grass semi-circle, and finally to clamber up onto the highest point. Mary stands on one of several crumbing stone platforms that are arranged at points along the earthworks and is looking over the hillock now, too.
“What’s that, Grandma?” Lillie asks, pointing to the platform.
Mary’s gesture includes all the platforms. “These are where the cannons used to be.”
“Cannons? Why?”
“Because this was a fort, Lillie. Fort Stevens.”
Lillie is confused. She and Charley make snow forts in the winter and tree forts in the summer. This is nothing like either of those. None of her forts have cannons. “It’s a fort?”
“Yes. There are forts all around the city. Soldiers used to be here during the war.”
“Oh.” She still doesn’t understand but is afraid that she is supposed to.
“Do you remember we told you that your Grampa was a surgeon in the war?”
“He was here?”
“No, not right here. The war was everywhere. But do you know who was right here? Almost right where you’re standing?”
“Who?”
“President Lincoln! He was right here during the attack on the city.”
“President Lincoln,” she echoes in wonderment. She knows about him: he was ten feet tall and the smartest and best man ever for saving the union. The meaning of that last part is still fuzzy to her, but she knows it’s somehow very important.
“He got his tall hat shot off because he kept standing up to see what was happening during the battle.” Mary stands on her tiptoes at the earthen wall and cranes her neck to scan the landscape, mimicking what the president might have been doing when the hat was attacked.
Lillie laughs at the pantomime, but still feels confused. “Who was shooting at him?”
“The Confederates. The Johnny Rebs.” It’s clear that Lillie has no concept of what she’s talking about. “Here, let me show you. Can you get down by yourself?”
Mary walks to an open spot of dirt near the end of the semi-circular hill, picking up a stick along the way. She rests herself against the earthworks while Lillie crouches down to see the map that Mary starts to draw. First, she pokes dots to outline a large circle. “See, there are forts that go all the way around the city. This is Stevens, but there’s Totten, Reno, Marcy, DeRussy. Many more.”
“Why?”
“Well, this city is the capital of the whole United States. When bad people want to hurt the country, they attack the capital. So it’s important that we defend the city against those people.” She draws a line straight down the center of the circle. “And this is the Seventh Street Road,” pointing from the line in the dirt to the road below, to indicate that they are one and the same. She continues to draw. “When your Mamma was just a little younger than you are now, Jubal Early’s army came marching down that road from the north, planning to claim Washington City for the Confederates. And our army, the Union, came marching up from south of the city to fend them off.”
Lillie’s eyes are big. “Did they come to our house?”
“Well, our house wasn’t even there yet. This was far out in the country back then, all farmland. That’s why they put the forts all the way out here, away from the city. But I’ll tell you,” Mary pokes a dot next to the road almost in the center of the circle, “your Mamma, your Aunt Mary, and I were living right here when all this was happening, and I can tell you we were mighty afraid that they were going to march right into our house.”
cd
Jubal Early, triumphant in his last several encounters, has marched his army down from Frederick, having swept up and around from West Virginia. Washington City, until only recently well-defended by an army of eighteen-thousand men and nine-thousand guns, is down to about four-thousand irregulars—so irregular, in fact, that some of their number is made up of invalids rousted from the local hospitals—to defend the thirty-seven miles of fortifications that circle the city. General Grant has pulled the real soldiers from Washington into the siege of Petersburg, where the Union has General Lee holed up and increasingly cut off from his supply lines. When the news comes of Early’s intention to march on Washington City, Grant dispatches seventeen-thousand troops to the capital, but Early gets there first. Some of his officers, who ride in advance of the Confederate force, find points along the breastworks that are entirely unmanned. Washington City suffers from a surfeit of generals and dearth of fighting men. In the very best tradition of the seat of U.S. power when confronted with a crisis, many important people independently declare themselves in charge, issue conflicting edicts, and remain comfortably above the ensuing chaos.
The city has lived in fear of a Confederate invasion since the disaster at First Manassas, and now, in the run-up to the fight for the city, her residents are infected by rumor, wild speculation, and general hysteria. Old Jube breathes hellfire, they say, and his vast army has burned Pennsylvania and Maryland to the smoky nub. Mary hears the breathless tales from the customers at her little dry goods counter at the back of the yard, the talk swirling around her. Soon he will have shot lightning bolts from his eyes and leveled armies by pointing his finger.
That’s not to say she’s sanguine; she comprehends the danger, especially given that their house is only one square back from the Seventh Street Pike. It’s obvious that the Pike is to be the main thoroughfare for Union movement, and for the Confederates, should they break through the northern line of defense. She has two children to protect and care for, and her weak-eyed, spindly boarder, Mr. Briggs, has fled to his parents’ farm on the Eastern Shore to avoid whatever is coming. He surely would be of no help in the crisis; his entire body twitches whenever he hears the talk. She is completely on her own. On this point, she finds herself angry rather than fearful. Where is Christian but hundreds of miles away and far from any fighting? Taking his ease, as he likes to say. He has left them to this, to fend for themselves as best they can.
To add to the misery, it is the hottest summer that any of them can remember, and in Washington City that is saying something. The oppressiveness of knowing the battle is coming is overmatched by the oppressiveness of the heat and the suffocating, wet-wool tent of inescapable humidity. Tempers flare amid the misery and speculation, but any threat of fistfights peters out in a lack of energy to engage. Decorum does not allow for any unpinning of high collars or sloughing of jackets for the decent folk, so the adults slowly boil inside their civilized clothing, waiting for the city to be overrun by southern savages. In the heat and anxiety, Mary closes her door to customers, unable to maintain her composure.
“Can you hear it?” Mrs. Slocum from next door asks Mary in the wrenching noon heat of July eleventh.
“Hear...?”
“The gunfire. It’s coming from their skirmishers. They’re harassing the picket line in front of Fort Stevens.” Mrs. Slocum’s husband is a veteran of the Mexican war, and the impending battle gives her an opportunity to display her knowledge of military tactics and terminology. She dabs her face and neck with a wet cloth while they both stand in the sliver of shade offered by their adjoining porches. Nighttime offers no relief; in fact, it often feels as though the thickened air wraps even more tightly in the dark, like a tangle of wet bedclothes that cannot be kicked off. No one has slept.
“But that’s miles away. I wouldn’t think...” Even as Mary starts
