At full moonrise on that last night Richmond, Virginia was destined to stand as the Confederate capital, with my toil as a gravedigger until then seldom slacked, I collapsed beneath a gaunt soapstone angel. Its rapt eyes were pinned to the conflagration purging the city’s fabled seven hills. Its denizens were cutting all clinging tendrils of sentiment over the Southern Cause for which those surrounding me had died defending.
Smiling while at the same time humming “Dixie,” Arlo, an amputee artillerist assigned some weeks ago to assist me, tossed down an armload of deep-bellied shovels and crowbars beside my shabby brogans.
“Well, I’ll be blowed,” he swore in a reedy but affable voice. “They freed the madwomen from The Insane Asylum. What else can happen?”
“Aye,” I solemnly agreed. “I overheard on Clay Street late this morning that lepers beg for bread crusts outside the walls of Chimborazo Hospital.”
“May the Harshener watch over us,” replied Arlo, blessing himself with a Sign of the Cross.
The early hours were the best to flee. By now, besieged Richmond represented the perfect picture of pandemonium. Those born in the purple, horror stricken and wild with woe, clogged all bridges leaving west and south out of the city. Did sanctuary exist a short carriage down sloppy turnpikes? The bluecoat hordes were at the gates. Arlo and I, along with the hatchet-faced whores advertising themselves in Locust Alley, were among the feckless few left behind.
Chopped patches of freshly spaded red clay speckled
the Hollywood
Cemetery moonscape. Shot-torn chestnut shingles
branded with surnames
and ranks demarcated the interments of the Confederacy’s
fallen Colonels
and Generals, heroes from glorious campaigns at Manassas,
Chancellorsville, and Cold Harbor. Now, the war’s fifth spring had
dawned. Beneath the emerald buds profuse on poplars and sycamores,
we exchanged sips from a borrowed demijohn of peach brandy.
Hecklers toting tin lanterns and mallets arrived, wobbling between ornate, ivy-clad tombstones while cursing the rich and ransacking their caskets. Garish rings choked fingers. Fancy hats were slouched over swarthy foreheads.
“Yo, don’t ye dare draw any closer,” Arlo hooted over
to their bumptious
ringleader.
The ringleader brayed with truculent derision. “Tonight the world is our oyster, gravedigger,” he taunted.
Tapping my shin, Arlo muttered, “Let’s drive these
ghouls back to their
catacombs.”
Thumb-cocking the Navy pistols dislodged from our mule-skin
belts, we waded across the silver-tongued lawn. Likewise, the bearded
ringleader
advanced toward us, his fire-breathing cohorts aswarm
behind him.
An upflung bayonet skittered down my coat sleeve, slashing
thankfully
buttons and not bones. I dodged the next inflicted
swipe.
Bellowing like a demonized fiend, Arlo discharged both
weapons at point-blank range. Though acrid smoke thickened by the
absence of light
was blinding, we were emboldened to hear a body-wrenching
groan.
“Take heed of the others!” Arlo yelped. He brandished a dress sword lent to him by a dead mustachioed South Carolinian colonel to do battle.
Yet so, the clan halted, harsh jeers subdued to sullen whispers traded amongst themselves. Making no more noise, they picked up the dying ringleader and stumbled back within the murky shadows of the mausoleum.
“I reckon Butcher Grant won’t too lightly esteem our
occupation,”
a breathless Arlo declared. He spat a yellowish,
baleful squirt to snip a
salamander preening on a stone chalice.
“Reckon not,” I affirmed.
This was the end. We would receive no further
mule-drawn carts sagging
with embalmed corpses tucked like bolts of calico
cloth inside crude pine boxes. We would no longer scribe their identities
on warped yellow planks in red chalk. We would no more answer their
rotten stench demanding a swift Christian burial by digging and digging.
Still, gravedigging wasn’t all detestable -- we didn’t have to handle a
speck of back-sass.
Squatting on the balls of our feet, we watched the
dismantling of a once
cherished government, thrilled at new explosions along
the flaming wharves, and anticipated the conqueror’s nearing cannonade.
We laughed. This truly was the end. Arlo contended all we needed
to complete the folly was roly-poly Nero sawing up a storm on his fraudulent
fiddle.
All at once, Arlo ceased mangling his habitual chaw.
“Hear something?”
Twisting around, he peered down the gradual slope
toward potter’s field
where the moonbeams fell poorest. From the pile
of digging tools, he wrested a grubbing mattock, thrust his considerable
bulk on the copper-banded peg leg. “There, it sounded again.”
Uneasy, I spoke in a low tone. “Ain’t nothing except maybe a boar hog rotting about for April garlic bulbs.”
A keening wail as what a bride wedded too young lets
rip on her long-contemplated honeymoon night broke over the background
din from
Richmond. Fidgety, Arlo hopped around to confront
me, his eyes luminous
and wide.
“I know goshdang well you heard that ruckus,” he insisted. His snuff-stained teeth chattered and clacked.
“Stuff a sock in it, would you? I’m trying to listen.” A dominant wave of chilled air accosted us. Rendered with a flourish, a military drum rattled, summoning the soldiers’ attention to arms. Shaking my head from side to side to clear my snake-bitten senses, I scanned beyond the serpentine stone wall, expecting to size up the double marching columns of crisp blue infantrymen. Such a spectacle, however, didn’t materialize.
We leaned on the digging tools and craned our necks out of joint glancing all around. Half-fearfully half-unbelievingly, we beheld every grave (many the product of our sweat equity!) of every high-ranking butternut officer slain in the name of honor trembling something furious. A rumbling shifted and lifted our feet frozen iron fast to the spot by an abject horror neither of us wished to confess.
What other option did we own but to slouch there like statues, witnessing row upon row of gravesites blister open and the dewy slick turf erupting and buckling clear to one side? Invisible forces clawed at and flailed behind loose, damp-smelling earth. I suppose a more religious man might have attributed it to archangels. As it was, I was practicing atheism at the time. Nevertheless, I readily conceded this wasn’t any mortal’s contrivance.
On and on the drumhead was beat. Doleful pine
boxes burped from the
pits excavated. Lids flew off. Diaphanous
effigies outfitted in resplendent uniforms shimmied free of their knotty
and sappy dungeons.
They glided up into a glimmering cluster, then gracefully
shuffled and
converged into a single queue.
“What in the blue blazes is all that?” His mouth also agape, Arlo’s shaky finger pointed out what was obvious to us both.
“Maybe the haunts of Napoleon’s field marshals?” I weakly conjectured.
Approaching, the lead ghostly presence looked vaguely familiar. At arm’s length, he stopped short. From his crimson cape and yellow gauntlets and erect carriage, I immediately recognized Lieutenant General A. P. Hill.
“Grave digger,” he stoutly addressed me. “I was
fatally struck down no
more than an hour ago by a fuzzy-cheeked Maine sharpshooter.”
“Well sir, we can prepare you a site before sunup,” I promised the General with all due cordial alacrity.
Irritated, General Hill blinked twice. “Good God, man. I possess no yearning to tarry in Richmond. I shall lead this band of risen souls to join General Lee’s final campaign to victory,” he snapped.
Quaking, I nodded my head once.
“Exercise that sidearm on yourself, rally with us in noble spirit,” General Hill ardently prevailed upon me. The pallid lookers-on cheered mightily.
I didn’t enlighten him how General Lee’s vagabond army
was melting and
vaporizing and eviscerating into the Virginia countryside
burgeoning with Spring’s katydids, wren-song, and cherry blossoms even
as we conversed.
I carefully replied, “No, General Hill for I feel duty
bound to remain put. However, perhaps my able-bodied assistant Arlo
would accept your
invitation.”
Arlo, who sat pounding another copper band to brace
his peg leg, quit
once I mentioned him by name. Grappling for
my hand to unfold and stand
himself up, Arlo sputtered, “Why sir, I’m flattered
you hold my services in such high regard, but I too should linger near
the Home Guard.”
The General appeared lost in thought.
“General Hill, you must leave at once. Fly like
the west wind toward
Appomattox Court House,” I urged.
He gave the order. Legions of gray-uniformed officers, some giddily stroking powder-burnt whiskers, sailed over the hedgerow of Osage orange, waltzed a half-turn in mid-air to cut over the bristling ramparts of Richmond proper. Rising in flame-riddled starlight, waving their ostrich-plumed hats and clanky gold swords, they were peregrines bent on waging war. The animated drawls, each Rebel State in the Stars and Bars represented, cascading to our ears buzzed about glory. After a quarter-hour, they’d all but disappeared from view.
Once the atmosphere amid Hollywood Cemetery had settled
again to placid
glumness, Arlo gnawed at his thumbnail. His
brogue grew gruff and fretful. “Why didn’t you speak the truth?
Bobby Lee and the Second American Revolution hold no more of a chance than
a wax cat does in Hell.”
Ruefully, I shrugged my shoulders. “Who the Hell
is going to argue with a dead General?”