What Might Have Happened Part 32

"When will the attack begin, Major?" Poe asked.

"It has already begun, sir. The mist cleared early to the west of us. The men were moving out just as I left General Anderson's headquarters."

Poe c.o.c.ked his head. "I hear no guns, Major Moses."

"Perhaps there has been a delay. Perhaps-" Moses shrugged. "Perhaps the wet ground is absorbing the sound. Or there is a trick of the wind-"

"Nevertheless," Poe said, "I hear no guns."

"Yes, sir." Moses cleared his throat. "It is not unknown, sir.

"Still, Major Moses," said Poe. "I hear no guns."

Moses fell silent at this self-evident fact. Poe whirled around, his black cape flying out behind him, and stalked toward his tent. He could hear Moses's soft footsteps following behind.

Men on horseback came, reporting one brigade after another ready to move forward. Poe told them to wait here for the word to advance, then return to their commanders. Soon he had heard from every brigade but those of Gregg and Law-a messenger even came from Fitz Lee, reporting the cavalryman's readiness to move forward at Poe's signal. After ten minutes of agitated waiting, while the sky grew ever paler and the mist retreated to lurk among the trees, Poe sent an aide to inquire.

Poe gave an irritated look at his division waiting in their ranks for the signal. If the enemy had scouts out this way, they'd see the Confederates ready for the attack and warn the enemy.

Go forward with the four brigades he had? he wondered.

Yes. No.

He decided to wait till his aide came back. He looked at his watch, then cast a glance over his shoulder at Major Moses.

"I hear no guns, Major," he said.

"You are correct, sir." Moses smiled thinly. "I take it you intend to enlighten me as to the significance of this?"

Poe nodded benignly. "In time, Major."

Moses swept oft" his hat in an elaborate bow. "You are known as the master of suspense, sir. I take my hat off sir, I positively do."

Poe smiled. The Jew was amusing. He tipped his own hat. "Thank you, Major."

Moses put on his hat. "I am an enthusiast of your work, sir. I have a first edition of the Complete Tales. Had I know I would encounter you, I would have had my wife send it to me and begged you to inscribe it."

"I should be glad to sign it," Poe said, surprised. The Complete and Corrected Tales and Poems of Edgar A. Poe had been published at his own expense six years ago and had sold precisely two hundred and forty-nine copies throughout the United States-he knew precisely, because the rest of the ten-thousand-copy edition was sitting in a lumber room back home at Shepherd's Rest.

"Before the war," Moses said, "I used to read your work aloud to my wife. The poems were particularly lovely, I thought-so delicate. And there was nothing that would bring a blush to her lovely cheek-I particularly appreciate that, sir." Moses grew indignant. "There are too many pa.s.sages from poets that one cannot in decency read to a lady, sir. Even in Shakespeare-"

Moses shook his head.

"Fortunately," said Poe, "one has Dowdier." "I thank that gentleman from my heart," said Moses. "As I thank Tennyson, and Mr. d.i.c.kens, and Keats."

"Keats." Poe's heart warmed at the mention of the name. "One scarcely could antic.i.p.ate encountering his name here, on a battlefield."

"True, sir. He is the most rarefied and sublime of poets- along, I may say, with yourself, sir."

Poe was surprised. "You flatter me, Major."

"I regret only that you are not more appreciated, sir." His tiny hands gestured whitely in the air. "Some of my correspondents have informed me, however, that you are better known in Europe."

"Yes," Poe said. A dark memory touched him. "A London publisher has brought out an edition of the Complete Tales. Unauthorized, of course. It has achieved some success, but I never received so much as a farthing from it."

"I am surprised that such a thing can happen, sir."

Poe gave a bitter laugh. "It isn't the money-it is the brazen provocation of it that offended me. I hired a London solicitor and had the publisher prosecuted."

"I hope he was thrown in jail, sir."

Poe gave a smile. "Not quite. But there will be no more editions of my work in London, one hopes."

"I trust there won't be."

"Or in France, either. I was being translated there by some overheated poet named Charles Baudelaire-no money from that source, either, by the way-and the fellow had the effrontery to write me that many of my subjects, indeed entire texts, were exactly the same as those he had himself composed-except mine, of course, had been written earlier."

"Curious." Moses seemed unclear as to what he should make of this.

"This gueux wrote that he considered himself my alter ego." A smile twisted across Poe's face at the thought of his triumph. "I wrote that what he considered miraculous, I considered plagiarism, and demanded that he cease any a.s.sociation with my works on penalty of prosecution. He persisted in writing to me, so I had a French lawyer send him a stiff letter, and have not heard from him since."

"Very proper." Moses nodded stoutly. "I have always been dismayed at the thought of so many of these disreputable people in the literary world. Their antics can only distract the public from the true artists."

Poe gazed in benevolent surprise at Major Moses. Perhaps he had misjudged the man.

A horseman was riding toward him. Poe recognized the spreading mustachios of the aide he'd sent to Gregg and Law. The young man rode up and saluted breathlessly.

"I spoke to General Law, sir," he said. "His men were still eating breakfast. He and General Gregg have done nothing, sir, nothing!"

Poe stiffened in electric fury. "You will order Generals Gregg and Law to attack at once!" He barked.

The aide smiled. "Sir!" he barked, saluted, and turned his horse. Dirt clods flew from the horse's hooves as he pelted back down the line.

Poe hobbled toward the four messengers his brigadiers had sent to him. Anger smoked through his veins. "General Barton will advance at once," he said. "The other brigades will advance as soon as they perceive his movement has begun. Tell your commanders that I desire any prisoners to be sent to me at once." He pointed at Fitzhugh Lee's aide with his stick. "Ride to General Lee. Give him my compliments, inform him that we are advancing, and request his support."

Men scattered at his words, like shrapnel from his explosion of temper. He watched them with cold satisfaction.

"There is nothing more beautiful, sir," said Major Moses in his ear, "than the sight of this army on the attack."

Poe looked with surprise at Moses; in his burst of temper he had forgotten the man was here.

He turned to gaze at the formed men a few hundred yards below him on the gentle slope. They had been in garrison for almost a year, and their uniforms and equipment were in better condition than most of this scarecrow army. They were not beautiful in any sense that Poe knew of the word, but he understood what the major meant. There was a beauty in warfare that existed in a realm entirely distinct from the killing.

"I know you served in Greece, sir," Moses said. "Did the Greek fighters for liberty compare in spirit with our own?"

Poe's heart gave a lurch, and he wondered in alarm if his ears were burning. "They were- indifferent," he said. "Variable." He cleared his throat. "Mercenary, if the truth be told."

"Ah." Moses nodded. "Byron found that also."

"I believe he did." Poe stared at the ground and wondered how to extricate himself. His Greek service was a lie he had encouraged to be published about himself. He had never fought in Greece when young, or served, as he had also claimed, in the Russian army. Instead-penniless, an outcast, thrown on his own resources by his Shylock of a stepfather-he had enlisted in the American army out of desperation, and served three years as a volunteer.

It had been his dread, these years he'd served the Confederacy, that he would encounter some old soldier who remembered serving alongside the eighteen-year-old Private Edgar A. Perry. His fears had never been realized, fortunately, but he had read everything he could on Byron and the Greek War of Independence in hopes he would not be tripped up by the curious.

"Ah," Poe said. He pointed with his stick. "The men are moving."

"A brilliant sight, sir." Moses's eyes shone.

Calls were rolling up the line, one after another, from Barton on the left to the Ravens next in line, then to Corse- all Virginia brigades-and then to Clingman's North Carolini-ans on the right. Poe could hear the voices distinctly.

"Attention, battalion of direction! Forward, guide centerrrr-march!"

The regiments moved forward, left to right, clumps of skirmishers spreading out ahead. Flags hung listlessly in the damp. Once the order to advance had been given, the soldiers moved in utter silence, in perfect parade-ground formation.

Just as they had gone for that cemetery, Poe thought. He remembered his great swell of pride at the way the whole division had done a left oblique under enemy fire that day, taking little half- steps to swing the entire line forty-five degrees, and then paused to dress the line before marching onward.

Sweeping through tendrils of mist that clung to the soldiers' legs, the division crossed the few hundred yards of ground between the entrenchments and the forest, and disappeared into the darkness and mist.

Poe wondered desperately if he was doing the right thing.

"Did you know Byron, sir?" Moses again. Poe realized he'd been holding his breath, antic.i.p.ating the sound of disaster as soon as his men began their attack. He let his breath go, felt relief spreading outward, like rot, from his chest.

"Byron died," he said, "some years before I went abroad."

Byron had been feeding worms for forty years, Poe thought, but there were Byrons still, hundreds of them, in this army. Once he had been a Byron himself-an American Childe Harold dressed in dramatic black, ready with the power of his mind and talent to defeat the cosmos.

Byron had intended to conquer the Mussulman; Poe would do him better, with Eureka, by conquering G.o.d.

Byron had died at Missolonghi, bled to death by his personal physician as endless gray rain fell outside his tent and drowned his little army in the Peloponnesian mud. And nothing had come of Byron in the end, nothing but an example that inspired thousands of other young fools to die in similar pointless ways throughout the world.

For Poe the war had come at a welcome moment. His literary career had come to a standstill, with nine thousand seven hundred fifty-one copies of the Complete Tales sitting in his lumber room; his mother-in-law had bestirred herself to suggest, in kind but firm fas.h.i.+on, that his literary and landscaping projects were running up too fantastic a debt; and his relations with Evania-on Poe's part at least-were at best tentative.

When Virginia seceded and Maryland seemed poised to follow, Poe headed south with s.e.xtus, a pair of fine horses, equipage, a curved Wilkinson light cavalry sword, Hardee's Tactics, a brace of ma.s.sive nine-shot Le Mat revolvers, and of course the twelve hundred in gold. He kissed Evania and his beloved Mrs. Forster farewell-within a few months he would return with an army and liberate Shepherd's Rest and the rest of Maryland. He, as well as Byron, could be martial when the cause of liberty required it. He rode away with a singing heart.

Before him, as he woke in his bed his first night in Richmond, he saw his vision, the benevolent madonna giving him her benediction. In going south he was being, he thought, faithful to Virginia; and he hoped to find the spirit, as well as the name, of his lost love embodied in the state to which he swore allegiance.

Jefferson Davis was pleased to give a colonel's commission to a veteran of the wars of Greek liberation, not to mention a fellow West Pointer-the West Point story, at least, being true, though Poe did not remind the President that, because the horrid Allan refused to support him, Poe had got himself expelled from the academy after six months.

There was no regiment available for the new colonel, so Poe began his military career on the staff of General Joseph E. Johnston, commanding in the Shenandoah Valley. He occupied himself by creating a cypher for army communications which, so far as he knew, had survived three years unbroken.

Johnston's army moved east on the railroad to unite with Beauregard's at First Mana.s.sas, and there Poe saw war for the first time. He had expected violence and death, and steeled himself against it. It gave him no trouble, but what shocked him was the noise. The continual roll of musketry, buzzing bullets, shouted orders, the blast of cannon, and the shriek of sh.e.l.ls-all were calculated to unstring the nerves of a man who couldn't abide even a loud orchestra. Fortunately he was called upon mainly to rally broken troops-it had shocked him that Southern men could run like that-but in the end, after he'd got used to the racket, he had ridden, bullets singing over his head, in the final screaming, exhilarating charge that swept the Yankee army from the field, and he could picture himself riding that way forever, the fulfillment of the Byronic ideal, sunset glowing red on the sword in his hand as he galloped north to Maryland and the liberation of his home. . . .

Maryland never managed to secede, somehow, and Poe's Byronic liberation of his home state had to be postponed. Via blockade-runner, Poe exchanged pa.s.sionate letters with his wife while remaining, in his heart, faithful to Virginia.

At the horrible, bungled battle of Seven Pines the next year, Major General Daniel Harvey Hill made a properly Byronic, if unsupported, attack against McClellan's left and lost half his men, as well as one of his brigadiers. Poe was promoted and given the shattered brigade. Joe Johnston, during the same battle, had been severely wounded, and the Army of Northern Virginia now had a new commander, one Robert E. Lee.

It did not take Poe long to discover that the ferocious, dyspeptic Harvey Hill was both an ignoramus and a lunatic. Before more than a few days had pa.s.sed, neither spoke to the other: they communicated only in writing. Poe broke the Yanks' wigwag signal code, which didn't mean much at the time but was of help later, at Second Mana.s.sas.

But by then Poe was not with the army. Only a few days after taking command, Lee went on the offensive, and Poe, supported by exemplary reasoning and logic, refused point-blank Harvey Hill's order to take his brigade into Boatswain Swamp.

Now, after three years of war, almost all the American Byrons were dying or had been shot to pieces. Jeb Stuart, Jackson, Albert Sidney Johnston, d.i.c.k Garnett, Ewell, Hood, now Longstreet-all dead or maimed.

And Edgar A. Poe, leaning on his stick, a sick ache throbbing in his thigh, knew in his heart that Byron's death had been more merciful than anyone had known.

He had written the eulogy himself, never knowing it at the time: But he grew old- /This knight so bold- /And o'er his heart a shadow /Fell as he found /No spot of ground/That looked like Eldorado.

Byron's eulogy. Poe's, too. Stuart's, everyone's.

"Forty years dead," he said. "We have other poets now."

"Yourself, of course," said Major Moses, "and Tennyson."

"Walter Whitman," said Poe. The name left a savage, evil taste in his mouth.

"Obscene." Moses s.h.i.+vered. "Filth."

"I agree."

"You have denounced him yourself."

"Repeatedly."

Poe stared at the dark trees that had swallowed up his entire division. How many, he wondered, would come out of those woods nevermore? Sickness welled up inside him. In another minute he might weep. He turned and shouted for s.e.xtus to bring him a chair.

The first edition of Leaves of Gra.s.s had happily escaped his notice. The second edition, with the preface by Emerson, had been sent to him for review at the Southern Gentleman. He had denounced it. Whitman and Emerson replied; Poe printed their replies and returned fire, and the fight went on for years, a war that prefigured the more deadly one begun in 1861.

A showdown, he had thought triumphantly. He had long distrusted the New England clique and feared their grip on the North American Review-the fact that they regarded the pedestrian and bourgeoisie Longfellow as a genius was reason enough for distrust. But now the south had its own literary magazine; Poe was no longer dependent on the approval of New England literary society for employment and regard. Whitman, he wrote, knew nothing of versification. Whitman thought prost.i.tutes and steam engines and common laborers fit subject for verse. Whitman knew nothing of the higher truths, of the sublime. Whitman filled his verses with the commonplace, with references so mundane and contemporary that in a hundred years no one would know what he was talking about.

Whitman did not even look like a literary man. In the ambrotype used as a frontispiece, Whitman was dressed only in his s.h.i.+rt, looking like a farmer just come in from the fields, not an elevated, rarified, idealized creature-a poet-who spoke the language of the G.o.ds.

And Whitman was obscene. Grossly so. Clearly he was a degenerate of the worst description.

Poe preferred not to imagine what Whitman did with those young men he wrote about in such evocative terms. Emerson might have used every rhetorical trick he knew to disguise the filth, or talk around it, but he never denied it-and this from someone who affected to wors.h.i.+p the transcendental, meaning the refined and pure. It was then that Poe knew how bankrupt the North was, how desperate, as compared with his refined, elegant southland.

"Whitman is the perfect Yankee poet," Poe said. He drove his stick into the soil as if the earth hid Walter Whitman's heart. "No sublimity, no beauty, just stacks of prose disguised as poetry- sometimes not even prose, only lists. Lists of ordinary things. Produced so much stanzas an hour, like yards of cloth in a shoddyworks." He drove the stick again. "Like Yankee soldiers. Not inspired, just numerous."

Moses gave a laugh. "I must remember that, sir. For when General Longstreet returns. It will amuse him."

Poe stared at the woods, grinding his teeth. He hadn't meant to be witty; he was trying to make a point.

There was sudden musketry from the hardwoods, a succession of popping sounds turned hollow by multiple echoes. Then there was silence. Poe listened intently for a moment.

"Pickets," Moses said.

How many Yankees? Poe wondered. He turned back in the direction of his tent. s.e.xtus was nowhere to be seen.

"Bring a chair, you blasted orangutan!" he shouted. He had no idea whether or not s.e.xtus heard him.

More popping sounds came from the woods-individual shots this time. From a different part of the line, Poe thought.