Play for a kingdom, p.1
Play for a Kingdom, page 1
Contents
* * *
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
The First Match
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
The Secobd Match
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
The Third Match
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Game Postponed
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Travel Date
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
The Fourth Match
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
The Last Meeting
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Epilogue
About the Author
Connect with HMH
Copyright © 1997 by Thomas Dyja
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Dyja, Thomas.
Play for a kingdom/by Thomas Dyja.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-15-100267-3
ISBN 0-15-600629-4 (pbk)
ISBN 13: 978-0-15-600629-3
I. Title.
PS3554.Y48P58 1997
813'.54—dc21 96-53875
eISBN 978-0-544-23859-6
v2.0420
To my father,
and my son
. . . for when lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler gamester is the soonest winner.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Henry V, ACT III
Prologue
A BLUE RIVER FLOWED DOWN THROUGH THE HILLS AND ONE-HOUSE towns of Virginia that night in May of 1864, under a moon that caught the sharp silver ripples of bayonets whenever the clouds parted long enough. It was a river in flood; Union soldiers four wide and twelve thousand deep claiming a land they thought was theirs, nearing the hamlet of Stevensburg at the sluggish pace of two miles an hour.
As always when a river floods, the victims believed the killing force to be contrary to the laws of God and nature, but that night the few men watching from behind their windows, mumbling to their wives, had honestly been expecting it since the weather held warm in April and the mud dried back to dirt. War had disturbed the natural order of Virginia every year since ’61. Spring now brought the dogwoods to bloom and the flies and this Yankee flood into a land usually at peace with its rivers. Three times the rush of men had rolled through, then pulled back in defeat, and three times the few farmers and tobacco dryers stubborn enough to remain had started over again. This night they saw the ripples and shapes in the dark and hoped Lee could send it back one more time. One more retreat and the Yankees would stay north where they belonged. If not, the South would be forever under.
The river of Union men flowing down the road kept hopes as firm as Virginia’s. Old veterans, some only twenty-one with just days to go in their enlistments, stared at the necks of the men before them and prayed they’d make it home through the death that hung in the still Southern air. They prayed for victory, too, and thought they might get it now that Grant had stirred some vigor into this army famed for its losses and the deadly incompetence of its generals. If the army did not love him yet, they knew he meant to win and they knew there’d be a cost. The first drives south had been parades of “On to Richmond,” brass bands and laughing side swirls of lazy soldiers distracted by blackberry bushes or some stray cows. This year the sober quiet of men tired of war, afraid of defeat, and still wondering about their new general, muffled the scattered whoops of fresh conscripts. The raw men felt no duty, carried no honor, had never seen war. Instead, they were mostly thieves and cheaters at Bluff, loud cowards who marched off-step and placed bets on who’d hang Jeff Davis while the veterans shook their heads and prayed harder. This army—part killer, part coward, part gentleman, part thief—was a match for its new leader. Both pushed along with questions men didn’t ask.
The campaign began with Wilson’s cavalry galloping out of Culpeper around ten p.m. while thousands of men broke bivouacs east of the courthouse. Winter shacks and extra belongings had been burned days earlier in the happy bonfires they’d lit in Brandy Station, here in Culpeper and other camps along the fifty miles of Union-held Virginia, to celebrate the end of their waiting. Those who had wintered in Culpeper were especially glad to leave this town that had offered through clenched teeth her prized brick hotels and trim houses with views of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The soldiers were tired of the sneers and snubs of a people who considered themselves prisoners in their homes.
Wilson’s vedettes were now spreading ahead like the foam of a wave in search of new shores that would only be less hospitable. The rest of the army had stepped off with drumbeats at midnight, Warren’s Fifth Corps in the lead, and now, at two a.m., the thousand wagons bearing the Fifth’s Maltese cross came behind with freedmen at the reins of mules fighting their yokes and the great weight of matériel they drew. The blue river streamed farther east, deeper south. Every wheezing mule and wheel that creaked, every canteen clanking on a gun and brogan shuffling in the dust, added a note to the dull roar of invasion. Sedgwick and the Sixth raised flags, then merged into this force driving on with one national mind. No one man, not McClellan or Grant or Lincoln, could take credit for this Union. The war’s own progress had fused a nation with rails, commerce, and mass graves, and the army could only mirror a new and more uniform country as it surged forward, well fed and well clothed by the mechanical age it had made necessary.
The First Match
Chapter 1
UP TOWARD THE FRONT OF THE FIFTH CORPS, IN THE MOVEMENT’S van, five rows of red dots bobbed atop the solid blue of caps and jackets. Amid Griffin’s division, in Sweitzer’s brigade, these remnants of a company detached for reasons as yet unexplained floated along with this Union tide. Their pants were scarlet, like the caps; loose trousers that white leggings forced into comfortable billows. The blue jackets trimmed with red fastened at top and bottom to show a vest the same deep scarlet as the pants. The moon caught fourteen gold buttons on each jacket; decorative flourishes that shone like small fires and bound the men of this company to their regiment, the 14th Brooklyn, now far in the back guarding wagons of bullets and food and counting down the days to May 21, the end of its three-year enlistment.
A thin man, clean shaven, cap tipped so the brim stretched down over his eyes, edged out just ahead of the group as though trying to get home that much quicker. Sergeant Dan Anson didn’t so much march as spring along on his toes, turning his head side to side, slowly searching for clues in the dark. After the last mile of silence, one of the two men on his right ventured a question: “Where’s this Grant taking us, Danny?”
The man who’d asked had a blond handlebar mustache with perfect twists. Unlike most around him, he’d also managed to keep his uniform clean since receiving a new jacket the year before. The ends of a base ball bat stuck out from the sides of his bedroll. Newton Fry was a handsome man and his bearing proved that he knew it.
Danny kept looking to the side.
“Going after Lee?”
Danny Anson took another scan around while Newt waited for his answer. “Nope. Grant’s trying to miss him. That’s why we’re a-headin’ toward the Wilderness again.”
A few steps went by in silence. Newt Fry shrugged. “Maybe so.” The thought of that eerie forest sank everyone’s heart. This army couldn’t take another Chancellorsville. While the 14th hadn’t been there that day last year, they had seen the wagons loaded with men bleeding trails into the dirt, shrieking as they bounced along the road.
The third man cleared his nose to the side then wiped it on his sleeve. A stocky man, maybe five feet eight, he had a chin with a deep vertical dent and his thick legs rolled him along side to side like a ship in heavy seas. His name was Lyman Alder and he didn’t want the silence to wash back over them. “What of our new generals, lads? Eh?”—a question asked of no one in particular, meant to take their minds off the many disconcerting possibilities they faced. The whole regiment had been shifted to a new corps when Grant came in, and now, with eighteen days to go, they were sent off on their own. Eighteen days seemed a very long time this dark night.
Danny wrinkled his nose like he’d just tasted something bitter, then spoke in a confidential tone, audible only to his friends beside him. “Damned engineer, is all.”
“Lee’s an engineer,” said Newt.
“That’s different.”
Ly man Alder had his own opinion on the lieutenant-general, and he didn’t mind who heard it. “Well, Grant’s some hard medicine, I think.”
On the left, a weathered, lined face smiled sourly. “I knew from the first ye’d have that Grant; yer butchers, the two a ye, and proud of it.” Tiger Quigley snorted once, proud of his own joke. The man shambled along with his hair sticking all ways and his arms swinging at his sides. His mustache was thick and untrimmed; bristles curled into the sides of his mouth. Holding a stout laurel-root pipe between his few remaining teeth, he said, “So, Danny, have ye seen enough dead men yet?”
“I’ve dressed my last, that I can tell ya.” Danny was an undertaker back in Brooklyn. Making the idle well-to-do of Williamsburg presentable for the Judgment had been a good living, but three years of brave men buried in shallow graves had made his job seem frivolous.
Newt quickly changed the subject. “The minute I step off the train, I’m walking straight into McCollins and ordering up twelve oysters about yea big.” He showed with his finger how he liked them.
Tiger hawked and spit. “Ach. Ye got it all wrong, Newton. Ye’re just a-wantin’ the oysters ’cause yer lonely for that Mrs. Fry a yers.” He looked ahead to see if Danny was smiling, which he was, so Tiger kept the floor. “No, Lyman Alder over there is the man with the goods for me. A steak, me boy. Three inches thick and cooked through till it’s gray as Bobby Lee’s coat.” Lyman didn’t look up. “Ye wouldn’t give yer lifelong friend a gift for saving yer sad butchering life so many times? Yer a cheap sot, for true.”
Lyman shook his head. “Oh, don’t start with that. Newt saved me that day and it’s a sorry show for you to claim the credit.”
Newt opened his mouth, but then thought better of it, so he stuck a finger in and began chewing a nail.
Tiger smiled again, but not pleasantly. “The grocer has something to say, does he? The hee-ro. I been nice to ye, Newton Fry, keeping me mouth shut in the interests of us all getting on these last days, but don’t be thinking I like ye.” The three new boys in line behind them laughed.
Danny got in the middle. “Shut up both a ye. Horace Worm, ye got a poem?”
Someone in back cleared his throat, then chanted in a high tenor:
There is in Brooklyn town the very best of girls.
Her name is Sally Edwards and she has a set of curls.
They’re not upon her head ye know.
It’s not so primer simple.
She’s got ’em oh so further down
by another set of dimples!
Everyone except Newt laughed.
Six or seven beat-up old houses appeared on the left, at a crossroads. No light came from inside. Danny Anson swore that he saw the curtains move, though enough windows were broken for it to be wind. One roof was bowed like the back of a dray horse. If people still lived there, they lived poorly. No livestock were visible, no smoke from the chimneys. Bullet holes dotted the walls. Stevensburg’s only purpose now was to serve as a landmark. Behind it, a hill rose up with one tree, bare as the houses below, standing on top with branches pointing in each direction. Depending on one’s mood, it either pointed south or north; invitation or warning. Just past that sorry village, the road climbed up a ridge and the Wilderness spread out beneath. Eyes accustomed to the dark could see treetops lacing the horizon and a forest cut by a narrow road that turned south into its heart. The line of men moved down onto the road and into the forest, whose trees formed walls on both sides, like levees barely holding back seas of pine.
In the wary silence of a night march, men imagined what waited for them behind that first, distinct line of trees. The obvious fear was of Rebels, but Rebels weren’t the threat; the cavalry had cleared them aside. The greatest threat on a long and dark movement like this was the soldiers’ own minds when men began fighting off thoughts born of fatigue, fear, and boredom. Memories of horrors they’d performed at Fredericksburg or Antietam floated up like hastily disposed bodies rising to a river’s surface in the summer heat. Would Newt’s wife see the mark of Cain on his brow? Could Danny’s children love a father who has killed? The idea of a home turned against them made some angry, left others in despair, and reminded them all that they probably deserved whatever would be thrown their way when they returned home to a place nicknamed the City of Churches.
Under the best of circumstances, Lyman Alder thought too much, and now the pictures marched through his mind like their own invading army. He still saw the men who’d gone up during the glory days of the 14th: Fat John Porter; David Leigh with those tiny feet; Beaver Peter Ulster. Both of Beaver Peter’s legs got blown off and that was a shame because he’d been a hell of a dancer. Three of the company’s best. What was left and struggling toward Richmond were twenty out of the original one hundred; mostly the dregs of the company, save for a handful of brave men lucky enough to never have been hit or so unlucky that their injuries weren’t bad enough to send them home.
Alder shook his head, briefly scattering the dead faces until a larger and more dangerous thought swept down. Since Gettysburg a new concern had gnawed on him during these endless empty passages that balance the fire of a soldier’s life: Ernie, his one son, whom he’d last seen at the age of eight. The boy hadn’t written for so long; months, by now. After Gettysburg and Lyman’s injury, Ernie wrote constantly, first saying how much he missed him, then asking when his father would be an officer and if he’d ever carried the flag into fire. Lyman had sent back measured, appropriate replies that he’d thought were proper for a father trying to explain something about the realities of life to his son, but he realized now the boy might have seen through them in his heart to the testiness and distance that Lyman felt as he was writing. Finally the boy asked simply if he had been a hero and Lyman was forced to say no.
That wasn’t the only reason why the boy wasn’t writing anymore. His wife Victoria’s last letter said that Ernie had been caught stealing from a dry goods store near his school. Her brother Albert, the police officer, had gotten the boy out and given him the lashing he deserved, and while the boy had settled down some, he still gave indications that without a firm hand over him, he might very well take to other forms of delinquency. Lyman’s father—the “Alder” in “Alder and Son Meats”—had taken to waking Ernie up before five to help haul in the sides, the old man grumbling all the while about how Lyman had let the boy go spoil. The rest of Victoria’s letter described a place he barely knew after three years away at war; familiar or not, that was the world Lyman would be coming home to. He couldn’t say that the world he was now intimate with, the world of battle, was any worse. And that was the one thought he tried desperately not to have.
By 4:30 the sky lightened over the trees on their left. The whole army welcomed the day and relaxed, ignoring for a few hopeful minutes the possibility that the day they were embracing could also bring their death. Birds began calling back in the woods and wheeled about overhead catching breakfast on the wing. Men picked up conversations they had left off in some dark patch of trees. A German regiment marching behind the company sang about castles and victory, the first number in a concert that would go on all morning. A man in Company L held a hand up now to present his latest composition: a new set of words for “Dixie.”
I wish I was in the town of steeples.
Freedom there for all God’s peoples!
Eighteen days! Eighteen days! Eighteen days, Brooklyn land!
A base ball match and hot clam chowder,
Fetching lasses all a-powdered,
Eighteen days! Eighteen days! Eighteen days, Brooklyn land!
For Lincoln we have done our part, Hurray! Hurray!
Now let us go back to our hearts
That live and die in Brooklyn.
Eighteen days! Eighteen days! Eighteen days till we’re in Brooklyn!
Eighteen days! Eighteen days! Eighteen days till we’re in Brooklyn!
