In Yazoo they were signing on under the captaincy of Clarence F. Hamer, who, until just weeks before, had been a lawyer in Yazoo City. Though there was nothing yet official, Robley had been appointed to the rank of lieutenant. That rank was the result not of family influence or money, but rather of the acclamation of his fellow soldiers.
Unfortunately for him, his younger brothers did not appreciate, as he did, his importance and position.
“Y’all wanna miss the whole damned war?”
Robley Senior frowned and shook his head.
Under the oak tree the two dozen other young men assembled there looked up at the sound of Robley Junior’s voice. Like the three Paine boys, they were the sons of the planters that lived pressed against the Yazoo River. Like all the sons of the wealthy plantation owners, who had grown up to understand that they must serve honor as faithfully as they would serve God, they had flocked to join the new-formed Confederate Army of Mississippi.
Like his boys, Robley reckoned, they all had fathers both proud and sick with fear.
The boys had been gathering all day under the big oak at the Paine plantation. Now they were all there, twenty-four young men, and soon Lieutenant Paine would lead them up to Yazoo City, where they would join the rest of their regiment. From Yazoo City they would travel by steamer to Vicksburg, then by train to Jackson, where they would begin to learn the art of soldiering.
Robley smiled. To listen to them and their pontificating you might think they were already veterans of years of bloody fighting. They discussed war the way they discussed the young ladies: high talk and great bravado based on an absolute dearth of practical experience.
He heard shoes in the hallway and turned, and the door opened and his boys joined him on the porch. His heart lifted to see them; tall and strong, handsome, smiling boys. Jonathan and Nathaniel wore identical gray shell jackets, Robley Junior a gray frock coat with a single second lieutenant’s stripe on the collar. They wore gray trousers and kepis tilted back at a jaunty angle-save for Lieutenant Paine, who wore his perfectly horizontal.
Each jacket sported a single row of brass buttons with a star in the middle and the word “Mississippi” surrounding it. The buttons ran down the front of their jackets and held them snug against their strong, lean forms. They had slung over their shoulders cartridge boxes and canteens and haversacks, and they carried knapsacks on their backs. They clutched their shiny new.58-caliber Mississippi rifles. They smiled as if setting off for a great camping trip.
Robley Paine ran his eyes over each grinning boy and he smiled as well. They looked like window displays for a shop selling soldiering gear. “I’m proud of you boys,” he said.
“Thank you, Father, thank you,” they mumbled, embarrassed, trying to be weighty and sincere. They were too young to understand the depths of a father’s love, so he let it go at that.
Robley Paine, Sr., was a passionate secessionist, what the papers liked to call a fire-eater. As a senator in Jackson he had been calling for Southern independence since long before it became the fashion to do so.
Paine loved his nation, his new nation, the Confederate States of America. There was nothing, save for his boys, that he loved more. And now the one love was demanding the sacrifice of the other. It was Abraham and Isaac, to the third power.
“Y’all write your mother, you hear?”
“Yes, Father…” The boys were glancing over at their comrades, who were standing and adjusting themselves for the march. The Paine boys were eager to be at it. They were afraid their father would do something embarrassing, such as hug them. Robley understood that, and desperate as he was to embrace each of his boys, to never let go of them, instead he thrust out his hand and gave each a manly shake.
“Very well, then. Off with you,” he said and managed something of a smile.
Robley Junior, Nathaniel, and Jonathan clumped down the stairs to the lawn and over to where their fellows were clustered in the shade under the big oak. It was a massive tree, hundreds of years old and easily seven feet wide at the base. Twelve feet up the trunk, two huge limbs thrust out at right angles. From the river, looking back at the house, the tree seemed to be welcoming with arms spread, ready to embrace anyone tramping up the lawn toward the Paine home. Robley loved the tree and its insinuation of hospitality.
“All right, y’all, form up, now,” Lieutenant Paine was saying, and Robley was happy to see that the boys were obeying, after a fashion. His son had a lot to learn about command, but Paine did not want to see the boy’s authority questioned now, at the very outset of his military career.
The door opened again and Katherine Paine, his wife, the boys’ mother, joined him, and he put his arm around her. Her eyes were red and her eyelids swollen. He had thought she would not join him, did not think she could stand to see her boys, her only children, marching off to war.
The young soldiers formed up, and with Lieutenant Paine in the lead began to walk off toward Yazoo City. They made a lovely sight in the warm sunlight of the late afternoon. Jonathan turned and in a very unsoldierlike manner grinned and waved, and Robley and Katherine waved back and a little sob came up from Katherine’s throat.
The boys’ feet raised little clouds of dust as they moved off the lawn and onto the dirt path that would meet with the road that ran from Vicksburg to Yazoo City and on which the Paine plantation was situated.
It was not an original thought, Paine understood that, but that did not make it any less true.
The gray-clad, well-equipped troops marched out of sight. Katherine buried her face against his arm, and he could feel her body shake as she tried to subdue her sorrow. It was the duty of a Southern woman to send her boys off to defend their nation, but she was a mother first, a Southern woman second.
Robley squeezed her tight. It was hardest for the mothers, he knew. Fathers understood in their guts why their sons could not remain safe at home while others fought. Young men took up arms and young ladies were flush with romantic talk of soldiers, and full of scorn for those not in uniform.
But for the mothers, there was nothing, save anxiety and grief.
He pressed his cheek into Katherine’s hair and looked out past the massive oak, down to the Yazoo River. He had always thought of that river as a moat, as a watery defensive line that kept his home and his beloved family safe from whatever was out there. He loved that river.
And now as he stared at it he allowed himself to wish that it really was a moat, some impassable barrier which the filthy Yankee hordes could not cross. They would stand on the other side and howl and wave their arms and throw stones, but Robley and his family and his new nation would be safe on this side, and they could go about their business unmolested until the Yankees tired of their fruitless effort and went home.
But the Yazoo was too far south to protect all of his nation, and it was not a moat in any event. And now his boys, his Robley, his Nathaniel, his Jonathan, were marching away, leaving the safety of the river, the welcoming arms of the big oak.
His boys were going where he could not protect them anymore. It made him sad and filled him with dread, and he felt the tears coming too.
4
The Charleston Mercury
