He had friends buried here—good men who deserved better, men who would have never made their own escape and left him behind to die. He could see their faces again, hear their entreaties.
Please, Sir. You tell my mama how to find where I am—
But he couldn’t tell anyone’s mother where her son had been buried. The lay of the land was different somehow, overgrown and unrecognizable. There was nothing to guide him anymore, not even the foundation of the house where the bodies had been kept until somebody found time for another mass burial.
Where are they!
He felt unsteady on his feet suddenly. He could feel his heart begin a heavy pounding in his chest. It was hard to breathe, and he had to fight down an incredible urge to run. He took a deep breath and abruptly clasped his hands behind his back to keep them from shaking.
It would pass. He knew that. All he had to do was wait.
He glanced back at the woman. She sat in the buggy where he’d left her, pale and on the verge of becoming alarmed. He turned and walked unsteadily in her direction. He wasn’t about to fall on his face and give her any tales to tell about the new colonel.
This time she got her skirts out of the way when he climbed into the buggy. He sat beside her, still fighting down the memories of his captivity.
The rain drummed loudly on the buggy top.
“Do you want to go to military headquarters?” the woman asked after a time.
He looked at her sharply. He’d forgotten all about her.
“Yes,” he said finally.
She snapped the reins and sent the horse forward, turning the buggy in a wide circle and heading back in the direction they had come. He paid no attention to the route she took nor the surroundings until she abruptly stopped.
“It’s there—the upstairs,” she said, indicating a two-story building across from a hotel. Much of the street out front had been taken over by harried-looking civilians—old men, women and children, all of them clearly unmindful of the weather.
“Who are all these people?” he asked, and she kept avoiding his eyes.
“They are…they’ve come because they’re afraid,” she said.
“Of what?”
She didn’t answer him; she merely shook her head, as if it were too complicated for her to explain—or for him to understand.
He stared at her a long moment. “I expect I shall find out soon enough.”
She seemed about to say something, but didn’t. He gave her a curt nod and got down from the buggy, then began walking toward the building that housed the North Carolina Western Division military headquarters. He had to literally push his way inside. Women plucked at his sleeve as he tried to pass, some in supplication and others with an obviously more commercial intent. He ignored all of them to put the fear of God into the first soldier he saw—a hapless private who lolled against a wall happily conversing with a painted woman Max had earlier seen prowling the railroad station for customers.
In spite of Max’s ire, the private somehow found the presence of mind to lead him upstairs, where Max found an unexpectedly young sergeant major in a crowded and disordered room he assumed was an office.
“This way, Colonel Woodard, Sir,” the sergeant major said, as if his new commanding officer hadn’t just kicked a private soundly in the backside.
Max stood where he was, ignoring the fact that the sergeant major clearly expected him to take a seat in the chair behind the cluttered desk. He was not yet ready to delve into the stacks of papers his predecessor had left scattered about, nor was he ready to let go of his pique. He knew that Colonel Hatcher’s departure had been precipitous—the state of the man’s office confirmed that—but he had expected some attempt on Hatcher’s part to effect an orderly change of command.
Max walked to the window and looked down at the street below. The crowd was still there in spite of the rain—and growing, he thought. The woman who had brought him here was trying to drive the buggy through, and she was immediately surrounded by bystanders. But whatever questions were being put to her, she didn’t answer. She kept shaking her head and finally used the buggy whip to send the horse on, giving the crowd no choice but to let her pass.
“Your name, Sergeant Major?”
“Perkins, Sir.”
“What do all those people downstairs want?”
The sergeant major carefully held out a steaming cup of coffee instead of answering.
“I asked you a question, Sergeant Major,” Max said sharply.
“Yes, Sir. Petitioners come to talk to the new colonel, Sir.”
“How is it they knew I was arriving today? Do you ordinarily keep the civilian population privy to the army’s comings and goings?”
“Well, Sir. Sometimes telegraphing gets intercepted up the line—old tricks die hard for some of these so-called ex-Rebs. If the message ain’t got nothing to do with us, they’ll send it on through, like as not. If it does…well—maybe they will and maybe they won’t—either way, word gets out as to whatever information happens to be in them.” He shrugged. He also offered the tin cup of coffee again. This time Max took it.
“These ‘petitioners.’ What exactly do they want?”
“Some of them would be wanting the Oath of Allegiance, Sir. People what finally got wore down enough to come in and ask to take it—so’s they can get some food on the table.”
“It’s taken them three years to get here?”
“Well, I expect you know what the Rebs are like, Sir. Especially the women. They hold out as long as they can. I expect the war would have been over a good year or two before it was, if it weren’t for them.”
Max agreed wholeheartedly—in spite of a noted general’s assertion that he could buy any one of them with a pound of coffee—but he didn’t say so.
“All of them can’t have just decided to take the Oath,” he said. He took a sip of coffee, surprised to find it was quite good. He’d forgotten that some of the best coffee in the world came at the hands of sergeant majors. The skill seemed to come with the rank, regardless of the fact that this particular one didn’t appear old enough to have it.
“Well, Sir, one or two of them are here because they can’t take it,” Perkins said. “Them what carried the Reb flag a little too high during the late war—or them what own too much property and ain’t about to get rid of it. They couldn’t get nowhere with Colonel Hatcher, so they’d be here to ask you to pardon them, so they can swear allegiance and get all the benefits thereof. Then there’s the usual civilian complaints, Sir.”
Max decided to sit down, after all. He was tired. He looked healthy enough these days, but he still suffered from a noticeable lack of stamina. The long train ride from Washington and then the visit to the prison grounds had taken its toll. He took another sip of the coffee, then tried to find a place to put the tin cup among the stacks of papers on the desk. “What kinds of complaints? The men in blue accosting their daughters?”
“No, Sir—not that there ain’t plenty of accosting going on, mind you. There’s some real pretty girls in this town and don’t nothing stir up a soldier’s juices more than running into one of them and knowing she’d just as soon gut you as look at you. The boys take it right personal, Sir, if you know what I mean. And they get to feeling all honor-bound to do something about it. Ain’t nothing builds a man up like turning some little old girl’s head, especially if she thinks she hates the air you’re living on.
“But we don’t generally hear about any of that up here. If the accosting’s mutual, it’s either ship the girl off to her relatives or let ’em get married, which is likely what some of them