Walter Williams - No Spot of Ground

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.

*

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.

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.

“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 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.