right away.”

“Thank you.”

Soon people began coming out. Anxiously she searched the crowd, for it occurred to her that if she missed Jeff she would be stranded alone in Richmond with no way to get to Uncle Silas’s but by walking.

And then she spotted his black hair above the gray uniform as he emerged. He seemed to have grown since she had seen him last! She started forward and opened her lips to cry, “Jeff, here I am!” But then she stopped.

By Jeff’s side was Lucy Driscoll, dressed in a peach-colored gown and her hair done up in the latest style. She looked as pretty as any girl Leah had ever seen, and she was hanging onto Jeff’s arm. Lucy was small, as Leah had always wanted to be. Now, as she looked up and laughed into Jeff’s eyes, there was a flirtatious manner about her that Leah knew she herself could never achieve.

The pair drew closer, and once again Leah started to speak. But before she could, Lucy reached up, pulled Jeff’s head down, and gave him a kiss on the cheek.

Jeff flushed but seemed pleased by it all, and at that moment he saw Leah. He swallowed hard and stopped abruptly. “Why, look, Lucy. There’s Leah!” He came up to her at once but looked somewhat discomfited. “I didn’t expect you
today!”
he said awkwardly. Lucy was still hanging onto his right arm, so he disengaged it and held out his hand. “Good to see you, Leah.”

Leah took his hand but shook it only briefly. “I didn’t mean to interrupt,” she said rather coldly.
“Your father has taken Esther and Tom out to Uncle Silas’s.”

“Why didn’t you go along with them?” Lucy said. “I’d think you’d want to.”

Leah wanted to say, “I wanted to be with Jeff,” but she did not want to admit that.

“Well, I’ll take you out there, Leah. Lucy and I will, won’t we?”

“Of course, we’ll be glad to. My father will have a carriage take us.”

“Your father said for you to come in one of the army wagons, Jeff,” Leah said. She looked at Lucy. “But he doesn’t have to go if he doesn’t want to.”

Jeff said quickly, “Well, of course I want to!” He turned back to Lucy. “Look, there’s Samson over there. You don’t mind if he takes you home, do you, Lucy?”

As a matter of fact, Lucy probably did mind. But it was obvious she saw there was no other way out. “Of course not, and, Leah, you must come over to see us. Jeff comes to our house quite often, don’t you, Jeff?”

Jeff looked rather foolish and said, “Why, I guess I do.”

“Thank you.” Leah waited until the two had said their good-byes.

Jeff turned to her then, saying, “I guess we’ll have to walk out to the camp and pick up a wagon.”

“I guess so.”

On the walk to the army camp, Jeff asked about Esther, then about all of Leah’s people back in Kentucky. He noticed quickly that she was unusually silent, and he asked, “Is something wrong? Did you get sick on the train?”

“No, not at all!”

“Well, you just look sort of pale.” Then he added, “But you look good. You’ve grown up even in the little time you’ve been gone.” He almost said, “I’m glad you’re back,” but Leah was acting so strangely that he could not think of a way to put it.

At last, when they had obtained the wagon and were on their way out of town toward Uncle Silas’s farm, he said, “You’re not upset with me because I went to the play with Lucy, are you?”

“You can go to a play with anybody you want to,” she said. “I’m not your keeper!”

Instantly Jeff knew she was upset, but there was nothing he could do about it now. He spoke to the horses and drove off at a fast clip. He was thinking,
Girls sure are funny. I wish they’d be nice and steady like boys
.

I
don’t see why she has to get so mad! After all, it was only an old show!”

Tom Majors looked across the field desk at Jeff. Tom had become an aide to his father, had procured a new uniform, and looked very handsome. A week had passed since he’d arrived in Richmond with Leah and Esther, and during that time he had noticed that Jeff was getting grumpier and grumpier.

Putting his turkey-quill pen down, Tom leaned back in his chair and studied his younger brother. “You’ll have to remember that girls have sensitive feelings,” he remarked.

Jeff lifted his heavy eyebrows in a gesture of surprise. “Well, what about me? Don’t you think I’ve got any feelings?”

Tom grinned abruptly. “No, I don’t think boys are supposed to have feelings. They’re like pigs and dogs. They don’t really get angry or upset or get their feelings hurt.”

“What are you talking about? Even dogs get their feelings hurt. I remember the time you fussed at Old Blue for not treeing any squirrels, and he went around for a week with his tail between his legs.”

“Yes, but Blue was an unusual dog. He was far more sensitive than you are, Jeff. You’re supposed to be a tough Confederate soldier, and here you are
worried about little things like your girl being mad at you.”

“She’s not my girl!” Jeff said and clenched his teeth. “We’re just good friends, so I don’t see why she has to get mad at me just because I took Lucy Driscoll to an old minstrel show!”

Tom picked up the turkey quill and dipped it into the ink. He stared at the pen and said, “Did you know that right-handed people have to have quills from the right wing of the turkey in order to make the ink flow right?”

Jeff stared at his brother as if he had lost his mind. “Tom, here I am having a crisis, and you’re giving me a lecture on which side of a turkey wing a quill comes out of! Who cares? What I want to know is, how am I gonna talk sense into Leah!”

“Why don’t you give her a present? Some candy or some perfume or something like that would be good.”

Jeff paused and thought about it. “Nah, that wouldn’t work.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I already tried it.”

Jeff stood up and stomped out of the tent, leaving Tom half amused and half troubled over his younger brother’s problems. He wrote steadily for some time, and then his father came in. Tom stood to his feet, saluting him sharply. “Good morning, Colonel Majors!”

“Good morning, Sergeant!” The colonel looked approvingly at his son’s natty new uniform. “That’s probably one of the last new uniforms in the whole Confederacy. It looks a whole lot better than mine.”

Tom looked down self-consciously. “I feel like a
fake, really. Wearing a uniform when I know I’m not going to be doing any fighting.”

Nelson Majors sat on a camp chair and looked over the work that Tom was doing. “It takes more than people shooting guns to win a war. You know that, Tom. Somebody’s got to make the guns and the bullets—and get them to the front. You’ve been a great help to me since you’ve come back. It’s going to be a real job to get this army ready to face Grant.” Leaning back in his chair, he brushed a hand over his coal-black hair. “People never think about how hard it is to move ten thousand men from point A to point B.”

“Especially when most of the railroads aren’t working, and we don’t have any horses.”

“Right! Now, Stonewall Jackson, he was a genius at that sort of thing.”

Tom grinned ruefully. “Yep, if he didn’t kill us first, he’d get us to where he wanted us, all right. That man sure didn’t have any patience with anybody who dropped by the way.”

“No, he didn’t. He was tough—but the best general that I ever saw.”

“Better than General Lee?”

“He was General Lee’s right arm. But he couldn’t do what Lee’s doing, like making things smooth with President Jeff Davis. Talk about somebody having sensitive feelings! Our president’s as sensitive as a man without a skin.”

Tom blinked. “Oh, that reminds me. Jeff and Leah are still carrying on with that feud of theirs.”

“They’ll get over it.”

“Sure, I know that, and you know that, but Jeff doesn’t know that. He thinks it’s going on forever. Growing up is pretty hard, Colonel.”

Nelson Majors looked over at his tall son and smiled briefly. “I don’t know if I’ll ever get either of you raised.” He hesitated, then added, “You haven’t said anything about Sarah since you’ve been back.”

“Yes, I have. I told you she was doing well.”

“That’s not telling me about her.”

Tom knew exactly what his father wanted to know, but he did not choose to talk about it. He also knew he would have to sooner or later, but now he just said shortly, “We’re not engaged, Pa.”

“I thought you wanted to marry her.”

“I don’t want her to marry a man with only one leg. She deserves better than that.”

“That’s her decision, Tom, not yours.”

Tom looked at his father with surprise. He respected his father’s opinion greatly. “Well, Pa,” he said lamely, “I just don’t want to handicap her.”

“Suppose
she’d
lost a leg. Would you still want her?”

“Why, of course I would, but that’s different.”

“It’s not a bit different!” Nelson Majors argued. “Love is more than an arm or a leg. It’s for better or for worse.”

“Well, if an accident comes
after
marriage, that’s true. But there are lots of men that would like to marry Sarah, and she deserves the best.”

“I think
you
are the best, Tom, and you ought to give this matter serious thought.”

“Well, I don’t—”

“I’m looking for Colonel Nelson Majors!”

Both men looked up as a woman appeared almost magically at the opening of the tent. She was not a large woman, and she was not more than twenty-seven or twenty-eight, Tom estimated. And she was very pretty. She had bright red hair and
eyes a strange shade of blue-green. Her face was oval, and she had a dimple in her right cheek even when she wasn’t smiling—and she wasn’t smiling now. There was an angry look on her face.

The colonel said, “I’m Colonel Majors. May I help you?”

“I want to speak to you—alone!”

“Sergeant, would you leave us alone?”

“Yes, sir!”

As soon as Tom was out of the room, Nelson Majors said, “Will you have a seat, Miss …”

“It’s
Mrs
. Mrs. Eileen Fremont, and I don’t need a seat to tell you what’s on my mind!”

Nelson had been admiring the beauty of the woman, for she was indeed very attractive. However, he felt uncomfortable with the anger he saw in her eyes. “What’s troubling you, Mrs. Fremont?”

“I’ve come to complain about the way my brother-in-law is being treated.”

“Brother-in-law?”

“Yes, he’s in Libby Prison here in Richmond. I’ve come all the way from Louisiana to see him.”

“Your brother-in-law was in the
Federal
Army?”

“Yes, he was!” Eileen Fremont’s chin rose in determination. “There are quite a few of us from the South who have relatives in the Yankee army.”

“I understand, Mrs. Fremont. I come from Kentucky myself, and many of my friends and some of my family decided to stay in the Union.”

“Have you been to Libby Prison, Colonel?”

“No, ma’am.”

“It’s a disgrace! They treat the men there worse than we treat pigs back in Louisiana! Men are sleeping on the ground without a single blanket! The
place is filled with lice, and the food isn’t fit to feed a hog!”

Nelson Majors felt definitely ill at ease. “Well, I’m sorry to hear that, Mrs. Fremont. But actually that’s out of my department. You will have to see the head of the prison—”

“I’ve tried to see him, but he won’t let me in!”

“I expect he’s very busy.”

Mrs. Fremont’s eyes glinted. “I saw him at a restaurant. He was eating himself into the grave. He’s fat as a pig, and he looks, more or less, like one!”