Walter Jon Williams - No Spot of Ground

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No Spot of Ground
NO SPOT OF GROUND
Walter Jon Williams
The dead girl came as a shock to him. He had limped into the Starker house from the firelit military
camp outside, from a cacophony of wagons rattling, men driving tent pegs, provost marshals setting up
the perimeter, a battalion of Ewell's Napoleon guns rolling past, their wheels lifting dust from the old
farm road, dust that drifted over the camp, turning the firelight red and the scene into a pictured outpost
of Hell"¦
And here, to his surprise, was a dead girl in the parlor. She was perhaps sixteen, with dark hair,
translucent skin, and cheeks with high painted spots of phthisis red. Her slim form was dressed in white.
She lay in her coffin with candles at her head and feet, and her long-faced relatives sat in a semicircle of
chairs under portraits of ancestors and Jefferson Davis.
A gangly man, probably the dead girl's father, rose awkwardly to welcome the surprised stranger, who
had wandered into the parlor in hopes of asking for a glass of lemonade.
The intruder straightened in surprise. He took off his soft white hat and held it over his heart. The little
gold knots on the ends of the hat cord rattled on the brim like muffled mourning drums.
"I am sorry to intrude on your grief," he said.
The father halted in what he was going to say, nodded, and dropped back into his chair. His wife, a
heavy woman in dark silk, reached blindly toward him, and took his hand.
The intruder stood for a long moment out of respect, his eyes fixed on the corpse, before he turned and
put on his hat and limped out of the house. Once he had thought this sight the saddest of all; once he had
written poems about it.
What surprised him now was that it still happened, that people still died this way.
He had forgotten, amid all this unnatural slaughter, that a natural death was possible.
* * * *
That morning he had brought his four brigades north into Richmond, marching from the Petersburg and
Weldon depot south of the James break-step across the long bridge to the Virginia Central depot in the
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No Spot of Ground
capital. Until two days ago he'd commanded only a single brigade in the defense of Petersburg; but poor
George Pickett had suffered a collapse after days of nerve-wrenching warfare in his attempt to keep the
city safe from Beast Butler's Army of the James; and Pickett's senior brigadier was, perforce, promoted
to command of the whole division.
The new commander was fifty-five years old, and even if he was only a division commander till Pickett
came back, he was still the oldest in the army.
At school he had been an athlete. Once he swam six miles down the James River, fighting against the
tide the whole way, in order to outdo Byron's swim across the Hellespont. Now he was too tired and ill
to ride a horse except in an emergency, so he moved through the streets of Richmond in a two-wheel
buggy driven by Sextus Pompeiius, his personal darky.
He was dressed elegantly, a spotless gray uniform with the wreathed stars of a brigadier on his collar and
bright gold braid on the arms, English riding boots, black doeskin gloves. His new white wide-brimmed
hat, a replacement for the one shot off his head at Port Walthall Junction twenty days ago, was tilted
back atop his high forehead. Even when he was young and couldn't afford anything but old and mended
clothes, he had always dressed well, with the taste and style of a gentleman. Sextus had trimmed his
grizzled mustache that morning, back in camp along the Petersburg and Weldon, and snipped at the long
gray curls that hung over the back of his collar. A fine white-socked thoroughbred gelding, the one he
was too ill to ride, followed the buggy on a lead. When he had gone south in 1861 he had come with
twelve hundred dollars in gold and silver, and with that and his army pay he had managed to keep
himself in modest style for the last three years.
As he rode past the neat brick houses he remembered when it was otherwise. Memories still burned in
his mind: the sneers of Virginia planters' sons when they learned of his background, of his parents in the
theater and stepfather in commerce; his mounting debts when his stepfather Mr. Allan had twice sent
him to college, first to the University of Virginia and then to West Point, and then not given him the
means to remain; the moment Allan had permitted the household slaves to insult him to his face; and
those countless times he wandered the Richmond streets in black despondent reverie, when he couldn't
help gazing with suspicion upon the young people he met, never knowing how many of them might be
living insults to his stepmother, another of Mr. Allan's plentiful get of bastards"¦
The brigadier looked up as the buggy rattled over rusting iron tracks, and there it was: Ellis & Allan,
General Merchants, the new warehouse of bright red brick lying along a Virginia Central siding, its
loading dock choked with barrels of army pork. The war that had so devastated the Confederate nation
had been kind only to two classes: carrion crows and merchants. The prosperous Ellis & Allan was run
by his stepbrothers now, he presumed, possibly in partnership with an assortment of Mr. Allan's
bastards--in that family, who could say? The brute Allan, penny-pinching as a Jew with the morals of a
nigger, might well have given part of the business to his illegitimate spawn, if for no other reason than to
spite his foster son. Such was the behavior of the commercial classes that infected this city.
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No Spot of Ground
Richmond, he thought violently. Why in the name of heaven are we defending the place? Let the Yanks
have it, and let them serve it as Rome served Carthage, burned to the foundations and the scorched plain
sown with salt. There are other parts of the South better worth dying for.
Sextus Pompeiius pulled the mare to a halt, and the general limped out of the buggy and leaned on his
stick. The Virginia Central yards were filled with trains, the cars shabby, the engines worn. Sad as they
were, they would serve to get the division to where it was going, another fifteen miles up the line to the
North Anna River, and save shoe leather while doing it.
The detestable Walter Whitman, the general remembered suddenly, wrote of steam engines in his
poems. Whitman surely had not been thinking of engines like these, worn and ancient, leaking steam and
oil as they dragged from front to front the soldiers as worn and tattered as the engines. Not trains, but
ghosts of trains, carrying a ghost division, itself raised more than once from the dead.
The lead formation, the general's old Virginia brigade, was marching up behind the buggy, their colors
and band to the front. The bandsmen were playing "Bonnie Blue Flag." The general winced--brass and
percussion made his taut nerves shriek, and he could really tolerate only the soft song of stringed
instruments. Pain crackled through his temples.
Among the stands of brigade and regimental colors was another stand, or rather a perch, with a pair of
black birds sitting quizzically atop: Hugin and Munin, named after the ravens of Wotan. The brigade
called themselves the Ravens, a compliment to their commander.
The general stood on the siding and watched the brigade as it came to a halt and broke ranks. A few
smiling bandsmen helped the general load his horses and buggy on a flatcar, then jumped with their
instruments aboard their assigned transport. The ravens were taken from their perch and put in cages in
the back of the general's carriage.
A lance of pain drove through the general's thigh as he swung himself aboard. He found himself a seat
among the divisional staff. Sextus Pompeiius put the general's bags in the rack over his head, then went
rearward to sit in his proper place behind the car, in the open between the carriages.
A steam whistle cried like a woman in pain. The tired old train began to move.
Poe's Division, formerly Pickett's, began its journey north to fight the Yanks somewhere on the North
Anna River. When, the general thought, would these young men see Richmond again?
One of the ravens croaked as it had been taught: "Nevermore!"
Men laughed. They thought it a good omen.
* * * *
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No Spot of Ground
General Poe stepped out of the mourning Starker house, the pale dead girl still touching his mind. When
had he changed? he wondered. When had his heart stopped throbbing in sad, harmonic sympathy at the
thought of dead young girls? When had he last wept?
He knew when. He knew precisely when his heart had broken for the last time, when he had ceased at
last to mourn Virginia Clemm, when the last ounce of poetry had poured from him like a river of dark
veinous blood"¦
When the Ravens had gone for that cemetery, the tombstones hidden in dust and smoke.
When General Edgar A. Poe, CSA, had watched them go, that brilliant summer day, while the bands
played "Bonnie Blue Flag" under the trees and the tombstones waited, like chimneys marking the
factories of a billion happy worms"¦
Poe stood before the Starker house and watched the dark form of his fourth and last brigade, the new
North Carolina outfit that had shown their mettle at Port Walthall Junction, now come rising up from the
old farm road like an insubstantial battalion of mournful shades. Riding at the head came its commander,
Thomas Clingman. Clingman saw Poe standing on Starker's front porch, halted his column, rode toward
the house, and saluted.
"Where in hell do I put my men, General? One of your provost guards said up this way, but--"
Poe shook his head. Annoyance snapped like lightning in his mind. No one had given him any orders at
all. "You're on the right of General Corse, out there." Poe waved in the general direction of Hanover
Junction, the little town whose lights shone clearly just a quarter mile to the east. "You should have gone
straight up the Richmond and Fredericksburg tracks from the Junction, not the Virginia Central."
Clingman's veinous face reddened. "They told me wrong, then. Ain't anybody been over the ground,
Edgar?"
"No one from this division. Ewell pulled out soon's he heard we were coming, but that was just after
dark and when we came up, we had no idea what to do. There was just some staff creature with some
written orders, and he galloped away before I could ask him what they meant."
No proper instruction, Poe thought. His division was part of Anderson's corps, but he hadn't heard from
Anderson and didn't know where the command post was. If he was supposed to report to Lee, he didn't
know where Lee was either. He was entirely in the dark.
Contempt and anger snarled in him. Poe had been ignored again. No one had thought to consult him; no
one had remembered him; but if he failed, everyone would blame him. Just like the Seven Days"˜.
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No Spot of Ground
Clingman snorted through his bushy mustache. "Confound it anyway."
Poe banged his stick into the ground in annoyance. "Turn your men around, Thomas. It's only another
half mile or so. Find an empty line of entrenchments and put your people in. We'll sort everyone out
come first light."
"Lord above, Edgar."
"Fitz Lee's supposed to be on your right. Don't let's have any of your people shooting at him by mistake."
Clingman spat in annoyance, then saluted and started the process of getting his brigade turned around.
Poe stared after him and bit back his own anger. Orders would come. Surely his division hadn't been
forgotten.
"Massa Poe?"
Poe gave a start. With all the noise of marching feet and shouted orders, he hadn't heard Sextus
Pompeiius creeping up toward him. He looked at his servant and grinned.
"You gave me a scare, Sextus. Strike me if you ain't invisible in the dark."
Sextus chuckled at his master's wit. "I found that cider, Massa Poe."
Poe scowled. If his soft cider hadn't got lost, he wouldn't have had to interrupt the Starkers' wake in
search of lemonade. He began limping toward his headquarters tent, his cane sinking in the soft ground.
"Where'd you find it?" he demanded.
"That cider, it was packed in the green trunk, the one that came up with the divisional train."
"I instructed you to pack it in the brown trunk."
"I know that, Massa Poe. That fact must have slipped my mind, somehow."
Poe's hand clenched the ivory handle of his cane. Renewed anger poured like fire through his veins.
"Worthless nigger baboon!" he snapped.
"Yes, Massa Poe," Sextus said, nodding, "I is. I must be, the way you keep saying I is."
Poe sighed. One really couldn't expect any more from an African. Changing his name from Sam to
Sextus hadn't given the black any more brains than God had given him in the first place.
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No Spot of Ground
"Well, Sextus," he said. "Fortuna favet fatuis, you know." He laughed.
"Massa always has his jokes in Latin. He always does."
Sextus's tone was sulky. Poe laughed and tried to jolly the slave out of his mood.
"We must improve your knowledge of the classics. Your litterae humaniores, you understand."
The slave was annoyed. "Enough human litter around here as it is."
Poe restrained a laugh. "True enough, Sextus." He smiled indulgently. "You are excused from your
lessons."
His spirits raised by the banter with his darky, Poe limped to his headquarters tent, marked by the
division flags and the two ravens on their perch, and let Sextus serve him his evening meal. The ravens
gobbled to each other while Poe ate sparingly, and drank two glasses of the soft cider. Poe hadn't
touched spirits in fifteen years, even though whiskey was a lot easier to find in this army than water.
Not since that last sick, unholy carouse in Baltimore.
Where were his orders? he wondered. He'd just been ordered to occupy Ewell's trenches. Where was the
rest of the army? Where was Lee? No one had told him anything.
After the meal, he'd send couriers to find Lee. Somebody had to know something
It was impossible they'd forgotten him.
* * * *
Eureka, he called it. His prose poem had defined the universe, explained it all, a consummate theory of
matter, energy, gravity, art, mathematics, the mind of God. The universe was expanding, he wrote, had
exploded from a single particle in a spray of evolving atoms that moved outward at the speed of divine
thought. The universe was still expanding, the forms of its matter growing ever more complex; but the
expansion would slow, reverse; matter would coalesce, return to its primordial simplicity; the Divine
Soul that resided in every atom would reunite in perfect self-knowledge.
It was the duty of art, he thought, to reunite human thought with that of the Divine, particled with
unparticled matter. In his poetry he had striven for an aesthetic purity of thought and sentiment, a
detachment from political, moral, and temporal affairs"¦ Nothing of Earth shone in his verse, nothing
contaminated by matter--he desired harmonies, essences, a striving for Platonic perfection, for the
dialogue of one abstract with another. Beyond the fact that he wrote in English, nothing connected the
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No Spot of Ground
poems with America, the nineteenth century, its life, its movements. He disdained even standard
versification--he wrote with unusual scansions, strange metrics--the harmonies of octameter catalectic,
being more rarified, seemed to rise to the lofty ear of God more than could humble iambic pentameter,
that endless trudge, trudge, trudge across the surface of the terrestrial globe. He wanted nothing to stand
between himself and supernal beauty, nothing to prevent the connection of his own mind with that of
God.
He had poured everything into Eureka, all his soul, his hope, his grief over Virginia, his energy. In the
end there was the book, but nothing left of the man. He lectured across America, the audiences polite
and appreciative, their minds perhaps touched by his own vision of the Divine--but all his own divinity
had gone into the book, and in the end Earth reached up to claim him. Entire weeks were spent in
delirium, reeling drunk from town to town, audience to audience, woman to woman"¦
Ending at last in some Baltimore street, lying across a gutter, his body a dam for a river of half-frozen
October sleet.
* * * *
After the meal Poe stepped outside for a pipe of tobacco. He could see the soft glow of candlelight from
the Starker parlor, and he thought of the girl in her coffin, laid out in her dress of virgin white. How
much sadder it would have been had she lived, had she been compelled to grow old in this new,
changing world, this sad and deformed Iron Age dedicated to steam and slaughter"¦ better she was dead,
her spirit purged of particled matter and risen to contemplation of the self-knowing eternal.
His thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of a man on horseback. Poe recognized Colonel Moxley
Sorrel, a handsome Georgian, still in his twenties, who was Longstreet's chief of staff. He had been
promoted recently as a result of leading a flank assault in the Wilderness that had crushed an entire
Union corps, though, as always, the triumph had come too late in the day for the attack to be decisive.
"General." Sorrel saluted. "I had a devil of a time finding you. Ewell had his command post at Hackett's
place, over yonder." He pointed at the lights of a plantation house just north of Hanover Junction. "I
reckoned you'd be there."
"I had no notion of where Ewell was. No one's told me a thing. This place seemed as likely as any." Poe
looked off toward the lights of Hanover Junction. "At least there's a good view."
Sorrel frowned. He swung out of the saddle, and Sextus came to take the reins from his hand. "Staff
work has gone up entirely," Sorrel said. "There's been too much chaos at the top for everything to get
quite sorted out."
"Yes." Poe looked at him. "And how is General Longstreet?"
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No Spot of Ground
The Georgian's eyes were serious. "He will recover, praise God. But it will be many months before he
can return to duty."
Poe looked up at the ravens, half expecting one of them to croak out "Nevermore." But they'd stuck their
heads under their wings and gone to sleep.
He will recover, Poe thought. That's what they'd said of Stonewall; and then the crazy old Presbyterian
had died suddenly.
Just like old Stonewall to do the unexpected.
The army had been hit hard the last few weeks. First Longstreet wounded in the Wilderness, then Jeb
Stuart killed at Yellow Tavern, just a few days ago. They were the two best corps commanders left to
Lee, in Poe's opinion. Longstreet had been replaced by Richard Anderson; but Lee had yet to appoint a
new cavalry commander--both, in Poe's mind, bad decisions. Anderson was too mentally lazy to
command a corps--he was barely fit to command his old division--and the cavalry needed a firm hand
now, with their guiding genius gone.
"Will you come inside, Colonel?" Poe gestured toward the tent flap with his stick.
"Thank you, sir."
"Share some cider with me? That and some biscuits are all the rafraîchissements I can manage."
"You're very kind." Sorrel looked at the uncleared table. "I've brought your orders from General
Anderson."
Poe pushed aside his gold-rimmed dinner plate and moved a lantern onto the table. Sorrel pulled a
folded map out of his coat and spread it on the pale blue tablecloth. Poe reached for his spectacles and
put them on his nose. The map gave him, for the first time, an accurate look at his position.
This part of the Southern line stretched roughly northwest to southeast, a chord on the arc of the North
Anna. The line was more or less straight, though it was cut in half by a swampy tributary of the North
Anna, with steep banks on either side, and at that point Poe's entrenchments bent back a bit. The division
occupied the part of the line south of the tributary. In front of him was dense hardwood forest, not very
useful for maneuver or attack.
"We're going on the offensive tomorrow," Sorrel said, "thank the lord." He gave a thin smile. "Grant's
got himself on the horns of a dilemma, sir, and General Lee intends to see he's gored."
Poe's temper crackled. "No one's going to get gored if division commanders don't get their instructions!"
he snapped.
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Sorrel gave him a wary smile. "That's why I'm here, sir."
Poe glared at him, then deliberately reined in his anger. "So you are." He took a breath. "Pardon my"¦
display."
"Staff work, as I say, sir, has been a mite precarious of late. General Lee is ill, and so is General Hill."
Poe's anxiety rose again. "Lee?" he demanded. "Ill?"
"An intestinal complaint. We would have made this attack yesterday had the general been feeling better."
Poe felt his nervousness increase. He was not a member of the Cult of Lee, but he did not trust an army
without a capable hand at the top. Too many high-ranking officers were out of action or incompetent.
Stuart was dead, Longstreet was wounded, Lee was sick--great heavens, he'd already had a heart attack--
Ewell hadn't been the same since he lost his leg, Powell Hill was ill half the time"¦ And the young ones,
the healthy ones, were as always dying of bullets and shells.
"Your task, General," Sorrel said, "is simply to hold. Perhaps to demonstrate against the Yanks, if you
feel it possible."
"How am I to know if it's possible?" He was still angry. "I don't know the ground. I don't know where
the enemy is."
Sorrel cocked an eyebrow at him, said, "Ewell didn't show you anything?" But he didn't wait for an
answer before beginning his exposition.
The Army of Northern Virginia, he explained, had been continually engaged with Grant's army for three
weeks--first in the Wilderness, then at Spotsylvania, now on the North Anna; there hadn't been a single
day without fighting. Every time one of Grant's offensives bogged down, he'd slide his whole army to
his left and try again. Two days before, on May 24, Grant had gone to the offensive again, crossing the
North Anna both upstream and down of Lee's position.
Grant had obviously intended to overlap Lee on both flanks and crush him between his two wings; but
Lee had anticipated his enemy by drawing his army back into a V shape, with the center on the river,
and entrenching heavily. When the Yanks saw the entrenchments they'd come to a stumbling halt, their
offensive stopped in its tracks without more than a skirmish on either flank.
"You're facing a Hancock's Second Corps, here on our far right flank," Sorrel said. His manicured finger
jabbed at the map. Hancock appeared to be entirely north of the swampy tributary. "Warren and Wright
are on our left, facing Powell Hill. Burnside's Ninth Corps is in the center--he tried to get across Ox Ford
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No Spot of Ground
on the twenty-fourth, but General Anderson's guns overlook the ford and Old Burn called off the fight
before it got properly started. Too bad--" Grinning. "Could've been another Fredericksburg."
"We can't hope for more than one Fredericksburg, alas," Poe said. "Not even from Burnside." He looked
at the map. "Looks as if the Federals have broken their army into pieces for us."
"Yes, sir. We can attack either wing, and Grant can't reinforce one wing without moving his people
across the North Anna twice."
General Lee had planned to take advantage of that with an offensive against half Grant's army. He
intended to pull Ewell's corps off the far right, most of Anderson's out of the center, and combine them
with Hill's for a strike at Warren and Wright. The attack would have been made the day before if Lee
hadn't fallen ill. In the end he'd postponed the assault by one day.
The delay, Poe thought, had given the Yanks another twenty-four hours to prepare. Confederates aren't
the only ones who know how to entrench.
Plans already laid, he thought. Nothing he could do about it.
Poe looked at the map. Now that Ewell and most of Anderson's people had pulled out, he was holding
half the Confederate line with his single division.
"It'll probably work to the good," Sorrel said. "Your division came up to hold the right for us, and that
will allow us to put more soldiers into the attack. With your division and Bushrod Johnson's, which
came up a few days ago, we've managed to replace all the men we've lost in this campaign so far."
Had the Yankees? Poe wondered.
"When you hear the battle start," Sorrel said, "you might consider making a demonstration against
Hancock. Keep him interested in what's happening on his front."
Poe looked up sharply. "One division," he said, "against the Yankee Second Corps? Didn't we have
enough of that at Gettysburg?"
"A demonstration, General, not a battle." Politely. "General Anderson has also put under your command
the two brigades that are holding the center, should you require them."
"Whose?"
"Gregg's Brigade, and Law's Alabamans."
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NoSpotofGroundNOSPOTOFGROUNDWalterJonWilliamsThedeadgirlcameasashocktohim.HehadlimpedintotheStarkerhou\sefromthefirelitmilitarycampoutside,fromacacophonyofwagonsrattling,mendrivingtentpegs\,provostmarshalssettinguptheperimeter,abattalionofEwell'sNapoleongunsrollingpast,their\wheelsliftingdustfromthe...

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