Free Sharyn Mccrumb_Elizabeth MacPherson_07 by MacPherson's Lament

fall.
    Gabriel tried not to think about politics. Or losing the war. None of it made much sense to him, especially when you looked at the havoc that came of it all. But he thought that he might someday be old enough to tell the story of their retreat from Richmond for the comedy of errors that it was. He could laugh at it now
if
he hadn’t been living it. “So there we was,” he’dbe telling his grand-younguns, “a-throwing pieces of that picket fence into the firebox on that locomotive and trying to get her a-going, and all the time we could hear them Yankees coming. Well, she finally built up a head of steam, and us sailors and a raft of the townsfolk clambered aboard, and off we chugged till we got to the first bit of a hill right outside the station near the riverbank, and she ground to a halt. That little locomotive wasn’t equal to the task of hauling that great bulk of humanity any great distance, and there we sat, with a right smart view of the city of Richmond. We could see lines of Union cavalry and artillery snaking along toward State House Square, and we reckoned any minute they’d look up and see us, and that would be the end of us. But if the Lord wasn’t on our side, then I reckon He sat that one out, ’cause they never paid us no mind, and besides, the bridges were all afire by then.
    â€œBy and by the steam engineer went running up to the admiral, and he must’ve told him about finding another locomotive hid away in the shops, because directly they went and hauled that engine out and hooked it on in front, and we were able to proceed at a crawl to the first decent woodpile. We lit out and grabbed the better fuel, and then we really fired up and got the hell out of Richmond.”
    The farther they got from the scene of destruction, the easier they breathed, and evennow he could find things to laugh about on the run to Danville. It seemed like they couldn’t go more than a mile without having to pick up a straggler—a stray colonel, even generals—left stranded by the recent turn of events. Then there were the railroad people. The admiral didn’t appear overly amused by the sight of those conductors and engineers bustling out from their stations and trying to take over the operation of the train now that the navy had assembled it and got it going. He soon sent them off with a flea in their ears!
    They reached Danville around midnight on April 4 and slept in the cars until sunup. Later, when news of the fighting farther north filtered into Danville, they learned what a narrow escape it had been. After turning Lee’s flank at Five Forks, Sheridan’s cavalry had attacked the Southside Railroad. They had torn up the rail at Burksville Junction just an hour and a half after Admiral Semmes’s train had passed through there.
    The orders to join General Lee in the field no longer stood. Admiral Semmes—now a brigadier general—organized the four hundred sailors left to his command into brigades. Hawks and Bridgeford were still serving under Captain Dunnington, who was now an army colonel.
    â€œBut we’re still bottom of the heap,” saidBridgeford. “Seems like the more it all changes, the more it stays the same for boys like us.”
    They were in the trenches on the outskirts of Danville now, defending the new capital from raiding parties, and waiting to see if the Union Army would turn its might on this last stronghold. The green of spring and the budding trees made a welcome change from the devastation of the blackened city they’d left behind, but a steady drizzle made the landscape drab, chilling them as they huddled in their mudholes. Sunshine would have made their watch more pleasant, but it would have done little for the scenery: no place in Virginia was really beautiful that May. The fields were untended stubble, with weeds and broken fences; everywhere the neglect of the war years showed in Danville’s shabby