Glory In The Name

me something? Don’t they owe me wages, at least?

He thought of Robley. Where was he? In camp, no doubt. Jonathan did not follow the military situation, could not bear to think on it. But it was not possible for anyone in possession of his hearing to know nothing of what was going on. It was discussed constantly, and in all quarters. So Jonathan knew that the combined armies of Beauregard and Johnston were still encamped in and around Manassas, that they had done little since the Great Battle.

In October, Jonathan heard there had been some fighting at a place called Ball’s Bluff and the Yankees had been licked again, but he did not know if the 18th Mississippi had been part of that. Beyond that, nothing.

I could go to Robley… His brother tried to be the strict disciplinarian. Sometimes Jonathan thought Robley tried to fill in where their father was deficient, in that regard. But he was not unkind. Far from it. He could go to Robley, beg his brother’s forgiveness, ask for money enough that he could set up somewhere. Get a job. Surely there were things a one-legged man could do? Clerk, bookkeeper. He wrote a good, fair hand, had a head for numbers.

The whole thing overwhelmed him, made him sick with fear.

He thought of Robley, the last time he had seen him. How very angry he was. And Jonathan knew it was not just his and Nathaniel’s defiance that angered him. It was that Jonathan and Nathaniel were going into the fight, and he was not, and he wanted to, as much as his brothers, but his sense of duty would not allow him to walk away from Hamer’s Rifles.

Jonathan heard, subsequently, somewhere, that those troops at McLean’s Ford had in fact got into the show, late in the day. So Robley got what he wanted in the end. And if I had stayed put, made Nathaniel stay put, we would have been together and got into the fight just the same…

And that led to another thought. How do I know that Robley’s all right?

Jonathan sat up on his elbows, waited for the spinning in his head to stop. “Hey, Bobby…”

Bobby, across the room, looked up. He set down the bandages he was rolling, ambled over. He moved fast even while looking as if he was not.

“Yassuh?”

“Is there a way that a fella can find out if someone was killed or wounded in the Battle of Manassas?”

Bobby rubbed his chin. “I do believe they gots lists of all the boys was killed or hurt, down ta da Mechanics’ Institute. It’s where dey gots da War Department, ’cross from de capitol.”

Jonathan lay back again, nodded his head. He had to do it. Stand up, walk out the door, go and see if Robley Junior was still alive, or dead or wounded all this time. He had just compounded the terror. “Will you help me get there?”

“Sure enough,” Bobby said with tempered enthusiasm. He went off to get permission to leave, then came back, helped Jonathan sit up, swung his remaining leg over the edge of the bed. Every movement caused his head to whirl, so long had he remained supine.

Bobby helped him strap on the hateful prosthetic, supported him and helped him on with his pants, a cast-off pair of uniform trousers.

Bobby sat him down again and while he fought for equilibrium the black man pulled his shirtsleeves over his arms, buttoned the shirt down the front. He pulled Jonathan’s shell jacket out from under the bed, shook it out.

“Let me see that,” Jonathan said. Bobby handed it to him.

Jonathan held the jacket in both of his hands. He examined the gray cloth, the brass buttons with “Mississippi” stamped on their faces. They had called him “Mississippi” before they knew his name, because of those buttons.

He stuck his finger through one of the bullet holes. The jacket was riddled with them, as if moths had been at it, and stained with dark patches of blood that had failed to come out, even with the washing Bobby had given the thing.

Jonathan shook his head. All those bullets. How had he lived through it? Why?

“Here, let me help you on wid dis,” Bobby said, gently taking the coat from Jonathan’s hands, as if he did not want Jonathan to further contemplate his melancholy.

“Miss Tompkins, she say we kin take da buckboard. It ain’t too far, but I don’t hardly credit you wid da strength to walk to da carriage house.”

Jonathan pulled on the jacket, buttoned the brass buttons. It was like stepping into a past life, experiencing something from another place and time. Something that seemed utterly alien to the conscious mind but still completely familiar.

Bobby held out a hand and Jonathan took it and allowed Bobby to pull him to a standing position. Bobby stepped beside him and Jonathan put an arm around his shoulder and they stood there while Jonathan’s head settled down.

“I’m all right, I’m all right,” he said at last. “Crutches…”

Bobby tentatively let him go, stepped away to grab Jonathan’s crutches. Jonathan tested his weight on the stump, tried to get a feel for his balance. Not too bad. His shell jacket, cut to fit snug, now hung like a sack coat.

“Here you are, Missuh Jon’tin,” Bobby said, handing Jonathan the crutches. Jonathan tucked the armrests under his arms, set the tips on the floor, eased his weight onto them. Took a step, then another. “Good, good…” he gasped. “Good…show me the way, Bobby.”

They walked, slowly, out of the big room, into a foyer of sorts. Miss Tompkins’s was an elegant house, at least as well appointed as the Paine plantation house, if not quite as big. Now it was entirely given over to the wounded.

Bobby led Jonathan across the carpeted floor-worn and dirty now with the traffic coming and going-and opened the big front door.

Jonathan hesitated. He was breathing hard, in part from the exertion, in part from the panic that seized him. He had not been outside in months, had never really intended to go outside again. It was not a conscious thought-if he had thought about it at all he would have realized that it was absurd-it was just a feeling, understood, never expressed.

But there was the outside, right through the door. A front porch, the roof of which was supported by columns, a Confederate flag flogging in the breeze. Stairs down to the walk, a white picket fence around a narrow yard, sidewalk, cobbled street, people walking by, carriages, the whole world carrying on, waging war, and it did not know or care about Jonathan Paine and what he suffered.

Jonathan breathed deep, hobbled on, out the door. Bobby closed it behind him, helped him down the stairs and around the back of the white clapboard house to where the carriage house stood. In the open area in front of the carriage house stood the buckboard and two black, restless horses in traces. Their breath made gray clouds around their muzzles on that cold day.

Jonathan stopped and leaned on his crutches while Bobby arranged a crate for him to step up on and onto the buckboard’s seat. He gulped breath, felt his limbs trembling from the effort of getting out to the carriage house. His stump throbbed and he was covered in sweat, despite the cold wind that whipped around the courtyard, tumbling leaves and torn papers.

Bobby helped him up onto the buckboard’s seat, and with great relief Jonathan sat.

“You don’t have ta do dis, Missuh Jon’tin,” Bobby said. “You let me know what you wants to find out, I kin go find it out.”

“No,” Jonathan said, gasping the word. “No. I have to do it.” He did not know why. Some kind of penance. Perhaps he would not be satisfied with an answer he did not see himself. Whatever the reason, he had to go.

Bobby flicked the reins, made a clicking noise with his tongue, and the horses stepped out. The buckboard seat bounced and swayed on its springs and Jonathan held on, tried not to think about throwing up.

Richmond was crowded, packed with people, the roads crammed with vehicles. It reminded Jonathan of the docks in New Orleans, that kind of traffic, that kind of bustle. There was nothing else to which he could compare it, he had never seen anything like it.

There were soldiers everywhere, companies and regiments marching past, loitering around, waiting, just as Jonathan remembered, the eternal waiting of military life. Gray-clad privates and privates clad in whatever their home states provided, or whatever they wore off the farm, officers on horses with gold braid swirling around gray