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AURA LEE PART THREE 11/28/2009 11:37:20 AM
That was the best part of day—when the sky was brightest, between eleven-thirty and one, when daydreaming was at its best and everything made sense, and what didn’t make sense didn’t matter anyway. The Civil War was nearly over.
Scoffie Goodis, on that clear summer morning in 1862, felt wrapped in a sheath of shivering, invigorating anticipation; he knew the war was about to end and he knew the South, thank God, would win at last! Now, if he and Hunter Worboys could stay out of harm’s way for a scant three or four more weeks, they’d soon be home in Milledgeville, and life would pick up where it had stopped the day Fort Sumter’s relentless siege and shelling had begun.
Scoffie was twenty-three that summer, and he’d never felt better about himself, or life—or, for that matter, the ministry. He’d not killed anybody, had not broken any Commandments, had not been directly involved in any battles of consequence, and had fired his rifle only in target practice. To his knowledge, no Yankee had so much as drawn a bead on him (and vice versa). His future was secure. His life was laid out in minute detail: Linda Lynn Crumb was waiting at home, and they’d be married—he was sure of that, if little else—by Christmas. He’d have a church of his own, probably in Sparta, once he finished his interrupted studies at Augusta’s Roberts Baptist Divinity Institution—and if Reverend Percy McCollum, his mentor, was, as all knew he was, a man of his word.
Now a corporal and a private respectively in the Georgia 3rd Detached Reserve Infantry, Confederate Army of the South, Scoffie and Hunter had been assigned to General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia as batmen to General Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson. They, along with Lt. Joe Morrison and Lt. J. P. Smith, Jackson’s aides-de-camp, served (lived, in truth) at the pleasure of the South’s greatest war hero.
“How come they chose us,” Hunter had asked, addicted as he often was to persiflage as they rode with the cavalry north to Richmond, “from outta all them ‘Ginny fellas, how come they choose us to hold ol’ Stonewall’s hand? Shoot, we never even been up in ‘Ginny b’fore!”
“Doan rightly know,” Scoffie replied, scrunching his butt sideways in the saddle and hunching his six-foot six-inch frame to lean over the pommel and glance at his friend. If there was anything distractingly uncomfortable to Scoffie, it was his height; and his angular face with its high cheekbones and elongated jaw, thick lips and piercing brown eyes. His hair was jet-black and hung straight, almost like a Cherokee’s, and when he didn’t shave for two or three days, he became the uncanny doppelganger of the man he hated most in all the world: Union President Abraham Lincoln.
Hunter had once remarked that the best thing to ever happen to Scoffie was being born in Georgia. “You be a Yankee you’da been fightin’ in a blue Union hat, and they’da shot you dead first day thinkin’ you was that assho’ Lincoln!”
Scoffie snorted. “Don’t look no more like ol’ Abe than Cain look like Abel.”
“How you know what them ol’ guys look like?” Hunter remarked. “One thing I never could figure: if Cain an’ Abel was Adam and Eve’s boys, where’d them gals they married up with come from? How’d all that begattin’ git goin’?”
Scoffield Shipman Goodis had met Hunter Wylie Worboys the first day of school in Milledgeville in 1847, when they were both six years old. They had been close friends ever since, and when Scoffie went to Augusta Roberts right out of secondary school, Hunter followed as though the decision had been predestined.
“No question ‘bout that,” Hunter made plain, “but I’m not laid out to be a preacher—like Scoffie here. I think teachin’s what I’m bent for.”
“When y’all cain’t do,” Scoffie whispered, soto voce, “teach.” And Hunter jabbed him solidly in the ribs.
Hunter was a robust person, not tall so much as to be noticeable, but wide, strong, fair of skin, a reddish-tow head, a squat carrot, his face a spread of freckles overseen by bright blue eyes whose glistening made one think he was about to break into tears—but his smile was the giveaway: no tears there, this was a young man full of himself and full of unbridled glee. Even at twenty-three, Hunter was a man in full. . . .
General Thomas Jackson, on the other hand, was a military officer with keen management skills and the dauntless courage of a pioneer hoping to find a starving grizzly behind every tree. Organized battle was his forte (Jackson was the first American militarist to pronounce it “fort,” not “for-tay.” Jefferson and John Adams were the first American academicians—in fact, the comparisons between Jackson and Jefferson were frequent and somewhat profound.)
“Know somethin’?” Scoffie asked Hunter. “Tom Jackson knows more about Tom Jefferson than anybody ever lived.”
“That a fact,” more statement than question.
“Yep. You think you know somethin’ ‘bout Jefferson, y’all jus’ look at Gen’ral Jackson an’ that sure confirms it right there and then.”
“That a fact.”
They rode on a spell before Scoffie elaborated. “Take Monticello.” Being a Southerner who’d never lived in Virginia, he pronounced it Mount-a-shay-low.
“What ‘bout it?”
“That little ol’ house Jackson’s got in Lexington for his wife and little ol’ baby daughter,” Scoffie offered, a glint in his eye just talking about his idol; “people jus’ call it ‘Stonewall Jackson House.’ Gen’rel Jackson been heard callin’ it Montinegro.” Cullin’ it Mount-a-nigra.
It was Hunter’s turn to shift in his saddle and look at his tall friend. “What’s that mean? Climb on a nigra?” They both laughed self-consciously at the unintentional ribald remark, and their horses swung their necks back to look at them. “Easy, big fella,” Hunter admonished, snapping the reins against the mare’s mane.
Jackson’s encampment ten days later was in a slight valley, a swale, southwest of Fredericksburg, not far from Virginia’s blood-soaked countryside where the Union Army had been dealt a crippling, internecine defeat just last December, a useless slaughter that had demoralized the North into weeks of depression and had contributed mightily to the eventual 620,000 Americans who would be dead as a result of the Civil War.
“We got ‘em now!” Scoffie had enthused back then, when word reached them in Georgia. “Them Yankees’re all done!”
Hunter nodded at the profundity of it all. “Can we go home now?”
They arrived at the encampment that spring day in April ’63, two hours before sunset. On a ridge facing east, the blazing sun at their backs, they reined up and sat looking over the dipping, undulating plain before them. The Rappahannock River wound serenely in the distance in front of them. There was a tree line running north to south along the river’s banks on both sides, and General Robert E. Lee’s 60,000 men had set up a veritable city of tents, campfires, small ordnance stockades, pyramids of rifles outside the tents, mess wagons, hastily dug latrines, scattered cannon, caissons, horses—oh, yes, the horses—hundreds and hundreds, thousands of horses. And everywhere, horse manure. Horseshit.
Hot, steaming, fresh, gleaming horseshit. Tons of it, piled higher than the tents. And, of course, flies—millions of flies of all kinds, all sizes. And heat. Virginia heat and killer humidity. And the numbing omnipresent odor of horseshit wrapped in a blanket of suffocating heat.
“This war,” Jackson once said, in his light, soft and eloquent voice, from the doorway of his tent, “will be remembered as the war of copious horse manure. The stink of dead souls is nothing; it is horrendous but it is nothing. There’s only one thing worse than the smell of horse manure and dead, rotting souls. That’s the smell of a mule, dead or alive.” Jackson’s dislike of mules was legendary
On the northern and eastern side of the Rappahannock was the Federal Army of the Potomac under the recently appointed commandant, General Joseph “Fighting Joe” Hooker, who had, without Lee’s or Jackson’s knowledge, injected his 134,000 men with new vigor, hope and equipment.
Joe Hooker, like Thomas Jackson, U.S. Grant, Jefferson Davis, and Robert E. Lee, was a West Point graduate. Unlike Jackson and the others, however, he was remembered mostly for his uninspired achievements in lacrosse and rarely mentioned position near the bottom of his class. He had just recently been summoned off the field of battle to an urgent audience with President Abraham Lincoln. The meeting was held in a room adjacent to a coal bin in the basement of the War Department building, just west of the White House and squatting before the Navy Department building, accessible at the end of a brick walkway and four foot wall half a block from the White House. Secretary of War Stanton had declared the basement den, in reality a part of the servants’ quarters, a “Situation Room,” the first time the phrase had ever been applied.
